![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtxref_ficAuthor's Note: Written for < lj user="comment_fic">'s Doctor Who/Torchwood, Jack Harkness/any, there have been so many places he's called home, so many people he's thought of as family.. Wound up as an unofficial "Five Things Plus One Things" fic. Various pairings (Jack Harkness/John Hart, Jack/Angelo Colasanto, Jack/Mystery Edwardian Woman [ie. in the photograph seen at the end of "Something Borrowed], Jack/OFC
A colony on the Boeshane Peninsula, a seaside community on a spit of land jutting from a dusty supercontinent: he'd been born there, to a fisherman, his other father a drifter who'd left on the next cargo transport that came and went. His father's wife had given his father another son, whom young Jax had doted on, mischievously tormenting him and looking out for him and keeping him close by turns. Until that fateful day when in one blitz attack, when slavers in the service of a terrible horde had assaulted the colony, he lost father and brother. He had said goodbye to his step-mother and gone off in search of his brother.
The Time Agency's training center: They were his family now, teaching him what he needed to know to travel the universe in four dimensions. A new name, a new life and a new love who was wackier and wilder even than he was. And for a time, they had ended up playing at home making, when the same time storm had trapped them in its eye and they had three years on their hands. It had even seemed complete when Jack found he was expecting a little Jack, but time storms are no place for a newborn, and he swore he'd never do that again, if they ever got free of the storm.
Brooklyn, New York: A room above an Italian family's butcher shop. One bed, a few pictures, a pretty girl who liked to dry her hair on the fire escape across the airshaft, and a shyly passionate young man newly arrived from Italy, ready to conquer America and make it his own. He'd seen some of the sights already, and so he was more than happy to share them with his new young companion. As small as the space was and as short a time they had together, he was determined to make something of it, building up a good nest egg and setting it aside for Angelo to use, the day that Prohibition ended and the young man was released from prison.
Cardiff, 1913 The rules of Torchwood had forbidden fraternization among the agents, but they had never said anything about forging a relationship with someone whom the agency had rescued. If he'd never chased Weevils out of her root cellar, he would never have met Verrity Newman. He had tried to drug her with their early version of RetCon, but it refused to take hold, and she had recognized them when they had crossed paths again. Over cups of tea and sandwiches shared at a small cafe in the city, the relationship had grown stronger, until the night she had gently refused his advances, though she would accept them on the condition that he married her. And at the time, perhaps because she had treated him like a man and not like a freak or a hooligan, he had thrown caution to the wind and let her snare him...
London, 1950s: War makes one do strange things, and he had seen so much of it, even he had gotten tired of it. He let himself be caught up in the post-war scurry to return to normalcy. He'd turned his back on soldiering, even turned his back on Torchwood, deciding to take up a job as an insurance adjustor: he was an expert on causing mayhem and creating covers for it, so it made sense at the time to go into a field where he helped put the wreckage back together. He'd even gone so far as to try the bed-sitter flat with a wife, a cat and eventually a child. But Torchwood had a way of catching up with him, and that included cleaning up after one of their messes. Old habits die hard and he quit his job, returning to his old job. But his wife wouldn't hear of it: a family needed a man with a stable job that didn't have him haring about after aliens...
The TARDIS: He'd been called in, by a madman who traveled in a blue box, saved him from certain death and given him a purpose. The madman's face might change, and his companions might come and go as often as Jack's own bedfellows and there was the whole matter of the TARDIS not always likely her most frisky (and temporally unmoving) passenger, but some things stayed the same. Wherever they went, whoever they traveled with and whatever the folk gathered around the console might look like, they were all part of one of the greatest families that the universe had ever seen: the Doctor's Children of Time.
A colony on the Boeshane Peninsula, a seaside community on a spit of land jutting from a dusty supercontinent: he'd been born there, to a fisherman, his other father a drifter who'd left on the next cargo transport that came and went. His father's wife had given his father another son, whom young Jax had doted on, mischievously tormenting him and looking out for him and keeping him close by turns. Until that fateful day when in one blitz attack, when slavers in the service of a terrible horde had assaulted the colony, he lost father and brother. He had said goodbye to his step-mother and gone off in search of his brother.
The Time Agency's training center: They were his family now, teaching him what he needed to know to travel the universe in four dimensions. A new name, a new life and a new love who was wackier and wilder even than he was. And for a time, they had ended up playing at home making, when the same time storm had trapped them in its eye and they had three years on their hands. It had even seemed complete when Jack found he was expecting a little Jack, but time storms are no place for a newborn, and he swore he'd never do that again, if they ever got free of the storm.
Brooklyn, New York: A room above an Italian family's butcher shop. One bed, a few pictures, a pretty girl who liked to dry her hair on the fire escape across the airshaft, and a shyly passionate young man newly arrived from Italy, ready to conquer America and make it his own. He'd seen some of the sights already, and so he was more than happy to share them with his new young companion. As small as the space was and as short a time they had together, he was determined to make something of it, building up a good nest egg and setting it aside for Angelo to use, the day that Prohibition ended and the young man was released from prison.
Cardiff, 1913 The rules of Torchwood had forbidden fraternization among the agents, but they had never said anything about forging a relationship with someone whom the agency had rescued. If he'd never chased Weevils out of her root cellar, he would never have met Verrity Newman. He had tried to drug her with their early version of RetCon, but it refused to take hold, and she had recognized them when they had crossed paths again. Over cups of tea and sandwiches shared at a small cafe in the city, the relationship had grown stronger, until the night she had gently refused his advances, though she would accept them on the condition that he married her. And at the time, perhaps because she had treated him like a man and not like a freak or a hooligan, he had thrown caution to the wind and let her snare him...
London, 1950s: War makes one do strange things, and he had seen so much of it, even he had gotten tired of it. He let himself be caught up in the post-war scurry to return to normalcy. He'd turned his back on soldiering, even turned his back on Torchwood, deciding to take up a job as an insurance adjustor: he was an expert on causing mayhem and creating covers for it, so it made sense at the time to go into a field where he helped put the wreckage back together. He'd even gone so far as to try the bed-sitter flat with a wife, a cat and eventually a child. But Torchwood had a way of catching up with him, and that included cleaning up after one of their messes. Old habits die hard and he quit his job, returning to his old job. But his wife wouldn't hear of it: a family needed a man with a stable job that didn't have him haring about after aliens...
The TARDIS: He'd been called in, by a madman who traveled in a blue box, saved him from certain death and given him a purpose. The madman's face might change, and his companions might come and go as often as Jack's own bedfellows and there was the whole matter of the TARDIS not always likely her most frisky (and temporally unmoving) passenger, but some things stayed the same. Wherever they went, whoever they traveled with and whatever the folk gathered around the console might look like, they were all part of one of the greatest families that the universe had ever seen: the Doctor's Children of Time.
