Here's how they tell him it all went down, two days later.

The surgery takes hours -- it's delicate work, trying to remove a brain tumor, especially one that has displaced so much healthy tissue -- but in the end, there's little they can do. They take out what they can and close her up. But she won't wake up. Too much damage.

He'd screamed. He'd ranted and raved and nearly punched out one of the male nurses, trying to get in to see her. They would have let him, of course, the counselor assures him; they just wanted him to calm down first, but he doesn't, and in the end someone sees fit to sedate him. To keep him from hurting himself.

"We're all just concerned for you, Owen," Trina says. He knows her; he's seen her work with other patients. Usually he likes her quiet tones, the way she speaks so calmly. But he feels patronized -- if it weren't for the straps he'd probably be going for her, just to get her to shut up. "Doctor Garrett said he'd authorize leave time for you if you needed it, and we'll make sure that still goes through."

He doesn't want leave time. He wants Katie back. He wants to find the American.

Like everyone else, Trina insists there is no American. "You're just looking for someone to blame," she says soothingly, and it feels like a pat to the head.

"Damn right I'm looking for someone," he says, almost a growl. He doesn't say space aliens this time, but Americans dressed from the 1940s aren't much better.

He goes looking for proof, using up all the patience the staff has -- and they're giving him more than the norm, since they know him, like him, pity him -- but in the end it's all gone, leaving only stiff frowns, insincere gestures, and a three-month leave of absence for grief that really amounts to 'get out before we have to kick you out.'

He switches from haunting the halls to haunting the cemetery. He can’t stand to even look at his -- their -- flat.

The rest of him doesn't feel anything at all.

But then Jack doesn't move. And he doesn't go away. And really, that's not like hallucinations (one can assume). And Owen starts to get angry.

Because if Jack's not a hallucination, then that means he's real. All this is real. And what the hell is the man doing back here now? Owen doesn't feel like giving him a chance to explain.

'This' is apparently the entire history of Torchwood. He reads and he reads until his eyes are sore, and the screen's wavering, distorting patterns are about to send him for his glasses, which he realizes with a pang he doesn't even have with him. They're at home.

Home.

He breaks away from the computer then, information unfinished, and distracts himself with the medical bay.

The equipment there is astonishing, and he doesn't understand how half of it works, alien or human, but its overall content scares him.

This isn't equipment to save lives. This is a lab, to dissect and study. There are no tools to perform delicate surgery, or even do more than patch up bullet holes or laser blasts, really. Jack said 'medic.' He meant 'Mengele.'

He confronts Jack on this point, fists clenched in his pockets so his surprise and anger don't show (never show it, first lesson he ever learned, even before he started school). Jack takes his words with the smooth casualness Owen is beginning to recognize as his trademark, sitting there with a smile on his face, and letting Owen's words go in one ear and out the other.

"You're here to keep the team safe, Owen. After that, you're here to make sure Cardiff is safe -- and more often than not, that doesn't mean helping the aliens. It means making sure they don't do more damage. Find out what their weaknesses are, how to overcome their strengths. That's how you save lives, Owen. I'm not asking you to take them. I'm asking you to protect them."

Jack is a good liar. Owen isn't. But he does know when to play along.

He's just tired of death.

"What, you don't go out in the field?" Owen asks, mind racing, trying to figure out what he would do out in the field.

"No." Tosh says it with finality, and her eyes have gone dead.

So it's Suzie he asks about Tosh.

"She doesn't go out on missions? What use is that?"

"She coordinates from the Hub. Keeps track of the aliens on the scanners, monitors the CCTV." Suzie doesn’t look up from her work. She's taking apart a crystalline device of some kind; he can't tell more than that.

"Yeah, but with the SUV and her PDA, can't she do most of that out in the field? Don't tell me you two could handle everything on your own." He watches over her shoulder, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He's supposed to be doing a write-up on the state of the lab, but he doesn't want to wrap his head around it again.

"We manage. Anything too big we'll call her out, but usually Tosh works better back at the Hub."

Owen means to pursue it further, but Suzie's hand is twitching towards the laser spanner, and that's his signal to go, before she turns it on him.

He just doesn't understand why it's such an issue, that's all. Though, he supposes, watching Tosh from his secondary station, she's so small, she'd probably not be much good in a fight against something like a Weevil. She seems to like it that way, and at least Owen doesn't have to worry about patching her up.

Suzie isn't all sunshine and puppies, but she's normal, and that's the most reassuring thing right now. She's practical, pragmatic, answers Owen's questions straight on, and takes his criticism with a laugh.

