John Thane
From Beyond The Rift Wiki
Contents |
[edit] The Mun
- Name: magi
- Contact
- Email: magistrata@gmail.com
- GChat: magistrata@gmail.com
- AIM: draegonhawke
- LJ: http://draegonhawke.livejournal.com
[edit] The Character
- Name: John Thane alias roughly a thousand other things
- Age/Birthdate: He still looks 30something. He still thinks he's thirtysomething. This is incorrect.
- Species: Human
- Type: Immortal
- Canon: Doctor Who / Torchwood / the epic multifandom AU series-es entitled Damaged People and Repair
- Journal: http://john-thane.livejournal.com/
[edit] Appearance
John Thane cultivates a roguish appearance, with an emphasis on boyish good looks. Brown hair, clean features, and an expressive face make him lively and animate. He's got a bit of a babyface to him, though this is as much in his expressions as anything. He's tall and solidly-built, with a bearing that tends to keep people aware of his body.
Normally, Thane would have a Time Agency uniform – dark grey with red and gold trim – on hand. Now, he doesn't. He's got Jack Harkness's WWII attire, greatcoat included, but it doesn't look quite right on him, any more.
[edit] Personality
At first blush, Thane is a charming, roguish young man with just an edge of danger to him. He's intelligent and personable, quite seductive when he puts his mind to it, with an easy confidence that suggest he's got everything in his life under control.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Scratch the surface and what emerges is a bitter and twisted man on a one-person blood feud, obsession and anger driving him, running on a solid foundation of fatalism with an undertone of terror. He's on a frantic hunt for something he's certain will destroy him, but he's going to pour his all into that because he honestly believes he's got nothing left. In pursuit of this aim he will do anything, including once holding the cure to a plague ransom to extort a planet's mineral wealth so that he could further finance his hunt. He considers himself not so much above as beyond morality, and he doesn't allow himself to stop or re-examine anything in his life because if he does, it'll all crash in around him.
Scratch deeper, and you find a deeply shattered young man at the end of his rope. On this level he's horrified at the person he's become and the things he's done and is doing, but sees no way out. This part of him would likely suicide if ever brought to the surface, but hasn't been up that far in a long, long time.
[edit] History
John Thane's story isn't that atypical, for a Time Agent. Left home early because he didn't fit in, joined up with the Time Agency for the glory and good work, learned too late that it was an organization of glorified strongarms, and realized that sinking to a pretty despicable low was the only way to climb. And sink, and climb, he did.
Thane became a ranked Information Extraction Specialist, which is a fancy way of saying torturer, and was by all accounts very good at it. He became something of the Agency's go-to guy, partially because his job coincided so neatly with his interests: studying and working with the reactions and reflexes of the human body. (Where he gets the technical know-how to give really great sex? Yes, this also arises from these studies. There's more than one way to convince a mark.)
Eventually, however, this life began to wear him down and he faced serious doubts as to the organization which employed him, the work he was doing, and the person he'd become. He planned to escape back home, hoping to reassimilate into his previous life and be rehabilitated, but these plans were unfortunately derailed when his home was caught in the crossfire of the Time War and erased from any accessible timeline.
Thane, as a time traveller, was one of a very, very few who both recognized the disappearance and could understand what had happened. The Time Agency by this time was losing all vestiges of a central organizing structure, and a number of Agents went rogue. Thane was one of them, adopting a crusade to find the Time Lords, whom he pegged as the ones most directly responsible for the unwriting of his entire life and community.
He allowed this crusade to consume him, employing an array of tactics learned in the Time Agency to finance and further his hunt. During this time he encountered a future version of himself, Jack Harkness, who was able to trigger a paradox on him to force him to undergo serious mental reconstitution as part of the Time Agency's psych clause. In this reconstitution five years of his memories were comprehensively rewritten in order to erase evidence of his family and their fate, and the last two years – his crusade – were deemed irreparable and deleted.
This created a fractured consciousness, the two halves of which only functioning as individuals so long as they operated in isolation: the conscious self developed into Jack Harkness, who went on to leave the Time Agency and travel with the Doctor, and the buried memories formed a consciousness which developed into John Thane. When Elashte, in an attempt to unbury what he perceived as memories only, temporarily repressed Jack's consciousness, Thane was able to take control and prevent Jack's mind from diluting his own.
This left one very angry Time Agent in Chicago, where unbeknownst to him, Time Lords were thick on the ground...
