Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!

Owen Harper was having a day. A bad day. A really bad day. And every time he turned around, Gwen bloody Cooper was making it worse.

First of all, he'd woken up in someone else's bed. He'd been out on the pull the night before and had gotten lucky at the third pub he'd gone to, letting a very busty bottle-blonde take him home with her. (He'd learned the hard way during medical school to always go to theirs, to never again let a one-night-stand find out where he lived.)

Trying to get out of bed without waking last night's shag proved to be difficult as she was a cuddler and he'd had to slowly but gently move her arm from around his neck and her leg from between his. Finally, just when he thought he was in the clear and freedom was mere moments away, Owen had caught his foot in the duvet, losing his balance and crashing his head into the bedside table.

When he'd arrived at work, he had a headache and a lovely bruise blooming on his forehead. The Paracetamol he'd gulped down with much-too-hot coffee had left him with a tender throat but a slowly receding headache.

It was a headache which returned with a vengeance when he'd cut open what he thought was the stomach of a dead alien Jack and Ianto had retrieved during the night; the poor thing hadn't survived the trip through the Rift without a ship to protect it. The organ had exploded the instant the scalpel touched it, hitting him square in the face and drenching him with sticky orange goo. As it turned out the organ was actually the alien's liver and the goo was its bile.

Three showers later his skin still had an obvious orange tint to it; Jack – Mr I am Always Naturally and Eternally Tan – actually had the nerve to ask him if he was using one of those chemical tans from a spray can. "You do know that everyone can tell when you're faking it, Owen, but I do appreciate that you're trying to look like me."

Owen had thrown his shoe – not caring that it was still covered in orange goo – at the infuriating man, who managed to laugh loudly and duck just in time to let the shoe hit the water tower, where it left an ugly orange streak as it slid down into the pool below, contaminating the water.

This had drawn a death-glare from Ianto, who told him in a tone colder than an Arctic wind, "I am not making another drop of coffee until after I have had time to clean that up, Dr Harper, which given the density of my schedule today, won't happen until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest."

The ladies had not spoken to Owen for the rest of the day, even refusing to bring him anything from Starbucks whenever they'd gone out on a coffee run, while Ianto had moved cleaning the autopsy bay of alien detritus to the bottom of his chores list. Gwen in particular had shot him dirty looks every chance she got.

Two hours later, just seconds before Ianto was to call in their lunch order, Toshiko's rift alert program sent them out to a local farm, where they discovered the remains of yet another alien toaster. This one – the fourth in seven days – had crashed into the farmer's outhouse, going through the roof, straight through the hole in the seat and into the pit below. Not wanting to destroy any more of the farmer's bathroom than was absolutely necessary, Ianto had lifted the toilet seat's frame while Jack dangled Owen upside down, lowering him into the cesspool until he could reach the toaster. Just as the medic's fingers made contact with the offending appliance, Jack had sneezed, inadvertently dropping Owen into the mess up to his shoulder. Only his heroic and painful contortions had kept Owen's head above the poo.

Gwen had laughed so hard at Owen shrieking "get me up, get me up!" that she'd fallen on her arse, narrowly missing a large and still steaming cow pat.

Even though the farmer allowed Owen to use the garden hose to clean up as best he could, Ianto had made him ride home in the very back of the SUV, in the compartment used to transport sewer-dwelling Weevils. "I don't know which one smells worse, Owen, you or a sweaty Weevil."

After showering twice and slathering his body from head-to-foot with one of Gwen's overpoweringly scented lotions, Owen had thundered through the Hub and down to the blast furnace, where he'd thrown his clothes into the flames and then slammed the heavy iron door so hard it had bounced back open. That was a feat never before achieved in the history of Torchwood.

It was several hours past lunch and close to dinner time before Ianto was finally able to order in food, pizza for Tosh and Gwen, Indian for himself and Jack, and Chinese for Owen. Normally, Ianto wouldn't have gone to as much trouble as getting in three different foods – his rule was never more than two – but he actually albeit momentarily felt sorry for Owen. No one deserved to be dropped head-first into an outhouse's shit pit, not even a snarky, hot-headed, arrogant, Cockney medic.

Sitting around the large wooden table in the boardroom, the team ate with gusto while listening to yet another of Jack's stupendously tall tales, this one about fluorescent pink-and-green alien monkeys with two – yes, two – prehensile tails and IQs in the high 300s.

Lost in the lurid fantasy of those two tails doing marvellously naughty things to his body, Owen failed to notice that his container of heavily sauced – "tell them lots of extra sauce, tah, mate" – shrimp and veggies had a fault in its bottom seam, one magnified as the sauce seeped into it. As he held the container under his chin and was shovelling the next load of food into his mouth, the bottom of the container let go, sending its contents cascading down his shirt and into his lap, where the very hot sauce immediately soaked into his trousers, then into his pants and finally it coated his private parts.

Things were only made worse when Gwen laughed uproariously as she used her mobile to film Owen dancing around the room, screeching in pain and frantically slapping at his crotch.

