Work Text:
Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me
I get a feeling that’s so hard to bear
You give me fever
...
In stories she had heard in her travels, it was always said that love was a flame. It could burn and consume and destroy but it was also a source of warmth, of comfort, of light. She had laughed at them—what would stories know of love? How could anyone presume to describe such a silly emotion? She had been so young back then, so arrogant. She had believed herself above such things. She had believed that she would never marry unless it was a mutually beneficial political arrangement and she would never, ever lose her hearts to love.
Especially not to someone like Leela.
If Romana were to personify fire, she would describe it as a knife-wielding, underestimated Human who never dressed properly and who had a tongue as sharp as her knife. Like fire, Leela was strong and wild. She was untamable, uncontrollable when she wanted. She was bright and fierce and almost primitive but Romana found nothing but intelligence in her very-blue eyes. Leela could provide comfort as much as she could bring pain; Romana had seen it in the way she treated the Broken Man, in the way she loved her husband, in the way she cried over her K-9’s death.
It made sense, in retrospect, that Romana would fall in love with someone who was everything the stories had described. It was a delicious irony that the icy Lady President would love the fiery savage. And Romana watched in silent vigil as Leela slept on their new Gallifrey, safe and peaceful. She wanted this—more than anything else, she wanted Leela safe. It was wrong, so very, very wrong that she would put the lives of one over the lives of all those on Gallifrey. But Leela was her life, the only thing left of her passion.