Author's note: This was originally posted in a livejournal community back in June of 2006. It contains spoilers through Parting of the Ways for Doctor Who and speculation only for Torchwood.
One man in his time plays many parts, and Jack Harkness has not even limited himself to only his own time. Still, as the years tick by on his relative chronometer, two particular personalities dominate the stage. Captain Jack the decent man does well for himself in the Time Agency, until his memories are removed and he takes a beating, retreating into the background of Harkness's psyche. He is content to quietly nurse his wounds while Captain Jack the coward builds a brilliant career for himself as a con man, until one night in 1941 when a pretty girl and a strange man put the latter to shame and coax the former out of hiding. The decent man thrives in their company; the coward is nowhere to be seen when Jack Harness dies heroically in the distant future. The decent man dies, and the coward comes back to life in time to see the TARDIS disappear. It hurts but he can hardly blame the Doctor – after all, the character he had come to know is dead.
Typically the atmosphere is not a cause for concern on worlds where the TARDIS lands, but this time necessity has brought them to a planet with air that only the Doctor's superior Gallifreyan biology can handle. After admonishing his companions not to touch anything in the console room, he has gone off in search of some part vital to the continuation of their journey, leaving Rose and Jack to amuse themselves for a few hours. Rose take a bath, paints her toenails, and then heads to Jack's room in search of company. Jack has a habit of strolling around his personal space sans habiliment of any sort, and as a result Rose has quickly learned to knock. Still, his door is open this time, so she has to hope he's somewhat decent – as decent as Jack ever is, at least.
"Hey Jack, I'm bored," she announces before poking her head through the entrance, "Do you wanna- What's that?" The man is slouched on his bed, dressed only in jeans, and studying a large piece of paper while wearing a distant expression. He looks up and puts on a big grin, patting the bed beside him.
"Come see." Rose crosses the room and sits where he indicated. She pays no attention to the absence of his shirt, and is too used to him by now to even react to the fact that he's invited her into his bed. He's holding a sketch, a quite good one, showing Jack himself. His elbows are perched on a bar, his fingers wrapped delicately around a martini glass, his lips quirked in a lovely smile.
"The original went up with my ship, but I had a digital copy in here," he indicates his wristcomm, "and the Doctor happened to have a compatible printer."
"I wanna know what else you've got copies of in there?"
"Important documents mostly, and a few personal mementos. Life like mine, you never know when you'll be left with nothing but the clothes on your back. Or no clothes at all, as has been the case on more than one-"
"Yeah yeah, you and all your naked stories. Who did the drawing?"
"A guy I got to know once, Peter. Artist. I was hanging around a bar in New York, waiting for volcano day, and he started sketching me. Gorgeous guy. Did a couple of other drawings after I got naked–"
"I'll bet he did. What were you doing in New York?"
"Con. Similar to the one I tried on you guys, only it was a fake Grezkish digital library in the World Trade Center. Good for a self-cleaner, that, but kinda tricky to set up-"
"The World Trade Center? You mean-" she frowns, disturbed, "September eleventh? All those people died and you were there to make money off it?"
"Sure, just like the Blitz or – Oh." Realization dawns. "2001. I guess that's a little close to home for you." He sighs. Captain Jack the coward wouldn't care, but the decent man hates to disappoint her. "I'm sorry, Rose. For me that's ancient history, same as any other time there was a lot of destruction."
"Yeah, I guess so."
"If it makes you feel any better, I've never been to those bombings in London," he offers. She shakes her head, happy to move past the subject to more cheerful matters.
"Anyway. Tell me about Peter." He does, weaving in amusing anecdotes about taxi drivers and the many ways to take hilarious advantage of certain early twenty-first century attitudes about sexuality. He's got her laughing as usual, slapping his shoulder and calling him a liar, though she also seems impressed that his interest in Peter went beyond the physical. He enjoys her proximity, but even more so the way she's completely at ease with him. Flesh has been common in his life, comfort like this rare. She should probably know better than to trust him, but he can't complain. Captain Jack the decent man likes her to think well of him, and so he can't help throwing in this last part of the story.
