Fortunately the first regeneration is the worst.
It takes a while for them to settle down again. Rodan tiptoes around her for a day, but then Leela runs out of patience. Tackling Rodan, Leela tickles her until they're both laughing, at ease with each other and themselves once again.
The change is initially rough. Rodan's body is much less controlled now and for nearly a month she has a bruise on every limb. Her voice is louder and harsher; she chooses different words and there's a period when she insults Leela on a regular basis.
Then Leela begins to insult back, then Rodan learns to control her limbs, then K-9 is reprogrammed to recognize Rodan's voice as he does Leela's. They learn the new ways they fit together and adjust. It isn't the same as before, but it's just as good, and that's what counts.
They continue on precisely as before, only Rodan now has more interest in fighting and less in constantly reprogramming their TARDIS.
This means, according to the laws that their lives seem to follow, that a few years after Rodan's regeneration their TARDIS breaks down on an abandoned planet.
Well, breaks –
Well, abandoned –
Either way, two spans after their crash landing on some unmarked planet, their TARDIS is smoking from his doors, and they have been captured and tied up by the Cybermen, who certainly aren't supposed to be here and now.
(Leela has pointed out a few times that this regeneration is more acerbic and sarcastic than the last. Acerbic wasn't the word she used, but Rodan finds it the most accurate.)
On the alternate path, they are at least tied up together, which means that if Rodan moves just a bit, her neck can brush Leela's, and their minds merge.
Leela relaxes behind her, mind gentling. Rodan smiles back. "I think," Leela says slowly, despite the fact that her words echo through Rodan's mind a heartsbeat before she says them. "That it is a very good thing I do not age."
Rodan chuckles, testing her bonds. "Why?"
"Because I do not want to leave you, doing this alone."
Rodan shows Leela her emotions, her overwhelming feelings of pleasure and contentment andlove, oddly enough. "Why tell me now?"
Leela wriggles, and pulls away, the last touch of her mind filled with pride and glee. "Because you cannot untie knots. And I can."
Laughing, Rodan stretches as her hands are untied. "So. Cybermen."
"I have no more gold dust," Leela says, sounding sad.
Rodan nudges her gently, standing up. "I programmed computers for a living. Cybermen –" She snaps her fingers, a human expression. This body cares less about the differences between human and Gallifreyan than the last.
Leela grins. "Good." Her hand reaches out; Rodan takes it instantly. "Their leader went this way."
"Wonderful," Rodan tells her as they walk in lock-step down the corridor. "Should be easy."
It is easy, astonishingly enough. The Cybermen weren't prepared for a Gallifreyan and a human who know precisely how to work to their own strengths and have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Cybermen's weaknesses. Rodan disables the Cyber-systems easily while Leela provides cover, having stolen a Cyberman's gun. And then –
"Omega," Rodan says softly, staring at the repurposed screen as if it would change the data. "And us with no TARDIS."
Leela peers over her. "Numbers."
Rodan considers thumping the screen, but decides that the jury-rigged system is unstable enough. "Binary. Stupid system, septenary is much more flexible."
"What is wrong?" Leela asks, voice tight.
Rodan huffs quietly and does thump the screen. The numbers flicker and then stabilize, remaining essentially the same. "The Cybermen were after technology that would make them immune to gold dust," she says, beginning the manual coding, trying to find a map, any map, "so they brought down a merchant ship. A Gallifreyan merchant ship. And those Gallifreyans are imprisoned here, in this complex." Her stomachs threaten to revolt; she turns off her digestive system because this is not helping. "Some of them are partially converted already."
Leela doesn't move for a second. "We have to get them out."
"Dear," Rodan says slowly, because she has the statistics up alongside a map and the results are nothing she wants to know. "Not all of them can leave."
Her wife shifts her weight, adjusting the gun slung across her chest. "We can try," she says stubbornly.
"We always can try."
Rodan stands, the map memorized. "Yeah. We can." It's a lie that she knows as she says it. Many of the merchants have had too much replaced with metal to even be within a hope of redemption, but if Leela wants to try, then they will try.
They try.
Of the forty-nine merchants, a full twenty are so converted they have lost any sense of self. Leela shoots them immediately. Only nine are completely unconverted; the rest are somewhere in between and Rodan stares at them sadly. She has read the stories of the Cybermen and knows what will happen. In the end, it is a choice between killing them and sealing them off and hoping that no one lets them out. She knows which one the Doctor would choose but she is not a Time Lord and has none of his skills or his eternal logic-be-damned hope.
She takes Leela's gun and sends her out of the room with the nine they can save.
When it is over, she takes on the gruesome task of incinerating the bodies. It is the only way to be certain that the Cyber-tech cannot come back, but when she is done, the scent of a charnel house sticks to her.
Leela gives her a sad look, taking the gun back. "There should have been another way."
"Yes," Rodan says simply, and goes to comfort the merchants.
