Archive of Our Own

There comes a time in the life of every young heterosexual male when that which was once foreign and frightening becomes tantalizing and desirable. Chemical surges carry with them the startling rush of discovery, the power of novelty overwhelming all sense and logic. By all rights, these young men have discovered nothing. Like Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus before them, they have merely awoken to the awareness of things that had existed and thrived long before their own belated hormonal arrival. Yet the thrill persists.

Jack Hawksmoor was not the average young heterosexual male. By the time he reached his ninth birthday, in fact, and the experiments finally came to a close, little remained of his body that was human at all. He didn't sleep, and he didn't eat – the air pollution of 1970s New York City provided for all of his needs. His heart no longer beat with the steady rhythm of flowing blood, and his ridged feet could barely tolerate shoes, preferring to soak up the power of the sidewalks and pavement. But in this one respect, Jack found he wasn't so unlike his peers after all.

This isn't to say that there were no differences. Jack received his first kiss at age thirteen, when enough time had passed for his classmates to begin to forget all the times Jack had flickered out of sight only to reappear, naked and shivering and covered with fluid, a moment later. Lydia Hawthorne, the quiet girl who sat directly behind him in their alphabetically-organized math class, pulled him aside after school in a surprising show of confidence and asked him to go out with her, and they sealed the agreement with a kiss. Lydia was sweet and pretty, and the kiss wasn't bad, for a first, and they dated for three weeks before Lydia decided to move on to greener pastures. It was, overall, a good experience. But it wasn't love, or even that hormonal teenage rush of discovery. For that, Jack Hawksmoor turned to the city of New York.

Piles of raw materials shaped by circumstance and the hands of others into unique, individual beings, cities were, for Jack, no different than women were for any other man. And if cities were like women, as Jack firmly believed, then New York City was the girl next door. He'd lived there all his life, in a cramped apartment in the East Village, and he'd begun to learn her streets even before the first experiments. As the operations began, the city started to speak to him, in whispers at first that grew louder with the passage of time and the transplantation of new organs. The pathways through Tompkins Square Park would gossip about the beatniks and hippies who'd danced around its trees while the makeshift tents of the homeless wailed their laments. But it was all at a distance, and Jack was little more than a blushing bystander, like a neighbor embarrassed to hear an argument through thin apartment walls.

It wasn't that the city changed, any more than women changed when boys decided to take notice of them. But at some point, when Jack was just entering high school, the city's whispers became less embarrassing and more intriguing. Outside, traversing the grid of city blocks, he felt as though he were discovering New York for the first time, like a modern day Henry Hudson. The streets knew his name, and he knew theirs, but now they saw each other with new eyes.

Jack felt the city begin to wrap around him, enveloping him in an embrace. The sidewalk cushioned his steps as he walked, subway car grab bars warmed to his touch like a blushing virgin, and street lights winked their greetings. Jack felt power surging through him as the relationship progressed, the power to cling to the city's walls like a desperate lover and the strength to hold her very foundations in his hands. At every corner the city spoke to him, louder than ever before, sharing her secrets without shame. The Brooklyn Bridge, civil engineering's "Old Bitch," stood unapologetic for the men she had killed in her rise to power, but to Jack her masonry towers promised undying devotion. Uptown, the fountain angel in Central Park greeted him with ghostly serenades. And finally, as he came to grips with his new potency, Jack allowed the city to take him inside, slipping into her concrete and asphalt to become one joyous, symbiotic being.

When Jack lost his human virginity several years later, to a girl he met at a party he hadn't even planned to attend, it was nothing compared to what he'd felt the first time he'd sunk into the pavement of New York City and encased himself in her womb.

When his mother tried to take him out of New York, to visit a dying aunt in the suburbs, Jack experienced heartbreak for the first time. He felt dizzy and terrified, gasping for breath, his heart beating wildly out of synch. He knew, then, that he'd never be a bachelor, that he wasn't built to live alone, away from a city's embrace. His mother rushed him back into the city, terrified for her son's health, and in the hospital room at Beth Israel Jack felt the pillows reach up to nuzzle his hair. "There, there," they said, speaking in the city's voice, "I'm here."

But though Jack could never be single, he also couldn't commit. The girl next door was nice, for a time, but her troubles often weighed heavy on his mind and health, flooding him with periodic feelings of helplessness. Jack's transplanted heart yearned to explore other lands, to learn and grow and someday return a better man. For years, he'd felt a tugging, urging him on to cities far away, and when he finally gave in he found himself sinking into the streets of New York and spilling out of the pavement in San Francisco, 3,000 miles from where he'd been.