"Once you get out there and see it all, Owen, you'll see what a wonderful job this is." She's taking apart some weapon she says they took off a Naborean last week, whatever that is. "Our methods are a little unorthodox, I know, but trust me, we know what we're doing."

Three months later, he's sleeping with her, and he's not so sure that's true any more.

Jack is surprised that Owen knows the basics of how to handle a weapon. Owen doesn't utter a word.

"He's got a gun! Get security!"

BANG.

Screams.

"Owen --"

"-- how did you --"

"Bugger that, get me a fresh pair of gloves, NOW! Where the hell is security?!"

So he's crap at actually aiming. Jack puts his hands, warm and solid, on Owen's shoulders, and by the time they emerge again, three hours later, Owen can shoot anything, moving or not, living or not, without the slightest waver or hesitation.

He goes out and gets solidly drunk.

So he isn't exactly expecting it when Jack comes out of his office and says "I think I'll let you handle this one," and throws a spray canister at Owen's head.

Two and a half hours, fifteen bruises, one sprained wrist and countless scrapes later, Owen has his first Weevil call under his belt. He stares at the ugly, twisted creature, still struggling vaguely, even subdued by the spray, cuffed and sacked.

"What do we do with it?" he asks.

"We can't let it go, it'll just come back up again and kill," Jack says from behind him, not even winded. The injuries have all been shared between Suzie and Owen. "That's why it's not such a big deal if they get killed in capture. But we try to take them alive. They're sentient. We just can't communicate." The Weevil lets out a low moaning growl. "This one's got a nice little cell on level six to look forward to." Jack hauls it up and they manhandle it into the back of the SUV before it can recover and try to escape.

"So we just leave it to rot." Sure, it’s like jail, or a psych ward; it does make sense, he thinks dimly. But how many of them are there? Do they ever run out of room? Where do they come from? Why do they come out? He thinks of mass animal migrations, changing climate, shifting environmental factors.

"If you've got any suggestions, I'm all ears," Jack says with a grunt.

Owen hesitates, the door to the SUV open. Is Jack serious, or giving him the brush-off? Only one way to find out. "I'd like to study it."

Because his teammates scare him.

Hell, he's scaring himself. He hasn't slept properly since he got here, a combination of grief and nightmares -- Katie, dead on the table, that alien crawling out of her skull; Weevils running through the streets; Jack, standing like a tall black shadow, his very presence crushing him, pressing him to the earth, filling his mouth with dirt and choking him -- until even the sight of his bedroom makes him uneasy, and the couch is beginning to do the same.

He runs screaming silently into the night, seeking out answers he knows he won't find, a peace he knows isn't there -- he just wants to be normal again. But he can't figure out how to get back there. All he finds are loud parties, blinking lights, moving bodies. He grasps at it like a drowning man, and it doesn't matter if it's a false hope he's clinging to, it's his. There are pills and powders and bottles and bodies, bodies that don't care what he did that day or who he lied to or cut open, just how well he can move and how hard his cock is and what he can do with it.

There are no faces. Faces get pushed away, get pushed down, get pushed off 'til they get off, and go. He'd fuck 'til he's raw, but he's already raw, so he fucks until he's empty.

And when he goes into the Hub the next day, everyone seems a little less familiar, a little less wrong.

So he goes out again the next night.

"You could have done practically anything, and you chose this?!" He's furious. Livid. "You could have asked me, and I could have formally resigned! You could have done a mental leave! That would have made sense. But no," he sneers, leaning in on the table. "You had to pull together this bullshit."

"We had to make sure that if you tried to say something, no one would believe you," Jack offers reasonably.

"Mental leave still works, not saying I slept with patients." He's disgusted with them.

Jack just shrugs, that cool look like this isn't actually his problem, even though he caused it. "What's done is done, Owen. Deal with it."

"No," he snarls, and storms out. "If you need me, I'll be selling cocaine to children and kicking puppies," he shouts.

He doesn't have any cocaine, though, so he settles for going to the clubs until four in the morning, and then sleeping in and missing half the workday.

It's his third mission out, some kind of sea monster that's lost its way and ended up in the Bay, picking off the occasional tourist. Suzie says why not let it, and Jack shoots the last of their ammo at it with the creature still having nary a scratch, and Tosh is yelling directions into his earpiece, but all Owen can hear is the blood rushing in his temples, and the little voice in his head, reminding how slick the ground is, how easy it would be to slip, he's still new, it wouldn't take much, and that thing has such sharp teeth...

Then he's moving -- too fast -- and wet, and cold, and now everyone is shouting, and there's pain somewhere but he can't make out where, and all he can do is laugh, wildly and weakly, choking on the liquid bubbling, thick and coppery, in his mouth.

