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Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance, silver moon’s sparkling, so kiss me.
Rose.
He’s drunk, silly drunk when they kiss for the first time. Silly, drunk and already half in love with each of the two people who share his new home. He’s probably a little in love with the Tardis too and it doesn’t have anything to do with the Hypervodkas and enhanced Venturian Whisky-like chasers. Rose is maybe three times worse off than he is, and the Doctor falls asleep on the control room floor and wakes up in the morning with a diamond pattern on his cheek.
There are plenty of kisses before the Game Station. More kisses than he knows how to count. When they are really in love and everything, for a little while, is pretty damn perfect. In those kisses, Rose tastes like beauty and innocence and those sweet little berries that grow in the hills of Boe. Kissing Rose starts to fix something in him that broke a long time ago, it makes him into the Jack that might actually deserve the name. Because he doesn’t ever lie to Rose with those kisses and she loves him through them.
Their last kiss is a lie. He kisses her like he’s coming back, like it’s just another adventure and tonight they’ll cuddle up on the couch in the library and he’ll watch her favourite twenty-first century movies and pretend that he doesn’t miss 4D participation. He doesn’t kiss her like it’s goodbye, but his words betray him. He’s halfway to being dead before she realises that.
Gwen.
She’s smart. She’s smart and when she smiles she shows off the little gap between her teeth that he finds more cute than sexy, but then he is getting pretty old. She reminds him of Rose, he won’t deny it, but that’s only a little, and only at first. When he meets Gwen, Rose is a reopened wound and a little bit like her is more than he ever thought he would get again.
Gwen is in love with Rhys. She doesn’t always act like it, but she is. Jack has had his heart’s full of already-in-love people so even if he loves her, he doesn’t mean it the same way as he could. But he kisses her. Because he’s Jack and she’s Gwen.
It doesn’t feel like they’re in love. It feels like guilt and thinking of someone else. She’s the not-crazy in all the not-normal that Torchwood seems to gather. Every one of them is broken except her. He kisses her until she’s just like the rest of them, when she does more than kiss with Owen and marries Rhys and tries to make that work.
He likes kissing Gwen, because it might be love, but it’s not the kind of love people try very hard at.
John Hart.
“Kiss me.”
“Okay.”
They last exactly five years (one week, over and over and over again). They don’t pretend it isn’t a lot of boredom and even more frustration.
Their final kiss leaves John spread out across the floor.
Donna.
He never actually kisses the real Donna. He kisses the metacrisis Donna who’s got enough of the Doctor inside her to make it seem a little like cheating on his memories.
He meets the other Donna, the one who mustn’t remember, on a hen night in Cardiff. Jack becomes the unpaid entertainment. If Ianto wasn’t there with him, he probably would have stripped.
Donna doesn’t remember him, which is a bloody good thing because the Doctor would kill him if something happened to her. Hell, he’d probably do it again and again just to make sure the anger registers fully.
The redhead waits for him outside the loos and it catches him off guard enough that she’s kissing him before he even realises she’s there. Sloppy Time Agent skills aside, he gets himself under control enough to push her away as soon as his back hits the wall.
There’s a hint of remembrance in her eyes that scares him almost to death so he kisses her again, his tongue slipping inside her mouth and then he bites down hard against his own back tooth, the retcon releasing into them both.
Ianto teases him mercilessly for three weeks about that night. He doesn’t ever learn what really happened, only that he has another gap in his memories and the world doesn’t end.
Alice.
He’s only there for a little while, before Lucia has enough and sends him packing. He doesn’t blame her for not wanting him around, but he hates her more than a little, for making him leave his little girl.
Alice is everything to him. She isn’t his first child, but with the life he has now, he doesn’t plan to let this happen too many more times. She fills up a part of him that’s been empty since the big blue box left him behind. She’s bigger on the inside and he thinks she would probably love him even if she knew who he really was.
For five years he gets to see her grow. He gets to share her first words and her first steps and he’s there when she walks into her first day of school. He cries worse than Lucia does, but then she’s already glaring at him, and anger’s a pretty useful cover for sadness, he knows.
Up until she’s four years old, Alice asks for a bedtime story every night. He puts on voices and even acts some of the scenes out and never once has to read from a book. He tells her fairytales about a Doctor and a Rose and even sandy beaches in lands you can only see at night when the stars come out.
She never falls asleep until he’s finished, clinging on even as her eyes keep falling closed and her head sinks into the pillow.
She says Goodnight Daddy, and he kisses her forehead and tucks her hair behind her ear, turning off the light and closing the door.
Every night he waits for her to ask for another story. He doesn’t stop waiting until she looks at him worse than Lucia ever did and leaving the Galaxy doesn’t take him far enough away to make it better.
Nine.
Jack thinks of the men he knows as the Doctor as different people. He knows he shouldn’t, because the Doctor has told him the same thing he told Rose, that even if the body changes, the mind is still the same. But Rose only knew two Doctors. And Jack knows that her second one tried his hardest to be the way she wanted him to still be.
Jack has known them all. Will know them all. And he knows that the memories are the same, but that’s about it.
So Jack thinks of them as different people. It’s easier that way, easier to keep them all straight in his head and it’s not like he isn’t used to seeing people he knows act as someone completely different. The Time Agency took all the best actors, it’s why no truly great movie came out of the fifty-first century.
