Author's note: Spoilers for Season 2 up to and including 'Something Borrowed'.

Twenty things to do in Cardiff when you're dead

1. Start a club

Owen and Maggie swap phone numbers before they leave the roof, and he assumes he'll never hear from her again. So, because everything is upside-down at the moment, a couple of days later he gets a text from her.

They arrange to meet in a wine bar in Roath, near where she lives, which is fine with Owen; he doesn't want to see anyone he knows. While he's not exactly overburdened with friends outside work, there are people who know him round the bay area. The last thing he needs at the moment is curious medics noticing his lack of autonomic biological functions.

That first time he's waiting for Maggie, he orders a small glass of wine, because he's got to buy something and he's not keen to repeat the projectile vomiting experience any time soon. Unless Jack's somewhere in the vicinity, in which case, bring it on. Owen's figured out that he can drink very small amounts; it's the amount of liquid that's key. Once he got over the shock of discovering his new undead status, it has been interesting from a scientific point of view, working out what he can and can't get away with.

Swirling the Rioja carefully in the glass in time-honoured TV wine-wanker fashion, he takes the smallest possible sip, and wonders how come his taste buds are still working if his digestive system's shut down. They are functioning in a reluctant, flavours arriving through a thick layer of cotton wool type-way, it's true, but he can taste the rich oakey flavour of the Rioja. It's not unlike having some sort of chronic condition, Owen reflects, all these lifestyle adjustments. He's never really thought of death as a chronic condition before, but chronic just means you can't get rid of it, doesn't it? That would seem to be the case here.

Maggie arrives ten minutes late, and she's dressed up for him. Well, she's dressed up, anyway, in trendy jeans and a crisp white collared shirt with some sort of interesting silver necklace. That's a good sign, surely? He can't imagine birds that are planning to top themselves spend a lot of time picking out appropriate jewellery to do it in. Although you never know with women. Owen really hopes she doesn't think this is a date. But then the first thing she says as she sits down across from him is, "You know this isn't a date, right?"

"Right," he says, obscurely disappointed. "Strangely, I'm not exactly beating the ladies off with a stick now I'm you know, dead."

Maggie nods. She's had her hair cut; she's got a fringe now. She looks better with all that bony forehead obscured, Owen thinks. That's a good sign too. No-one gets their hair done to look good in a coffin.

"So, how've you been?" he asks. It's not a very Owen question – since when does he care how anyone else is? But he's not really feeling himself at the moment.

"Better," she replies. "What about you?"

It's the first time anyone's asked him that so directly, and surprised, he blurts out, "Well, life goes on."

Could he possibly have said anything more stupid, in the circumstances? He looks up and sees Maggie's sympathetic expression waver slightly as she fights the urge to laugh. Owen can't help it; he smiles. It is funny, now he thinks about it. He's never been a worrier, but there have been times in the Torchwood autopsy bay that he's had cause to wonder exactly how and when he was going to die. Stabbed, shot, sat on by a Weevil? It never occurred to him he'd end up in this ridiculous limbo.

It becomes a regular Tuesday night arrangement; a Suicide Survivors' Club: membership, two, and the weekly glass of wine is as good a way of any of checking whether his taste buds are still working.

2. Give up on science

Every so often, Owen manages to forget what's happened, usually when he's absorbed in something like a computer game (Jack's still limiting his field time, and he's got to shoot something; CGI zombies will do as well as anything). Then it's back to worrying over the thousand unanswerable questions. They're unanswerable because they're impossible.

Like, what happens to skin that doesn't form new cells? The old ones drop off, eventually, right? They have to. What's he going to do when the bones start poking through the skin, wear a bag over his head? And that's not all. He's got no heart beat; hence, no circulation. But the law of gravity seems to have been suspended in his case, along with his sex life, most of his dignity and the last few shreds of his belief that at some level, mostly, Jack knows what he's doing.

After a few days, Owen chucks his textbooks in the bin. Whatever's going to happen from now on, he's not going to find the answers in a book.

3. Get out more

These days Owen doesn't like being underground so much. Things seem easier to deal with outside. He's spent so much of the last three years in the Hub, or pursuing aliens down Cardiff's seedier alleys and car parks at night, that it comes as a surprise just how much daylight there actually is.

