The warm feeling spreading through him courtesy of the sunshine gets just that little more intense at the Doctor's touch. Jack thinks somedays he wanted that more than the answers he'd ached for after the Game Station, grabbing hands and running. It had always felt better, running with the Doctor and Rose, than it had when he was all by himself.

"I know," he says, and right now he does. The fear of being rejected again has calmed, not only because of the sunshine's effects but John's acceptance of so many things and…

"I've just been busy, in a good way. Somehow got myself a proper boyfriend for the first time in awhile. And.." he almost laughs with delight, because the thing he's been searching for so long is here, and maybe broken in ways that can never be fixed, but alive and here and for the moment all the guilt and shame are gone, "my brother's showed up to boot, and we've got a lot of catching up to do. Really does make putting down roots sound pretty nice." It doesn't even occur to him, right then, that he'd never told the Doctor about Gray--at least not from when he stood in the relative timelines; he hasn't had the nerve to ask, but something in him keeps feeling like whenever the Doctor was before the Dreamscape was later, that they'd found each other again for some moment, and man having to preserve the timeline by not prodding for hints of the future sucks sometimes.

Not so much right now, though.