I actually posted this ages ago over on Torch_Wood, in response to a much earlier episode. However, after the events of episode 13, it seems quite apt, really....
It drives Jack crazy when I call him “sir”.
He doesn’t admit to it, of course; but I can tell by the raised eyebrow and the slightly clenched jaw that it’s getting to him. Not in a “wish he’d stop doing that” way, but in a “I want to drag you to my office right now and rip your clothes off” sort of way. Which, of course, is why I do it.
Someone once said that you gotta take the rough with the smooth, and by God is that the case in this place. You take the being beaten to within an inch of your life along with the quiet cups of coffee at your desk. You take the roughness of day-old stubble grazing your thigh along with the velvety softness of a mouth caressing your own.
Gwen once asked me why I called Jack “sir”, when everyone else called him by his first name. I thought about this for a while before I answered her; mostly because I wasn’t entirely sure myself. In the end, I think it’s something about being physically close to him but always feeling emotionally distant, always feeling that he’s waiting for something. He has a knack of making you feel as though you’re the only person in the room, but you just know that if that other person, that mysterious other, was to enter, he’d shoot you down and walk over your bloody corpse to get to him.
So I call him “sir”. I call him that to drive him crazy; but I also do it to stop him from driving me crazy. To stop myself falling so hard that I’ll hit the bottom and break.
What’s in a name? In this case, self-preservation.
