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Title: "One Calamity"
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Andy/Gwen (male-bodied), Gwen/Rhys, just a touch of Jack/Ianto in the background.
Rating: Explicit (sexual situations, language)
Notes: References to "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" and Almost Perfect. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sanginmychains and kel_reily for giving this the sweet, hot beta-fu.
Summary: A workplace accident drives Gwen onto Andy's doorstep, but playing house never goes as well in practice as it does on paper.
“Fate is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.”
-- Publilius Syrus
At a little after half-six, Andy decides to make a trip to the shops. He’s out of cheese, and he’s running low on beer, and while he’s never been particularly good at telling quite when the milk has gone off, he’s growing increasingly suspicious of the bottle lurking in his refrigerator door and probably ought to pour it out in favor of new.
He zips up his jacket, checks that his wallet is in his pocket, and then locks the door behind him. The carpet on the entryway stairs mutes the way he rumbles down them, at least one teenage habit not yet dead. He opens the entry door and steps out onto the pavement and into the cool evening air.
Across the street, there’s a bloke in a black leather jacket leaned against the front of a block of flats. He looks familiar, probably a neighbor finishing up a smoke, and Andy doesn’t pay him much mind. He looks like an older student, maybe, judging by the Alex Kapranos haircut.
It’s a nice night, and good for a walk.
When he crosses at the end of the street, he notices that his mystery student seems to be following him. The guy waves. Andy waves back, uncertain. Definitely familiar, he supposes, but Andy still can’t place him. That’s not so unusual – he meets a lot of people as a consequence of his work – but probably best not to encourage him since there’s always the chance that he wants to have a go over a traffic ticket or something. That sort of thing isn’t exactly common, but he’s heard stories.
Andy turns away, hopes it’s not obvious that he’s starting to get edgy. Each step without his stranger in view makes him feel a little more tightly wound, though, like if he has to strike he will. He listens for footsteps behind him. No way is he going to go into the station tomorrow with a black eye or a cracked rib because some idiot wanted to prove he was hard by taking down a copper.
“Damn it, Andy!” the man shouts. “Would you stop, already? Don’t you recognize me?”
Irritated, Andy turns around to tell him no, no he doesn’t. His hand is already in the air, finger pointing and ready to drive home that fact when he recognizes the old St. Fagan’s t-shirt under the leather jacket, and the way the man is standing there with his hands on his hips while he glares impatiently. Andy’s eyes go wide.
“No.” Andy says, far less authoritatively than he wants to. “No. Sorry, I –”
“Andy it’s me,” the bloke says as he takes a step forward and reaches out a hand. “It’s me. Gwen.”
Andy scoffs his disbelief, but the sound he makes is pitched too high to be good for anything. “Fuck off.”
“You see it, though, don’t you?” the man-who-cannot-possibly-be-Gwen says as he tries to close the gap between them. He’s wide-eyed and pleading. “Now that I’ve said it, you can see it. I know you can, Andy. Can’t you?”
“You’re crazy,” Andy protests, takes another step back, and pulls himself up a little taller to jab that finger like he’d intended to the first time around. “That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it? Look at me,” the stranger says, and gestures at himself. “Look at me and tell me I’m not who I am. Please just bloody look at me.”
Andy backs into a newspaper box. The only thing that stops him stumbling is the hand that clasps around his wrist and pulls him upright.
There’s no denying it. The differences in the face are plain, but her pale eyes are the same. So’s the gap in her teeth and the nervous way she smiles when she wants you to believe her. Her Swansea lilt is there, intact, but the timbre of her voice is lower. Flatter. Rough like her breathing.
He looks at her hands because isn’t that how you’re supposed to be able to tell? But Gwen’s hands are perfectly masculine. The fingers are still long and slender, but strong. Broader, maybe, like they’re on a different scale than he remembers them. Her wedding ring isn’t there, of course. A woman’s wedding set would look absurd on hands like those. Never mind that it would probably need re-sizing.
“How?” he asks.
She purses her lips, and the expression seems strange on that new face. Not unmasculine as such, but weird because he’s only ever seen her make it as a woman. Now it’s framed by a five o’clock shadow and a stronger jaw, and it’s not the face a face like that would make. Not quite. “It’s complicated.”
“And?”
“And it’s sort of a long story,” Gwen says. She frowns and looks over her shoulder at a group of kids playing in a garden across the road. “Look, I’m sorry. This probably wasn’t the best time. You’re on your way somewhere, and –”
Andy cuts her off, puts a hand on her arm, and leads her along the pavement. “Actually, I’m just going to Tesco. For cheese. You’re more than welcome to come along.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep.” He looks over at her – and is it still ‘her’ or should it be ‘him’ now? – and tries to take in more of the new details. “And don’t think I don’t know that ‘it’s complicated’ and ‘sort of a long story’ both mean ‘Torchwood.’ Showing up all blokey isn’t exactly normal day-to-day, after all, is it?”
She stifles a nervous chuckle. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”
They make small talk. At the shop, Andy fills his hand basket with things like the cheese and milk he’d planned to buy, but also a pack of biscuits, which they bicker over in ways that are comfortingly familiar until he looks up and sees the shape of her again. On impulse, he picks up some microwave popcorn. He makes Gwen carry the beer home and she chats away at him. It’s easier to let her, partly because he can tell she’s trying desperately to make this normal somehow, and partly because he hopes she will. Andy leads her up the stairs into his house, unlocks the door, and gestures her into his flat.
“I think this is the most I’ve seen or heard from you in months,” Andy says offhandedly as he takes the six pack from her and carries it into the kitchen. He waits a couple of beats, puts the cheese and milk in the fridge. When she still doesn’t answer, he ducks his head past the dividing wall.
She’s sitting on his sofa, crying.
Andy takes a step back and closes his eyes. Of course she’s crying. Gwen never shows up unless something has gone horribly wrong. He digs the bottle opener out of the drawer and pops the caps off of a couple of beers. Resigned and not a little concerned, he carries them out and hands her one.
# # #
Three Weeks Previous
They find the box in a jumble of debris near the St. David’s 2 construction site. Jack picks it up bare-handed and turns it over. It looks like what might happen if someone tried to sculpt a DVD case out of a small block of graphite. It’s matte grey, with a funny rainbow sheen when the light hits it at a certain angle.
“What is it?” Gwen asks as she passes through the slashed orange plastic fence.
Jack gives the box an irritated look. “No idea. Whatever it is, though, it’s broken.” He tosses it to her, then turns away to kick through the rest of the rubbish. On the whole, it’s mainly harmless. Terrestrial trash. Not worth the effort to –
“Um, Jack?” Ianto says, and points Gwen’s way. “I don’t think it’s broken.”
Veins of blue-green light pulse along the box’s surface. Gwen stares down at it, glassy-eyed. Hypnotized, maybe, and Jack curses under his breath. He darts forward to catch her as her knees give out and the box clatters to the ground, inert.
“Go get the SUV,” Jack shouts over his shoulder to Ianto as he lowers Gwen gently to the ground.
She’s breathing, and her pulse feels strong. Her eyes dart wildly beneath their lids, though, and her face is flushed. Jack stuffs the box into his coat pocket and lifts Gwen up to carry her. Ianto arrives in the SUV mere seconds later, and the two of them maneuver her into the back seat.
“Anything in particular I need to be doing?” Ianto asks as they get in, Jack in the driving seat and Ianto in the back to keep Gwen steady.
Jack shakes his head. “Just keep an eye on her and let me know if anything changes on the way back to the Hub.”
In the rearview mirror, he can see Ianto squeeze Gwen’s hand as the SUV careens back onto tarmac. Their blue lights are running, and Jack makes good time. Within minutes he hops off the road again and onto the Plass, where he brings them up alongside the water sculpture. He helps Ianto lift her out, and then they trade places again so that Jack can take her down into the Hub via the lift. He does his best to get her situated in the medical bay and lays her out on the exam table. Ianto hurries in a few moments later, winded but quick to lend a hand.
“We need to make sure she’s stable,” Jack says as he undoes Gwen’s shirt to affix a couple of electrode pads to her skin. He looks up as data begins to scroll across several screens. The rest of the monitoring equipment comes online automatically. “Ianto, I need you to get me some cold compresses. She’s burning up.”
“Got it.”
Gwen’s head jerks back as she comes to, and she sucks in a panicked lungful of air. “Hurts,” she whimpers through gritted teeth. “All over. Hurts.”
“It’s alright,” Jack tells her as he tries to keep her still. He strokes her hair, squeezes her hand, her shoulder, but her vitals are all wrong and there’s nothing he can do. The first bitter stabs of guilt and panic well up. Owen would be able, but Owen is gone and sealed up, a casualty of Turnmill. At his best, Jack is little more than a field medic with a few cool toys; the best he can do is try to keep her calm and take away some of the pain. “Gwen. You’re going to be okay.”
But she isn’t okay. There’s nothing about the sounds she’s making, or the fact that he and Ianto have to put her in restraints when her body starts to pull itself apart, that could possibly be anything but awful. They do what they can for her with the drugs at hand, and when it’s obvious what’s happening, they rush to cut her out of her clothes and her wedding rings before they hurt her or cut off her circulation. The only mercy in it is that when it’s all over, she drifts into a drugged, exhausted sleep.
