Miranda parked her car around the corner from Nora's flat and sat behind the wheel thinking. She had taken to heart what Fish and Nora's father had said, she'd thought long and hard about what she was about to do. The decision to reveal her immortality to Nora wasn't made lightly but as the days and weeks went on, Miranda had grown sadder over Nora's absence from her life.

Oddly enough it had been Gwen's words that had influenced her the most. The former PC had knocked on her door one night for a forced girl's night in, a bottle of wine in one hand and a sack with a romantic comedy and ice cream in the other. The two women had laughed during the movie while they ate whole pints of ice cream then they had gotten tipsy on the wine as they had talked. After Miranda had tried to explain how revealing her immortality to mortal lovers had never worked well for her in the past, Gwen had simply said, There's a first time for everything. So she decided to take a chance and risk it.

Miranda got out of her car and hit the buzzer for Nora's flat. She had tried to call the other woman but it seems that Nora's penchant for losing her mobile phone hadn't changed. The number no longer worked.

"Yes?" came Nora's voice over the barking of Alvin the Corgi.

"Nora? Erm… It's Miranda. I'm sorry to just drop by. I tried calling but your phone isn't working," she stammered. Gods I sound like an idiot…

"Give me a minute, I'll be right down," came Nora's startled reply.

Miranda turned away from the doorway and began to pace slowly, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself. She wasn't surprised that Nora hadn't invited her up. Hell, she was surprised Nora didn't tell her to sod off. It had been more than a month since the two women had spoken.

"Miranda?" Nora said softly.

When Miranda turned around she felt her heart tighten. She hadn't realised how much she'd missed Nora until that very moment, hearing her name in beautiful Welsh vowels.

"I'm sorry. I tried calling your mobile and the number wasn't working and I didn't want to call your office," she stammered.

"No, it's fine, Miranda. What are you doing here?"

"I just… I was thinking… I couldn't… I didn't…" Miranda stopped stammering and took a deep breath to steady herself. By the Gods just spit it out! "I miss you. I was wrong and I wanted to talk-"

"Nora? Who is it? Dinner's getting cold!" shouted a woman from up the stairs.

Miranda turned her head upwards and then looked at Nora as her heart plummeted. It's better this way… Miranda told herself but it was a bitter pill to swallow.

"I'm sorry. I never should have… I'm… I'm sorry. I'm going," she stammered as she turned and headed for her car, forcing herself not to look back to catch one last glimpse of Nora.

Before she'd taken more than two steps, she felt a hand on her shoulder. "It's my sister, you daft cow," Nora said with a laugh. "Let me get rid of her and we can talk. Go wait in your car, you're not exactly her favorite person right now."

Sister? "It's all right, Nora. I can come back."

Nora shook her head and started to walk away, not giving Miranda time to argue, she said, "No, we should talk. Give me ten… fifteen minutes."

Miranda dutifully walked back to her car, a little stunned, and got back behind the steering wheel. She had parked around the corner. She used the time to compose herself. With an impatience worthy of Jack and precision worthy of Ianto, Miranda waited the fifteen minutes and then walked back to Nora's door. She rang the buzzer again.

"Miranda?" she asked over the speaker.

"Yeah, it's me," Miranda replied.

Nora buzzed her into the building and Miranda walked up the stairs, knocking on the door. Nora thrust a mug of tea into Miranda's hands right after she'd walked in.

"Have a seat," Nora said, her voice a little harsh. "I guess you're here because of something Tad said?"

Miranda shook her head as she sat down onto the sofa. "I have spoken to your father but it was mostly Torchwood business."

"Mostly?"

"He mentioned that you were upset and that he felt you could handle the truth," Miranda confessed.

"He was right wasn't he? You were lying to me about something?" Nora said, a little affronted.

"There's no easy way for me to do this. There's nothing I can say that will make it clearer than if I just demonstrate and I know this is all going to sound completely mental."

Miranda eased herself off the sofa until she was kneeling on Nora's floor. She shifted the papers and magazines off of the glass coffee table and took the dagger from her boot and a handkerchief from her pocket. Nora looked a little startled at the weapon's appearance but was unafraid.

"Two weeks ago I told you that there were things in life I couldn't give you… children… growing old together? It's because I can't have children. I don't grow old, Nora. I don't age."

Miranda sliced into her forearm with the dagger, opening a deep cut. Wincing, she wiped the blood away with the handkerchief so Nora could see the cut clearly. Nora slid off the sofa as well, seizing Miranda's arm by the wrist as the cut sealed itself, vanishing as if it had never been.

"Duw!"

"I'm immortal," she said simply, wiping the rest of the blood away from her arm and the coffee table with the handkerchief.

