Chapter Text
Andred is gone, and no one else in the universe seems to care. Leela curses herself for thinking they would, for expecting Time Lords to treat even one of their own with any kind of dignity. The few who even bother to speak to her are clearly more concerned with the security ramifications of the Commander of the Guard vanishing, and then not even all that concerned about that.
But he is gone, and all her instincts are telling her that he isn’t coming back. The Lord President—she never could remember his name—didn’t see fit to have even a conversation with her about it. Someone else has already filled Andred’s job, and when she went to demand answers that bastard kept calling him a deserter.
Their rooms are so quiet now. K-9, having finally grown tired of being yelled at, vanished somewhere. Into a closet, maybe. Leela finds herself pacing endlessly, pulling at her simple and loose robes until they fray in her hands, throwing her knives—the ones she crafted herself and keeps carefully clean and sharpened—at the walls with reckless abandon. They dig into the perfectly smooth blue walls and the arched doorways and tear through the furniture Andred insisted was comfortable to sit on.
And she feels…nothing.
This city is not hers. This planet is not hers. It was bearable only with Andred by her side, which means that now it is no longer bearable. It is stifling, and horrible, and ugly.
That leaves her with two options: find out what happened. Or leave.
She owes it to him, she knows, to find out what happened. But she also knows, with the same instincts she’s always had that used to let her duck before an enemy was visible to the rest of her tribe, that she is never going to see him again. There is not and never will be anything for her here.
Part of her expects, at any moment, the familiar whooshing wheeze of the TARDIS—not a TARDIS—and for him to appear, and give a playful shrug, and whisk her away from it all again. But she is alone on the street. For the first time in many years, even K-9 is not trailing at her heels.
It’s not just her rooms. The whole world seems to be too quiet now. She sees Time Lords only from a distance. None of them come near her as she walks right out of their damned city to the beautiful plains they considered a wasteland.
…Where she is told there is nothing there for her either. That apparently her visits over the years and her help when she first arrived mean nothing at all—or not enough—to the outsiders. Their leader is not so impolite as to say it like that, but in typical Time Lord fashion he rejects her. She belongs more to the city than to the wilds now.
What does he know? Nothing much, for the time being, when she leaves him with a knife in his chest. He will regenerate, so it hardly even counts.
She feels nothing but the wild restlessness of a caged beast. She cannot stay here for even one more night. So, she wonders, as she often has over the decades, what would the Doctor do? The Doctor would get in his TARDIS and leave. He would neither wait for someone else to save him, nor stab them all for not caring.
It’s a close thing, as she passes the Citadel. It’s been a long while since she had killed anyone, in a permanent way. It might make her feel, if not better, then at least something.
But it would not bring him back. Nothing will do that. Better to leave this life behind than to spend the rest of it in a Time Lord prison.
Leela knows where broken TARDISes are kept; she asked to see, once, where the Doctor had gotten his. It is, like most places here, guarded, but not well. It is nothing for her to slip through a vent and into a long corridor with capsules on either side. She knew what to expect, but they still look wrong. Cold. Unfriendly.
Leela shakes her head hard to refocus, long hair swooshing around her. Sentimental nonsense. She isn’t looking for a home, only a way out of here. She just needs to find one that is open…
“Warning, Mistress!”
“K-9, no! I told you to stay home!”
“Affirmative.”
“Then why did you not?”
“Warning! Danger! We are in a restricted area! Someone is approaching!”
“Quickly, follow me!” Leela grabs the door of the nearest TARDIS and tugs, only to find it locked.
And another. And another. Each more frantically than the last. Until, just before the corner, she spots it: doors left open a crack.
She almost makes it before a Time Lord in black robes steps smoothly into her path.
“Get out of my way.” Her knife is already in her hand, but there is no anticipation of the fight, not now.
“What are you doing here, savage?”
“I do not know you.”
“I am Commander Torvald, of the CIA, and it is my business to know of the sole alien on Gallifrey. What are you doing down here?”
“Leaving.”
Something flickers in his expression, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. “Really?”
“It is no business of yours what I do, and I expect you and everyone else will be glad when I am gone. Now get out of my way before I make you!” She slashes her knife, casually, slow enough to let him scamper out of the way to avoid being impaled.
“Wait! Leela!” But she’s already inside and K-9 is behind her and the doors are closed and she puts the Time Lord out of her mind. He was hardly even an obstacle.
She doesn’t know how to fly a TARDIS. She never did. She thinks she recognizes a lever that opens the doors, but little else looks familiar—this TARDIS is very different from the one she knew. But over the past decades, she’s learned enough about Time Lord technology to work it out. It helps that she doesn’t care where she ends up, as long as it’s away from here.
She can read the labels on the buttons, now, and she might have missed a step or two, but between her best guesses and K-9’s advice, they manage to launch themselves into the vortex. The room is rocking and lurching, but not all that much more than it did with the Doctor.
And then…it it’s still going, lurching and rocking and pitching. Leela is clinging to the console. K-9 is being rolled back and forth.
“K-9! How do we materialize?”
“The green switch, Mistress.”
“But I hit the green switch!”
K-9 buzzes for a long moment. Leela loses her balance and falls to her knees, clinging to the edge of the console to keep within reach of the switches and buttons and levers.
“Warning, Mistress, the materialization circuit is damaged.”
“Why did you not tell me this before?”
“You did not ask before.”
“Agh! So we are stuck, in the vortex, forever?”
“94.3% certainty we will be stuck.”
“What is the other 5.7%?”
“If something were to crash into us we could be knocked out of the vortex. However, the time vortex is very large and crafts that travel it very few, making this possibility extremely unlikely—”
The TARDIS jolts in a different direction suddenly and Leela loses her grip, flying head over heels into the far wall. When she opens her eyes, rubbing her head, everything is cast in a sickly shade of green.
“K-9? Where is that green light coming from?”
“InsUFFicIenT DatA,” he buzzes as he is also thrown across the room.
At least the light is real and not a result of hitting her head.
And then, as fast as it all began, everything stops. They are no longer shaking or, as far as she can tell, moving at all. The silence is heavy. Leela grabs the wall and pulls herself up, glad no one but K-9 is there to see how unsteady she is as she shakes out her bruised limbs. There was a lever…yes, that one. It looks like the one that used to turn on the scanner. She pulls it, to get an idea where they are.
The doors swing open, which in the end has essentially the same effect. They are on some sort of planet that she doesn’t immediately recognize. She can’t see much from in here, only tall purple ferns and a clear blue sky, but it’s enough. Anywhere has to be better than Gallifrey. This is as good a place as any to exist.
“Come, K-9. This is our new home.”
He beeps and buzzes and mutters something about low probabilities, but he does roll out behind her onto the soft mossy forest floor.