The Velocity Of A Kebab [2/7]
Title: The Velocity Of A Kebab
Rating: Teen [language and sexual situations]
Characters: PC Andy/Tosh, Owen, Jack, Ianto, Rhys
Advisories: AU, character death
Disclaimer: I'm denying I speak English at this point
Note: Written for tw_bigbang 2009
Summary: The flap of a wing, a slight change of angle, and the task of chasing after the spooky-do's could have fallen to another of Cardiff's finest...
**********
"Once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these tents and find it's a party. You know, food, drink, people dancing, the girl crying in the corner?"
They ignored Jack, like they always did when he was acting daft to take their minds off things. Owen was still seeing double from the night before, and the night before that, and any number of nights since the Beacons had had him trying to catch whatever moments of legless solace he could in anyone else's bed but his own. He rubbed his forearm across the bridge of his nose and tried to refocus on the skeletal remains half-buried in the strata of the pit, anything but the way Tosh and the newbie were arsing about up at the edge of the dig. Hadn't taken him long to separate the straggler from her herd, oh, no. Not that he could blame her for wandering, the ex-copper was certainly fit (and damn lucky Carys had only wanted his swipe-card), and it was a relief not to have the constant crawling sensation of eyes quietly adoring him from afar, but...
But. Yeah, not like he didn't occasionally pull up the footage of her getting down to it with the possessed girl, but that was a bit different, wasn't it? Bloke wouldn't be human, regardless of what he thought of her. Although picking birdshot out of Tosh's stomach was about as intimate as he cared to get, really. Even if she had been the one with the bollocks to straighten out Captain Carrot about the times you maybe didn't want to run straight into the arms of the friendly local Heddlu --
The newbie didn't manage to fall into the pit, quite, though not for want of trying. But he did kick down a clod of earth that hit Owen square on the head. "Oi!"
"Sorry, Owen." Tosh didn't look sorry, though. Not even as sorry as she habitually looked. She turned straight back to Mister Schoolboy-Face Copper and his wide-eyed marvelling at the alien stapler of the week without so much as handing Owen down a tissue. And he was fine with that sudden lack of offering to bear his children, really he was, except now he had grit in his eyes and for once a bit of fawning might have served some useful purpose.
The rest of his workday went about as well once they'd cleared the site for the builders to move back in and transferred their finds to the security of the Hub. Davidson had even managed to ruin several weeks' work on a specimen by absentmindedly shoving a sandwich into the wrong cooler. Owen managed to check the impulse to see what would happen if he gave the sandwich back without mentioning its little adventure and disposed of it properly in the xenohazard incinerator instead, inwardly lamenting the loss to science that Jack's stubborn frowning upon running human trials on Torchwood's employees if it could be helped represented. And being Tosh's new distraction wasn't really sufficient grounds for potentially poisoning someone anyway --
But that was the sort of still small voice best drowned out by finding someone to pull and going back to theirs for a noisy shag. It wasn't necessarily the best night of the week for it, but Owen had a go anyway, propping himself up at a bar while he considered his prospects. Maybe the blonde with the cracking arse, looks like the sort who might go for the degree...
"Won't work, mate, she's not into blokes."
Owen turned to regard the man who'd planted himself on the next stool with a withering look. "Sorry, I don't remember asking you."
"Didn't want to see you wasting your time, is all. Saw you at that dig this morning, I reckon you've had a bad enough day you don't need to add a punch in the neck to it. I'm Mark, by the way."
"And I'm really not interested."
"No, you're Doctor Owen Harper, born 1974 in London, recently sacked from the A&E system for shagging your patients. And so you ended up with Torchwood."
It was a cover, but it was a secondary layer of cover, the one Tosh had set up to make a cleverer hacker think that they'd stumbled upon the truth under the first lie. Closer than Owen had seen a stranger get to any of them in a long while. "And Torchwood's a band or something you think I'm in, is it?" He tossed back the rest of his drink and made to slide off the stool. "Sorry, mate, even if I was who you think I am, I don't do autographs --"
"You hunt aliens. And alien artefacts. Like this."