"Tad called you 'an unnatural woman'. I thought he was gay bashing. This is what he meant?" Nora was still staring at her arm. "How did he find out?"

Taking her arm from Nora's grasp, Miranda stood up and walked into the kitchen, returning with some glass cleaner and some paper towels. As she cleaned the coffee table, she said, "In 1978, the Torchwood team was invited to the retirement party of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Your father saw me there. Back in June, when I went to London, it was for Torchwood's annual UNIT briefing. Your father was there too, he recognised me."

"I wasn't even born in 1978! How old are you?" Nora asked, shocked.

"Too old," Miranda said sadly, giving her usual evasive answer. She stood up and put the glass cleaner away.

"How did you get like this?" asked Nora as she turned towards Miranda. "Was it something to do with Torchwood? An accident or an experiment?"

Miranda tilted her head slightly. Nora was taking this far better than she expected. "My kind are born mortal but with the potential to become immortal."

"The potential?" Nora asked, confused.

"Our immortality is awakened by the shock of a violent or unnatural death."

Nora swallowed and asked, "You mean you had to die? How?"

"You don't want to know that, Nora," Miranda answered evasively. Life had been much different when she had been born. While death was almost never a pleasant affair, Miranda's first death had been a gruesome and painful ordeal.

"I asked didn't I?" Nora said, drawing herself up defiantly.

Miranda sighed and looked away from Nora's gaze. "I was a slave in a warlord's harem. I displeased him. He beat me to death."

Nora flinched a little at the brutality of the answer but her curiosity won out over her pity. "You said 'my kind'? There are more of you?" she asked.

"There aren't many of us… less than one thousandth of a percent of the population," Miranda shrugged.

"Is there a check box on the census for immortal?" Nora laughed nervously.

Joyce Greenfield had been Miranda's Watcher in the 70's. Miranda had noticed the woman following her. Joyce had provided Miranda with a a great deal of information, nothing that could give Miranda an edge in the Game but enough to prove the organisation's existence to Miranda. The Watchers had been following immortals for centuries. Their data was impressive.

"Not exactly…" Miranda crossed the flat to Nora's window, shifting aside the curtain. "Come here for a minute."

Nora moved to stand beside Miranda. "What am I looking at?"

"Do you see that man? Across the street? Sandy hair and freckles in the leather coat? His name is Kiernan Davies, he's my Watcher. Or as I like to call him, 'My Welsh Stalker'," Miranda said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.

"Your what?"

"My Watcher, a secret society of mortals who, well, watch my kind."

"He's watching my flat?" Nora gasped.

"No, he's watching me. He follows me everywhere I go as best as he's able," Miranda said and then smiled. "It would probably be more accurate to say that I let him follow me wherever I go."

"What for?" Nora asked.

"I'm getting there. I told you that I'm immortal but that's not entirely accurate. There is one way to kill me."

"Please don't say a silver bullet or a stake to the heart…" Nora said with more nervous laughter.

"No," Miranda said shake of her head. "Decapitation."

Nora winced, her hand unconsciously rubbing the side of her neck. "So you can die."

"Yes, but not from sickness or old age," Miranda said with a nod. She could tell that Nora was reaching her limit. It was a great deal of strange information to absorb and, so far, Nora was handling it better than anyone she had ever told. Miranda found herself daring to hope that maybe Gwen was right but the worst portion of the explanation was coming up.

Miranda dropped her voice and said, "The Watchers observe what we call The Game. My kind? We challenge each other and fight to the death."

Nora's eyes were steadily widening as she listened and now her jaw was starting to drop.

Miranda repeated the words she had heard four thousand years ago from her own teacher, "When there are but a few of us left, we will be undeniably drawn to a far off land for The Gathering where we will compete for the prize. In the end, there can be only one."

"You're telling me you go around slicing people's heads off?" Nora shouted, finally seeming to reach all she could take. She backed away from Miranda, fearful.

Trying to keep her voice as calm and soothing as possible, Miranda said, "I only fight to defend myself from the others."

"But you've killed? You've murdered! How many?"

"I don't keep score, Nora," Miranda said gently, "but, yes, I've spilled blood."

"All for this prize? What is it?"

"No one knows."

Nora gasped, her eyes wide and her expression shocked. "That's mad! Going around killing each other over a prize and you don't even know what it is? As if any prize would be worth it! It's like some sort of sick tournament without any rules!"

"There are rules, Nora," Miranda said, holding up two fingers. "Only one immortal may challenge another. Once a challenge has begun, no other can interfere. There is no fighting on holy ground, churches, cemeteries and the like."

"And these Watchers they enforce these rules?" asked Nora, incredulously.

"No, they merely observe the Game. We police our own," Miranda said, still trying to keep her voice calm and level so that she didn't push Nora too much. She could hear the hysteria on the edge of the other woman's voice.

