Work Text:
She’s shaking like a wet dog.
They all are, really. Caught in the violet rainfalls of Tescalcado, which, the Doctor thinks miserably as she draws her coat tighter around herself, should really think about getting another ‘n’ into their advertising. It’s violence, is what it is.
Not acidic, at least.
It’s what she told the fam the last time they were here.
“It’s just,” Dan says, finishing a rant entirely drowned out by the rain, “it’s just, you said it was going to be sunny and warm.”
“Rule one,” the Doctor mumbles, feeling her mood dropping by the minute. Trying, she tells herself, grasping desperately at the last golden strands of optimism. They were just there, hidden somewhere in the muscles of her shoulders, and she shakes them out for good measure. Nothing happens. Well. She just hopes whoever stumbles over where she’d dropped them will appreciate them for what they are.
Her very last strands of sanity.
“And here I thought,” she says, keeping her tone light, even as her brain is already screaming mistake! mistake! at her. “you doin’ the piloting implied you’d be taking the fall.”
“When in doubt, fault’s with the owner,” Yaz answers, almost as if it’s automatic; and with a surprised snort, Dan starts to laugh beside her. It only takes a second for the Doctor to be surrounded by their delighted laughter at a joke no one could possibly find any humor in.
It’s probably one of those inside ones, responsible for the new lines around Yaz’s eyes. Which is good; which is fun; which just this morning, filled the little holes stamped into her chest with warmth.
She won’t take credit for anything, especially not for leaving, but the Doctor was the one who asked Dan to stay.
She sighs, half-hoping the rain will drown it out, half that they’ll hear it and stop, stop reminding her of the grief hidden in the glances they’re shooting behind her back now, stop reminding her that she can never pause the wheel of time, reminding her that she is running out, that she is trying to be better and failing in all of the exact ways she has been failing ever since she started trying.
The laughing peters out naturally, sadder towards the end.
The Doctor feels a weight drop onto her shoulder. When she looks to the side, Yaz’s face hidden by the shadows of the shrubbery, she feels the annoyance drip out of her, disappearing into the soil.
The silence stretches on for a bit. In the rules they’ve started weaving around themselves, the Doctor has to be the one to break it; she doesn’t know exactly why, only that Dan’s stopped stepping between the two of them when the Doctor’s said something insensitive and Yaz just stands there staring, scrutinizing, merciless.
She’s getting better. Didn’t even have to talk to offend, this time.
The Doctor draws her knees to her chest, dropping her head back against the stem of the ancient tree behind them. It’s chock-full of artron energy. The Doctor’d written a thesis about the Tescalcadian woods in the Academy; it had been soundly, unanimously rejected, due to the Time Lords being stuck-up, arrogant, soul-sucking pricks in stupid hats, and Koschei distracting her halfway through.
As of yet, the mystery remains unsolved.
If the trees really are a school of TARDISes, growing and procreating autonomously, as she’d proposed back then, they’re not giving anything away to her.
The thick green scrub grown at this one’s foot mostly covers their heads, at least, the drippety-drip all around them creating the impression of very much being trapped in the middle of the famous rainfalls. The Doctor catches a stray purple drop with her pinky, lets it run down into her coat sleeve.
Maybe it’s not all bad how their trip went wrong, again.
Yaz is tapping on her sleeve.
The Doctor doesn’t look, but she opens her mouth, like it’s easy, and mumbles, “for what it’s worth, I did give you the right coordinates. Sunny day, like Dan said. Couple decades after we were here with R—” something twists in her chest, like brambles, and she smiles over it even though no one’s looking. “With the fam. First-class weather prediction, they’ve got now.”
“You saying it was her fault?” Dan asks. She turns around to him as he lifts his head from his knees, blinking into the greenish half-light.
His tone is light-hearted, and she appreciates that about him—appreciates everything about Dan, when she thinks about it, and wonders if he’d balk at being called a good egg. Make a pun of it, probably. She likes that about a bloke. Still, the Doctor remembers the way he’d hesitated when he’d crawled to join them in the shrubbery and it’d dawned on him that the only free space was on the Doctor’s left.
He’s known Yaz longer than she has, and she gets it, but there has got to be a point where she will be forgiven for it.
“Well,” Yaz starts, “I am not exactly—”
“Nah,” the Doctor cuts her off. Screws on a smile, and hopes Yaz doesn’t see it through the dimness. Honesty, the one thing she has demanded of her, over and over again, and the Doctor searches and searches within herself. “Not Yaz’s fault. The TARDIS hasn’t been feeling very well.” She swallows. “I’ll sort it.”