He drives south to Penarth and follows the coast road to Lavernock Point. It's all of six miles from Cardiff, but he's never been there. He can't think why, as he wanders along the windswept beach, picking his way over the slippery rocks and enjoying the way the horizon curls around the headland. The cliffs are a riot of colours: shades of brick-red, yellowy green and blue shade imperceptibly into black, studded occasionally with fossils, in places too inaccessible for people to chip them out.

It's a brisk day, the wind whipping up white surf on the water stretching all the way between the Welsh coast and the Somerset shore. An information board below the dunes, its plastic surface worn and pitted, informs him that he's standing on the site from where the first ever wireless telegraphy message was transmitted by Marconi in 1897. It said (in Morse), ARE YOU READY?

He wonders, suspiciously, if Jack was involved.

4. Watch educational TV

What are you supposed to do all day when you're dead? Owen ditches the day time TV viewing when he realises he's not wondering any more if Robert Kilroy Silk's an alien – maybe there's a galaxy where that shade of tan's natural – because he's begun to get properly interested in the guests' problems. God knows why; it isn't like he's going to tune in and find the topic's 'I'm dead but I'm still walking around.'

Then he remembers the box set of 'Buffy' he bought last year in a bargain bin and never got round to watching. He hadn't imagined he'd be using it as a documentary. He studies it now, finding it worryingly easy to fast-forward through the parts that focus on Sarah Michelle Gellar in ridiculously low-cut tops and tight leather pants (the only reason he bought it in the first place). How did the vampires pass the eternal tedium of their eternal lives, anyway? Mostly drinking, fighting and shagging, it would appear, with a fair amount of standing round in long coats and brooding. That doesn't help him much, what with the first three activities being out of the question and Jack pretty much having a monopoly on the brooding and coat thing.

5. Consult an expert

He finds himself thinking about Maggie, even when it's not a Tuesday night. Well, not about Maggie exactly; more about how many other people like her there are out there. Are people jumping off car park roofs all the time? He reads about the Samaritans on the internet. He had always assumed they were God squad, but they're not. The name was an accident; a description coined by a journalist in one of the first articles about them. He goes into the central Cardiff branch and speaks to a woman called Jo. She's short and squat and she should've gone to Specsavers, but she listens to Owen patiently when he asks what the volunteers do.

"People ring us for all sorts of reasons," she says. "Sometimes they're under stress from work. A lot of them have lost something or someone; a job, a house, someone they love. Some of them cry. Some of them talk and talk. More than half the callers don't speak at all; those are the ones I find hardest. You don't know what's going on the other end; it could be anything."

"What do you tell them to do; the ones who talk?" he asks.

"We don't," she says, firmly. "We're here to listen, not advise. We try to help them work out what to do for themselves."

"What would you say if someone told you something that was clearly delusional," Owen asks, casually. "Like, that they were dead?"

"All delusions come from somewhere," Jo says, looking directly at him; her glasses are ugly but her eyes are kind. "What's really on your mind, Owen?"

6. Perform surgery

The doorbell goes at eight one evening and Owen considers just not answering it. He has a feeling it might be Tosh, and while he appreciates she's trying to be kind, he's never done well with people feeling sorry for him. So when he reluctantly opens the door and finds Gwen standing there, it's a pleasant surprise.

She's got a box under one arm, which she passes to him as she takes her leather jacket off and hangs it up by the door. Owen gets a brief flash of the several occasions when Gwen's clothes got thrown off onto the floor rather than neatly hung up, but shrugs it away. He's beginning to find all those sense memories strangely distant from him now, like they're someone else's; he can remember what it felt like to have sex, but it's increasingly hard to recall why it was so important.

He looks down at the box that he's clutching in his right hand and snorts. "Operation?"

Gwen grins. "I found it in a junk shop in one of the arcades this afternoon, and I thought, who do I know who doesn't like losing and's probably bored?"

"Oh, like I could possibly lose to you at this," he mocks.

"You think? Undisputed Operation champion of Blaenau Holiday Village, 1994, standing right here," she says, and reaches into her back jeans pocket. "Besides, I thought we could make it interesting."

