Ianto Jones took his coffee black, and seriously.

When Torchwood One had been destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf, Ianto had been one of the few survivors, and he had returned to Wales looking for a job with the Cardiff operation. Jack had never had much time for Torchwood One, he didn’t like the way they did things and thought their disastrous handling of the Dalek-Cyberman situation had proved him right. So he was never going to have much interest in Ianto Jones, despite the cut of his suit, never mind how cute he might have been. But Ianto was determined, and he campaigned hard, though to Jack it felt like he’d got himself a stalker. And Ianto was ready to do anything to get himself a place in the Hub. He was an intelligent man with Honours in English Literature and History – but he’d just make the coffee and run the hoover around if that was what it took to get back into Torchwood.

So, in the end, Jack had given him a break as the tea boy and the guy who rang for the pizzas. He had earned his stripes since then and no one really thought of him as the office boy any more. He was a lot more than that, especially to Jack. But no one else could make coffee like Ianto. And, truth was, Ianto liked to make coffee. There was more to it than pouring hot water over ground beans.

The philosopher Sir James Mackintosh had said that the powers of a man’s mind were proportionate to the quantity of coffee he drank, and Voltaire had knocked back fifty cups of it a day, so Ianto reckoned there had to be something in it. And saving Cardiff from the kinds of things that came through the Rift called for quick, inspired thinking, so Ianto took it upon himself to make sure the coffee was good.

Ianto Jones, saving the world with a dark roast.

One day, when he’d had time on his hands, Jack had tried to work out how many times he had died. He actually sat down in his office with a block of paper and a couple of pens and wrote a neat 1 in the margin and alongside it he wrote Dalek.

That had been how it all started. After that there had been endless bar-room brawls – they had even killed him at Torchwood back in the early days – and at one time he’d worked in a travelling show billed as The Man Who Cannot Die. OK, people had paid to kill him then, but he figured that even if it bought him a few beers at the end of the day, when you got down to it a death was a death.

Then Torchwood had discovered that they had a problem with alien sleeper agents and the whole city started going up in smoke, and Jack lost the list and never got around to starting it again. The score was somewhere around a couple of hundred, by then. But he hadn’t even started on the trenches in Flanders.

He was sure he had already forgotten some of them – unlike his lovers; he remembered all of them (every sex and species) – the one thing he never forgot, however, was how it felt to come back to life.

Like being dragged over broken glass.

It never got any better, and he never got used to it.

Several floors below, Ianto and his companions in the elevator had made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor. According to the acrylic plaque on the wall of the cabin, it was supposed to carry no more than ten people at a time. Ianto thanked God that they hadn’t been travelling at maximum capacity when the power went. It already felt like they were running out of oxygen.

He knew that was ridiculous, the cabin wasn’t airtight; they weren’t going to suffocate, it was just getting hot, that was all. He had already peeled off his jacket and loosened his tie.

Ryan, the guy that had lost his wife, had stopped whimpering. He had stopped doing anything, in fact. He just sat in a corner of the cabin staring ahead of him, almost catatonic, probably playing over and over in his mind the moment that Gillian had been taken by something awful that came out of the wall. Ianto seriously hoped that they got him out of there soon, or perhaps the poor man would be caught in that hideous mind-loop for ever.

Simon and Andrew sat opposite Ianto, their arms looped together. It looked casual but he knew that they were each taking comfort from the contact. He thought about Jack, and hoped that he was all right.

He caught himself, and smiled. Like Jack wouldn’t be all right.

Toshiko followed, just two steps behind and reached the bedroom as Jack dived onto the massive bed in there like a big kid.

‘Now this is something I could use,’ he grinned.

Toshiko smiled. Jack was a big kid sometimes, all right, but he didn’t play kids’ games. She bet he could come up with some pretty interesting and enjoyable ways to use the bed.

For a nano-second she wondered if he was about to invite her to try out a couple, and she wondered if she would agree.