Ataraxion Application
PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Teresa
OOC Journal: twilight_rain
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Definitely over 18
Email IM: email: lycanthropy101@gmail.com ; IM: lycanthropy lit
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Captain Jack Harkness
Canon: Torchwood
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Post-Children of Earth, pre-House of the Dead
Number: 003 (The number of the vault that Jack's held frozen in for 107 years)
Setting: Whoniverse wiki entry
History: Because Jack is an immortal time-traveler, his history is pretty vast and complicated. He's also a pretty secretive guy when it comes down to it, so not a lot is known about his past, especially the earliest years of his life. What we do know is this:
Jack's original name is unknown, Captain Jack Harkness being the name of a man whose identity he stole to work cons, but it is a name he has used for so long that it's stuck and is now a part of who he is more than his original name ever will be. He was born in the 51st century on the Boeshane Peninsula. The climate at the time wasn't good, and the place was frequently invaded. Jack manages to escape relatively unscathed until one day a particularly brutal attack is launched. Jack is told to take his brother, Grey, and run for shelter. Somewhere in the middle of the mayhem, he accidentally lets go of his brother's hand, and Grey is taken by the invading aliens. Jack returns to the compound that he lives in to find that the aliens have also killed his father. Jack later describes this as the worst day of his life. From there, he vows to himself find Grey and bring him back, but though he spends many years searching, he never succeeds himself.
Growing up, he convinces his best friend to join up with him to fight in a war, claiming that it will be an adventure for the pair of them. They fight against what we only know to be in Jack's words "the worst possible creatures that you can imagine", and eventually are caught crossing enemy lines. They torture Jack's friend and make Jack watch him die, and then they let him go, and it is a memory that though only mentioned once, also haunts Jack many years after it happened.
From there, Jack goes on to join the Time Agency, an organization dating between the 49th and 52nd centuries. It supplies him with a Time Agent wrist strap that enables him to travel through time for missions, although as to what those missions entail it is unknown. It is said that "the Agents' purpose is to change without interfering, to leave an effect with no evidence of cause. To be untraceable, undetectable, invisible. To all intents and purposes, the Agents do not exist." According to him, he is the first one ever from the Boeshane Peninsula to be signed up to the Time Agency, and consequentially the little peninsula's poster boy. They call him the Face of Boe (although whether that eventually makes him THE Face of Boe in the scheme of things is also unknown). Jack is eventually partnered up with John Hart, at some point spending five years together trapped in a two-week time loop. Eventually, and through circumstances that are also unknown, Jack finds out that the Agency has erased two years of his memory against his will, so he leaves, taking his wrist strap to then become a time-traveling con artist to get back at the Agency.
It's during this time that Jack runs into the Doctor. Jack's preferred method of conning someone would be to find a piece of space junk, direct it to a soon-to-be disaster site, sell it to a passer-by claiming that it's worth more than it is and then after receiving payment, the item would be destroyed before the buyer can pick it up. Somehow ending with a Chula ship of his own, he's set up a con around a Chula ambulance during the London Blitz. Meeting Rose Tyler, the Doctor's then companion, he thinks that she is a Time Agent herself an then tries to con the Doctor and Rose with the Chula craft. However, as a result of his crashing the ambulance to earth, he has released the healing nanogenes into the air, and their first experience of human DNA is that of a little boy with a gas mask on who was unfortunately caught up in the crash, so the nanogenes start converting all humans they run into to be like that. They stop the nanogenes by introducing it to what proper human DNA should look like and then fix all the people effected, but there is still the matter of the bomb that is set to go off right where they are. So Jack takes it into his hands to save them, taking the bomb into his ship to save everyone, but the TARDIS materializes into his ship and he's rescued by the Doctor before the bomb goes off.
From there, Jack joins the Doctor as a second companion, and the three of them travel through space and time on numerous adventures. Eventually they end up on Satellite 5 in the year 200100 and find themselves in the middle of a carefully planned Dalek assault against the Earth. Jack heroically sacrifices himself for the cause, killed by a Dalek in battle on the satellite. Later during that battle, Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS and gains the powers of the Time Vortex for a short while, during which she dispatches of the Daleks but also brings Jack back with the words "I bring life". Jack revives, confused and dazed as to what exactly just happened only to watch the TARDIS dematerialize away, leaving him stranded there. It is because of this event, however, that Jack cannot stay dead. He becomes a fixed point in space and time, and every time he is killed or injured, he recovers from it back to what is basically factory default for him.
From there, he uses his vortex manipulator in his wrist strap to try to hop back to Cardiff and meet up with the Doctor there, since at Cardiff's center there is a rift in space and time that the Doctor uses to refuel the TARDIS. His vortex manipulator burns out in the jump, however, and leaves him in Cardiff like he wanted, but stuck in the year 1869. He waits around Cardiff some time before he ends up doing some traveling, eventually ending up shot during a fight on Ellis Island in 1892, his second death and also the moment when he learns of his immortality. From there, he returns to Cardiff to hang around the Rift and wait for the Doctor, and eventually catches the attention of the Torchwood Agency branch stationed there in Cardiff because of it. The Torchwood Institute is an organization established by Queen Victoria and funded by the crown to defend against alien threats, and with the Doctor as their number one enemy, Jack's constant mention of looking for the Doctor set off their radar. In 1899 Jack is captured and tortured to discover his connection with the doctor, as well as to discover why and how it is that he can't stay dead. He is eventually released on the condition that he work for Torchwood, which he initially refuses. Jack ends up in a bar where he meets a young girl who reads his cards and tells him that the Doctor will eventually return in 100 years there to Cardiff. Faced with 100 years of waiting, Jack decides to reconsider Torchwood's offer and signs up to work for them in the meanwhile.
Through his work with Torchwood from then on, Jack is send on a number of missions of all sorts, was in China during the Boxer rebellion, joined up with the Night Travelers, and fought in World War I, to name a few things. In 1927 he's sent to New York to stop the Trickster's Brigade from infecting President Roosevelt's brain with a parasite that is intended to stir up the course of history from then on. While traveling there, he meets a young immigrant named Angelo, and presumably falls in love with him. He decides that like the Doctor, he can have a companion as well, to share the adventure of his life with, and so he takes Angelo with him to dispose of the alien parasites. The authorities are alerted to their presence, however, and Jack is shot and killed while Angelo captured and sent to jail for a year. When he is released, Jack goes to meet him and try to reconcile their relationship, claiming that he was only pretending to be dead, but Angelo saw what happened and he knows that Jack had died. Being a religious man, already ashamed of their homosexual relationship, convinces himself that Jack is the Devil, and ends up stabbing Jack in an attempt to get rid of him. When Jack comes back to life from that, Angelo brings the butcher whose shop they are renting a room over up to witness it, and he too kills Jack and discovers the man's unexplainable talent. From there, Jack is eventually chained up in the basement and repeatedly killed by members of the neighborhood, who first thought he was the devil but then decided that his immortality was a miracle or a blessing, and collected his blood as souvenir themselves. Angelo helps Jack to escape from there, on the hopes of escaping with him elsewhere, but from that experience Jack has come to the conclusion that opening himself up to someone only ends up in heartbreak, so he disappears from Angelo's life.
