Work Text:
You don't leave someone on their own after they've taken a life. Even an alien life. Owen might have been a poor substitute for having a professional counselor on-staff, but he did know that much. "Posh," Owen commented as Andy unlocked the front door of the little house and showed him inside.
"It belongs to my aunt. If she wants to delude herself that she's moving back from New Zealand any time soon, I figured who am I to argue?"
Certainly looked like a fussy old auntie's house, good wood and banal tat everywhere. Not all that much in the way of concessions to modernity in here, a dozing laptop set up on the dining room table but no telly. Owen supposed that the aunt had laid down a collection of rules for her housesitter that probably made the Torchwood employee handbook look like something Jack had scribbled on a take-away menu while he was falling-down drunk. (There were, actually, several cryptic references to moo shu pork in the handbook that had always made Owen more than a bit suspicious, unless it was a euphemism for something so obscure that even he hadn't managed to figure out how to violate that regulation yet.) Owen sat down on the very auntie-like velvet settee and eyed what looked like the drinks cabinet. "It's traditional to apply brandy for medicinal purposes," he said hopefully.
Andy went rummaging through the cabinet. "Probably shouldn't drink on an empty stomach, but, yeah. It was that kind of a day, wasn't it."
"I am a doctor," Owen said, taking the offered glass. "And it's my expert opinion that Torchwood is much more likely to kill us than getting pissed on your aunt's good brandy. Or whatever the hell this is," he added, taking a sip and frowning.
Andy peered at the faded label. "Calvados."
"Whatever. Now, if there were any risk of your aunt coming home suddenly to find us in her drinks cabinet, yeah, I'd be a bit worried. But New Zealand, fuck it. This is, yeah, empty stomach, not the brightest idea. 'S good, though."
Andy sat down beside him on the settee, hitching those long legs up onto his aunt's coffee-table in a small gesture of defiance. "It looked so human," he said after a silence in which he'd made a good start on his brandy. "Even seeing it change like that, it looked so..."
"And then it looked so dead-human," Owen said, nodding.
"Thing is... when I shot it... It felt right." They'd both drained their glasses by now, and there was a long pause as Andy picked up the bottle again with a hand that was only trembling a little and managed to refill them without christening the settee. "I think I'm more afraid of what that says about me than I am of the aliens."
"First time I had to use my gun in anger I sicked up all over Jack after."
"He must have appreciated that."
"I now know exactly how much it costs to have that bloody coat of his cleaned, as of a few years ago anyway. He didn't actually dock my pay for it, but he certainly found enough excuses to mention it for the next couple of months."
"You're a doctor, though," Andy pointed out with that methodical copper logic of his, worrying at a clue until it yielded its secrets to him. "Hippocratic Oath? Where I'm sworn to Queen and country. Lot of ways to go wrong with that if you start taking yourself too seriously."
"Same thing, though. Keeping other people from ending up dead. So they can keep on doing whatever the hell it is that normal people do, like... fuck, I don't know. Almost had it there for a minute."
"To other people's normal lives," Andy said, clinking his glass against Owen's. "Whatever those are. I thought I was keeping some ludicrous hours on the regular force."
Owen did know how that went, yes. "Try being a doctor. Try being Torchwood's doctor. Forget going out on the pull, I'd just like to see some sunlight once in a bloody while."
"Bloody glamourous special-ops job." Andy drank off the last of his brandy. "I used to be so jealous of Gwen, you know? Swanning around on her spooky-dos like she was too good to round up the drunks with the rest of us anymore. But it's just drunks with bigger teeth, isn't it."
"And even less chance of pulling someone to meet you once you've gone off-duty," Owen said, shifting on the settee so he could look at Andy directly. "'Cos you never do, do we. Go off-duty, I mean."
Andy's eyes had gone dark with brandy and memories, too old for that boyish face. Owen was just lightheaded enough now to try kissing him. "So we're at the part where I become yet another Torchwood sleeping-with-Owen-Harper statistic, then," Andy said as the surgeon pulled back uncertainly.
"You make that sound like something so dirty."
Andy started to laugh. "Ah, fuck it, it's the best offer I've had in yonks, anyway," he said, softening the words with a tremulous smile, and took his feet off the table. "Come on, bedroom's upstairs, I don't think I could even email Nerys in the face if we started going at it on her good settee. God, I must be crazy," he added as Owen offered him a hand up.
"I believe the slang the kids are using these days is 'taking one for the team'," Owen said. Andy laughed at this.
"Lie back and think of Torchwood? Sounds like something Jack would come up with. Except he'd be there with bells on."
"Done bells," Owen pointed out. "'S overrated, remember?"
