Title: Lust vs. Love
Characters: Owen with mentions of Katie, his parents and Jack.
Word Count: 1000
Rating: Pg-13
Spoilers: Spoilers for S2 episode Fragments
Disclaimer: Torchwood doesn't belong to me but the BBC, I'm just borrowing.
Author's notes: Written for the tw_lucky_7 challenge involving the second prompt lust and the character Owen.
Lust was easy, it was something that he could understand, lust and attraction, there was nothing more important. Unlike a large percentage of people he placed no faith in the concept of love, that's all it was after all, just a concept, and one that he had never experienced at that. His parent's relationship was not one of love, he could hardly call it a relationship, he couldn't even remember his father being around. And his mother had certainly never shown any love towards him, he was more an unpleasant reminder of the past, something she wanted rid of, but didn't have any option but to keep. No, love was for fools, he'd take good solid lust over love any day.
When he had first started to take notice of others, in a less than platonic way, he set himself some boundaries that had to be abided by at all times. He could enjoy whoever he wished, they could form an attachment to him, but he had to stay detached from them emotionally. As long as the, he loathed even in his head to refer to them as, relationships were purely based on lust then he would have no problems. People fell in and out of lust all the time without any problems or emotions coming between them, which was the exact type of thing he was after, there was no need for him to set himself up to be emotionally crippled, as he would be if he dealt with love.
He lived that way his whole time through medical school, making sure that everyone who got involved with him that anything between them was the result of lust and nothing more. He wasn't going to allow himself to be corrupted or his boundaries to be broken down, he'd seen the results of love and the effects it had on people. There was no way that he would allow an emotion that he was unfamiliar with to control him, instead he kept his meetings with people as casual as possible. It wasn't exactly hard to do either, even if he had known how to love, there was no-one in particular at that point that he would have been able to fall for.
There were a few people that he liked as people, he could do like, it wasn't so unfamiliar to him as love was, and he kept those people separate from those he lusted after in his mind. That isn't to say he didn't lust after some of the people that he liked, but instead of all his communication with them being centred around lust, these people he became friends with. They became his closest confidantes in a way, ranked way above lust on his scale, even though he did have a friends with benefits type of relationship with some of them. With them sex was not the driving force of his actions, but rather conversation, understanding and a good laugh.
When he did his internship in a hospital, and later when he was working full-time as a Doctor he knew that he had been right in the way he had led his life. Love destroyed. He saw it often enough, people finding out that they are dying and what those who love them go through, losing someone beloved to them. Each time he saw another crying relative in a waiting room it reinforced his boundaries, there was no way that he would be them, sitting there in tears, even though they said that they were better for it. He hadn't had any such attachments in his life, not even growing up, so the idea of adding attachments that would hurt him in the end seemed insane. His boundaries were up, and he intended to keep them up to protect himself, even if it meant he never felt the good side of what people called love.
His defences were pulled down however when he met Katie, it was lust at first sight for him, she did not feel the same though and was determined not to be another notch on his bedpost. He couldn't help himself though, that didn't stop him from pursuing her and the more she turned him down and he tried again, the more he realised that he felt more than lust for this woman. He eventually wore her down, or it might have been the other way around, he had after all agreed to attempt a proper relationship, something that once would have sent him running.
He came to see what those people sitting in hospital waiting rooms had meant, that loving someone was worth it, even if that love did cause you pain. It was amazing to him, he felt himself being swept along with no control, something that he normally detested, but that he didn't really care about anymore. Then Katie got sick and suddenly when they finally got some hope that everything would be okay after her operation she died. The pain that he felt when she died was indescribable, never having felt anything as strong emotionally in his life. He realised, even when starting to put his life back together and starting at Torchwood, that he couldn't allow himself to be hurt in such a way again.
Lust would once again take the fore in his life, especially as that life was going to be full of danger from what he had been told, lust and life-affirming sex. He could maybe even stretch a little and allow for like to get a look in again, a few friends may help him, with or without benefits didn't really matter. But never again would he allow himself to be controlled again by love. As he started the new chapter of his life, recurring themes from older chapters reappeared as Owen Harper once more raised the boundaries he needed to keep him safe. After all lust was prevalent everywhere and in his life it was one of the most important things he could express.