From there, Jack goes on to meet Estelle, having a brief relationship with her but then Jack disappears off to World War II and they lose touch. In 1965, Jack is sent with a few military officers to follow through with a deal with an alien race known only as the 456, communicating solely through radio waves. He delivers them twelve children as a gift in exchange for a cure for a new strain of Indonesian flu the aliens claim would otherwise wipe out 25 million people. He is assigned this task because they know he cannot die but also because they know he will follow through with the orders, and does. Jack becomes involved with another Torchwood agent, Lucia Moretti and together the pair of them have a daughter, Melissa. The pair of them later split up because it's too much for Lucia to watch herself age while Jack stays the same. Melissa is sent into the Witness Protection Program and renamed Alice, but Jack eventually finds her again and stays in touch with her, even if he is nowhere near the father figure to her that he really should be. On New Year's Day in the year 2000, Alex Hopkins, the then head of Torchwood 3 (Torchwood Cardiff), comes into possession of a device that supposedly allowed him to see the future. What the device makes him see sends Alex into a nervous breakdown that ends with him killing the entire staff of Torchwood 3, and then himself, leaving Jack as the sole surviving member, left in charge to pick up the pieces.
Over the next few years, Jack constructs his own Torchwood team, recruiting Toshiko Sato from prison in 2004, Dr. Owen Harper in 2006 after the pair of them have a rocky meeting involving an alien parasite in Owen's fiance's brain that ends up killing her. At some point he hires his second-in-command, Suzie Costello, although when and under what circumstances is also unclear. After Torchwood 1 is destroyed during the battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks, an event that is later called the Battle of Canary Wharf, Torchwood 3 becomes the last remaining Torchwood branch, branching off from the ideals of the original Torchwood to become something he believes that the Doctor would be proud of. Shortly after the battle, he also hires former Torchwood 1 employee, Ianto Jones, although not without some heavy persuasion and flirting from the other man's part. At some point during the next few years Jack ends up with the Doctor's severed hand off of the Sycorax ship, keeping it in a portable container in the Torchwood Hub and setting up an alarm connected with it to detect when the Doctor shows up in the area again. During the investigation into the use of the Resurrection Gauntlet, Torchwood gains the attention of PC Gwen Cooper, a factor which proves valuable when she ends up uncovering the fact that Torchwood's Suzie Costello is murdering people in order to have opportunity to test the artifact. Suzie shoots herself and creates a vacancy in the Torchwood team, which Gwen is immediately fit into and thus the entirety of the most current Torchwood team was completed. Over the next span of time, Torchwood acts as a unit together solving investigations of whatever comes through the Rift, and somewhere during the timeline Jack ends up in a physical relationship with Ianto Jones.
During one mission, Jack accidentally ends up transported back to 1941 by the Rift and is able to meet his namesake, the original Jack Harkness. In order to retrieve him and Toshiko back from the past, however, Owen opens the Rift, an action that every Torchwood employee knows expressly that it should not be done. Opening the Rift that way creates cracks through time all over the planet, and strange events and people start appearing everywhere, with the whole of it centering back on the Rift. Eventually, the Torchwood team betrays Jack and opens the Rift a second time in order to put things right, but they also release the creature Abaddon from where it was imprisoned in the Rift as well. Jack manages to defeat it but ends up dead for the next 3 days, presumably because Abaddon drained so much of his life energy that it took a while for him to recover. Very shortly after his recovery, Jack is alerted to the Doctor's presence in Cardiff, and so without even so much as a word to his team he's off to hitch a ride on the TARDIS and meet up with the Doctor and finally get the answers that he's been waiting 140 years to hear. The TARDIS, however, is uncomfortable with the fact that Jack is a fixed point in space and time, as that should not exist, and ends up transporting them to the end of the universe, the year 100,000,000,000,000, with Jack hanging onto the outside of the ship. The Doctor admits to running away from Jack on purpose because he's uncomfortable with what Jack has become and that there's nothing that can be done to fix him. That he's stuck the way he is.
Though Jack has found out what he wanted to talk to the Doctor about, they end up uncovering that Professor Yana, who is there with them on the planet at the end of the universe, is actually the Master in disguise. He regenerates and steals the TARDIS, leaving Jack, the Doctor, and then companion Martha stranded at the end of it all. The Doctor uses Jack's vortex manipulator to get them back to the right year and the three of them continue to the Valiant, a ship in the sky where the newly regenerated Master is holding a press conference as also newly-elected Prime Minister. Jack and the Doctor are then captured, Jack being held and tortured for the next year while Martha, who manages to escape and find help. Martha eventually ends up returning and saving Jack, the Doctor, and her imprisoned family, the Master ending up shot by his emotionally abused wife, Lucy Saxon. Refusing to regenerate, he dies, and after Jack destroys the Master's paradox machine, time reverts back to a year previous when it was created. Only those that were on board the Valiant during the paradox are aware as to what happened in what becomes known as the Year that Never Was. Jack is then offered a chance to travel with the Doctor for a while, but he turns it down, telling him that his home and his loyalty is to his Torchwood team back in Cardiff, and so he returns to them.
The Torchwood team, of course, is a bit upset at the fact that Jack disappeared for several months without so much as a word, but they quickly get back into the swing of things. Jack's former partner John Hart shows up and cons the team into helping him search for what he believes is going to be a way to find a priceless diamond, but is actually a bomb set to latch onto the DNA of whatever person killed the woman that John unfortunately had ended up killing. John chains himself to Gwen but they find a way to get the bomb off of him, throwing it into an opening in the Rift right as it detonates and saving themselves and the city. John then leaves but before he does he reveals that he's found Gray, Jack's long-lost brother. No further explanation is given at the time, and so Jack is just left in the dark about that for that moment. During this event, Jack asks Ianto out on a date, and it can be assumed that their relationship continues to grow closer during the next while. While investigating The Pharm, a medical organization that claims that it can cure diseases that were supposedly incurable, Torchwood member Owen Harper is shot and killed. Unable to accept the loss, Jack tracks down another Resurrection Gauntlet (gloves tend to come in pairs after all), and brings Owen back from the dead. But only sort of. Owen is basically stuck as a reanimated corpse, alive in the sense that he can talk and move and think, but he can't breathe or eat or drink or sleep or have sex (no blood flow), so for a while Owen rages against Jack for doing this to him, but eventually comes to terms with it.