The merchants are on an experimental mission, it turns out, to try to expand the trading arm of the Time Lords to even more planets. This works in Rodan and Leela's favour: such merchants are more broad-minded than most of their caste, and less likely to turn away a renegade who isn't even a Time Lord. The merchants are traumatized, obviously, and their collective mind reeks of fear and terror. It takes everything Rodan has to resist it and project calm. She comes worryingly close to being overwhelmed before Leela grabs her hand and provides another source of strength.
The merchants' ship is destroyed, but they know more about mechanics than Rodan does and come up with parts for their TARDIS from remnants of the Cyber-base. Which then only raises the question of what to do with them?
Nine merchants without transport or goods – there's nothing for it but to take them back to Gallifrey, except that Rodan would be just as happy to never go back to Gallifrey. Leela helps her get them into the TARDIS and then gives her a hand with piloting him, but they're all emotionally exhausted. Finally Rodan designates bedrooms and packs them off before curling up with Leela on the couch in their sitting room.
She wakes up to find three hovering merchants. Muttering threats at anyone who might disturb Leela (her wife is never cuter than when asleep, limbs splayed and head thrown back) she shoos them all out into the console room, where she finds the other six very carefully not touching the console.
Merchants.
The TARDIS has the same opinion – he is bemusedly interested, and wants to know her plan. "Where were you off to?"
The list of planets means nothing to her, but she doesn't expect it to. What's important is that they are finally beginning to think of a next, of a later. Their collective mind is still a shambles and it still presses painfully against her own. She's fortunate, now, because the TARDIS supports her, his presence solid in her mind.
"If we dropped you off at one of those, could you contact another temporal power for help?" She has absolutely no interest in keeping them on board any longer than she has to, and they rub her all the wrong ways: subservient, self-serving, short-lived.
The answer, fortunately, is yes. Rodan isn't sure what she would do if it was otherwise. She is vaguely shocked at how insular she still is, just insular in other ways. She cares little for the differences between her and Leela, between Leela and other humans, but these differences between her and other Gallifreyans stick out like a rift in time. Even if she wanted to return, she can't. There is nothing for her on Gallifrey now, no way for her to fit back into the fold that is, that was home.
She sets their course to the most advanced planet on the list, and then sends the merchants back to their bedrooms. There is nothing they can do to help, not on a TARDIS, and Rodan would just as rather they weren't in the console room anyway.
They land more or less in the right location (correct planet, five hundred years off), and their TARDIS seems just as eager as she is to get them off as quickly as possible.
Leela is up to see them off, brushing hair out of her face. "Will they be safe? On this planet, will they be safe?" she says blurrily, scratching K-9 behind the ears.
"Safe enough, dear," Rodan tells her casually, flipping the switch to shut the doors. "They're within range of Gallifrey, so a ship should be out shortly."
Leela comes up behind her, pressing against her back. "No more Cybermen."
Rodan leans her head back, resting it on Leela's shoulder. "Agreed."
Their TARDIS breaks and they repair him; K-9 breaks and they repair him; Rodan regenerates once, twice, nine times over; Leela is the only one kept safe, because she is the only one who cannot come back.
Centuries pass.
They run, save worlds and topple empires, see the Doctor and occasionally other renegades, kill hundreds and rescue far more, and love each other more than anything else in the universe.
Occasionally Rodan checks their ages, more out of curiosity than anything else. In the beginning it worried her, how much younger Leela was, but now – there are still over a hundred years between them, but when both are approaching two millennia, this is a minor detail.
Some days Rodan finds it astonishing how intensely she loves Leela. She is Gallifreyan, a member of a species not known for intense emotions, yet Leela is her all.
The years roll by, ticked off by their TARDIS in sync with Gallifrey's.
The Doctor is arrested, and for a moment Rodan considers returning to Gallifrey. Leela agrees, but K-9 reminds them both that one Technician and one human can hardly hold off the full weight of the Time Lords. In the end, the Doctor gets himself out.
A new President is elected, one whose name Rodan knows, Romanadrovratrelundar, but is kidnapped by Daleks almost immediately. They offer their assistance to the Doctor, who has already solved the problem by the time they manage to track him down.
More years pass, and pass they do, leaving them unchanged, unaltering. They are carving out a name for themselves: the Ladies, who fight oppression and injustice and who, after teaching the meaning to themselves, decided they would fight sexism too. There is a sector of a galaxy who worshiped them as goddesses, before Rodan turned Leela loose and let her show their priests what a goddess was. (The sector still worships them, only the priests are now priestesses who wear manufactured leather and sharp knifes.) There are many planets that fear them. There are more whose rulers fear and whose oppressed worship, lying in wait for the day that the sky will send down a lone-standing door and two women who listen to no words of restraint.
Some days Rodan worries that they live a charmed life, that this cannot continue forever. Then they watch another die, and she remembers the cost, the room in their TARDIS filled with names, with the records of all those they have failed. So she suppresses the worries, forgets that they existed, and moves on to the next adventure.
One day, reality will catch up.