Jack watches as Ianto does his best to make her comfortable. He tucks a pillow under her head and covers her in a blanket. After an uncomfortable moment’s silence, he retreats to the Hub sofa.
This is his fault. He was careless. He could have prevented this.
Ianto emerges from the medbay looking far calmer than he has any right to, except that this is like the business with The Perfection all over again, and Ianto’s a veteran. “We’re going to have to tell Rhys.”
“What on earth do we say?” Jack snaps. “‘Hi, Rhys? Yeah, Gwen’s had an accident and by the way I think we just altered the legal status of your marriage?’ Yeah, no.”
“You’re saying we should keep this a secret?”
“No.” Jack rubs at his face with his hand.
Ianto reaches out and gives Jack’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll go get her some clothes.”
# # #
Present
“And you can imagine how well that went over,” Gwen says. She brings the bottle to her lips and draws a long swallow.
Andy, transfixed and still a little nervous, watches her Adam’s apple bob.
“I mean, he loves me. Rhys. He does.” She stares at her beer bottle, worries at the edge of the label. It’s gone soft and loose with condensation. “It’s just that, well. This is a bit much for him, I think. He didn’t sign on for this.”
“Neither did you.”
She sniffs and begins to peel the label free. It comes away from the glass cleanly except for a single spot where the glue is too stubborn to let go. The paper tears slightly, but Gwen lifts at it just so and the label comes off in one piece. She rubs the last of the glue and paper fibers away from the bottle with her thumb. “No, but I signed on for Torchwood. That’s close enough.”
“But doesn’t Torchwood specialize in this kind of thing?” Andy watches her face now instead of her hands. “I mean, can’t they –”
“What, fix me?” she asks sharply. “Would I be here on your sofa if they could? It’s not like Jack can just flip a switch or wave a magic wand and everything’s normal again. So no, they can’t just ‘fix’ me. And anyway, I’m not broken.”
He reaches out to take her hand. It’s like touching one of his rugby mates, and that’s weird, but he rolls with it. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” she says, and stands. “This was stupid. I shouldn’t have come. I mean if Rhys can’t deal with me being around while I’m like this–”
Andy’s on his feet at that. “Wait, what? Rhys? What’s going on? Did he throw you out or something?”
“Of course he didn’t throw me out.” She crosses her arms. “I left. It was him or me, and I didn’t want to give his mam the satisfaction of knowing I’d driven him off.”
Andy gapes. “So let me get this straight. You wind up in a different body through no fault of your own, Rhys decides he can’t deal with it, and so you give him your flat to spite your mother-in-law?”
“You haven’t met his mother.”
“I’ve met Rhys! That’s enough, I think, to make a judgment!”
Gwen glares at him from beneath the fringe of her new haircut.
# # #
Two Weeks Previous
Rhys is in the kitchen when she comes home. She unties the tactical boots Ianto ordered for her and leaves them on the shoe stand, drops her bag just inside their little entryway, and ventures in to join him. Well, almost. He’s been moody since she came back wrong. She’s been giving him space.
“Smells good,” Gwen says, and tucks her thumbs into her back pockets. “Chicken parmigiana?”
“Yeah.” He looks up at her and scowls. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. What have you done to yourself?”
“Sorry?” She grins nervously at him, glances down toward the corner of the settee. Her duvet and pillow from the night before are folded neatly where she left them this morning.
“Your hair,” he says, and gestures with his wooden spoon. “You’ve gone and chopped it off.”
“Well, yeah,” she says slowly. “Rhys, look –”
“I am looking!”
She balls her hands into fists and straightens up. “Well then you might have noticed that maybe I was due for one!”
“Oh, you were, now?” He chucks the spoon into the sink and then wipes his hands with a towel. “One week in and it’s time for a haircut, is it?”
“What, you’ve got a better idea?”
Rhys storms past her and into the loo. He comes out a second later and throws her old plastic make-up bag at her feet. “Pick it up.”
“Rhys –”
“I said pick it the fuck up, Gwen.”
She reaches down in a huff and jerks the bag up in her fist. The battered plastic zip has come undone a little, and an old tube of lipstick falls out. She reaches down to pick it up, she starts to put it back into the bag.
“Uh uh,” Rhys growls. “Put it on.”
“What?” Gwen narrows her eyes and looks askance at him, but Rhys fixes her with a hard, angry glare. He’s between her and the entryway. If she runs, she’ll run smack dab into him. “Rhys, this isn’t–”
“Put. It. On.”
She uncaps the lipstick.
The motion ought to be familiar. She’s done it since she was a little girl, after all. She hasn’t got a mirror, though, and her hands are shaking. Plus, she’s drawn unlucky with a heavy red that she’d never put on without a liner first. Which is to say, of course, whatever she does right now is going to look terrible.
“You’re supposed to be a woman Gwen. I married a gorgeous fucking woman. Not some freak with a pair of bollocks who looks like he had a bad night down at the tranny bar, or some dyke slag who goes native a week into a pair of fucking boxer shorts.”
She cries, tries to wipe the tears away from her burning cheeks, but he grabs her and shoves her into the bathroom until she’s face-to-face with the medicine cabinet mirror.
“Look at yourself,” he says through gritted teeth, like he’s just barely holding himself together. His fingers are dug into Gwen’s shoulder hard enough to bruise. “Do you see, Gwen, how you’re shaming me?”
Gwen shakes her head and the pathetic, mussed up man in the mirror does the same. She sobs, tries to look away from the glass, but she can’t quite. It’s all too horrible, and she sees the way his face starts to break before Rhys lets her go to storm back into the kitchen.
# # #
Present
Andy gives her a look in return, but his heart isn’t in it. “So if you’re not sleeping at home, where are you staying? Have you got somewhere else to go?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “We’ve got a sofa at work. And showers, you know, like a locker room.”
“And what’s Mulder think about all that?” Andy reaches down to pick up his beer.
“It’s fine,” she says.
Andy makes a noncommittal noise.
Gwen sighs. “Alright, it’s awful. My back hurts, there’s not a bloody thing in that building that doesn’t make noise at night, and Jack’s in and out all hours doing who knows what. It’s like camping in a corridor in the Cardiff Royal Infirmary, and the food’s like eating at the station house.”
She leans against the wall, arms crossed. “The coffee’s pretty brilliant, though.”
# # #
One Week Previous
Gwen sighs, puts her elbows on the boardroom table, and buries her face in her hands. After two weeks, she’s grown (mostly) accustomed to the stubble, but right now she hates it enough that the feel of it against her palms makes her want to grit her teeth and –
“For the record, I think he’s taking it almost as badly as you are,” Ianto says, and hands her a crystal tumbler of whisky.
She accepts it, downs it in one. Ianto pours her another and sets the bottle down between them. He sits down next to her with a drink of his own.
“Shouldn’t we be better at this by now?”
“Probably.”
She takes her time with her second whisky. She’s slowly learning to appreciate it, though she expects that some of that comes down to Ianto’s good taste and her own desire to take the edge off in the evenings. “Anyway, both of you have been great these past couple of weeks. Really, really great.”
“We try.” Ianto swirls his drink and frowns at it. “Though I think Jack’s achieving new and exciting levels of concern. The device isn’t like anything we have in the archives or anything he’s seen. I think he’s even tried phoning Martha about it. He asked me yesterday about whether we’re still on good terms with the French Equippé.”
“You’re joking.”
He shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Christ.”
They drink in silence for a while. She’s glad for his company. She can’t bear to see Rhys, and she can’t imagine trying to explain this to her family, so right now all she’s really got is Torchwood. Between him and Jack, Ianto’s been the one to take her unexpected masculinity in stride and help her when it’s all a bit too much. She tries to think of it as him returning the favor from when he woke up remade as someone else, and he’s been great to talk to about things she doesn’t quite understand yet, like urinal etiquette and certain jokes about masturbation.
She tilts her head just enough to watch him, but not quite enough to look at him directly. “Ianto?”
He looks up. “Yes?”
“How do you and Jack, um. You know.” She makes a vague nervous gesture with her hand.
Ianto gives her a blank look. “Sorry?”
“Like when you’re, uh…intimate?”
“Ah.” He rubs his forehead with his fingertips and refills his glass. “I’m not sure you should think of Jack as an ideal model in that area.”
“Oh, come on,” she says with a grin. “Have a bit of sympathy for a girl who’s stuck with a bit of unfamiliar equipment. It’s not like I’ve stopped fancying blokes on account of being one.”
He peers up at the camera in the corner and then sits up a little straighter. “Alright. Um. Well, the basics are all pretty simple, really. Hands and mouths more or less. It’s a bit like regular foreplay I suppose, though I guess it can sort of be its own thing between two men.”
Gwen listens while he tries to explain about things like fingers and lubricant. He’s trying to be matter-of-fact, almost clinical, but after a couple of minutes she finds she needs to shift in her seat a bit. It’s like the way his mouth moves when he speaks takes on whole new layers of meaning. She keeps getting distracted by the idea doing some of the things he’s describing, or maybe watching Jack do it for her. Or maybe Jack could do them to her while Ianto watches. The pull of want between her legs is so immense, she barely notices when he finishes talking.
“Does that clarify things at all?” he asks her, and Gwen can’t help but get the impression that he’s being quite cautious about not looking at any part of her that’s much below her navel.