It could have been an ordinary bit of jewellery, just a disk of delicately interlaced wires dangling around Mark's neck from a plain leather cord. But there was something about the way his eye tried to slide off the metal as if it wanted him not to look straight at it that snared Owen's attention, perverse impulse to stare into a perception-filter until he caught it out at its tricks giving away his obvious interest. "Let me guess, you're going to tell me that you know who I am because you read my mind with that thing?"
"It's not so much actual thoughts," Mark said. "More... emotions, sensations, a state of mind if you want. You've been thinking that I can fuck off for interrupting you whilst you were on the pull, obviously. But you're interested. Now you're picturing what you could do with a toy like this before your boss took it off you. And it is. It's amazing to shag someone when you can feel everything that they're feeling as well. As long as they're having fun, of course. I'd go on, but you're about to piss yourself with fear --"
Still nothing that a very, very good student of body language couldn't have teased out, Owen reminded himself, as Mark leant back against the bar with a smug lift of one eyebrow. Or someone who'd done enough research to drill down to that cover, preparatory to running a Torchwood-sized con. (Knowing that any of them would have to check it out, sod the professional vanity even, just because that was why they were all there --) He shook his head. "Nah, it's bollocks, though, innit, 'cos --"
"But you want to find out for yourself."
Perception filter or not, now the pendant was all that Owen could see as Mark looped a thumb into the cord and pulled it off over his head. Held it out, swinging gently like a hypnotist's watch -- "If you --" Owen found that he had to swallow before he could go on; "If you know about me, about Torchwood... Why approach me? Why bring yourself to our attention?"
An eloquent shrug. "Maybe I want to do my civic duty and turn this in to the proper authorities. Or I reckon I might get a better deal if I cooperate before you track me down with it anyway. Maybe I'm just tired of not having anyone to talk to about it. And I don't need this to tell me that you know how that is."
It could still be a set-up. The disk was still warm from resting against the other man's skin. It could fry my brain. He was lifting the cord to slip it over his head --
It could be fantastic.
Mark had been right, the blonde wasn't staring at her mates' tits out of envy. Owen could see the swirling threads of anxiety and hope and the sullen burn of rejection hanging in the air of the club, the inner soundtrack of the mating dance of self-aware young primates throttled up until the volume slider broke off in his hand: notice me did I just fabulous arse need a fag notice me wrong shoes for going to be notice me he's she's they're enough notice me notice me notice me
Hands steadying him as he reeled back against the bar; "Easy. It's a lot to take in all at once. Try to focus it. Concentrate on one person. Look at the mousy little bird down the end there, what is she feeling?"
Like trying to pick out one line of a conversation at a crowded table, this was, but Owen shoved aside the competing clamour and tried to listen for a single bright note; "She's... she doesn't fancy her date, she thinks he's..." A sudden click like a joint popping back into its socket and he could, he could taste her disgust, she was going to kill her mates for setting her up with this weed she'd break in two if she tried to wrap her legs round his -- Always the quiet ones, he thought as the connection slipped out of his startled grasp. "Why would you let this out of your hands for a second?" he croaked.
Mark shrugged again. "Gets to be a bit old, really. People are basically slaves to impulses they're not even aware of, it's like eating a dragon's heart to learn the speech of birds and finding out that all they want is to eat worms and shit on your head. But it is fun. For a while. Especially the parts that involve shagging..." Mark caught Owen's eyes, and a flash of a sensation he knew well:
lust
"I'm not usually into blokes," Owen found himself protesting some while later, sweating in a tangle of purple sheets.
"It's only skin," Mark murmured into Owen's shoulder.
Bit late to object now, anyway. He'd given as good as he got, spurred on by the shivering echoes of refracted pleasure, and it might not have been his first choice of a pull for the night but one couldn't argue with results. "Just don't go thinking it's more than a bit of fun, yeah?"
Beside him a languid stretch. "I should go, you've work in a few hours. Think I can find my way out." Mark caught Owen's hands as he made to remove the pendant: "Keep it. Have fun. It might even improve your bedside manner." He planted a kiss on Owen's knuckles and rose to go, collecting scattered clothing with a brisk efficiency that somehow managed to retain an elusive sort of grace. "See you round, maybe."