Andy snorted. "Is Jack? The way he talks --"
"I try not to imagine his sex life, it's just too depressing. And too much of it I already don't have to imagine. We do need to put a bloody bell on his neck one of these days."
The guest bedroom was clearly the only room that Andy was at liberty to arrange to his own taste, which seemed to be minimalist either by natural inclination or in reaction to the excesses of the rest of the house. Not particularly surprising that this was where the telly lived, although it was about as tiny as might be expected of someone who claimed he couldn't really be arsed to follow much more than the news.
Kissing Andy was a lot easier once Owen got him down onto the bed to negate his height advantage. Damn, they were both pretty into this, for something that had started out as a lark. An obligation, even, him to uphold his dubious reputation and the policeman to go along with the Done Thing? But it had stopped seeming inevitable for the wrong reasons long before they'd both reached skin, and started seeming inevitable again for something approaching right ones not long after. "Wait, I haven't got any --"
"I do."
Andy regarded Owen from under knotted eyebrows as he retrieved his trousers from the floor and went rummaging through the pockets. "You're slightly frightening."
"Comes of hanging around Jack too long. Learn to be prepared for anything, anywhere, anytime. Erm, you've got, like, forever to stop doing that, by the way." No blushing virgin, their new hire, and apparently just as much the quiet competent bloke in bed as he was out of it, from the evidence. Get him together with Ianto and it would be like mime sex.
Well, all right, Owen Harper was man enough to turn over the reins once in a while when the situation warranted, and if Andy was going to keep producing ideas like that one then the situation certainly did seem to warrant. Still a bit like discovering Captain Carrot was into bondage, which he was pretty sure he'd seen on the internet somewhere by now come to think of it, but the time to take issue with that was probably before he'd got your knee hooked over his shoulder, Owen rather thought. Clearly overtaken by the animal need to reaffirm life, the lad was, even when you were technically doing it the wrong way round for that, and
oh
god
yes
right
THERE --
"That was a bit of all right," Owen admitted some while later.
Andy stretched, which was a sight in itself to watch with those long limbs. "Staying?"
"May as well, even if I could walk right now I'm still too fucked-up to drive. You'd probably arrest me for trying to get behind the wheel." A thought occurred to him. "Don't suppose a copper has a pair of handcuffs just lying about in here, does he? For, you know, medicinal purposes?"
"That would be an egregious abuse of Her Majesty's trust."
"Bugger."
"On a first date, anyway."
"We may just make a kinky bastard of you yet, Andy Davidson," Owen said, just a wee bit shocked.
"I gather Torchwood tends to do that to people," Andy said, letting Owen settle in closer under the duvet. "Jack can't just be that lucky."
"He is that lucky," Owen said. "Most of the time. But ask him about Suzie, sometime. He's not infallible. 'S why he likes Gwen, she makes him look stupid."
"I almost understood that, I think," Andy said drowsily. "Should that worry me?"
"Probably, yeah." Owen rested his head against Andy's shoulder and gave in to the creeping languor of a well-shagged doze, punctuated by the usual fits and starts of trying to sleep beside someone for the first time in your acquaintance --
Realising, come morning, that he was curled up against the naked backside of a police constable of the United Kingdom, and actually feeling surprisingly content about that. A little more than content, really. He pressed his lips to the back of Andy's neck as the other man began to stir, of a mind to reinforce the reminder of what it was all about, and maybe repay him for his inventiveness last night if not try to top it. (Who was he kidding, he was trying to top it. Pun possibly intended.)
And that was a small victory against the dark too, to have someone moaning against him in wild abandon (and damn if Andy didn't still outdo him by hitting a higher note when he came, the bastard, although one might count that as win/win), and if Owen was still trying to believe that this hadn't been just as much for his own state of mind he'd have to admit by now how badly he lied...
But as good as he felt to lie here wondering what other potential revelations lay behind his new partner's deceptively innocent face, it was past time for starting to think about getting up. Not a good idea to leave Jack and his dirty mind this long to wonder what half his field team could still be up to that didn't involve him, and anyway even if they wanted to try for another round one of them was going to have to pop out to Boots first. Andy propped himself up on an elbow and looked around for the clock, rubbing his eyes with the heel of one hand. "We're late for work."
"Well, I am. You I'm putting on medical leave until, let's call it Monday morning. I prescribe you to sit about in your pyjamas, watching mindless daytime telly, and try to pretend that life makes some sort of sense when you're not worrying about the next alien that's going to try to eat everyone." Owen picked up his shirt and thought about asking after the shower. Nah, wouldn't do to turn up smelling of his shampoo -- "I'll come round to check on you when Jack lets me off tonight, you think you'd like takeaway Chinese?"
Andy reached down between the mattress and the iron headboard and came out with something shiny and silver. "Second date?"