I want you by my side.

 

Everyone else thought he just stopped caring about anything, and started sleeping with Jack just to do it. To imagine that it all had never happened. 

It had never been that. There had been those moments, at the very beginning, in between saving one another. Catching Myfanwy had been the most obvious moment that it had started. Conflicting things that had started there. It was all there, from the beginning. A sort of tension that simmered under the surface in every interaction. 

Then there had been Lisa, and while Ianto may have been flexible in his definitions of relationships, he was nothing short of a faithful partner. All of the things happening in the background had to fade to white noise in the face of her pain, and the need for her to be well again. It would have been a betrayal, then.

 But then Lisa was gone. All of her pain, their pain, the pain that had sometimes filled the space between them, until there was no room for anything else. All of the guilt for what he felt when he wasn't with her. All of the ties that made it so he was kept to one place and time. There was grief, yes of course there was. But eventually... It was more like he had been mourning her for a very long time. Since the battle of Canary Wharf. Since the War. Since Torchwood One. He had been grieving for so long, even while she was still 'alive', that it didn't seem so inappropriate to try to step past it so soon after she 'died'.

And this, this tension between himself and Jack. It had also been there for most of that time. Waiting for the moment when it could fully make itself known. 

This wasn't new. This wasn't abrupt, or sudden, or flighty, or a whim. It was inevitable. It was only a question of when.