Jack jumped when the cup slipped from his grasp, his slightly wild gaze flying to the shards of china that were even now scattering in all directions. Nearly thirteen hundred years, he thought wildly. She was saying she was nearly thirteen HUNDRED years old and yet never once had she popped up on ANYONE's radar.
The door opened quickly and Ianto's head poked in when he heard the crash of china breaking, his hand held tightly to his gun just in case it was needed.
Jack shook his head and shooed the concerned man out of the room with a rough motion, unwilling to break the strange silence that had settled between the two of them with unnecessary questions or explanations.
Ashildr for the most part merely sat there completely unruffled as if it were every day that she announced she was an immortal who had walked this planet for over a millennium. Her gaze never left his shocked face, though he could see an almost painful hunger leap into the tortured depths as finally she knew he believed her every word.
"My apologies, it's not every day that I meet another immortal. Especially not one so… intriguing as you." He leaned down and quickly cleaned up the broken pieces of china, grabbing several napkins off the tray to sop up the mess of coffee that had splattered on the floor before he tossed the whole sodden mess in the bin beside his desk.
"So you finally believe me?"
Jack paused in the middle of pulling himself up to his desk, his gaze suddenly going hooded though he couldn't stop the automatic response. "I'm still not sure that I do believe you, though you have some information that you otherwise shouldn't unless you actually did travel with him."
Ashildr just threw her head back and laughed. "I've been watching out for you Captain Jack Harkness. I know that's not your real name, I actually met the original bearer of that name. It would seem your real name has been lost in time, if you even remember it at all." She challenged, leaning forward so abruptly that Jack froze beneath that piercing gaze.
"I had nearly forgotten my name after only eight centuries. I had forgotten everything that had once meant something to me. I had lost too much, watched too many I had loved grow old and die over the centuries. It became easier to forget really, to find joy in the thrill of a momentary adrenaline rush since it was all meaningless in the end."
Jack took a deep breath, the endless sorrow in her words echoing his own feelings of remorse and loss that had only grown more unbearable as the years turned into centuries. He had nearly gone mad in that first century while he had waited for the right Doctor to finally show up. His endless deaths, each seemingly worse than the last, had taken a little bit more of his humanity from him until he found joy only in the basest debauchery, in the deepest bottle or in yet another pointless night with some random stranger. He had allowed himself to love a few times during that first century, but all too quickly he too had learned the hard lesson that love would be the thing that drove him completely insane if he allowed it.
Her words struck a deep chord within him, and suddenly Jack found himself wanting to know more. "How did it happen for you, Ashildr? Did you ask for it?"
She shook her head, the forced chuckle barely enough to dry the shimmer of tears in her eyes that was even now threatening to overflow. "No, Jack, I had no warning. I never even dreamed that such a thing was possible. He had used a chip from a… creature, an alien that had attacked our village to bring me back from the dead. He called it a repair kit of some sort which he then placed on my forehead."
She sighed softly, her eyes clouding with the memory that she had tried so hard to forget over the centuries. "It was absorbed into my body and is forever repairing me. He gave me a second one so that I could make a companion one day when I finally understood what it meant to be immortal. But he didn't stay to tell me any of this, he left it to my father to tell me when I finally regained consciousness. I didn't understand, Jack. I didn't understand any of it. He didn't stay to tell me that I would never grow old or die, that I would only be able to watch everything I had known and loved turn to dust."
Jack could feel himself getting angry with the Doctor once again, though this time on Ashildr's behalf. This future Doctor, however many regenerations down the road he was now still hadn't learned a damn thing from what he had done to Jack. What was worse was that he had done it to a woman who had no idea such a thing were possible except in the realm of dark magics and fairy tales, or the most foul of witchcrafts. He was of half a mind to call his Doctor and beat him senseless well into his next regeneration for being such a bloody idiot AGAIN.
Ashildr was watching Jack, watching the emotions play across his face and the tensing of his jaw as her story continued. She was hitting a nerve with him for some reason and she wasn't quite sure what it was, though she did remember the regret that she had briefly glimpsed in the Doctor's sad eyes all those centuries ago when they had both sat in that long forgotten tavern.
"It must have driven you mad in the beginning." Jack's voice cracked on the question, his own mind flooded with memories of the madness of his first few centuries of life, the madness that had nearly destroyed him when he had lain buried in the earth for nearly two millennia.
Ashildr could only nod tightly in response. "It did, Jack."
They both sat in silence for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts as the conversation brought up memories that both had tried for centuries to bury. Jack ached to know so much more about this woman, this one human who the Doctor had been compelled to save and see what he felt had made her so special. "It was an accident for me, the Doctor didn't even know it had happened until after it was over."
