m_findlow

Summary: Jack isn’t ready to say goodbye to Owen just yet.

Jack simply couldn't accept that Owen was gone. Their mission had been going well. They'd managed to save Martha in the knick of time, had confirmed the alien experiments that had been taking place, ensuring that the aliens would be returned home if possible, or at least held somewhere where they wouldn't be subjected to torture and experimentation.

All that was left to deal with was their leader – no more than some primped up doctor who thought he'd achieve medical breakthroughs at the expense of innocent alien lives. Jack hadn't considered him dangerous, even when he’d been wielding a gun at them. Like all civilians Jack had encountered over the decades, none of them ever intended to use the weapon they pointed at you. It was all for show. Most of them would be lucky if they could even pull the trigger.

Not this time though. The gun had gone off and shot Owen straight through the heart, killing him in an instant. Jack's gun had gone off a split second later, reacting instinctively to the threat, killing the doctor on the spot.

The shock of it all hadn't yet sunk in. He was ordering his team to immediately vacate the premises and to get Owen in the back of the SUV. They did it because Jack commanded them to, even if they were otherwise rooted to the spot, frozen by their own shock and grief.

The whole way back to the hub there was nothing but silence, each of them processing the sudden and unexpected loss. All except Jack, whose mind had immediately shut out any acceptance of the reality of their situation. Where he should have been grieving, he was instead thinking of any way in which he could fix this. Death, in his long experience, was not a permanent state. There were ways and means around it, but right now he didn't have a TARDIS, or Rose, to bring Owen back. There had to be another way, and though the SUV was speeding at a breakneck pace along unfamiliar night time roads, Jack's hands were steady on the wheel. He shouldn't have been able to think straight at all, but his neurons were firing without effort, working through everything he'd ever experienced, searching for a loophole.

Gwen was in the front, tears silently steaming down her face. Ianto reached forward, slender hand offering her his handkerchief. That's it, Jack thought, catching the movement in the corner of his eye and making a connection from one random thought to another, a dozen times over. There was a glove that had been capable of bringing people back from death. Tosh had destroyed it over a year ago in order to save Gwen from having her life drained from her into Suzie's otherwise dead body. Jack could do the same, only he couldn't ever die. No matter how much life the glove sucked from him to inject into another, it would never be enough to kill him.

That was the answer. It hadn't occurred to him until he'd seen Ianto's hand, that where there was one glove, there'd be another. They always came in pairs, that's what Ianto had once remarked. There was a second one somewhere in Cardiff. Jack only had to find it and he could bring Owen back. It was an incredible long shot, but in Jack's heart he knew that tonight was not the night they said goodbye to Owen. He still had so much life to give them and Jack could make that happen.

He threw the SUV into a sharp bend in the road, wheels biting into the gravel siding and probably giving his passengers a fright, but now he had the bit between his teeth he wasn't about to let it go. Hope spurred him on to get back to Cardiff as quickly as possible. Suzie had always said the glove worked best on the recently deceased. Though her own resurrection had somewhat disproved that theory. If you wanted it enough, you could make it happen even if they'd been in deep freeze for six months.

Where to find it, though? The last one had been dredged up from the bottom of the bay. He needed more than a hunch where it might be. Someone with additional foresight and, just like all his other thoughts, he came upon the answer without trying. There was one girl in Cardiff who would know where it was. Not a girl, so much as she was a creature from another world, capable of peering into the future and also, he hoped, into the past.

He'd dropped the team at the hub and left within minutes without explaining himself. There wasn't time for it now, nor to get their hopes up.

The girl’s gift of sight was something Jack had used on more than one occasion. She didn't fail him, giving him the location in her own cryptic way. Jack nutted out the clue without assistance, and should have known that the abandoned church full of deadly sleeping weevils would be precisely where something so powerful might lay hidden. It had cost him his life to retrieve it. The glove sensed his intent and made him earn the right to hold it. It had clattered from a pile of junk at the church altar, awakening every last weevil in the church, all of whom converged on Jack, tearing his body apart in a bestial fit of instinct. Still, he'd made it out of there eventually, bloodied and dishevelled, but with his prize, just as the sun was beginning to rise on a new day. A day where no one died, Jack prayed.

The looks on the faces of his teammates when he returned made him second guess himself for a heartbeat. There were no relieved looks of hope – only fear at what he clearly proposed to do. He didn’t care if they were scared or worried. All he knew was that he wouldn't give up on Owen yet.