Yet another shower later and wearing the last clothing he had left in his locker, Owen reappeared from the lower levels. The depressed scowl on his face was matched by the overly baggy sweatshirt worn over much too small sweat bottoms. She hadn't said anything, but Toshiko was sure the sweatpants were actually hers; she remembered putting them in the laundry, but not getting them back later. As she watched Owen stomping around the Hub, periodically tugging the too-tight bottoms from his butt crack, Tosh couldn't keep a grin from curling her lips.

However it was Gwen's "Did you lose something up in there Owen?" that had Jack collapsing into the nearest chair with a fit of hysterical laughter.

Once Ianto had finally found the time to clean the autopsy bay of its orange goo and dispose of the alien's remains in the morgue, he'd relented and made everyone – including Owen – a round of his delicious coffee, serving it with an assortment of biscuits for the team to choose from. He'd even slipped one special chocolate-covered shortbread wrapped in a napkin onto Owen's workstation.

Grabbing the special biscuit before anyone could notice he had one and they didn't, Owen flung his feet up onto his desk, knocking into the monitor, which spun just enough to catch the handle of his favourite mug, toppling it and sending its contents pouring across his keyboard. As he scrambled away from the mess he'd just made, the caster of Owen's chair caught in the metal grating – something he would later swear had never happened before – and he tipped over backwards, knocking his head on the floor and raising a new and very painful lump.

After he shook his head and opened his eyes, he saw the angry fire burning in Toshiko Sato's eyes as she surveyed the destruction of yet another computer keyboard.

"Owen Harper! That's the third one this year and it's only April!" she hissed. Her voice was low but every syllable was laced with venom.

"Oops?" Owen offered in vain as he clambered to his feet and stood before her like a naughty schoolboy, exaggerating his pout by sticking out his lower lip.

"Oops nothing!" The petite Japanese dragon was not impressed with Owen's attempt at humour. "This is precisely why you aren't allowed to have a laptop like the rest of us. They're too expensive to keep replacing every time you screw up."

A few minutes later, after he'd quietly accepted Toshiko's reprimand, Owen was filling out the requisition form so that Ianto would give him a new keyboard, when he heard the alarm for the cog door scream to life. In the silence that followed a terrible new sound filled the air.

"La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-something," Gwen's voice was horribly off-key as she sang out. "Put 'em together and what have you got? Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!" To make matters worse, she never stopped singing either out loud or under her breath, not in the SUV as they drove to and from an unfounded sighting of a spaceship landing on Cardiff Bay's Barrage and not when they were wrapping up their reports for the day. Not even Owen's heartfelt pleading for her to "stop the bloody caterwauling, please!" had stopped the former PC from singing forth with added glee and increased volume once she'd discovered how much it was annoying the medic. It wasn't until she walked out the door, heading home for the evening, that the song finally and mercifully ended.

Long after Gwen and Tosh were gone, Owen was still down in the autopsy bay and at his wit's end. Nothing he had tried could replace the sickly-sweet Disney song in his brain; thanks to Gwen it was on permanent repeat, threatening to destroy his sanity. Listening to Tosh drone on about a new computer program she'd written for improving the alien database didn't work, nor did listening to the entire seventeen-minute and five-second track of Iron Butterfly's 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' three times. He had even tried watching the raunchiest porn he could find on the computer while wearing headphones with the volume turned way up. It did not do the trick.

Desperate to silence the sound of Gwen bloody Cooper's voice, Owen was staring forlornly at the bottle of Retcon set on the medical bay's counter. He was trying to figure out just how much of one pill he needed to take; he only wanted enough to erase the last ninety minutes or so from his memory. 'Get it wrong and I lose my medical education.'

Settling down at the autopsy table with pencil and paper, he began the calculations necessary to obtain the proper dosage; he'd seen Ianto do it once and had decided that 'if the tea-boy can do it, so can I. After all, I'm the doctor around here; he just makes the coffee.'

Upstairs in Jack's office, Ianto delivered a blue-and-white mug filled with steaming end-of-day coffee and in return, Jack pulled his lovely Welshman into his lap and began kissing the living daylights out of him. It didn't take long before their clothing was flung to the four corners of the room and Ianto was pressed flat on his back on Jack's desk as the immortal did the most delicious things to his anatomy.

Frustrated by his inability to calculate a dosage that wouldn't remove half his life's memories, Owen finally threw up his hands in defeat and decided the only option left to him was to go home and get so staggeringly drunk that he passed out cold on the nearest surface.

He was halfway across the main floor of the Hub, just a few feet from the cog door when the unmistakable sounds of people having sex – and thoroughly enjoying it if the volume of the moaning was anything to go by – filled Owen's ears. In a move he would later truly regret, Owen paused just for a split second and looked up at Jack's office, where he was met with the horrific sight of a naked Jack Harkness plastered face-first against the picture window while Ianto Jones filled him from behind.

Clapping his hands over his ears, Owen squeezed his eyes closed and dashed blindly towards the cog door, praying that this would not be the only time in history that door failed to open automatically. As he stumbled up to the car park and his vehicle, he tried desperately to replace the sounds of Jack and Ianto having sex with the tune to 'Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo'.

It didn't work.

end