Torchwood and Milliways related ramble

[yakalskovich]

Last night, just when I was signing off, the approval for firstcptjack  dropped into my inbox; I squeed briefly to essayel and then signed off.

So I'm officially a Torchwood mun in Milliways now, even though my charrie is needed for just one episode of the going-through-canon bit. But OMG is he ever needed there - no 'Captain Jack Harkness' without Captain Jack Harkness. The real one. Who is my charrie now.

How am I going to play him? As I find him in canon, of course. Dedicated fighter, brilliant flyer, good people skills, priorities very firmly in place. The material that the Torchwood website provides about him is - painful, to say the least. Miss Nancy Floyd, the blond girl? Claims him as her fiancé in that newspaper cutting, so it's really that claiming-people-after-their-death thing there, too. He can't contradict her any more. People are free to make him into whatever they wished he had been.

For some reason, I feel that those Floyds are probably the family he was billeted with for the time of his training assignment - he is astonished to see her at the dance, after all, so he knows her from another context, and this feels like a fairly good context for that sort of girl.

Jack is discreet about himself up until his dramatic last night; he does the expected, not what he wants, on the front of personal relations, as he's about something else entirely - flying, and fighting against Nazi Germany. Now, what might the background of an American volunteer in the RAF be? What motivates a young man to fight for a country not his own? Risk his life for it every day?

One, he might have been a US Air Force pilot even before the war - he has the skills, he ought to use them. He might have resigned his commission in America to see some real action over Britain. But Jack isn't the kind of person who does that for the sheer hell of it - he has too much restraint and diplomacy for that. He could do it for political reasons - he feels America ought not keep out of this war, and if it does, at least he can do his part to combat the Nazis. He might have heard rumours about what truly happened in those concentration camps (news of that was filtering out to an incredulous world that partially dismissed it as propaganda) and feel that these people have to be stopped from taking over the world at all cost. After England and Russia, what would be next? Japan already had China and was taking over much of the Pacific regions, Germany with its ally Italy were taking over Europe - in 1940, things looked incredibly bleak. He's probably even quite the American patriot and fight for his country by fighting for another, so the evil is stopped before it reaches America itself.

On top of that, he could have had more personal reasons. Harkness is a Scottish name. There is even a Harkness tartan. What if his family still had ties to relatives in the old country, strong ties there? If I take torchwood.co.uk as canon (and one is glad for the additional data!), then Jack was already in the RAF before the Battle of Britain even started. So no relatives having been killed in the Blitz or any such dramatic reasons would apply. But fighting for his folks in the old country? That would be a good motivation, on top of the politics and the patriotism.

So, how did he end up in the RAF, logistically? Depends on how old he is. I don't find any information on that; I don't even find any information on how old the actor is - neither his own web site nor IMDB tell us so. How old would he be? Not too young any more, something between 28 and 34, perhaps? Would he have been an Air Force pilot, gone into civilian aviation, then joined up in Britain? Or would he have resigned from the US Air Force to go fight for Britain, with the blessing of those of his superiors that deplored not being able to help stop the Nazi threat?

In any case, he was experienced enough to fly one of the vital fighter planes in the Battle of Britain, and to be used for training up the bitterly needed British pilots before and after that. He was a good flyer, he took high risks. and he lived to tell about them time and again. He doesn't preen, though, or cash in on his successes - at this point, the privateness of his private life comes in. He's not a ladies' man simple because he isn't - but I can't see him doing much about this, either, not like the desparate, high-strung fighter pilot who's a minor character in Mary Renault's 'Charioteer' - which I translated while I lived in England, just to kill time spent waiting for people to stop watching cricket. So I know this book very, very well; I talked to people back then that were alive at the time to get the full context, and I heard some haunting stories that will probably surface, at one point or another, of my playing Jack in Milliways. He's from a period that I really, really feel at home in - oral history does give you another angle on history.

On the one hand, mores and gender roles did relax during the war - on homosexuality, not so. The stance of the general public on that was still the famous 'Horsewhipping's too good for them!' expletive; people viewed that 'perversion' much as people view pedophilia today - unspeakably vile, must be stopped at all costs. Then again, there were the more bohemian types that more or less accepted it as something that simply happened, or saw it as a tragic flaw somebody might have that they'd struggle against all their lives. It was, in any kind, underground, like growing wine in a bathtub during the Prohibition era, which is what Ralph in 'The Charioteer' compares it with. You can never have your love as honest and aboveground as the 'normal' people do because you're lumped in with all sorts of shady types and prostitutes by the sheer illegality of it all.

That's what Jack was up against - and I somehow feel that Jack was likely to pass it all up. Flying and fighting were important. The fact that he liked guys, not girls? Was not. I can't see that he was in denial about it, that he hated himself for it or that he was fighting his inclinations - they were simply not important, in comparison. He'd endanger his mission and alienate his men - so hands off that part of his life. It would have been that simple. He'd sometimes find guys attractive that he met, and the dismiss all thoughts of that. I can't even see him with a tragic attraction to a man that he'd never breathe a word about, and then the other one would be killed in the course of duty, like Ralph and the subaltern he tells about in 'The Charioteer'. That part of Jack's life would just be on a back burner utterly.

