Jack woke with a start and a gasp. It wasn't the kind of shock that came from coming back from the dead, but it unsettled him nonetheless. Some sort of sedation that left him feeling heavy and sluggish.

Slugs. Not slugs, but some other kind of insect. That's what triggered his first memory. The things were under his skin. He had to get them out. He tried to move to claw at his skin but found he couldn't. When he looked down he saw the reason why he was so immobile was on account of a heavy canvas jacket, forcing his arms to hug around him. He knew a straight jacket when he saw one, all taught and heavy with huge buckles tasked at keeping him from harming himself or anyone else.

The room was unfamiliar as well. It was spartan to be sure, with only the hard bed on which he found himself lying a small thin window right at the top of one wall, letting in the barest amount of light, and opposite it, a heavy metal door with an even smaller panel of glass; just enough for a person to peer through and inspect the room's occupant.

He stopped his struggling for a moment and lay there as still as he could. He couldn't feel anything inside him now. No crawling movement, no burrowing. They were gone. It was a strange kind of relief.

A man with a heavy white doctor's coat entered not long afterwards. He carried a clipboard and a placid expression. 'Hello. I see you're awake.'

'Where am I?' He assumed it was some kind of hospital.

The doctor pulled up a small wooden stool he'd brought in with him and sat himself down on it. 'You're in the Chatfield House Institution for the Troubled. You're quite safe here.'

Jack nearly gagged on the response. They'd put him in the nuthouse?

'You had quite a spell by all accounts,' the doctor told him. 'Would you like to tell me about it?'

He didn't really, since it was all a bit of a blur to him, but he wasn't getting out of this thing anytime soon by saying nothing. He did his best to pull his thoughts together. 'It was crawling under my skin. I don't know what they were.' He attempted to scratch at his arm within the confines of the fabric as if it were still crawling under the surface, the memories of it so vivid and real he could imagine he wasn't cured at all. He'd wanted to tear his skin open with a knife just to get it out. Maybe he had. He couldn't remember that part, but there were hazy flashes of blood interspersing the clutter of recollections in his mind. Either he was the one running through the streets dripping blood or it was someone else. 'Cutting them out was the only way.' Had to get them out.

'Them?' he said, not even bothering to look up from the clipboard as he made notes.

Jack bit his tongue before he tried to describe the alien creatures that had been burrowing inside him, feeding, multiplying, trying to kill him. 'Okay, so I know how that sounds, but it's gone now. You can let me go.' He gave a little wriggle inside the jacket, just to be doubly sure he couldn't feel them still inside, perhaps hibernating, waiting to wake back up.

'If I had a shilling for every time one of my patients said that.'

Patient? No, that wasn't right. No one would have had him committed. 'There must be some kind of mistake,' Jack insisted.

'They often say that as well.'

Jack tried a different approach. 'Look, I work for the British Crown. Intelligence division. Some of the things I see you wouldn't believe. No one would. It's not the same as being crazy.'

The Doctor consulted his notes. 'We have no record of you. Not even the American embassy knows who you are.' He paused and looked up from his notes, looking Jack straight in the eye. 'Are you an illegal alien?'

Jack barked out a laugh at that. 'More than you could ever possibly know.'

'And these creatures that are inside you…'

'Were inside,' Jack tried to make it abundantly clear.

'Do you think they're likely to return?'

'I don't know! They could still be out there for all I know, just waiting to attack again. That's why you have to let me go. So I can find them and capture them.'

The doctor pursed his lips. 'I'm afraid that's just not possible. You've very clearly been disturbed by their appearance. I think it would be best if we let you rest for a while. The mind takes a long time to heal. Perhaps in a few months if you're feeling up to it, we might take you out for a walk on the green. Fresh air is good for the constitution but we don't want you to have another episode if you feel unsafe outdoors.'

Months? The word left him feeling sucker-punched. 'No, I have to get out of here now! I'm not crazy.' He wasn't crazy, was he? There'd been alien creatures. Either this body had eventually rejected them or they'd left of their own accord, he didn't know. They might still be inside other people doing God only knew what. He had to find them.

The doctor ignored his desperate pleas. 'One of the nurses will come around in a few hours to feed you and help you relieve yourself. But until then you should rest.' He stood up, tucking the clipboard under his arm and made a motion to the heavy set nurse outside the door to let him out.

Jack followed him to the door, stumbling along the way which was enough to slow him down before the door slammed in front of him, sealing him inside. He struggled against his bonds but there was scarcely an inch to move. 'No! Don't leave me here! I'm Torchwood! Tell them I'm Torchwood!'



Jack had been incarcerated before, but a sanitorium was a different beast to a prison. Even prisons had their own freedom of sorts, and a rhythm to the way life operated inside them. He still had charge of his own body in prison, even when he'd been chained. Having someone visit twice a day to spoon feed him and remove his trousers to make him use the toilet - a bucket - was an exercise in humiliation. The jacket never came off, no matter how much he tried to use his charms on the nurses. Until it did, he had no chance of escape. For the other twenty three hours a day, he had nothing to do but lie there and stare at the walls, trying and failing to make his recollections any clearer about what had happened and how he'd ended up here.

