m-findlow.livejournal.com

Title: All things considered
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 622 words
Content notes: none
Author notes:  Written for Challenge 125 - Scales
Summary: Just a little insight into the enigma that is Owen Harper

This was Owen's favourite part of the job by miles.

Being the team's doctor necessarily meant patching up injured teammates, aliens and unfortunate passers by. It also meant occasionally showing the sort of compassion that was generally required of someone in his profession. He could cope with all of that.

Working for Torchwood also meant high speed chases, life threatening situations, guns and plenty of excitement, like some bizarre intergalactic game of Cowboys and Indians.

But no, the best part was autopsy. This is what he had trained for half his life. He loved getting his hands stuck in, up to his elbows in it sometimes, and figuring out what had happened and why.

Jack took an interest only so far as the what and why, occasionally offering up some first hand knowledge garnered from years travelling the galaxy. Gwen seemed keen on having a go and sometimes Owen didn't half mind sharing some of the less exciting slice and dice cases, particularly the human ones. Tosh didn't get involved beyond what might be gleaned from medical scans, preferring bytes over body parts, and Ianto struggled with the gore at the best of times, learning to keep the coffee deliveries well away when Owen was making a job of it.

Owen usually hated reports  of any kind, but his autopsy reports were always neat and detailed. He took hours to go through the process properly, carefully dissecting each creature. Piece by piece it was measured and weighed, and Owen observed with interest. The eyeballs weighed more than a cup of coffee. Did Ianto think that was interesting? No, never mind. The heart, the lungs, the whatever that bit was, who knew? It didn't matter, on the scales it went and the specifics recorded on file. He measured the length of the fibia, then the tibia, or at least the alien equivalent, collected samples from the stomach contents, then weighed that as well. He tried to best estimate the volume of circulating blood, noted the physical appearance, unusual features, whether they had hair and where.

Torchwood hadn't had such a comprehensive medical and anatomical database of alien creatures since Greg Bishop had worked there in the 1940`s. He was even mildly pleased with the volume of potentially useful information he had gathered in the space of the last four years. Some of it had even been used since he'd been here, and it was with no small amount of smugness that he wielded such revelations.
 
Long gone now we're the days of moping about and feeling like a fish out of water that had dominated his first few months at Torchwood, trying all the while not to think about Katie and how he'd ended up here in the first place. He still went out and drank most nights, but now it was the relief at the end of a successful, or perhaps not so successful day's work, rather than the piteous anarchic coping mechanism that it once was.

Owen Harper was determined to put his medical skills to work, and with the purpose Jack had intended for him since day one.
 
Standing in the autopsy bay, covered in green slime from their latest discovery and extracting what appeared to be the creature's heart, he was reminded of something from an old history class he'd taken in university. The ancient Egyptians had a burial custom of weighing the heart of the deceased. If it weighed more than the feather on the opposite side of the scales,  they would be denied passage to the afterlife.

He wondered then if, with each bit of goodness he managed to do working for Torchwood, and with each life saved, if somehow it would make his heart lighter also.