It simply wasn't what he was about at all - and when he met that terribly attractive guy on what was to be the last night of his life, things simply escalated and got out of hand. One, terribly attractive guy. That he got on with, on a simple, person-to-person level, like a house on fire. Somebody with the same accent in a sea of Welsh people, with a smattering of Cockneys and public school boys. Then Torchwood!Jack tried to push him into savouring that last night, because he knew it was the last night, and he was feeling terribly guilty - the man whose identity he'd stolen and whose records he had falsified to deny him the blaze of glory he went out in was a thoroughly decent, upright guy, and his death was a loss to many. His death, that Torchwood!Jack had profited from. From those two positions, the events of that one last night simply escalated. We watch them admiring each other, respect and attraction coalescing into the first stirrings of what might turn into love - but is not to be, as Torchwood!Jack must return to the future, and real!Jack goes to his death. Half a dance and one kiss, during which emotions suddenly avalanche - then, the end.

The blinding white light that Torchwood!Jack vanished into might have made people doubt the sanity of their perceptions altogether. Not real!Jack; he knew that he'd finally done what he wanted and kissed a man he was falling in love with, but the rest of the people at the Ritz - I can see that sneaky manager walk up, break the atmosphere, tell the band to play something really spirited; people coming out of the daze of what they just witnessed and drinking and dancing all the more wildly; the airmen deciding that in view of tomorrow, they'd have to stop with the drinking and either get sleep, or get on with the wenching part. In the morning, they'd have their coffee and swallow their uppers if they felt they needed them (they did get pills issued officially to help them keep awake, after all) and then get going. Kissing of blokes and mysterious shining white lights would all have been eclipsed by what was ahead of them.

Love or no love, I don't even know if real!Jack thought about Torchwood!Jack at all that last day. He might have, after the mission, but he never returned from it. He died in his burning plane that he couldn't bail out from.

The newspaper cutting on the Torchwood site says 'died single-handedly defending Cardiff from a German bombing raid'; but that article was prone to exggeration anyway, see the fiancée thing. But there remains the fact that Cardiff obviously was where those Messerschmidts were going, and Jack took down three of them. So he would have been near Cardiff when that happened, and close to the Rift. Torchwood, canon and fanon, has the option of sending the burning fighter plane straight through the Rift and into the bay of present-time, with real!Jack escaping with severe injuries, but not beyond the Torchwood team to save. Fanfic has the option of reviving him that way, and even canon does.

I, on the other hand, have to bring him to Milliways and can play him as dead. I don't need the rift to make him appear over the lake in his burning plane, crash into it, and simply swim ashore. He'll be one badly singed and dripping wet pilot that only later realises that he is, in fact, dead. I have to talk to Josie first to make sure sinking the Spitfire in the lake is all right, but I can imagine him mounting an expedition, later, and going down there to find, in fact, his own badly burned body. Or I could just stay vague on that point and have him be aware of his own death from the beginning - 'No way could I have survived this' - and quite obviously, even though it looks like it, the place is not Scotland. There will be aliens. There will be a faun as the head of the kitchen, and a purple god keeping the library; there will be a talking pig clearing the paths, and people in the weirdest clothes and skin colours. There will be music the sort of which he never heard. He will accept the place, as he accepted the man he'd fallen for vanishing in a blinding white light.

Then, of course, there will be the thing about his name - 'You are not Captain Jack Harkness, I know Captain Jack Harkness, he's just not here right now'. Again and again, over and over. He'll meet people from his own canon that might even be aware (or guess) that Torchwood!Jack has stolen the name. He'll meet people that will tell him Trochwood!Jack is a whore working with the Delicate Flowers. He'll meet people that will tell him Jack Harkness went off with the devil. No way will he ever guess that the other Jack Harkness is the man he knew as Captain James Harper. We'll have to be careful he doesn't meet the other Torchwood charries too early, especially not Tosh; but that can be done. Him meeting, say, Suzie, who tells him he's not Captain Jack Harkness, Captain Jack Harkness used to be her boss at Torchwood - that might be fun. Lots of different information about what Captain Jack Harkness really is will be fun for the plot at Milliways.

Next thing, same gender relationships. The bar is full of them; they even marry and have children. I'll have to find somebody to administer that culture shock - somehow I'd like Green!Jack and CSI!Gil, but faun!Gil and AS would work as well. For avoidance of RPsterbating (and spoiling Sal on TW12 which she, AFAIK, hasn't seen yet), the other couple would be better - or one more current slash couple, be they canonical love interests, people that get slashed all the time, or one of those incredibly odd Milliways couples like Sooty and Gil. Jack will, at first, react in a pole-axed, unreadable way; when whoever it is suspects he's opposed to it and tells him that in Milliways, such views have no chance, he'll answer that no, he didn't mind. There is a war on where he comes from, people looked the other way when things moved in the shadows; but this openness isn't anything he's seen before.

He won't volunteer information about himself. He won't start savouring the cornucopia of available guys the way 'Suti did wen he was new in the bar. He won't fall in love with anybody. He won't be about that. He'll probably meet other pilots from strange worlds that he or I know nothing about - he'll fly a spaceship or an X-Wing, II suspect, before he goes to bed with another bloke, not because he's opposed to that, it's simply not what he's about. He'll remember Torchwood!Jack, think of him fondly, might even admit that yes, there was somebody he cared for very deeply and whom he's never going to see again, not volunteering any information about that person's gender.

When Torchwood!Jack returns to the bar after canon, their encounter will probably be much further back on my Jack's personal timeline than on his. In any case, the end is utterly open; it depends on how our charries interact in the canon re-enactment threads, and gazillions of other circumstances that are still up in the air, or haven't even gone up yet. In any case, the encounter with Torchwood!Jack and the solution of all the riddles about Captain Jack Harkness will be the end of the canon related plot that I have with my Jack; after that, he's just another Milliwayser free to develop away from the constraints of his canon. Meet people, get a job, fall in love. Get a life. Leave, eventually, maybe. Or find himself completed, and pass on the way some people do - the way Barry did, for example.

The end is utterly open.