She slaps her wallet onto his expensive glass coffee table, pulls a chair up and takes the lid off the box.

---

An hour later, he's oh-so-carefully levering the miniature plastic pelvis out with the tweezers and if he had any breath, he'd be holding it; there's a lot of money riding on this move. He's already twenty quid down and he'd forgotten how bloody fiddly this game can be. He's nearly there, nearly safe, when Gwen leans forward and blows in his ear. The buzzer sounds and the piece of plastic drops from the tweezers and falls on the floor.

"You cheating bitch!" he explodes. He catches her eye and they both start to snigger, and in seconds he's actually lying on the floor holding his ribs because he's laughing so much. He can't remember when he last laughed like this. He can't remember when he laughed at all. After a while, Gwen holds out a hand and hauls him to his feet, and he falls onto the sofa. She sits down beside him, warm against his side and they stay like that for a while, not speaking.

7. Break your own rules

Those flowers Tosh had were not from him. Not no way, no how. Owen's never bought flowers in his life. People buy flowers for bad reasons. There's the sorry I hit you but I'd had a few and you were in the way bunch. The I'm not glad you're dead or anything but look, I'm not exactly crying or anything am I, offering. Not forgetting the classic, you're sick, so here's a bunch of cut flowers that'll wither and die in this over-heated hospital; a thoughtful reminder of your own mortality.

So it's a mystery to him why he keeps slowing down when he passes florists. For some reason, he keeps remembering something Tosh said at Gwen's wedding.

"Load of fuss just to get hitched," he'd grumbled, noticing that someone – Gwen? – had handwritten the place cards.

"It's nice to know someone thinks you're worth making a fuss over," Tosh had said, quietly; so quietly he only just heard her.

He has no idea about flowers; so he lets the florist choose, mostly, although he picks out some red tulips, because their neat, enclosed symmetry reminds him of Tosh.

He writes on the card, 'These flowers will self-destruct if you tell anyone I sent them. Owen."

8. Contribute to medical education

The medical school library hasn't got any more information than the world wide wait has, relevant to the situation, care and life-chances of a walking dead man, but Owen does trust their sources slightly more than Google's. It's weird being back here; his memories of the uni library mostly involve spending time working out the best sight lines to check out women unobserved.

He comes back several times; it's a sort of nostalgia, he supposes. He knew he was good at medicine, right from the start. He had ambition too; mainly concerned with how quickly he could make consultant in some niche speciality, buy a sports car and have attractive house officers hanging on his every word. Well, he's got the sports car and you could describe Torchwood as a niche speciality, all right. So why does he feel such a sense of failure as he wanders through the campus?

The mortuary's still in the same place it used to be, although he notices the dissection labs have been done up recently in a particularly fetching shade of vomit green tile.

Owen pretends to be reading a notice board in the corridor outside the labs, while students assemble for an anatomy class. They look as nervous as all hell, particularly a girl with curly blonde hair; she's pacing and getting things pointlessly out of her shoulder bag and putting them in again. It's spring; a time for daffodils and – if you're a medical student – coming face to face with your first cadaver.

---

"Nowadays, as you know, bodies for dissection are scarce and expensive. Some of my colleagues have been known to wish for the days when you could slip someone a couple of quid to rob a grave, but obviously we don't condone that sort of behaviour nowadays."

A couple of the students titter dutifully at the non-joke. The lecturer's a woman, with an Indian accent. She sounds fairly young; maybe only four or five years older than Owen. Fuck, he hopes she wasn't one of the anatomy demonstrators when he was at college.

The lecturer flicks the sheet back.

"Oh; this isn't the one I–"

She collects herself.

"As you can see, our cadavers aren't necessarily elderly. This one, for instance, has died of a gun shot wound. This is obviously not ideal in all aspects, as there will be internal damage, but will be educational as it's a form of trauma we're seeing increasingly in Cardiff, unfortunately. Now, gather round. I'm going to start by making an incision from the hollow of the throat to the sternum–"

"Jesus, you lot never seen a scalpel before or what? I haven't got all day."