"I think I saved his life, actually. He had a commission that he was supposed to drop off in the guy's office that morning, in the first building that went down. I convinced him to let me take it instead." Captain Jack the coward had been appalled at the idea; he wasn't supposed to be anywhere near ground zero that day, but he did it anyway. And then ran, because it didn't do for a con man to go getting attached to people, even if they weren't marks.
"D'you wanna go and see him?" Rose asks. "I've never been to New York and I'm sure the Doctor would-"
"No." He wants to say that parting is such sweet sorrow, but quoting dead poets to get girls is something Captain Jack the coward does.
The decent man died and the coward survived. At least, that's what Jack tells himself when he seduces his way aboard a freighter that comes to the Games Station to drop off supplies; that's what he tells himself when he deceives his way into a lift to a more familiar time period; that's what he tells himself when he cons his way into a time ship of his own. It's an early model, made before his own era, an ugly box built solely for time travel, capable of moving through space only as far as the squeaky wheels on the bottom will take it. Still, it's a time ship, and it gets Captain Jack the coward moving again.
The TARDIS is parked in a street outside a garden on a planet with a name that even Jack can't quite wrap his tongue around, though that doesn't stop him from gently teasing Rose for her even more pitiful efforts. The Doctor mocks them both and starts a speech on the inadequacies of the human vocal apparatus, which is interrupted when Rose starts yawning. He shoos his companions off to bed, promising a tour in the morning, but Jack can't sleep and is soon back in the console room and heading for the door.
"Where do you think you're going?" the Doctor asks.
"For a walk?"
"Not dressed like that." So it is that Jack becomes acquainted with the wardrobe. He emerges first without any clothing at all, claiming that the birthday suit is a universally known costume, but the Doctor won't have it and directs him to a purple and blue striped kilt and a black vest.
"Will you be dressing to match tomorrow?" Jack asks cheekily.
"You wish," the Doctor says.
"I do," Jack agrees in earnest. The Doctor exits without reply.
The walk turns into an ill-advised liaison with one of the locals, whose post-coital excretions are none-too-friendly to human biology. Jack barely makes it out of the bar's back room before collapsing on the floor. An unsympathetic bouncer relocates him to the alley, where the Doctor finds him groaning a few hours later.
"Didn't expect you to come looking for me," Jack mumbles as the Doctor carries him back to the TARDIS. Rose likes him, that's obvious, but the Doctor's always been rather standoffish, and by all appearances dishearteningly immune to Jack's shameless flirting.
"What would I tell Rose in the morning?" the Doctor retorts, but there's a surprising affection in his eyes. "You apes are far too easy to get attached to."
Juliet asked what's in a name, but that's little comfort to an affronted lover when the wrong thing slips out in the heat of passion. Jack Harkness, no matter what part he's playing, has never said the wrong name in bed. Which is why it's so startling when he almost does. The time is the twenty-third century, the place is London, the girl is blonde, and the name he almost says is Rose. (A rose by any other name, but he fails to see the irony.) He favors men until he moves on, because any blonde British girl can seem like Rose after a certain amount of alcohol but there isn't enough booze in the universe to make another man resemble the Doctor.
"Oh, she was beautiful-"
"Everyone's beautiful according to you-"
"I take pleasure in great beauty," Jack says, his tone warm and sensual, his lips curved in a trademark seductive smile. He reaches for Rose's hand and she snatches it away, laughing.
"That's a line! That's such a line! Hold on, that's – that's a line from a sodding James Bond movie!"
"It's a good line," Jack objects smoothly.
"You don't know Spock or cheesy or Britney Spears but you can quote James Bond? How's that work then?"
