[Jack lets out a short huff of laughter as he relaxes into Ianto's hold without even thinking about it. He's done that with a lot of people, true, but Ianto's more conscious than many of the fact there are times he needs just this way more than sex.

Right now, for instance.]

Yeah, well, we got lucky on the timing there. If that stuff'd knocked me back another year, I'm not sure I would've been verbal at all that first day. And if I'd been much older…

[he sighs, wishing he didn't understand why his mind's decided to start rifling through this particular bunch of boxes, because then it would be a lot easier to just kick them back in the corner.

But even if John hadn't told him, however briefly, that something awful had happened to Simon, he would have seen it. Because he could recognize the shape of the man's cheerful, charming masks too well and what it took to make them.]

Bet it comes as a big shock that right around that time, I got it into my head the best way to convince everyone around me that I wasn't a coward was to run off and enlist. And I guess I must've already been charming enough, since I managed to talk my best friend into coming along.

['talk', hell, he'd begged--hadn't wanted to go alone. Not that it had mattered, in the end. And it doesn't matter that he's never managed to bury that memory, that it's one of the few things that's always stayed clear, it's still enough to make his chest tight to think about.

It had made him do a lot more, after the fact.]