Sex Addiction: An Argument from Aetiology, by halotolerant (NC-17)

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Fandom: TORCHWOOD
Pairing: Jack/OC
Length: 3,963 words
Author on LJ: halotolerant
Author Website: unknown
Why this must be read:

This story’s premise has been contradicted by canon, but it’s such a wonderful character study of an adolescent Jack that I advise you to just roll with it.

So, what if the Time Academy chose its recruits when they were really young — say, less than three years old? What if the students were, until the age of eighteen, kept so strictly segregated by gender that they were unaware of the very concept of gender? And what if there was a mix-up in the sorting...

Mu lived with the males. At three he had been put with the males and there he stayed. Except that to themselves they were not ‘males’, they were people. They were each roughly the same in appearance and as their time at the Academy progressed, each changed in roughly the same time. Mu did not. He grew no beard, his voice would not break and his torso lacked definition. He took to wearing billowing clothing to hide these imperfections, and gradually – in the filter-feeding manner of all institutional gossip – Jack was to learn that Mu was being rather horribly bullied about it all.

He heard the information whilst sitting in the Refectory. Psi – his current paramour – was sitting in his lap, complaining about some issue relating to food allocation. Rho, who bore the news, looked at Jack in surprise.

“You mean to say you haven’t noticed? What have you been doing all this time?”

Jack took a self-conscious look at Psi. Jack had been a late-bloomer, sexually ignored, more or less, until he was 16 and finally gained that certain something. It had left him somewhat lacking in confidence.

When, now, he looked over to where Mu sat, alone, he felt a pang of sympathy and a sensation that he was facing a choice that would define how he felt about his own character for quite some time.

Some boys approached Mu, already mockingly stroking their own inadequately covered chins and laughing. Mu stood up, defiant in posture, and they pointed at his voluminous shirt and started tugging at it, one holding back his arms to prevent a strong-looking right-hook ever getting delivered.

And so Jack made a choice. He would never realise until later – much later – and over three thousand years earlier, when he was granted the time to think about many things – that this choice would buoy him up for decades, that the little piece of self-worth it sowed would shelter him in one of the harshest abandonments a man can face.

But that is later, and earlier.

This is a bittersweet story that depicts het sex as a terrifying, exhilarating plunge into alien territory — which, come to think of it, is probably how most of us experience it at first.

Sex Addiction: An Argument from Aetiology