Author's Note: Hello readers! Just as a heads-up, this story might not make much sense unless you're familiar with the plot of the episode 'The Unquiet Dead.' If you want to refresh yourself, I'd recommend reading the synopsis on Wikipedia here: wiki/The_Unquiet_Dead or the more detailed plot description on the TARDIS Data Core: wiki/The_Unquiet_Dead_(TV_story). Please enjoy!

Content warning: corpse possession, character death, mention of child death.

I've always known, ever since I was a little lass, that the angels in my head were calling me to something greater. I'd fall asleep every night to the sound of their singing. Faint and far-off it was, and yet achingly familiar, like a childhood friend you forgot you ever had. They wanted something of me, that much was sure, but I could make neither heads nor tails of it - until now, that is, until the Doctor and his talk of beings from the stars.

We make our way down the stairs and gather in the cold, damp morgue - the Doctor, Miss Rose, Mister Sneed and the author, Mister Dickens. One of the Gelth flares out of a gas lamp and hovers in the air, a beautiful blue wisp of a thing. Its childish voice instructs me to stand beneath the arch. Rose tells me I don't have to do this, but I don't pay her any mind. With all due respect to her, she hasn't spent her whole life hearing the angels. She doesn't have the Sight.

I step under the arch into a cascade of voices. A million, billion faces materialize before my mind's eye: all lost, afraid, bereft of their bodies. All in need of my help.

"I can see you," I call to the Gelth, "Come, come to me. Come to this world, poor lost souls!"

A great sensation engulfs me, starting in my chest and spreading to the ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes. No emotion I've felt in my life - not grief for my parents, love for the Lord, the exhilaration of the seance - is anything, anything compared to this. This is joy, so pure and powerful it blurs my sight with tears. As the Gelth pour through me from the Rift, crying out with gratitude that only I can hear, I'm overcome with familiarity. I know them; I have always known them, long before they were my angels. But how? Why do creatures from the other end of the universe suddenly feel closer than family?

Something returns to me from long ago. I remember falling through space and time, insubstantial as the wraiths all around me. Then, just as now, I was enveloped in the energy of the Rift. Cast about in its current, I tossed and turned and tumbled before being spat out at the end of the tunnel, in a place I would come to know as Cardiff.

Two faces emerged through the mist - the first two I saw in this world. Mam and Dad. No, they were not Mam and Dad then to me, only two lowly human-creatures grieving over their lost offspring. Poor wee thing. A stillbirth, cut off before the bud of life could open.

I was desperate. I needed a host, a lifeline, something to tether me to this unfamiliar reality. But above all that, I think, I pitied the human couple. I chose their child's vessel, abandoned before it had even begun to live, and filled its vacated form with my own essence. A miracle baby, they said I was, delivered from death's doorstep by the blessed angels.

The truth floods me along with the spirits of my brethren.

I was never human. I am Gelth.

More revelations strike before I can recover from the first. A hundred scattered memories are gathered together, puzzle pieces revealing a larger picture I'd somehow forgotten. Mary Anne Miller, that's how I was christened. But the name never stuck. I called myself Gwyneth since I was old enough to speak, and so Gwyneth I became. Mam and Dad were bemused, but accepted my chosen nickname. Gwyneth. Gelth. The real me reaching out a hand through the haze, speaking my native name through a child's voice in an alien language.

I was always told I had been sickly as a baby. Barely growing, often sleeping, always ashen and frail. The physician said I had been stunted by the shadow that almost took me when I was born. He was half-right. My hold on my this plane was weak back then; my true incorporeal form struggled to integrate with this borrowed flesh. I was no different from the Gelth who now inhabit old Mrs. Peace and poor Mister Redpath. Every night I was forced to retreat into the vents of the building, through which flowed the gas as life-giving to me as water is to a fish. Every morning I returned to my host, rejuvenated. No one was the wiser.

