Torchwood: Fanfic: Curing a headache

[m_findlow]

Title: Curing a headache
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Owen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 474 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "any, any, painful headache" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack has a headache of the persistent type

Jack wasn't the type to normally get headaches, but then again, this was a horse of a different colour, or a headache of a different kind to be precise. Perhaps recruiting Owen hadn't been the best idea he'd ever had. The first few months had been brilliant. Owen had slipped into the team quietly, ha!, hard to believe now. He'd been crawling his way back to the surface from the deep pool of grief that came from losing Katie just a few short months ago. He'd gone about his day with careful diligence, burying himself in his work, and learning as much as he could from Jack and the others about the sorts of things that actually inhabited the tiny rock he called home. He'd also managed to provide valuable insight into many of the species they'd encountered, his medical skills tried and tested with each new case, and his curiosity understandable and appreciated.

Jack had been feeling rather pleased about his recruitment choices to date. Each one had complemented the other perfectly and he could almost sit back and believe that he'd hit his stride in forming a cohesive team of clever, committed, caring individuals.

Then he'd come to know the real Owen Harper. The one that lay under the grieving fiancé. Jack liked personality, hardiness, pluck and a good sense of humour. It was all the reasons he'd recruited Suzie, but like so often was the case, water and oil never mixed. When Owen finally came out of his shell, he was a completely different person. He was smug and cocky, snarky and sometimes just downright rude or mean. He could go head to head with Suzie in a heartbeat and had no qualms about coming out on top. He supposed it was why when the fireworks finally kicked off properly, that they'd landed straight into bed with one another. Which was fine. But when they were out on a case, Jack expected them to behave like professionals, not schoolchildren.

He started to notice the downward spiral that had become Owen's life. Left to his own devices, without a permanent someone else to keep him grounded, he was like a loose canon. He began to show a blatant disregard for things like turning up on time, turning up sober, or even turning up at all. When he was there, he was either moody and giving grief to anyone who crossed his path, Jack himself included, or he was silent and brooding. It was the headache Jack didn't need. Things had picked up and the rift was getting more and more active. He couldn't afford for a critical member of his team to be going off the rails at this point. He just wished that there was a doctor who could diagnose the cause of his headache and an appropriate remedy for it.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Unfortunately, their doctor is the cause of the headache and he's not even remotely interested in curing it.

Novel approach to the prompt! Thanks for the fill.