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AN: The 'metamorphic symbiosis regenerator' seen here featured in the Fifth Doctor tale "Mawdryn Undead", where they were revealed to be Time Lord technology used to help stabilise Time Lords after dangerous regenerations; eight criminals had somehow managed to steal the regenerators from Gallifrey but were subsequently left trapped in a state of perpetual bodily regeneration due to their lack of understanding of the equipment (I'm naturally assuming that the Doctor will be able to use them more effectively than Maqdryn and his associates did)

Old Faces, New Hopes

A couple of hours later, the staff at the Pharm having been evacuated and the alien corpses having been recovered from the facility to be disposed of later, the Torchwood staff were back in the Hub, going over the last bits of business from the previous days' work.

"So, the hitman the Pharm hired to do their dirty work... died as a result of mayfly infection?" Jack asked, looking slightly uncertainly at Gwen and Ianto before turning to where Owen, Martha and the Doctor sat opposite. "Is that possible?"

"With what we've got of their biology, it could work; with the injections he was using, it's possible that he ended up inhaling some of the mayfly larvae the patient expels at the moment of death and didn't know what had happened to him until then," Owen said, shaking his head slightly at the thought. "God... if we hadn't been careful, that could have happened to me and Martha..."

"As it is, however, it didn't; no point dwelling on the 'could-haves', right?" Martha said, she and the Doctor exchanging knowing glances that only the two of them could know the meaning of; there'd been more than the occasional moment when he'd been feeling particularly depressed over his self-perceived failure to stop the Master's schemes during the Year, and Martha had always been there to help him through it.

"On the topic of 'could-haves'," the Doctor put in, "I take it that the fire we started there will have dealt with any of the... remains... at the Pharm?"

"Nothing distinctive could have come through that fire," Jack said, nodding in grim understanding at his old friend. "Don't worry about it; there's nothing there that anyone can use to start this up again."

"Good..." the Doctor said, a saddened expression briefly crossing his face at the thought.

"We can't save everyone," Gwen put in, looking over at the Doctor with a brief smile. "Trust me; if we could have saved anyone in there, we would have."

"We're not like Miss Hartman's Torchwood, Doctor," Ianto said, prompting the Doctor to glance up at him with a somewhat pointed stare at the reference to the woman who'd caused him so much heartsache due to her inability to accept when she should leave things alone. "We'll do what we can to help anything that isn't actively trying to kill us... and we definitely won't exploit them."

For a moment, the Doctor and Ianto simply stared at each other, both of them clearly remembering the woman who'd done so much damage to both their lives- even if Jack was the only person who knew precisely what the Doctor and Ianto shared in common; Rose and Lisa were private issues that they should only bring up if they wanted to-, before the Doctor stood up, a slight smile on his face as he looked at the people around him.

"Anyway," the Time Lord said with a slightly forced cheer, "with that dealt with, and on the topic of preventing needless deaths... would you all care to assist me in restoring an old friend to the age she's used to?"

Both the Doctor and Jack couldn't help but share a satisfied grin at the automatic assent that came from everyone around the table at that suggestion; after so long dealing with various alien races who regarded mankind as primitive barbarians, it was always nice to witness moments like this when a relatively random group- particularly one that, by its very profession, sometimes had to cause death on a semi-regular basis- showed their willingness to preserve even the life of someone they didn't know.

"You're sure this is going to work, Doctor?" Jack asked, looking uncertainly at his old friend as the two of them stood in the Torchwood 'medical area', looking silently at the still figure of Leela lying on the new 'bed' before them, the traditional Torchwood operating table having been replaced by a longer 'table' standing on its end with a skin-coloured 'cushion' where the person lay, with cables connecting to a triangular headrest and two light purple tubes surrounded by small silver circles on either side, the table connected up to both the Rift manipulator and the TARDIS via two cables stretching towards the objects in question (The Doctor had called it a 'metamorphic symbiosis regenerator', used by Time Lords to help them through particularly difficult regenerations; apparently he'd salvaged it from a derelict at some point, although he'd been forced to connect it up to the TARDIS to accommodate the missing control systems for this procedure). "I mean, Leela's not a Time Lord-"

"Trust me Jack, I know what I'm doing," the Doctor said, tapping the side of the chamber with the sonic screwdriver even as he crossed the fingers of his left hand where it was currently inside his pocket and hoped that he was being accurate. "Now, these things normally operate by helping to stabilise the Time Lord's cells after sustaining serious cellular damage- I've suffered from something like that twice myself; the first time I needed an old friend's help to get the process started but the second time I was able to wait the worst of it out in the TARDIS while everything straightened out on its own-, but I've modified this chamber to instead regress Leela's cells by filtering the Rift energy from there-" he indicated the cable leading from the pod to the Rift manipulator, "and channel it into Leela's cells using the equations Tosh and I developed. With the Rift energy combined with the residual artron energy in Leela's cells from her time with me, her body should automatically revert back to the age she was at when she first began to travel with me as the Rift energy 'stabilises' her body back at that point- thus erasing all traces of the excess bio-field radiation from her system and allowing her to age normally- while leaving her mind untouched; the regenerator only targets the cellular structure while allowing the neural cells to adjust at their own pace-"

"Hold on; 'adjust at their own pace'?" Jack repeated, seeking clarification on that issue; the idea of doing anything to anyone that required their brain to 'adjust' didn't appeal to him after so long spent unaware of what had happened to his own brain.

