Title: Work
By: ninefics
Characters: Owen Harper
Word Count: 487
Rating: 16+
Warning(s): Implied homosexuality, implied heterosexuality
Spoiler(s): No.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I am not affiliated with the television series Torchwood, nor any of the cast and crew. No harm is intended. It's all just for fun.

When he was in school, training to become a doctor, he never considered doing anything else. General practice. Family health. No specialisation. The risks for getting things wrong were lower and while there was contact with a lot more people it was shorter and less personal. Being a specialist meant seeing the same person over and over again through a diagnosis and treatment and after care. Working in a clinic meant a sea of namless, faceless, anonymous punters.

There were also a lot more chances to meet women.

He thought about getting into gynecology but his friend Darren who was a few years ahead of him in the programme, said it was the worst thing that ever happened to his dating life.

"I can't screw a girl anymore," he said. "All I see are charts and swabs and test results and medical histories and STDs and if there's anything that'll put you off fanny it's knowing what sort of gross nasties lurk in there."

And that had been enough for Owen.

So he studied and he worked and he trained until he eked through his exams and his training with excellent marks but constant reprimands for his attitude and bedside manner and he quickly learned that his job was not glorious, not exciting, didn't pay as well as he would have liked, and he was constantly being coughed on by sticky children with runny noses and the only women he was meeting were house mums carting their children to him after being exposed to God knew what or because of some injury obtained playing football or falling off a roof or smacking each other with hammers.

Of course, sometimes those mums were young and their husbands were busy and while little Billy slept off the light sedative he'd been given to stop him from shrieking while Owen stitched up his leg, mummy would show Doctor Harper how grateful she was.

Sometimes it was daddy who was grateful and that suited Owen just fine, too.

And now (because people found out how grateful certain mummies and a few daddies had been) he was working for Torchwood.

If you could call this "work." So far it was one big, twisted, acid trip. Every morning he went to work without knowing if it'd be a day spent sitting on his arse and playing Solitaire, a day spent cutting into alien things, a day spent patching the team back together (in one week he'd managed to run through the Hub's entire supply of liquid bandage spray and three tubes of Loctite Super Glue), a day in which he "somehow" ended up giving his boss a blowjob, or a day where they went out, did some stuff, had unsatisfactory results, and then went home.

This was not what he imagined his dream job would be, but fuck if it wasn't exactly that.