Notes: Set about three weeks after Chapter Ten of Damage Control, but can probably be read alone. All you really need to know is that the Doctor suffered something of an emotional breakdown, and went to ground at Torchwood sometime between VotD and Sleeper. It probably helps if you've seen the Torchwood episode 'Fragments.'

(For evidence that the Doctor is, in fact, lying about his age to some degree or another, just read the Wikipedia article, or watch any three episodes where he mentions his age and compare. Classic or NuWho, either works.)

Warnings: swearing. Lots of swearing.

-DW-

Owen observed the Doctor over his coffee cup. It was the mid-afternoon lull, after lunch and before all the kiddies went home from school to find that mummy and daddy had been replaced by snot-sucking parasites, or whatever drug trip they would be dealing with later. He was spending the time – which he could have been using to beat Toshiko's high score at Space Invaders – sipping coffee and watching their alien houseguest fiddle unproductively with a Draconian wristwatch.

This was only partly because the Doctor had sought him out, as he tended to do on his better days, and Owen was loath to turn him away. Mostly, it was because Jack never bothered anyone who was on Doctor Duty with whatever menial chore he wanted done. It was mostly that. Really.

The Doctor was doing alright today. He usually was, when Owen saw a lot of him. On the bad days – the days when he wouldn't speak or eat or look at anyone, or the days when he curled into a ball and buried his face in his knees and just sobbed – Owen let other people deal with him.

(There were times when he disappeared into the TARDIS for hours on end, and nobody wanted to think very hard about what he was doing in there, because his bad days were bad enough, so what must his worse days look like?)

Today was a good day, though, and the Doctor had color in his cheeks and a plate of crumbs at his elbow and a spark in his eyes. And he had sought Owen out. The combination made Owen confident enough to ask a question he'd been wondering about.

"How old are you?"

"Nine hundred and four," replied the Doctor immediately, not glancing up.

"Bullshit."

The Doctor did glance up this time, one eyebrow quirked in a look of mild skepticism.

"You think I'm lying about my age? What, like I'm actually twenty-five and I just say I'm nine hundred to sound impressive?"

"First of all, you're completely delusional if you think you look twenty-five. Thirty-five, maybe." Owen continued, ignoring the Doctor's small noise of protest and his affronted look. "Second, I don't think you're younger than you say. I think you're older."

"What makes you say that?" asked the Doctor, sounding intrigued – and he must have been, because he set the wristwatch to the side and leaned forward to listen properly.

"Little trick of human psychology," said Owen, who was making this up on the spot. "You say 'nine hundred ninety-nine' they think, 'old, wise, I should respect him.' You say 'one thousand and one' they think 'ancient, untouchable.' All of a sudden you're really, properly alien, not just some bloke with cold hands and a completely unfair aging process."

"Oh, that's brilliant!" said the Doctor, with that ridiculous, goofy grin that he wore whenever anyone did something which he found particularly clever. "Completely wrong – about the reason, not about the age – but brilliant."

"Right. So how old are you really?"

"I'll tell you, on two conditions. First, you can't tell Jack –"

"Done."

"– and second, you have to answer my question first."

"Alright," Owen agreed, familiar with this routine of give-and-take.

"How'd you end up at Torchwood?"

Owen flinched, fumbled his teacup. The Doctor caught it with alien speed and set it on the table, eyes never leaving Owen.

Owen swallowed hard, licked his lips. He didn't have to answer – but then the Doctor wouldn't either, and this delicate balance they had between them might crumble. Anyway, he didn't have to tell the whole truth – the Doctor never did – just enough. Enough to fulfill the unspoken agreement. Tit for tat, truth for truth, scar for scar. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Owen began to speak.

"I was working at a hospital – just a normal doctor, you know; too many patients, too little sleep – and I . . . I lost a patient." He stopped, swallowed the lump in his throat. Don't think about it; don't think about her; it was just a patient, just some nameless, faceless patient. "Turns out she had an alien in her head – some sort of brain parasite, or something. So, Torchwood sweeps in, clears up all the evidence – I thought I was going mad, for a while. But I managed to track Jack down. He might be neat, but he's not subtle. I was pissed as hell, of course, punched him in the face a few times – and then he hired me. Said he liked my persistence."

"Sounds like Jack," the Doctor said with a nod. If he sensed that there was more to the story, he didn't press. That was another part of their routine – they were doctors, both of them, even if the Doctor claimed that he wasn't the medical sort. They poked and they prodded until they found where it hurt, and then they stopped, stepped back, evaluated. If they could fix the problem, then they did. If they couldn't . . . .

Owen couldn't fix the Doctor. He doubted that anyone could, though Jack would keep trying until the end of time, and since that was nearly literal in his case, he might just make some progress. What Owen could do was give the Doctor a distraction – something safe and familiar to occupy his incredible, alien mind so that it wasn't just spinning in circles, tearing itself apart. It was the psychological equivalent of pain killers – it wouldn't help anything in the long run, but it made him a bit more comfortable, let him function a bit more easily.

