Startling awake, Abigail felt nothing but the cold wrapped around her wrist and body, sending shivers across her skin and body, engulfing, penetrating, desecrating her aura.
"Where am I?" she muttered, before her memories rushed back into focus.
Her head was pounding; it had been resting on her chin whilst she slept, until she jolted upright, lingering between the worlds of dreams and nightmares and reality, until she discovered there was no difference.
She gazed in disbelief at the man who sat opposite her, sitting at the same wooden table as she was in this small, dark, cold room with the high ceiling.
It looked like an ancient sewer in there, and it smelled like it too.
The walls were nothing but rust and moisture, and a similar sort of wet touch lingered in the air, as if there was a current of water nearby and a mist of water spread from its cascading surface and into the air around them.
There were bars everywhere and rusty pieces of metal fence which were still attached to their ancient positions in the walls and ceiling, like remnants of an ancient cage.
She rattled the metal cuff around her left wrist against the leg of the chair she was chained to, in an attempt to pull herself free.
She kept doing it until rage and desolation grew and she ultimately started crying and screaming to be released.
"Who are you?" Abigail asked the stranger. "What do you want from me?"
The man sat at the table casually with a calm expression on his face.
He was handsome, but distant, and his smile was kind, but only the vanguard of a deeper threat, the tip of the iceberg of a range of emotions and secrets he hid beneath his charming appearance.
'Information," he said blatantly and utterly simple, as he placed both elbows on the wooden table, and Abigail noticed his American accent.
Owen was the only one who watched how Jack interrogated Abigail Williams.
He sat in Jack's office, pushing his hand into the surface of Jack's desk.
He glanced at his pale hand, and he watched how the muscles in his hand reacted to the touch of the desk.
Then he lifted his hand from desk the and looked at all the dead veins, the white hue and the colourless fingernails, before he put his hand on the desk again, this time pushing harder and harder as his hand trembled, buckling under the immense pressure and tension which Owen could not feel.
All he could feel was the desk pushing back, his bones unable to push any further and his body buckling under the inability to push beyond the wood, although he heard the desk's legs crackling under the stress of Owen's strength.
Then he stopped again and looked at his hand.
Still, he felt nothing.
His eyes refocused, gazing upon the screen where he could see Abigail's shocked expressions as Jack slid a photograph towards her end of the table.
"Do you recognise this man?" Jack asked her.
As she glanced down at the photo, Abigal's lip shivered.
Jack's eyes remained completely still and expressionless.
"Coffee?" Ianto asked, as he approached Gwen who sat at her own workstation, in her own far away dark corner of the Hub, where she had hidden herself from the others.
Gwen was pulled out of her self-induced trance, and let go of the keyboard.
The blue screen was whirring in the background still, searching for any signs of Joseph Milton's brother.
"After what we've been drinking this morning?" Gwen spoke amused. "No thanks."
"I thought as much," Ianto said with a smile, putting his arms behind his back. "That's why I didn't bring anything."
Gwen tilted her head backwards as she slouched back in her chair with a big sigh and smile.
"Thanks for nothing," Gwen said.
"Any time," Ianto spoke with a subtle nod of his head.
Gwen stretched her arms as a new item popped up on blue screen.
"So, anything new?" Ianto asked as he leaned against the edge of her desk.
Gwen sighed a sigh of disappointment, rubbing her face with her hands.
It had been a long day, indeed.
"Nothing," she said exhausted. "It's like he's vanished off the face of the Earth. I'd say we could ask around , but the problem is we sort of wiped the minds of all the witnesses. There's no-one we could ask!"
"And they say I'm stupid," Mickey said as he worked his way down the yellow, metal staircase besides Gwen's workstation. "But this beats everything!"
"We did ask," Gwen said. "No-one knew where he was, and if they'd been lying…"
"They wouldn't remember if they did! Excellent!" Mickey said.
"You're being sarcastic," Ianto said.
"Oh, I am!" Mickey said. "You're wiping people's minds and now it comes back to haunt you. Brilliant!"
His laugh annoyed Gwen.
"We did what we had to do," she said.
"If I disagree," Mickey asked. "Will you retcon me?"
"Was that a joke?" Gwen asked.
"No, I don't think it was," Ianto said.
"Thing is, there were dozens of Daleks in the skies a few months ago, and no-one bothered to retcon them!"
"The Daleks?" Ianto asked confused.
"The people!" Mickey corrected.
"It'd be impossible to do on such a large scale," Ianto spoke, beating Gwen to it as he put his hands in the pockets of his fancy suit.
"And unnecessary," Gwen added.
"And this isn't?" Mickey asked with an air of ridicule and defiance in his attitude and tone. "I just don't get why she's in there. Is it really that important that we wipe her memory?"
"Well, if Jack thinks so, then we do it!" Gwen said.
Mickey just couldn't believe he heard that.
"What, does Jack think he's God or something?" Mickey asked.
"Jack has saved this world more times than you could count!" Gwen spoke spirited.
"Doesn't mean I'm going to worship him," Mickey said. "Just think about it! There are millions of people out there, dying, fighting, going through torture, murder, death, rape! Why don't we give them retcon? Make them forget everything they went through. Wouldn't that be the right thing to do?
"Or isn't it alien enough?" Mickey added.
Gwen stood up from her chair to face Mickey.
"You just don't get it, Mickey," she said. "You don't. We don't hand out prescriptions. We save the world from the most terrible, terrible things…"
"So rape isn't terrible?" Mickey interrupted.
"Don't you talk to me about rape!" Gwen cried, pointing her finger in his face.
Now Mickey finally backed down, knowing he had made a mistake.
"Mickey Smith, we have been doing this for much longer than you are and let me tell you this!" Gwen said. "This isn't about them! It's about us!
"If the people out there find out what we do, what we see, what we know…"
Gwen was trembling.
"They're not ready!" she said.
"I was," Mickey said.
He and an entire world of humans fought of the Cybermen in that parallel world, disabled their factories and drove them into another reality, victorious.
"Just because Jack keeps saying it, doesn't make it true," Mickey said. "I don't know why you people keep seeing him like some kind of God or hero, but he isn't.
"He's human, just like the rest of us." he added.
They had been lucky to find her, or better yet, that she found them.
The questions that were raised during her interrogation started a strain of thoughts in Owen's mind he could not ignore.
Thing is, Joseph was almost exactly the same age as Owen was when he died, and he couldn't believe it.
He hadn't even thought about it before, but for him to have found a new body who had died at age 28 just like he had would've been unbelievably fortunate and almost impossible.
Or perhaps it just worked that way; maybe his soul latched on to anything similar to his previous body.
Male, approximately the same length, slightly different hair colour, and age.
His perception of self wouldn't have been altered that much, and the transition would've been easier.
If this were true, firstly he would never resurrect into the body of a woman, sadly enough, and secondly, this meant that there were rules to his new form of life.
The rules of the undead and the rules of the Glove.
But what did the rules say about the witnesses?
The ones who are left behind?
Owen couldn't possibly imagine seeing someone he loved rise from the dead, only to be possessed by the spectre of another man, and he couldn't possibly imagine breaking this news to Abigail.
Owen couldn't look away from the woman in that interrogation-room, and although he could not feel anything, he somehow started to feel something for her.
For the boy he now possessed once loved her, once touched her, they laughed and lived and their lips met, before he was taken from her.
Maybe he did not owe anything to Abigail Williams to save her from this dreadful, desolate situation, but he did owe it to Joseph not to let her life and mind be destroyed this day, in the name of Captain Jack Harkness.