FIC: A Familiar Face
Title: A Familiar Face
Author: evelyncarver
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Owen, Ianto
Table: N/A
Summary: Owen knows the new boy from somewhere and he’ll figure it out sooner or later.
Note: Torchwood prompt #4 Recognition
The new guy starts on a Thursday. Owen isn’t sure why he knows this, time has blended together since he started working for Torchwood and more often than not he has no idea of the day of the month, much less the day of the week. The new guy is supposed to help with that, reduce the workload, and keep them organized.
He comes in dressed in a suit with a waistcoat and tie. It instantly sets him apart from the rest of the team. For Owen being able to wear jeans and t-shirts to work every day is one of the better parts of tis rotten job and he scowls at the new guy’s overly formal and put together look knowing that it won’t last long. You can’t make time to go to the dry cleaners while working at Torchwood and dry cleaners don’t do alien slime removal.
Owen is left alone on that particular Thursday morning. The new guy spends his time in Jack’s office and Suzie and Tosh are out dong whatever it is the do when he’s not along with them. He used to think they were shagging but now, since Suzie’s shagged him, he’s not so sure. But he keeps busy, there is always another alien autopsy to do or more paperwork that he hasn’t done.
At lunch time the new guy leaves Jack’s office and comes down to the autopsy bay and Owen is bored so he decides to ignore him, see if he can get a rise out of him. But when the new guy introduces himself Owen discovers that he’s Welsh, the first Welsh employee in the Welsh branch of Torchwood, and then he mentions food and the thought of not having to dig around in the fridge for something that might be edible is quite appealing and Owen reluctantly follows the new Welsh boy up to the conference room.
Tosh and Suzie come back in the middle of lunch, both of them red cheeked and sweaty, one day he’ll figure out what they do when they disappear, but not today, that seems like too much work and Owen’s not in the mood to do any more work today after his autopsy and 20 minutes of paperwork.
They sit around the table after lunch while the new boy disappears with the rubbish from the takeaways. He returns ten minutes later with a tray of coffees. Owen doesn’t really feel bothered by him now, but he sees a flicker of something in the man’s face when he accepts his coffee and that starts to bug him.
When Owen leaves that night, an hour early, the flicker is still bugging him. He really doesn’t know any Welsh men, unless they’ve RetConned the guy before or he was in the police. He leaves resolving to think about it, maybe check the guy’s medical records, he might have been a patient all the months ago when Owen was still a NHS doctor. But when he gets home and there’s no food in the fridge he heads out and once he’s had his second beer all thoughts of the new guy leave his head.
The next morning he’s hung over and cold and not at all looking forward to opening up the half-rotted, stinking, bloated corpse that someone fished out of the bay for him. So he’s almost happy when the new boy comes into the autopsy bay. Owen accepts the coffee and the paracetamol and sits down on a stool next to the dissection table to wait for the effects to kick in and wake him up and sooth his pounding headache.
The new boy returns fifteen minutes later. Owen got the email from Jack containing Ianto Jones’ previous medical file but he hasn’t bothered to open it yet. He didn’t really know of the trouble that anyone could get up to in Wales. Still if the guy was Torchwood material there was bound to be something big and painful in his past.
When Owen made him take off his shirt the new boy hesitated but Owen brandished the stethoscope he complied. The scars that littered his body would probably fade in time, they were still fresh but Owen saw no reason to pick at something that as healing and pretended that they didn’t exist for the duration of the exam, deciding to read the file Jack had sent him as soon as possible.
The physical was quick, Owen wanted to read the file and there really wasn’t anything wrong with the new guy, besides the scars and the stresses of working for Torchwood that would most likely eventually wreck him. Owen dismissed him, added the blood sample to the employee tray and set the rest of his notes aside to enter into the computer later.
The medical file that Jack had sent him was sketchy, still Owen was surprised to discover that Ianto Jones had been Torchwood One. He’d stayed in a UNIT hospital after the attack and any information that they’d collected hadn’t been shared with Torchwood. There was also a distinct possibility that someone else had doctored the file although Owen wasn’t going to ask Tosh to check it, that would make him look suspicious and he didn’t think it was that big a deal right now.
When he checked Ianto Jones’ Torchwood One general file something clicked. Owen remembered a man who had been a junior researcher and worked in the Archives and been in the lower levels of Torchwood One when the Cybermen had begun their mass conversion. He remembered arriving there just a few minutes after everything was over and grabbing the first person he could find that could walk and talk. They hadn’t had much time before UNIT got there and Jack was insistent they keep certain pieces of technology in their own hands.
Seeing the employee ID photo of the smiling man that Torchwood One had taken he remembered telling the man to calm down and focus. He’d overridden his concerns about his girlfriend, she was most likely dead anyway, and he’d neglected the man’s injuries wanting to get out of there and back to Cardiff as soon as possible.
Owen remembered the choices that he’d made that day, getting bits of tech safely into his bag, flagging the dead and nearly dead for retrieval and giving Ianto Jones a light sedative to keep him from going into shock and calming him down enough to be useful. He remembered his bag being full and heavy when Suzie had come to get him. Jack was yelling at someone in the background and Tosh was waiting for them in the SUV.
He’d dumped Ianto Jones then, he barely knew the man and he was sure that he’d never see him again. And on Thursday he hadn’t recognized the man so tidy and put together and calm and collected. Today was Friday and it hadn’t even been a month since Canary Warf and Owen felt heartless and sick at the way he behaved.
Ianto Jones was dealing with a pile of paperwork on the main level of the hub and Owen could see him if he looked up. He hated looking at him, when he looked into the new boy’s eyes he could see his own failure and inhumanity looking back at him. Owen swore to himself that he hated Ianto Jones, that he couldn’t stand the tea-boy from Torchwood One.