While investigating what they thought was just a Rift flare, the Torchwood team is caught in a series of explosions, slowing them down and getting them out of the way enough for John Hart to set up bombs all over the city and set things up for the next stage of events. Jack goes to meet John on his own in hopes of handling it all on his own, but John abducts him and transports him back to Cardiff in the year 27 AD. Here it is revealed that John is being manipulated by Gray, who, embittered by being held captive and tortured for many years of his life, blames Jack for all of it. John has no choice but to bury Jack alive under Gray's orders, though he sticks his ring in the grave with him as a tracking device so that they can find Jack later once he gets back to present day Cardiff. Once he does, they cannot track the signal, but that is because in the year 1901, while the Jack of the time is elsewhere on a mission, Torchwood 3 tracks down the signal of the ring to where Jack is buried, digging him up and interrogating him as to what exactly is going on. He has them put him in the cryogenics vaults to revive at the current date so as to come back and help his team fix things. He does and they do, but Owen is shut inside a nuclear power plant during a meltdown, and Toshiko has been shot in the stomach, so in the process they lose two Torchwood members, narrowing their numbers down to three, which creates a strain on the team, as just because there are fewer of them does not mean that the Rift or the rest of it is going to let up on them. A little bit later that year, the Earth is relocated by the Daleks to the Medusa Cascade, and Jack teleports with the use of his vortex manipulator to help the Doctor put it right, running into old friends and new alike, inviting Martha and Mickey to join the Torchwood team after it's all over, although their response is never outright stated.
Only a little while after that, the 456 that Jack dealt with in the past return and start speaking through the children this time. Ever child on the face of the Earth stops and starts speaking in unison to tell the planet that "We are coming". The government has been in communication with the 456 as well and creates a specially designed tank for the 456 to beam down in. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister connects this event with Jack Harkness and all the others that participated in the past, and as an effort to try and erase all evidence, attempt to destroy Torchwood and Jack by planting a bomb in his stomach. Through a chance event, Torchwood finds out about it in time and is able to get Ianto and recently-discovered-pregnant Gwen to safety. Jack's body parts are then collected and assembled in a holding facility, where the next day he finally grows back together and comes alive again. Because they cannot kill him but they need him out of the way, they encase him in a block of cement. Luckily, remaining Torchwood members Ianto and Gwen manage to get him out and the three of them set up base in an abandoned warehouse and plant their own eyes into the events with the help of Lois Habiba and their special camera contact lenses. Through this, they learn that the 456 want 10% of the children of the Earth and are willing to start war against the human race if they do not get them.
Jack and Ianto go in to try and negotiate with the 456 but the alien proves to be unwilling to move on its stance and as such sets the building it's being held in into lockdown, releasing a fast-killing virus into the air and massacring everyone that's inside, including Ianto and Jack (although Jack survives because he is immortal). Jack pleads with the 456 during this time that he'll do anything if they spare Ianto from this, revealing how deeply his feelings run for the other man, but it is no use. His spirit broken, Jack is then captured and held prisoner. It is only when Gwen convinces those in charge that Jack's their only hope do they let him go to figure out a way to stop all of it. And he does, but it's at the cost of his own grandson - they need a child and fast because the 456 are going to take their 10% otherwise, and so he has no choice but to use his grandson Stephen as the center of the backwave of frequency that ends up killing the 456. His daughter hates him for it, with his grandson dead as well as his lover, Jack blames himself for all of it and cycles into a deep depression, during which he has to leave Torchwood and Cardiff and travel far away to try and escape from the ghosts that are really only inside of his head. He would give anything to see Ianto once more, no matter how selfish it is or what the costs, and he knows it. Though there is more history after this point in the timeline, because this is the point where I want to pick Jack up from, I hope that I can be allowed to stop here.
Personality: Jack is quite possibly one of the most complicated characters to understand. He didn't start out his life as a good guy, and sometimes his past comes back and bites him and he hates himself a little for those mistakes. He's got eternity to look forward to, and he'll never really understand what he is or why is is the way he is, and so he's afraid. Plus, he's been thrust into a place of command that he isn't really sure that he deserves, as the leader of Torchwood, but he was literally the only member left alive to take over, so he carried on, the way he does. Because if for nothing else, Jack is resilient.
He's got a guilt complex about a mile wide that started at a very young age when, during a raid on their home planet, he accidentally let go of his brother's hand and consequentially, he blames himself for the fact that his brother was taken away by the aliens. He tried to go back to the way life used to be, but his father was killed in the very same raid, and it's obvious that his mother isn't the same without his father or little brother, and he comes to believe that she blames him for losing Gray as well. Later on, working with Torchwood, he's made a lot of mistakes, and some of them have ended in the deaths of some of the people that he's cared for the most, and so he blames himself for that as well, regardless as to whether they are actually his fault or not.
He's also got abandonment issues. This started with of course losing Gray when he was young, and losing his father on the very same day as well. He then grew up a little and joined in fighting a war, but his best friend was caught and tortured in front of him and he presumably died as well. Then he grew up some more and joined the Time Agency, where things were apparently working well enough until he woke up one day and had lost two years of his memory, without any explanation as to why they were gone or what they were removing, so he left. And then he met the Doctor, who saved him, gave him something to believe in again, and he died fighting for that man, and he thought that that was a good way to go. But then Rose brought him back and he found them again just in time to watch the TARDIS dematerialize without him, leaving him alone in the year 200,100 with apparently only one good jump left in his Vortex Manipulator, which, damaged from the battle, sends him to the nineteenth century instead. From there, he tries to restart his life in that era until he finds out one day, after being stabbed in the chest, that he can't actually die for good. So he goes back to Cardiff to look for the Doctor for real, hanging around the Rift in hopes of finding him, and gets picked up by Torchwood. Torchwood that uses and abuses him for the next century, until New Years Eve, 1999, when the leader of Torchwood 3 looks into the future, doesn't like what he sees, and ends up killing the entire team, including himself, and leaving Jack alone in charge of TW3. And then there are the deaths of Tosh and Owen and eventually Ianto, and the knowledge later on that the Doctor left him behind all those years ago on purpose because he was 'wrong' and the Doctor couldn't handle it, and. Taking into account the fact that he is the only person capable of living forever, and the knowledge that everyone he ever has loved or will love will either leave him because they can't handle what he is or because they will end up dying in some way or another has made him a very guarded person.
That isn't to say that Jack doesn't know how to have fun. He's from the 51st century, where sexuality is a lot freer than it is nowadays, and as such, so is Jack's. He doesn't discriminate who he'll flirt with--man, woman, alien, any combination thereof, he doesn't care. So long as he finds you attractive, you're it. Through the whole of Doctor Who and Torchwood, though, Jack is seen flirting with and kissing all sorts of people, but there is only one person that he's ever been caught sleeping with more than once, and that's Ianto. Ianto is something special to him, a special that he doesn't want to define both because he thinks that labels cheapen what there is and also because he's afraid that if he admits Ianto's something extra special to him, and dare I say it, that he might actually love him. That whatever powers that be that are controlling the universe will come down and take him away that much faster, because for once he's happy in a relationship with a partner that understands him, as much as a partner can understand someone like Jack, which is to say not a lot.