She swallows and nods. “Yeah. That’s, uh. That’s helpful, yeah.” She stands up a little awkwardly, careful to hold her jacket at about waist level. “Sorry, but can you excuse me for a minute?”
# # #
Present
“Tell you what,” Andy says, and puts his empty bottle down. “I’ve got the rest of that beer. I could whip us up a spag bol and we could watch a DVD or something. If you want, you can borrow my bedroom for a couple of nights. I’ve got a spare set of keys, and don’t mind sleeping out here on the couch now and again. It’s not much, but it’s here if you need a bolt hole until things settle down. Sound like a plan?”
“You’d do that?” she asks, eyes wide with surprise.
He shrugs. “Just did, didn’t I?”
Gwen practically tackles him, she hugs him so hard. “Oh, Andy. Thank you.”
He gives her a squeeze and then pats her on the back. She’s hugging him like she used to hug, which is a little disconcerting. Certainly it’s more intimate than he’s accustomed to from other men. “Now go on. Pop out and get your things. I’ll put the pasta on and dig out some fresh sheets.”
Once she’s gone, and once he’s cooking, Andy spares a thought about how he should have been more careful what he wished for. He’s spent the last year more or less begging the universe to make something like this happen – well, not like this, exactly – except that now that it’s happening it’s all weird and wrong. He wonders what sort of bad karma on his part could have turned the woman of his dreams into…well, not a woman. It’s nice she’s on his doorstep and all, but he doesn’t think he’s asking too much of the world to make it happen in ordinary ways.
“And yet,” he says with a sigh while he defrosts some ground beef in the microwave.
She isn’t gone long, and he’s still sort of fumbling about pulling the meal together when he hears a tap on his door, followed by the scrape of the spare keys in the lock.
“It’s me!”
“Welcome back,” he says, and waves to her when she walks into view.
She’s got a single blue rucksack over her shoulder that makes her look more like she’s off to a class than spending the night somewhere. Then again, if he were packing an overnight bag, that’s probably what it would look like, too. Just a couple of t-shirts, some underwear, socks, maybe a few basic toiletries.
Gwen slides the bag from her shoulder and undoes the zip just enough to lift out a bottle of wine. “For dinner,” she tells him as she passes it to him. “And, you know, uh. Houseguest and all.” She gives him a boyish grin that doesn’t instantly translate to anything familiar.
“Right. Houseguest.” Andy takes the bottle and puts it down on the counter before he goes poking around in the drawer for a bottle opener. “Can you check the cupboard over to your left? I think I’ve got a couple of glasses in there.”
“Yep,” she says, and reaches up for them. “Want me to wash them?”
“Probably not a bad idea.” He finds a corkscrew at the back of the drawer and waggles it at her triumphantly. “And here we go.”
He sends her out into the other room to pick a film from the shelf while he dishes out the pasta and pours the wine. This moment is, for all intents and purposes, well within the acceptable spectrum of ways he’s been wishing she’d come to her senses. Bit more on the friendly end than the “Andy, I’ve been a terrible fool and wish to apologize by taking my top off for you” end, but still. Dinner and a bottle of cheap red?
Andy mutters something under his breath about the universe having a sick sense of humor and carries the plates out.
Gwen holds up his copy of V for Vendetta and cocks her head to the side. “This any good?”
“Depends on how you feel about Alan Moore.”
She turns to look at him, then back down at the case. “Who’s Alan Moore?”
“Ah,” Andy says with a faint smile as he arranges their food on the coffee table. “Not sure you’ll like it, actually. Not in your line of work, at least.”
“Oi! This from the man who owns a copy of Hot Fuzz,” she says, and puts V for Vendetta back on the shelf.
“I liked Hot Fuzz,” he says, brow furrowed in feigned offense.
She grins and pulls another DVD from the shelf. “You just want to blow up a Somerfield.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Andy talks her through getting the DVD started, and they settle in to eat. She sits close to him like she always has, and once they finish with their supper she nestles closer. After some hesitation, he puts his arm around her shoulders.
“This alright?” he asks, uncertain.
She nods, and cuddles up against him. Andy thinks of the absent curve of her breast, or the way her softness has given way to something more angular. Taller too, he thinks, though at the moment she’s compensating pretty well for that. He strokes her arm with his thumb and drinks his wine. He can’t decide whether it’s easier to think that she’s in that body somewhere, or if it’s better to just get on with it and acknowledge that Gwen’s become something altogether different.
Either way, it scares the piss out of him.
# # #
He wakes up the next morning to the sound of someone else in his bathroom. Andy sits up, rubs his eyes, and squints at the clock on the wall. He’s a little stiff from sleeping on the sofa, and just a tiny bit hung-over, though it’s nothing a good cuppa won’t fix. The previous evening comes back to him slightly out of order, but by the time Gwen comes down the hall with wet hair in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, he’s prepared for it. Mostly.
“Sorry,” she says as she picks up her boots from the shoe stand. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” he lies, and rolls his shoulders. “Did you sleep alright?”
“I did, yeah. Thank you. I think I really needed that. Everything, actually. Last night. It means a lot to me.”
“Just glad I can help.” His knees crack when he stands to have a proper stretch. He watches her put on her boots and how she reaches up to comb back her wet hair with her fingers when it gets in her way. “Oh, um. Just so you know I’m on second shift tonight and tomorrow, but you can still come in if I’m not around.”
“Yeah, alright.” She knots her laces and stands up, then picks up her keys (and Andy’s spares) from the table. “I might take you up on that.”
“Good.”
He waits until he can hear her footsteps stop at the bottom before he locks the bolt behind her and then lets his head drop forward with a thump against the door and sighs.
Mad doesn’t even begin to cover this. Even his morning routine (which amounts, essentially, to ‘piss, shower, shave, eat’) feels disrupted. He keeps noticing little traces of Gwen around his flat. She’s made his bed, for instance, and her wine glass from the night before is still on his kitchen counter. Those things are simple and nice. They please him, more or less.
It’s other things, like the little specks of hair in his sink from where she’s shaved but not rinsed it down all the way, that are harder to accept. He knows she’d be mortified at him finding them, not just because of the mess, but also because of the overt masculinity of it.
Andy sweeps his fingers down inside the basin and then stares at the flecks on his fingertips. All day while he putters about and runs errands, and all evening while he works, that’s the image that he keeps coming back to. Gwen can show up all flash and blokey on his doorstep, and that’s damn odd, but standing in his loo with her last day’s stubble on his fingers? Well, it sort of drives the point home. There’s no denying the reality of that, now is there?
# # #
Two days later, she spends the night again.
Andy’s dead on his feet when he shuffles in at a quarter after eight in the morning, glad to have done with the first of his two late nights. He’s looking forward to having the next four days off after tomorrow, though mostly just in the abstract. Right now, he’s knackered.
She’s gone already, of course. Whatever passes for a normal day at Torchwood apparently starts in the morning. She leaves him a note, though, and some left-over tandoori chicken, which he eats cold and with his fingers in front of the telly. He goes to bed when he’s finished eating.
He’s already drifting when he realizes that his sheets smell like her. While he doesn’t get up right away to change them – they’re perfectly serviceable as-is – he goes to sleep certain there’s something a deeply creepy about sleeping in the same bedclothes as a woman he wants in spite of her being a married man.
# # #
“No way.”
“Oh, come on,” Gwen teases as she grabs his wrist and jabs him in the ribs with a finger. “It’s a good story!”
“It’s an embarrassing story! And anyway –” Andy squirms in her grip and swears when he nearly slips off the sofa. “And anyway, no. Weren’t you there?”
She grins. “Yeah, but I was in an official Torchwood capacity, so telling would be like, you know, state secrets.”
Andy scoffs. “Do you realize how not-secret you lot are? You’re so flash with your lights and your driving around with guns. Do you know how many calls we got about that thing with the bloke in the fish mask?”
Gwen snickers. “Didn’t you have to take a statement from a pair of lesbians that night?”
“See?” He exclaims and swats her. “This is what I’m talking about. How is it that you get to know everything about what I do, and you get to swan about all glam and special forces, while I’m stuck here in the dark? That’s fair, is it?”
“Well, in fairness, you do like a nice couple of lesbians,” she teases and downs the rest of her drink. She licks a drop of wine away from the corner of her mouth.
“Oh, fuck off,” he says with a laugh as he picks up their cups and stumbles to the kitchen to refill them. She follows him.
“Damn,” Gwen says. He pours more of the wine into her cup and hands it back. “How are we almost out of sangria?”
Andy takes a drink and gestures toward her. “That, Gwen, is the trouble with manhood. More body mass means you go through the sangria faster. It’s tragic.”
“Seriously tragic.”
They tap plastic cups.
“So speaking of, things getting any easier for you?”
Gwen shrugs. “It’s alright, more or less. I miss the girly bits, though, like doing my hair or picking out shampoo because it smells nice. I miss being pretty. People treat me differently now. I mean, the respect is nice, but it’s sort of lonely.”
“Lonely?”
“Well, Rhys obviously,” she says and looks at him without meeting his eyes. “But everybody else too, I guess. Being a man, you know, I’m sort of generally invisible. It doesn’t matter if I wear the same thing twice, or if I forget to shave. Nobody’s really looking. Well, except for Jack, but he doesn’t count.”
“Wouldn’t know anything about that kind of thing.”
