When you are an adult, you spend a lot of time pretending to be a grown up. You’re not really.

Everyone is still about 14. You just pretend you’re not. You drink beer, you talk about sex, you swear, you buy a house, you have kids, you get a job… you do everything you can to prove how grown up and adult and important you are. But really, really, you’re not.

You’ve no bloody idea how to live your life. You’re just doing what everyone else does in the hopes that you’re somehow doing it right. Shoring yourself up against the real world. The world that was cruel and terrible and took everything away.

‘We’ll call it George,’ Jack said suddenly.

‘Call what George?’

‘The parasite that’s inside your boyfriend. Makes it easier if we label them differently. Stops us getting confused. The one that attacked us in the Scotus Clinic was Ringo, the one inside Rhys is George, the one inside Marianne Till is Paul and that leaves the one inside Lucy Sobel as John.’

‘You forgot this one,’ Owen said, waggling the tiny alien creature back and forth in the air.

‘This one can be Stuart. As in Sutcliffe.’

‘You know what I’m trying to say. It’s real, not some spooky Scooby-Doo ghoul thing.’

‘Actually,’ Toshiko felt constrained to say, ‘the ghouls and ghosts and monsters in Scooby-Doo always turned out to be men in masks. Usually the caretaker.’ She noticed Gwen’s raised eyebrow. ‘I liked Velma,’ she said defensively.

‘Yeah, which only goes to prove that you’re not a true Scooby-Doo fan,’ Owen said. He was still watching the patch of darkness as it hugged the corrugated metal side of the warehouse, moving slowly but inexorably toward them. ‘The sixth incarnation of Scooby-Doo, dating to the early 1980s, had Scooby and Shaggy meeting up with real ghosts, vampires and all kinds of shit. Didn’t you ever see The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo? Or Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers?’

‘Sadly, no.’

‘Fun though this is,’ Jack interrupted, ‘I think we have a more pressing concern right now. Although I did think that Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf marked an absolute low in the output of the Hanna-Barbera studios.’

An hour later, they were still in the Boardroom, with the addition of coffees all around.

‘I have noticed,’ Owen said quietly, ‘that when it’s just us, no coffee.’

‘Jack arrives,’ agreed Toshiko, ‘and oh, look, the coffee gets made.’

‘Delivered,’ Gwen added, ‘by hand.’

Ianto just shrugged. ‘I like Jack. The rest of you? I can take you or leave you.’

Gwen was looking over the edge of the roof at the mass of black-eyed people gathered at the foot of the building, like ants. She thought for a moment of Idris Hopper, trapped in that house a few miles away, raging against all this. For all she knew, Rhys could be out there too. And all their friends, family… anyone, everyone.

Ianto joined her.

‘I really, really hate heights, me,’ Gwen said.

‘You should go on a date with him,’ Ianto said, jerking a thumb in Jack’s direction. ‘To him, up on a place like this, that’s a great night out. But when I suggested a rollercoaster once, oh no, that was a death-trap apparently.’