Owen sits up, gives them his best cheeky grin and slides off the metal table, holding the sheet over his cock. As he walks out, hears the unmistakable crumpling sound of someone – the blonde, he hopes – passing out on the floor. He retrieves his clothes from where he's stashed them in the Gents and hopes the class are all hygiene-minded, as he's put retcon in the gel wash. Ah, no-one'll believe them, anyway.

9. Surprise yourself

Getting killed doesn't half rearrange your priorities when it comes to chucking out stuff you don't need and ought to have done something about long ago. Owen's on one of his periodic bin-sack filling missions, when he finds it. An old green payslip from Cardiff General with a London number scribbled on the back. He remembers the moment well. His last day as a junior doctor; the end to being the lowest form of pond life and finally, some prospect of the occasional night's sleep. A message on the answerphone in his shared flat, from his mother, with her new number. He wrote it down on the first piece of paper that came to hand and promptly forgot about it.

He rings the number, fully expecting it to be someone else's now. It's been more than three years. So he's shocked when a familiar voice answers. Shocked, and totally lacking in anything coherent to say.

"Um, yeah, this is Owen," he gets out, eventually, after an embarrassingly long pause.

There's a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.

"Owen?"

To his surprise, his mother sounds pleased.

"Claire, Claire, it's Owen," she says, muffled, and he hears shrieks of surprise in the background. "You remember Claire, right?"

Their neighbour from Peckham. He hasn't given her a thought in years and years but a picture of her pops into his head, all dyed red ponytail, tiger-print leggings and spiky high heels. She used to let him stay up and watch 18 certificate films and make him gin and tonic, heavy on the tonic. It all seems so innocent, now.

"Yeah, I do. She used to babysit for me."

How weird that his mother's friends haven't changed. He's been chasing aliens and getting shot by psycho drugs researchers with a God complex while she's been sitting gossiping to Claire, most probably over a gin and tonic.

"She's babysitting for me again, today, actually," his mother informs him. She doesn't sound awkward at all; it's like they spoke last week. Owen wonders if he's entered some alternate reality; one in which he rings his mother every Sunday night. There's some laughter in the background; childish shrieks.

"Say hello to Owen," she instructs someone, and he braces himself for Claire to come on the line.

"Ello," says a small, loud, voice in his ear; not Claire's; not unless she's switched from gin to helium.

"That's your sister."

"Sister?" Oh, Jesus. The timing of the previous phone call suddenly makes sense.

"Siobhan. She's two," his mother informs him proudly, although he hasn't asked.

It takes him several more long minutes to get her off the phone, minutes during which he learns a great deal more than he really needs or wants to about Siobhan's intelligence, funny sayings and achievements in the area of potty training; all the time, he's thinking of what lies are best to tell when the conversation turns to him. But it never does; he'd forgotten: his mother never asks him questions.

Well, that was weird. Owen rubs his head, then reminds himself not to. Skin cells; probably just lost dozens of the little buggers.

10. Annoy your boss

It beggars belief, the amount of time things like eating, sleeping and showering take up. And that was just the basics; there's all the time Owen used to spend shagging, thinking about shagging, and getting drunk prior to shagging to account for, as well. Acres of time, great unfilled expanses of time, and he supposes he could be doing something useful with it, but it's hard to think what.

Tosh and Gwen went home around seven and even Ianto sloped off an hour or two muttering something about ironing shirts. But what's the point of going home, when all home does is remind you of how utterly pointless a place to live is when you're not alive?

It's five minutes to midnight and he's run out of things to do – he's even cleaned and tidied the lab thoroughly for the first time in over a year. He's currently trying to set a new personal best for the number of times he can bounce a tennis ball off the sloping wall.

"What do you do?" Owen asks Jack grouchily. His boss is watching one of the Rift monitors; Owen sometimes thinks he does it just because he finds the swirling patterns soothing, because there's no activity that he can see.

"What, apart from stand around looking incredibly sexy?" Jack deadpans.

"No, I meant, instead of sleeping," Owen clarifies, irritably, and before Jack can open his mouth, he adds, "Apart from the obvious."

"I do sleep," Jack says. "I just try to keep it to a minimum."

Sleep, Owen remembers from the psych module they had to take at medical school is essential for good mental health. Explains a lot about Jack, really. "Five hundred," he says to himself, pulling off a tricky manoeuvre, that nearly, but not quite, smashes Tosh's computer screen.

