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Captain Jack Harkness falls in lust almost every time he meets someone new, and he falls in love nearly as easily as that. He has had so many partners over the centuries he’s been alive, and he remembers them all, whether they were together for one night or ten years. He loves indiscriminately, regardless of gender or (to an extent) species; he loves people romantically but he loves his friends even more, loves them so much more than they think. He communicates through touch and hates how stingy 21st century people are with it, he shakes the hands of strangers, kisses his friends’ foreheads and slings casual arms around shoulders. Jack enjoys sex but what he craves in the everyday sense is mornings spent in bed and evenings with his arms wrapped around someone else.
Jack was born in the 51st century but Jack is not a 51st century man, not anymore. He is an amalgamation of all the time periods he’s spent considerable time in; he still dresses like he’s in the RAF, never takes off his vortex manipulator even though it hasn’t worked in years, he’d be lost without his 51st century tech but his favourite songs are all from the 1940s. People think of him as am incredibly progressive, liberal person, but really he’s stuck in his ways the same as every other old man: it just happens that his ways came from a time several thousand years in the future.
Captain Jack Harkness is not the same person Javic Piotr Thane was. Maybe one day he won’t be Jack Harkness anymore either, but whatever name he holds Jack will always have the same core values: love, and time, and people, and life. However many times he dies, he will always be so very alive.
There are two soulmate scenarios I like to imagine for Jack. In the first, the name of each person you love appears on your body when you fall in love with them. In the other, the name of your soulmate appears on your skin during teenagerhood. In the first, I imagine him picking up new names on every planet and in every time he visits, until, by the time his stretch in Cardiff has come to an end, his entire body is filled with cramped script except his hands and face. He can’t even read some of them without a lot of contorting and several mirrors, but if you read him a name he would remember that person easily, a nostalgic smile or dirty smirk making its way onto his face.
In the second, I imagine him being fascinated as friends and older relatives had names bloom on their arms, collarbones, or chests, usually one, sometimes two, or, very rarely, three. I see him waking up one morning and glancing in the mirror to see ink twisting its way over every limb, climbing his back and nestling between each rib and the next. I imagine him grinning wider than he has in months, and resolving to read, learn and meet the owner of every single name.
It makes him sad, sometimes, to think of all the people he has loved and lost, all those he has yet to meet but will still inevitably lose someday. It hurts, so much, and he spends hours standing on rooftops thinking about people and missing them wholly. Most of the time, though, it just makes him happy: yes, he has and will lose people, but it’s not the losing that’s important, is it? It’s the meeting and the getting to know and the making friends and the falling in love and every little joke and smile and shared meal and shared night that makes every loss worth it. After all, it’s better to love and to lose than never to have loved at all, and that is the philosophy Jack must live by.