“Mm,” Yaz answers. “It’s fine. It’s kind of nice here.” She smiles at the Doctor, teeth showing, “Peaceful.” Yaz grins, and the Doctor grins back, like their very own inside joke.
“Yasmin Khan,” she says. “Knew you would.”
“Makes gold out of anything, that one,” Dan adds.
The Doctor turns to him, silently, thinking of the man with a phone and a wok and a dog who hated him, and slings a tentative arm around him.
Dan nods, and stretches his legs out in front of him, rests his head on the Doctor’s bony shoulder. Yaz sinks back onto her, on the other side, face buried in the dampness of her coat. She shifts once on the crumbly ground, and closes her eyes.
The Doctor wakes up with a headache.
The air’s cold around the bridge of her nose, and the rain sounds are stopped still. Birds call, far above them, and insects scuttle and wiggle under their legs, under and over and all around them. It’s a blissful cacophony, full of ordinary, instinctive life.
The Doctor readjusts her elbow slightly to provide Dan’s neck with a more comfortable angle, pushes her shoulder into Yaz’s so she’s not quite as slumped over, and settles for another hour.
Yaz finally wakes a good ten minutes into the shouting.
“Shh.” The Doctor lodges her hand free, and waves it at her, meeting her friend’s nose with muffled protests. “Quiet. Don’t draw attention.”
She feels Yaz sit up at the edge of her shoulder. Instantly understanding, because of course she would.
“My fault. I should’ve known.” The voice says now, resigned, and the Doctor closes her eyes. “Should’ve taken them with me, that very first night.” The voice curses, Gallifreyan, broken-edged, making the Doctor flinch, hands flying to her ears, pressing down, “Alright! I’m coming!”
The footsteps fade into the distance, and Yaz exhales audibly along with her.
It’s this moment that Dan decides to join them.
“What,” he asks, bedraggled, “are you two doing up?”
The Doctor sighs, blinking against the heat in her eyes, and drops her head against the tree with a thud.
“Did that,” she asks, trying for bright, carefully shaking out her arms, grimacing at the twist of her elbow. “Did that sound a lot like me to you, too?”
Much later, they gather in the kitchen.
The TARDIS has been insisting on it, leading the Doctor through one strobing, headache-inducing corridor after another until she’d found the one that lead her here, blissfully, beautifully blue. The others had already arrived, dressed in pyjamas, eating and chatting. They don’t stop when she enters. The TARDIS grumbles quietly at her from the ceiling.
“So I got the space-time coordinates wrong,” Yaz suggests.
The Doctor rips a piece of toast apart in her hands, thoughtlessly. Might not’ve been hers, but it’s anyone’s fault for putting it near her restless fingers.
“TARDIS isn’t feeling well.” Yaz smiles at the ceiling, and it makes another deep, low grumble. “She must’ve put in the same ones you went to with us. Makes sense, right?”
“Does to me,” Dan agrees, happily eating his breakfast soup. All about soup, that lad.
The Doctor digs through her brain for the words. Her ship hasn’t been feeling up to helping her translate, which means she’s got to stick to one measly little language, maybe two if Yaz is feeling lucky. “Comfort in familiarity,” she finally says, dropping the flayed remains of the toast back on Yaz’s plate, absentmindedly licking her buttery fingers. “Maybe.”
“You remember shouting in that forest,” Yaz says, like a fact, and the Doctor wishes she had half of her conviction. “So it wouldn’t have been your future, would it?”
“No.” The Doctor smiles, claps the counter with one hand, lets her hair fall over her face. She’s never been able to do that before, even though she would’ve loved the drama of it in her last bodies, or the obscurity.
There’s something tight, balling up in her chest. “I don’t think it would.”
“But—”
“Honesty, right?” the Doctor cuts her off. She traces a greasy line across the counter and tries to ignore the slurping noises coming from Dan’s direction. She laughs to herself, feeling tears prick at her eyes, hidden by the hair, and hopes it doesn’t make her sound cruel. “Honesty, that’s what I promised you.”
“That’s what you said you wanted,” Yaz corrects her, firmly. “It’s what you said would feel good. So why—”
“I don’t remember that day very well,” the Doctor continues, “but I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t! When did we visit Tescalcado?”
Yaz inhales sharply. “After the orphan planet.”
“If I was going off alone—” better, she thinks desperately, as if she has ever managed. As if the sky doesn’t shatter down on her as soon as she does. “I was probably visiting—” The slurping has stopped, and the Doctor’s seen Yaz’s subtle hand signs, she is perceptive, she knows their little tricks, they’ve outwitted her by four years and she can’t possibly catch up. “Visiting.”