"Owen. Go home. Watch TV. Read a trashy book. Hell, write a trashy book. Just leave me in peace for a bit, will you?"

Jack turns, grabs the tennis ball mid bounce and lobs the tennis ball down the stairs to his living quarters.

So Owen goes home.

He finds a Suduko book and a couple of well-thumbed thrillers in his in-tray the next morning.

11. Collect some statistics

Owen starts going through the medical personnel records, for no good reason than that he needs to keep himself busy or he'll go mad, there's loads of them, and the rest of the team are unlikely to question something that looks like him doing work. He's consulted the records, before, obviously, but normally to research something specific, such as when psychotic former co-workers (and occasional shags) get resurrected by dodgy alien tech and try to kill Gwen. That sort of thing. He's never been through them systematically.

If he wasn't already dead, it would be pretty grim reading. Ripped to death by Weevils. Weevil-related crush injury. Cardiac arrest following pursuit by Weevils. Weevil-related incidents crop up so regularly, particularly with new staff, that he just starts to denote them with a 'w', although 'STD contracted from Weevil; note: must research possible transmission routes – fascinating!' makes him wonder if he's actually quite well-adjusted as Torchwood medics go.

Then there's the mundane, but no less fatal ways that Torchwood staff have met their maker: road traffic accident (no, Jack wasn't driving); nut allergy causing anaphylactic shock (Jesus; you dodge the worst the Rift's got to throw at you and a packet of dry-roasted finishes you off; what a way to go) and the intriguing 'fell off invisible lift while drunk; note: must retcon service engineer.'

He's not sure what to do with the analysis when he's finished it. He could write a paper: "Causes of death in a classified alien investigation facility: a longitudinal study." Or he could just stick it in the files. If any future Torchwood medic ever needs to know what the numbers are on them getting snuffed out aged 29 by a crossbow-wielding Weevil, the info'll be right there at their fingertips.

12. Read a book

After a week of not sleeping, Owen's so desperate for entertainment he'd read the back of the cornflakes packet if he hadn't chucked it in the bin days ago. He looks at the books Jack gave him. The first one's about zombies, oh, ha bloody ha, and the other's The Da Vinci Code. Well, nine million people can't be wrong, right?

A couple of hours later, he knows the answer to that question. Oh yes they can. And how. He knows the people who bought this book. They're the people who won't let their kids get vaccinations 'because the government are covering something up', while they happily swallow Torchwood's explanation of the giant horned monster that stalked the streets of Cardiff last Christmas as 'a gas leak'. And yet, he reads on.

The plot is intricate, and ridiculous. Worldwide conspiracies; cryptic messages; powerful, secret organisations, prepared to kill to prevent the truth coming out.

Who are they trying to kid?

13. Listen to strangers

Owen's never really listened to anyone. He's always been too busy talking. He wanders round the shopping area of Cardiff one Saturday afternoon. He doesn't know what it is; it's not like he's invisible or anything, but no-one pays him much attention. He wonders whether everyone pays subconscious attention to things like heartbeat, breathing and body odour; can you feel another human being's presence, or lack of it? Is he fading out; becoming ghost-like?

He checks his reflection in a mirror. He appears completely normal, as far as he can tell; paler than usual, and he still has the bandaged right hand, but he follows two girls around the home furnishings department of Marks and Sparks and they don't even notice. One of them's dark, lively and so very Welsh that he can only make out every other word; if she was ten pounds lighter he could be listening to Gwen. The other's taller and freckled, with spiky ginger hair. They're looking at plates, but talking about men.

Owen can hear the ginger one's miserable, but her friend doesn't notice; she's too busy boring for Wales about her couch potato boyfriend.

"Thing is, he expects me to read his mind; when I moved in with him I always thought I'd upset him on a Saturday night; I didn't realise he always gets like that when City loses."

People are talking all the time, but no-one's really listening. It's normal. It's what people do.

Finally, now, when all the retcon in the world can't make him normal again, Owen wants it more than anything.

Just for a second, he wonders if this is how Jack feels.

