Title: The Irony of Life
By: clockstopper
Pairing: Jack/everyone
Rating: PG-13
Summary: So burningchaos asked for Captain Jack Harkness and anyone, (as did partofthequeue2 [although she asked for Jack/Owen] and tanisafan asked for something with Jack, preferably with Ianto). Well I took this and thought it meany Jack with everyone, which is what this kind of turned out to be. At first I was going to make it all Jack/Ianto-ish, but then I decided why not try out Jack POV (which was a bit harder than it sounds) and then this one just started going. And he'd not really with everyone and it has a bit of a Jack/Ianto slant to it so I guess that makes everyone happy. Right?

Jack’s not a slut.

At least not according to him, to his time. Back in the fifty-first century, people just didn’t care and Jack sometimes misses that, misses it all the time actually because it’s not even about the sex thing.

It’s about the freedom, the ability to go out and say I want to have sex with her because she’s pretty or I want to have sex with him because he’s hot or I want to have sex with that because look at those tentacles.

There are no categories in the fifty-first century and just because that applied mostly to sex, doesn’t mean it didn’t apply to other things as well.

Instead what he gets is Gwen looking at him, blue eyes a bit piercing into him until he finally asks her what the hell she’s staring at and, in that no nonsense incredulous tone of hers says ‘you’re a bit of a slut, Jack’.

He thinks she meant to say ‘you’re a slut, Jack’, but Gwen’s too nice, too proper about stepping on people like that to just call him on it outright so she tacks on the ‘a bit of’ just to make herself feel better.

Like Jack doesn’t know that already.

Like he doesn’t know about their little pool and how Owen would flip his lid if he knew that he had evidence to suggest Jack was ‘gay’ in his words. Jack thinks it’s funny that with enough alcohol, someone like Owen would be adventurous enough to do anything, but its better that he doesn’t know it.

That’s what retcon’s for anyway.

Like he doesn’t know that Gwen had been clinging to the hope that he fit into that straight category for whatever fantasies were playing through her head. She’d had a bit of a hero complex going for him until she had started really working with him and decided that while he’s gorgeous, because really who can deny that, he’s not for her. Not even for her fantasies and if she’d moved on to Owen, Jack really doesn’t mind.

Relationships with the people you work with can get really messy anyway.

Like he doesn’t purposefully flirt with Tosh, she needs it and it makes her smile and blush and stammer and its entertainment, even if it is a bit mean sometimes. It’s not like he wouldn’t if Tosh asked, he’d be there in a second.

But she never would and Jack likes that about her.

Like he doesn’t know what Ianto had been trying to get at with all those thinly veiled comments about how he had had to wipe the CCTV footage of the Hub when Suzie had still be around. Not many times, mind you, but sometimes it got to be too much and she’d wanted it as much as he’d wanted it and Jack thought it had been a good thing, something to keep them both grounded.

Apparently it hadn’t been enough.

Like he doesn’t know that he can’t remember all the people he’s slept with, because he can’t, not really. There were so many from before, when it had been okay to sleep around with anyone or anything that caught your fancy.

He can’t even remember all the people from the twenty-first century he’s slept with, all the years and face blurring together. There’s a few, the more memorable ones, like that guy he met in Ireland once with the green face and the bluish spikes and the wonderful accent. Jack remembers the pale skin and the blue eyes and the way he drank like it was no one’s business but he’s own.

Or that scientists that had been in Wales as a layover to Russia who had spent the whole time talking about how much of a genius he was and proving that it applied in bed. He hadn’t been good looking in the traditional sense, but Jack had liked his mouth.

Or that girl, who’d had dark hair and eyes and everything and had practically pounced on him. Jack remembers her strength just as much as he remembers her beauty. He also remembers how she had left, had said ‘thanks for the good time, but I gotta go back to being someone’s wife now’ and Jack remembers thinking she probably sucked at it. Probably only had been someone’s wife because she thought it was the best thing to do.

