Chapter 21=

Ianto watched as a skinny man in a pinstriped suit and tie stepped out of the strange blue box. If this was the Doctor then 900 years clearly had done little to help his fashion sense, he thought as he spied the elder's shoes, "I'm assuming that you're the Doctor that we asked Martha to call?" he asked calmly.

"Yup, that's me! Now, what's the matter with Jack?" he asked.

"He's… sick," Tosh explained, at a loss at what other word there was to describe it. "We know about the year that never was," she added gently, "and I'm sorry."

"Thank you," he accepted sincerely. "But you know how it is, busy life; moving on. So what's wrong with the captain, huh?"

Owen didn't think that he was really a medical doctor but started to talk anyway, "He's severely underweight, sick with a stomach bug and stress. And he has a self-esteem issue- which you're partly responsible for."

"Yeah, Martha sort of mentioned that," he said, bringing a hand up to scratch his head sheepishly. "Did he tell you everything?"

"This is your entire fault for leaving him behind on the Gamestation," Ianto butted in coldly. At Owen's confused look, he added, "Jack talks in his sleep; that mild sedative you gave him on the way back was like a truth serum. And he was far too exhausted to realise what it was he was saying. If you hadn't left him on the satellite place then he would never have ran after you and you would never have tried to run off and never got taken to the end of the universe."

"Yeah," the Doctor admitted, "not one of my best moments, I'll give you that."

"Can you fix Jack?" Ianto asked him.

"If you can't then we're screwed," Owen said bluntly.

"Well, let's find out!" the Doctor said cheerfully, bouncing down the stairs.

~0~

The Doctor did a double take at the sight of his old friend lying under a blanket on the floor, little more than a skeleton, "We told you, he's been sick," Tosh whispered. "He hasn't been right since he came back."

"Owen tried," Ianto explained, "he took him away to a cottage but nothing worked. He got gassed by this weapon thing yesterday and was unconscious for 24 hours. He woke up a while ago but he won't let anyone touch him- he's scared."

"Of what?" Gwen asked, baffled.

"Take your pick," Owen muttered grimly, to which Tosh elbowed him hard in the ribs. Ianto rolled his eyes at the medic.

"He's sick Doctor, he's feverish and after everything that he's been through, he's stressed and sleep deprived. How would you expect someone to be?"

"Fair enough, now I'm going to go into his mind. It'll be painless and quick- I promise. I'll try to undo the damage that the Master did and whilst I'm at it, I'll put him into a sleep."

"Stop talking and get on with it then!" Owen snapped.

"Right, yes, I'll see you in a bit," two fingers on each temple and he was gone.

~0~

The walls that Jack had built up around his mind had been in place for over 150 years. Now he just walked through the rubble, like the sole survivor after an earthquake. The damage done by the Master was clear: Jack's mind was usually like a library but now random pages flickered about loose from their bindings and the shelves upturned. One tiny shelf was still upright and it contained the worst memories that the immortal had. So he was able to do nothing without self-doubt constantly in the back of his mind. The Doctor opened the first, knowing that the rest would follow.

There was an invasion, a little boy and another, still younger, child, running along a beach, sweaty and in sweaty hand and then just a lone sweaty palm, thinking that the other was close behind, an angry mother screaming at a boy for letting his brother down. Another time agent, slowly turning into a monster with a desire for blood as red as his jacket; waking up one day to find that he couldn't remember the past two years of his life. A soldier called Algy, dead from a piece of shrapnel through his stomach, a girl with bright red hair who was the only one left, the only survivor besides Jack of a group of soldiers with hearts as big as anything.

Two women systematically torturing Jack over and over on a daily basis before locking him up each night in a cell, New Year's Eve, 1999, re-entering the hub to find everyone dead but for some man who then shot himself after giving an ominous message. Waking up after three days dead, the torchwood team betraying him; '"'s not easy even just looking at you Jack, 'cuz you're wrong,"', freak, the Master, pervert, rape.

The Doctor tried his best to soothe the fiery burn of the memories and placed some good ones on the shelf. The damage done by the Master was too extensive and even if he tried, Jack would probably die from his poor physical state before he could leave. The time lord sensed the sadness of his friend and drew a big smiley emoticon on the ground before withdrawing from his friend's mind.

~0~

The Doctor came out of Jack's mind to see four worried members of the torchwood team, "Is he ok now?" Ianto demanded worriedly.

"I can't undo the damage that the Master did to him," he said sadly. "I did all that I could but any more and I ran the risk of being there so long that Jack would have died with me still in his mind- no telling what would have happened then."

"Did you put him to sleep?"

"Oh, yeah, hold on a second," he put his fingers back on Jack's temples and concentrated hard and then gently caught the limp body as he fell asleep.

"You said that his mind was broken, what does that mean exactly?"

"Well… think of a mind as like a library. Shelves upon shelves filled with books. Each book contains a memory and each shelf contains either similar memories or other memories from that period of a person's life. The bad memories are usually scattered all over the place by the brain. But the Master, he found all of Jack's worst memories and put them all on one shelf together. Then he kicked down the rest of the shelves and ripped the books apart- by the way, if he ever has flashes of memory, it's one of those pages drifting past- so no matter what Jack does now, there would always be those little insecurities in the back of his brain."

"So what did you do about it?" Tosh asked him. Owen was scribbling everything he could remember down on a notepad in case they needed it at a later date.