“I’ve told Dan about Gallifrey,” Yaz says openly, and the Doctor tries anything not to sob into her hands. She doesn’t do that, this time round, she runs and she smiles and is better she is honest now but when it comes down to it, it seems she might as well just cleave apart.
“Of course.” She shudders. “Of course you have.”
“Just what I know.” And Yaz sounds angry now. She should really get her home, one of these days. “Just the bones.”
The Doctor shudders again.
“I remember that day,” she confesses. “Barely! Bad one. Lovely planet, lovely birds, lovely—you were cross with me, all of you! For the rain.” It wasn’t for the rain. Yaz doesn’t correct her; and she has always been too kind to stand where she does now. “Right set of Brits you lot are.”
Push through, she tells herself, one honest thing. One honest thing, even if it curdles the marrow in her bones. Oh, where did she put her words.
“I’d been asking the TARDIS…” she tastes her best friend’s name in her mouth slowly, like a reprieve. “for a bit of ginger for weeks. Just a splash, y’see. Just to spice up my sweets.” She straightens, exposing her face to the bright kitchen light. “Y’see.”
Yaz’s hair is disheveled, flat on one side of her face, out of her braid for the first time that the Doctor’s seen her since she’s been back. She takes a step, almost soundless in her ridiculously fluffy slippers. Completely polyester, she notes. Very twenty-first century.
“Ginger does something for you.”
“To me,” the Doctor corrects. Yaz lays a hand on her shoulder, warm and very still, and she feels her whole face melt downwards. “It’s lovely, for a while. ‘Til it’s not. It’s not addiction that gets you. Immune systems are braced against such efforts on Gallifrey.” This is another lie, another fact made true only by having her speak it. She is the first and the last of the Time Lords, of course she is, she is them through and through, and she can’t stop lying. “It’s what creeps in when you’re done at the end of the day.”
“Doc.” Dan startles them both, having sat up from his chair with so much grace. She wonders where he’s practiced; she wonders where he’s had to hide. He smiles. “I can understand that.”
Yaz feeds more bread to the toaster, Dan brews some tea, and the Doctor spoons sugar into it until it refuses to take any more.
They sit together, and they don’t talk. It’s another hour until the TARDIS lets them leave.
Her arms burn.
She blinks, as though it’s going to make the muddy water any less muddy, or the seaweed any less slimy between her fingers. Pauses, just for a moment, and the water solidifies around her, creating a resting place, a temporary reprieve.
The Doctor winces.
Not now, she reminds herself. Why the need for a nap always comes up just when she’s busy, she’d really like to know. Although thinking about it, the need for a nap is probably why she keeps busy in the first place.
See. Tired, and already introspection creeps up on her.
Almost there.
She hits her palm against the communicator at her cheek, but it only buzzes at her. Damn her, remembering that they wouldn’t need comm dots here, because the populace provides devices to all the tourists. Damn the populace for being sweet and making them narrow range, so they’ll create the impression of talking for the land-dwelling visitors.
Finally, the communicator crackles. She could cry with relief.
“See anything?” Yaz asks. Her eyes, only just visible through the water and the hard plastic fitted to her face, fused to the orange diving suit, are dark and intense. She’s gotten so good at being in danger it almost scares the Doctor. She’s become a soldier, that one, entirely through her fault, and entirely without her.
Except she’s not a soldier. She’s just good at what she does.
“They’re not far,” the Doctor answers. “They—” a tightness in her chest makes itself known, cutting off her air. She struggles, kicks her feet so she turns ever so slightly away from her companions, and tries not to panic as oxygen fails her.
In. Out. They’re not running low, are they? She should really have stopped breathing. She should really stop thieving all their resources. She holds her breath, tries to focus on her bypass, but her body is as intelligible to her as a black hole, as the water around her. Too late, she remembers that she hadn’t been breathing in the first place, and finally draws in the much needed oxygen.
She exhales shakily.
Too late, she notices that she’s shut off her communicator, and Yaz is screaming at her without sound, kicking her legs, crossing the space between them. Dan’s at her heel, his hair wet with sweat beneath his helmet.
The Doctor feels encroached upon, suddenly, the weight of the water bearing down on her, the threat nipping on her heels. “I’m alright,” she manages, and only just remembers that Yaz doesn’t appreciate her cramped little smiles anymore. She makes a thumb-up gesture instead, not sure if it’s any better. “Lizards are about ten minutes out. We’ve got to get to the surface til then. Go!”
“But the TARDIS—”
The Doctor’s hearts pound in her chest. “I’ll get to the TARDIS.”