And then there’s the Doctor and Rose, because really who could forget about those two. Although Jack thinks they probably don’t apply to the twenty-first century in the strictest sense, but they’d been there, both of them and he can’t help missing them, wanting to be with them again even though he knows it’s next to impossible.

So he lives like this, in the twenty-first century where he’s a slut and he embraces it because being a slut is better than not living at all.

“So should I attempt to get these clothes cleaned or just throw them away?”

Jack looks up from his paperwork, mindless and never ending forms about proper procedures and budgets and he knows that he’s just supposed to sign the, Ianto takes care of everything else, but they still make his eyes itch.

“I don’t know. Gwen was making said noises over that shirt.” Jack says.

Ianto frowns and looks into the bag that has all their clothes, splattered with what Jack wishes he could say was unidentifiable green stuff, but knows better than that.

“The dry cleaner is going to have a field day with that one.” He mutters.

“You just let her deal with it.”

Ianto smiles that same smile Jack had first noticed when Ianto had come into the Hub and said he’d been sent over to help out with pretty much everything.

“It’s sort of my job, sir.”

“I don’t remember ‘taking other people’s snot covered clothes to the dry cleaners’ being in your job description.”

“Clearly you didn’t read the fine print.”

He says it jokingly, but there’s something missing from those pale blue eyes that make Jack want to go look at Ianto’s contract just to make sure.

“Anyway, I better do something with this fast. It looks like the snot, as you so eloquently referred to it as, is beginning to harden.”

“Burn ‘em.”

“Sir, I thought Gwen…”

“She should know better than to where her best clothes to go alien hunting. I’m sure there’s a saying that goes like that.”

Ianto gives him a puzzling look before nodding. He ties the bag closed and looks at Jack one more time.

“Is there anything I can get you sir. Coffee, tea, some food.”

There had been a time, not too far back, when Ianto had called him something much worse than a slut. Had called him a monster, incapable of love and his words have floated off, proven to have been said in angry, but Jack thinks about them some times.

He can handle being called a slut and whatever nicer or meaner versions of that word people can come up with. It’s just the way the people now think, but Ianto’s never had a harsh word for him.

Had never cared and when the conversation had been brought up he had never wanted to know. Never once tried to speculate when theories were running rampant.

“No, Ianto.” Jack says.

Ianto smiles again and pulls the bag up, holds it away from his person a bit and walks off with it, to burn it no doubt because Ianto actually listens to him when he gives orders.

“Well, then, goodnight sir.”

“Night.” Jack says with a nod.

He thinks it’s a bit funny how life works because even though they don’t necessarily agree with his ways, he knows Owen and Gwen and maybe Tosh under the right circumstances would still want him. Anyone would still want him for that matter and wake up the next day and tell him he’s way too easy.

Hypocrites, he knows it, but that’s not the funny part. The part that has him in proverbial stitches is that the one person, at least the one person he’s close enough to that he can actually try and cobble something with, that doesn’t judge him for that is the one person he can’t have.

He doesn’t love Ianto, far from it and he thinks he’s pretty much done with that anyway, but it’s more than lust, more than just wanting a body to warm his bed. There’s feeling there, on his part and he thinks maybe on Ianto’s.

Thinks it’d be good, great, filled with passion and fire and he’s definitely thought about how it’d feel to have Ianto underneath him, around him, open and wanting and he thinks about the maybes and the days he thinks it might be possible

On the days where Ianto smiles at him in that certain way or gives him the last of the sugar, Jack thinks maybe, but he pushes it aside because Ianto would want more.

Maybe not now, maybe not for years to come, but it would come and Jack’s not capable of giving more. So he doesn’t go there, goes everywhere else. Bars and clubs with people just as lonely, but less fucked up than he is and losses himself in them, in their bodies and their warmth and tells himself he’s not thinking about anything but that moment.

He may be a slut, but he’s certainly not a heartless bastard.

FIN