He wakes up, from a thick grey fog, to the taste of chemicals in his mouth and the steady beeping of machines that he recognizes too well. This is, he thinks, what happens when you don't plan things out.

He should have learned that lesson by now.

A shape moves in the corner of his eye, one shadow stretching out and breaking away from the others.

Jack. Standing at his bed, looking down at him.

"You're not that clumsy, Owen" he says, and Owen can tell that he doesn't mean his misstep out on the pavement. "And you don't get to run away that easily." His voice is hard. "You won't find any resolution that way."

"Fuck you, Harkness." The first harsh words he's spoken to the man since that first day. His last day on Earth.

Jack's grin is wicked, sharp. "You can do that, if you think it'll help."

Tosh wanders by, and actually looks up for once, saying, "Oh, Owen -- let me turn the ventilation up for that. We're underground, it won't dissipate, remember? I'll write some automatic protocols for you." And then she's gone, and he puts the canister away.

Then Suzie gets herself injured on the next field mission, and he has to stay and help her, and there's no way he can get close to this creature now.

And he knows Jack is watching him, probably waiting for him to try something a little more obvious, but at this point Owen's pretty sure if he stepped into a crosswalk wrong, Jack would be there to swoop in and stop him, and he doesn't want to give the bastard the opportunity.

So he waits.

And after a while, waiting turns into not doing.

"Isn’t that what Torchwood London's for?"

"Not if they don't remember you were there." And Jack explains everything. With a smile. With that carefree look that says it's all old hat, and who the hell ever heard of consequences?

Owen is trembling with fear and rage, and fighting the urge to be sick. He knows he's gone pale, because Jack's giving him that look like his first supervising physician gave him the first time he came across an evisceration. He makes himself stay where he is.

"Did you do that to me?"

And Jack smirks, that sick fuck. "Wasn't just chloroform and video tapes, Owen."

And then he whites out, and the next thing he knows is there's a pain in his knuckles and Jack is on the floor, blood on his lip. "If you ever think I will ever do something like that to another human being -- You don't know what it's like, that raw, gnawing pain of not knowing, the tricks it plays, the fear --" He stops, choking back words as Katie sobs in his head, and he has to run from the Hub or be violently ill.

He goes on another bender, and doesn't come back for two days, hiding out in pubs and shady hotel rooms. When he comes back, Tosh is in London and Jack doesn't mention Retcon again.

It seems not.

He doesn't even figure it out himself. It's Suzie who realizes it, stalking into Jack's office seething quietly and coming out screaming and just about ready to start throwing punches until Owen drags her out to the pub and makes her tell him everything. Not that it's difficult -- the people in the next booth over can probably hear half of what she's saying.

At first, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, but that's probably how Jack got away with it for so long.

"You know how it is, we're always complaining about how none of this stuff comes with an instruction manual, Toshiko's translation matrix is more of a language databank because we can't tell where any of this is coming from, and now I've finally found one."

"A translation matrix?"

She shakes her head. "An instruction manual. So I send a copy down to London, because they've got a Linguistics Department --" and she wanted to gloat, probably, "-- and I get a phone call from none other than Yvonne Hartman, asking me what happened to our translation software that we couldn't translate a 'simple manual.'" She puts a sneer on her face, and takes another sip of her beer. She's on her second pint, dark heavy Guinness that looks lighter than it is because she's not waiting for the head to settle.

"So I look through the computer records. There isn't one. According to Tosh, there never has been one, which was why Jack let her work on creating one." She spits the words out. "So I go and confront Jack about it. And like the lying snake he is, he won't admit it at first, until I tell him what Yvonne said. And he shuts me down. Tells me to drop it, and practically throws me out of his office."

That gets Owen's eyebrows up. Jack never tosses Suzie, she's the clear favorite of the lot. "At least he didn't try to pull one on you after you'd brought it up," he offers.

Suzie just rolls her eyes. "Bet you we won't be getting any translation software out of this," she mutters into her glass.

She's right, of course.

Some days he thinks that's his sentence too.

Because when you get right down to it, all biology is pretty much the same. Most of the species in the computer's databanks are bipedal, with two arms and a head aggregating the sensory organs. It's a good pattern, that one. And 90% of the rest are similar to other creatures Owen's already seen, in one form or another. Tentacles, tails, claws, whatever -- it's all just skin and bone and a vascular system, and it's only the details that change. That leaves a pretty small margin for wonder. And it's not like Owen's going to get a chance to dissect an energy creature, so really, he's hardly going to get a sense of wonder from looking at a small, glowing cloud. Tosh and Suzie have their machines, their technology, and Jack's got the culture covered. That's where the diversity comes in. That's where it’s different.