San Francisco was a gentle lover. The city still carried a sadness, almost a hundred years old, from the time the earth on which she sat had rebelled against her very presence. But beyond that sadness was a feeling of hope, a belief in love and progress and the future that cynical New York had never allowed herself to feel. Jack was shocked by the gentleness, by the way the tall towers of the Golden Gate Bridge welcomed him with open arms and none of the macho bravado of the Brooklyn. Jack would have problems with San Francisco later on, but for now she was sunny and new, her wooden piers massaging his bare feet without the hint of a splinter and her voluptuous hills a welcome change from New York's hard angles.

Taking San Francisco's ethos of free love in mind, Jack allowed himself the full license of exploration. Even as he began to style himself into a sort of superhero, using his sleepless nights and deep connection to his cities to stop the crimes that harmed them, he still saw himself as an urban Casanova, traveling from city to city in concrete wombs to discover what new pleasures they might offer.

Boston was a thoughtful partner, passionate and erudite, deriving her strength from her libraries and lecture halls and the weight of her proud history. Los Angeles was glittering and scattered, more plastic than steel and granite, and almost unbearably vain, but surprisingly creative where it counted. In Washington D.C., the Washington Monument's two mismatched halves spoke to Jack in separate cadences, blending together into a singsong lullaby of red, white, and blue, while the reflecting pool enticed him to sink down into her stillness. Chicago, blustery and fierce but tempered by Midwestern manners, urged Jack to experience new heights of passion at the tip of the Sears Tower, while New Orleans was a whirlwind affair that left Jack feeling drunk and dazzling and grasping at church spires for purchase. Atlanta, Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Richmond, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami – each city was her own person, quiet and loud and gentle and passionate in turns, each filling Jack with more love and desire than he could ever have imagined.

It took a while for Jack to find the courage to leave the country, but once he did he wondered why he'd ever been afraid. Paris was every bit the romantic the popular press had claimed, a sophisticated mistress with pollution as savory as her cuisine and a tower whose graceful latticework Jack's body could get lost in. Tokyo's lights and aggressive modernity were a shock to Jack's senses after his brief experience with the city as a child; he hadn't gotten to notice, then, how beautiful her colors and whirling bicycles could be from the perspective of the immaculate streets and sidewalks. Rio de Janeiro was an exuberant lover, her rolling Portuguese vowels licking at Jack's ears as her signature music vibrated through her walls, while in Sydney Jack felt he could melt forevermore into the curvy embrace of the Opera House shells. From Beijing to Montreal, London to Manila, Mexico City to Cairo, Jack fell in love hundreds of times, in well over a hundred languages.

Jack still sometimes slept with human women. They satisfied the base desires the last bits of his mutilated humanity craved. But the relationships never lasted. The women he slept with, not unreasonably, wanted to be treated like people, like significant individuals. Jack liked them, and respected them, but he could never place them above his cities in his heart. Of all the women, only Angie understood that truth and still stuck around. With nine pints of liquid machinery coursing through her veins, Angie knew what it meant to love something that seemed cold and lifeless to everyone else. There were no illusions between them about what either would choose if given an ultimatum, and that suited Jack just fine.

The cities, on the other hand, always lasted. Even New York, abandoned so long before, remained his love, the kind of first love he knew he would never forget. Even when he joined Stormwatch, and later the Authority, and his primary business in cities became one of command and necessity instead of seduction and leisure, the ecstasy and affection remained in all his interactions. His urban polyamory, if anything, made the missions more successful, his loving attentions making the cities that much more likely to follow his requests.

Now, he loves a city unlike any he's ever known before, a city that flies through the air and is more alive, in an objective sense, than any city on the land. She has no cobblestones to caress, no train tracks to stroke in an easy rhythm. But it is with this city that he's able to visit all the others, moving from city to city with ease, catching up with the old and introducing himself to the new. It's with the help of this strange new city that he knows when those he loves are in trouble, when he needs to rush off to their rescue like a dashing knight out to slay the dragon that threatens his smoggy princess. This relationship is a mature relationship, one less of passion than of mutual respect and trust. It is nothing like his teenage flirtations, and Jack is all the better for it. As long as he sits at the Carrier's helm, helping his team to shape the entire world into a better place, the King of Cities knows he's exactly where he needs to be.