Title: ghosts in my head
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG
Length: 2600 wds
Content notes: set in late season 2; deals with Owen's canonical situation at that point
Author notes: n/a
Summary: Owen doesn't sleep, but he does dream. And the dreams he gets are mostly nightmares, because of course they are.


Owen doesn't sleep, but he does dream. And the dreams he gets are mostly nightmares, because of course they are.

To be entirely fair, that was true before he died too. But the worst part about being dead is that he can't always tell that he's dreaming, because he's awake the whole time.

The thing about the human brain is that it can't just keep going, on and on forever. Even if the rest of him can, even if he's trapped in some kind of endlessly unchanging nonlife, his brain still needs to stop. He doesn't tire physically, but his brain does. It still needs to do all of the usual shuffling and organizing and memory-pruning that the human brain normally does to ensure proper working order during most people's sleeping hours.

So it does it while he's awake.

He's learned by now that he can just let himself zone out if he needs to. It takes him a while to be able to let go enough to do that around his teammates, and the first time he actually drifts away with anyone around, he finds himself being shaken back to reality by a frantic Tosh, who thought he was actually-for-real dead. By now, though, they've gotten used to it, and when he's been lying on the couch on the Hub for a couple of hours with his eyes half closed, he'll be vaguely aware of the others being extra quiet around him, Jack shushing people, someone (probably Gwen or Tosh) tiptoeing up to put a blanket over him. Like he's really asleep. Like that's even possible right now.

But it's something like it, and it lets his brain do whatever a human brain needs to do in order to stay sane. In a way it's fascinating, being conscious (or at least semi-conscious) while his brain rearranges its mental furniture, like being able to see behind the curtain while the stagehands move the scenery around. On the whole, it's more interesting than terrifying, or at least he manages to keep it on that level (usually). When the dreams get bad, though ...

When the dreams get bad, he learns to start looking to his teammates as his reality check. When he flinches at phantom movement out of the corner of his eyes, when things start crawling out of the walls or people's faces start melting ... he'll rely on the others to let him know what's real and what isn't. If they're reacting too, well, it's just another day in the Hub; time to grab his medical kit or one of Tosh's fancy gadgets or the nearest gun and deal with it.

And if no one else is seeing it, if it's just his tired brain shuffling things around, and he's not entirely sure he can keep his reactions to himself — then he'll get away, back to the privacy of his flat if possible, or off to one of the various semi-private spaces in the Hub (the unused conference rooms, the catacombs) where he can sit against the wall and stare at nothing and hallucinate in peace until his brain settles down again.

He doesn't tell the team that he still dreams. Maybe he will, one of these days. For now, it feels a little too much like admitting that he's halfway to barking mad.

And, as with sleep, he starts to learn to anticipate his need for it. It doesn't just come out of nowhere. He can tell he's getting tired, making mistakes, starting to have trouble thinking his way through a problem. If he goes to lie down for a while when he's feeling like that, it'll be better; he can get through it with just a couple of hours of faint hallucinations and some general fogginess, which is actually not too bad. It's only if he really pushes it that the dreams get too intense.

And some dreams are actually nice. He still has sex dreams. He has dreams where he can feel and taste. It's frustrating as hell to have only his numb, deadened reality to go back to, but right now he'll take any escape that he can get.

He gets used to it, as much as you can get used to anything.

*

It's been a particularly bad run of days. There's Rift activity all over the city, and Jack dies twice, and they almost lose Gwen to a Rift anomaly, and Owen has to stitch up both Tosh and Ianto, and there's blood everywhere, and just ... it's a lot. They're run ragged for days, and without really thinking about it, Owen does what he's always done in a crisis, going back to his medical school days: pushes down his discomfort and leans into the work until he can let himself crash.

The problem is, his body doesn't get tired anymore. His mind does.

And when things actually do start to go really, truly sideways on him, he's up to his elbows in blood that belongs to a young woman who got torn up by a Weevil, and he can't give in to it, he just has to keep pushing through it the way he did back in his A&E days. He has to cling to sanity by his fingernails, fighting his way through the wavering and inconstant world, and somehow he claws his way through it to a point where things have calmed down enough that he can stumble off somewhere private and sit against the wall and shiver for a while.

