badly_knitted (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
badly_knitted) wrote2025-04-03 05:32 pm
badly_knitted) wrote2025-04-03 05:32 pm
Entry tags:
Ficlet: Hate To Love You
Title: Hate To Love You
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Tosh, Owen.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 587
Spoilers: Set pre-series.
Summary: Tosh can’t help loving Owen, but at the same time, she hates him.
Written For:
sheenianni’s prompt ‘Any, any, I lovehatelove you and you don't care at all,’ at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
threesentenceficathon.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Tosh loves Owen, she has almost from the day they met, when Jack first brought him to the Hub, all bitter, brittle, broken, and angry with the world. She’d wanted to comfort him that day, even though she didn’t know what was wrong, just that something bad had happened to him and… Well, join the club, which she supposed he was since Jack had recruited him as Torchwood’s new medic. They were all damaged goods here, all of them had been through stuff they didn’t want to talk about, but couldn’t forget, and maybe that was part of the glue that held them together as a team. That and Jack, their boss, their leader, their heroic captain who’d found each one of them and seen something in them that made him think they were worth rescuing from whatever situation they were in…
So Tosh loves Owen Harper. Don’t ask her why, because it’s complicated and she doesn’t have a good answer; she just does, and she knows there’s a vulnerable, even a gentle soul buried somewhere beneath the hard shell he’s built around him to protect himself from being hurt again, or hurt worse than he already has been.
She knows there’s a better person inside Owen, trying to get out; she’s seen glimpses, in unguarded moments, when he’s thought no one was there to witness the pain and sadness, the grief, guilt, and shame he hides so well, and she thinks that before whatever it was that happened to him, he was probably warm, and kind, and funny. But that was then. Now he’s all sharp edges and sharper words, and he doesn’t care who he cuts with his rage, probably barely even notices, or maybe he takes some kind of sick, twisted pleasure in making other people hurt as much as he does, and so…
She hates him, hates the way he can cut her to the quick with a careless word, without so much as looking at her. She hates the way he sneers, and pokes fun at her, not in a cute, playful manner, but with deliberate cruelty, like a cat playing with a mouse, wanting to see her flinch away so he can mock her further, venom dripping from every syllable, driving the knife in deep and then slowly twisting it… And all the time there’s such a hollow despair in his eyes that her heart goes out to him even as she shrinks in on herself, wishing there was somewhere she could hide where his words couldn’t touch her…
And he doesn’t care; not for her, not for himself, not for anyone. All he can do is hate, and lash out, trying to exorcise the pain inside him by spreading it around like a disease, infecting everyone he comes into contact with, even though it doesn’t lessen his own suffering in the slightest. Misery loves company, or so the saying goes, and Owen is misery personified, and…
She knows he’ll never love her, knows he’ll never accept her comfort, doesn’t want her company. He’d rather get drunk every night and sleep with nameless, faceless women he’ll never see again than just sit down and talk to someone who could, perhaps, be a friend if he’d only let her in. But she can’t even hope for that much, and so she works alongside him, and she loveshatesloves him, and he looks right through her as if she’s invisible and goes on not caring, while her heart breaks a little more every day.
The End
So Tosh loves Owen Harper. Don’t ask her why, because it’s complicated and she doesn’t have a good answer; she just does, and she knows there’s a vulnerable, even a gentle soul buried somewhere beneath the hard shell he’s built around him to protect himself from being hurt again, or hurt worse than he already has been.
She knows there’s a better person inside Owen, trying to get out; she’s seen glimpses, in unguarded moments, when he’s thought no one was there to witness the pain and sadness, the grief, guilt, and shame he hides so well, and she thinks that before whatever it was that happened to him, he was probably warm, and kind, and funny. But that was then. Now he’s all sharp edges and sharper words, and he doesn’t care who he cuts with his rage, probably barely even notices, or maybe he takes some kind of sick, twisted pleasure in making other people hurt as much as he does, and so…
She hates him, hates the way he can cut her to the quick with a careless word, without so much as looking at her. She hates the way he sneers, and pokes fun at her, not in a cute, playful manner, but with deliberate cruelty, like a cat playing with a mouse, wanting to see her flinch away so he can mock her further, venom dripping from every syllable, driving the knife in deep and then slowly twisting it… And all the time there’s such a hollow despair in his eyes that her heart goes out to him even as she shrinks in on herself, wishing there was somewhere she could hide where his words couldn’t touch her…
And he doesn’t care; not for her, not for himself, not for anyone. All he can do is hate, and lash out, trying to exorcise the pain inside him by spreading it around like a disease, infecting everyone he comes into contact with, even though it doesn’t lessen his own suffering in the slightest. Misery loves company, or so the saying goes, and Owen is misery personified, and…
She knows he’ll never love her, knows he’ll never accept her comfort, doesn’t want her company. He’d rather get drunk every night and sleep with nameless, faceless women he’ll never see again than just sit down and talk to someone who could, perhaps, be a friend if he’d only let her in. But she can’t even hope for that much, and so she works alongside him, and she loveshatesloves him, and he looks right through her as if she’s invisible and goes on not caring, while her heart breaks a little more every day.
The End