Two players, two sides, one is light, one is dark.
They're playing around each other, the light and the dark, in this odd, strange silence. And every day, Owen dies a little more, feels a little less, breaks down a little further.
Three days ago he died, and they think he's fine.
But they're wrong.
Jack goes out everyday, with his gun and his living, breathing team, with that cocky grin plastered across his face, because he has nothing left to lose. And despite the huge void where his emotions used to lie, Owen still musters the capacity to get so, so angry.
He struggles with the damned coffee like a fucking clerk while Ianto is grinning at him like an idiot, reveling in the cosmic justice that finally been granted him.
Jack takes away his gun while they go about their lives as usual, so bloody normal.
Owen runs, her runs a lot, he can run forever.
It feels so good because he doesn't feel anything. His lungs don't ache and his legs don't cramp, and he jumps in the bay, and he screams.
He screams, and nothing comes out. He floats there, suspended, twenty fathoms under the surface of Cardiff bay for hours, or seconds, or maybe millennia.
And when he finally pulls himself back to the surface, Jack is there, waiting for him, with that damned look on his face. "Thirty six minutes, not bad." Owen glares up at him, and he simply answers, "A skinny guy in tight jeans runs into water, I was taking pictures."
Because nothing is ever serious for Captain Jack.\
He throws out every article in his unused apartment that was indicated for life. He smashes the beer against the wall, because if he can't have it, no one can.
Owen retains his lucidity, his biting wit, his sarcasm. He managed to carry on, and they loved him for it.
Jack never cares about anything; his head gets lopped off, and he just grows it back. But Owen has to live in a bubble. He jerked back his finger to prove a point, and now he has to spend the rest of his piddling existence with it wrapped with a splint.
They got blown up and buried under a building, and Jack got up and brushed himself while Owen knew that he'd carry those fractures for all eternity.
Jack tells him to cool off, to accept it, buts it's a bit easier to be dead when you just go on healing, eating, fucking.
Owen can't help but think that this man, this awful, frustrating, wonderful, enigmatic fucking man was just so unbearably hypocritical.
And so Owen managed to overcome the darkness in his final death, giving his life to save the world.
And Jack overcame the light.