Jack Harkness

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[edit] The Mun

[edit] The Character

  • Name: Captain Jack Harkness, alias roughly a thousand other things.
  • Age/Birthdate: He still looks 30something. Since becoming immortal, he's stopped counting birthdays; it was beginning to get depressing. He was born in the 51st Century, in a month with no Earth analogue. (He gives June 7th when required to, and shifts the year around in suitably flattering ways.)
  • Species: Human
    • Type: He's been immortal for years before falling through the Rift, and soaking up Rift radiation's usually done little more than give his tans that extra sumthin' sumthin'. However, since arriving in Chicago, he's been feeling a bit... weird. Like, he's seeing auras. (So far the auras have failed to correlate to anything useful like people's personalities, alien presences, what has happened, what /will/ happen, potential chat-ups or regions of heightened energetic activity, and he really just wishes they'd go away.) And--this one is plain distracting--he's beginning to think in tongues. That he doesn't understand. Since the Riftpower Roulette, Jack's discovered that he has the ability to turn into a rottweiler or a dolphin at will. He's not sure what he thinks about this, but thinks it might grow on him...
  • Canon: Doctor Who / Torchwood / the epic multifandom AU series-es entitled Damaged People and Repair
  • Journal: http://hey-capn-jack.livejournal.com/

[edit] Appearance

Jack is generally regarded as a handsome man. He's tall, strong, clean-shaven, clean-cut, with impeccable sense of fashion (if one likes period military) and hygiene and features that are downright chiselled. He's got a roguish bent to him, and he plays it up. He's quite used to being the most impressive man in the room, and if there is someone out there more handsome than him, he'd like to meet him. And probably make out with him. You know, a lot.

[edit] Personality

Jack is now the leader of an intrepid band of crusaders fighting for worldly justice--well, okay, he's heading up the Cardiff branch of Torchwood--but he's been in most of a dozen different jobs including freelance do-goodery, special ops, special time ops, and being a con man. He's got the peculiar cockiness of one who knows himself to be the equal of most anything or anyone he comes across, or is at least certain that what he can't beat, he can get out of.

It's not a front--he genuinely is that confident. Most of the time. And for the most part, he's earned it. But earning it was a long hard journey, and left him with a lot more than self-assuredness. He's got a pronounced cynical streak and can tend towards fatalism at times--hell, the universe's dealt him a few really shitty hands, in its day--and he's more reserved than his outward extravagance would let on. There are certain values of "close" he doesn't let most people near, if only because it sucks having to outlive them time after time.

He'd like to style himself as unfalteringly loyal--he'd like to be unfalteringly loyal--but he has to admit that his loyalties are complex beasts and even he doesn't understand them half the time. Really, interpersonal interactions are something he's still figuring out. They go pear-shaped with... annoying regularity, really.

[edit] History

Jack's history is a complex one, partially because it's long, partially because he time-travels, and partially because he tends to gravitate toward bizarre occurrences. Here goes.

Jack was born in a little colony on Boe-Shayne, where he lived until he enlisted in the Time Agency. In the Time Agency he was given quite the comprehensive paramilitary training, a somewhat flexible approach to morality, and two missing years of memory. Not feeling particularly charitable towards his alma mater after that, he stole a timeship and set out to con them for all they were worth.

His cons came to an abrupt end when his morality got involved, requiring him to fix his accidentally... nearly wiping out life on Earth. On the minus side, that might be he most mortifying moment. On the plus side, it meant that he got to meet--and be the companion of--the Doctor. And that was great--really it was--until the Doctor got into one deathtrap too many, got him killed by Daleks, and left his presumed corpse behind.

It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd stayed dead, but he didn't. And continued not to stay dead through many years and many more deaths than he'd want to inflict on anyone. He installed himself on Earth, in Torchwood, hoping that the Doctor would show up someday and find him. After a few decades of that, though, he got itchy feet and decided that the best course of action was to fix up a vortex manipulator and go looking.

