badly_knitted (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
badly_knitted) wrote2025-06-12 06:46 pm
badly_knitted) wrote2025-06-12 06:46 pm
Entry tags:
Ficlet: Bad Judgement
Title: Bad Judgement
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto, Owen, OCs, Jack.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 595
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Not only does he have a terrible bedside manner, but Owen Harper really is his own worst enemy at times.
Written For:
sarajayechan’s prompt ‘any, any, a “quit your whining and get a hold of yourself” slap makes things worse’, at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
threesentenceficathon.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Doctor Owen Harper, Torchwood’s medic, might be a good doctor, at least in theory, but he wasn’t an especially nice person, which begged the question of why Jack had recruited him instead of someone more personable. Then again, by now Ianto had come to the conclusion that Jack’s hiring process was along the lines of ‘see person, recruit person, figure out what to do with them later’. He didn’t go in for interviews or vetting potential candidates, just grabbed anyone with a potentially useful skill who’d had a run-in with aliens, and called them Torchwood agents. Maybe Jack’s heart was in the right place, after a fashion, but the same couldn’t be said of his brain, not that he seemed to use it much, at least not for any kind of critical thinking.
So, when the previous medic had suffered an unfortunate accident, and Torchwood had needed a new one, Jack had found Owen, who fit his criteria for the role. Doctor, recently bereaved due to alien involvement, currently out of work due to aforementioned tragedy and his reaction to it, exacerbated by having been retconned, because Jack did seem to like retconning potential recruits… Voila, new medic. Hates everyone, angry at the world, constantly either drunk or hungover, but knows how to stitch wounds, prescribe medicines, and all the other medical stuff, even if he hates treating living patients and has no bedside manner. In Jack’s eyes, it seemed that was good enough.
That had been before Ianto had joined Torchwood Three, otherwise he would have tried to talk Jack out of his impulsive choice, because there were times when he had to seriously doubt Owen’s claims of being a doctor, and this was definitely one of them. The medic was in fine form, grousing and grumbling, berating everyone, as he treated the victims of a rampaging alien. So far, he’d shown little to no sympathy for anyone, other than the pretty girl he’d tried to chat up, whose infuriated boyfriend threated to strangle him with his stethoscope. On top of that, he was doing a terrible job of convincing the injured that their attacker was a stray seal. Which of course it hadn’t been, but that was hardly the point. Owen might be the brutally honest type, but the truth had no place in this kind of situation, when the public needed to believe the lies they were being told.
Then, just as Ianto thought the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, a middle-aged lady started sobbing that the thing had eaten her dog, poor little Benji, and instead of comforting her, or even letting one of the others step in… Owen, in his infinite wisdom as a doctor, had decided she was on the verge of hysteria, and slapped her sharply across the face…
Ianto could have intervened, and probably should have, but then again, it was Owen, and really it was about time he got to suffer the consequences of his own ill-thought-out actions. The woman looked at him in shock, cried, “You hit me, you brute!” and punched Owen in the face so hard she broke his nose, at which point the whole thing devolved into a free for all that only ended when the police showed up, and made a number of arrests.
Yes, it meant Ianto would have to go and bail Owen out later, he was fully aware of that, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain satisfaction at seeing his colleague hauled away in handcuffs, charged with assault. And at least this time it wasn’t Jack.
The End
So, when the previous medic had suffered an unfortunate accident, and Torchwood had needed a new one, Jack had found Owen, who fit his criteria for the role. Doctor, recently bereaved due to alien involvement, currently out of work due to aforementioned tragedy and his reaction to it, exacerbated by having been retconned, because Jack did seem to like retconning potential recruits… Voila, new medic. Hates everyone, angry at the world, constantly either drunk or hungover, but knows how to stitch wounds, prescribe medicines, and all the other medical stuff, even if he hates treating living patients and has no bedside manner. In Jack’s eyes, it seemed that was good enough.
That had been before Ianto had joined Torchwood Three, otherwise he would have tried to talk Jack out of his impulsive choice, because there were times when he had to seriously doubt Owen’s claims of being a doctor, and this was definitely one of them. The medic was in fine form, grousing and grumbling, berating everyone, as he treated the victims of a rampaging alien. So far, he’d shown little to no sympathy for anyone, other than the pretty girl he’d tried to chat up, whose infuriated boyfriend threated to strangle him with his stethoscope. On top of that, he was doing a terrible job of convincing the injured that their attacker was a stray seal. Which of course it hadn’t been, but that was hardly the point. Owen might be the brutally honest type, but the truth had no place in this kind of situation, when the public needed to believe the lies they were being told.
Then, just as Ianto thought the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, a middle-aged lady started sobbing that the thing had eaten her dog, poor little Benji, and instead of comforting her, or even letting one of the others step in… Owen, in his infinite wisdom as a doctor, had decided she was on the verge of hysteria, and slapped her sharply across the face…
Ianto could have intervened, and probably should have, but then again, it was Owen, and really it was about time he got to suffer the consequences of his own ill-thought-out actions. The woman looked at him in shock, cried, “You hit me, you brute!” and punched Owen in the face so hard she broke his nose, at which point the whole thing devolved into a free for all that only ended when the police showed up, and made a number of arrests.
Yes, it meant Ianto would have to go and bail Owen out later, he was fully aware of that, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain satisfaction at seeing his colleague hauled away in handcuffs, charged with assault. And at least this time it wasn’t Jack.
The End
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