Owen grunted and rolled over onto his stomach, not really paying his full attention to the fading sounds of Mark's exit (for a shag like that he was welcome to anything he might want to nick on the way out, shit, Owen would go help him with the telly but that would mean getting up); at length he managed to drag the duvet up over himself, to sleep like the well-shagged dead until his alarm blatted at ought-Jack-thirty. And then lay abed for as long as he dared, listening to the distant jangle of normal people's normal lives going on round him in other flats, and trying to thrust aside a persistent wisp of idle fancy about whether it might be nice if Mark did turn up sometime for another go. Didn't need to give anyone else a chance to rip his heart out of his chest.
A slow walk to work, then, practising with his control over the device. By the time he'd got to the tourist office he could nearly block it out altogether, no more than a rumbling hint of hidden information to the faces floating past. (But he'd been doing that all his life, hadn't he, shutting them out so they wouldn't drag him down with --) Even that faded behind massed concrete barriers with his descent beneath the normal world, to his job and his Captain already lying in wait: "You're late, your first patient of the day is already here." Owen followed Jack's nod to a draped form on the worktable. "Turned up in an alley last night. I'm no doctor myself but --" Owen nearly gagged as he flicked aside the sheet -- "I'd say somebody's made off with this man's heart."
"When I want a lay opinion on a case I'll ask for one," Owen snapped, but halfhear -- erm, unenthusiastically, surveying the ruins of the ribcage. What did they use, a post-digger? He shrugged into his lab-coat and reached for a pair of examination gloves, already calculating what sort of force might have produced this injury...
And conveniently 'forgot' to mention anything at all about last night, though the weight of the pendant nagged quietly at the edges of his mind even as he tried to concentrate on the shredded meat beneath his forceps. So, he'd turn it in later, but some further testing was wanted first, yeah? (Since his head would have exploded already if it was going to, and therefore he'd probably only be the one asked to volunteer to run the experiments anyway...) Dangerous to try it on Jack, of course, and probably mentally scarring besides assuming there was anything to be read from him at all, Owen was already convinced the man was some sort of sex-android that had fallen through the rift himself and decided he knew a good setup when he saw one...
But it wasn't as if he owed Davidson anything, was it?
Almost too easy the way the man already wore his heart on his sleeve, but Owen rested his weight against the edge of the autopsy table and let himself hear... mostly something like a stream of inane chatter, the dullness of this report versus what he'd have been about at this time of the morning back in his old life, inchoate curiosity as to whether there were still any of the chocolate biscuits left that wasn't quite rising to the need to go and find out yet, checking in with his cock every nought point five seconds 'cos, bloke... Normal, in other words. Far too normal for this place, probably. And actually really boring. Eating worms and shitting on your head, yeah...
Ah, well, better applications for his trinket, maybe. Try to put all of this murder and mayhem out of his head to go out on the pull again tonight, see what wearing this thing was like doing a bird. Scientific comparison, yeah? Make a proper study of it. Not that he was worried, or anything, and you couldn't really point to that kiss as evidence of anything, he'd have snogged Jack goodbye if he'd been trapped in that locker with him and not as if Davidson hadn't been kissing back, remember that whole argument about pocket-torches and pockets after they'd survived that Jack had overheard enough of to be smirking at them both for a week (and if this fucking lightweight hadn't forgot himself and moaned at just the wrong instant)...
Oh, god, he was turning bender, obsessing about Davidson's cock, riding him while those huge hands cupped --
Wait. That wasn't coming from inside. Not unless he'd picked up a far curvier self-image somewhere in the last few minutes. Owen froze over his scalpel as tiny heels tapped across the platform above him. Tosh... quiet boring swotty unlucky-in-love Tosh, and...?
And was it any of his business, no, it was not any of his business who shagged that stupid twat, erm, who that stupid twat shagged, they were consenting adults after all and oh god he did not need to know how good it had felt to bury himself to the hilt in her as she cried out (another man's name) when Tosh laid her folder in front of Davidson. Should have worn different trousers -- "Owen? Are you all right?"
Jumping a mile at her voice probably hadn't helped anything, either. "Yeah, 's just... this is gruesome, even for us. Not something you get used to even working A&E. I mean, what sort of nutter goes after hearts?"
