Jack Harkness watched his team with cool indifferent eyes.

Gwen and Rex were bickering over a crate of weapons still packed in preservative grease. Snatches of their conversation drifted to him. Though his thoughts were drifting through long eons past and the many faces of the dead.

"Jack?" Gwen called again.

Jack was leaning against the railing of a catwalk that rimmed the hangar they had claimed as their new temporary headquarters.

"Jack are you even listening?" She snapped.

He shifted his gaze to her but didn't otherwise move.

"I'm always listening."

"Well?"

"I'm going out." He said and turned on his heel. He left via an emergency exit at one end of the catwalk that lead to a steel fire escape on the exterior of the building.

Gwen set her jaw and glanced at Rex. He held up his hands defensively apparently conceding the point of their argument.

"He's your best buddy."

"Shut up."

Gwen tried to follow Jack but was greeted with the echoing buzz of his motorbikes fading engine as she exited the hangar. She set her jaw and folded her arms.

"What would you say if you could catch him?" Rex asked as he followed her.

"That's he's being an ass." She growled.

"Right, and that would achieve what? Look he's working some shit out. Just give him time."

"Every time you open your mouth lately Rex I want to throw you off something."

"Go for it, not like I'll die." He said bitterly.

Jack let the wind tear at him, his coat flowing behind him like a cloak. The road was deserted and filled with hairpin turns and sudden drops, sharp corners with sheer cliffs threatening. He downshifted and hugged the gas tank grinning into the wind.

Sometimes the only way to feel alive was to be nearly dead.

He thought of his brief life of mortality before setting the Miracle right. The bartender and the despairing call to Gwen. He hadn't realized how much he relied on his curse to keep him together. Now that he knew how fragile and weak he really was, how needy, it had shaken him deeply. His sense of self, the cavalier hero, the ruthless fist when needed…had been wiped away. At the end all he could wonder was how Ianto- his latest truest and most recently slaughtered- love would view the man he was without immortality.

Would Ianto have loved that man? Selfish, weak, despairing…

He increased his speed again, moving so quickly now that he couldn't see clearly. The road wound through a vast tract of land once leased to the state anonymously purchased by a shell company on Jack's behalf. It was in the heart of the American West. After the events of the invasion of the 456 he wasn't confident in the British government's cooperation. He knew where he stood in the U.S., alone. No gray area.