@imperiiatrix
leelaofthesevateem:
“If you liked the way you were in my eyes, why would you change to be more like everyone else wished, and expect that to please me?”
Leela tied the sash around her waist and let Romana lead her by the hand. “You would have needed to change time, for that,” she said. “If you had found me on my planet–before ever I knew the Doctor–then you might have twisted me to your whim, I think. I killed so easily then, with even a kind of joy in it. I was not cruel even then, but it pleased me to know that my body was a weapon with a well-honed edge. You could do that still, I suppose. Break the universe, make a paradox of me–two Leelas for the two women in your head. Let her be the Leela for you to pet and pamper, and me be your scourge, for you to scourge in turn.”
They passed through the doors of the big house, all grand and shining. The rooms Leela remembered from their first trip to Davidia she had not seen for many years; that complex was on the other side of the planet. For all that Leela knew, Romana had torn it down. This was a house of air, of light-colored stone and vast, tall, open spaces, beautiful enough in its way.
Pandora had taken Leela to Braxiatel’s planet, once, to gloat before she burned it–Leela remembered the fiddly golden grandeur of that palace. She wished it had not been destroyed, but it had not been her kind of beauty. She had to admit that the cleaner, warmer lines of this place were something she could like, if it were not all so tainted. Very much, Leela thought, like the mind that had planned it.
“How long are you going to stay?” Leela asked.
“I suppose, in the end, I wasn’t trying to please you.”
Standing in the place she’d built and tamed- everything open and large, every ceiling tall, since neither of them liked confined spaces- rather than the wilder fens Leela preferred, she was more Pandora than anything, with only the colder, sharper parts of Romana bleeding through. “Oh, I do like that idea. Time is mine to break, and the Doctor never did deserve you. You had to stow aboard, like some common thing, I’d never have made you do that. She’d be my favourite weapon.”
She smiled, amused. “Long ago, when I was nothing more than a President, the rest of them thought you were nothing more than a knife aimed at my enemies, fanatical in your loyalty, with no ideas of your own beyond instinct and savagery, but they were always missing the truth of it. Instinct has nothing to do with knowing where to stick a blade, so that it’ll hurt and maim, yet not kill quickly. Can you really claim to have never been cruel?”
She relinquished her hand to sit on one of the chairs. It was too stiff and ornate to be comfortable, but it was more like a throne than anything softer would have been.
“Do you want me to leave?” She asked, with a hint of real curiosity. She’d gone to great lengths to leave Leela with nothing to live for but her visits, her only reprieves from never-ending solitary confinement. A prison was a prison, even when it was the size of a planet. “Do you truly prefer all this silence and solitude?”