As months stretched into years, it became easier and easier to survive in my human form. Somehow our biologies, initially so at odds, had reconciled. Prolonged exposure, I suppose, will do that to a thing. My trips into the gas vents were rendered unnecessary. I grew from toddler to child to young woman, sprouting those human features that my body could only have produced if it was, in some way, still alive. Hair, teeth, a mature figure. I survived the flu that took Mam and Dad when I was twelve, my Earthen body strengthened by the alien spirit within. The shell of Mary Anne Miller was no mere corpse, then, but a receptacle, robbed of one soul by death and granted another by fate. This became not my disguise, but my own body.

After twenty-five years, I became so used to living as a human that I forgot I was ever anything but one.

Yet I still heard the voices of my people, if I forgot their names, their faces, their forms. My abandoned angels called out to me day and night. Free us, save us, pity us. Pity the Gelth. That was the source of my Sight. Not because I was born atop the Cardiff Rift, but because I was born beyond it. Mediums, spiritualists, clergymen, pastors; I sought them all and none could help. Little wonder. Perhaps I should have consulted an astronomer. Or perhaps my homeworld lies too far beyond this one to even be a pinprick in the night.

This flurry of realizations has come as quickly as the fall of the December snow outside. In the mere seconds since I opened the Rift, my life was split open, hollowed out, and stuffed with something new. In the next instant, it changes even further.

The voice of the Gelth warps from childlike begging to something deep, low, demonic. Blue translucence becomes scarlet flames. The morgue, which just before had been bathed in cool, ghostly light, is now more akin to a hellscape. I try to react, but find my body rooted to the spot like the corporeal anchor it is. Even hearing is nearly impossible above the unearthly chorus of Gelth in my mind. The few words I can make out are enough to freeze my heartbeat, if I have one at all. The Gelth will come through in force. A few billion. All in need of corpses.

There it is, the final piece of the puzzle. The Time War burned away everything we had: our bodies, our home, our morals. I was a scout sent through the Cardiff Rift as a last resort. To find the Gelth a new home, whatever the cost.

Mister Sneed is yelling now, his face contorted but his words sounding light years away. He's ordering me to stop his madness, to listen to my "master" - and, for one terrifying, euphoric second, I'm pure Gelth again, revolting at the notion that this insignificant life form assumes superiority over me, that anyone could consider the lives of a few billion human-creatures equal to our own-

Human-creatures. Humans. Mam and Dad, earnest and hardworking, my parents in spirit if not in blood. Rose Tyler, modern and blunt but well-meaning and destined for so much more. The Doctor, with his encouraging tone and otherworldly knowledge. The butcher's boy down the road, his shy smile stirring up things I never knew I could feel. Carollers in church, their voices a glorious crescendo. Even Mister Sneed, cross and stiff but generous when I had nothing - now executed before my eyes, his body a puppet for my kin.

I was sent here to conquer humanity, but somewhere along the line, I became a part of it.

Chaos is unfolding around me, but I'm barely aware of it. My vision seems to be deserting me as did my sense of hearing. The Doctor, Rose, and Dickens are nowhere to be seen. Gelth surge into the cadavers like a living, hungering flood. My birth species delights in the destruction of my adopted race. I am utterly helpless, locked in place by the Rift, by my human form, by the war raging inside my soul.

Now someone's in front of me again, talking. I can't tell who it is, but their urgency cuts through the fog like a beam of light. "...Send them back … lied … not angels."

"Liars?" I manage to choke out. My Gelth, my angels, my brothers and sisters? Yes, liars all.

"Look at me," the person says, and a face becomes clearer. It's the Doctor, his eyes pleading. "If your mother and father could look down and see this, they'd tell you the same. They'd give you the strength. Now send them back!"

But it's impossible. I can't close the gate. I can barely keep conscious anymore. So many years I spent making this body my own, and the onslaught of Gelth has worn it down in minutes. "They're too strong."

"Remember that world you saw?" the Doctor persists. "Rose's world? None of that will exist unless you send them back through the rift!"

The world I glimpsed in the future-girl's mind flashes through my memory. London, bursting with noise and colour and life, metal boxes racing past, mechanical birds in the sky. Hundreds, millions, billions of lives to be lived, stories yet untold. There is still so much more to come. We have no right to take that from them, even if we must fade away to nothingness, to less than gas ...