"They follow you around to see it all happen? Why? Some sort of sick thrill?"

"The Watchers believe the outcome of the Game will change the course of humanity. They believe there is some greater truth or purpose to the Game. They follow our lives, record who we fight, who wins and who dies, for the sake of history."

"But you can stop! You don't have to kill anyone!"

"Nora, it's not that simple. The others? They'd still pursue me," she said, again gently trying to keep Nora calm. The Game was always the hardest thing to explain, the hardest for people of this modern age to accept. "If I'm challenged and I lose, I don't just die. Everything I am, my strength, my life force, will flow into the victor, making him or her stronger. We call it the quickening. It's the driving force in the Game. It's what compels us to kill each other. The more heads you take, the stronger you become. The stronger you become, the longer you survive."

"How could you? Kill another human being?" Nora asked, her voice a bare whisper.

"How does a police constable shoot a criminal? How does a soldier fight in battle? Because it's me or them, Nora. And after all these years? I still want to live."

Nora sat back down on the sofa, a look of stunned disbelief on her face. Miranda didn't push or speak. She let Nora sit there in silence, long minutes passing as Nora processed all this strange information. It was nearly ten minutes before Nora said anything. Miranda was relieved to see that Nora had calmed and that the panicked look on her face had settled into something more herself.

"You weren't going to tell me any of this were you?" Nora asked.

"I wasn't planning on it just yet. I had thought, maybe, at some point in the future," Miranda said with a shrug.

"Then why are you telling me now?"

Miranda hung her head. She crossed from the window and knelt down in front of Nora, reaching out to hold Nora's hands in hers. "I'm selfish, Nora. I want to keep seeing you."

"Selfish? How is that selfish?"

"By all rights, I should walk away. I should leave you free to have all the things I can't give you… a home… children… growing old with someone…"

Nora stood up. "Why can't we have those things?"

"I can't have children, Nora. I don't age. People tend to notice someone who's been living in the flat around the corner for forty years but doesn't look a day over thirty," Miranda said, still kneeling on the floor.

"And someday you'll watch me grow old and die," Nora's voice a bare whisper.

Miranda swallowed. "Yes."

"You've watched others, people you've loved, die? Lost them?" she whispered.

"Yes," Miranda said, not able to look at Nora as she spoke.

"How many?"

"Too many," she said, giving another of her evasive answers.

"Am I ever going to get a straight answer out of you?" Nora snapped, exasperated.

"Some of the questions you're asking have complicated answers," Miranda said, honestly, lifting herself onto the sofa.

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to know the answer," Nora said. She squared her shoulders and drew herself up. "How old are you? How many lovers have you outlived? I don't want to be with someone who lies to me."

Miranda swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. She closed her eyes as memories flooded her. There were names without faces and faces without names. Other aspects and bits of people percolated up in her memory. Isabetta's face spattered with blood as she coughed. Her first husband's head laying metres from his body. An American soldier during the second world war who's name she'd never known who'd taken her with her back against a brick wall down an alley. Someone who loved figs. Someone who's eyes crinkled just so when he smiled… or was it she? The sound of a laugh she couldn't place to a name or a face.

"I was born in the middle of the Bronze Age. It was about four thousand years ago," Miranda said softly. She closed her eyes and felt tears prickling behind the lids. "I've been married five times, two wives, three husbands."

Miranda didn't realise it but she was twisting the ring on her right hand. She opened her eyes again when she felt Nora reached out and touched the ring she was nervously fiddling with.

"When was this?" Nora asked gently.

"1920," Miranda said quietly.

"What happened to her?"

"Him…" Miranda shook her head and told Nora what was true in 1926. "He deserved a wife who could give him children, who could grow old with him. That wasn't me."

"You left him?" Nora asked softly.

"Sometimes it's better that way," Miranda said just as softly.

"You mean it's simpler," Nora countered, raising her chin. She drew a shaky breath before she continued, "You never told him, did you? Will you leave me too someday?"

It was the moment of truth. Miranda knew exactly how she felt about Nora. It was why she was laying her secrets bare before her. "I won't leave until you ask me to."

Nora crushed her lips into Miranda's, her arms encircling her neck. Momentarily stunned, she took a few seconds to respond, plunging one hand into Nora's hair as the other slid up between Nora's shoulder blades, pressing the other woman into her. Nora's lips parted and her tongue slid into Miranda's mouth. Miranda let out a deep throaty moan as Nora's tongue slid along the roof of her mouth. Nora pushed Miranda backwards into the sofa, pressing herself into the other woman. It wasn't long before Nora broke the kiss and leaned back enough to look into Miranda's eyes, breathless.

"I'm not asking," Nora said as she tugged Miranda down the hallway towards her bedroom.