His breath stills for a moment when Gray starts speaking, words calling forth the brief flashes he's been recalling. But so little of it is anything he wants to remember, even if the edges are less sharp and jagged now. For what's certainly not going to be the last time, he wishes he could give Gray more than broken pieces of the boy he was.

But that pain hurts less than usual, watching Gray's hand on Estelle in the sunlight. Even as Gray keeps speaking, echoing Jack's own experiences in burying his past. Maybe he'd taken longer to do it, had been far more concious and purposeful about what he was doing at the start, but the end result was almost the same. He'd just covered it up differently, most of the time.

His past doens't get a chance to cover his past in shadows, though, because it gets jostled just that little bit by Gray's touch. Jack surprises himself a little by laughing, shaking his head.

"Sorry, even if I wanted to, that's not happening," but he's smiling as he says it. "I'm always going to worry about you, but I'm trying not to let it weigh me down so much. It's getting easier." It feels a little strange, for something like that to be the truth instead of a way of keeping someone from seeing under one of his masks. Not that he'd have much chance of that with Gray, even after all the years and pain that had separated them for so long.

"Especially when I remember I've got several lifetimes of teasing you to catch up on."