That might have worked had he not met one Sam Tyler, stranded in an alternate time, and been thrown into a horrible knot involving Sam's Time Lord lookalike, more random time-hopping than he'd have preferred, time dogs, a race of horrible pyramid-headed Judges, and more crossed timelines than he could shake a paradox inhibitor at. By the time he met the Doctor again, or rather by the time they'd sorted out all the layered catastrophes, he'd realized that Earth and Torchwood were more important.

Now it's a few years later, and it's a good thing Earth and Torchwood are worth this much trouble. Because Jack's been betrayed--or feels betrayed--by some of the people he's trusted the most, he's dealt with the deaths of his two best friends/lovers in this time period, and now great ancient forces that claim to predicate all sentient life in the galaxy are looking at him and making considering noises. And he has the feeling they're getting angry.

Which might explain the situation he finds himself in now....

[edit] Beyond The Rift

Jack was thrown through the Rift by a race called the Sifr, who, to all appearances, wanted him to cool his heels for an indeterminate amount of time so he'd be less prone to resisting their plans. Originally assuming that the Rift was a "penal colony for everyone who pissed the Sifr off," he was proved wrong as no one in the place seemed to have heard of them.

He met the Doctor, who showed him that the people here were not of his universe; met Sam Tyler, immediately recruiting him to work with Torchwood; and almost immediately took control of everything he could see – a fact which met him with a lot of animosity from one Romana Angelos. Still, he proved to be pretty well-liked among the basement residents, and was quick to throw himself into situations such as the Calisto fiasco and the Plague.

During the plague, he was called in to help the Doctor, the Rani, and a demon named Elashte in developing a cure, and wound up, among other things, pulling a gun on Romana in order to save Elashte's life. Having suspected from early on that the angel/demon conflict wasn't as clear-cut as people would have liked it to be (the Sifr tended to style themselves as angels, or close to it), this, to his mind, confirmed those theories.

Which led to no good end.

After more brushes with his own personal dark side than he'd care to admit in the hunt for and apprehension of John Hart, he learned that Romana was planning an attack on the Main Gauche to kill Elashte. He stridently opposed this in a confrontation which escalated to bloodshed, and in order to protect Torchwood from potential Angelic retribution, he abdicated his position as Torchwood command (promoting Gwen Cooper to the role instead) and moved to the Gauche himself.

While there, he obtained the Kashtta Tower for Torchwood and formed a politicial relationship with Elashte, growing to trust him more as time went by. He kept radio silence with Torchwood for some time, breaking it only in moments of extreme duress such as informing them of a rampaging Dalek on the loose in Chicago or, that same day, breaking in to put a stop to Toshiko Sato's impromptu coup. He eventually returned in time to help fight off an assassination attempt via small army of Sam Tyler and Gwen Cooper, but not before Elashte had raised serious concerns about certain repressed tendencies in his subconscious mind.

The massacre resulting from that battle was enough to convince him that maybe Elashte had a point in his concerns, and he returned to the Main Gauche soon after to address those issues. Unfortunately, Elashte was unable to bring the repressed tendencies to light in a controlled fashion, and wound up inverting Jack's consciousness into a man styling himself John Thane.

Thane ran rabid around Chicago for far longer than he should have, but one thing about being a paranoid, obsessive little fuck of a Time Agent is that you get good at surviving. He was finally taken down and his consciousness unpartitioned by a delta wave masterminded by the Doctor in the Watch and using psychic data from the Vesmier, but not before he abducted and tortured a number of people including April, the Doctor, Toshiko, Dmitri Lang and Julian Sark. (Thane also killed Sam Tyler, though Jack managed--he's not sure how--to bring him back in an act of desperation.)

With two opposed consciousnesses partially-integrated and vying for control in his mind, Jack fled offworld using his wrist device teleport and was eventually picked up by the Chula, who decided to "solve" his emotional problems by implanting a device in his spine and brain which would suppress all emotional reaction and a couple higher reasoning functions as well. Then they dumped him back on Earth, in Chicago, where he spent a long time skulking in the shadows.

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