“Aw. Poor thing.” She reaches over and musses up his hair.
He struggles, half-heartedly, to nudge her away.
“What’s wrong? I thought you fancied me, Andy,” she teases as she grabs him by his front two belt loops and presses up against him, pins him against the wall.
“Oh did you?” he says lightly, but he knows he’s flailing a little. He’s smashed, and that’s Gwen against him, but she’s a bloke, and it’s all too dead weird to process through that much booze.
She slides a hand down from his waistband and cups him through his jeans. “Do you, though? Could you want me?”
“Gwen–”
“Go on,” she growls in his ear as she rubs him. Her breath is hot on his ear, and she grinds against his hip in sympathy with her hand. “Show me how much you want this.”
The fact of the matter is that Andy has always liked women. Loved them. He thinks they're fantastic from the tops of their gorgeous, scented heads all the way to tips of their small, smooth toes. There's not a damned thing he doesn't like about the way a woman looks or feels or tastes, and so it's always felt a little pointless to buck the trend and look the other direction. That's more trouble than it's worth, and plus, blokes are knobby. Knobby fingers, knobby toes, and…well, not to be vulgar but there's that rather obvious bit downstairs in the front to concern himself with.
And based on what he feels against his hip through Gwen’s own jeans, he definitely classes himself as concerned at this point. Very.
“C’mon, Andy,” she purrs, lips brushing the corner of his mouth as she undoes the button and zip of his jeans. “You never stopped wanting to take me to bed, did you? How many ways have you had me in your head, hmm? Do you like to come on my tits? Do you fuck me up the arse?”
He gasps as her fingers shove in past the waistband of his pants, but he doesn’t stop her. “Gwen, please, this isn’t –”
Gwen drops to her knees and peers up at him through her lashes as she takes his cock into her mouth.
“Oh God help me,” he whispers, and squeezes his eyes shut.
Andy wonders, hysterically, how far this is going to go. He wants to stop her and apologize, to swear that he isn’t like this and that this isn’t why he’s letting her use his flat. Instead, he combs his fingers through that boy’s haircut of hers while she sucks him off. Cupped in his palm, her head bobs in an easy rhythm like this is the simplest thing in the world. Every so often she makes a little moaning sound that vibrates all the way down to his core. It’s a satisfied noise, a turned-on noise, and he can’t help but tighten his grip a little and move his hips so she has to take a little more of him.
She takes it all. Takes more, even. He tries to warn her when he’s close, but she’s either too drunk or too into it, and he winds up clinging to the wall with his free hand when he comes in her mouth.
Gwen swallows it all and sucks him clean, and it’s all Andy can do to stay upright.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her as she tucks him back into his trousers.
“So give us a cwtch for my trouble and we’ll call it even,” Gwen says. She gets to her feet and leads him back to the bedroom. She takes off her jeans and settles in on the mattress while he watches.
He’s a little nervous of what she has in mind, but Andy lets her pull him down and snuggle up with her back against him. She takes his hand in hers and holds it to her chest for a few minutes before she pushes it against her groin. Her cock.
Andy swallows and nods. He owes her, doesn’t he? Plus, it’s probably better than getting fucked.
Her y-fronts push down easily over her narrow hip, and he traces up the length of her shaft with his fingertips. She makes a little sound and her cock twitches under his touch. No, there’s no denying what he’s about to do.
As hand-jobs go, it’s probably clumsy, but at least he’s in a good position to pretend, at least a little, that he’s touching himself. The movements are familiar, more or less, and she seems to enjoy it. Andy gets her off as quickly as he dares, tries not to flinch at her spunk on his fist when he takes his hand away.
They lay there in the dark, silent. When he’s sure she’s asleep, he goes to the loo to wash his hands. He ends up taking a shower and then goes to sleep on the couch.
# # #
Gwen doesn’t come back that night, or the night after.
He breaks down and texts her on the third night just to check up before he goes out to the shops to stock up on things. He buys an extra pack of chocolate Hobnobs just for her, though he isn’t sure whether he does it out of guilt or obligation.
When he hasn’t heard from her in a week, he takes them to work and leaves them in the break room. By the end of his shift, they’re gone.
# # #
“And this will fix me?” Gwen asks as she stares up at the medical bay screen. Jack is standing a few feet behind her, arms crossed, and she can feel him watching her every move, every breath. Ianto stands further back, watching from above, along the rail.
“It will.”
She turns to face him. “And if I say no? What if I decide I’d rather stay like this?”
“That’s your choice.” Jack’s expression is firm. Serious.
She looks back at the screen. She’s learned, over the last month, not to hate this body. She’s proved she can live in it, maybe make a life in it. It isn’t so bad anymore. She’s tough and fast and doesn’t get PMT. The sex (and she’s had it twice since Andy, once with a man and once with another woman) is almost addictive. Being inside someone – coming inside of them – makes her feel strong. Animal.
“I’d have to change my name, wouldn’t I? You’d have to give me a new identity.”
“Yep,” Ianto says from the rail. “Your friends and family would take a bit of work. Retcon and possibly also relocation, at least in Rhys’s case. We’d probably have to fake your death, but it’s certainly possible.”
“But I could stay at Torchwood?”
Jack nods.
Gwen takes a deep breath and looks at the device on the exam table. Waiting. She imagines Rhys the widower, off in London mourning until he managed to move on, maybe have the children he keeps begging her for. Her mam and dad would be heartbroken. To be a man would be to lose her family, to have no home or history except a slip of paper to tell others where she’s been.
She spares a glance at Jack and Ianto. That’s their lot, she thinks. Not hers.
Gwen shucks off her jacket and nods at the device. “Let’s get this over with.”
# # #
When he walks up the pavement to his house, Andy doesn’t notice that his lights are on. He’s bleary eyed after the second of two late shifts, just like he always is, so when he pushes his door open it takes him a couple of moments to register what he’s seeing.
Gwen sits on his sofa, her slender fingers cupped around a mug of hot tea. Her hair is still short, but her shoulders are narrower and rounded. The cut of her unzipped leather jacket accentuates her bust. She seems delicate to him all of a sudden, which is strange because he’s never thought of her that way before.
“Hi,” he says, surprised and uncertain.
“Hello,” she says, clearly somewhat less so. She’s wearing makeup again, he notices. Sort of like she’s making an effort, but maybe that’s to be expected after a few weeks being someone else. “I came by to give you back your keys. I figured, you know, now that everything’s back to normal again, it would be best.”
“Oh. Right.” Andy closes and locks the door behind him, hangs his hazard yellow slicker up, and then turns back toward the lounge, unsure of what to do next. “So, I suppose this means you’ve gone back home to Rhys again.”
Gwen sighs, puts down her mug, and fishes the keys out of her pocket. “Not quite where I pictured this conversation starting, but yes.”
He sets his jaw, braces himself against the ache in his chest. “He threw you out.”
“He didn’t ‘throw me out,’” Gwen protests.
“No, you bolted for his benefit! I took you in! Doesn’t that count for something?” Andy closes his eyes, lets out a breath, opens them to look at her. “Was it so horrible, staying with me? Did I put you off, somehow?”
“No. It’s just Rhys–”
“Couldn’t handle you like that,” he says. “And neither could I, but I tried, which is more than Rhys bloody Williams did for you.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she snaps and puts his keys down hard enough to mar the surface of the table. When she stands, she lets out an irritated little huff. “What did you think was going to happen? That I’d suddenly see the light and come running to you? Andy, I’m grateful. I really am. But –”
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.” Andy wants to sound angry, but he doesn’t. He just sounds dull and bitter, like the gormless saddo that he is. “Look, you’ve made your choice. You made it a long time ago. If you ask me – and you haven’t, but I’m going to say it anyway – I think you chose wrong. All I wanted was a proper chance, Gwen. I’ll never get it, but there you go.”
“Oh, Andy.” She puts a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs her off and steps away. Like always.
# # #
“It was a plague,” Jack explains, as he seals the device in a one of Torchwood’s heavy containment boxes. “No one’s sure where it came from, or why, but it got into the water, and went after anything with a Y chromosome. The technology was there to clean it up, but by the time anyone knew what was happening and could start to move, the damage was already done. Nearly half of the human and wildlife populations, poof. Gone.”
“So they made this,” Ianto says, curious. “But why not just send more men?”
“Oh, they probably did. But in terms of sheer numbers, even if you could ship them in by the boatload? That’s years, maybe decades. A whole generation. And with the birthrate already in free fall…”
“Not to mention a massive agricultural slump,” Ianto said, realizing the gravity of the situation. “They needed a local solution in the shorter term.”
Jack nodded, picked up the box. “Exactly. You do what any colony does. You make do.” He hauled open the door to his safe and punched in the code to open the grate.
“Do you think Gwen ‘made do?’” Ianto asks, a hint of a smile crossing his face.
“What, with Rhys?” Jack locks the box away in secure storage. “I doubt it. Rhys Williams is many things, but last I checked bi-curious definitely wasn’t one of them. Plus, she was sleeping on our couch. Sort of a shame, really. I feel like we really missed an opportunity to–”
“If you say ‘come together as a team,’ so help me…” Ianto lifts Jack’s coat to help him heft it up onto his shoulders.
“Well, I wasn’t going to, but now that you mention it?” He strides out of his office and out into the Hub toward the lift. “Like I said. We really missed an opportunity.”
