A/N: Egads! Another update? So soon? The world is ending! Run for your lives! *snort* I'm a dork. Hope everyone enjoys this!

Owen Harper was a magnificent doctor. That fact was rarely ever in question. His status as a human being… Well, that was another issue altogether. Personally, he figured his time with Torchwood and saving the world on at least a weekly basis had to balance out how much of a miserable git he was the rest of the time. After all, not many people knew why he was cloaked in the snarky attitude.

Not even Gwen, the coworkers he was shagging on a regular basis, knew that Owen the Jerk was just a front. But, somehow, Tosh did.

He frowned down at the still form of his friend on the cold metal slab that usually held alien corpses. It was more of a similarity than he liked and he forced his mind back to the task at hand: figuring out exactly what was wrong. Her pulse was steady and rapid but her breathing was labored, her chest randomly heaving in an attempt to pull in a large breath. Her pale skin seemed ashen, though her temperature itself was above normal, and her wet clothes clung to her skin like a leech.

He twitched very slightly before slapping himself on the forehead. "Oi! Does Tosh have another set of clothes here?" He turned to gaze to the two men that watched his progress and was slightly relieved when Ianto nodded once and disappeared to wherever it was he went when he handled things.

"Do you know what's wrong?" Gwen asked softly. Owen twitched his gaze over to her, noting she seemed genuinely concerned despite her tendency to overlook Toshiko much of the time. "Why hasn't she woken up?"

His gaze returned to Jack to find the man gazing down at the techie girl in intense worry. "I think it's pneumonia again," Owen said in a thoughtful voice.

Jack nodded once and pressed his lips together but Gwen continued the questioning. "Again?" she echoed.

Owen thought back in an instance a couple years past when Toshiko had gone out for him yet again when he'd been much too hungover to be of much use. It had been deep in winter at the time and the fact of her huddling in a blanket the following day as she worked through one of her various ongoing projects had caught his attention. "She caught pneumonia when she was little. If you had a brain in your head, you would know that the body generally becomes more susceptible to it after the first time."

Gwen scowled at him, to which he merely grinned and turned his back on her. He would need to test Tosh's blood to be sure but he was relatively certain of his diagnosis. Now, they needed to rid her of the wet clothes and put her on a banana bag until she woke. Which begged the question: did they actually have IV fluids?

"Here we go," Ianto announced as he came back into view, carrying a bundle as he descended to the autopsy bay. "I'll take her to the showers and get her changed."

Owen immediately extended an arm over his patient, arching a suspicious eyebrow at the man. "Hey, now. I'm the doctor here."

Ianto's eyes narrowed very slightly. "She'll be embarrassed if you do it."

"I'm a professional right now," he told him, clearly enunciating the words. "Besides, she'll need a warm shower as well to help take away the chill. Would you have thought of that, Tea Boy?"

"Of course I would," Ianto rejoined, clutching the bundle of clothes closer to his chest.

"Ianto, let Owen do it," Jack commanded in a soft tone. The Welshman looked up at his boss, his eyes wide. "He's right. He is the doctor and this is something that falls into his purview."

Even Owen could tell he was trying to pull something, though the dark-haired doctor couldn't figure out what that was for the life of him. Instead, he settled for smirking smugly at Ianto and hefting Toshiko into his arms again. An idle thought flitted across his brain, wondering if her choice bits were as frumpy as her clothing or if she was hiding something a bit more desirable under her conservative attire. However, he immediately batted the thought away, knowing he deserved a sound smack for it.

Of course, that brought his mind around to the reason he was angry at the woman in his arms. After all, hadn't she possessed something that allowed her entrance to their deepest thoughts? It was degrading and appalling and made his gums itch with misplaced anger. Deep down, below the professionalism and the jerky remarks and the nonchalant disdain, Owen knew that he cared what people thought of him. Especially Toshiko, for some reason.

The events of the day before had caused him to be hyperaware of his own thoughts, something that was completely out of character for him. After all, he outwardly was the type of person to voice his thoughts immediately, making it seem as if there was no filter between his mouth and his brain. It irked him that now Toshiko, the one person who seemed determined to be consistently nice to him, was also the one person that knew how much of a pit his mind really was.

