Title: Cheaters Never Win
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Suzie, Gwen, Jack, mentions Tosh.
Rating: PG-15
Word Count: 772
Spoilers: Everything Changes, They Keep Killing Suzie.
Summary: Suzie has plans for the ultimate in cheating, but there are some games you just can’t win.
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge #132: Cheating.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.




Suzie had figured out early that Torchwood agents had a tendency to die young, but she’d been determined to escape that fate. She planned on beating the odds, living to a ripe old age, and being the first field agent to survive long enough to draw a pension. She’d been so idealistic when Jack had recruited her.

But the job chips away at you. All the wonders of the universe could potentially fall through the Rift, yet they only ever seemed to see the garbage. Broken bits of tech, mangled wreckage, useless objects, and aliens bent on death and destruction… Gradually, she lost her optimism, becoming jaded and worn.

Then they’d found the glove, and for once they had something that could benefit humanity, if she could only work out how to use it. It could provide them with a way of cheating death, giving people who died a second chance at living. Except that frustratingly, no matter how hard she tried or how long she practised, she couldn’t bring anything back for more than two minutes. It was driving her mad!

That was when she started experimenting further, using the knife to improve the connection between her and the deceased. It meant killing a few people, but what would that matter if she could master the glove completely? The ends justified the means; she needed freshly killed people to work with, it was just more expedient to kill them herself, that way the corpses were as fresh as possible and there was no time wasted.

She never really noticed how obsessed and how paranoid her research was making her. She was simply driven by an overwhelming need to keep going, to succeed, and she knew she’d have to make provision in case something happened to her, so that she could be brought back to continue her life’s work. Suzie had never expected to be found out though, and when that nosy little copper somehow managed to put all the pieces together despite being retconned, she knew time was running out. So she took matters into her own hands and activated her backup plan. It was simple; one bullet through her own brain and all she had to do was wait for someone to use the glove on her. And they would. They’d have to, she’d left enough carefully scattered clues. They’d bring her back to find out what she knew, and then…

It worked like a dream. Even better, the nosy PC who had taken her place in Torchwood was the one to resurrect her, so not only would she get to cheat death herself, she could get revenge on her replacement. It seemed fitting; Gwen ruined her plans, so now Suzie was going to take Gwen’s life. She did regret having to give up her research on the glove, there was so much more she could have done with it, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to get her hands on it while Gwen was sneaking her out of the Hub on the pretext of taking her to visit her dying father one last time. Well, why not get revenge on him too while she was at it? Kill two birds, or in this case two people, at once. That way she’d be able to begin her new life without any emotional baggage. A fresh start, that’s what she wanted; she’d start over somewhere else, far from Torchwood, and live out her days on her own terms.

She almost made it too, could see the ferry approaching as Gwen faded fast and Jack tried repeatedly to kill her. But the smug bastard was always too smart for his own good, he figured out the connection, ordered Tosh back at the Hub to destroy the glove. Suzie wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all, she’d been so close to achieving her goal and now it was all going to be snatched away from her again. Still, she wouldn’t go easily. She used the last of her breath to taunt Jack some more.

“Captain, my captain. Do you want to know a secret? There's something moving in the dark and it's coming, Jack Harkness. It's coming for you.” Petty revenge perhaps, but dying terrified her. The least she could do was to make sure Jack would fear it as much as she did.

It wasn’t Suzie who got the last laugh though. Despite shooting him through the head and having him come back to life, she just never really put the facts together.

Jack had been cheating death for longer than she, or even her father, had been alive.


The End