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Andy/Gwen (male-bodied), Gwen/Rhys, just a touch of Jack/Ianto in the background.
Rating: Explicit (sexual situations, language)
Notes: References to "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" and Almost Perfect. Thanks to
sanginmychains and kel_reily for giving this the sweet, hot beta-fu.Summary: A workplace accident drives Gwen onto Andy's doorstep, but playing house never goes as well in practice as it does on paper.
-- Publilius Syrus
At a little after half-six, Andy decides to make a trip to the shops. He’s out of cheese, and he’s running low on beer, and while he’s never been particularly good at telling quite when the milk has gone off, he’s growing increasingly suspicious of the bottle lurking in his refrigerator door and probably ought to pour it out in favor of new.
He zips up his jacket, checks that his wallet is in his pocket, and then locks the door behind him. The carpet on the entryway stairs mutes the way he rumbles down them, at least one teenage habit not yet dead. He opens the entry door and steps out onto the pavement and into the cool evening air.
Across the street, there’s a bloke in a black leather jacket leaned against the front of a block of flats. He looks familiar, probably a neighbor finishing up a smoke, and Andy doesn’t pay him much mind. He looks like an older student, maybe, judging by the Alex Kapranos haircut.
It’s a nice night, and good for a walk.
When he crosses at the end of the street, he notices that his mystery student seems to be following him. The guy waves. Andy waves back, uncertain. Definitely familiar, he supposes, but Andy still can’t place him. That’s not so unusual – he meets a lot of people as a consequence of his work – but probably best not to encourage him since there’s always the chance that he wants to have a go over a traffic ticket or something. That sort of thing isn’t exactly common, but he’s heard stories.
Andy turns away, hopes it’s not obvious that he’s starting to get edgy. Each step without his stranger in view makes him feel a little more tightly wound, though, like if he has to strike he will. He listens for footsteps behind him. No way is he going to go into the station tomorrow with a black eye or a cracked rib because some idiot wanted to prove he was hard by taking down a copper.
“Damn it, Andy!” the man shouts. “Would you stop, already? Don’t you recognize me?”
Irritated, Andy turns around to tell him no, no he doesn’t. His hand is already in the air, finger pointing and ready to drive home that fact when he recognizes the old St. Fagan’s t-shirt under the leather jacket, and the way the man is standing there with his hands on his hips while he glares impatiently. Andy’s eyes go wide.
“No.” Andy says, far less authoritatively than he wants to. “No. Sorry, I –”
“Andy it’s me,” the bloke says as he takes a step forward and reaches out a hand. “It’s me. Gwen.”
Andy scoffs his disbelief, but the sound he makes is pitched too high to be good for anything. “Fuck off.”
“You see it, though, don’t you?” the man-who-cannot-possibly-be-Gwen says as he tries to close the gap between them. He’s wide-eyed and pleading. “Now that I’ve said it, you can see it. I know you can, Andy. Can’t you?”
“You’re crazy,” Andy protests, takes another step back, and pulls himself up a little taller to jab that finger like he’d intended to the first time around. “That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it? Look at me,” the stranger says, and gestures at himself. “Look at me and tell me I’m not who I am. Please just bloody look at me.”
Andy backs into a newspaper box. The only thing that stops him stumbling is the hand that clasps around his wrist and pulls him upright.
There’s no denying it. The differences in the face are plain, but her pale eyes are the same. So’s the gap in her teeth and the nervous way she smiles when she wants you to believe her. Her Swansea lilt is there, intact, but the timbre of her voice is lower. Flatter. Rough like her breathing.
He looks at her hands because isn’t that how you’re supposed to be able to tell? But Gwen’s hands are perfectly masculine. The fingers are still long and slender, but strong. Broader, maybe, like they’re on a different scale than he remembers them. Her wedding ring isn’t there, of course. A woman’s wedding set would look absurd on hands like those. Never mind that it would probably need re-sizing.
“How?” he asks.
She purses her lips, and the expression seems strange on that new face. Not unmasculine as such, but weird because he’s only ever seen her make it as a woman. Now it’s framed by a five o’clock shadow and a stronger jaw, and it’s not the face a face like that would make. Not quite. “It’s complicated.”
“And?”
“And it’s sort of a long story,” Gwen says. She frowns and looks over her shoulder at a group of kids playing in a garden across the road. “Look, I’m sorry. This probably wasn’t the best time. You’re on your way somewhere, and –”
Andy cuts her off, puts a hand on her arm, and leads her along the pavement. “Actually, I’m just going to Tesco. For cheese. You’re more than welcome to come along.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep.” He looks over at her – and is it still ‘her’ or should it be ‘him’ now? – and tries to take in more of the new details. “And don’t think I don’t know that ‘it’s complicated’ and ‘sort of a long story’ both mean ‘Torchwood.’ Showing up all blokey isn’t exactly normal day-to-day, after all, is it?”
She stifles a nervous chuckle. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”
They make small talk. At the shop, Andy fills his hand basket with things like the cheese and milk he’d planned to buy, but also a pack of biscuits, which they bicker over in ways that are comfortingly familiar until he looks up and sees the shape of her again. On impulse, he picks up some microwave popcorn. He makes Gwen carry the beer home and she chats away at him. It’s easier to let her, partly because he can tell she’s trying desperately to make this normal somehow, and partly because he hopes she will. Andy leads her up the stairs into his house, unlocks the door, and gestures her into his flat.
“I think this is the most I’ve seen or heard from you in months,” Andy says offhandedly as he takes the six pack from her and carries it into the kitchen. He waits a couple of beats, puts the cheese and milk in the fridge. When she still doesn’t answer, he ducks his head past the dividing wall.
She’s sitting on his sofa, crying.
Andy takes a step back and closes his eyes. Of course she’s crying. Gwen never shows up unless something has gone horribly wrong. He digs the bottle opener out of the drawer and pops the caps off of a couple of beers. Resigned and not a little concerned, he carries them out and hands her one.
# # #
Three Weeks Previous
They find the box in a jumble of debris near the St. David’s 2 construction site. Jack picks it up bare-handed and turns it over. It looks like what might happen if someone tried to sculpt a DVD case out of a small block of graphite. It’s matte grey, with a funny rainbow sheen when the light hits it at a certain angle.
“What is it?” Gwen asks as she passes through the slashed orange plastic fence.
Jack gives the box an irritated look. “No idea. Whatever it is, though, it’s broken.” He tosses it to her, then turns away to kick through the rest of the rubbish. On the whole, it’s mainly harmless. Terrestrial trash. Not worth the effort to –
“Um, Jack?” Ianto says, and points Gwen’s way. “I don’t think it’s broken.”
Veins of blue-green light pulse along the box’s surface. Gwen stares down at it, glassy-eyed. Hypnotized, maybe, and Jack curses under his breath. He darts forward to catch her as her knees give out and the box clatters to the ground, inert.
“Go get the SUV,” Jack shouts over his shoulder to Ianto as he lowers Gwen gently to the ground.
She’s breathing, and her pulse feels strong. Her eyes dart wildly beneath their lids, though, and her face is flushed. Jack stuffs the box into his coat pocket and lifts Gwen up to carry her. Ianto arrives in the SUV mere seconds later, and the two of them maneuver her into the back seat.
“Anything in particular I need to be doing?” Ianto asks as they get in, Jack in the driving seat and Ianto in the back to keep Gwen steady.
Jack shakes his head. “Just keep an eye on her and let me know if anything changes on the way back to the Hub.”
In the rearview mirror, he can see Ianto squeeze Gwen’s hand as the SUV careens back onto tarmac. Their blue lights are running, and Jack makes good time. Within minutes he hops off the road again and onto the Plass, where he brings them up alongside the water sculpture. He helps Ianto lift her out, and then they trade places again so that Jack can take her down into the Hub via the lift. He does his best to get her situated in the medical bay and lays her out on the exam table. Ianto hurries in a few moments later, winded but quick to lend a hand.
“We need to make sure she’s stable,” Jack says as he undoes Gwen’s shirt to affix a couple of electrode pads to her skin. He looks up as data begins to scroll across several screens. The rest of the monitoring equipment comes online automatically. “Ianto, I need you to get me some cold compresses. She’s burning up.”
“Got it.”
Gwen’s head jerks back as she comes to, and she sucks in a panicked lungful of air. “Hurts,” she whimpers through gritted teeth. “All over. Hurts.”
“It’s alright,” Jack tells her as he tries to keep her still. He strokes her hair, squeezes her hand, her shoulder, but her vitals are all wrong and there’s nothing he can do. The first bitter stabs of guilt and panic well up. Owen would be able, but Owen is gone and sealed up, a casualty of Turnmill. At his best, Jack is little more than a field medic with a few cool toys; the best he can do is try to keep her calm and take away some of the pain. “Gwen. You’re going to be okay.”
But she isn’t okay. There’s nothing about the sounds she’s making, or the fact that he and Ianto have to put her in restraints when her body starts to pull itself apart, that could possibly be anything but awful. They do what they can for her with the drugs at hand, and when it’s obvious what’s happening, they rush to cut her out of her clothes and her wedding rings before they hurt her or cut off her circulation. The only mercy in it is that when it’s all over, she drifts into a drugged, exhausted sleep.