"A romantic nutter?" Davidson suggested. Tosh put a hand to her mouth to conceal a giggle. desire would she bum in those privacy around would he maybe now yes yes yes --
Owen stamped up the tiled steps and fled for the toilet. Peculiar sensation, not to know whether you wanted to toss off or sick up. He ought to start by flushing this fucking thing, never mind protocol or scientific advancement or fucking Torchwood's fucking bloody archives.
But even to get to the safety of a remote enough stall he'd have to go through the conference room, and of course here was Ianto in his path, absorbed in his beloved coffee machine. Bending over it like he must have bent over his machine girlfriend in their cellars, and wasn't that a twisted metaphor for a twisted fucked-up man, hand on a lever like a caress --
miss her
Owen paused, struck by the clarity of the borrowed sensation.
miss her so much like rats why didn't they
Recognising it.
why didn't they kill me too
"Oi, sorry, I..." Now Ianto was looking at him in naked confusion. "Sorry. About... Yeah."
That wisp of hopeless loss and longing had turtled away somewhere behind Ianto's mask of inscrutability again, but Owen could still hear or feel or smell or whatever the fuck you'd call this extra sense the faintest trace of something more than mere irritation that he might have been interrupted in his oh-so-pressing chores to be sent to see if there were any more of the chocolate biscuits. In Owen's ears the rasp of his own breath and in his head the buzz of two minds passing beneath him somewhere, fall for quiet place those legs falling for -- "Listen, mate, I..."
Ianto looked at the hand on his shoulder with a sceptical lift of his eyebrows, but when the blue eyes tracked back up to Owen's face there was something else behind them, some spark of surprised connection. Owen wondered if the pendant could transmit as well as receive. "You're not the only one here who's lost someone. 'S how Jack came to hire me. She was, she was my... What I'm saying is, it doesn't get better. But you learn to rearrange yourself around it. It's not always going to be the only thing you can think about."
The man was very tightly wrapped, damn Torchwood One's psychic training anyway, but Owen sensed the tiniest undercurrent of a guard being relaxed, just the slightest. "Anyway. Any time you want to go get pissed."
Ianto appeared to be thinking about this offer as if it were so far beyond what a day's usual routine of bin-bags and coffee grounds might have tossed out to him that it was absorbing all of his computational power just to look at it straight on. Finally a small nod. "Yeah, maybe."
>
Rating: Teen [language and sexual situations]
Characters: PC Andy/Tosh, Owen, Jack, Ianto, Rhys
Advisories: AU, character death
Disclaimer: I'm denying I speak English at this point
Note: Written for tw_bigbang 2009
Summary: The flap of a wing, a slight change of angle, and the task of chasing after the spooky-do's could have fallen to another of Cardiff's finest...
**********
"Once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these tents and find it's a party. You know, food, drink, people dancing, the girl crying in the corner?"
They ignored Jack, like they always did when he was acting daft to take their minds off things. Owen was still seeing double from the night before, and the night before that, and any number of nights since the Beacons had had him trying to catch whatever moments of legless solace he could in anyone else's bed but his own. He rubbed his forearm across the bridge of his nose and tried to refocus on the skeletal remains half-buried in the strata of the pit, anything but the way Tosh and the newbie were arsing about up at the edge of the dig. Hadn't taken him long to separate the straggler from her herd, oh, no. Not that he could blame her for wandering, the ex-copper was certainly fit (and damn lucky Carys had only wanted his swipe-card), and it was a relief not to have the constant crawling sensation of eyes quietly adoring him from afar, but...
But. Yeah, not like he didn't occasionally pull up the footage of her getting down to it with the possessed girl, but that was a bit different, wasn't it? Bloke wouldn't be human, regardless of what he thought of her. Although picking birdshot out of Tosh's stomach was about as intimate as he cared to get, really. Even if she had been the one with the bollocks to straighten out Captain Carrot about the times you maybe didn't want to run straight into the arms of the friendly local Heddlu --
The newbie didn't manage to fall into the pit, quite, though not for want of trying. But he did kick down a clod of earth that hit Owen square on the head. "Oi!"
"Sorry, Owen." Tosh didn't look sorry, though. Not even as sorry as she habitually looked. She turned straight back to Mister Schoolboy-Face Copper and his wide-eyed marvelling at the alien stapler of the week without so much as handing Owen down a tissue. And he was fine with that sudden lack of offering to bear his children, really he was, except now he had grit in his eyes and for once a bit of fawning might have served some useful purpose.
