Torchwood: Fanfic: Branded

[m_findlow]

Title: Branded
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 601 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for falkner's prompt "Torchwood, Jack, he's not big on labels" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack can't stand being labelled

Jack's not a fan of labels. Here in the twenty first century, they were everywhere, and everyone had to carry their fair share of them. Tosser, bimbo, schmuck, airhead, cheapskate, stickler, killjoy. And that was just the derogatory ones that got thrown at you when someone was having a bad day. There were labels for describing his physical appearance, labels for the way he spoke, the way he acted, the way he dressed. If he'd had to have a sticker for each one, he'd be covered head to toe in the wretched things. Why couldn't people just be people just be people? And some labels irked him more than others. Labels proclaiming his sexual orientation really got up his nose. Gay, bisexual, omnisexual, homosexual, queer, undecided, what they hell did it matter? Love was love, you couldn't put a label on that, and who was the great God that had decided it had to be one way or the other? Why couldn't you just have feelings for whomever you liked without having to make a big hoohah political statement about it?

He didn't care what they called him, and whether they said it with pride or disdain. But his lovers, his poor lovers. What heartache had they suffered thanks to the narrow minded culture that had festered here? They'd been forced into boxes with labels, pointed at and shunned for their innocence at doing the one thing that mattered more than anything in the universe, falling in love. And some had suffered more than others, his most recent lover more than any. Poor Ianto, he'd not even managed to come to grips with it himself, let alone face a world intent on labeling him one way or another. And because he didn't know any better, he'd tried to take their labels and make them fit, only to find them contstrictive and confusing. Jack wanted to shake him some days, watching as he struggled to slot himself into a neat little category just like everything else in his life. That one little label had the ability to devalue everything else that made him the person Jack adored; funny, clever, brave, handsome, devoted. All of those things became insignificant because of one little word.

He wasn't alone in that battle. Jack too struggled with the rest of the labels he'd been given. Alien, leader, hero, hypocrite, heartless, immortal, wrong. None of them felt right. He might have been from a different world in the far flung future, forced to take on a role he hadn't been prepared for, and having to deal with the consequences of his actions, but he was still human, albeit a little further along the evolutionary chain. And in being human, he still had all those things that everyone else had, hopes and dreams, fears and insecurities, a need for comfort and happiness, a sense of belonging, desires to learn and grow, the ability to make mistakes, to let jealousy, greed and spite take over, to have the best intentions in the world and yet still to fail. Above all he needed love and validation, the most human of all traits. All of those things should surely outweigh these silly little descriptors that people were so fond of.

Human. That was the label they should carry. They should be proud of what they were. His only consolation was that in three thousand years, where he would be born, in another part of the galaxy, but still ultimately human, the labels would be gone. And with luck, it wouldn't take all of those three thousand years for things to change.