Jack watches as Ianto does his best to make her comfortable. He tucks a pillow under her head and covers her in a blanket. After an uncomfortable moment’s silence, he retreats to the Hub sofa.
This is his fault. He was careless. He could have prevented this.
Ianto emerges from the medbay looking far calmer than he has any right to, except that this is like the business with The Perfection all over again, and Ianto’s a veteran. “We’re going to have to tell Rhys.”
“What on earth do we say?” Jack snaps. “‘Hi, Rhys? Yeah, Gwen’s had an accident and by the way I think we just altered the legal status of your marriage?’ Yeah, no.”
“You’re saying we should keep this a secret?”
“No.” Jack rubs at his face with his hand.
Ianto reaches out and gives Jack’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll go get her some clothes.”
# # #
Present
“And you can imagine how well that went over,” Gwen says. She brings the bottle to her lips and draws a long swallow.
Andy, transfixed and still a little nervous, watches her Adam’s apple bob.
“I mean, he loves me. Rhys. He does.” She stares at her beer bottle, worries at the edge of the label. It’s gone soft and loose with condensation. “It’s just that, well. This is a bit much for him, I think. He didn’t sign on for this.”
“Neither did you.”
She sniffs and begins to peel the label free. It comes away from the glass cleanly except for a single spot where the glue is too stubborn to let go. The paper tears slightly, but Gwen lifts at it just so and the label comes off in one piece. She rubs the last of the glue and paper fibers away from the bottle with her thumb. “No, but I signed on for Torchwood. That’s close enough.”
“But doesn’t Torchwood specialize in this kind of thing?” Andy watches her face now instead of her hands. “I mean, can’t they –”
“What, fix me?” she asks sharply. “Would I be here on your sofa if they could? It’s not like Jack can just flip a switch or wave a magic wand and everything’s normal again. So no, they can’t just ‘fix’ me. And anyway, I’m not broken.”
He reaches out to take her hand. It’s like touching one of his rugby mates, and that’s weird, but he rolls with it. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” she says, and stands. “This was stupid. I shouldn’t have come. I mean if Rhys can’t deal with me being around while I’m like this–”
Andy’s on his feet at that. “Wait, what? Rhys? What’s going on? Did he throw you out or something?”
“Of course he didn’t throw me out.” She crosses her arms. “I left. It was him or me, and I didn’t want to give his mam the satisfaction of knowing I’d driven him off.”
Andy gapes. “So let me get this straight. You wind up in a different body through no fault of your own, Rhys decides he can’t deal with it, and so you give him your flat to spite your mother-in-law?”
“You haven’t met his mother.”
“I’ve met Rhys! That’s enough, I think, to make a judgment!”
Gwen glares at him from beneath the fringe of her new haircut.
# # #
Two Weeks Previous
Rhys is in the kitchen when she comes home. She unties the tactical boots Ianto ordered for her and leaves them on the shoe stand, drops her bag just inside their little entryway, and ventures in to join him. Well, almost. He’s been moody since she came back wrong. She’s been giving him space.
“Smells good,” Gwen says, and tucks her thumbs into her back pockets. “Chicken parmigiana?”
“Yeah.” He looks up at her and scowls. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. What have you done to yourself?”
“Sorry?” She grins nervously at him, glances down toward the corner of the settee. Her duvet and pillow from the night before are folded neatly where she left them this morning.
“Your hair,” he says, and gestures with his wooden spoon. “You’ve gone and chopped it off.”
“Well, yeah,” she says slowly. “Rhys, look –”
“I am looking!”
She balls her hands into fists and straightens up. “Well then you might have noticed that maybe I was due for one!”
“Oh, you were, now?” He chucks the spoon into the sink and then wipes his hands with a towel. “One week in and it’s time for a haircut, is it?”
“What, you’ve got a better idea?”
Rhys storms past her and into the loo. He comes out a second later and throws her old plastic make-up bag at her feet. “Pick it up.”
“Rhys –”
“I said pick it the fuck up, Gwen.”
She reaches down in a huff and jerks the bag up in her fist. The battered plastic zip has come undone a little, and an old tube of lipstick falls out. She reaches down to pick it up, she starts to put it back into the bag.
“Uh uh,” Rhys growls. “Put it on.”
“What?” Gwen narrows her eyes and looks askance at him, but Rhys fixes her with a hard, angry glare. He’s between her and the entryway. If she runs, she’ll run smack dab into him. “Rhys, this isn’t–”
“Put. It. On.”
She uncaps the lipstick.
The motion ought to be familiar. She’s done it since she was a little girl, after all. She hasn’t got a mirror, though, and her hands are shaking. Plus, she’s drawn unlucky with a heavy red that she’d never put on without a liner first. Which is to say, of course, whatever she does right now is going to look terrible.
“You’re supposed to be a woman Gwen. I married a gorgeous fucking woman. Not some freak with a pair of bollocks who looks like he had a bad night down at the tranny bar, or some dyke slag who goes native a week into a pair of fucking boxer shorts.”
She cries, tries to wipe the tears away from her burning cheeks, but he grabs her and shoves her into the bathroom until she’s face-to-face with the medicine cabinet mirror.
“Look at yourself,” he says through gritted teeth, like he’s just barely holding himself together. His fingers are dug into Gwen’s shoulder hard enough to bruise. “Do you see, Gwen, how you’re shaming me?”
Gwen shakes her head and the pathetic, mussed up man in the mirror does the same. She sobs, tries to look away from the glass, but she can’t quite. It’s all too horrible, and she sees the way his face starts to break before Rhys lets her go to storm back into the kitchen.
# # #
Present
Andy gives her a look in return, but his heart isn’t in it. “So if you’re not sleeping at home, where are you staying? Have you got somewhere else to go?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “We’ve got a sofa at work. And showers, you know, like a locker room.”
“And what’s Mulder think about all that?” Andy reaches down to pick up his beer.
“It’s fine,” she says.
Andy makes a noncommittal noise.
Gwen sighs. “Alright, it’s awful. My back hurts, there’s not a bloody thing in that building that doesn’t make noise at night, and Jack’s in and out all hours doing who knows what. It’s like camping in a corridor in the Cardiff Royal Infirmary, and the food’s like eating at the station house.”
She leans against the wall, arms crossed. “The coffee’s pretty brilliant, though.”
# # #
One Week Previous
Gwen sighs, puts her elbows on the boardroom table, and buries her face in her hands. After two weeks, she’s grown (mostly) accustomed to the stubble, but right now she hates it enough that the feel of it against her palms makes her want to grit her teeth and –
“For the record, I think he’s taking it almost as badly as you are,” Ianto says, and hands her a crystal tumbler of whisky.
She accepts it, downs it in one. Ianto pours her another and sets the bottle down between them. He sits down next to her with a drink of his own.
“Shouldn’t we be better at this by now?”
“Probably.”
She takes her time with her second whisky. She’s slowly learning to appreciate it, though she expects that some of that comes down to Ianto’s good taste and her own desire to take the edge off in the evenings. “Anyway, both of you have been great these past couple of weeks. Really, really great.”
“We try.” Ianto swirls his drink and frowns at it. “Though I think Jack’s achieving new and exciting levels of concern. The device isn’t like anything we have in the archives or anything he’s seen. I think he’s even tried phoning Martha about it. He asked me yesterday about whether we’re still on good terms with the French Equippé.”
“You’re joking.”
He shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Christ.”
They drink in silence for a while. She’s glad for his company. She can’t bear to see Rhys, and she can’t imagine trying to explain this to her family, so right now all she’s really got is Torchwood. Between him and Jack, Ianto’s been the one to take her unexpected masculinity in stride and help her when it’s all a bit too much. She tries to think of it as him returning the favor from when he woke up remade as someone else, and he’s been great to talk to about things she doesn’t quite understand yet, like urinal etiquette and certain jokes about masturbation.
She tilts her head just enough to watch him, but not quite enough to look at him directly. “Ianto?”
He looks up. “Yes?”
“How do you and Jack, um. You know.” She makes a vague nervous gesture with her hand.
Ianto gives her a blank look. “Sorry?”
“Like when you’re, uh…intimate?”
“Ah.” He rubs his forehead with his fingertips and refills his glass. “I’m not sure you should think of Jack as an ideal model in that area.”
“Oh, come on,” she says with a grin. “Have a bit of sympathy for a girl who’s stuck with a bit of unfamiliar equipment. It’s not like I’ve stopped fancying blokes on account of being one.”
He peers up at the camera in the corner and then sits up a little straighter. “Alright. Um. Well, the basics are all pretty simple, really. Hands and mouths more or less. It’s a bit like regular foreplay I suppose, though I guess it can sort of be its own thing between two men.”
Gwen listens while he tries to explain about things like fingers and lubricant. He’s trying to be matter-of-fact, almost clinical, but after a couple of minutes she finds she needs to shift in her seat a bit. It’s like the way his mouth moves when he speaks takes on whole new layers of meaning. She keeps getting distracted by the idea doing some of the things he’s describing, or maybe watching Jack do it for her. Or maybe Jack could do them to her while Ianto watches. The pull of want between her legs is so immense, she barely notices when he finishes talking.
“Does that clarify things at all?” he asks her, and Gwen can’t help but get the impression that he’s being quite cautious about not looking at any part of her that’s much below her navel.
