The Pass a Note!Meme

The Rules:

-Pass a note! To another character in your muse's canon, or to someone else's muse!
-It can be text, whipped up in photoshop, done by hand and scanned in, doesn't matter!
-Spread a little love old-school style (no pun intended)

( Gwen's note to Jack )

"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. )

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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

Trust is one of those words that people use, to often, to generally. Like love and loyalty and honesty. Used so often it loses meaning, after a while, because it just rests on your tongue like something you would say to anyone, any day, without thinking about what it really means, without understand the power you have behind being able to say it.

You can’t know what it’s like to trust until you have something to actually entrust with someone. I have a secret like that. One I can’t share with anybody, because it doesn’t matter anymore who I trust.

I trust Jack… with my life. With my heart. With a million other things he probably doesn’t deserve. I trust Ianto, with my well being, to keep me strong. I know I can trust Martha, to be here when Jack rings. He can trust her, so I can too.

I trust the Doctor. Or Sarah Jane Smith. But they aren’t my friends, rather just names I’ve read and faces I know will be there when they are called upon to fight beside us.

I can trust Rhys. Finally. He deserves every little bit I can give him, because he’s part of it now.

Then there is everyone else. Mum, dad, my friends. The girls I knew at college, girls I’ve known most of my life. Andy. Old lovers, new lovers, the lovers in between. I can’t say I trust them. Because if I did, I would tell them, without the threat of worry or retcon or what Jack will say. I have one secret. One pressing, dark, festering bloody secret I can’t tell a single one of them. Who I trust doesn’t matter anymore. It’s about who Torchwood trusts. And I am Torchwood, and Torchwood is me.

I still trust. And I still have friends. But they can’t always be one in same.

It has such power, a word like trust. A power that is no longer mine to control.

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Do you trust your friends?
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 329

A while back I did a meme where people requested certain Gwens to write about. I haven't forgotten about them, I've just been taking my time writing them! So here are two I wrote a while back and simply forgot to post, and there should be more over time.

for itsthecoat, Playful!Gwen

2 a.m. was the best time for the game.

Overwhelmed with work and rigid on continual cups of coffee, Gwen wandered up behind Jack’s desk where he sat, deep in concentration over a stack of paperwork that couldn’t possibly be getting smaller.

She prepared her fingers, pointing them towards him and took a deep, prepared breath for what was to come. She pounced.

And somehow, he always knew. He spun around, before her fingers could reach their target, and he began to tickle her. She squealed and jumped away, speeding out of the office, listening to his footsteps following her. He would catch her – he always did. That was her favourite part of the game.

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Drabble Meme
Verse: Open
Word Count: 116

for goodathart, Naked!Gwen

“What the bloody hell are you doing in here?”

Gwen leaped, naked, across the room and threw a towel over her body. The Torchwood bathroom was very cold, but an exhausted Gwen had no intention of going back to her flat covered in that day’s lot of alien goo, and put up with the cold for a quick wash. On the other hand, she wasn’t expecting to pop out and find a smirking Captain John Hart.

“Get out!”

John laughed, almost doubled over, and shook his head. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s not like I’m interested, just went through the wrong door.”

“Not on your life!” she shouted. She grabbed her shoe and launched it at his head, missing by about half a metre.

“Definitely not on my life!” He was near hysterics, and paused long enough to wink at her before her headed for the door. She picked up her other shoe and threw it with all her might, watching it bounce against the door soundly as it shut quickly behind him.

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Drabble Meme
Verse: Open/Crack
Word Count: 172

Gwen carefully wrapped the presents and too care that they were sent out in time for Christmas. Some were easy to deliver (just plopping them on the desk Christmas Eve before heading back to the flat) and some a little harder (even though intergalactic parcel delivery was becoming much easier, considering her contacts.). Each were wrapped the same, with the same bow, and a tiny card with a personalized note.

( To Jack )

( To Ianto )

( To Owen )

( To Katie )

( To the Other Doctor )

( To Jenny )

( To The Doctor )

( To The Master )

( To Captain John Hart )

( To the UNIT People )

The last one she gave next to the lit Christmas tree, in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied with a kiss.

( To Rhys )

"One explanation of Guenever, for what it is worth, is that she was what they used to call a "real" person. She was not the kind of person who can be fitted away safely under some label or other, as "loyal" or "disloyal" or "self-sacrificing" or "jealous". Sometimes she was loyal and sometimes she was disloyal. She behaved like herself. And there must have been something in this self, some sincerity of heart, or she would not have held two people like Arthur and Lancelot. Like likes like, they say – and at the least they are certain that her men were generous. She must have been generous too. It is difficult to write about a real person." -From The Once and Future King, T.H. White

“A what?”

Jack frowned and crossed his arms. “Exactly what I said. A personal progress interview.”

Gwen stared at him, and crossed her arms in return. “Okay, fine. But you’ve only been back two days, Jack. Can’t we do this another time?”

Jack shook his head. “Requirement, after three months of service.”

She sighed. “It’s only been three months?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “You’re not getting tired of us yet, are you?”

( She didn’t reply. Because she could only think of how she had been tired since Day One. )
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Cut for Length, Mature Subjects and Language
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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Quote from "The Once and Future King"
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 1470

The Cardiff night rests heavily over the city.

The cold whip of the rain trails across Gwen's skin, like an icy finger, like death tickling down the curve of her neck.

She shivers.

The rain washes the streets, the puddles ripple beneath the remaining drops that fall. Ahead of her, Jack and Ianto trot, buried deep in the warmth of their jackets. They lean into one another now and again, brushing their arms together and swerving around puddles.

Gwen struggles against the biting air, and the two figures seem to move further ahead.

She wonders how they feel the absence. For Gwen, there should be footsteps beside her, the overwhelming splash of boots through street water. There should be the shouting of five voices through the rain and night air, all laughing and tripping and joking.

Instead, now and again rises a mutter she can grasp between the two ahead, and a word or two here and there that loses its meaning in the wind.

She says nothing.

They have each other. She has them, sometimes, but mostly it is quiet and lonely, the cups of coffee cooling on the desks and muted whispers across halls. She always sits on the opposite side of the boardroom table from them. It was never deliberate. Just how things worked out.

A splash on the street grabs her attention, and when she looks up, Jack beckons to her. "Come on, Gwen!" he shouts, he smiles, and she smiles back. She trudges through the forming flood, her trainers soaked, her jacket wrapped taut around her body.

He turns back to Ianto, his lips forming lost words.

"I'm coming," she offers, and it is stolen by the wind.

She never quite catches up.

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Third wheel
Verse: Canon/Open
Word Count: 287