It doesn't help that the past few days have given him enough fresh nightmare fodder to keep his mind occupied with bloody visions of his teammates being torn apart by Weevils. Or the gunshot that winged Tosh going another handspan to the left — or getting there too late to stop Ianto from bleeding out when the Weevil latched onto his arm — or Jack just not coming back this time ....

When one of his hallucinations crouches and touches his arm, Owen throws himself backward and slams into the wall.

"Sorry," Ianto says quickly. He is, astonishingly, not wearing a suit this time, or at least he's only wearing half of one. He's dressed pretty much like normal from the waist down, in creased trousers and shoes that he seems to have spent some time polishing the Weevil guts off of. But he's also wearing a soft blue jumper that might belong to Jack, hitched up over the bandages and sling on his arm. There's a bundle of blankets tucked under his good arm.

"What the bloody— I told you to go home and get some sleep," Owen mutters, shifting himself a little farther away from Ianto, back pressed against the wall. He's sitting on the floor somewhere in the archives. He has no memory of how he got here, but he tries to pull himself together and get back to familiar territory. "Doctor's orders, though what's the point even, if no one listens to me."

"Sorry," Ianto says again. He sits down against the wall. "It was only, we weren't sure where you'd gone."

Owen knows it's probably psychosomatic, but despite the fact that he wasn't asleep, couldn't have been, he still feels like he just got woke out of deep REM — dazed, grouchy and slightly stupid. On the other hand, he's not hallucinating anymore, so maybe he should be glad for Ianto snapping him out of it.

Not that he actually is. Sodding pain in his arse.

"I'm not a child," he says, straightening himself up against the wall. "I'm not going to go play in traffic if you don't hold my hand for five minutes."

"I know that," Ianto says, sounding briefly snappish himself. He's on half a dozen alien painkillers and Owen finds a kind of unhappy, twisted satisfaction in the way that it's obviously messing with Ianto's self-control. Then Ianto takes a deep breath and visibly walks himself back. He looks exhausted, his eyes shadow-bruised; he really should be home, and it annoys Owen all out of proportion to the situation that Ianto won't just go.

Instead, Ianto holds out a blanket. "You look cold," he says.

Owen glances down at himself. He's bare-armed, wearing a T-shirt stained with the girl's blood and probably some of Tosh and Ianto's too. The Hub is chilly, but it's not like he feels it anymore. At some point in the last couple of days he just got too sodding tired to bother picking out his wardrobe for the comfort of the living people around him.

There's blood on the bandage on his broken hand, too, flaking off onto his thigh. Unsanitary, he thinks. He's not sure how it got there. He does have a vague memory of washing his hands.

"I don't get cold anymore," he snaps. "Are you stupid, or did you forget that?"

He regrets it immediately; he always does, these days. He can't bear holding onto the anger at the people who are the main thing still holding him to the world. The people he cares about.

And Ianto just keeps holding out the blanket. "Let's say I'm getting cold looking at you," he says with a slight smile. "Do it for my sake if not yours."

Owen snatches the blanket and wraps it sullenly around himself, a blanket burrito made out of pure sulk.

Ianto doesn't leave. Instead, he fusses with a second blanket, obviously having enough trouble getting it wrapped around himself one-handed that Owen's hands twitch to help out. Eventually Owen gives up and leans over, with a muttered curse, to hold up one end of the blanket so Ianto can get his shoulder properly under it and pull it around himself.

"Thanks," Ianto murmurs.

Owen retreats into his blanket, and he doesn't want to admit it, but in spite of his lack of need for warmth, there is something very psychologically comforting about being wrapped up in a blanket. Especially since he can tell by brushing his cheek against it, numb as he is, that it's soft and fuzzy and ... a little warm, maybe, like Ianto took the time to warm up the blankets before bringing them down here.

He takes a more critical look at Ianto: blanket-wrapped, leaning against the wall, half asleep.

"There have to be better places for a nap than a cold concrete corridor a couple hundred meters underground," Owen says, and Ianto cracks an eye open.

"You're the one who picked it."

Owen is still sputtering at the complete unfairness of this when Gwen shows up with her arms full of couch cushions and blankets. "Sorry," she says breathlessly. "Had to get the Rift monitor sorted."

"Oh no," Owen says wearily, "not you too."

Gwen drops her cushions and flops on them. She smiles at Owen. "I'm always up for a sleepover. Rhys is on an overnight shift anyway. And Tosh is on her way down."