She swallows and nods. “Yeah. That’s, uh. That’s helpful, yeah.” She stands up a little awkwardly, careful to hold her jacket at about waist level. “Sorry, but can you excuse me for a minute?”
# # #
Present
“Tell you what,” Andy says, and puts his empty bottle down. “I’ve got the rest of that beer. I could whip us up a spag bol and we could watch a DVD or something. If you want, you can borrow my bedroom for a couple of nights. I’ve got a spare set of keys, and don’t mind sleeping out here on the couch now and again. It’s not much, but it’s here if you need a bolt hole until things settle down. Sound like a plan?”
“You’d do that?” she asks, eyes wide with surprise.
He shrugs. “Just did, didn’t I?”
Gwen practically tackles him, she hugs him so hard. “Oh, Andy. Thank you.”
He gives her a squeeze and then pats her on the back. She’s hugging him like she used to hug, which is a little disconcerting. Certainly it’s more intimate than he’s accustomed to from other men. “Now go on. Pop out and get your things. I’ll put the pasta on and dig out some fresh sheets.”
Once she’s gone, and once he’s cooking, Andy spares a thought about how he should have been more careful what he wished for. He’s spent the last year more or less begging the universe to make something like this happen – well, not like this, exactly – except that now that it’s happening it’s all weird and wrong. He wonders what sort of bad karma on his part could have turned the woman of his dreams into…well, not a woman. It’s nice she’s on his doorstep and all, but he doesn’t think he’s asking too much of the world to make it happen in ordinary ways.
“And yet,” he says with a sigh while he defrosts some ground beef in the microwave.
She isn’t gone long, and he’s still sort of fumbling about pulling the meal together when he hears a tap on his door, followed by the scrape of the spare keys in the lock.
“It’s me!”
“Welcome back,” he says, and waves to her when she walks into view.
She’s got a single blue rucksack over her shoulder that makes her look more like she’s off to a class than spending the night somewhere. Then again, if he were packing an overnight bag, that’s probably what it would look like, too. Just a couple of t-shirts, some underwear, socks, maybe a few basic toiletries.
Gwen slides the bag from her shoulder and undoes the zip just enough to lift out a bottle of wine. “For dinner,” she tells him as she passes it to him. “And, you know, uh. Houseguest and all.” She gives him a boyish grin that doesn’t instantly translate to anything familiar.
“Right. Houseguest.” Andy takes the bottle and puts it down on the counter before he goes poking around in the drawer for a bottle opener. “Can you check the cupboard over to your left? I think I’ve got a couple of glasses in there.”
“Yep,” she says, and reaches up for them. “Want me to wash them?”
“Probably not a bad idea.” He finds a corkscrew at the back of the drawer and waggles it at her triumphantly. “And here we go.”
He sends her out into the other room to pick a film from the shelf while he dishes out the pasta and pours the wine. This moment is, for all intents and purposes, well within the acceptable spectrum of ways he’s been wishing she’d come to her senses. Bit more on the friendly end than the “Andy, I’ve been a terrible fool and wish to apologize by taking my top off for you” end, but still. Dinner and a bottle of cheap red?
Andy mutters something under his breath about the universe having a sick sense of humor and carries the plates out.
Gwen holds up his copy of V for Vendetta and cocks her head to the side. “This any good?”
“Depends on how you feel about Alan Moore.”
She turns to look at him, then back down at the case. “Who’s Alan Moore?”
“Ah,” Andy says with a faint smile as he arranges their food on the coffee table. “Not sure you’ll like it, actually. Not in your line of work, at least.”
“Oi! This from the man who owns a copy of Hot Fuzz,” she says, and puts V for Vendetta back on the shelf.
“I liked Hot Fuzz,” he says, brow furrowed in feigned offense.
She grins and pulls another DVD from the shelf. “You just want to blow up a Somerfield.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Andy talks her through getting the DVD started, and they settle in to eat. She sits close to him like she always has, and once they finish with their supper she nestles closer. After some hesitation, he puts his arm around her shoulders.
“This alright?” he asks, uncertain.
She nods, and cuddles up against him. Andy thinks of the absent curve of her breast, or the way her softness has given way to something more angular. Taller too, he thinks, though at the moment she’s compensating pretty well for that. He strokes her arm with his thumb and drinks his wine. He can’t decide whether it’s easier to think that she’s in that body somewhere, or if it’s better to just get on with it and acknowledge that Gwen’s become something altogether different.
Either way, it scares the piss out of him.
# # #
He wakes up the next morning to the sound of someone else in his bathroom. Andy sits up, rubs his eyes, and squints at the clock on the wall. He’s a little stiff from sleeping on the sofa, and just a tiny bit hung-over, though it’s nothing a good cuppa won’t fix. The previous evening comes back to him slightly out of order, but by the time Gwen comes down the hall with wet hair in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, he’s prepared for it. Mostly.
“Sorry,” she says as she picks up her boots from the shoe stand. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” he lies, and rolls his shoulders. “Did you sleep alright?”
“I did, yeah. Thank you. I think I really needed that. Everything, actually. Last night. It means a lot to me.”
“Just glad I can help.” His knees crack when he stands to have a proper stretch. He watches her put on her boots and how she reaches up to comb back her wet hair with her fingers when it gets in her way. “Oh, um. Just so you know I’m on second shift tonight and tomorrow, but you can still come in if I’m not around.”
“Yeah, alright.” She knots her laces and stands up, then picks up her keys (and Andy’s spares) from the table. “I might take you up on that.”
“Good.”
He waits until he can hear her footsteps stop at the bottom before he locks the bolt behind her and then lets his head drop forward with a thump against the door and sighs.
Mad doesn’t even begin to cover this. Even his morning routine (which amounts, essentially, to ‘piss, shower, shave, eat’) feels disrupted. He keeps noticing little traces of Gwen around his flat. She’s made his bed, for instance, and her wine glass from the night before is still on his kitchen counter. Those things are simple and nice. They please him, more or less.
It’s other things, like the little specks of hair in his sink from where she’s shaved but not rinsed it down all the way, that are harder to accept. He knows she’d be mortified at him finding them, not just because of the mess, but also because of the overt masculinity of it.
Andy sweeps his fingers down inside the basin and then stares at the flecks on his fingertips. All day while he putters about and runs errands, and all evening while he works, that’s the image that he keeps coming back to. Gwen can show up all flash and blokey on his doorstep, and that’s damn odd, but standing in his loo with her last day’s stubble on his fingers? Well, it sort of drives the point home. There’s no denying the reality of that, now is there?
# # #
Two days later, she spends the night again.
Andy’s dead on his feet when he shuffles in at a quarter after eight in the morning, glad to have done with the first of his two late nights. He’s looking forward to having the next four days off after tomorrow, though mostly just in the abstract. Right now, he’s knackered.
She’s gone already, of course. Whatever passes for a normal day at Torchwood apparently starts in the morning. She leaves him a note, though, and some left-over tandoori chicken, which he eats cold and with his fingers in front of the telly. He goes to bed when he’s finished eating.
He’s already drifting when he realizes that his sheets smell like her. While he doesn’t get up right away to change them – they’re perfectly serviceable as-is – he goes to sleep certain there’s something a deeply creepy about sleeping in the same bedclothes as a woman he wants in spite of her being a married man.
# # #
“No way.”
“Oh, come on,” Gwen teases as she grabs his wrist and jabs him in the ribs with a finger. “It’s a good story!”
“It’s an embarrassing story! And anyway –” Andy squirms in her grip and swears when he nearly slips off the sofa. “And anyway, no. Weren’t you there?”
She grins. “Yeah, but I was in an official Torchwood capacity, so telling would be like, you know, state secrets.”
Andy scoffs. “Do you realize how not-secret you lot are? You’re so flash with your lights and your driving around with guns. Do you know how many calls we got about that thing with the bloke in the fish mask?”
Gwen snickers. “Didn’t you have to take a statement from a pair of lesbians that night?”
“See?” He exclaims and swats her. “This is what I’m talking about. How is it that you get to know everything about what I do, and you get to swan about all glam and special forces, while I’m stuck here in the dark? That’s fair, is it?”
“Well, in fairness, you do like a nice couple of lesbians,” she teases and downs the rest of her drink. She licks a drop of wine away from the corner of her mouth.
“Oh, fuck off,” he says with a laugh as he picks up their cups and stumbles to the kitchen to refill them. She follows him.
“Damn,” Gwen says. He pours more of the wine into her cup and hands it back. “How are we almost out of sangria?”
Andy takes a drink and gestures toward her. “That, Gwen, is the trouble with manhood. More body mass means you go through the sangria faster. It’s tragic.”
“Seriously tragic.”
They tap plastic cups.
“So speaking of, things getting any easier for you?”
Gwen shrugs. “It’s alright, more or less. I miss the girly bits, though, like doing my hair or picking out shampoo because it smells nice. I miss being pretty. People treat me differently now. I mean, the respect is nice, but it’s sort of lonely.”
“Lonely?”
“Well, Rhys obviously,” she says and looks at him without meeting his eyes. “But everybody else too, I guess. Being a man, you know, I’m sort of generally invisible. It doesn’t matter if I wear the same thing twice, or if I forget to shave. Nobody’s really looking. Well, except for Jack, but he doesn’t count.”
“Wouldn’t know anything about that kind of thing.”
“Aw. Poor thing.” She reaches over and musses up his hair.
