for muses_gonewild... Quote Prompt

[thecopper]

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
- Arthur Schopenhauer


The gunfire broke the air around them. The spring wind of Cardiff burned Gwen’s nose, tinted with gunpowder, smoke, and the tangy scent of blood. Familiar smells.

She ducked down behind the burned out shell of a car. Jack crouched next to her, shouting orders across the yard at Ianto, most of his orders unnecessary and lost in the gunfire. The team worked like a single entity during these times, moving around each other like water flowing across rocks, parting long enough to do their duties before seamlessly running back together. They were three parts of the same mind, and words, at times, were unneeded.

Gwen popped up from behind the car and fired off her gun before crouching back down. She looked at Jack, and then her eyes roved around looking for the girl. The one that had helped him. She was an alien, of course, but a good one, a lost one, who had warned them against the small invasion that drew near.

The condemned warehouse that had been the meeting place for the small, dangerous band of aliens towered over them, and Gwen’s eyes moved to the door. Six dead bodies littered across the yard. If it hadn’t been for their green blood glinting in the gentle Cardiff sun, Gwen would have thought they were human.

Gwen glimpsed the girl as she slipped into the door of the warehouse. She appeared young, only about sixteen, although she claimed she was much older. She had been posing among humans for years, until she found Torchwood.

Really, she had found Gwen. Outside the Hub, two days before. Jack hadn’t believed the girl at first, but she was gentle and persuasive. Gwen sat with her for hours in the interrogation room, and they drank strong, black coffee that Ianto served them with a dark, foreboding look on his silent face.

They all knew how things would end, she supposed, because things always ended the same way.

The girl told Gwen that she was a scout for her race. More of a scientist, really, and she had come to Earth to learn more about humans. When she first arrived she met a man in a bar, who had curly hair and laughed at her awkward jokes, and she had married him.

She wouldn’t tell them his name, or what her human name had been. All she told them was about the night she came home and found him murdered. And it was then she knew her people had returned. That they knew of her betrayal, and that she would be next. Her, and then the human race, because they would never stop.

When she found Torchwood, she had become a plain looking girl with green eyes and mousey blonde hair. She told them if the scouts that came after her were killed, her people would consider the human race a threat and never return. Gwen wanted to believe her, even if Jack didn’t.

Gwen named the girl Annie.

They had found the warehouse, but they hadn’t been prepared for the firefight. And although almost half the aliens had been killed, the rest hid in the warehouse and used the human weapons they had obtained.

Jack, Ianto, and Gwen became Torchwood in those moments, in flowing movements as they ducked away from and returned the gunfire. But Annie wasn’t. She wasn’t human, and she wasn’t Torchwood, even if she looked human, and even if she had, for a few fleeting moments, felt like part of the team.

Gwen stood up to run after her, and Jack grabbed her arm.

“We have to go after her!” Gwen shouted. Jack pulled her down as another splay of bullets exploded over their heads. “They’ll kill her!”

Jack kept a steady hold on her arm. “Gwen, they will kill you before you even get to the door.”

“Jack, we can’t just leave her!”

He opened his mouth to respond, but his words were ripped away by the explosion. The building enveloped in immediate flames, and the car they hid behind tipped over. Jack splayed himself over Gwen, and she slammed her hands over her ears as she shut her eyes.

At all lasted only moments - the firefight, the argument, the explosion - though it seemed to stretch out over years. It seemed to last the length of a single, precious lifetime.

When they dug themselves out from beneath the car, with Ianto’s help, they stood in front of the licking flames and what was left of the warehouse. Sirens wailed in the distance, echoing through the smoky air. The team stood side by side and watched the building burn, and what was left of the bodies jutted out from the ruins of the broken warehouse.

They all knew how it would end.

“We said we would save her,” Gwen said. The smoke choked her lungs, and she wiped the dirt from her face.

Ianto stared out over the burning building, his face frozen in his usual silence.

Jack wouldn’t look at her. “We did what we could. If you had followed her, Gwen, you would have both died.”

Gwen opened her mouth and stared at him. “You knew she would do this. You had it planned all along.”

“It was her idea, Gwen.”

But he still wouldn’t look at her.

They left before the authorities arrived, and the paper later reported an abandoned warehouse had exploded due to a gas leak ignited by a fire set by squatters. Seventeen bodies had been retrieved from the rubble. All unidentified.

Gwen tore out the article, and above the headline scribbled “Annie;” the pretend name of a small, mousey haired girl, who had saved the world and had already been forgotten. A frail, homeless alien who had done nothing but attempt to regain a life that was never really hers to begin with.

The article rested in the bottom drawer of Gwen’s desk in the Hub, with a collection of names and stories that weren’t quite true, but weren’t quite false, either. They were all that remained of the fading echoes of forfeit lives.

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Cut for Length
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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Quote from Arthur Schopenhauer
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 1016