"Tosh is supposed to be home resting too! Does no one pay any attention when I say anything?"

Apparently not, because Tosh appears a moment later, accompanied by Jack, and they're both carrying actual sleeping bags. Owen is going to murder .... well, Jack, anyway. Murdering Tosh seems cruel.

"Hi, Owen," Tosh says shyly, setting up her sleeping bag next to him.

"Come on people, really?" Jack says, surveying the individual piles of blankets and cushions. "This isn't how sleepovers are done. This century is so repressed."

Owen watches through narrowed eyes, with a growing feeling of dread, as Jack starts zipping sleeping bags together, and gets Gwen to help him push all the cushions into a heap (Ianto and Tosh, as the injured parties, are apparently off blanket-nest-building duty). Then with that unrestrained gentle side that he has sometimes, Jack starts wrapping people up, beginning with Ianto, obviously, then moving on to the others.

"No, no, no; absolutely not," Owen protests, but halfheartedly. "Jack — what —" He realizes that Jack is trying to undress him. "What, not even going to buy me dinner first? Cheap date."

"Clean T-shirt," Jack says. "Put it on."

"You're not the boss of me."

"I literally am. Put the shirt on."

Owen glowers and strips out of the blood-stained shirt and pulls on the other one, a rumpled one with a band logo that probably came out of his locker. They've all seen him naked and dead, so it's not like it matters much.

"You cannot seriously be planning to sleep down here," he says, surveying the chaos of sleeping bags and blankets and cushions. It looks like Ianto and Gwen are having a minor tug-of-war over a choice pillow.

"Just for a few hours. Everyone needs sleep." Jack taps his wrist strap. "Keeping an eye on the Rift with this. We're good. Bed, Owen."

"I don't — oh, stop it, fine, I'm going —"

He's too worn down to try to fight Jack off, and so he finds himself bundled underneath a haphazard pile of sleeping bags. He ends up somehow with Ianto tucked up against him on one side and Tosh on the other. (If he didn't know any better he'd think Jack did it on purpose so Owen could stay in contact with his patients. Actually, Jack probably did do it on purpose for exactly that reason. Bastard.)

And then he starts to realize something, which is that he has absolutely no idea what's going to happen when the exhaustion working its way through his cold, dead brain has its way with him again, and he freezes in a kind of embarrassed fear.

"Owen?" Tosh asks quietly. "Are you all right?"

"I ..." He struggles to sit up. "I'm going to — look, I just need to go back to my place for a while."

"Forgot something?" Jack asks, propping himself up on an elbow. There's a sleeping bag sliding down around his shoulders and he's stripped down to a T-shirt and uniform trousers, wrapped around the other side of Ianto. "Whatever it is, unless it involves a Weevil about to chew someone's face off, it can wait."

"No — I —" Owen takes a breath. He's always known he'd have to explain it sometime; he just didn't want to do it like this, when he's worn to the bone, his emotional control even shakier than it normally is. He's too tired to even shore himself up with anger. "I — that is, there's a thing my brain does when it gets tired, it's like I'm dreaming without actually —"

He's unprepared for Jack to reach across Ianto and cover Owen's mouth with his hand. Jack's hand is warm; Owen can feel it, a little.

"Owen," Jack says, "it's all right."

Owen manages to free himself. "I'm just saying —"

"Are you going to axe-murder us?" Ianto asks drowsily.

"Well, no, but —"

"Then settle down," Jack says, shoving him down into the pile of blankets.

Tosh's hand finds his and laces her fingers through his numb ones. And Gwen says sleepily, from the other side of Tosh, "We all have nightmares, Owen."

"Fine, don't blame me if I do end up axe-murdering you all in the middle of the night," he mutters, but he pushes himself down under the blankets. And it occurs to him that Gwen knew exactly what he was talking about, they all do, and ... even if they don't know all of it, maybe they know a lot more of it than he thought.

And they don't care.

He still can't sleep. That part hasn't changed. But as the others go slowly relaxed around him, and Tosh's fingers grow slack in his, he finds his way to a drifting sort of calm. It's peaceful, and the world goes a little soft around the edges, and if there are nightmares, or something akin to them, all he has to do is touch the sleeping people around him to know that they're safe.