He struggles, half-heartedly, to nudge her away.
“What’s wrong? I thought you fancied me, Andy,” she teases as she grabs him by his front two belt loops and presses up against him, pins him against the wall.
“Oh did you?” he says lightly, but he knows he’s flailing a little. He’s smashed, and that’s Gwen against him, but she’s a bloke, and it’s all too dead weird to process through that much booze.
She slides a hand down from his waistband and cups him through his jeans. “Do you, though? Could you want me?”
“Gwen–”
“Go on,” she growls in his ear as she rubs him. Her breath is hot on his ear, and she grinds against his hip in sympathy with her hand. “Show me how much you want this.”
The fact of the matter is that Andy has always liked women. Loved them. He thinks they're fantastic from the tops of their gorgeous, scented heads all the way to tips of their small, smooth toes. There's not a damned thing he doesn't like about the way a woman looks or feels or tastes, and so it's always felt a little pointless to buck the trend and look the other direction. That's more trouble than it's worth, and plus, blokes are knobby. Knobby fingers, knobby toes, and…well, not to be vulgar but there's that rather obvious bit downstairs in the front to concern himself with.
And based on what he feels against his hip through Gwen’s own jeans, he definitely classes himself as concerned at this point. Very.
“C’mon, Andy,” she purrs, lips brushing the corner of his mouth as she undoes the button and zip of his jeans. “You never stopped wanting to take me to bed, did you? How many ways have you had me in your head, hmm? Do you like to come on my tits? Do you fuck me up the arse?”
He gasps as her fingers shove in past the waistband of his pants, but he doesn’t stop her. “Gwen, please, this isn’t –”
Gwen drops to her knees and peers up at him through her lashes as she takes his cock into her mouth.
“Oh God help me,” he whispers, and squeezes his eyes shut.
Andy wonders, hysterically, how far this is going to go. He wants to stop her and apologize, to swear that he isn’t like this and that this isn’t why he’s letting her use his flat. Instead, he combs his fingers through that boy’s haircut of hers while she sucks him off. Cupped in his palm, her head bobs in an easy rhythm like this is the simplest thing in the world. Every so often she makes a little moaning sound that vibrates all the way down to his core. It’s a satisfied noise, a turned-on noise, and he can’t help but tighten his grip a little and move his hips so she has to take a little more of him.
She takes it all. Takes more, even. He tries to warn her when he’s close, but she’s either too drunk or too into it, and he winds up clinging to the wall with his free hand when he comes in her mouth.
Gwen swallows it all and sucks him clean, and it’s all Andy can do to stay upright.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her as she tucks him back into his trousers.
“So give us a cwtch for my trouble and we’ll call it even,” Gwen says. She gets to her feet and leads him back to the bedroom. She takes off her jeans and settles in on the mattress while he watches.
He’s a little nervous of what she has in mind, but Andy lets her pull him down and snuggle up with her back against him. She takes his hand in hers and holds it to her chest for a few minutes before she pushes it against her groin. Her cock.
Andy swallows and nods. He owes her, doesn’t he? Plus, it’s probably better than getting fucked.
Her y-fronts push down easily over her narrow hip, and he traces up the length of her shaft with his fingertips. She makes a little sound and her cock twitches under his touch. No, there’s no denying what he’s about to do.
As hand-jobs go, it’s probably clumsy, but at least he’s in a good position to pretend, at least a little, that he’s touching himself. The movements are familiar, more or less, and she seems to enjoy it. Andy gets her off as quickly as he dares, tries not to flinch at her spunk on his fist when he takes his hand away.
They lay there in the dark, silent. When he’s sure she’s asleep, he goes to the loo to wash his hands. He ends up taking a shower and then goes to sleep on the couch.
# # #
Gwen doesn’t come back that night, or the night after.
He breaks down and texts her on the third night just to check up before he goes out to the shops to stock up on things. He buys an extra pack of chocolate Hobnobs just for her, though he isn’t sure whether he does it out of guilt or obligation.
When he hasn’t heard from her in a week, he takes them to work and leaves them in the break room. By the end of his shift, they’re gone.
# # #
“And this will fix me?” Gwen asks as she stares up at the medical bay screen. Jack is standing a few feet behind her, arms crossed, and she can feel him watching her every move, every breath. Ianto stands further back, watching from above, along the rail.
“It will.”
She turns to face him. “And if I say no? What if I decide I’d rather stay like this?”
“That’s your choice.” Jack’s expression is firm. Serious.
She looks back at the screen. She’s learned, over the last month, not to hate this body. She’s proved she can live in it, maybe make a life in it. It isn’t so bad anymore. She’s tough and fast and doesn’t get PMT. The sex (and she’s had it twice since Andy, once with a man and once with another woman) is almost addictive. Being inside someone – coming inside of them – makes her feel strong. Animal.
“I’d have to change my name, wouldn’t I? You’d have to give me a new identity.”
“Yep,” Ianto says from the rail. “Your friends and family would take a bit of work. Retcon and possibly also relocation, at least in Rhys’s case. We’d probably have to fake your death, but it’s certainly possible.”
“But I could stay at Torchwood?”
Jack nods.
Gwen takes a deep breath and looks at the device on the exam table. Waiting. She imagines Rhys the widower, off in London mourning until he managed to move on, maybe have the children he keeps begging her for. Her mam and dad would be heartbroken. To be a man would be to lose her family, to have no home or history except a slip of paper to tell others where she’s been.
She spares a glance at Jack and Ianto. That’s their lot, she thinks. Not hers.
Gwen shucks off her jacket and nods at the device. “Let’s get this over with.”
# # #
When he walks up the pavement to his house, Andy doesn’t notice that his lights are on. He’s bleary eyed after the second of two late shifts, just like he always is, so when he pushes his door open it takes him a couple of moments to register what he’s seeing.
Gwen sits on his sofa, her slender fingers cupped around a mug of hot tea. Her hair is still short, but her shoulders are narrower and rounded. The cut of her unzipped leather jacket accentuates her bust. She seems delicate to him all of a sudden, which is strange because he’s never thought of her that way before.
“Hi,” he says, surprised and uncertain.
“Hello,” she says, clearly somewhat less so. She’s wearing makeup again, he notices. Sort of like she’s making an effort, but maybe that’s to be expected after a few weeks being someone else. “I came by to give you back your keys. I figured, you know, now that everything’s back to normal again, it would be best.”
“Oh. Right.” Andy closes and locks the door behind him, hangs his hazard yellow slicker up, and then turns back toward the lounge, unsure of what to do next. “So, I suppose this means you’ve gone back home to Rhys again.”
Gwen sighs, puts down her mug, and fishes the keys out of her pocket. “Not quite where I pictured this conversation starting, but yes.”
He sets his jaw, braces himself against the ache in his chest. “He threw you out.”
“He didn’t ‘throw me out,’” Gwen protests.
“No, you bolted for his benefit! I took you in! Doesn’t that count for something?” Andy closes his eyes, lets out a breath, opens them to look at her. “Was it so horrible, staying with me? Did I put you off, somehow?”
“No. It’s just Rhys–”
“Couldn’t handle you like that,” he says. “And neither could I, but I tried, which is more than Rhys bloody Williams did for you.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she snaps and puts his keys down hard enough to mar the surface of the table. When she stands, she lets out an irritated little huff. “What did you think was going to happen? That I’d suddenly see the light and come running to you? Andy, I’m grateful. I really am. But –”
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.” Andy wants to sound angry, but he doesn’t. He just sounds dull and bitter, like the gormless saddo that he is. “Look, you’ve made your choice. You made it a long time ago. If you ask me – and you haven’t, but I’m going to say it anyway – I think you chose wrong. All I wanted was a proper chance, Gwen. I’ll never get it, but there you go.”
“Oh, Andy.” She puts a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs her off and steps away. Like always.
# # #
“It was a plague,” Jack explains, as he seals the device in a one of Torchwood’s heavy containment boxes. “No one’s sure where it came from, or why, but it got into the water, and went after anything with a Y chromosome. The technology was there to clean it up, but by the time anyone knew what was happening and could start to move, the damage was already done. Nearly half of the human and wildlife populations, poof. Gone.”
“So they made this,” Ianto says, curious. “But why not just send more men?”
“Oh, they probably did. But in terms of sheer numbers, even if you could ship them in by the boatload? That’s years, maybe decades. A whole generation. And with the birthrate already in free fall…”
“Not to mention a massive agricultural slump,” Ianto said, realizing the gravity of the situation. “They needed a local solution in the shorter term.”
Jack nodded, picked up the box. “Exactly. You do what any colony does. You make do.” He hauled open the door to his safe and punched in the code to open the grate.
“Do you think Gwen ‘made do?’” Ianto asks, a hint of a smile crossing his face.
“What, with Rhys?” Jack locks the box away in secure storage. “I doubt it. Rhys Williams is many things, but last I checked bi-curious definitely wasn’t one of them. Plus, she was sleeping on our couch. Sort of a shame, really. I feel like we really missed an opportunity to–”
“If you say ‘come together as a team,’ so help me…” Ianto lifts Jack’s coat to help him heft it up onto his shoulders.
“Well, I wasn’t going to, but now that you mention it?” He strides out of his office and out into the Hub toward the lift. “Like I said. We really missed an opportunity.”
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