"Yeah," Jack says, quietly. "And I'm going to lead you back here. Right out of where you are."

His fingers twine in Ianto's hair. Everything is intertwined, here – power and symbolism and suggestion and reminder and recall. Being this close is not a foreign situation to either one of them, even when it's been perverted from both sides – by Adam or Thane, false memories or buried, this side of the Rift or the other.

"But you need to find the way out," he says, and starts letting the emotion he's not shielding... slide. The thrum of loyalty becomes dependence, then yearning; the watching becomes predatory; the love, hunger. For violence, for power. For one thing to change and choke itself out under an action of will.

It's not easy, but it's too easy at the same time. All he has to do is dip back down into his Agency days, remember how it felt to be so poisonous and feral. He can reconstruct a persona from the things Ianto's told him and what he himself has seen. Adam went for the clichés. Jack Harkness, John Thane, Jarec Issendur, all of his various name codes, understood those.

Tell me when it's right, he thinks. His hand is steady at the back of Ianto's head, preventing him from pulling away. "Tell me when this hurts."