The rest of his workday went about as well once they'd cleared the site for the builders to move back in and transferred their finds to the security of the Hub. Davidson had even managed to ruin several weeks' work on a specimen by absentmindedly shoving a sandwich into the wrong cooler. Owen managed to check the impulse to see what would happen if he gave the sandwich back without mentioning its little adventure and disposed of it properly in the xenohazard incinerator instead, inwardly lamenting the loss to science that Jack's stubborn frowning upon running human trials on Torchwood's employees if it could be helped represented. And being Tosh's new distraction wasn't really sufficient grounds for potentially poisoning someone anyway --
But that was the sort of still small voice best drowned out by finding someone to pull and going back to theirs for a noisy shag. It wasn't necessarily the best night of the week for it, but Owen had a go anyway, propping himself up at a bar while he considered his prospects. Maybe the blonde with the cracking arse, looks like the sort who might go for the degree...
"Won't work, mate, she's not into blokes."
Owen turned to regard the man who'd planted himself on the next stool with a withering look. "Sorry, I don't remember asking you."
"Didn't want to see you wasting your time, is all. Saw you at that dig this morning, I reckon you've had a bad enough day you don't need to add a punch in the neck to it. I'm Mark, by the way."
"And I'm really not interested."
"No, you're Doctor Owen Harper, born 1974 in London, recently sacked from the A&E system for shagging your patients. And so you ended up with Torchwood."
It was a cover, but it was a secondary layer of cover, the one Tosh had set up to make a cleverer hacker think that they'd stumbled upon the truth under the first lie. Closer than Owen had seen a stranger get to any of them in a long while. "And Torchwood's a band or something you think I'm in, is it?" He tossed back the rest of his drink and made to slide off the stool. "Sorry, mate, even if I was who you think I am, I don't do autographs --"
"You hunt aliens. And alien artefacts. Like this."
It could have been an ordinary bit of jewellery, just a disk of delicately interlaced wires dangling around Mark's neck from a plain leather cord. But there was something about the way his eye tried to slide off the metal as if it wanted him not to look straight at it that snared Owen's attention, perverse impulse to stare into a perception-filter until he caught it out at its tricks giving away his obvious interest. "Let me guess, you're going to tell me that you know who I am because you read my mind with that thing?"
"It's not so much actual thoughts," Mark said. "More... emotions, sensations, a state of mind if you want. You've been thinking that I can fuck off for interrupting you whilst you were on the pull, obviously. But you're interested. Now you're picturing what you could do with a toy like this before your boss took it off you. And it is. It's amazing to shag someone when you can feel everything that they're feeling as well. As long as they're having fun, of course. I'd go on, but you're about to piss yourself with fear --"
Still nothing that a very, very good student of body language couldn't have teased out, Owen reminded himself, as Mark leant back against the bar with a smug lift of one eyebrow. Or someone who'd done enough research to drill down to that cover, preparatory to running a Torchwood-sized con. (Knowing that any of them would have to check it out, sod the professional vanity even, just because that was why they were all there --) He shook his head. "Nah, it's bollocks, though, innit, 'cos --"
"But you want to find out for yourself."
Perception filter or not, now the pendant was all that Owen could see as Mark looped a thumb into the cord and pulled it off over his head. Held it out, swinging gently like a hypnotist's watch -- "If you --" Owen found that he had to swallow before he could go on; "If you know about me, about Torchwood... Why approach me? Why bring yourself to our attention?"
An eloquent shrug. "Maybe I want to do my civic duty and turn this in to the proper authorities. Or I reckon I might get a better deal if I cooperate before you track me down with it anyway. Maybe I'm just tired of not having anyone to talk to about it. And I don't need this to tell me that you know how that is."
It could still be a set-up. The disk was still warm from resting against the other man's skin. It could fry my brain. He was lifting the cord to slip it over his head --
It could be fantastic.
Mark had been right, the blonde wasn't staring at her mates' tits out of envy. Owen could see the swirling threads of anxiety and hope and the sullen burn of rejection hanging in the air of the club, the inner soundtrack of the mating dance of self-aware young primates throttled up until the volume slider broke off in his hand: notice me did I just fabulous arse need a fag notice me wrong shoes for going to be notice me he's she's they're enough notice me notice me notice me
Hands steadying him as he reeled back against the bar; "Easy. It's a lot to take in all at once. Try to focus it. Concentrate on one person. Look at the mousy little bird down the end there, what is she feeling?"