“But it’s back there with the killer water lizards!” Dan makes a face, probably reevaluating everything that lead him to this moment. Shouldn’t ever do that, she thinks. “You can’t go back! They’ll suck up your oxygen just like that.”
“She,” the Doctor reminds him—didn’t Yaz tell him about that, too? “is my best friend.” She winces, doesn’t look at Yaz. Doesn’t look, period. After all these centuries, humans are so difficult to navigate, still. “And she hates being submerged. Water, lava, oil, organic mush, you call it. She might even be sinking. Gravity, we’re not a fan of that, either. I’ll be fine.”
The silence at the end of the line makes her check her communicator twice, then again. They need to get going.
The water moves around them instead of becoming solid, faster and faster, and bubbles form, and the Doctor curses her luck, and thanks it for keeping them safe.
“I am not leaving you,” Yaz says finally. Her face twists in mild surprise when they start moving upwards. It takes a moment for the situation to dawn on her. Dan’s a bit above her, caught in the stream, and she pushes at the heel of his boot with a closed fist. The water makes an almost audible hiss as he’s catapulted towards the surface.
“Remember to breathe!” Yaz shouts, and the Doctor winces at the feedback looping through the communicator. The line stays open, heavy with Yaz’s breathing and the Doctor’s breathlessness, itching to push through the water while she still can.
She balls a fist. Yaz’s knee is getting close to nose level—another meter, and she’ll be within reach. And she has promised, she’s been pleaded with, but faced with it, with choosing to grab her friend’s hands and pull them into the line of fire with her, she finds that she won’t.
She can. It’s very easy.
But—
She kicks her legs against the water, feeling her body being pulled upwards, upwards, away from her ship, away from a horde of bloodthirsty, sharp-teethed water lizards, moving towards Yaz—her eyes are so dark, and even after four years that have weathered and worn and lined her face, she still looks so young. The Doctor touches the heel of her foot, and Yaz timeline spreads out through the dark water like a light at the end of a tunnel.
Not endless, but long, and winding, and complicated.
She makes a fist, starts to gather enough power to push, starts to search for anything, anything, she can push off of, so she can propel herself out of this safety mechanism, so she can fulfill her duty to her ship, and—
A hand clasps around her wrist.
Yaz looks down at her, helmet tilted, so very bright and orange in all the darkness, and pulls the Doctor with her.
And she could easily wriggle herself free. She could give Yaz that little push—the one that signals to the escape mechanism that she is to be sped up, that she is to be rescued—but what then? Then the Doctor has to find a way to get back into the dark.
It’s all so much effort. It’s all so much weight on her shoulders.
They break through the surface.
She hopes she will be forgiven.
The TARDIS is very cold that night.
She has been very quiet in her communications, a grumble there, creaking at night, groaning when the Doctor slips under the console to spend the night working. She’s very quiet when they recover her from the water. She’s quiet, and cold, and the Doctor goes to work with dark, expensive grease on her hands, and tries anything to make her ship comfortable.
When she’s used three buckets, and another one to drop into that shaft in the console that she doesn’t use anymore, but that the TARDIS decided to pointedly pop open, the temperature drops another five degrees. She is very tired.
“What else d’you need?” she says anyway. Guilt sticks to her hands and neck. She let herself take the easy way out. She’d have survived the oxygen-sucking lizards, and even if she hadn’t—
“Doctor!” Yaz calls. She’s got to be a couple of corridors over, at least, but the TARDIS loops the sound round to her with ease. She’s got a response at the tip of her tongue, when Yaz repeats, “Doctor? What happened to you?”
Her mouth closes.
Is she really going to ask this now—of all times—when they’re not even in the same room?
“Why are you all soggy?”
The Doctor slides out backwards from under the console. Her head bumps against one of the buckets, and she can feel her hair sliding up against the grease. She nudges it aside, and clamps the console with one hand. A shaking hand; she feels light-headed again, the grease clogging up her nostrils. The Doctor pulls herself up.
Yaz isn’t here, and she is entirely dry.
“Doctor!” she hears her friend’s voice again, high-pitched with panic as she hasn’t heard in all the while she’s been back. The Doctor commands her knees to comply, trying to converse with her tired bones even as her own body still feels alien to her. Foreign. It’s always been the way, with this one, but it’s getting worse and worse, and she’s pretty sure her ship is getting worse with her.
A TARDIS without sense for its physical body—she shudders to think.
“Doctor,” Yaz says in the distance, and the Doctor starts running. “Doctor, you’re bleeding! Doctor—Doctor, where are you going?” A sound, like tearing fabric, and a frustrated yell.