Despite all that having been said, Jack is a good captain, and a good man, no matter how much he may doubt himself on each front. He puts the needs of others above the needs of himself, regrets poor decisions of the past but carries on, doing what is necessary in order to save the day, regardless as to what people might think of him afterwards. Anything that they might judge him on, he can guarantee that he's probably already thought many times over about himself anyway. Jack has a problem with running away when things get tough, however. Rather than admitting things to himself or dealing with his situation or his emotions, he'd much rather run off and pretend that none of the problems ever existed. He's claustrophobic from having been buried alive for around 1000 years, and sometimes just going to stand on roofs under the open sky makes him feel better about his life, helps clear his mind and collect himself whenever he's stressed or hurting or melancholy. Despite this running away, though, he is a responsible person, and he always comes back. His own issues with abandonment and guilt lead him to try to never inflict the same things on others.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Being from the 51st century, Jack is very familiar with high-tech technology, and as demonstrated in the series, possesses higher-than-average engineering abilities, high-jacking technology from other alien cultures. He's smart enough with technology to be able to understand the complex nature of the TARDIS and the paradox machine when the Master stole the TARDIS and rigged it up to be one. He's also got a lot of military experience, through the Time Agency, various armies and air forces from over the years, and Torchwood. He has weapon and firearm knowledge and is pretty good at unarmed brawling. He also claims that he knows torture techniques, though it's unsure exactly when in his life this is from. As for supernatural abilities, Jack cannot stay dead. He dies, but because the TARDIS has made him into a fixed point in space and time, every time he does he just revives and reverts back to the state that he was before, no matter what happens. He's been blown up from the inside out, buried alive for centuries, encased in cement, dropped off of buildings, you anme it. If it's possible for him to keep this ability the same as it always has been, I'd be interested in keeping it the same. It's a large part of who he is, and he's used to not caring what happens to him, throwing himself in front of bullets for friends because he knows he'll survive but they won't.
As for his weaknesses, Jack doesn't really have any physical ones. He's no stranger to pain, having suffered a lot over the years, so even that won't get to him. Not physical pain, at least. He's not good with loss, however, like previously stated, and as such it takes a bit for him to be able to trust anyone implicitly. Which is a weakness in a sense. He doesn't want to let anyone get too close in case he might have to suffer the loss of them, doesn't want anyone to get too close in case they use what they learn about him against him. Even Ianto, the person who's probably the closest to him out of anyone on the Torchwood team, who knows the most about him, is still in the dark when it comes to most aspects of Jack's life.
Inventory: If it's possible for him to have his wriststrap with some of its abilities intact, I'd be interested in letting him have his wriststrap. As it is without any limitations, it's already been limited from any time or space travel, and is only good for scanning, communication, and that sort of thing. He can also program it in such a way that it seems like some sort of universal remote control for anything that is tech-oriented, like the cog door or the invisible lift in the Hub. I'm fine with any sort of limitations that may need to be placed on the wriststrap as an item, I just think that having the physical object with him would be comforting for him. Also his watch. He likes to be able to tell the time. And his Webley revolver. He rarely goes anywhere without it.
Appearance: Jack Harkness is an all-around impressive man, standing at 6'1", bright blue eyes, big, white, shiny matinee idol smile, handsome face, sturdy, muscular build. He's broad-shouldered and built like the military man that he is. He is well-known for being a very handsome, very irresistible man, especially when he's smiling. Not only do his looks attract people, but so do his 51st century pheromones, which smell like everyone's favorite aftershave or cologne.
Age: Around 200 years old, unless you count the time he was buried alive, and then he's actually 2200.
AU Clarification:
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
Jack had always been in the habit of finding the highest building to stand on and stare out at the rest of the world. In the beginning, it'd been more of a brooding sort of thing. He'd been unhappy with his situation, unhappy with his life. He felt like everything that he was centered on waiting for the Doctor to come back, and even then he was hanging on the word of a little girl with a pile of tarot cards. He needed an escape, a moment to stand there and look out over the city and remind himself that there was a purpose to all of this. That he would see the Doctor again. That the Doctor would make things right again, and that was what he thought of when he stood there on that ledge and looked out over the city. At least at first.
Because then he'd finally met with his Doctor. He'd found out that there was no fix, and then there was the Year that Never Was, and he'd had a lot of time to reflect on his life. And so when he finally found his way back to his team and his life back there in Cardiff, when he found himself up on that ledge it wasn't a longing for something he didn't have that drove him there. He needed reflection, a time to step back, like he'd done on the Valiant for that year, to focus his life and the choices he made. To question his decisions. No longer was he looking for a hero to swoop in and fix his life. He was growing up. It only took him 200 years, but he was getting there. Making his own choices, taking responsibility for his team, letting himself live a little. And then Gray had shown up. Ordered him buried in the ground. And that Cariff soil, the ground that he'd lived and breathed and cried and bled on for the last century of his life, became his tomb.
After that, when Jack found himself up on the edge of a building, it wasn't for the reasons he'd had before. It wasn't because he needed someone to save him, or he needed the moment to reflect. He'd had a very long time to reflect by himself, as it was. In the spaces between, when he could remember, which were blissfully short and spread out over the course of the time he'd spent there. After being buried alive, when Jack found himself up on the edge of a building it was to feel the sky above him. The ground far below. To feel the open space and smell the (relatively) fresh Cardiff air.
"Knew I'd find you here," came Ianto's voice behind him, and Jack chuckled, turning from where he stood on the edge of the building to glance across at Ianto peering out at him from the door across the way.
"You're lucky that I'm not so easily startled," he said, stepping off of the ledge and making his way to where Ianto was stationed (safely as far from it as he could get). "You would have been scraping me up off of the pavement down there, you know."
Ianto shrugged, and the pair of them knew that he'd come up to retrieve Jack enough times for that not to have been an issue. "You're to make a call to the Prime Minister sometime today," he replied. "I can't cover for you on this one, Jack, and if you think you're going to get out of it again you've got another thing coming."
Jack made a bit of a face. "Mmm, bossy. I like it," he said, with another chuckle and a wide grin, before it softened. Responsibility. It could be such a pain in the ass. "I'll be down in twenty minutes," he said. "And if I'm not down by then, you're allowed to call in the authorities on me, how's that?"
Ianto nodded, and made to leave, but Jack stopped him with a hand on the door. "...I'd like a coffee, if you can manage one. When I'm down."
Another nod, and a tentative smile this time. "Yes, sir." And he headed downstairs to set the machine to warm. And Jack turned his face back to the sky enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his face for just a little bit longer.
Comms Sample:
You know. I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss the little things. Like...weather. I'm no stranger to space travel, but you never realize how much charm there is in a rain shower until you're stuck on a ship again. That goes especially for all of those of you out there who're from the UK, by the way. You're gonna start missing the weather, I guarantee it, and then you'll regret all those times you moaned about it.
Enough of that, though. I'm looking for someone. Attractive Welshman, answers to the name of Ianto Jones. He's got a sweet upturned nose and a pair of gorgeous blue eyes and he's probably blushing while reading his device right about now. If you see him, let him know that Jack's looking for him in his quarters. I've got a surprise waiting that I can almost guarantee that he's going to enjoy.