Like trying to pick out one line of a conversation at a crowded table, this was, but Owen shoved aside the competing clamour and tried to listen for a single bright note; "She's... she doesn't fancy her date, she thinks he's..." A sudden click like a joint popping back into its socket and he could, he could taste her disgust, she was going to kill her mates for setting her up with this weed she'd break in two if she tried to wrap her legs round his -- Always the quiet ones, he thought as the connection slipped out of his startled grasp. "Why would you let this out of your hands for a second?" he croaked.
Mark shrugged again. "Gets to be a bit old, really. People are basically slaves to impulses they're not even aware of, it's like eating a dragon's heart to learn the speech of birds and finding out that all they want is to eat worms and shit on your head. But it is fun. For a while. Especially the parts that involve shagging..." Mark caught Owen's eyes, and a flash of a sensation he knew well:
lust
"I'm not usually into blokes," Owen found himself protesting some while later, sweating in a tangle of purple sheets.
"It's only skin," Mark murmured into Owen's shoulder.
Bit late to object now, anyway. He'd given as good as he got, spurred on by the shivering echoes of refracted pleasure, and it might not have been his first choice of a pull for the night but one couldn't argue with results. "Just don't go thinking it's more than a bit of fun, yeah?"
Beside him a languid stretch. "I should go, you've work in a few hours. Think I can find my way out." Mark caught Owen's hands as he made to remove the pendant: "Keep it. Have fun. It might even improve your bedside manner." He planted a kiss on Owen's knuckles and rose to go, collecting scattered clothing with a brisk efficiency that somehow managed to retain an elusive sort of grace. "See you round, maybe."
Owen grunted and rolled over onto his stomach, not really paying his full attention to the fading sounds of Mark's exit (for a shag like that he was welcome to anything he might want to nick on the way out, shit, Owen would go help him with the telly but that would mean getting up); at length he managed to drag the duvet up over himself, to sleep like the well-shagged dead until his alarm blatted at ought-Jack-thirty. And then lay abed for as long as he dared, listening to the distant jangle of normal people's normal lives going on round him in other flats, and trying to thrust aside a persistent wisp of idle fancy about whether it might be nice if Mark did turn up sometime for another go. Didn't need to give anyone else a chance to rip his heart out of his chest.
A slow walk to work, then, practising with his control over the device. By the time he'd got to the tourist office he could nearly block it out altogether, no more than a rumbling hint of hidden information to the faces floating past. (But he'd been doing that all his life, hadn't he, shutting them out so they wouldn't drag him down with --) Even that faded behind massed concrete barriers with his descent beneath the normal world, to his job and his Captain already lying in wait: "You're late, your first patient of the day is already here." Owen followed Jack's nod to a draped form on the worktable. "Turned up in an alley last night. I'm no doctor myself but --" Owen nearly gagged as he flicked aside the sheet -- "I'd say somebody's made off with this man's heart."
"When I want a lay opinion on a case I'll ask for one," Owen snapped, but halfhear -- erm, unenthusiastically, surveying the ruins of the ribcage. What did they use, a post-digger? He shrugged into his lab-coat and reached for a pair of examination gloves, already calculating what sort of force might have produced this injury...
And conveniently 'forgot' to mention anything at all about last night, though the weight of the pendant nagged quietly at the edges of his mind even as he tried to concentrate on the shredded meat beneath his forceps. So, he'd turn it in later, but some further testing was wanted first, yeah? (Since his head would have exploded already if it was going to, and therefore he'd probably only be the one asked to volunteer to run the experiments anyway...) Dangerous to try it on Jack, of course, and probably mentally scarring besides assuming there was anything to be read from him at all, Owen was already convinced the man was some sort of sex-android that had fallen through the rift himself and decided he knew a good setup when he saw one...
But it wasn't as if he owed Davidson anything, was it?
