Burning Cosmos {A Torchwood Story Three}

5. New Flat, New Us

"Yesssss!" a voice echoes through the Hub as the door opens. I grumble, jerked out of a nap after helping with the Hadron Collider, and who else but Owen shimmies into the building whooping.
"Drinks on me, guys! Woohoo!" he rejoices as he dances badly across the room to the sofa, stopping to haul me up. The grin on his face reminds me of the first time I told him I liked his cappuccinos.

"What's got you in such a good mood? Have you won the rat-face competition?" I tease, and he laughs and spins me around. I can't help but laugh with him.
"I've got drinks at Barfly! The manager reckons they're losing business to Sugar, that new place, so there's street promo everywhere giving out free drinks leaflets. And I kept going round every one of them and hiding each of my leaflets, so I've got dozens! Tosh, Gwen," he shouts to the girls as they come down from the boardroom, "we're going out tonight!"

When his back is turned to talk to Ianto who's just walked in with coffees, I smile. I'd never tell him this, but every time he's as excitable as a toddler at Christmas, I fall for him a little bit more.

~∆~

That night, after we've waved goodbye to everyone, Owen and I stagger home, clutching each other to keep from falling over. The breeze isn't too harsh, but the cold is making us damp. We can't stop giggling, poking the other's sides feebly and stumbling over the door of our block.
I fumble with the door keys and we almost fall into our flat, laughing our arses off.
"Right, right, come here," he says, slurring his R's, and he tries to pull me into a hug ending up with us falling to the floor.
I scream in drunk laughter and slap him on his shoulder. "Gerroff, you lummox!"

We both sit up and instinctively I let my head fall into his lap. He in turn begins stroking my brown hair, a tipsy ritual we made a while back. It feels so comfortable that I almost fall asleep there and then. But then Owen pushes me off and reaches for his mobile.
"What are you doing?" I ask, my head starting to spin at the sudden movement.
"I want Chinese," he replies, and I laugh.
"Why do you always get so hungry when you're sloshed?"

He socks me in the arm lightly before phoning the takeaway place. He knows my order off by heart so I crawl to the kitchen cupboards, haul myself up, and pour a cup of water very badly. I laugh at my own clumsiness, and when Owen gets off the phone he comes to see the counter soaked and bursts into fresh peals of laughter.

Twenty minutes later we're sitting in front of each other on the floor of the living room, eating food and talking over tonight.
"What was your favourite moment?" I ask him, and he considers before grinning.
"Seeing you in that skirt."
I lash out and kick him feebly, my foot dragging through the shag carpet. "Shut up. Seriously, what was it?"
"You looking hot as fuck," he insists, gesturing to me with his fork.
"Aw, shucks. Right," I announce as I finish my egg fried rice, "bedtime. We got work tomorrow. Help me up."

Owen stands up and gestures to me like Prince Charming. I take his hand and he pulls me up too fast, nearly toppling me again! We laugh and walk each other into our bedroom.
I look around the room we've shared for months on end, without our own privacy, which is nice, but sometimes it's nice to have some privacy, right, like how I didn't in the drug ring?

"Do you think we should actually get round to finding a two bed now? I mean, we forgot to do it for, like, two years."
"Hmm," Owen replies, leaning over for his retainers case and almost falling onto the bed, "that was around the same time as Canary Wharf, so only just over one year, but I get your point."
Oh yeah; I forget nobody remembers the Year That Never Was. "Either way," I say to get myself back on track, "shall we have a Google now, before we forget?"
He shrugs. "Yeah, okay, then when we look on my laptop next we'll remember it. Where was it, that flat near Mermaid Quay?"