However, before he could become too ensnared by the familiar anger and disgust, Owen reminded himself that he had a job to do, preferably before the Asian woman's condition became too serious. He turned on one of the showerheads until it was warm enough to chase away Toshiko's lingering chill but not so hot that it would scald. Sure that the raining water was the correct temperature, he stood under it, handling Toshiko carefully as he began to remove her clothing. Soon, every article of clothing – from her sodden jumper to the dark tights that she wore under her slacks – laid in a discomfited heap, the rainwater that had soaked them slowly leaking from the clothes into a nearby drain.

It was then that Owen finally noticed the thing that Jack had been waiting for: the scars. Most of them were faded to thin lines on her arms and legs but there were three distinct ones that worried the doctor, scars that he knew would never truly fade. The first was a circle of mottled scar tissue in the center of her back directly between her shoulder blades. It was an inch in diameter and had the look of healed cigarette burns. Oh, but the healed wound was deep; whoever had done this to her had done it several times, reopening the same wound often. The second was a distinctly sexual wound but one Owen was sure Toshiko hadn't liked. It was a deep bite mark, so deep that he knew that it had either been a perfect recurrence on several occasions or a singular wound that would have caused enough blood loss to threaten her life. The last scar was on her waistline and he knew it was a single occurrence. It was a brand, faded now but a long series of numbers that stretched from her right hip to directly below her navel.

Forgetting for a moment that he was treating a coworker, Owen stared at the numbers melted into her skin, trying to fit this puzzle into what he knew about Toshiko Sato. The truth of the situation took him a moment to grasp. Yes, Tosh had covered for him many times and they had had some fun times outside of work, though nothing too remarkable, but what did he know about her personally? Every fact he could tell someone about her had something to do with Torchwood: that she was a miracle worker with technology that should, by all rights, be well beyond her; that she was especially touchy if you ruined one of her precious projects; that she had always seemed unduly suspicious of Suzie and her obsessions; that Jack seemed to favor her, despite his obvious attachment to the Tea Boy. The list could go on but he knew nothing of her past, of her family, not even if she preferred Asian cuisine over the sometimes abominable British fare.

Where had these scars come from?

She was back in that small, cramped space. Though her surroundings were obviously of concrete, her brain always thought of it as stone, the wet and cold stone of dungeons of old. After all, she was nothing but a nameless prisoner. Her mind was locked safely away, though it was not entirely free of those times, the times when the guards took out their more sadistic emotions on the prisoners.

Toshiko was keenly aware that no matter how much pain she endured, two things were true. One, there could be someone just a few cells over that was getting it so much worse and two, no matter how much she wished to wail at her own fate, it would just continue the next day, without end. Her time here, though she had long lost her grasp of the actual passage of time, had led her to accept the pain, to accept the sexual degradation, the malicious beatings, and the actions of a person that in another life would have hidden this true, twisted face that she saw every day.

There were days, of course, when she cursed the skies and her guards and the very events that had led to her capture. If the terrorists had never kidnapped her mother, if her family hadn't been the most important thing to her, if she had never taken that job to begin with… So many ifs, so many possibilities that could have kept out of this cell. Of course, though, if any one of those things hadn't happened, Jack would never have found her and she would never have joined Torchwood.

Torchwood, Toshiko thought then. That's right. I don't live in this cell anymore.

Even as she made the realization, she crested to the surface of her own nightmare, breaking through the bubble of her own consciousness. She could feel water falling on her skin and arms clutching her body. It was odd how intimate it felt. She must have only lost consciousness for a moment. She was probably still at the bay and Jack was holding her. It wasn't until she opened her eyes that she realized exactly how wrong she was.

Owen's face and small, brown eyes looked at her in concern. And from the feel of his hands, she was utterly naked.

With an effort that made her feel like a weight of lead and her head spin like a dervish, Toshiko whirled away from the man, feeling only slightly comforted when her back hit the cold tile hard. She closed her eyes, wishing with all her might that this was not happening, that she was not completely nude in front of the one man her heart longed for.

Opening her eyes, she sighed heavily. No such luck.

"What the hell!?" she screeched loudly, her wailing voice reaching an extremely high pitch. She didn't have the presence of mind to figure out this situation, just knowing that all her dignity had gone the way of her clothes. After a moment, though, her knees buckles and she swayed to the floor under the weight of her pounding skull and a heavy pressure on her chest. "Ohh," she moaned softly, pressing her head farther down to the tile near the drain.

