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By the time his captors accept that they’ve got the wrong man — that he doesn’t have the answers they want, that they’ve wasted time and effort; that he isn’t the Torchwood operative they took him for, that he was just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time — Jack Harkness is a beaten, bloody, broken man.
Not mentally; never mentally, if only because he’s pretty sure if he was going to go nuts he’d have done so about eleven deaths ago. Unless he did go nuts eleven deaths ago and just hasn’t noticed.
Physically, though…
Well, yeah. Physically, he’s very broken.
“So what’re you gonna do with me now?” he slurs at the woman looking down at him, disgust and disappointment in her eyes. “Kill me?”
Her face gives nothing away. That’s fine; he’s already got the information he came for. Now he just needs to get away with it.
“Maybe,” she says.
“You don’t want to keep wasting space on me,” he says. “And if you let me go, I could tell the world about you.”
“We’ll see,” she says, and walks away.
It’s only then that he really starts to worry — about his mission, and about himself. He was counting on them murdering him. He wasn’t sure he’d even survive the torture, but here he is, still breathing.
He’ll have to kill himself, of course, if they don’t do it for him — there’s no way he’s remaining in this condition, and anyway he needs to get his intel back to the team — but he never likes committing suicide. More to the point, with the state of his injuries, suicide could be tricky. Especially if they don’t let him go. Even if they do, it’s hard to hold a gun in broken fingers, or jump off a bridge with shattered legs…
The woman’s colleague comes in, a short time later, and he’s holding a gun.
Jack sighs in relief, fractured ribs protesting the disturbance. Good. Their moral bankruptcy is as complete as he thought. He was hoping for that.
Having deemed him useless, they shoot him and dump his body in the river.
As causes of death go, drowning isn’t his favorite. It takes a few tries before he manages to get to the surface in time to avoid dying again.
A few miles downstream, Captain Jack Harkness swims to shore, grinning — with body, and secrets, intact.
