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You don’t age on Gallifrey.
Oh, you grow older. You gain the experience and wisdom of an old one, an elder, but your body remains the same. The Time Lords are lucky: they can at least change that about them.
When Leela chose to stay on Gallifrey, it was a decision made spur-of-the-moment. She’s always been like that: impulsive, impetuous, a taker of risks. It was the same way with choosing to travel with the Doctor. She barely knew him, but he was different. Exciting, bold, dangerous, strange. She knew — oh, how she knew — that there was nothing for her in her tribe. When the people you grow up with are willing to expel you to certain death, it changes your perception of them.
Staying on Gallifrey had been a new kind of adventure, an adventure with romance and love, an adventure with aliens and all those new sorts of technologies the Doctor had introduced her to. She’d grown and changed with the Doctor, and she was ready to test the waters in a new world.
She had kissed Andred, while they were in the TARDIS. And he had been so very shocked, so very surprised. It hadn’t been a very good kiss , it had to be said. Andred didn’t know what to do or where to put his hands or any of the things normal people might be expected to do during a kiss. Their teeth clacked, and it was far too chaste for Leela’s liking. This was alright, though, Leela had thought, because Andred is — was — an alien. He isn’t — wasn’t — to know anything about kissing. Looking back on it now, she’s surprised he didn’t walk away in disgust. It’s what most other Time Lords would have done, she now knows. But Andred stayed. His breath hitched in his throat, and he got far more excited by something as easy as a kiss than Leela had expected.
When they’d broken apart, he’d stared at her, eyes wide, and Leela wondered if this was the Time Lord equivalent of going red in the face. (She’d never seen the Doctor blush, and while she’d never quite believed his claims that Time Lords didn’t, she was beginning to wonder if perhaps the Doctor was actually telling the truth about that.)
“Can you do that again?” he’d asked, and she’d grinned at him, but she hadn’t been able to kiss him again, because they’d had to move before Sontarans found them.
Andred was sweet. Surprisingly normal for a Time Lord. He wasn’t one of the silver-tongued politicians, nor was he one of the eccentric librarians or archivists, nor was he a pretentious academic, nor was he one of those notoriously standoffish scientists. He was a commander in the Chancellery Guard, and he was young, and he was wonderful. He was the man she wished to grow old with.
Only Andred is — was — Gallifreyan. A Time Lord. She learned that he was two hundred and fifty-seven years old shortly after they got married, and she nearly dropped the knife she was sharpening in shock.
“How are you so old?” she’d asked, her voice going high in shock. She had thought him to be around her own age, perhaps a little bit older or younger.
He’d laughed at that, and taken her hands in his. “Time is relative, my love,” he’d said, kissing her on the forehead. “You think I’m old, but I’m barely an adult in Time Lord terms. In a race of near-immortals, two and a half centuries is barely anything.”
“And you have been a guardsman for all this time?” she breathed, realizing for the first time exactly how little she knew about her husband.
He shook his head, brown hair falling into his eyes. “No, you have to do your time at the Academy first,” he replied. His lips quirked upwards, like he was about to make a joke, until he saw Leela’s face. “What’s wrong?” he’d asked, his tone immediately changing, reflecting his concern.
She had looked up at him, then, and she had been upset. How else was she supposed to feel? “If two hundred and fifty seven years is nothing to you, what is our marriage?” she’d asked. She dropped her hands from his. “I love you, and maybe you love me, but you will live long after I am gone. I am not a Time Lord, Andred. I grow old and I die.”
And a shadow of worry crossed his face, a shadow that didn’t disappear for the next twenty-five years.