When she arrives, Yaz flings around to her. She’s shivering violently, dressed only in her red blouse and jeans in the TARDIS’ winter temperatures, hair curling wet around her shoulders. She bites into her lip, pressing her eyes closed, and takes a deep breath.
The Doctor stands motionless in the face of her anger, but Yaz’s head only sinks to her chest as she sags against the wall behind her. The Doctor takes a few cautious steps, then a few more. She reaches out a hand, and carefully places it at the back of Yaz’s head.
Her friend sinks into her.
The Doctor places another hand on her back, drawing her tightly to her, trying to compress. Yaz buries her face in her coat, and the Doctor was wrong before. Hugs aren’t about hiding your face. That’s just a side effect. Hugs are about pressure, hugs are about squeezing every last inch of what just happened out of her friend and leaving no survivors. Hugs are about not having to speak.
Yaz chokes out a single, broken sob, and the Doctor shatters along with her.
Tea.
Tea isn’t about drinking either. Again, it’s about pressure. The Doctor’s fingers pressing into her cup, burning with heat until she can’t stand it. A finger looping into the handle. Something to tap on. Something to look at that aren’t the shadows of the fire playing across her friend’s face.
The library was specially done up for them. The sofas even larger and more purple than before, and piles upon piles of blankets stowed under and over and across and most importantly, on. The tea was still steaming when they came in, and despite the cold, the Doctor felt her face burning with shame at having misinterpreted her ship like this.
She wasn’t trying to show her anger, she was trying to show her love. She was trying to make the coziness double and triple worth it, and force them into it just a little bit, besides.
Yaz is already half lying down in one of the sofa’s corner. They’ve draped three blankets over her, and she’s on her third cup, index finger tracing the rim.
Temporal echo.
It’s another phrase that doesn’t mean anything, another one that’s pretty and see-through and that Gallifreyan refuses to find a translation for due to astounding imprecision.
It’s likely to have been one, regardless. There’s got to be truth in it, because Yaz didn’t protest, or maybe she needs to indulge in the reassurance right now. But there’s got to be truth in it, because the Doctor can’t explain it to herself otherwise.
She’s run the heat checks, she’s asked her TARDIS, and there is nothing, there is no one on this ship beside her, beside her friends, beside Dan secretly practicing on the Doctor’s old guitar in his suspiciously toasty room.
Maybe she’s being haunted by Time, but what does Time get out of it? Is that how she dies? Bloodied, and silent, and facing her friend’s blank horror.
“You were going to push me today,” Yaz mumbles. Her face is turned away, into the sofa. “You were going to swim off on your own, right into the heart of a myriad of hungry aliens.”
“Yes,” the Doctor says.
“You were going to leave me.” Yaz’s voice turns ever so slightly bitter. “You were going to do it without looking back. You’d just have gone. You’d just never have told me anything.”
“No,” the Doctor says.
She applies more pressure on her cup, feels the burn on her skin with a detached kind of ache. She used to feel her cells dying, used to feel her skin’s efforts to knit itself back together, and she’s not sure when it’s stopped. She’s not sure when she’s started to feel every breath in her throat instead. It used to be automatic, being alive, and she doesn’t know when it stopped.
Did Swarm do to this to her? Did he dissolve her lungs—her throat—the universe and her past alongside, and didn’t put them back together right?
“I was looking back,” she says now, gently. “I was.”
“You said you wanted to tell me,” Yaz notes, “but you haven’t.”
“You haven’t asked.”
“It’s exhausting,” Yaz admits, and something about her voice carries the same honesty she’d displayed sobbing into the Doctor’s shirt, seeking comfort where usually, there is none to be found. “Pushing. I don’t want to be—” she squeezes one of her eyes closed, face contorting around it, and the Doctor almost snorts at her pain. She’s made that same face over and over again, trying to be honest and finding it unbearable. “It makes me feel like police. I don’t want to be police around you.”
The Doctor taps on her cup.
“I was only an Angel for a couple of hours,” she says, quietly. “It was stiff and very cold. I’m still not sure if I was stone or if they just entombed me in it. I was paralyzed.” She dips a finger into her tea. It’s gone lukewarm. “I was scared, Yaz, alright? They just transported me like that, for—for their amusement, and—” her hands are shaking. Yaz slowly slides up the sofa until she’s sitting, looking at her. “I am so sick of people being amused by me,” she says, and it doesn’t hit the mark. “I am sick of people using me,” and it does. “I am sick of them disappearing before I—before I—” her hands make fists. The air’s growing hotter by the minute, but this, she can’t burn herself on.
“Before you get to confront them?” Yaz asks quietly.