She gasped when she heard his admission, her fingers flexing involuntarily on the now cold cup of coffee in the only sign of her eagerness for more. "I'm sure you know about aliens and the Doctor's ship and what exactly it can do, since you've been studying anything to do with him for as long as you have."
"Yes, I do Jack though I must admit that I do not understand them. I begged to go with him five hundred years ago, he denied me so I had to learn what I could on my own."
Jack just nodded. "That seems to be his M.O." He leaned back in his chair, his hands running over his face even as he blew out a frustrated breath. "I can't believe I'm even contemplating telling you this, but since you're like me, it seems somehow oddly appropriate."
Ashildr let dark lashes fall to cover the greedy gleam of hunger for all that he had to tell her, though she couldn't conceal the quick flick of her tongue to moisten her lips. "I'm hardly going to be able to run and tell anyone what you're going to share. If I do, then it would draw too much unwanted attention to my own… unique situation."
Jack couldn't let go of the thought that he was messing with the timelines if he continued down this track, but for the first time in all his long existence here was someone who understood just what it meant to be burned by the Doctor like he had. Yes he had long since made his peace with the skinny alien, but that didn't mean that he still didn't have moments like now when he could quite happily throttle the Time Lord for what he had done.
"I'm over two thousand years old now, though I didn't experience many of those centuries in the same way that you did. I do however know exactly what you mean about the madness, about how everything fades away after a while and nothing, even dying, having much of a thrill anymore."
He'd managed to shock her with that statement, her lips parting before she blurted out. "But you didn't show up until the late 1800's. I've been looking for you for five centuries, how could I have missed you for so long?" She sounded genuinely upset that she had lost nearly five hundred years and he had been there that entire time.
"That's because you weren't looking in the right place, Ashildr."
"Where could I have looked? Did you somehow manage to make it to the new world when it was first discovered and that's how I missed you?"
He threw his head back with a laugh, finally feeling in control for the first time since she had walked into the hub. "I wish it had been as simple as that. No, you never would've found me because I was lying in an unmarked grave for nearly nineteen centuries."
She sat back, her hand flying to her forehead to still the sudden spinning of the room around her. This man, this immortal, had known pain and suffering the likes of which she could only imagine. His simple words were spoken with such a lack of emotion, she knew that he was most likely screaming in rage and anguish at just the thought of all those years spent underground. She needed to know more, she needed to know everything and she needed him to know everything about her as well. It was more of a compulsion now than it had ever been.
"How?"
Jack looked up at her question, his gaze flicking to Ianto who was standing by the door anxiously looking in to see if everything was all right. He nodded curtly but knew that he couldn't continue this conversation here, there was too much that both of them knew that could mess with timelines even worse than they already were. He had already made the decision to tell her the whole truth, since she was as much an aberration as he was and the Doctor hadn't seen fit to destroy either of them when he probably should have. So what if he found some comfort in the presence of another unwilling immortal who the Doctor had abandoned to fend for herself? He felt like he bloody well deserved it.
Pushing away from his desk, he walked over to the coat rack and pulled on his blue captain's coat. "Come on, let's go for a drink somewhere. I'll buy, but we're not finished talking by a long shot."
He held out his hand to her, his gaze dropping to the diamond and emerald brooch that she had pinned to her neck that had been his first clue that she might be more than met the eye.
She placed her hand in his firm grasp before rising to her feet, her gaze once more regal as she let it sweep over him from head to foot. "Still living in the past are we, Captain?"
He just grinned and bowed at the waist before motioning for her to precede him out of his office. "I could ask the same of you, Ashildr."
She just laughed and tossed her hair over her shoulder, her steps slow and measured as she swept past the startled Ianto and waited for Jack to join her side. "I preferred some centuries over others, but the year I got this brooch was by far one of my favorites. It's the year the Doctor came back and it finally all made sense."
Jack glanced over to Ianto, seeing the younger man betray no emotion whatsoever when he heard Ashildr's comments about having seen centuries. That cool aplomb was one of the reasons why Jack loved Ianto so much, and why with a single glance he knew that Ianto would destroy the recordings that he had just made.
Ianto had heard everything anyways so it was not like Jack was keeping secrets, but he didn't want to risk anyone else getting their hands on that recording. Too many people in the world already knew about the immortal Jack Harkness, they didn't need to know about Ashildr as well. Not if he had anything to say about it.
He held his arm out and she placed her small hand into the crook of his elbow, the two of them maintaining a charged silence that neither was quite yet willing to break. There would be time enough for admissions, and Jack had a feeling that this was only the beginning.