"The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries aren't the best time for being an anachronism. Just advanced enough to notice things and ask uncomfortable questions, still too primitive to understand –or for that matter believe – the answers. Don't you people still think time travel's impossible and you're alone in the universe?"
"Not all of us," Rose says, grinning.
"Still, too backward for my convenience, and the culture doesn't really make up
for it. I was there once when I was still with the Agency, and," he hesitates briefly, glancing at Rose, "that other time, but that's it." She ignores the look.
"Backward? Great, 'cause it's not enough I've got him insulting my species left right and center, now there's you doing a number on my era."
"I could do a number on something else," Jack offers, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. Rose rolls her eyes.
"You were on a mission for the Time Agency and went 'round taking in cinema?" the Doctor asks, emerging from beneath the console he'd been working on.
"I was establishing local contacts. Very important part of the procedure," Jack protests, laughter in his voice.
"Contacts. Right."
It may be a line, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Jack Harkness is cynical and world-weary, but he sees beauty just about everywhere. It doesn't matter if he's Jack the decent man, Jack the coward, Jack the eager youth, Jack the tarnished traveler, or Jack the short lived but unforgettable professional singing dancing drag queen. He sees beauty and he appreciates it, and that is one of the few constants in all his many roles.
The limitations of his current time ship have kept Jack confined to Earth, and the difficulties involved in transporting the thing mean that he's barely even left the UK. He's pulled a few cons but his heart hasn't really been in any of them, and it isn't long before he's yearning for a new stage. The plan, he decides, is to jet to a period when he can sell this clunker as an antique and get himself a proper vehicle. As it turns out, that's not quite what's in his script.
Captain Jack the coward programs his time ship, holds on for dear life because the damn thing's been increasingly temperamental recently, and curses and sputters mildly when the readout announces that, due to a malfunction, he has arrived in the early twenty-first century. He curses and sputters with considerably more vehemence when the ship adds that its power cells have been depleted and it will not be making any more journeys unless recharged. Naturally, the necessary energy source won't be invented for several centuries.
"Whatever happened to low battery warnings?" he demands, but the ship doesn't answer because it isn't that advanced. His objections to the time he's stuck in are about as he described to Rose, but the liquor now is no better or worse than the liquor anywhen else, so he's soon drowning his sorrows in a London bar. He wonders whether Rose has ever been here, whether Rose has even been born yet or if she should be dead already because the alcohol is clouding his mind and he can't remember what year she's actually from or what year he's in now. He wonders whether the Doctor has ever been here, whether the TARDIS will materialize in the alley behind the place, whether a strange man in a leather jacket will enter in the perfect dramatic moment and buy Jack a drink and open himself up to any number of appropriate innuendoes. Jack wonders, too, if the mere presence of the Doctor and Rose would be enough to resurrect the decent man, and whether they would be willing to take the coward in a second time.
The Doctor doesn't enter, dramatically or otherwise, that night or any of the other nights for the next two weeks that Jack spends in the bar. He's romancing an American exchange student who's Brit lit major, doing a fantastic Falstaff monologue for her, never mind that some of the lines are Hal's and some of the lines aren't even Shakespeare, when two quiet men in dark suits enter the bar. They hover in the background, politely waiting until the girl goes to the bathroom to sidle up on either side of Jack, and he remembers all over again why he doesn't like this era.
They steer him, gently but firmly, outside to their dark van with the tinted windows. He protests ignorance while they talk about his abandoned time ship, but starts paying closer attention when they move on to subjects he doesn't think they ought to know about yet. They mention aliens, and threats, and an institute, and finally a job that might appeal to someone like him.
Someone like him. Jack wonders which character they're after. Not Jack the coward, this is too noble a role for him, but it's also a bit shady for Jack the decent man (anyway, dead men tend not to be great employees, though corpses do require fewer health benefits) and if they were after the drag queen they would have gone to a different bar. They talk and he listens, because he's stuck here and he's got to play some part, at least until he finds himself a good exit.