Yay! I'm glad you liked it. It's great to know that Jacques comes across as a good parent (and with a good father-son relationship here)--he definitely tries, and it's what I was aiming for. He's not flawless, but he definitely tries, and I'm aiming for it mostly working out well.
Well, everyone comes from somewhere, no? Between Jacques and I think a few other characters as well (Agen____t, for example), I've done a certain amount of thinking about how a former badfic character might relate to it all and try to understand things. My own thinking on it has shifted over the years--Jacques now has a journey of thinking about who he is vs who Jack Harkness is, and it rather mirrors my own shifts in thinking. At this point, the perspective is more "I am my own person who was once more or less Jack and shares some history and memories with him", but initially it was much closer to "I must take care to separate myself from Jack, to figure out very clearly where he ends and I begin, because I have a bunch of his memories but am clearly someone else, because I was obviously different enough to replace him and six agents and a CAD said so too." (It doesn't help that on the surface they visibly share a good few traits--poor guy. The main things that made him Not Jack are the sort of core differences that he wouldn't be comfortable talking about casually. He also started off far closer to Jack when it comes to speech patterns and so on--writing him in 2013, in his first year of recruitment, is a bit strange and takes more effort for that reason. He's developed since then, both in and out of universe.)
Anyway. Setting all that aside (and trust me, I can talk about this type of characterization for ages), kids like to know where they come from, in my experience. It's good to know where you come from. Having roots is important. You can make of them what you will, to a certain point, but it's good and important to know what you're starting with. IRL, people who feel disconnected from their roots might go searching for them--there's a fascinating book by Paul Cowan on the topic (memoir style), the title of which currently escapes me. Anyway. A kid like Cai being curious about, essentially, his birth family (even though he himself was uncanonical and they were OOC in the rest of the fic) makes a lot of sense to me. His parents, at least, are canonically together; you also get kids like the Satos, or the Robinsons, whose birth parents usually aren't together (...and might even hate each other for most of canon, like Henry Robinson's). Even there, though, you can at least look at each individual parent and at the canon. There's still something. Even Agen____t, who showed up as basically a blank slate SHIELD agent, has had that much to draw on--the training and atmosphere and the knowledge of what zir home canon's Earth is like. It's important.
I mean, yeah, self-sufficient is one thing, but...I don't know. I mostly meant it as a sort of "I'm having fun doing my thing, but would be excited if this happened"? And, in Cai's case, hopeful since he has a question? I don't know. I didn't mean it to be particularly sad! I'm sure the agents come by as often as they can, and the Nursery staff likely fill some of the gaps. If memory serves, I was also pretty good at finding ways to occupy myself, especially after I learned to read quickly, but I still really wanted my parents around. But then, I was also an only child with a good relationship with my parents, so...context. But based on what I've read and seen and so on, a child's baseline is often wanting to have that safety and security of a parent around, even though that can be damaged? I've also read some things (mostly around the internet, probably some in articles or books) by people who grew up with bad or incredibly bad parents, and very often (almost universally) they seem to have wanted (and often still want as adults) that--the good, kind, safe and supportive parents they should have had. I don't know. I feel strongly about this. But my main point is probably something along the lines of that as far as I know, the kid "baseline" is to want to have their parental figures around sometimes (or frequently), even if they're also plenty capable of entertaining themselves for hours on end.
~Z, apparently taking a turn for the serious somewhere? It's also just incredible to me that there are people who can trace their family tree back centuries. The whole concept of this sort of roots and how people might take very differently to them fascinates me. But now it's been almost an hour on the Board, and this really isn't the moment to go off on that tangent, and I'd better stop writing and post this. Anyway. Thanks for reading and reviewing, doc. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and that it made you think a little.