[locked to jack - debut] not quite dead yet
Tosh's voice was the last one that Owen heard before the coolant was vented into the room he was in. He wasn't sure if it was the last one he wanted to hear, but it was the last one he did. He thought for a moment, just a moment of what might have been. But he was dead and what hope of a relationship did someone think to have with a corpse? He thought of Jack then. Jack who would be eternally alive. There was some sort of odd balance there, some sort of beautiful symmetry that didn't make any sort of sense until he saw the coolant rushing towards him and closed his eyes in surrender.
He'd lost the ability to feel temperature when he died. Not that it mattered anymore. He was glad to have been spared the fate of feeling what that particular sensation was like, actually. The coolant knocked him over with the force with which it was ejected into the room, but it didn't hurt. Nothing hurt anymore. Owen laid on his back and let himself be submerged, let it take him because there was nothing for it now. He was ready.
That's the funny thing about being ready, though. Just because you're ready for something doesn't mean that the universe is ready to let you have it.
The first thing Owen noticed was sound. Not the sound of the alarms in the room, but the sound of traffic.
The second thing Owen noticed was searing pain from his pinky finger. From the cut in his hand that would never heal.
Owen didn't think they had pain like this in the afterlife. He didn't remember what death was like, honestly.
There was pain somewhere else too. Pain in his chest, but it didn't feel like it had when he'd been freshly shot.
Owen opened his eyes and looked. He was underneath a bridge. Or rather, he was laying on a support girder underneath a bridge, about ten feet off the ground. He wondered for a moment if the Doctor had done something, but Owen didn't think that he was the sort of man to trouble himself with the affairs of Torchwood. Owen swallowed. And wow, was that a surprise. There was saliva in his mouth and air in his lungs. He reached up with his uninjured hand and pressed two fingers to the pulse point at his throat.
He was alive.
He didn't know how or why this happened. Hell, he didn't have a fucking clue where he was, but wherever it was, he was alive.
Owen sat up, slowly, carefully and looked down at his chest, at the white shirt he was wearing and the shock of red on it from the suddenly non-fatal wound on his chest. He looked at his hand, at the blood on that bandage that had seeped through his stiches.
Owen let out a laugh, broken and near hysterical.
He was alive. Oh god, he was alive.