Disclaimer: *in a Monty Python God-voice* Let it be known that, for my first Torchwood fanfiction…I OWN NOTHING OF TORCHWOOD OR JACK HARKNESS. Unfortunately.

LET down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.

—Emily Dickinson

It had only been meant to be temporary, Jack told himself when things became unbearable. It was all in good faith, he'd meant to come back to Cardiff eventually, but he just needed some time to get away, as far as possible.

Away from, well, everything—the sights, the sounds, the memories. Yes, it was the memories that were threatening to devour him alive. It was the memories that caused the nightmares, which was why he'd ceased to sleep even the few hours that he normally survived on. It was the memories that dogged him both day and night, memories of Ianto Jones, whom he'd loved for all too short a time and loved far too little, Ianto's boyish face now calm and still in death.

Jack would often scream himself awake from his dreams of a dead Ianto. It wasn't that the thought of Ianto as a ghost scared him. He knew Ianto was far too sensible in life to return as a vengeful spirit in death. In fact, if he listened hard enough, Jack could almost hear Ianto scoffing at the very concept of the afterlife. No, it was the accusation and chilling hatred for causing his untimely death that Jack saw in Ianto's once-warm eyes, burning through Jack and searing his soul no matter where he hid in the barren landscape of his dream-world.

Sometimes, Ianto's face would haunt him in the real world as well. Whenever a dark-haired man in a business suit passed Jack on the street, he would double-take. Any Welsh-accented voice would freeze him, even if he were in the middle of crossing a roadway. (He'd narrowly avoided several car accidents in that fashion—not that it mattered, seeing as he couldn't bloody die.) Jack spent his time away from Cardiff hoping against hope that Ianto Jones wasn't dead, even though Ianto (poor Ianto, he'd never deserved to die like that, with the dubious honor of being the first victim of the alien virus; Jack should have gotten him out of that warehouse sooner or never taken him in the first place) had breathed his last in Jack's arms, dark eyes pleading as he died for the first and only time.

Don't forget me. Those three simple words seemed to curse Jack Harkness, as he fled across continents and oceans away from the smoldering ruins of Torchwood Three, making him unable to forget Ianto Jones for even a healing moment.

Jack wasn't actually sure how far he'd intended to run in the first place. To Asia, but no, that wasn't nearly far enough. To Australia, but there were far too many Welsh there for Jack to live comfortably. To the Americas, perhaps, or even all the way to the ends of time and the universe if he could find a way to rejoin the Doctor—?

But in the end, it was decided (not by Jack) that he remain in the Americas for the foreseeable future. In North America, to be precise, smack in the middle of the Nevada desert, not terribly far from the radiated wasteland of Trinity.

It had all started out as a complete accident. Jack had been backpacking across the desert on foot, having taken a footpath that had bypassed all the signs warning against trespassing on government property. When a Hummer filled to the open-top roof with armed and camouflaged soldiers had roared up from behind, Jack had done the only sensible thing. He ran.

And they, of course, had shot him down when he refused to stop for them.

When Jack came to five minutes later, two soldiers were inspecting his body for secret weapons or spy devices. They were so shocked to see a formerly-dead man resurrect himself that they shot him again. And he again rose from the dead, only to be shot for the third time, this time with tranquilizers that would have knocked out a space whale the size of London.

When he finally regained his senses, still feeling incredibly hung-over from the drugs in his system, Jack found himself strapped down to a steel table in a dull white hospital room with a man in a white lab coat standing over him. Jack himself was naked from the waist up, and there was a window in one wall that provided a clear view of the proceedings for the crowd of people in lab coats one room over.

He had just opened his mouth to comment on how kinky the whole set-up was when a wooden gag was shoved down his throat. And then the burning, never-ending pain started. They had hooked him up to a generator and were sending an electric charge through him that was enough to power all of Torchwood Three for a year. It was a relief when his heart finally stopped, but the blissful blackness was quickly ended when another jolt of electricity pushed him to the right side of life again.

And so Jack fell into a morbid routine. Day after day (though he lacked any way of telling the time in the windowless cell they placed him in), the scientists of Los Alamos, for that was what he'd stumbled across, were using him as a test subject, experimenting with him to understand why he couldn't die. They'd kill him, getting more inventive as the days went by and they discovered that their new subject (Jack hadn't given them his name, even though they'd tortured him first to see if he really was an enemy agent, spying on their experiments. Not like he'd tell them, anyway, seeing as they couldn't threaten him with anything more than death, which was just an inconvenience for him. That was perhaps the only positive result out of being immortal: nothing really scared him anymore, unless it was the death of someone else, but Ianto was already long gone) was really and truly quite disposable, and then take samples of his cells to see how they had changed during the resurrection. And as Jack could have told them if they had just asked, there really wasn't anything to see. So they kept right on testing him, waiting for a result that would justify their tests after the fact. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Jack had gotten bored of this game after a while, which was when he had tried to escape. It had failed epically, resulting in two scientists dead in the counter-attack and Jack being starved to death in his cell as punishment. After that harrowing experience, Jack realized two things: that being forbidden to eat or drink for a week was perhaps the worst possible way to die or be tortured or both (never would he forget the taste of his own blood as he tore at his own body to quench his killing thirst), and that his body was indeed suffering adverse effects from these repeated, forced deaths. For the first time that he could remember, Jack fell ill—with a raging pneumonia that killed him three times before finally burning out of his system, leaving his body a shell of its former self. There would be no more daring escapes for Captain Jack Harkness: at least, not any time soon and most certainly not on his own.

The Nevada scientists had their own mini-Rift to deal with, which had been opened by the massive test explosions of the atomic bomb back in the Forties. As there was no such thing as Torchwood in the States, the stuff that passed through the Rift automatically became the playthings of Los Alamos. Jack sometimes saw other creatures, small aliens from other planets or sentient devices from the centuries of the future, being carried past him into neighboring cells. And sometimes, late in what Jack would come to consider the night, he'd hear tormented shrieks as the scientists upstairs did their job and experimented on their new finds, often killing the creatures in their haste, but sometimes sending them back to their cells and letting Jack be sung to sleep by the moans of those pitiful things next door.

It was in those times that Jack, weary and sick and injured from the outside in, contemplated the Asian concept of karma and wondered if all those he'd killed before their time—his grandson, his lover, his coworkers, countless other beings that had fallen through the Rift and had never returned home—were getting their due by watching him suffer like this. Small comfort, that.

But in the darkest underground cell of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it was the only comfort that Jack Harkness had left.