Written for an extra for angst_bingo. Prompts suicide/asphyxiation/quarantine/roofied/assault.

It's an unclassified alien that Jack has never encountered before, and they're chasing it around Cardiff, not even sure if they have the right weapons. Very Torchwood. Of course, it decides to run into a shopping mall and they all race in after it. People are screaming, there's chaos, the usual. The alien is nowhere in sight, so they draw their guns and advance through the rioting crowd. Owen gets elbowed in the stomach and doubles over in surprise.

Seconds later, something slams into his side and he falls. The alien is striking at his face, his chest, his neck, and he raises his arms to fend it off. Something sinks into the flesh of his left arm and he feels a rush through his body before a shot rings out and the sensation disappears along with the weight on top of him as the alien crumbles sideways.

"Are you okay?" Gwen and Ianto haul Owen to his feet.

"Fine, fine. Is it dead?"

"It's dead," Jack calls. "You're bleeding. Let's put this guy in cryo and get you patched up."

Owen nods, touching his wound gingerly. "Sounds good."

Owen gets patched up while Jack and Ianto prepare the alien's body for the morgue. Ianto details the characteristics, clothes, weapons, and anything else that's needed for the archives. Jack prepares the body and makes stupid quips over the corpse. Tosh patches Owen up and goes back to her programming and Owen drops onto the sofa.

"I'm wiped," Owen rubs at his eyes with a hand.

"Go home, Owen." Jack commands. "All of you, go home. We can finish the rest of this tomorrow."

Owen feels dizzy as he drives home, and staggers up into his flat, barely making it inside before he's sick at the sink. He flops into a chair. It's probably just excess adrenaline. His veins are buzzing. He stares out into the dark for a long time and thinks about his life, his years, this job, his family.

Ten hours later, it's eleven in the morning and he's tying a well-crafted noose to the rafters. There's a bleak blackness in his mind and he wants it all to just go away as he slides his head through the loop and steps off the ledge.

He wakes up in the medbay of the Hub. Everything is blurry. Darkness buzzes in his mind and he reaches for a scalpel.

"Stop." His hand hovers over the metal tray. "You tried to kill yourself." Jack states. "Why?"

"Piss off, Harkness. Leave me alone."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Because there's a bloody buzzing in my head and I don't want to live anymore. Piss off and let me go."

"No." Suddenly he's hauled up from the table. He struggles, but Jack is taller and bigger and stronger and his captain manhandles him downstairs and into a cell.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"Something is wrong with you." Jack crosses his arms over his chest and studies Owen. "Yesterday you were happy. Or at least content. Now you're trying to kill yourself as soon as you wake up. Something isn't right."

"What are you talking about?"

"Give me your arm." Owen does so, hoping maybe it'll get him out of this cell faster. Jack draws a phial of blood.

"What the hell is it?" Gwen asks as she peers at Tosh's computer screen.

"It appears to be a compound I've never seen before. Whatever it is, it's inside Owen and it's manipulating him."

"He wants to kill himself."

"I know."

"Well," Jack insists. "Let's find a cure."

Owen claws at his own arms, watching the red welts raise on the surface of his skin. He scratches until the red welts are instead stained with red blood. He squirms at the darkness writhing in his head. He wants out. Out of this life, out of this writhing. He just wants relief from all the pain.

"Found anything?"

"Jack, nothing in this compound is in our database. I can't even begin to come up with a cure or an antidote until I've done weeks or months worth of tests. And I doubt Owen will last that long."

"Get going, then. Gwen, Ianto?"

"Still looking to see if there's a similar description or reference in any of the alien translation's we've found. No luck yet."

"Hm."

Jack goes back to his office to think. No one looks at the CCTV to Owen who is slamming his head against the cold brick of the cell. No one wants to see the parallel inside them, the crumbling. No one wants to watch their own die slowly, inevitably, at his own hand, simply because this job will always ruin.