Title: These Lips Were Made For
- Characters: Gwen, Ianto
Rating: PG
Summary: She's missing something. This should be rectified. Gwen seeks to fill a peace of mind that she never noticed needed filling.
Notes: Inspired by the 2009 NY Comic-Con Torchwood panel. Set between the end of S2 and CoE.

- b - e - g - i - n -

It hit her, one day, idling by what was once Owen's desk while waiting for Ianto to return from the Archives, and remembering as she often did when there was a spare moment, that this job was different.

As a job or a career, regardless of specifics, Torchwood was the same as any other: get up, leave home, put in the hours, clock out, and then return home to what was ever waiting behind the door. Doing a service for the human population, ultimately. Not very far from serving burgers, in a structured way, and some times, all-nighters had to be pulled, like doctors in their wards. You had colleagues to work with, and those colleagues sometimes leave and never return for reasons that always vary on the wind. The pay could be shit, the pay can be worth it. The feeling of accomplishment came and went, the magnitude of contribution gone appreciated or unnoticed.

The general practice of it was identical to any other. Except one, small, tiny bit.

Gwen remembered kissing Owen inside the locker in the autopsy bay, as the cybernetic shell of Lisa Hallet tromped about above them.

She remembered kissing Jack on her first day, compulsively, and the kiss she had not allowed from the nostrovite masquerading as her boss.

These thoughts were fine, if only that was what the memories had been. But they were not figments of her imagination. She kissed her boss and slept with her colleague. That really happened.

She remembered kissing Carys before kissing either of them, and later (much later) wondering if all girls felt like that, possessed by sexually-energized gaseous beings or not. Now she regretted not finding out with Tosh, because it might have been nice to have that feeling with a friend, that 'something nice' you share once. A lingering impression to hang onto shared with someone you trusted with every ounce of faith. That one little burst of inexplicable truth that could only be scaled by so few words spreading in a million directions: you are extraordinary.

Tosh and Owen were gone; she had that intimate moment with Owen, and not one with Tosh. Her eyes skirted to Jack's glass window, catching him mulling over his papers with a pen twirling mindlessly in his hand. Gwen had snatched a moment she would never have with Jack again (in the foreseeable future), and she could live with that ship supposedly sailing on.

But.

The box Ianto carried up was dusty, but the folders inside looked spotless; straight from the cabinets, Gwen imagined. With care, he set it on the low table by the couch and took three or four off the top and held them out to her. "It shouldn't take long," he said. "Reclassifying the Shaytls as the Kuriyotane only requires a couple of footnotes and a redirect with a signature and a date--"

Impulse. You needed impulse or getting ahead was impossible. Gwen was already ahead of the game, in some cosmic pocket no one spoke of, but some part of her said, "You need this. Because Torchwood is it." So she took those folders, pressed them to her chest, put a hand to Ianto's nape, and kissed him.

There was not any fighting, any flailing, any resisting, just slack-jawed stillness that only applied themselves in the parting between them. Quick, chaste, awkward for Gwen, and baffling for Ianto. He had no revulsion, no outrage, no indignation, no breakdown. All that was there was confusion and a tone of honest curiosity.

"What was that for?"

She had no idea.

"Dunno. Just...sorry." And she turned her back and hurried away like a schoolgirl. Stupid, stupid, she chastised herself, and Gwen squared herself away to do as she offered to in the first place.

This is why Torchwood was different from any other job: you would not be snogging any of your colleagues like it was almost the right thing to do.