“Before I get to ask them, why?” The Doctor says. “Why do I want to keep things alive, and you don’t? Why do I have to build these rules around me, and you don’t?”
Why do you get to destroy me, and I don’t get to destroy you
The thought is too fragile to lay it bare to Yaz. It’d be like going in for a hug and seeing one another’s faces the entire time; like vulnerability cut open.
She can’t tell Yaz of wanting to carve into her mother’s mind and see what’s inside before she has even told her she has a mother.
“I don’t think,” Yaz says quietly, “that these questions would have answers, even if you did get to ask.”
The Doctor presses the meat of her hands into her eyes. Pressure. It’s all about pressure, so it doesn’t have be about gravity.
“Question for you,” she says, because she’s a genius, and she’s already bared herself today. “When’s the last time you’ve been home?”
She says it, and immediately, unbidden, memory overwhelms her. When did you last go home? She gasps for air; she presses her hands deeper into her eyes, because letting go now would be unbearable. Still, she feels the air around Yaz flinch.
“I’m sorry,” she tacks on, genuine, genuinely panicking, “that was cruel.”
Yaz whispers, “it was.”
The Doctor imagines her sinking back further into the cushions, or perhaps standing up and walking away—it’s what she would do if she didn’t have so much to lose, if she didn’t have a myriad of topics lodged in her head, so she only has to pull at one for a river of them to tumble out of her mouth. Only she has been trying not to do that. Honesty tastes foreign on her tongue, barely makes it through the narrow of her throat, but she is so intimate with its opposites. A distraction. A monologue so long and winding it’d put Rassilon himself to sleep. A lie, and she is as bad with those as she has ever been.
She thinks Yaz might have just gone, so she startles badly at the tap on her hand.
On instinct, she lets them sink into her lap, and blinks at the spots dancing in her vision. Round and round and round, and isn’t it weird how these are colors she can never see when she’s awake?
“You didn’t say you had to tell me,” Yaz says. Her hair is almost dry now that the TARDIS has raised the temperature, curly and thick and really, the Doctor thinks, lovely. The sort of hair she’s never had. Maybe she should stop whining about the ginger. “You didn’t say you needed to. Or that I deserved it.” I do, her eyes say, and through the guilt and the reluctance, the Doctor has to admit that she is proud. “You said you wanted to. And I believed you.”
“I do,” the Doctor says. She reaches out across the gap—she can do that now, her skin gives comfort now, sometimes, when she is not very cold or very tired or very angry—and takes Yaz’s hands in hers. They’re very nice hands, too. She’ll have to take care not to think of it too much, or she’ll end up regenerating into her. Messes up a friendship, that one. “I know I do, or did, I just can’t find that feeling anymore. Or… I can’t find the other thing.”
“The other thing?” Yaz stares at their hands, then up at her. “Willingness? Openness?” She hesitates. “Trust?”
“Words,” the Doctor answers.
“It’s alright.” Yaz smiles at her now, only very slightly, and not in forgiveness. Warmly, either way. “We have time.”
It’s always funny, the way a frayed thing can’t stop itself unraveling.
The sun plays nicely on the leaves.
Smells like home, the Doctor thinks, and doesn’t examine that at all.
“What d’you reckon’s the scent here called?” she asks anyway, deliberately casual. She’s surprised to see Dan sidling up next to her, instead of Yaz. She really, really likes him, he’s funny, and he cares about people, he cares about Yaz, and maybe her, too. He’s hit Sontarans with his mum’s wok, and he keeps his miniaturized house in his pocket, but hasn’t worked up the courage yet to ask her to help him turn it back. But he does avoid her sometimes.
“I’d say it’s sort of piney,” he answers. He’s only in one thin shirt, and looks content as can be, which fills her with a kind of easy warmth that she craves. Make people happy. She is failing, and she is not better, but she’s still the Doctor, and this is her thesis statement. “Which is weird, ‘cause it’s all leafy trees, far as you can see. Hint of dirt. Breeze, but a foresty sort of breeze. Sweat; no offense.” She grins at him. None taken, for once. “And then there’s somethin’ like… some sort of metally bit. Don’t know what.”
A thrill of fear runs through her, instinctive; and distantly, she wonders at herself for thinking of the Cybermen first, instead of the Daleks. More recent wounds, she supposes.
“Thanks,” she says, sincerely. “How’d you like yesterday’s soup, by the way?”
“Oh, it was great. Y’know,” Dan ponders, “Didn’t use to think much of soup. It just sort of grew on me. Some things are easy like that.”
There’s something beneath that sentence that she doesn’t catch, but he goes on. The Doctor takes a quick look back, where Yaz has fallen behind, sniffing at some flowers. She looks content, and she’s in their line of sight, which is all she can ever wish for their friends, really.