And he thinks of the Doctors in terms of numbers. That’s easier too, because of course, the Doctor never has any other name, at least not one that changes with his face. So since he’s met them all, Jack numbers them. It’s a while before he finds out that the Doctor does the same. They laugh, oh how they laugh.
Nine is the Doctor that saves Jack. He thinks of them like that too. He tries not to, because no matter what the Doctor and Mickey Smith might think, he does know that not everything is about him. But Nine is the Doctor that saves Jack several times over. Nine is the one that tastes of stardust and time. Nine might leave him behind and never, ever come back for him, but Nine is a part of Rose&Jack&theDoctor. Nine is the biggest part of the Jack that Jack becomes. Nine tastes like yesterday, and Jack doesn’t ever think he will outgrow him, but eventually, he does.
Jenny.
That is a mistake. She tricks him into thinking she’s someone she isn’t and as soon as their lips touch he knows who she really is.
He never tells the Doctor. He doesn’t ever tell anyone. She’s the Doctor’s daughter which makes her a sister or a daughter or a niece or something that means kissing like that is illegal on most civilized worlds.
Jenny seems to feel the same way as soon as it happens so they’re lucky really, that they’re both such good actors, because those Christmas dinners on the Tardis could be a whole lot more awkward than they are.
Ianto.
Ianto. After...after, Jack doesn’t kiss anyone for almost a year. Which says something about the way that Ianto makes him feel because even when they’re together, they both know that Jack kisses people the way everyone else shakes hands.
Ianto says something about everything. Ianto is the first person to make Jack want to be with only one person and not to share. Ianto makes him want to hide them both away where the world can’t see them and interfere. With Ianto he becomes ‘a couple’. They date and when they kiss, Jack thinks this is home and doesn’t ever want to be anywhere else.
They almost kiss the first day they meet and then the next and the next and Jack hires Ianto because he is persistent and looks good in a suit and it has nothing to do with wanting to taste his lips and see if he’s as delicious as he looks.
Even when they’re fighting and not having sex, Ianto still kisses him. Jack is still allowed to wrap his hands around Ianto’s tie and tug, can still press his lips to Ianto’s jaw, his cheekbones, the corner of his mouth. He knows that the day when Ianto says no to kissing, is that day that whatever he has done has gone a step too far, and he’ll never get back what he has now. Jack might like to push at his boundaries, but he keeps well away from them when he’s with Ianto.
Ianto tastes like coffee and spring rain. For centuries, Jack avoids planets with both. After.
Martha.
Martha saves the world. She’s brave and clever and she knows what it’s like to love a not-man that loves another not-man that’s spent a year doing anything he can to hurt you.
They survive the not-year and after the Master burns they hide themselves away in the healing Tardis so they won’t have to watch the Doctor mourn for someone they hate.
They take two showers every day and change their clothes so often they both laugh that it’s a good job the Tardis brings the wardrobe back online as fast as she does.
They play cards and eat synthesized pizza and each night Jack lays on the far side of his single bed and Martha curls up beside him. He kisses her cheek and lets her wrap herself around his fully clothed body and between them, somehow, they heal.
Amy & Rory Williams.
Kissing one is exactly like kissing the other. It shouldn’t be, human biology alone tells him that, but all the same, it is.
He kisses Amy under the moons of Tru’tel and before Rory can complain he turns and kisses him too. And they’re both wonderful, and they taste the same.
They aren’t the first married couple he’s ever kissed, but they’re the first to need nothing more than that one time each to push him down against the bench and take turns in kissing him back.
Amelia Pond and Rory Williams. They hold a special place in his heart. So young and in love; in love enough to share it around and not worry that one of them will move on. He doesn’t kid himself that they’ll ever feel for him what they feel for each other, but what they do feel for him is twice enough.
He only travels with them for a short time, although they pop up in his timeline often enough not to be a coincidence. They invite him to their anniversary dinner every year and it should be strange and awkward, but when he greets them both with a kiss on their doorstep, it really truly isn’t.
River Song.
Jack is one of the few people to know River in the right order. It means, of course, that there are times where he hates her. Completely. And has to chain himself into the center of a temple erected in his honor just so he won’t go and tear the timelines to pieces.
But she kisses like an angel, a naughty angel that would have been kicked out of heaven the first time she slipped her tongue in a saint’s ear.
Jack’s over three thousand years old when he kisses River. He doesn’t think anything is going to be new ever again. He’s about as wrong as he can possibly be.
He’s still nowhere near his first real own time, but she tastes just like that. She kisses with more than just her mouth, which is something no one before the Forty-Ninth century learns to do.
They kiss like a flicker book. There and gone and there and gone. They kiss goodbye and kiss hello and it could be three days, it could be three years. River still travels through time and Jack’s got nothing but time these days, so turning up unexpectedly is almost, well, expected.
“Hello Darling.” She says one day, and the next year he stands as best man while she marries the Doctor. Best men always get to sleep with a member of the wedding party. He kisses the bride well into the night.
Twelve.
Twelve is married.
But then, Twelve always will be Jack’s favourite Doctor so he and River and Jack-
Oh, wait.
Spoilers.
End.