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Trust was a hard thing to come by.
This was something Romana knew well. She knew better than to trust, knew it was better to keep others at a safe distance. Use them when needed, lean on them if necessary. But trust? That was a strong word.
She could count on one hand people she would even consider trusting, and she wasn’t afraid to cut off fingers. She was the President of Gallifrey. That was the way it had to be.
And still, some would say she trusted too much. That she was led by her heart, that she was too liberal, too kind. Too kind! As if such a thing should be bad. But to the old power of Gallifrey, it was. It was weak. It was soft. To the old power, she had too much focus on the future and not enough on the glory of their past. For so-called masters of time, they were awfully blind to the passage of it.
Would she still have been the same had she never left? Would she have become one of those old, stuffy Time Lords, dozing through High Council meetings and using every dirty trick in the book to hold onto any power possible, digging in their claws like a creature desperate for water? Had she not seen the universe, would she just dismiss Leela as a savage like everyone else?
She hoped she would not, but feared she knew better.
But she was all the better for letting Leela in. Gallifrey was better for it, even if Leela nor Gallifrey herself saw it. Change wasn’t a bad thing. Goodness only knew how many times Leela’s instinct had got them out of scrapes, prevented them, even. Romana knew she could benefit from listening to her heart, her gut a little more.
The Time Lord’s cold logic was a hard conditioning to break, though. There were rules, and not everyone agreed they should be broken. Gallifrey for the Gallifreyans. Time for the Time Lords.
Presidents were not to be trusted.
Trust was hard to come by on a world where no-one said what they meant. Where the precedent for Presidents was slimy politicians who needed to be deposed before the power drove them mad, or at least, mad beyond return. Because an all-ruling president, they could stand, but a dictator of the whole vortex?
Leela understood more of madness than the Time Lords thought. She knew more about many things, because no matter their put-downs, she was not stupid. But to them, she was savage, a pet, a curiosity. She was not Gallifreyan, so she could not know as much as them about anything.
But she stayed, because she knew Romana needed something to put her trust in beyond herself. Romana was carrying the weight of a hundred worlds and though she tried to do it alone, Leela had heard many stories of Kings or Presidents who had tried to lift too much only to get crushed by all they tried to hold onto. She did not always do a good job of helping, she knew that, but her loyalty was to Romana, and she did not want to see her President destroyed by a world that wanted her to stand alone.
It seemed to be a very lonely world, Gallifrey. Even while she had still had Andred, Leela had felt the loneliness of the planet seeping up through the ground, soaking into her bones. A planet so old and so rigid could be nothing else.
The old Time Lords had scoffed at their marriage, called her a savage, Andred’s thing, and worse, words that made her toes curl and her fists clench, but for Andred’s sake she had held herself firm, only imagined burying her knife into their hearts which had nearly been as satisfying. Nearly.
But now Andred was gone, and she was learning why Time Lords did not trust one another.
She believed that Romana was probably a liar too, not because she wanted to be but because that was what Time Lords were. It was in their very dee-en-ay, deep in their souls, to be untruthful and loyal only to themselves. But she believed in feelings too, in the change of the wind and the turning seasons, and she wanted to believe that Romana had never willingly lied to her. If any one of these Time Lords could defy their own bones, it would be Romana.
Once, she had trusted Andred too, but somewhere in time, he had forgotten that he did not need to be a Time Lord. That he could give in to love and feelings they so often denied. That he could be hers.
It was only Romana, these days, who saw her as more than belonging to him. She belonged to no-one, nothing, and now, no place. If not for Romana, she would want to leave, to run, to let the waters in her great well of grief overflow and carry her on to somewhere new, somewhere away from all these rules and huge words and statements with no meaning, or too much meaning, and just go. Towards trees and hills and lakes, storms and sunshine. Fresh air.
But for Romana, she would have strength. She would take her grief and wear it as a shield against every other lying Time Lord who would call her names. It was in her nature to trust and to love.
Trust was a foreign place on Gallifrey, as much a threat as the aliens they feared would overrun them.
If only they’d see that change was the way forward.
Sometimes, Romana would watch Leela, looking out of the window into the Capitol. She wondered what she was thinking about, wished she knew. Wished she could soothe some of Leela’s pain. Wished she could understand it.
She would watch Leela, and they would sit in the highest office in the land and stare, wordless. These days, there wasn’t a lot to say.
Sometimes, when the silence grew too loud, Romana would ask Leela what she saw. The answer always made her smile, just a list of things that Leela was noticing. The colour of the sky. A bird circling a tower. A woman walking home.
Then Leela would turn back to her, ask her what she was doing. The answer was always the same, paperwork or planning, and it never seemed to satisfy Leela. She was a woman made for the out there, for running wild through the world. Romana had tasted that, brushed up against the idea of freedom. And then she had come back. Bureaucracy had come depressingly easily to her.
If it weren’t for Leela, she worried that she might have lost her perspective altogether.
After all, this was a world that would stop turning if it could, would stand still and crumbling if only to be able to say I am Gallifrey, therefore I am better than the universe. And the really worrying part was all those who believed this, genuinely. Who would watch their world collapse just to be superior.
The universe had no need for superiority complexes. The universe had no need for anything.
All that mattered, in the end, wasn’t reputation or legacy, but those around you. Those who would call you a friend. Romana had always suspected that Leela had used that word too freely, ascribed her friendship to anyone who would show an ounce of kindness.
Leela had told her, once, late one evening as the suns were setting behind the mountains and the lamps of the city were lighting up the ground below, told her that the Time Lords’ greatest weakness was kindness.
