It was getting tiring. Whenever they were brought up. 'Just because you're his part-time shag.' 'It's not like that, between me and Jack.' 'Eyecandy.'

It was tiring because he didn't know. He never knew. Jack hit on everything that moved, he joked about everything, and he hid everything with so much possessive obsession that it was hard not to feel like just that. Was he right, when he said it wasn't just sex? It got harder to fight, whenever the man turned away when he asked, whenever Jack shut down every attempt to find out anything about him with cold efficiency.

And he felt just stupid. Stupid for sinking when they'd been so deathly close catching the pterodactyl, shaking when, amidst the battle with Lisa, he'd been woken by the man's unyielding lips against his own, breaking at the hard look he'd gotten when he'd lied about Lisa being his last kiss. For yielding so thoroughly after Suzie's last death.

Stupid for thinking he was special when Jack vanished for months without telling them anything, for waiting, for going to pieces in his hands when he came back, for that leap of hope when Jack had said 'I came back for you,' before he'd crushed it with his reiteration. For that second leap when he'd been asked to dinner, for the pain in every touch that screamed 'I love you' in his head, for realizing that he was lost without the man.

For the thousands of times he sank under the weight of Jack's hidden life, and wondered if he would even register in a hundred years- or in fifty, or twenty.

Stupid for have only worn suits even before Lisa's death just for a stupid compliment that had been thrown back at him carelessly.

Stupid for hoping that, even if he somehow knew even less than Gwen Cooper about his lover, that it meant something. That he was seeing something the others weren't. That Jack was seeing something only a precious few seemed to have. That he wasn't alone in this.

That even if he was going to die alone, Jack was going to cry for him.

Stupid for giving and giving and giving and never asking, never taking.

Stupid.

And, worse, stupid for never telling Jack any of this, and letting him walk away- again and again and again- always left with the same question.

"Do you even care, Jack Harkness?"