Your Name: Teresa
OOC Journal: twilight_rain
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Definitely over 18
Email IM: email: lycanthropy101@gmail.com ; IM: lycanthropy lit
Characters Played at Ataraxion: N/A
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Captain Jack Harkness
Canon: Torchwood
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Post-Children of Earth, pre-House of the Dead
Number: 003 (The number of the vault that Jack's held frozen in for 107 years)
Setting: Whoniverse wiki entry
History: Because Jack is an immortal time-traveler, his history is pretty vast and complicated. He's also a pretty secretive guy when it comes down to it, so not a lot is known about his past, especially the earliest years of his life. What we do know is this:
Jack's original name is unknown, Captain Jack Harkness being the name of a man whose identity he stole to work cons, but it is a name he has used for so long that it's stuck and is now a part of who he is more than his original name ever will be. He was born in the 51st century on the Boeshane Peninsula. The climate at the time wasn't good, and the place was frequently invaded. Jack manages to escape relatively unscathed until one day a particularly brutal attack is launched. Jack is told to take his brother, Grey, and run for shelter. Somewhere in the middle of the mayhem, he accidentally lets go of his brother's hand, and Grey is taken by the invading aliens. Jack returns to the compound that he lives in to find that the aliens have also killed his father. Jack later describes this as the worst day of his life. From there, he vows to himself find Grey and bring him back, but though he spends many years searching, he never succeeds himself.
Growing up, he convinces his best friend to join up with him to fight in a war, claiming that it will be an adventure for the pair of them. They fight against what we only know to be in Jack's words "the worst possible creatures that you can imagine", and eventually are caught crossing enemy lines. They torture Jack's friend and make Jack watch him die, and then they let him go, and it is a memory that though only mentioned once, also haunts Jack many years after it happened.
From there, Jack goes on to join the Time Agency, an organization dating between the 49th and 52nd centuries. It supplies him with a Time Agent wrist strap that enables him to travel through time for missions, although as to what those missions entail it is unknown. It is said that "the Agents' purpose is to change without interfering, to leave an effect with no evidence of cause. To be untraceable, undetectable, invisible. To all intents and purposes, the Agents do not exist." According to him, he is the first one ever from the Boeshane Peninsula to be signed up to the Time Agency, and consequentially the little peninsula's poster boy. They call him the Face of Boe (although whether that eventually makes him THE Face of Boe in the scheme of things is also unknown). Jack is eventually partnered up with John Hart, at some point spending five years together trapped in a two-week time loop. Eventually, and through circumstances that are also unknown, Jack finds out that the Agency has erased two years of his memory against his will, so he leaves, taking his wrist strap to then become a time-traveling con artist to get back at the Agency.
It's during this time that Jack runs into the Doctor. Jack's preferred method of conning someone would be to find a piece of space junk, direct it to a soon-to-be disaster site, sell it to a passer-by claiming that it's worth more than it is and then after receiving payment, the item would be destroyed before the buyer can pick it up. Somehow ending with a Chula ship of his own, he's set up a con around a Chula ambulance during the London Blitz. Meeting Rose Tyler, the Doctor's then companion, he thinks that she is a Time Agent herself an then tries to con the Doctor and Rose with the Chula craft. However, as a result of his crashing the ambulance to earth, he has released the healing nanogenes into the air, and their first experience of human DNA is that of a little boy with a gas mask on who was unfortunately caught up in the crash, so the nanogenes start converting all humans they run into to be like that. They stop the nanogenes by introducing it to what proper human DNA should look like and then fix all the people effected, but there is still the matter of the bomb that is set to go off right where they are. So Jack takes it into his hands to save them, taking the bomb into his ship to save everyone, but the TARDIS materializes into his ship and he's rescued by the Doctor before the bomb goes off.
From there, Jack joins the Doctor as a second companion, and the three of them travel through space and time on numerous adventures. Eventually they end up on Satellite 5 in the year 200100 and find themselves in the middle of a carefully planned Dalek assault against the Earth. Jack heroically sacrifices himself for the cause, killed by a Dalek in battle on the satellite. Later during that battle, Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS and gains the powers of the Time Vortex for a short while, during which she dispatches of the Daleks but also brings Jack back with the words "I bring life". Jack revives, confused and dazed as to what exactly just happened only to watch the TARDIS dematerialize away, leaving him stranded there. It is because of this event, however, that Jack cannot stay dead. He becomes a fixed point in space and time, and every time he is killed or injured, he recovers from it back to what is basically factory default for him.
From there, he uses his vortex manipulator in his wrist strap to try to hop back to Cardiff and meet up with the Doctor there, since at Cardiff's center there is a rift in space and time that the Doctor uses to refuel the TARDIS. His vortex manipulator burns out in the jump, however, and leaves him in Cardiff like he wanted, but stuck in the year 1869. He waits around Cardiff some time before he ends up doing some traveling, eventually ending up shot during a fight on Ellis Island in 1892, his second death and also the moment when he learns of his immortality. From there, he returns to Cardiff to hang around the Rift and wait for the Doctor, and eventually catches the attention of the Torchwood Agency branch stationed there in Cardiff because of it. The Torchwood Institute is an organization established by Queen Victoria and funded by the crown to defend against alien threats, and with the Doctor as their number one enemy, Jack's constant mention of looking for the Doctor set off their radar. In 1899 Jack is captured and tortured to discover his connection with the doctor, as well as to discover why and how it is that he can't stay dead. He is eventually released on the condition that he work for Torchwood, which he initially refuses. Jack ends up in a bar where he meets a young girl who reads his cards and tells him that the Doctor will eventually return in 100 years there to Cardiff. Faced with 100 years of waiting, Jack decides to reconsider Torchwood's offer and signs up to work for them in the meanwhile.
Through his work with Torchwood from then on, Jack is send on a number of missions of all sorts, was in China during the Boxer rebellion, joined up with the Night Travelers, and fought in World War I, to name a few things. In 1927 he's sent to New York to stop the Trickster's Brigade from infecting President Roosevelt's brain with a parasite that is intended to stir up the course of history from then on. While traveling there, he meets a young immigrant named Angelo, and presumably falls in love with him. He decides that like the Doctor, he can have a companion as well, to share the adventure of his life with, and so he takes Angelo with him to dispose of the alien parasites. The authorities are alerted to their presence, however, and Jack is shot and killed while Angelo captured and sent to jail for a year. When he is released, Jack goes to meet him and try to reconcile their relationship, claiming that he was only pretending to be dead, but Angelo saw what happened and he knows that Jack had died. Being a religious man, already ashamed of their homosexual relationship, convinces himself that Jack is the Devil, and ends up stabbing Jack in an attempt to get rid of him. When Jack comes back to life from that, Angelo brings the butcher whose shop they are renting a room over up to witness it, and he too kills Jack and discovers the man's unexplainable talent. From there, Jack is eventually chained up in the basement and repeatedly killed by members of the neighborhood, who first thought he was the devil but then decided that his immortality was a miracle or a blessing, and collected his blood as souvenir themselves. Angelo helps Jack to escape from there, on the hopes of escaping with him elsewhere, but from that experience Jack has come to the conclusion that opening himself up to someone only ends up in heartbreak, so he disappears from Angelo's life.
