Jack shook his head, smiling at the other man's honesty, at how earnest he was. "Believe me. when you overstep any sort of boundary that I might have, you'll know about it. Chances are, though, it's never going to be any sort of boundary between Ianto and I. Maybe you're not used to people thinking like me, and that's fine, but really. He's not mine. There is no hierarchy between us just because of the order that we might have gotten to know him, you know. That's not how this works. Well..."

He shrugged. "That's not how it's supposed to work, at least. Granted, some people aren't cut out for this sort of thing, and they find that out the hard way, but." He smiled, and his smile shone through his voice so that neither of them had to open their eyes to know that it was there. "I guess the three of us just lucked out, in that area of things... That Ianto's ahead of his time in the way he thinks, especially. And that you and I both know that he's never going to play favorites, here."