"I did say these were designed to help regenerating Time Lords, Jack," the Doctor pointed out, glancing over at his friend with a brief glare. "The designers wanted to ensure that nothing these things did could affect the developing personality in its nascent stages in any way, shape or form- a few externally-induced regenerations might be able to 'tweak' a few basic personal details but that's about it; I've sometimes wondered if they gave my third body a greater inclination to obey authority but that's all guesswork-; they didn't want to create the temptation that some politically-minded groups might try and enforce their own vision of things, not that it stopped anyone doing it the old-fashioned way..."

"OK," Owen said, breaking off the Doctor's train of thought before Jack could ask for further details, the doctor and Martha walking over to join Jack and the Doctor, "Tosh is just directing Gwen and Ianto to make sure that everything's set up the way everything says it should be; once she gives the all-clear, all we need to do now is turn everything on and keep our fingers crossed."

"Right then," the Doctor said, glancing over at Tosh as she gave him a quick thumbs-up from where she had just finished examining the Rift manipulator, "here goes nothing."

Even as the Doctor turned to enter the TARDIS, however, he paused mid-step, turning back to look at the woman lying on the table before him, still dressed in the tattered remnants of her Gallifreyian robes- he hoped he still had some of her old things in the wardrobe somewhere; he tried not to delete anything left by his companions, but the damage caused by the biodata virus infection and Marnal's exploding cold fusion reactor certainly hadn't made it easy- and laying a hand on her cheek.

"Be well," he said simply, before he turned back around and entered the TARDIS.

A few moments later, the Rift Manipulator began to hum as the tubes on either side of the 'bed' began to glow, orange energy crackling along the two cables from the TARDIS and the Manipulator towards the regenerator, surrounding and enveloping Leela's body as the Doctor, Martha, and the Torchwood staff watched, the wrinkles, thinness, and grey hair of age being replaced by smoother skin, a stronger body, thick brown hair... the body of a warrior tempered by experience and knowledge far beyond what her original people could have ever experienced...

Come on

... the Doctor thought to himself, his fingers crossed as he stared at the sight before him, his old companion growing younger as he watched her. Please make it, Leela... please...

If it had been any other situation where he'd discovered a companion like this, the Doctor liked to assure himself that he would never have attempted what he was doing at this moment...

But this wasn't just any companion; this was Leela.

He'd unintentionally ruined her peoples' way of life when he'd improperly programmed Xoanon, and while she might have enjoyed her time with him her time on Gallifrey had been far from a complete picnic due to her status as an 'outsider' even BEFORE she'd become caught up in that whole mess with the Agency trying to find out about his past...

If he could do anything to make up his past foolishness to Leela, this was his best means of doing so.

He just wished that he could be more certain that these regenerators would do the trick; even with the Rift Manipulator equations calculated so precisely that not so much as a single excess atom of Rift energy could get into Leela's system, there was always the risk that this technology wouldn't do what the Doctor had tried to program it to do...

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity to the Doctor, the process ceased and the energy faded from around Leela, leaving her the same young warrior-'savage' she'd been back when he'd first met her on Xoanon's planet all those long centuries and bodies ago... the girl who'd continued to defy Magnus Greel even as he threatened to kill her in a manner she couldn't understand... the warrior who'd survived all the traps and challenges that the Lentic Empire had left behind for the insane Sozerdor to use... the woman who'd risked everything to help him get the treatment he needed to save himself from the Swarm...

"Did it work?" Martha asked, shaking him out of his train of thought; it was only when he looked back at the rest of the group that he realised he'd been so caught up in his memories that he'd forgotten to actually get Leela out of the regenerator in the first place.

"Oh... right," he said, shaking his head briefly as he returned his attention to the matter before him, walking up to the generator to examine the read-outs on a screen on the side. "Well, according to this everything's fine; we just need to-"

"Ugh..." the woman lying on the 'bed' muttered, raising her head slightly as she blinked at her surroundings. "What... wh... where am I?"

The Doctor couldn't help but smile slightly as he walked around to stand in front of his old companion, even as the faint trace of tears began to brim in the corner of his eyes.

"Hello, savage," he said with a smile, reaching up to gently caress her cheek as she stared at him, eyes so used to being weakened by age- and with some slight scar tissue around them, he noted; he wondered what had caused that- having some slight trouble adjusting to the new, more vibrant light before they settled on him. "It's me."

"D... Doctor?" Leela whispered as she stared at him, her eyes flicking from him to the TARDIS where it was positioned behind him, her gaze growing ever wider as she took in the sight of two things she'd clearly never expected to see again...

"Yeah... it's me," the Doctor said, nodding briefly at her. "It's been two bodies since we last met... but it's me."

As though those words had been a signal that she'd been waiting for, Leela leapt forward, wrapped her arms around the Doctor, pressed her face against his shoulder, and began to cry, the Doctor's arms automatically tightening around the now-young woman as he cried himself, both of them lost in the memories of the planet and people that they had known and lost so long ago, the Torchwood team and Martha unable to do much more than simply look on in silence as the two old friends shared their grief over the loss of their birth and adopted home planet.

AN 2: To any Leela fans out there, I KNOW she's a bit OOC right now, but she's been through a lot since we last saw her in "Gallifrey: Panacea" (The precise details of which I'll be covering in the next chapter), so now seems as good a time as any to allow her to let it all out while she's still emotionally drained from what she's been through; she'll be back to some degree of normal next time