Torchwood: Fanfic: Twice burned

[m_findlow]

Title: Twice burned
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Gwen, Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 772 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Any, any, burned fingers" at fic_promptly
Summary: In the aftermath of an incident with a rift item, it's not the physical injuries that hurt the most.

'Thanks, Ianto,' Gwen said, watching as he slowly wrapped the bandage around her injured hand. It was nothing major, just a small burn on her palm, but she appreciated that he fussed over it nonetheless. Like everything else he did, it was calm and measured, with a tenderness that few men could pull off. Perhaps he'd missed his calling to be a doctor.

'No trouble,' he replied. 'It's just a bit of first aid.'

As she perched on the edge of the metal gurney, her thoughts turned to Owen. He should have been here doing this, but he was gone now. She'd have given anything to have him back, even putting up with his often gruff bedside manner. He'd been a good doctor, and underneath all that grumpy, snarky attitude, he really had loved the job and cared about the people he worked with.

'Tell me I'm an idiot, Ianto,' she said.

He paused, half the roll of bandage still gripped in his slender hand. He frowned at her, sure he was missing something. 'Why are you an idiot?'

She brushed her hair away from her face. 'I dunno. It's just something Owen would have said.'

'Yeah, well Owen talked a lot of shit,' Ianto replied, continuing on with the task, not even looking up.

Ianto's frank reply caught her off guard. They hadn't really talked much about them, since the funeral. There wasn't even a body to mourn over for Owen. Tosh had a special place down in the morgue now, where she'd rest forever, or at least as long as Torchwood was around, but for Owen there was nothing. Not even a brass plate on a door in the morgue for them to remember him by.

'It was stupid, really,' Gwen confessed.

'What was?'

'This,' she said, nodding down at her hand.

He gave a little shrug. 'One of us would have picked it up eventually,' he said, recalling the small oblong device which was now locked away in a secure archives containment unit. Jack had already chastised them for going out to the rift alert without him, but what choice did they have? He'd been AWOL a lot lately, so they'd made the executive decision to leave him behind.

'Had I been there I could have told you it would react to organic tissue,' Jack had lectured. 'We have gloves and protocols for a reason, or have you forgotten?'

Gwen watched the expression on Ianto's face. She could tell he was annoyed with Jack, and hated being lectured to about protocol. Jack was the biggest offender of breaking protocol. Being told off like they were small children didn't help matters. Gwen also got the distinct impression that Jack's ire with them was about something entirely unrelated, but that the incident with the rift alert was a good avenue to vent some of that frustration. She could only imagine how tense things must be between the two men once she went home for the night.

Ianto added the small metal clip that held the end of the bandage in place. 'There you go. All done,' he said, before wincing slightly.

Gwen caught the tiny flinch of pain and grabbed his wrist pulling it towards her. There was a small burn on the side of his thumb that she hadn't seen earlier. 'Why didn't you say something?'

'It's nothing. I just brushed it for a moment when we were getting it into the containment unit. Your burn was far worse.'

She fixed him with an intense look, berating him for ignoring his own injuries whilst he tended hers. He sighed. 'Alright, go on. Tell me I'm an idiot. It's what Owen would do, after all.'

'A pack of idiots who should be more careful,' Gwen added.

'You should be,' came Jack's voice, leaning over the railing and looking down at both of them. His blue eyes bored into them with an intense, cold look. They looked up at him before he pushed back from the rail and walked away without a further word, or even a smile.

'It's times like this I really miss Owen,' Ianto said. 'He'd have had a few choice words for Jack.'

Gwen's eyes followed their captain all the way to his office, where he sank into his chair with a dark expression on his face, chewing absently at a thumbnail before turning his focus to his computer screen. Something along the lines of pulling his head out of his arse sprang to Gwen's mind. It wasn't always Owen's medical skills that were needed most. Perhaps it was Jack who was being the biggest idiot of them all.

Comments

[bk_forever]

So what's got Jack in such a snit? Maybe Ianto had better go give him a few choice words; he can snark as well as Owen could and it sounds like someone needs to give Jack a good talking to.