Torchwood: Fanfic: Practice makes perfect

[m_findlow]

Title: Practice makes perfect
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen, Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,472 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Any, any, practice makes perfect" at fic_promptly
Summary: Owen's about to get a lesson in penmanship

Owen watched as an irritated looking Ianto strode into Jack's office, shutting the door behind him.

Oh boy, another lover's tiff, he thought. What had Jack done now? he wondered.

After ten minutes, Ianto left, brushing past Owen with barely a look. He was about to ask for coffee but decided against it, preferring not to press his luck.

Two seconds later, Jack was calling him into his office. Great, he thought, probably wants to go shooting weevils now or something, just to let off steam.

'Sit down, Owen,' he instructed, offering the chair in front of his desk. He was remarkably calm. Perhaps he'd had a win. It would explain why Ianto seemed so peeved.

On his desk were a tall pile of files, all with endless numbers of yellow tags sticking out up and down the length of them. Owen hated those stupid yellow tags. It was Ianto's little power trip, marking the things in their reports that needed fixing. He noted the file on the very top of the pile, seeing it was one of his.

'Bit of paperwork there, boss?' he smirked. If Jack was planning on skiving off work, reminding him of the mountain of reports would definitely do the trick.

'Yours,' Jack replied, looking serious.

'What, all of it?' he scoffed, noting again the voluminous number of yellow tags. Bloody hell.

'They're indecipherable, Owen. All of them.'

'What are you on about?' he said, grabbing the one off the top of the pile and flipping it open. 'It clearly says the decedent died of an intercranial hemorrhage resulting in post mortem, er,' he said, twisting the file slightly sideways.

'Exactly. Even you can't read it.'

'I can,' he protested, 'it's just, you know, that one word is a little off.'

'A little?' Jack raised his eyebrows. 'I've just had Ianto in here telling me he's spent the last three days trying to get these into our database. He's had to manually key them in.'

Owen leaned back in the chair, arms folded. 'I thought we had that whizz bang scanner thing?'

'Optical character recognition,' Jack confirmed, leaning forward. 'It can read and translate over twelve hundred alien languages, but it still can't make heads or tails of your handwriting. It's got Ianto grumpy and irritable, wasting time trying to fix these, and when he's grumpy and irritable, he's no fun, which makes me grumpy and irritable.'

'And no fun?' Owen added.

'Jokes aside, Owen. We're all overworked as it is. I can't waste resources because you can't write neatly.'

Owen felt affronted. It was all well and good for Jack and Ianto to pass judgment on his handwriting. Ianto had that OCD neatness of someone who needed to get a life, and Jack had that old fashioned script that looked like it was from the nineteen forties, just like everything else. And he didn't think his writing was that bad. He'd seen a lot worse in his days working in A & E. It was just a thing. All doctors had bad handwriting. You just got used to it.

'So what? You're gonna send me back to school?' he said, crossing his arms in the opposite direction, annoyed.

'No. But I am giving you homework. Here,' he said, pulling a small blank notebook from his drawer.

'What's this for?'

'Lines. You're going to practice writing neater until it becomes habit.'

'You're joking right?' This little scheme had Ianto written all over it.

'I'm not. I want you to work on your technical writing. I can't have important reports containing critical medical and technical information that no one can read. Ianto has picked out some of the more wordy sentences from your reports to start you off, and I'm happy for you to practice anything else appropriate. I want you to spend the last hour of each day working on it.'

'What?' Jack had completely lost his mind if he thought Owen was going to sit detention and write "I must not annoy the boss" five hundred times.

'I expect you to hand it in to me before you go home,' he said, sounding every bit like the teachers he'd hated in school.

Jack held out the notebook and Owen was almost too shocked to take hold of it. Who the hell did he think he was?

'Anything else, Miss? Or can I go back to the playground now, and play with the other kiddies?'

'I want that back by six pm. And these are for you to take back and fix up,' he said indicating the large pile of reports. I want them able to be scanned by the end of the week. Ianto will be checking them.

Owen trudged out of Jack's office, suitably annoyed. Ianto was nowhere to be found, which was lucky for him Owen thought. Obsessive compulsive, perfectionist bastard. He'd get him back for this.

As promised, at six pm, a thunderous looking Owen came bursting into Jack's office where he Ianto seemed to be sharing some kind of private joke, smiling and laughing conspiratorially, so he slammed the notebook on Jack's desk without a word and left.

Jack watched him all the way to the cog wheel door before picking up the notebook and flipping through the pages.

'Does this say what I think it does?' he said passing the notebook to Ianto.

He consulted it, raising an eyebrow.

'Well, we did say he should focus on improving his medical terminology.'

'Hmph,' Jack muttered. 'I can think of lots better things I could shove up my sphincter than Owen's lines.'

'Maybe later,' Ianto promised.

The pair of them persisted with Owen, which only served to incense him further, becoming more colourful in his creativity. They were the ones insisting he stick to complicated medical jargon after all. What he didn't know was that Jack and Ianto were secretly amused by each day's efforts, and rather than putting them off their regime, only made them punish him more. If he heard the phrase "practice makes perfect" one more time, he was going to start using some of his lines on the pair of them.

"The rate of testicular degeneration is show to statistically increase in proportion to caffeine intake..."

"Captain Jack Harkness is a fucking twat..."

"The fatality resulted from an oversupply of endorphins to the cerebral cortex, coupled with an inability to dispose of excess hormonal activity via phallic pathways... "

"Ianto Jones should spend less time shagging the boss and more time fixing my paperwork..."

'Here's a good one,' Ianto said, flicking over the latest day's pages.

'It says that "medically speaking, what is the probability of full regenerative restoration on the functioning of the splenic system peri mortem on the post mortem vascular and immune system?"'

'What does that mean?'

'I think it's the polite way of wondering whether your spleen would come back if he surgically removed it before killing you.'

'Oh. Good question.'

Once Owen had run out of threatening and vitriolic things to say about the pair of them, Ianto set him the task of copying out some of Tosh's more technical notes, just for a change of pace. It didn't serve for him to be having too much fun, and this would slow him down on completing his ten page daily quota.

He hated them for it, but even he had to admit that after a week, going back and reviewing some of his old files, his handwriting really was quite bad. The fact that he could no longer read half of it spoke volumes. Still, having to take lessons on penmanship was both demeaning and not a little sadistic. As well they might send Tosh to a pub for lessons in social etiquette, and Gwen on a course to learn how to mind her own godamned business.

At the end of two weeks, Owen trudged into Jack's office and threw down the notebook without a backward glance, thoroughly fed up. This was a complete waste of his time and his skills.

'Owen,' Jack called out, stopping him from making a clean getaway.

'What now? I didn't write anything nasty about Teaboy today, in case you were wondering.'

'No, I was just going to say that I think we can call and end to your tuition,' he said, examining the latest set of scrawled pages. He didn't know quite what they meant, but the words endoscopic tracheaotomy were clear and intelligible.

'Seriously?'

Jack cocked his hated noncomitally. 'It's not fine calligraphy, but at least it's legible now.'

'Thanks, it's been fun. Not.'

'I disagree.'

'Yeah, well you would,' he grumbled. 'Next time you're being chased down by a rabid weevil intent on lunching on your lower intestine, I'll think myself glad that at least the cause of death on your death certificate will be neat.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Huzzah! Even Owen can read his own writing now! I wish I could read mine!

It does make me wonder why Torchwood don't type their reports though... ;)