This had made her laugh because it was so unexpected. Surely Leela had seen enough of Time Lords to know that they were unkind, ruthless and cruel, so immortal that they had forgotten what it was like to spend time actually being alive, so aloof that there wasn’t a being in the universe who would claim to like them.
Romana had never known anyone to like a Time Lord. Revere, perhaps, or despise. But not like.
Exactly, Leela had said: her point was not that Time Lords were kind, but that kindness was their undoing. They did not know how to accept a hand of friendship, a gift of peace. A simple gesture with no secrets. A Time Lord always looked for the evil or the gain in any situation, and that was what undid them. Some things simply were.
Romana hadn’t known what to say to that. She had wanted to argue, to defend herself, but all her defences lay heavy on her tongue. Because Leela was right, and she did it too. She was led by ulterior motives, her own or others, like Narvin, like Brax, like Darkel.
Like the Doctor.
For all he was, he had always held cards down his sleeve to make sure to win. Leela had learned from him that sometimes, to win, you had to cheat.
Romana had simply learned how to cheat better.
Leela had let the conversation move on, after that, drifting between topics, led by questions she could ask. Romana never seemed to tire of her questions, why things worked and how. She did not often understand the answer, and did often scoff at them for being too technical but Romana answered nevertheless, explained simply and without the knife-edge tone that so many others had perfected.
This was why Romana was her friend on this lonely, horrible planet.
Perhaps now her only friend in the universe, except K-9.
She certainly had no-one on Gallifrey who she would call a friend, and none who would even look at her as an equal being. Not since Andred. If the Doctor were still out there, oh, she would run away with him again in an instant. The noise of TARDISes haunted her still; sometimes she woke in a cold sweat n the middle of the night to hear that noise, and she would run and run down corridors, chanting in her head Doctor, I’m sorry, I’m coming, please take me away, only for it to be another’s TARDIS landing home, or a phantom.
So much of her time felt like chasing ghosts. Shadows of friends, ghosts of those she had loved. Even if she went back, would any of the Sevateem even remember her? She was sure they would have mourned, but that meant that to them, she was dead.
Perhaps it was she who was the ghost, after all.
These days, it was only Romana who made her feel solid at all, made her feel like she wasn’t just fading away into a background, unseen and unheard despite her screaming. She had learned long ago that no-one on Gallifrey would listen. Except Romana.
Often, Romana was distant and busy, had tasks and meetings and secret plans to create. She sent Leela on little missions, telling her they were important, but Leela suspected these were just schemes to keep her busy and out of trouble. Romana would never admit to that, but Leela suspected that she knew that she saw right through them.
But, for Romana alone, she would continue to go along with it. Though the way Time Lords looked at her boiled her blood, it was safer to be savage alone. If they started thinking she was more, they would trust her less, suspect she was trying to infiltrate, find out all their secrets. She had no interest in the secrets of time, just the freedoms the vortex had once granted her.
She knew Romana wished for that freedom too.
Once, late one night, after the suns had set and the lights below had dimmed enough to let the stars shine through. Romana had asked her what she was looking at, as if she was surprised there were still things to be seen in the dark. Leela was glad she would never grow so ancient that she would stop seeing the world around her.
The stars, she had said, I am looking at the stars, which had made Romana chuckle. It was the closest thing to a laugh Leela had heard her do in a long time.
Usually, Romana asked, and Leela told, and they both turned back to their tasks. Sometimes, Leela would keep going, fill the space with descriptions of the people outside. She hoped it would make Romana feel less lonely, hearing about all the people she was President of. Remind her that she was making a difference in real people’s lives.
Romana wouldn’t admit it, but the narrative Leela wove about the common people’s lives was a comfort. Sometimes she needed the reminder that the world wasn’t holding a knife to her throat, ready to spill her guts at any given microspan. What it must be to feel normal! To go out on the streets, with friends, to laugh.
Presidents didn’t have friends.
But that night, Leela had been gazing out into the dark, and she had been looking at the stars. For all their knowledge, their power, Time Lords never seemed to stop to take simple delights in things like the stars. If you knew how it worked, what need did you have to pretend it was magical?
If you removed all the magic from the universe, what did you really have to live for? Much as she was hesitant to admit it, Leela was right about that. Time Lord passivity had built them into statues, and time flowing around them was making them decay. Moving forwards was the only way, and perhaps that would begin in the stars.
Romana had risen from her desk then, feeling an ache in her knees and shoulders from sitting down too long, a pain that she had only come to know with the Presidency. Leela had turned to look at her, quizzical and she had smiled, trying her hardest to remember what curiosity for knowledge felt like.
Leela’s eyes had been fixed on her as she had crossed the room to stand at the window, to look at what Leela was looking at. To see what she saw. Which one? Romana had asked, peering out into the night. She had never realised just how many stars could be seen from Gallifrey. Wordlessly, Leela had pointed and Romana had commanded the desk light to dim.
Let me tell you a story, she had said, because Leela had pointed to a star she knew the name of, knew the worlds of and she wanted to share something back. Not to teach, or prove she knew more, but tell a story of a planet she had been to, once, long ago, to show Leela that she was listening, always.
Leela knew this already. She had the instinct of a savage, after all, but the very fact that Romana refused to call her that and tried to treat her as equal made Gallifrey worth staying on. As Romana told her about a distant, yellow star, she reached for her hand and held it tightly. For just a moment, it was just them and the vast curtain of stars that stretched endlessly.
On Gallifrey, calling someone a friend was not an easy task. After all, a friend was supposed to be someone who would stand beside you no matter what, who put faith in you and you in them. And, they both knew, trust was a hard thing to come by.