Chapter Text
Owen and Suzie pounded through the streets of Cardiff, Tosh calling directions through the comms in their ears. Jack had the SUV and was trying to cut off their quarry. Gwen had thrown herself into the chase with a frankly alarming level of enthusiasm and bounded up onto the rooftops. Her comm had fizzled out within minutes, so Owen had no idea whether she'd found the kid or not.
Then the kid came into view. Owen and Suzie were closing in, Jack catching up with them on foot from behind, when they were suddenly cut off by the descending metal grating that blocked off the Cardiff Market at closing time. Jack shouted at people to get it open again, but by the time it rolled back up, the kid in the hoodie was long gone.
And there was Gwen, standing in the middle of the street and staring at nothing, the kid's hoodie dangling from one hand.
Jack managed to shake Gwen out of her strange daze, but she didn't say anything. Her face was haunted and half obscured by her wild black hair. Her expression made Owen's hair stand on end.
Tosh reported that Gwen now had the source of the signal they'd been tracking. A quick search of the hoodie's pockets turned up an alien gizmo with little glowing lights. Gwen at last started to talk, telling them that she'd tackled the kid to the ground only to be overtaken by the most intense vision she'd ever experienced — apparently visions were not a new thing to Gwen — of a frightened little boy wandering about alone. Jack concluded that the main button on the device must have been hit during the tumble, activating it and giving the boy a chance to escape.
They had what they'd come for, so they returned to the Hub.
***
A little investigation proved that Gwen's vision had actually happened, and that the lost little boy she'd seen had lived to grow up, which discounted the idea that the weird alien machine let you see ghosts. They also identified the kid who'd had the machine as one Bernie Harris. Locating him, though, proved a whole other matter.
"Can't you just do some magic mumbo-jumbo to track him down?" Owen asked Gwen, waving a frustrated hand. He, Gwen, and Tosh were leaning on a brick platform in a park, eating pasties after a fruitless day of searching. Jack and Suzie came trudging up to join them in time to hear Gwen's grumpy response.
"I'm not bloody clairvoyant, Owen. Not anymore."
"Anymore?" asked Tosh.
"I was when I was younger," Gwen admitted quietly, "from living on the Rift all my life. I had a sort of connection to it, and information just poured into my head whenever it pleased. But the connection made me a conduit, and that was dangerous, and not just to me. I got into a bad situation and had to break my connection to the Rift. I thought it would kill me, but it didn't." She was quiet for a moment, looking thoughtfully up at the sky. "I can't say I miss it. It near drove me mad."
"When you say a bad situation," said Jack, "is that when…?"
Gwen smiled at him, melancholy suddenly gone. "Yes, that was the day everything changed. The day I met the Doctor." She smiled up at the sky. "There was this alien race called the Gelth. They were non-corporeal, and they'd lost their home world in a terrible war. A few came through the Rift, asking for sanctuary for their people. The Doctor agreed — on a temporary basis, until he could find them a new home — and asked me to act as conduit so they could come through. I did, but then it turned out that it was conquest rather than sanctuary that they really had in mind."
"Isn't it always," said Jack darkly.
Gwen smiled wryly. "I had to close the Rift again, and to detach myself from it. You need a lot of energy to do that. This was 1869, and all the lights were gas-powered. I had the Doctor, his friend Rose, and Charles Dickens—"
"Charles Dickens?" exclaimed several voices.
Gwen raised her voice and continued as if they hadn't spoken. "—I had them open all the gas valves and get out of the house. And then I struck a match. I really didn't expect to survive."
There was a moment of silence.
"The Charles Dickens?" said Suzie.
"The Charles Dickens," agreed Gwen with a smile.
"You have got to tell us the full story to that one," said Jack.
Gwen laughed. "Tomorrow at dinner, the full story, I promise — the Doctor, Charles Dickens, and ghosts on Christmas Eve!"
***
Since their attempts to find Bernie Harris had thus far failed utterly, Jack decided to try a different angle and recreate what had happened to Gwen. Gwen wasn't keen, so Jack tossed the little machine to Owen instead. They were passing under a bridge on their way out of the park at the time, Owen lagging behind. So he was the only one who noticed that the machine was now lighting up the way it had the night before.
He called out to the others, but they were bickering and didn't hear. He dared to press the button.
When Owen came back to himself, Gwen was right in front of him, her big eyes wide and concerned. He was gasping, he could barely breathe. Words started tumbling out.
"She— she was so scared. I couldn't move, I couldn't move!" Gwen gently pried the machine out of his hands, and Owen dropped it like it burned him. "I couldn't help … I couldn't help." He tried to breathe deep, to calm himself, and not bloody cry.