14. Do some research

More than a million people commit suicide every day; three times the population of Cardiff. That wasn't just a random doctor fact he told Maggie; he's been reading up. Well, it seems only sensible. What if he gets fed up of this? What if bits of him start dropping off quicker than he can stick them back on? No-one knows how long the effects of the glove will last. Pills are out, obviously; he can poison himself all he likes; there are no bodily systems to interfere with. No point slitting his wrists, either, or hanging himself. He's already ruled electrocution out; well, unless he gets really bored. The buzzing, tickling sensation when he put the lights out at Parker's was actually kind of interesting.

He wonders about some sort of guillotine, but would he still be conscious and aware, even after his head gets lopped off? His crack to Tosh about headless chickens suddenly seems a little too close to the mark. Oh, bloody hell. Ridiculous ideas like jumping into molten lava or boiling oil start to present themselves, but he's hardly the Terminator.

Normally he'd apply Tosh's brain to a conundrum like this, but it doesn't seem like something he's going to be able to convince her to help with. So he keeps adding new ideas to his spreadsheet and listing pros and cons alongside them. Something'll turn up.

15. Find a new perspective

Owen swims a lot. He's dead; his tissues and membranes should by rights be drying up and his eyeballs should have shrivelled to raisins, but somehow, this hasn't happened. Still, regular immersion in water can't do any harm, hopefully. Besides, it's relaxing, and the world's interesting underwater, even if Cardiff Bay's not exactly the Great Barrier Reef.

He finds all sorts of stuff floating about, much of it as revolting as you'd expect – flush your used condoms down the loo, boys and girls, and let the sea-life choke on them – but at least he doesn't have to worry about getting poisoned by raw sewage. He contemplates the greenish gunge and the barnacles on the bottom of boats and thinks about this strange half-life that he's living, suspended between one state and another.

16. Make a follow-up appointment

The paediatric oncology ward at St Helen's has been moved to another building; Owen's not surprised, really. Having cancer's bad enough, without finding out from the ward gossip that a member of staff recently got eviscerated under your bed. They did their best, but retconning an entire hospital is not really possible. Miss one person out, and the formidable NHS gossip and rumour mill's back in action almost instantly, regenerating like a fungus from a single spore. After some detective work, Owen tracks the ward down to a low-rise sixties building which looks like it was elderly care in a previous incarnation, judging by the piles of plastic commodes he has to edge around to get into the main door.

He asks for Jamie Burton at the nurses' station, posing as a researcher into acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

"Jamie? He was discharged last week," says the staff nurse, when he finally wrestles her attention away from the computer screen. "He's on home visits now."

"Palliative care?" Owen asks, frowning. Great. He talked the boy into a painful course of treatment, and it was pointless anyway.

"No, he's in remission. His consultant's delighted," she says.

17. Get religion

It starts as another information-gathering mission. If you've got questions, go to the experts. And who's going to know more about death than the god-botherers? Owen starts reading up on the internet; learns more than he really needs to about the Catholic concept of limbo. Stuck between worlds; yeah. No shit, Sherlock. But there are too many nutters out there in cyberspace, and he feels the need to talk to real people. It's something he feels increasingly, these days, and it's weird. Owen's always seen other people, with a very few exceptions, as obstacles between him and the other stuff he wants. He's never really understood what goes on in their heads, or cared, come to that. But now he finds himself talking to the hospital chaplain, over disgusting coffee in the St Helen's canteen.

"What's the point of religion?" he asks the man. "What's it for?"

Owen knows he can talk like this to a hospital chaplain. They've seen it all, and then some. The man would probably believe it if he told him about Torchwood, or at the very least, the look of interest and concern on his face wouldn't even flicker.

"Well, it's one of the grand narratives," the chaplain replies, making a face at his coffee and pushing it away down the formica table. "It's a way to make sense of your life. Not the only way, but one many people find useful. You don't know anything till you know yourself."

But that's just the problem, Owen thinks. He does.

18. Say goodbye

Filed in a little-used stack of Cardiff central library, Owen finds a book of interviews with women pilots from the Air Transport Auxiliary. The women tell stories of navigating through storms without instruments, of flying unarmed in a service with a kill rate higher than RAF Fighter Command. The author tries hard to get them to talk about feminism, but is endlessly deflected by tales of daredevil flights under low bridges. What they cared about mostly, it seems, was flying planes.