"Well, I couldn't just tear up the bad memories; it's both sets that make a person who they are, but bad memories burn so I lessened the burn, put some good memories on the shelf as well. That was about all I'm able to do at this point. Any more in your time and Jack would have died by then."

"So what do we do now?" the young Japanese woman despaired. "We can't put him in his bunker- Ianto hasn't finished tidying it yet."

"Actually, that was a lie. I just said that because he is practically suicidal at the moment and the couch would have been an easier place for someone to be able to keep an eye on him. Also I still have a razor in his bathroom cabinet."

"What is this 'bunker'?"

"It's a room under Jack's office where he lives. He doesn't really ever do much outside of torchwood except for take Ianto on dates."

"Let's go then!" the Doctor said, bouncing away up the stairs.

~0~

"Well, this is… not what I would have expected," the Doctor remarked as he climbed down the ladder. He turned to Ianto who was tucking Jack into his bed, adding his greatcoat over the freshly cleaned duvet as an afterthought. When he stepped back, he realised that the scene strongly resembled that of a small child with a snuggle blanket.

"What did you expect?" he asked, making sure that the duvet was exactly straight.

"I don't know, he's been here for 150 years, I would have thought that he would have made a life for himself."

"He was torchwood's prisoner Doctor, still technically is. And he was waiting for you; he couldn't afford to let his guard down."

"Prisoner?" he questioned, eyes wide. The Welshman nodded and carried on with stroking Jack's hair.

"They seemed to like the idea of an immortal plaything rather a lot," he observed.

"But, after he found me again, why didn't he get a life outside?" the time lord faltered. "This place… it's tiny! So empty and barren, surely no one could live down here?"

"Oh, he's only been in here since about the 1990s, I think. That was when Alex Hopkins was the leader, until then it was some dank, filthy cell with a blanket on the floor as a bed."

"He went through all of that, and came out sane?" that earned him a laugh. Luckily Jack was so deeply asleep that he wasn't disturbed in the slightest.

"What makes you think he was even sane when he started?" Ianto snorted. "It seems to me that Jack hasn't been sane in a very long time Doctor," he couldn't really argue with that. "Did you ever really see what they did to him on the Valiant, Doctor?" he queried. Startled by the sudden change of subject and filled with his shame, he stayed silent, "I thought as much," the younger nodded, "what they did to him was… despicable. And that's an understatement if there ever was one. The sick bastards made recordings of it Doctor. I saw a lot of things on those tapes and 'man's inhumanity to man' doesn't even cover it."

"You really do love Jack, don't you, Ianto Jones?"

"Yes, I do," he replied calmly, "and I certainly wouldn't leave him behind on a game station however many years in the future when he had just gotten killed by a dalek and then after meeting up with him again call him a freak."

"You really aren't going to let this go, are you?"

"Not really, no. if you knew everything that has happened Doctor, you'd understand how we all feel."

"Then tell me everything, tell me how Jack went from how he was on the Tardis at the end of the year that never was to a skeleton. Tell me how."

"I can't, Owen is the one who's most in the know. Ask him," Ianto looked away and smiled at the sleeping immortal, a sad, small little smile as he curled his hand around the sleeve of his coat and pulled it close. "He told me, after a mission, he told me that he went with you and it wasn't a good trip. Later that night he woke up from a nightmare and puked his guts up. I should have noticed then," he shook his head and disappeared up the ladder.

~0~

The Doctor had just been served a cup of tea made by Ianto- he was as good at making tea as he was at coffee- when he decided to ask the question that none of them were willing to answer, "So what happened, how did Jack turn into this?" he asked. It didn't surprise him that they all went silent.

"There was this man…" Tosh started before trailing off with a flustered gesture.

"He came back from the year that never was; we all noticed that something wasn't quite right. He'd lost weight and was twitchy. He didn't eat much and was much more self-deprecating than he had been before he left," Ianto sighed.

"I caught him going through the cupboards," Owen injected, "he told me later that he was looking for sleeping pills. They didn't work, he couldn't force himself to sleep dreamlessly and they just made the migraines worse."

"There turned out to be this man, Blake Anderson; he was a guard on the Valiant and somehow they failed to notice that he was one of the cruel ones. He had CCTV recordings, hundreds of them; told Jack that unless he 'satisfied' him, he would track us down and kill us and our families and then post the videos on the internet. He basically carried on where the Master left off and recorded all the sessions- I saw some of the tapes," Tosh blanched, "I burned every one of them."

"Then what happened?"

"By this point, Jack's sense of self-worth was at zero. He believed everything that he was told. He told Ianto that he was cheating on him and they broke up. I checked on him one morning and found him sick. He explained everything to me and I dealt with Blake. Then I took Jack to a cottage to try and help him. It went ok at first, and then something happened."

"What happened?" the Doctor queried, more sharply than he had first intended.

"None of your fucking business!" Owen snapped back. The Doctor had seen enough of human behaviour to know that when someone like Owen got that angry and defensive, it meant that whatever had happened was exceptionally bad.

"Ok," he said slowly, leaning back in his chair and stretching, "now we just have to wait until Jack wakes up- although there's a possibility that there might be a couple of side effects."

"Like what?"

He grinned, "There's a reason I like this sort of weapon. Its side effects are somehow able to benefit the sufferer, but custom suited for each person. And this is Jack we're talking about, be prepared for anything."