“I know she already said,” Dan goes on, voice light. He buries his hands deep in his jeans pocket. He’s almost better at looking idle than she is; she’s got to ask his secret, one of these days. She has this feeling he won’t mind. “But thanks for the hologram, Doctor. Don’t know if she’d gotten through without it, and we’d definitely not have gotten through without her.”
The Doctor looks away—has a feeling he understands that, too. Hair falls into her eyes.
“She told me a great bunch of stories, about you,” Dan goes on. “Don’t tell her I said this—she’s always a bit worried that if we’re too frank with ye, you’ll break, or something. Not the words she used. But either way.”
The Doctor looks more firmly to the ground.
“She told me about… she called it… pre-O, I think. She said what it meant once, but it was really dark, and I was stowed under the bed, and Jericho—” his voice cracks, the tiniest bit. She makes herself look up at him, but he’s not looking at her. Idling, still, bumbling along the path, expression clear as anything.
“Jericho was snoring. Either way, she said you were different, pre-O. Smiled more, snapped less. She said you even slept sometimes, but I’ve seen you sleeping.” Once, the Doctor adds, to reassure herself. Under that tree, in the rain. “She said that you could be difficult. That she was angry with you a lot. That you were mardy, and you didn’t trust her.”
The Doctor flinches. Her eyes close instinctively, wounded, but not in her own pride, for once; for this young woman she picked up, bright, wondrous, dreams sky-high, who had her friend—her pilot; the one with a duty to her—start out heaping her with promises, with beautiful, sparkling places. Vanished into another dimension, and came back a mardy, unforgiving, abhorrent mess.
Left her for ten months.
Left her for four years.
Has she asked Yaz, she wonders, if she was sure she wanted to stay?
“But that I wasn’t allowed to say any of these things,” Dan continued softly, looking at her from the side. Not like she might break. Not like she might snap, not even like she is slowly being crushed under a weight he knows is there but can’t see. “Or think these things, until I’d gotten to know you.”
The Doctor’s hearts slow down, grow bigger, feel like they might burst.
“Thanks,” she chokes out, and clutches at her chest. Maybe this tightness has been care all along. Maybe the oxygen in her blood is trying to tell her that she cannot possibly deserve being this, being surrounded by these people, by her friends, by her ship, by the beautiful, whole, buzzing universe.
“You don’t have to say anything more,” Dan tells her. “Something that Yaz also said—if you really care about something, words get stuck. They do, don’t they? I used to get like that a lot as a lad. ‘Specially after my wedding fell through. Used to not be able to talk about it at all, with anyone.”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor says, softly, subtly knocking her fist against her chest.
“You know anything about marriage?” Dan grins. “I don’t, clearly.”
“I’ve been married, yeah.”
“Wait—you?” He gasps, and for a moment, she feels put off, but when she looks at him, it’s all sparkles, and a lopsided smile she’s really gotten to love. He’s teasing her. Relating to her. He’s pulling all the cards, and she’s feeling warm, and maybe a bit ashamed.
“You’re a good friend, Dan Lewis,” she tells him, and if he’s taken aback by her honesty, or stumped by the label, he doesn’t show it one bit.
“Who’s Dan Lewis?”
The world slows down.
“Oh,” the other person says. “Thought I was talking to myself. Proper confused me. Never heard of a Dan Lewis in my life.”
The sun in the sky is bright as ever. The trees are gently swaying in the breeze, and Dan was right, it does smell of pine. The scent of metal grows stronger, biting in her nose.
“That’s you,” Dan says.
“Yeah,” answers the Doctor.
“You’re me,” the other Doctor says, unimpressed. She wrinkles her nose, and memory flashes before the Doctor’s eyes. “You’re all… bleached out.”
“You’ve got dead eyes.”
“Yeah, well,” the other Doctor, dead eyes Doctor, snaps. “Real people tend not to be perfect. Sorry if that offends you.”
“Well, that was unprovoked,” Dan notes. His hand goes behind his back, she can’t help but notice, to the small, folded up baton Yaz makes him keep there. They think she doesn’t notice, just because she blinks a little too slow sometimes, or doesn’t laugh at their jokes, but she can pay attention, when it’s important. When it comes to her duty, and their safety.
“Who’s that?” dead eyes Doctor asks, peeking behind their shoulders with practiced indifference. Only this is herself, and the Doctor sees that bloodthirsty glint in her face. “Division operative? I didn’t think they worked with—” she digs into her pocket, and produces a long, metallic cylinder.
