Owen's eyes were brimming with tears and his vision was blurry. But he was damned if he was going to let the team see him cry. They weren't going to find out how deeply this was affecting him.
He nearly broke down when he bent down to drop his gun on the table. He felt vulnerable without its comforting weight.
"So I guess this is goodbye."
Nobody said anything. Owen felt rage building up inside him, but a small, sane part of him knew that it was only an incarnation of the grief that had ingrained itself so deeply in him since he lost Katie.
"Good luck with the end of the world."
He almost smirked. It seemed it was not very difficult for him to slip behind his sarcastic, cynical armour. He began walking out, but he stopped. Since he was in the flow anyway…
He moved and stopped, his face mere inches from Gwen's.
"I would say thanks for the memories…"
He turned to leave. The moment he did, he felt his façade falling. He couldn't keep up the mask for much longer. The hub's entrance was suddenly too long a distance away.
He ran the last few steps out of the cogwheel door. Once outside, and hidden from the eyes of the others, he let himself break down. This was it. He was about to lose everything. First Katie, then Diane, and now his job. Until then, he hadn't quite realized how much his life revolved around Torchwood.
He had lost Katie, the love of his life, and he had used his job at Torchwood to fill in the holes that she had left in him. He had nothing else, and so Torchwood became what he lived for. Then came Diane, and when she left, she took most of him with her, and he was left even emptier than before. Once more, he had nothing else, and so he used Torchwood as his guiding star. He used it to pull himself back to normalcy.
Torchwood had become a part of him. He could not survive without it. And within twenty four hours, he was about to lose it all. No, within twenty four hours, he would never even have had it.
So when Diane appeared in front of him at the bar and told him that they could be together again if he opened the rift, he believed her, because he thought that if he did what she said, he wouldn't be alone anymore.
It had been days.
They had rebelled against him – hell, he had killed him. But still he had walked up to Abaddon and given himself up so that they could be safe.
He had woken up from a fatal gunshot wound. But what if this was irreversible? What if he was dead, once and for all? He hadn't even had a chance to hit him and to hug him, to apologise and to tell him that he trusted him more than he trusted anyone else on the planet.
He wouldn't think about it. He couldn't think about it.
Once again, he drowned himself in his work. Mortality rates in several hospitals around the city were still high, weevils were still running rampant around Cardiff and the hub was nearly completely destroyed. His fault, his fault, all his fault. As long as there was work to be done, he could avoid thinking about Jack.
When Jack came walking back, as tall and proud as always, he didn't know how to react. When Jack told him that he forgave him, he knew that it was more that he deserved. At that point, he didn't know what to make of that wonderful, impossible bastard in front of him. And when Jack pulled him in and hugged him, he felt the walls that he had so carefully constructed around himself crumble down.
Finally, he did something that he had not let himself do for years.
He let himself cry, he let himself let go, and, just for a few minutes, he let himself feel safe, in Jack's warm embrace.
He didn't care that the whole team was watching. He didn't care that he was showing weakness to people that defined him as insensitive. All that he knew was that Jack, Tosh, Gwen and even Ianto, each loved him in their own way. They were his family, and they loved him for everything that he was. He needed that love to survive.
Because really, he had nothing else.