Gas. This room is filled with it. My hand reaches into the pocket of my apron, closing around the familiar shape of a matchstick. I know now what I have to do. A simple action, one I've performed countless times in my duties as a maid. So easy, yet so final.

"I can't send them back. But I can hold them. Hold them in this place, hold them here. Get out."

The Doctor strokes my cheek, and I am grateful for the tenderness of the action even though I can no longer physically feel it. His eyes are heavy with a secret, one that I'm faintly surprised I never noticed until now. We're not so different, this strange man and I. We are both from the stars, we have both worn different bodies, and we have both lost - so much - to the Time War. He has been forced to make a terrible choice, the same one I now make. And - another shock - I can sense he will one day make it again, though not while he wears this face. He will have to live with that weight. I at least have the small mercy of death.

I can't tell if he can see the same truths in my eyes, but he sees enough to know there is nothing more he can do for me.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs, and kisses my forehead. "Thank you."

As soon as he leaves the room, I light the flame, and the Gelth burn a second time.

Everything I am, everything I ever was, human flesh and Gelth spirit, is scattered and sown across the cleft in time. In my lack of form I find not pain or anguish, but freedom. All of existence is open to me now. Maybe I'll soar to Paradise, be with Mam and Dad again as I'd always wanted. Or maybe they're at peace already, reunited with the child they lost too early. Perhaps all the bits and pieces of me - my smile, my mind, my heart - will be gathered up again and set back down somewhere else along the Cardiff Rift. I think I'd like that. I could be reborn, with a body of my own this time. It might even be in Rose's world.

After all, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than I once dreamt of.

Because I love minor characters and ghostly villains too much for my own good.

The idea for this came to me completely unexpectedly at work. I'd watched 'The Unquiet Dead' for the first time the previous night, and was thinking it over when I noticed how similar the names 'Gwyneth' and 'Gelth' are. Then I thought of how the Doctor realizes she's been dead at least since she stepped into the arch, and it hit me - what if it was actually much longer? What if she was actually a Gelth puppeteering a human body like the others in the episode, hence why she was able to keep speaking and moving even after her physical body was dead? With that, everything just clicked, and this crazy theory was born. (Just for reference, I don't actually think this is/want it to be canon, it's just something I latched onto for this fic).

I know the idea of a Gelth-possessed human developing into a sort of Gelth-human hybrid over time is a little odd, but let's face it, this is Doctor Who where pretty much anything can happen! We've had humans being turned into Daleks in too many ways to count, the Doctor rewriting his biology with the Chameleon Arch, Donna becoming part-Time Lord by touching a severed hand, Rory being resurrected as an Auton (and then back to human), River gaining Time Lord traits because she was conceived in the time vortex, the TARDIS' soul being put into a human(oid?) … and so on. Also, I needed an explanation for how a Gelth-possessed dead body would be able to grow to adulthood and be perceived as alive by everyone around it, so I figured that the two eventually 'merging,' and thereby giving the body a sort of new life, would work fine.

And speaking of 'humanizing' the Gelth, one of my goals with this was to, well, humanize them a bit. It seems to happen so often that the Doctor has to destroy some alien race who lost their own planet and are trying to take over the world. I was a little disappointed that the Gelth turned out to be in that vein too, because honestly, how much more interesting and unique would it have been if they really *were* just innocent refugees? But given how things turned out in canon, I guess I just wanted to show them from a slightly more sympathetic angle, while keeping in mind that they're still the villains. So having the protagonist of the story be one of their number was the best way to do this. Plus, it let me work in a comparison between the Doctor and Gwyneth, both of whom have to destroy their own species in order to prevent death on a larger scale. (In case it's not clear, when she foresees that the Doctor will have to make the same choice again, it's referring to The End of Time when he sends the Time Lords back into the War).

Even though I haven't watched Torchwood, I know that Gwyneth's actor plays Gwen Cooper, so I put in that line at the end to suggest that maybe Gwyneth is somehow reincarnated as her.

Lastly, I was NOT expecting this story or this Author's Note to be so long, but like Gwyneth, they kind of took on a life of their own!

Thanks for reading; reviews are much appreciated! :)