Really, he thinks, looking at the tissue samples in front of him, all pink and white, space hardly seems worth it.

Somewhere in there, instead of actually doing much cleanup besides trashing most of the biohazardous materials, he's sunk into a chair, and practically passed out. He doesn't realize it until he looks up and sees Jack by the supply cabinet, a roll of gauze in one hand, staring at Owen in concern.

"What --" he starts, and his voice is hoarse, groggy. He swallows, tries to start again, but Jack interrupts him first.

"Just getting some gauze." He holds up one arm in a vague gesture, too quick for Owen to even see what's wrong with it. "Scraped myself up a bit." His sleeve is rolled up to the elbow, and Jack wraps his own arm quickly and efficiently, Owen still sunk in his chair, looking dully on.

"Come on," Jack says, suddenly at his side, and Owen looks up. Jack pulls him out of his seat, tugging one of Owen's arms around his shoulders, and leads him out of the autopsy bay. Owen, confused, stumbles along. Jack's giving him this look, and Owen's not sure what it means. It kind of reminds him of the way Katie's older brother used to look at him from time to time, usually when they were out at the pub and Owen said he ought to get home before it got too late.

He misses Kavan. Kavan was such a nice guy.

"Come on, Owen," Jack says again, his voice soft, and Jack's laying him down on a cot. He tries to protest -- he doesn't need -- there's things he has to -- but Jack ignores his muddled words, and tucks a blanket around him, and Owen is trapped.

"Go to sleep, Owen." Jack pats his shoulder. "You did good."

All of Cardiff.

No checking for allergies, or unwanted side effects. Just him, and a false ID, and a few containers of potassium bromide. He'd followed the plan without a single thought to argue.

His hands are shaking by the time he emerges from the plant via a small, unwatched side entrance. Jack is there, leaning against the SUV, waiting for Owen's confirmation to restart the single CCTV camera watching the alley.

Owen doesn't say anything, though. He just comes over and sits down in the SUV, without saying a word.

Jack doesn't pursue it, just restarts the security systems and drives out into the dark wet night.

The ride back to the Hub is silent, neither of them saying anything. Owen stares out the window, watching the streetlights flash by, their amber spark scattered and refracted a million times by the raindrops on the windshield.

Jack parks in the car park for a change, and turns the engine off, settling his hands on the wheel.

"You all right?" he asks, his tone light, conversational, as if he's asking if it's Tuesday. As if he was expecting this. Maybe he was.

"No, I'm not," Owen says. The bay is dark and quiet. If he tries he could probably make out his flat from here, and he thinks idly that he ought to get curtains, before Jack comes up with a new way to be intrusive. "You said I could do things here to help, Jack," he turns to face the other man at last. "But it doesn't look like that, from where I'm standing."

The words are choking him inside; he can't find the right ones to say what he means. So he flees the vehicle, stalking out into the night, hands shoved roughly in his pockets, head down.

He wants to go back to his flat, take a shower, but since he just dosed the fucking water supply, he can't. So he lets the rain wash him clean.

It does a sorry job.

A piece of paper, stiff cream-colored card stock, is taped to the corner of his monitor. It reads:

I will at all times remember my responsibility as a guardian of the skies. I will uphold the sacred charge to promote the health and well-being of those aviators entrusted to me. My studies will be unending, My efforts ceaseless. Those who place their lives and the lives of their loved ones in my hands will not be disappointed. My obligation as a flight surgeon is to move ever forward in the mastery of my skill. I promise to practice the medical arts with forthrightness and honor. My skills must remain sharp, my mind quick, Lest I fail those whom I’ve sworn to protect. My insight and knowledge can turn the tide of battle; The skies of tomorrow await the discoveries of today. As a soldier, I dedicate my efforts to the well being of the United States of America. As an officer, I will always live the Army values and remain devoted to Duty, Honor, Country. As a healer, I dedicate my efforts to the well being of mankind. I wear the sacred wings of my profession with the pride and understanding that I carry the legacy of brave men and women who have given their lives so that I might better protect my fellow Americans. From the skies above, aviators are not separated by mountain and sea -- they are joined by a common sky. I will bring all of them home, my word is my bond, these wings my manifesto. I do solemnly swear these things by the heavens in which we fly: I am an Army Flight Surgeon.

Something settles inside him and Owen swallows carefully. When he looks up again, Jack is watching him through the window. He nods at the other man. Jack smiles warmly, and nods back, before returning his gaze to Suzie.