From there, Jack goes on to meet Estelle, having a brief relationship with her but then Jack disappears off to World War II and they lose touch. In 1965, Jack is sent with a few military officers to follow through with a deal with an alien race known only as the 456, communicating solely through radio waves. He delivers them twelve children as a gift in exchange for a cure for a new strain of Indonesian flu the aliens claim would otherwise wipe out 25 million people. He is assigned this task because they know he cannot die but also because they know he will follow through with the orders, and does. Jack becomes involved with another Torchwood agent, Lucia Moretti and together the pair of them have a daughter, Melissa. The pair of them later split up because it's too much for Lucia to watch herself age while Jack stays the same. Melissa is sent into the Witness Protection Program and renamed Alice, but Jack eventually finds her again and stays in touch with her, even if he is nowhere near the father figure to her that he really should be. On New Year's Day in the year 2000, Alex Hopkins, the then head of Torchwood 3 (Torchwood Cardiff), comes into possession of a device that supposedly allowed him to see the future. What the device makes him see sends Alex into a nervous breakdown that ends with him killing the entire staff of Torchwood 3, and then himself, leaving Jack as the sole surviving member, left in charge to pick up the pieces.
Over the next few years, Jack constructs his own Torchwood team, recruiting Toshiko Sato from prison in 2004, Dr. Owen Harper in 2006 after the pair of them have a rocky meeting involving an alien parasite in Owen's fiance's brain that ends up killing her. At some point he hires his second-in-command, Suzie Costello, although when and under what circumstances is also unclear. After Torchwood 1 is destroyed during the battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks, an event that is later called the Battle of Canary Wharf, Torchwood 3 becomes the last remaining Torchwood branch, branching off from the ideals of the original Torchwood to become something he believes that the Doctor would be proud of. Shortly after the battle, he also hires former Torchwood 1 employee, Ianto Jones, although not without some heavy persuasion and flirting from the other man's part. At some point during the next few years Jack ends up with the Doctor's severed hand off of the Sycorax ship, keeping it in a portable container in the Torchwood Hub and setting up an alarm connected with it to detect when the Doctor shows up in the area again. During the investigation into the use of the Resurrection Gauntlet, Torchwood gains the attention of PC Gwen Cooper, a factor which proves valuable when she ends up uncovering the fact that Torchwood's Suzie Costello is murdering people in order to have opportunity to test the artifact. Suzie shoots herself and creates a vacancy in the Torchwood team, which Gwen is immediately fit into and thus the entirety of the most current Torchwood team was completed. Over the next span of time, Torchwood acts as a unit together solving investigations of whatever comes through the Rift, and somewhere during the timeline Jack ends up in a physical relationship with Ianto Jones.
During one mission, Jack accidentally ends up transported back to 1941 by the Rift and is able to meet his namesake, the original Jack Harkness. In order to retrieve him and Toshiko back from the past, however, Owen opens the Rift, an action that every Torchwood employee knows expressly that it should not be done. Opening the Rift that way creates cracks through time all over the planet, and strange events and people start appearing everywhere, with the whole of it centering back on the Rift. Eventually, the Torchwood team betrays Jack and opens the Rift a second time in order to put things right, but they also release the creature Abaddon from where it was imprisoned in the Rift as well. Jack manages to defeat it but ends up dead for the next 3 days, presumably because Abaddon drained so much of his life energy that it took a while for him to recover. Very shortly after his recovery, Jack is alerted to the Doctor's presence in Cardiff, and so without even so much as a word to his team he's off to hitch a ride on the TARDIS and meet up with the Doctor and finally get the answers that he's been waiting 140 years to hear. The TARDIS, however, is uncomfortable with the fact that Jack is a fixed point in space and time, as that should not exist, and ends up transporting them to the end of the universe, the year 100,000,000,000,000, with Jack hanging onto the outside of the ship. The Doctor admits to running away from Jack on purpose because he's uncomfortable with what Jack has become and that there's nothing that can be done to fix him. That he's stuck the way he is.
Though Jack has found out what he wanted to talk to the Doctor about, they end up uncovering that Professor Yana, who is there with them on the planet at the end of the universe, is actually the Master in disguise. He regenerates and steals the TARDIS, leaving Jack, the Doctor, and then companion Martha stranded at the end of it all. The Doctor uses Jack's vortex manipulator to get them back to the right year and the three of them continue to the Valiant, a ship in the sky where the newly regenerated Master is holding a press conference as also newly-elected Prime Minister. Jack and the Doctor are then captured, Jack being held and tortured for the next year while Martha, who manages to escape and find help. Martha eventually ends up returning and saving Jack, the Doctor, and her imprisoned family, the Master ending up shot by his emotionally abused wife, Lucy Saxon. Refusing to regenerate, he dies, and after Jack destroys the Master's paradox machine, time reverts back to a year previous when it was created. Only those that were on board the Valiant during the paradox are aware as to what happened in what becomes known as the Year that Never Was. Jack is then offered a chance to travel with the Doctor for a while, but he turns it down, telling him that his home and his loyalty is to his Torchwood team back in Cardiff, and so he returns to them.
The Torchwood team, of course, is a bit upset at the fact that Jack disappeared for several months without so much as a word, but they quickly get back into the swing of things. Jack's former partner John Hart shows up and cons the team into helping him search for what he believes is going to be a way to find a priceless diamond, but is actually a bomb set to latch onto the DNA of whatever person killed the woman that John unfortunately had ended up killing. John chains himself to Gwen but they find a way to get the bomb off of him, throwing it into an opening in the Rift right as it detonates and saving themselves and the city. John then leaves but before he does he reveals that he's found Gray, Jack's long-lost brother. No further explanation is given at the time, and so Jack is just left in the dark about that for that moment. During this event, Jack asks Ianto out on a date, and it can be assumed that their relationship continues to grow closer during the next while. While investigating The Pharm, a medical organization that claims that it can cure diseases that were supposedly incurable, Torchwood member Owen Harper is shot and killed. Unable to accept the loss, Jack tracks down another Resurrection Gauntlet (gloves tend to come in pairs after all), and brings Owen back from the dead. But only sort of. Owen is basically stuck as a reanimated corpse, alive in the sense that he can talk and move and think, but he can't breathe or eat or drink or sleep or have sex (no blood flow), so for a while Owen rages against Jack for doing this to him, but eventually comes to terms with it.