***
Describing what he'd seen happen to Lizzie Lewis was one of the hardest things Owen had ever had to do. It felt like it had happened to him rather than her. Her screams for help were playing on an endless loop in his head.
The others took it like any other witness statement and started analysing and discussing it. Except Gwen. Gwen stared at him like she understood, she knew what he was feeling, how he was struggling to keep up a façade of normality, of antipathy.
Owen still wasn't sure what he thought of Gwen. He'd held the whole garden-gnome thing against her for a while, but it hadn't escaped his notice that she'd never put a gnome in any of his sections of the Hub. And it had been funny, really, with sufficient distance — he still chuckled when he thought of Ianto and Tosh falling over each other to catch the gnome on wheels while Suzie loudly threatened to shoot it.
But that was only the whimsical side of Gwen. Owen couldn't forget the merciless, unflinching way she'd killed the two Plasmavores in the Hub. He couldn't forget the amount of power that had throbbed through the room in those moments. And he couldn't forget before she'd revealed herself, the feeling of knowing something dangerous was hiding in the building, watching them, and there being absolutely nothing they could do about it.
If it hadn't been for how gently she'd tended to the injured and still more than half panicked Ianto in the wake of his ordeal, Owen wasn't sure he could have acted normally in her presence.
Now that unexpected kindness was coming out again, and this time it was directed at him. Gwen sat next to him on the couch in the Hub, where he was going through files in a desperate attempt to distract himself.
"It's been forty-five years," she said in an undertone intended only for him. "Ed Morgan might still be alive."
Owen said nothing, but his hands clenched.
"Do you want to go after him?" she asked. It was a straightforward question, no judgement.
"I couldn't help her," Owen murmured hoarsely. "But maybe I could avenge her."
Gwen nodded slowly. "I will help," she said, and an eerie shiver ran up Owen's back. He turned to see the dark look Gwen was giving him, the spooky shimmer in her eyes. "I despise rapist-murderers. Only thing worse than them is child killers. If you want to go after him, I will back you to the hilt."
Owen took a shuddering breath. "Thanks."
***
It was the start of a strange and unholy friendship. When Owen argued for reopening the case of Lizzie Lewis's murder, Gwen stood at his shoulder and backed him up. And when Jack shot him down, she murmured in Owen's ear, "It's all right; we can do it ourselves." She smiled her knife-edged smile. "I prefer it this way, really."
"Right, because that isn't at all creepy," he muttered back.
They absconded with a pile of files to a quiet café and spent two hours and two cups of coffee each going through them. They found record of an Ed Morgan who'd been detained for questioning, but released.
"Got to be him," said Gwen. "You brought the phonebook with you?"
They started cross-referencing, Owen occasionally stealing a glance at Gwen and thinking it weird how normal and human she looked. And she was beautiful. He was tempted to ask her back to his place, but Jack had given the team very clear warnings of how dangerous sex with faeries could be.
"You get addicted to it, and then you either die of exhaustion or of pining away for it," he'd said.
Owen figured if there was one thing Jack knew about, it was sex, so for once he took his boss seriously.
By the time the café was closing up, they had a short list of possible Ed Morgans and an address for one that Owen was pretty sure had to be their guy.
"Meet back here tomorrow morning?" suggested Owen out on the sidewalk, shrugging back into his jacket.
"Sure," said Gwen. "Good night." She turned away, only to run almost right into man who was staggering and definitely drunk. Gwen apologised, even though it had definitely been his fault, and he replied by grabbing her arm with one of the crudest propositions Owen had ever heard.
Now, Owen knew damn well that Gwen could and probably would nail this git's balls to a tree. But images of Ed Morgan were still burned into the backs of his eyelids, and he was responding before he had time to think about it.
"Listen, mate," he growled, striding up beside Gwen and shoving the man away with a firm hand on his chest. "Back off. And since you're too bloody pissed to so much as see straight, may I suggest you get off home before the lady decides to kill you by choking you to death on your own testicles."
The man swore at him, but did in fact back off and head the other way. It suddenly occurred to Owen that Gwen might have taken offence at his interference. He dared look at her and found her regarding him with warm amusement.
"Choke him to death on his own testicles — I like that," she mused. Then she grinned the knife-edge grin. "I have a better idea, though." She started after the man.
"What are you going to do?" asked Owen, just a touch nervous. He was pretty sure he shouldn't allow their resident faerie to go off to murder and/or castrate people in the dead of night. Not that he could exactly stop her.
She turned back to him and beamed. "I'm going to follow him home, sneak into his house, and duct-tape all his keys and remote controls to the underside of his kitchen table." She pulled a roll of duct-tape out of a pocket and waved it. "That'll teach him to go out and get drunk off his head."
Owen choked on unexpected laughter. "Oh, you are good."
Gwen winked. "I know I am. See you tomorrow."