Her mind slid the pieces together at blinding speed even as the threatening pneumonia in her lungs left her trembling on her hands and knees, naked as the day she was born. She'd fainted out at the bay, that much was obvious, and it seemed she'd been out in the cold rain far longer than she'd realized. Combined with the dehydration resulting from last night's pub crawl and the malnutrition stemming from only having had two bites of sashimi in the past thirty-six hours for sustenance, her immune system had failed just enough to allow the fifth attack of bacterial pneumonia she'd endured in her entire life. This scene in the showers was just Owen doing his job, being her doctor.

The water that had been cascading down her back shut off then and she was covered with something large and fluffy and dry. Though she wanted nothing more to roll onto her side and wait for the shaking to pass, she forced herself to her feet, finally looking up at Owen again. Something in his eyes flickered back at her, something exceedingly sad, something that made her quite angry.

"You saw," she bit out even as another shudder gripped her frame.

He frowned deeply, a scowl threatening to cover his face. However, memory obviously hit him again because his face twisted back into searching blankness. "What happened to you?" He said it with so much curiosity and so much pity that Tosh snapped.

She glared at him, feeling equal parts violated and crushed. "We all have parts of our past that we wish had never happened." She then turned away from her, feeling her ire fade as her keen eyes searched the room. There! A change of clothes laid in a careless pile near the doorway. She scampered to them and away from Owen, hurrying in an effort to dress herself before he caught the meaning of her words.

It was true that Toshiko knew about Katie and the alien that had plagued her brain for months. After all, hadn't she been the one to do the search when Jack determined that the creatures presented in humans as a progressively degenerative mental disorder, usually something similar to Alzheimer's? Hadn't she found that Katie Russell, Owen's then-fiancée, had been the most likely victim? Hadn't she performed the extensive background check on Owen Harper himself before Jack finally recruited him?

"The pendant," Owen said in a dull voice. "You know because of the pendant. You should never have worn it!" The longer he spoke, the more emotional and raw his voice sounded, yelling at her but maintaining his distance.

Dressing in a dark tank top and thin yoga pants, Toshiko frowned down at herself. This could hardly be called clothing. She tossed a glance around, ignoring Owen for the moment, and brightened slightly when she noticed Ianto in the corridor beyond the doorway, holding one of her faded purple jumpers. Not wanting to deal with an emotional encounter with her body so weak, she stepped out into the hallway and took the item from Ianto, frowning yet again when her body shook.

"Where are you going?" Owen demanded, finally taking long strides to Toshiko. Hearing the determined footsteps caused her to freeze in place, darting frightened eyes at the tall Welshman in front of her. "Tell me exactly what you know."

"She knows everything." Toshiko turned to see that Jack had stopped Owen and she breathed a sigh of relief. She just wanted to go home and have a long nap with nice dreams, hopefully one in which cramped cells and furious doctors did not play a part. Jack turned to look at her. "I'll tell him, okay?"

"Jack…" she started, feeling the deep desire to keep that part of her life shrouded in secret. "I don't think—"

The immortal man interrupted her immediately. "You've known about her all this time," he told her firmly. "Don't you think he should know about this?" She pressed her lips together, her dark eyes brooding with memory, and rubbed at her upper arms. Finally, she nodded her assent. "It'll be fine," he said then, his face and voice infinitely soft, telling her he had noticed how anxious the idea made her. Finally, he turned to Ianto. "Take her home. Make sure she eats."

Ianto nodded firmly and led them both out of the Hub. On the way, Tosh noticed Gwen's hesitant smile – had she been worried? – but took some silent pleasure in the confusion swimming in the other woman's eyes. Torchwood was full of secrets and not just alien-related secrets, but also the deep and dark things about the employees themselves that should never have to see the light of day.

After they settled into his personal car, the broad Welshman turned to her, concern swimming in his eyes. "Jack said you have scars?" He lilted his tone at the end to turn the statement into a question.

Toshiko smirked wryly. She had a feeling that some part of this was Jack's doing but of course, she couldn't blame it all on him – her frail immune system had certainly played a part. "You know that UNIT imprisoned me?" she asked.

Ianto nodded. "It's in your file. 'UNIT imprisonment, six months.' Your designation is blacked out, though."

She closed her eyes, thinking of the long number that would forever be burned into her mind and flesh. "Let's just say that the guards were not pleasant and leave it at that."

He nodded again, accepting her wish to keep the memories private, and started the vehicle. "Just remember – I'm here if you need to talk, okay?" Toshiko nodded but kept silent, a smile quirking at her lips. Maybe she wasn't quite as alone as she liked to believe.