While investigating what they thought was just a Rift flare, the Torchwood team is caught in a series of explosions, slowing them down and getting them out of the way enough for John Hart to set up bombs all over the city and set things up for the next stage of events. Jack goes to meet John on his own in hopes of handling it all on his own, but John abducts him and transports him back to Cardiff in the year 27 AD. Here it is revealed that John is being manipulated by Gray, who, embittered by being held captive and tortured for many years of his life, blames Jack for all of it. John has no choice but to bury Jack alive under Gray's orders, though he sticks his ring in the grave with him as a tracking device so that they can find Jack later once he gets back to present day Cardiff. Once he does, they cannot track the signal, but that is because in the year 1901, while the Jack of the time is elsewhere on a mission, Torchwood 3 tracks down the signal of the ring to where Jack is buried, digging him up and interrogating him as to what exactly is going on. He has them put him in the cryogenics vaults to revive at the current date so as to come back and help his team fix things. He does and they do, but Owen is shut inside a nuclear power plant during a meltdown, and Toshiko has been shot in the stomach, so in the process they lose two Torchwood members, narrowing their numbers down to three, which creates a strain on the team, as just because there are fewer of them does not mean that the Rift or the rest of it is going to let up on them. A little bit later that year, the Earth is relocated by the Daleks to the Medusa Cascade, and Jack teleports with the use of his vortex manipulator to help the Doctor put it right, running into old friends and new alike, inviting Martha and Mickey to join the Torchwood team after it's all over, although their response is never outright stated.
Only a little while after that, the 456 that Jack dealt with in the past return and start speaking through the children this time. Ever child on the face of the Earth stops and starts speaking in unison to tell the planet that "We are coming". The government has been in communication with the 456 as well and creates a specially designed tank for the 456 to beam down in. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister connects this event with Jack Harkness and all the others that participated in the past, and as an effort to try and erase all evidence, attempt to destroy Torchwood and Jack by planting a bomb in his stomach. Through a chance event, Torchwood finds out about it in time and is able to get Ianto and recently-discovered-pregnant Gwen to safety. Jack's body parts are then collected and assembled in a holding facility, where the next day he finally grows back together and comes alive again. Because they cannot kill him but they need him out of the way, they encase him in a block of cement. Luckily, remaining Torchwood members Ianto and Gwen manage to get him out and the three of them set up base in an abandoned warehouse and plant their own eyes into the events with the help of Lois Habiba and their special camera contact lenses. Through this, they learn that the 456 want 10% of the children of the Earth and are willing to start war against the human race if they do not get them.
Jack and Ianto go in to try and negotiate with the 456 but the alien proves to be unwilling to move on its stance and as such sets the building it's being held in into lockdown, releasing a fast-killing virus into the air and massacring everyone that's inside, including Ianto and Jack (although Jack survives because he is immortal). Jack pleads with the 456 during this time that he'll do anything if they spare Ianto from this, revealing how deeply his feelings run for the other man, but it is no use. His spirit broken, Jack is then captured and held prisoner. It is only when Gwen convinces those in charge that Jack's their only hope do they let him go to figure out a way to stop all of it. And he does, but it's at the cost of his own grandson - they need a child and fast because the 456 are going to take their 10% otherwise, and so he has no choice but to use his grandson Stephen as the center of the backwave of frequency that ends up killing the 456. His daughter hates him for it, with his grandson dead as well as his lover, Jack blames himself for all of it and cycles into a deep depression, during which he has to leave Torchwood and Cardiff and travel far away to try and escape from the ghosts that are really only inside of his head. He would give anything to see Ianto once more, no matter how selfish it is or what the costs, and he knows it. Though there is more history after this point in the timeline, because this is the point where I want to pick Jack up from, I hope that I can be allowed to stop here.
Personality: Jack is quite possibly one of the most complicated characters to understand. He didn't start out his life as a good guy, and sometimes his past comes back and bites him and he hates himself a little for those mistakes. He's got eternity to look forward to, and he'll never really understand what he is or why is is the way he is, and so he's afraid. Plus, he's been thrust into a place of command that he isn't really sure that he deserves, as the leader of Torchwood, but he was literally the only member left alive to take over, so he carried on, the way he does. Because if for nothing else, Jack is resilient.
He's got a guilt complex about a mile wide that started at a very young age when, during a raid on their home planet, he accidentally let go of his brother's hand and consequentially, he blames himself for the fact that his brother was taken away by the aliens. He tried to go back to the way life used to be, but his father was killed in the very same raid, and it's obvious that his mother isn't the same without his father or little brother, and he comes to believe that she blames him for losing Gray as well. Later on, working with Torchwood, he's made a lot of mistakes, and some of them have ended in the deaths of some of the people that he's cared for the most, and so he blames himself for that as well, regardless as to whether they are actually his fault or not.
He's also got abandonment issues. This started with of course losing Gray when he was young, and losing his father on the very same day as well. He then grew up a little and joined in fighting a war, but his best friend was caught and tortured in front of him and he presumably died as well. Then he grew up some more and joined the Time Agency, where things were apparently working well enough until he woke up one day and had lost two years of his memory, without any explanation as to why they were gone or what they were removing, so he left. And then he met the Doctor, who saved him, gave him something to believe in again, and he died fighting for that man, and he thought that that was a good way to go. But then Rose brought him back and he found them again just in time to watch the TARDIS dematerialize without him, leaving him alone in the year 200,100 with apparently only one good jump left in his Vortex Manipulator, which, damaged from the battle, sends him to the nineteenth century instead. From there, he tries to restart his life in that era until he finds out one day, after being stabbed in the chest, that he can't actually die for good. So he goes back to Cardiff to look for the Doctor for real, hanging around the Rift in hopes of finding him, and gets picked up by Torchwood. Torchwood that uses and abuses him for the next century, until New Years Eve, 1999, when the leader of Torchwood 3 looks into the future, doesn't like what he sees, and ends up killing the entire team, including himself, and leaving Jack alone in charge of TW3. And then there are the deaths of Tosh and Owen and eventually Ianto, and the knowledge later on that the Doctor left him behind all those years ago on purpose because he was 'wrong' and the Doctor couldn't handle it, and. Taking into account the fact that he is the only person capable of living forever, and the knowledge that everyone he ever has loved or will love will either leave him because they can't handle what he is or because they will end up dying in some way or another has made him a very guarded person.
That isn't to say that Jack doesn't know how to have fun. He's from the 51st century, where sexuality is a lot freer than it is nowadays, and as such, so is Jack's. He doesn't discriminate who he'll flirt with--man, woman, alien, any combination thereof, he doesn't care. So long as he finds you attractive, you're it. Through the whole of Doctor Who and Torchwood, though, Jack is seen flirting with and kissing all sorts of people, but there is only one person that he's ever been caught sleeping with more than once, and that's Ianto. Ianto is something special to him, a special that he doesn't want to define both because he thinks that labels cheapen what there is and also because he's afraid that if he admits Ianto's something extra special to him, and dare I say it, that he might actually love him. That whatever powers that be that are controlling the universe will come down and take him away that much faster, because for once he's happy in a relationship with a partner that understands him, as much as a partner can understand someone like Jack, which is to say not a lot.
