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2020-11-05
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The Torchwood men

Summary:

Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen, Jack, Ianto, Tosh, Gwen
Rating/Warnings: PG for suggestion of m/m relationships.
Summary: After watching the entirety of Torchwood Season One I had a lot of thoughts about the three men of Torchwood and their relationships with each other and the rest of Torchwood. This is just three short ficlets about them and how I see them.
Contains references to several episodes without going too much into detail.
Submitted through CompleteKingdomOfSlash

Work Text:

 

The Torchwood men
by Lilithangel
abchainey@xtra.co.nz
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lilithbint

 

Owen Harper

Owen is an intelligent man and graduated top of his class at medical school. A lot of people weren't that happy with that but he really didn't give a shit. He was good at what he did.

What he didn't know was how much it would hurt to care for his patients. He wanted to save everyone and couldn't so he ran away to Cardiff of all places where a man called Captain Jack Harkness, recruited him.

It was dangerous exciting work and he loved it. They saved people and when they couldn't it was so far out of his control that he couldn't feel guilty. Until he had a chance to right a wrong and then he learnt that sometimes fixing things doesn't help either.

Owen has a strong sense of justice and hated to feel helpless. He liked to control every encounter every interaction in his life. He used his intelligence to get what he wanted and to keep people at bay.

Owen often felt things too much. When he did fall in love it had to be with someone who feared love even more than he did. He was happy to admit when he was afraid of something but not that he loved someone until it was too late to take it back.

Owen was an angry man. Angry at a world that he couldn't save, angry at people who wouldn't admit their failings. Angry at his own fears and angry at himself.

Owen was an ambitious man he never tried to hide that. He learnt everything Jack was willing to teach him and ached for more. No woman had ever gotten under his skin the way Captain Jack Harkness did. Admiringly him, emulating him, loving him, hating him. Owen had never realised it was possible to feel all of that at once for one person.

He didn't want to be saved but Jack saved him anyway. He wanted to do the saving but instead he took the life of the man who had let him be more than he ever dreamed. And he cried into the chest of that man back from the dead, back from the darkness he had sent him into.

Love scared Owen Harper and he loved Jack Harkness.

 

 

 

Captain Jack Harkness

"Who are you Captain Jack Harkness?"

He didn't know who he was anymore.

Once a long time ago in the distant future he had been a boy foolish enough to believe in a truth that only succeeded in getting someone he loved killed.

Then he had been a soldier fighting for revenge rather than a cause, for answers he would never get.

Then they took a part of him away without explanation and he took everything left and went to explore the universe on his own terms. He became a man he had never met in an effort to get back some of what that boy had once believed in.

He met a man and a girl and they gave him a new cause. This time the cause got him killed but it didn't take.

It took a long time to understand what that meant. Hundreds of moments of darkness and pain only to return over and over to that same pain.

Hundreds of moments of watching people die unable to help them. Other moments of success only to watch them fade away and leave him.

Years, decades then centuries of loss and pain searching and waiting for the time to be right.

He gathered together people to fill in the bits of him lost over the stretch of history. The heart, caring and innocence he seemed to have lost in the darkness.

They anchored him to the world and to the man he wanted to be. Even when they betrayed him for the people they loved more they kept him focussed on what he needed to do.

He never meant to love again and yet it happened again and again. Drawn to their intensity, their need, their light and their darkness. To harsh a London accent, a doctor nothing like his doctor. To soft Welsh vowels that caressed him like the soft hands that took care of him.

When being the hero saving the world meant watching them break he did it. Because in the end even though he wasn't really Captain Jack Harkness he was still a soldier, still a captain.

 

 

Ianto Jones

Ianto Jones makes the tea and tidies up the mess.

Sometimes this is just what he is but most of the time it's more than mugs and pizza boxes.

He cleans up the blood tidies and tags the bodies. Makes up the death certificates and sorts out the families.

He tidies up the memories too. He knows how many retcon pills have been delivered, how many people have been returned to a life they don't know they left. Sometimes he wonders, wishes he could just swallow away Torchwood and be the librarian he thought he was going to be at school. But there is always something to clean up.

He knows when Tosh needs tea and not coffee when she's been sitting too long at her desk running simulations and searches watching too many images from CCTV.

He knows how many extra hours Owen will put in when a case really matters and he knows when the doctor will leave early to drown in the perfume of anonymous women and come in late the next day.

He knows when Gwen won't fancy pizza, when it too closely resembles what's left of a case she cannot talk to Rhys about. He knew when she and Owen started to sleep together and when they stopped.

He pays the wages each week and knows how many years Jack hasn't drawn more than the barest minimum out of a bank account that could support a small country.

He launders and throws away shirts with wounds that match vital organs that should have meant Jack's name on a death certificate and never have.

He knew when his keys were gone and who would have taken them. He knew when it had taken Jack too long to return. He found them and knew what the smell was as soon as he opened the door.

He turned off the car and moved the body into the back seat. Drove them back to the Hub and guided Jack to the bathroom. Removed their clothes and stood Jack under the shower until the shaking started and then he held Jack until the shaking stopped.

Put Jack to bed and held him whispering nonsense in Welsh until the eyes that had seen too much finally saw him.

Ianto Jones makes the tea and tidies up the mess especially when the mess is Captain Jack Harkness.

 

END