Owen turns the pages with clumsy fingers and a jolt goes through his non-functioning gut as he looks at Diane's familiar features one more time. It's a photo from the war years; an un-posed shot of her jumping down from her plane cockpit, sunglasses dangling from her hand. She stares out at the camera with total self-confidence; her look says life can throw anything at her and she'll deal with it. But there's no interview. Diane Holmes, the text says. Missing since 18th December 1953.

He drives back to Lavernock Point; he's had more time off since being dead than he's had in the previous three years (Torchwood: where holidays are for wimps and the undead). He sits on a bench and carefully folds the note Diane left him into a paper plane. He waits until the wind's blowing offshore, away from Wales, and launches it off into the great unknown.

19. Go to a wedding

Till death do us part has a strange ring to Owen, now he knows for sure it doesn't, always, and moreover, that death comes in many types and flavours.

Jack needs to get a grip, he thinks, catching sight of his boss's face as he dances with Gwen. He might as well have a great flashing sign over his head saying bad loser. This pining after her is just embarrassing; although, watching them, Owen can't decide if that's in fact what's going on the man's head or if it's a little like he was, sitting on the floor of the library stacks yesterday, poring over photos in old books. Wanting what you can't have is such a pointless waste of time, but they all do it, don't they?

Later, so much later that a dirty grey dawn's breaking over Cardiff and normal people are getting up for work, they arrive back at the Hub and Jack tells them; no, orders them – to go home. Somehow the three of them end up at Owen's flat, where they end up watching Singin' in the Rain on his widescreen TV. He doesn't like musicals, particularly – too much smiling; too many teeth – but this one's okay, and it chimes with his post-party, post-clean-up mood.

The coincidence strikes him, suddenly, as it gets to Good Mornin' To You and he realises they're watching two guys and a girl, singing about how they've been up all night. Although, far from being up, Tosh is now snoring lightly on his sofa, glasses drooping off her pretty nose. She's already kicked off her shoes, and her wrap lies draped over the remote controls on Owen's coffee table like a cream-coloured snake. He removes her glasses, carefully, and puts them down on the table. She scrubs up well, Tosh; he wonders if she even noticed how many blokes at the reception were giving her the eye.

He turns to Ianto, but he's apparently engrossed in the film – yeah, the young Gene Kelly's not totally unlike Jack, they've all noticed. He may have less hair, but the manic energy and charm's very familiar. Ianto's sitting on the floor, next to Owen, and he's actually removed his suit jacket and it's neatly folded across the sofa arm nearest Tosh's stockinged feet. His colleague's also loosened his tie, so the universe is about to end, probably. Or maybe that'll happen if he goes all the way and takes it off.

"Well, it might have been the wedding from hell, but at least we both got a dance," Owen remarks, to try to lighten things up, because shirtsleeves or not, he's seen Weevils more cheerful and relaxed than Ianto at the moment.

"Absolutely. Lucky me," says Ianto, sounding anything but.

On impulse, Owen gives him a hug; it's awkward and one-armed, and Owen's room-temperature body can't be that pleasant, but the other man doesn't push him away.

"He does care about you," Owen says. "He's just got a bloody strange way of showing it."

He's not sure this is true; if you ask him, someone needs to give their boss a good slap and tell him to pull himself together. Maybe Owen should. After all, what's the worst thing Jack can do to him? But Ianto looks slightly less desolate for a second, so he doesn't regret saying it.

20. Write a will

Owen finds a solicitor's office and they help him make a will. It takes all of fifteen minutes, ten of which are spent waiting for the receptionist to get off the phone so she can be one of the witnesses. There's the car, the flat; most of his earnings from Torchwood for the last few years. There's a limit to how much even he can spend on clothes, booze and expensive bits of technology, and Jack pays well. Or maybe he doesn't, come to think of it, given his staff's life expectancy. Anyway, when Owen tots it up, it's a fair whack.

He leaves everything to Siobhan, to be held in trust by the solicitor on her behalf until she turns eighteen. Owen's not stupid enough to give his mother a life interest. She could easily burn through that little lot well before his half-sister gets anywhere, near it, otherwise.

He appoints Jack as executor. It seems only fair.