So Owen didn't dig too deeply, didn't bother resetting bones which would never heal properly anyway, and the Doctor returned the favor.

"Okay," said Owen, clearing his throat once the silence had stretched for long enough. "That's my end of the bargain. How old are you, really?"

"Nine hundred and four –"

"You –!"

"—in Gallifreyan years," the Doctor concluded smugly. "Gallifrey was part of a binary star system – more days in a year – and it was bigger than Earth – more hours in a day."

"How many Earth years does that convert to, then?" asked Owen, rolling his eyes.

"Well, that's a bit tricky . . . nine hundred and four is really just a rough figure . . . I mean, things get a bit wibbly . . . in time loops you age mentally but not physically; in causal collapses it's the opposite; in reverted paradoxes you age both ways but the timeline folds back on itself and technically speaking –" He caught Owen's glare, and cut himself off. "I'm two thousand, three hundred, and seventy-nine point four-three-seven Earth years old. Approximately."

Owen felt his eyebrows jump towards his hairline.

"Damn, that's not just rounding down – you're like one of those old ladies who've been twenty-nine for fifteen years and wear their daughter's clothes."

"I am not!" the Doctor protested, his voice going high-pitched in indignation. "Besides, I'm not even lying, really. It's just . . . creative truth-telling."

"Truth mangling, more like," Owen retorted automatically, but his mind was elsewhere.

The Doctor was over two thousand years old. Two thousand years of brilliance and running and fighting. Of course, he might not have always lived that way – but Owen thought he probably had. He suspected that this was the first rest he'd had in a very long time, and even this was only because he simply could not keep going.

Was that the breaking point, then?

Owen often felt as if he was a step away from the edge, but he never quite seemed to reach it. Torchwood agents tended to die young, but he had always wondered . . . how long could you keep going? How long could you live like this, riddled with cracks, always expecting the next blow to shatter you? He wouldn't have thought anyone could manage for long, but Jack had been doing it for over a century. The Doctor had pushed through two millennia before he collapsed. How much of that time had he been running on fumes?

"Owen?"

The Doctor was frowning at him, eyes soft and concerned. Those eyes had watched planets burn.

"He said it would be better," Owen said, before he could stop himself.

"What?"

"Jack. When he recruited me, I told him how it drove me mad, as a doctor, how no matter how many people I saved it was never enough." He didn't know why he was saying this, to the Doctor of all people – but the Doctor knew, the Doctor understood. He had to. "Jack said it would be different, at Torchwood, but he lied. He fucking lied. It's exactly the same, just . . . bigger. We save the whole fucking planet – six billion people – and all I can see when I close my eyes is the one person we didn't save.

"And it never gets better, does it?" he asked, meeting the Doctor's eyes, dark and ancient and pained. "Doesn't matter how old you are, how many lives you save, that one you lost is always going to eat you up inside."

"I think –" The Doctor stopped, swallowed hard, continued. "I think that when it stops eating you up inside, that's when you should quit."

Owen stared at him for a moment.

"That's . . . so fucking clichéd."

The Doctor made an exasperated noise, and the heaviness which had infused the air around them evaporated.

"Well if I had any answers, I wouldn't be here, would I? Really, Owen, think things through."

Owen gave a slightly hysterical and not at all high-pitched chuckle (it was a chuckle, dammit; Owen Harper did not giggle).

"We're fucking pathetic," he said, wiping moisture off his face with the back of his hand (it was too fucking hot in here – dusty, too, very dusty).

"A bit, yeah," the Doctor agreed, with a cracked smile. "Must come with the title."

"I still don't believe you're a proper doctor."

"I am! I have degrees and everything."

"Yeah, from the University of Mars or some bullshit like that."

"Language, Owen. Anyway, UM is a horrible school – that's just where you go if you fancy red dirt and can't get into Brooke University."

Owen gave a snort of amusement and disbelief as they fell back into the easy, familiar banter. They were a bit pathetic, the two of them – broken doctors who cared too much, hiding from themselves and from each other behind wit and half-truths, obsessing over loved ones they couldn't fix and strangers they couldn't save. And yet . . . and yet . . . .

An alarm sounded.

The Doctor started and was on his feet in an instant, darting towards the archives. Jack, emerging from his office, caught him and pulled him into a brief embrace. He kept a hold of his shoulders as they pulled apart, said something Owen couldn't hear, caressed his cheek as he let him go.

Owen cursed halfheartedly under his breath as he rose. He traded worn-out complaints with Tosh, scoffed at Gwen's teasing insinuations about his conversation with the Doctor, scowled when Ianto's deadpan comment held a bit too much truth for comfort. Jack clapped him on the shoulder as he passed, his eyes warm with gratitude and pride.

At some point, they would all reach their breaking points – but just because they would break didn't mean they would be destroyed. The Doctor was still alive, still fiddling with things in the archives, still working his way into their hearts. He still had friends, old and new, and he still had fleeting moments of happiness. The Doctor had been shattered more thoroughly than any human (save perhaps Jack) would ever have the misfortune to comprehend, but he was healing nevertheless and that . . . .

That felt like hope.