Almost too easy the way the man already wore his heart on his sleeve, but Owen rested his weight against the edge of the autopsy table and let himself hear... mostly something like a stream of inane chatter, the dullness of this report versus what he'd have been about at this time of the morning back in his old life, inchoate curiosity as to whether there were still any of the chocolate biscuits left that wasn't quite rising to the need to go and find out yet, checking in with his cock every nought point five seconds 'cos, bloke... Normal, in other words. Far too normal for this place, probably. And actually really boring. Eating worms and shitting on your head, yeah...
Ah, well, better applications for his trinket, maybe. Try to put all of this murder and mayhem out of his head to go out on the pull again tonight, see what wearing this thing was like doing a bird. Scientific comparison, yeah? Make a proper study of it. Not that he was worried, or anything, and you couldn't really point to that kiss as evidence of anything, he'd have snogged Jack goodbye if he'd been trapped in that locker with him and not as if Davidson hadn't been kissing back, remember that whole argument about pocket-torches and pockets after they'd survived that Jack had overheard enough of to be smirking at them both for a week (and if this fucking lightweight hadn't forgot himself and moaned at just the wrong instant)...
Oh, god, he was turning bender, obsessing about Davidson's cock, riding him while those huge hands cupped --
Wait. That wasn't coming from inside. Not unless he'd picked up a far curvier self-image somewhere in the last few minutes. Owen froze over his scalpel as tiny heels tapped across the platform above him. Tosh... quiet boring swotty unlucky-in-love Tosh, and...?
And was it any of his business, no, it was not any of his business who shagged that stupid twat, erm, who that stupid twat shagged, they were consenting adults after all and oh god he did not need to know how good it had felt to bury himself to the hilt in her as she cried out (another man's name) when Tosh laid her folder in front of Davidson. Should have worn different trousers -- "Owen? Are you all right?"
Jumping a mile at her voice probably hadn't helped anything, either. "Yeah, 's just... this is gruesome, even for us. Not something you get used to even working A&E. I mean, what sort of nutter goes after hearts?"
"A romantic nutter?" Davidson suggested. Tosh put a hand to her mouth to conceal a giggle. desire would she bum in those privacy around would he maybe now yes yes yes --
Owen stamped up the tiled steps and fled for the toilet. Peculiar sensation, not to know whether you wanted to toss off or sick up. He ought to start by flushing this fucking thing, never mind protocol or scientific advancement or fucking Torchwood's fucking bloody archives.
But even to get to the safety of a remote enough stall he'd have to go through the conference room, and of course here was Ianto in his path, absorbed in his beloved coffee machine. Bending over it like he must have bent over his machine girlfriend in their cellars, and wasn't that a twisted metaphor for a twisted fucked-up man, hand on a lever like a caress --
miss her
Owen paused, struck by the clarity of the borrowed sensation.
miss her so much like rats why didn't they
Recognising it.
why didn't they kill me too
"Oi, sorry, I..." Now Ianto was looking at him in naked confusion. "Sorry. About... Yeah."
That wisp of hopeless loss and longing had turtled away somewhere behind Ianto's mask of inscrutability again, but Owen could still hear or feel or smell or whatever the fuck you'd call this extra sense the faintest trace of something more than mere irritation that he might have been interrupted in his oh-so-pressing chores to be sent to see if there were any more of the chocolate biscuits. In Owen's ears the rasp of his own breath and in his head the buzz of two minds passing beneath him somewhere, fall for quiet place those legs falling for -- "Listen, mate, I..."
Ianto looked at the hand on his shoulder with a sceptical lift of his eyebrows, but when the blue eyes tracked back up to Owen's face there was something else behind them, some spark of surprised connection. Owen wondered if the pendant could transmit as well as receive. "You're not the only one here who's lost someone. 'S how Jack came to hire me. She was, she was my... What I'm saying is, it doesn't get better. But you learn to rearrange yourself around it. It's not always going to be the only thing you can think about."
The man was very tightly wrapped, damn Torchwood One's psychic training anyway, but Owen sensed the tiniest undercurrent of a guard being relaxed, just the slightest. "Anyway. Any time you want to go get pissed."
Ianto appeared to be thinking about this offer as if it were so far beyond what a day's usual routine of bin-bags and coffee grounds might have tossed out to him that it was absorbing all of his computational power just to look at it straight on. Finally a small nod. "Yeah, maybe."
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