Despite all that having been said, Jack is a good captain, and a good man, no matter how much he may doubt himself on each front. He puts the needs of others above the needs of himself, regrets poor decisions of the past but carries on, doing what is necessary in order to save the day, regardless as to what people might think of him afterwards. Anything that they might judge him on, he can guarantee that he's probably already thought many times over about himself anyway. Jack has a problem with running away when things get tough, however. Rather than admitting things to himself or dealing with his situation or his emotions, he'd much rather run off and pretend that none of the problems ever existed. He's claustrophobic from having been buried alive for around 1000 years, and sometimes just going to stand on roofs under the open sky makes him feel better about his life, helps clear his mind and collect himself whenever he's stressed or hurting or melancholy. Despite this running away, though, he is a responsible person, and he always comes back. His own issues with abandonment and guilt lead him to try to never inflict the same things on others.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Being from the 51st century, Jack is very familiar with high-tech technology, and as demonstrated in the series, possesses higher-than-average engineering abilities, high-jacking technology from other alien cultures. He's smart enough with technology to be able to understand the complex nature of the TARDIS and the paradox machine when the Master stole the TARDIS and rigged it up to be one. He's also got a lot of military experience, through the Time Agency, various armies and air forces from over the years, and Torchwood. He has weapon and firearm knowledge and is pretty good at unarmed brawling. He also claims that he knows torture techniques, though it's unsure exactly when in his life this is from. As for supernatural abilities, Jack cannot stay dead. He dies, but because the TARDIS has made him into a fixed point in space and time, every time he does he just revives and reverts back to the state that he was before, no matter what happens. He's been blown up from the inside out, buried alive for centuries, encased in cement, dropped off of buildings, you anme it. If it's possible for him to keep this ability the same as it always has been, I'd be interested in keeping it the same. It's a large part of who he is, and he's used to not caring what happens to him, throwing himself in front of bullets for friends because he knows he'll survive but they won't.
As for his weaknesses, Jack doesn't really have any physical ones. He's no stranger to pain, having suffered a lot over the years, so even that won't get to him. Not physical pain, at least. He's not good with loss, however, like previously stated, and as such it takes a bit for him to be able to trust anyone implicitly. Which is a weakness in a sense. He doesn't want to let anyone get too close in case he might have to suffer the loss of them, doesn't want anyone to get too close in case they use what they learn about him against him. Even Ianto, the person who's probably the closest to him out of anyone on the Torchwood team, who knows the most about him, is still in the dark when it comes to most aspects of Jack's life.
Inventory: If it's possible for him to have his wriststrap with some of its abilities intact, I'd be interested in letting him have his wriststrap. As it is without any limitations, it's already been limited from any time or space travel, and is only good for scanning, communication, and that sort of thing. He can also program it in such a way that it seems like some sort of universal remote control for anything that is tech-oriented, like the cog door or the invisible lift in the Hub. I'm fine with any sort of limitations that may need to be placed on the wriststrap as an item, I just think that having the physical object with him would be comforting for him. Also his watch. He likes to be able to tell the time. And his Webley revolver. He rarely goes anywhere without it.
Appearance: Jack Harkness is an all-around impressive man, standing at 6'1", bright blue eyes, big, white, shiny matinee idol smile, handsome face, sturdy, muscular build. He's broad-shouldered and built like the military man that he is. He is well-known for being a very handsome, very irresistible man, especially when he's smiling. Not only do his looks attract people, but so do his 51st century pheromones, which smell like everyone's favorite aftershave or cologne.
Age: Around 200 years old, unless you count the time he was buried alive, and then he's actually 2200.
AU Clarification:
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
Jack had always been in the habit of finding the highest building to stand on and stare out at the rest of the world. In the beginning, it'd been more of a brooding sort of thing. He'd been unhappy with his situation, unhappy with his life. He felt like everything that he was centered on waiting for the Doctor to come back, and even then he was hanging on the word of a little girl with a pile of tarot cards. He needed an escape, a moment to stand there and look out over the city and remind himself that there was a purpose to all of this. That he would see the Doctor again. That the Doctor would make things right again, and that was what he thought of when he stood there on that ledge and looked out over the city. At least at first.
Because then he'd finally met with his Doctor. He'd found out that there was no fix, and then there was the Year that Never Was, and he'd had a lot of time to reflect on his life. And so when he finally found his way back to his team and his life back there in Cardiff, when he found himself up on that ledge it wasn't a longing for something he didn't have that drove him there. He needed reflection, a time to step back, like he'd done on the Valiant for that year, to focus his life and the choices he made. To question his decisions. No longer was he looking for a hero to swoop in and fix his life. He was growing up. It only took him 200 years, but he was getting there. Making his own choices, taking responsibility for his team, letting himself live a little. And then Gray had shown up. Ordered him buried in the ground. And that Cariff soil, the ground that he'd lived and breathed and cried and bled on for the last century of his life, became his tomb.
After that, when Jack found himself up on the edge of a building, it wasn't for the reasons he'd had before. It wasn't because he needed someone to save him, or he needed the moment to reflect. He'd had a very long time to reflect by himself, as it was. In the spaces between, when he could remember, which were blissfully short and spread out over the course of the time he'd spent there. After being buried alive, when Jack found himself up on the edge of a building it was to feel the sky above him. The ground far below. To feel the open space and smell the (relatively) fresh Cardiff air.
"Knew I'd find you here," came Ianto's voice behind him, and Jack chuckled, turning from where he stood on the edge of the building to glance across at Ianto peering out at him from the door across the way.
"You're lucky that I'm not so easily startled," he said, stepping off of the ledge and making his way to where Ianto was stationed (safely as far from it as he could get). "You would have been scraping me up off of the pavement down there, you know."
Ianto shrugged, and the pair of them knew that he'd come up to retrieve Jack enough times for that not to have been an issue. "You're to make a call to the Prime Minister sometime today," he replied. "I can't cover for you on this one, Jack, and if you think you're going to get out of it again you've got another thing coming."
Jack made a bit of a face. "Mmm, bossy. I like it," he said, with another chuckle and a wide grin, before it softened. Responsibility. It could be such a pain in the ass. "I'll be down in twenty minutes," he said. "And if I'm not down by then, you're allowed to call in the authorities on me, how's that?"
Ianto nodded, and made to leave, but Jack stopped him with a hand on the door. "...I'd like a coffee, if you can manage one. When I'm down."
Another nod, and a tentative smile this time. "Yes, sir." And he headed downstairs to set the machine to warm. And Jack turned his face back to the sky enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his face for just a little bit longer.
Comms Sample:
You know. I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss the little things. Like...weather. I'm no stranger to space travel, but you never realize how much charm there is in a rain shower until you're stuck on a ship again. That goes especially for all of those of you out there who're from the UK, by the way. You're gonna start missing the weather, I guarantee it, and then you'll regret all those times you moaned about it.
Enough of that, though. I'm looking for someone. Attractive Welshman, answers to the name of Ianto Jones. He's got a sweet upturned nose and a pair of gorgeous blue eyes and he's probably blushing while reading his device right about now. If you see him, let him know that Jack's looking for him in his quarters. I've got a surprise waiting that I can almost guarantee that he's going to enjoy.