m_findlow

Title: Up close and personal
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 865 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Torchwood, Jack, He has no concept of personal space " at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack's just a touchy feely kinda guy

Jack doesn't understand the twentieth-century. Specifically, he can't get his head around the fact that people don't like to touch one another. When he'd grown up on the Boeshane, he'd been taught that the most important thing in the universe was love, and that you should always remember to show people how much you cared. That meant that there was a lot of hugging, kissing and general touches of affection, even with people you wouldn't normally think of. That was just how people showed their humanity.

When he'd left the Boeshane, a lot of those childhood lessons had served him well, for a number of reasons. Whether it was to help smooth over strained diplomatic relations between two aliens races on the brink of civil war, flattering someone to obtain that salient and essential piece of information needed to complete a mission, or just spending some downtime on one of the many worlds designated as pleasure spots, not that anyone there minded particularly if you touched them inappropriately. No, most of the alien races he'd met over the years had no objections to his close physical presence.

His abrupt landing on Earth had changed all that. In the late nineteenth century, physical touching of any kind seemed almost taboo. People were so proper and frigid that he began to wonder how it was they ever managed to procreate. Sure, he found the odd person here and there that was up for a good time, and boy oh boy, were some of those less reputable taverns a whole lot of fun!

No, what he couldn't understand was how humans had resisted physical closeness so much. He'd learned in school all about the history of his people and how they had descended from the original peoples of this tiny world, proliferating all over the universe, setting up colonies and outposts just like his own home on the Boeshane. How had they changed so much over the years? Surely he couldn't truly be descended from these insensitive, uncaring beings?

Over time, he learned to temper his natural instincts just a little, though they seemed to return in full flight when he worked for Torchwood. After all, it wasn't all that much different to the Time Agency, and those behaviours had ensured his survival for a lot of years.

Despite his restraint, people often found him somewhat overbearing, often nudging subtly away from him when he got too close. It made them uncomfortable, but not enough to be impolite about it. Some eventually just got used to it.

Years stretched on and things began to improve a little. The sixties and seventies were Jack's favourite decades. Free love had finally come to town and he was going to take advantage of every minute of it. Perhaps this was the turning point in his specie's history, when what he'd come to know would be ingrained in the generations to come.

Sadly he was to be disappointed. The free love died away and the corporate world rose in its stead. People went back to being serious, and the party was over. At least the acceptance of homosexual relations was beginning to become the norm, slowly and gradually. If he'd thought getting frisky in the early twentieth-century was risqué, it was nothing compared to the onslaught of hatred for same sex relations. Gods, how on Earth were these people ever going to come to have physical relationships with other species when the time came, if they couldn't even understand relationships amongst their own kind? More and more he hated The Doctor for leaving him behind, now stuck on this planet full of cavemen and apes.

Even his most recent lover, though happy to give in to whatever physical needs Jack brings to the table, is still in public, reserved about their physical proximity. Slowly Jack has worked his charms on him, or perhaps it's that whole "life is precious" thought that makes them less reluctant to not enjoy every last moment of life, and damn the consequences. Torchwood tends to alter your perception of what's important in that way.

What a momentus occasion it was to be wandering through the zoo on a date, hand in hand, able to show the whole world that they were in love. Such a simple little thing that on the Boeshane would have been commonplace, was so rare here on Earth that it almost made Jack tingle all over with happiness.

Even now, Jack knows that he sometimes irritates people with his intentions. He can't help it. Whether it's a lover, a colleague, or even just a complete stranger, it's a huge or a gentle hand on the small and of someone's back, a stroke of a cheek, or a kiss on the temple, it's just his way of showing that he cares. He doesn't care if he's invading what you consider to be your personal space. He's not about to change who is just to conform with peculiarities of this time and age anymore. He's made so few true friends since landing here, that he will take whatever chance he can to be close to them and to demonstrate to them that they mean everything to him.