Torchwood: Fanfic: One chance

[m_findlow]

Title: One chance
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Gwen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 596 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Any, any, throwing it all away for this one chance" at fic_promptly
Summary: Gwen has one chance to change her life.

Gwen continued to stare out over the city as the sun rose, bright to meet the water that surrounded it, long after the mysterious man in his long coat had made his leave. She wasn't quite ready to let this moment end yet though. She just hoped nobody noticed the woman standing on the roof of the Millennium Centre and call the police, thinking she was a jumper. How to explain to one of her colleagues that she'd gotten up here all on her own, or at least thanks to a man who seemed able to bypass any sort of normal security.

Then again, people didn't seem to notice nearly as much as she'd once thought. She'd lived in this city all her life and never once had she seen a weevil, or anything else that she'd describe as alien. Not even a story from a friend, or a rumor, or some crackpot on TV trying to get their five minutes of fame, claiming that city was overrun with the extraterrestrial. Maybe they had, but maybe like her they'd been retconned, and made to forget to what they'd seen.

Could they really have done that? Kept an entire city completely in the dark about the things that happened here? Surely there must have been some people like her who'd managed to break through the effects of the drugs. Did Torchwood kill them to keep them quiet? They did carry guns, after all.

She really knew nothing about this Jack Harkness; the man who couldn't die. When he'd first asked her if she wanted the job, she hadn't hesitated in saying yes. She wanted to know everything there was to know about the secret city that lived beneath the one she knew so well. If that meant taking a few chances and keeping a few secrets, then that's what she'd do. She didn't have to know Jack to be able to trust him implicitly. He could have wiped her memories again, but he hadn't. He'd told her all these mad things about aliens and other worlds, and stuff that landed on Earth, and things that made her head spin in circles. His team looked so normal, just these everyday people, yet they were dealing with something so incredible that she could barely fathom having all that knowledge and not being able to tell the world about it.

Rhys couldn't know. Oh, no. Definitely not. Not that she'd even checked if it was okay to tell him any of this. He'd freak out. God only knew she had. If he thought she might be getting involved in something like this with monsters and aliens, he'd never let her leave the house. Some nights it was hard enough just going out on shift, when he knew she'd be facing drunken idiots and drug-addled teenagers, kids with guns, and knife fights on the estates. Couldn't she just be one of those police stewards at the football? he'd ask. A lot safer than being out on the streets.

But she didn't want that. She loved her job, and she loved that she was out there, making a difference, trying to help keep order so people felt safe in the city. This wasn't any different, really. Wouldn't she be helping protect people from the other stuff that was out there? Stuff that she hadn't even known existed. Of course she'd said yes. What other answer could there have possibly been? She'd take whatever consequences came of it because somewhere deep down, she just knew this was what she was meant to do.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Torchwood is certainly exciting, but it's not all some kind of thrill ride.