He'd been dozing when he heard voices on the other side of the door, and one in particular that stood out as recognisable. He struggled to get into a seated position before throwing himself up off the hard bed and towards the door, trying to peer out through the tiny five by five inch panel of glass. He nearly fell backwards in surprise when the face belonging to the voice peered back at him. Charles Gaskell.

'Charles! It's me, Jack. Let me outta here!' There was a nod and then the door was opened.

'Please remove the jacket,' Charles asked, turning back to the nurse at the door.

'I can't do that, sir,' the beefy nurse replied.

'On behalf of Her Majesty the Queen you most certainly can,' he said more abruptly this time. She reluctantly shuffled past him and began carefully undoing the series of buckles and ties, releasing Jack's arms from their cocooned position for the first time in nearly three weeks. Pins and needles ran through Jack's arms as he shook them loose, trying to get movement back into them.

'You can leave us,' Charles said, though the nurse locked the door behind her, leaving them both now trapped inside.

'You don't know how happy I am to see you,' Jack said, before his thoughts sharpened. 'What took you so long?'

Charles looked unapologetic. 'We thought you'd gone walkabout. It wouldn't be the first time you've been absent for a stretch of time. Emily didn't want to waste resources locating you when it seemed clear that you had most likely scarpered, shirking your responsibilities.'

'How did you find me, then?'

'Your patient notes became of interest to Torchwood. Of course I didn't know it was you at the time. Illegal American immigrant reporting creatures burrowing inside his body. Enough to pique the interest for a Torchwood investigation. It wasn't until I read deeper into the notes of where they found you that I realised it must have been you. I came as soon as I could, to visually verify the fact.'

Jack rubbed his hands up and down his face, feeling the accumulated sweat and grime come away with them. 'What happened? I've been trying to remember but it's all jumbled, like I'm stuck in a fog.'

Charles didn't quite meet his eye, hands slipping into the pockets of his tan coloured trousers. 'I'm afraid you got tangled up in something unfortunate.'

Jack's face clouded over. 'Tangled up in what, exactly?'

Charles looked genuinely apologetic. 'I didn't know about the experiments. Not until Emily told me. Alice had been working on a project of sorts. Chemical analysis of the barbiturate properties of alien flora. There were some… tests.'

Jack's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. 'She was experimenting on innocent people?'

'An isolated neighbourhood of lower class individuals around the Tiger Bay area,' Charles clarified. 'Mostly undesirables.' By which of course he meant drinkers, grifters, gamblers and whores, all of whom Jack actually found to be quite good company. At least you knew where you stood with straight talkers like that. Five shillings for a few drinks and some hanky panky, half a crown for the full night's service. For some of the regulars Jack wouldn't have even been charged.

Some of it began to come back to him now in fragments: people screaming about bugs flying around the room, Jack watching as some of them landed on him and burrowed right through his skin, more screaming, chaos in the streets, clawing at his skin until it bled everywhere, finding a knife and cutting himself open, volunteering to use it on anyone else. And none of it had been real, yet it felt more real than anything. He'd run and kept running, trying to get away, yelling a warning at anyone who'd listen to him, still clutching the bloody knife. No wonder they'd thought he was mad. 'That's barbaric!'

'Well, she could hardly use the local asylum residents. They're already mad.'

Jack was rendered speechless. 'And Emily sanctioned this?' Of course she did, Jack thought. Anything for her fuck buddy Alice.

'She was quite interested with the results and the practical applications. You seem to have had a rather profound reaction to the gasses. Part of your altered physiognomy, I presume? Most subjects experienced only a mild hallucinogenic delirium, followed by a period of amnesia. The latter effect could be quite useful in quelling the insistence that the city is riddled with monsters. Imagine an agent that could reverse the memories of witnesses.'

Jack didn't want to agree. The city was full of aliens and everybody seemed to know it and accept it, but that didn't make it right to use them as guinea pigs for something Torchwood had no idea what they were dealing with and how it would affect humans. Jack had experimented with recreational drugs himself but he'd never been so wired as to turn into a complete basket case needing to be locked up for his own safety. For all Alice knew she could have wiped his memory entirely and then what use would he have been to them to protect this planet. He might just be a pile of drooling idiot, and Torchwood didn't care one bit.

'Look, I am sorry about this, Jack,' Charles told him, placing a hand on his shoulder. 'Perhaps if you were less…'

Jack fixed him with a cold look. 'What? Human?'

'Promiscuous,' he said. 'You hardly endear yourself to the others. Perhaps being involved with the research might make it safer? Or at least ensure you're not one of the test subjects?'

Jack could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Be friendly and play nice? Aid in the experimenting on innocent people for the supposed good of the Empire? He'd rather be locked up here in a mental hospital having his brains slowly scooped out with a spoon. 'Just get me out of here,' he growled. 'We'll discuss the morals of all of this when I get back.' If they thought he was mad here, it was nothing compared to how mad he'd been when he finally got in front of Emily.