He walked away from the Doctor. He shouldn't have chased after him to begin with. It was a stupid idea. The Doctor didn't want him. He didn't now, and he didn't back then. He never would; and Jack wasn't going to spend any more time chasing after a fantasy.

He didn't need to, not anymore. That's what he'd learned in this last year. He'd learned that the Doctor was just a fantasy…a wonderful one, yes, but not real. He was bigger than life. He saved the world, and always did the right thing. That's what Jack had needed back then; someone to push him in the right direction, to show him there was another way to live. Then he'd left him behind. Not as Jack had originally thought, because the Doctor didn't know he was alive, but because he didn't want him. Jack had spent more than a century searching for someone who simply didn't want him. He didn't need to do that anymore; he didn't need to chase something that wasn't real.

Not now. Now he had something real. He had Ianto and Ianto was everything he had wanted the Doctor to be. Ianto didn't just push Jack to be a good man; to do the right thing, to be better than he was. Ianto truly believed he was those things. Ianto would never leave him behind because he was 'wrong'. Ianto wasn't a fantasy; he was real and he idid/i want Jack.

Now he had to go back home and convince Ianto that he wanted him. Convince him that he hadn't taken off on some grand holiday without a word to anyone. Ianto would only think he was gone for a few weeks but he still needed to make him understand. Jack knew the amount of time he was gone didn't really matter, a year; or just weeks it wasn't okay for him to desert someone he cared for without a word of explanation. He'd have to make him understand it wasn't a vacation that it had been…it had been a mistake, and he knew that. Now, he just needed to make Ianto believe that.