A/N: If you haven't seen The Invasion of Time, I've actually been told this is understandable (and good!) without it. I'd still recommend watching it though, because there's a lot of inside jokes. I wrote this before listening to any of Gallifrey, but it somehow still managed to stay within canon for that as well.

Thanks to Charamei for the beta. I'll post this once a day until it's done (there's 7 chapters).


She wants to stay.

Not because of the people, with their heavy clothes and strange customs.

Not even because of the planet itself, abandoned and lonely without the respect it needs.

Because of one person.

One bizarre, fascinating, odd person who bemuses and inspires her in equal parts, wearing those same heavy clothes and partaking of those same customs, with a name unpronounceable to anyone else's tongue, cold, calculating, and afraid of anything new, but yet –

She wants to stay.


She knows that many consider her ignorant, the Doctor among them. It does not bother her, which confuses the Doctor more than anything else.

What they fail to grasp is that she is perfectly aware of how much she does not know. One of the things she does know is the difference between ignorant and stupid.

This the Doctor does understand.

She is ignorant – but not stupid, and it would take someone stupid to miss the looks Rodan gives her, the long, confused, searching looks of someone fascinated by another and entirely unsure what to do about it.

She knows Rodan has a longer name. Rodan told it to her, the first night. She refuses to use it. Rodan is a suitable length for calling through the woods when animals are chasing her. The longer name is not.

She watches Rodan back, long, confused, and searching. This is not about sex. She has never been interested in sex, with males or females. What it is about –

Stupid she may not be, but ignorant she is, and she has no words for this.


When it's all over, she watches him walk away with only a twinge of guilt.

Rodan is not there. She does not know where Rodan is, but she is not in the room to see the Doctor leave.

If she has a twinge of guilt, she has only a glimpse of what the Doctor must feel. This is his planet, she thinks, or it was, and he is more upset by this than he wants her to know. He will feel better to leave her guarding it.

She is torn between Rodan and the Doctor. The Doctor needs her, though she is replaceable to him. Rodan does not need her, but Leela thinks she can become unique to her.

She stays, only feeling slightly out of place. He expects her to follow and she does not. She does not like to disappoint him, but what he thinks he wants is wrong.

She does not have the words to tell him that, and Rodan is not there to give them.

So she takes Andred's hand, because Andred is there, and this is an action the Doctor can understand, and she must stay, for his sake and for Rodan.

There is guilt, for deceiving him, but if he would open his eyes, he would not be deceived.

The excuses cannot cover the guilt of watching him realize that she will stay.


She makes Andred nervous.

It rolls off of him, hot and strong, and she thinks of telling him that he smells like a herd after she has killed one of its members. She holds the words back, though, because it is her fault that he is nervous.

"Leela," he says, and his voice shakes, "I don't know what I did, but –"

She laughs, and stops his mouth with a finger. He flinches away from her touch. "I did not stay for you," she tells him, still laughing, and he relaxes.

"But – the Doctor – you told the Doctor –"

This time she chokes back the laughter. It is not his fault that he believed her. "Andred, where is Rodan?"

Andred blinks at her. "The technician?" he says, and his tone of voice tells her more about his opinion than she wished to know.

She moves, and shows him her knife. It is very close to his face, because he must be very stupid. She knows he must be very stupid, because only one so stupid would think that Rodan is lesser for being a technician. Rodan is brilliant, which is a word the Doctor taught her. "Andred," she says, "where is Rodan?"

She is making Andred nervous again.


Rodan's rooms are neat.

She approves. Neat rooms are a sign of one who is successful, because only one who is successful has the time to clean.

Rodan appears not to approve, and seems annoyed by her rooms.

This, like so much else about Rodan, confuses her. She stands in the archway that means beyond are Rodan's rooms and stares, bemused, at Rodan, who is still wearing the same robes.

Rodan glares at the ground, at the walls, at her. "Why are you here?"

She is unsure where to start. She had not thought this far. Her plans stretched to leaving the Doctor, and beyond that she has been running, leaping from action to action. "I stayed behind," she says, because it seems best.

"Obviously," Rodan spits, and turns away.

"For you," she adds, quietly.

Rodan stiffens. "You should have gone with the Doctor," she says harshly, not moving.

She leans against the barrier between them. "Then who would tell you when reason is a liar and when it is not?" It is intentional, the echo, and she watches Rodan bow her head slowly.

Rodan's rooms are neat, but Rodan's emotions are not.


She is certain the chairs move when she is not looking.

She finds this confusing, and a little uncomfortable. She is used to standing up and coming back to find her chair in the same position. Even with the Doctor, the chairs did not move. Sometimes everything else did, but she always knew how to find her room, and everything in her room was always exactly as she left it. Now –

Now she stands and crosses to what Rodan calls a "viewscreen" and stares out at the shining silver dome, and when she turns back, her chair is gone.

Rodan's eyes flicker first to her, and then to the corner of the room. The chair is sitting there.

Rodan sighs. "You don't belong here," she says, eyes still fixed on the chair.

"Your words are true," she says, calm only because one of them must be and Rodan, surely, is not. "There is one bed, and it is small."

Rodan frowns. It plants a crease between her eyebrows that Leela would like to examine further. "No, I didn't mean –" Rodan stops and shakes her head. "Why are you here?"

"You," Leela says quietly. When she moves, her fingers come to rest on Rodan's arm.

When Rodan moves, her fingers come to rest on Leela's cheek. She is gloveless.

Years later, she will mark it as the First Touch. But now – all she knows is that Rodan is the most fascinating person she has ever met.

"Gallifreyans are touch telepaths," Rodan whispers and Leela can hear the question behind it.

She does not move except to smile. "You can see my thoughts."

Rodan does not smile back. "Only if you want me to. Do you – I shouldn't be doing this," she says in a nervous rush.

She makes to pull away but Leela grabs her hand first, holding it in place. It feels like when she stepped into the Shaman's tent and defied her god. There is that same scent of rebellion mixed with hope in the air. "Yes. I want this."

The chairs may move but she is never ever going to leave Rodan's side.