Thin, glinting in the sunlight. It’s a sonic screwdriver, perfectly ordinary, perfectly sonic, perfectly pointed, with a clean line reaching from her shoulder to her opponent’s face.
Lacking only in the distinct shape hand-produced with Sheffield steel.
And the Doctor’s been assuming she’s wearing a costume—she tries to avoid anything too undercover in this body, but you never know—but it’s not, is it? The dark hoodie, the trousers, the complete—lack—of anything fun, of anything weird, anything off-putting, anything—anything distinctive, it’s real.
“Who are you?” she breathes, and can feel Dan moving closer to her. She edges her shoulder in front of him, just to be sure he’s supporting, not protecting her. Dead eyes Doctor’s sonic whirs.
“Shimmers,” she finishes, looking blankly at her readings. “No shimmer. No biological cloaking that I can pick up on. But then, I wouldn’t, would I?”
“Who do you think I am?” the Doctor asks quietly.
“Why,” the other Doctor says, “you’re Division.”
“Not in millennia.”
“But you were!” she snaps, pulling at the string of her hoodie, drawing it tightly around her own finger. Nervous habit, and it’s the first time she recognizes herself in her. “And you can’t be me, because even if what the Master said was true, I remember every single second I have spent in this body. I will not,” she steps closer, and the Doctor doesn’t step back, even if she can hear Dan shuddering behind her. They’re nose to nose, breathing down at each other’s mouths, because they are the same—molecule to molecule. “Let you take that from me, too.”
“Believe me,” the Doctor whispers. “I am just as lost as you.”
She reaches up, and touches the back of her knuckles to her shadow self’s cheek, briefly, before this other Doctor reaches up and digs her fingernails in.
The Doctor suppresses a yelp. She can feel the nails breaking her skin, razor-sharp, but the other Doctor only lets them linger for a moment, before she pushes against her shoulder, breaking the contact.
“Get out of my head,” she growls, fingers splotched red. “You’re not fooling me. You’re not—whoever you are, get back to the Division and tell them that they’ll have to work harder to unnerve me, and that I will find them. That they will not be able to use humanity for their little games.” She smiles, teeth glinting, and it only feels familiar. “They will not be able to use anyone.”
Dan catches the Doctor by the shoulders as she stumbles back, reeling, no care for her physical body as she tries to process her other self’s words. Her other self—if she’s not a mirage, or a ghost, or exactly what she’s fearing the Doctor is—someone sent to unnerve her.
“Doctor?” she hears a yell behind her, and she whirls around, arms stretched in front of her, Dan’s hands still tight around her shoulders.
“Yaz, be careful!”
Yaz starts running at her words, blowing up dust, flowers dropping from her fingers, and the Doctor hears a voice behind her, just like her own—
“Who’s Yaz?”
Whirls back, shaking Dan’s hands off her shoulders, and reaches out, anything, anything to see if her other self is lying, Yaz would tell her that you can tell by the crinkle in her brow, by the state of her hands, but—
—but she stumbles into empty air.
No one catches her this time as she crumbles to the ground. The sharp tang of metal slowly dissipates into the landscape, and in hindsight, it’s much, much too easy to identify the twisting hideousness of a vortex manipulator.
The doctor spreads her palms across the dirt. She’s heaving, she notices now, the air growing ragged and stale in her throat as her pulmonary tubes refuse to take any more. She lifts a hand off the ground, thumps it on her chest once, twice in a lopsided attempt to fix herself. Her fingers bleed slowly.
She could try—
But the TARDIS is hours from here. She’ll never be able to preserve any faint trace of keratin in her wounds long enough to last for an analysis.
Left wondering, then.
It’s what she resigned herself to do.
“What was that, Doc?” Dan asks, voice only a bit rough. His hands hang naturally by his sides, not at all miffed by having been pushed away, and she appreciates it. Appreciates it especially when Yaz reaches them. She’s barely breathing hard, and she was already good at this life when she scooped her up into the void of space, the Doctor remembers. Her hands are stained with crushed-flower juice.
“Who was that?” she asks. Trying and failing not to sound suspicious, the Doctor thinks, the kindness granted by the fact she’s still sitting collapsed onto the ground. “Only it looked a lot like—”
“It was her, Yaz,” Dan finishes. “Another Doctor. ‘s as if we haven’t had enough, no offense.”
“None taken,” the Doctor answers tiredly. “Help me up?”
They hoist her up by the shoulders, her legs still feeling gibberish. Yaz inspects the back of her hand critically, but doesn’t urge her to go call Mabli or anything as far fetched, so it wouldn’t be too bad. Just her own fingernails, anyway.
“I don’t know what that was,” the Doctor mumbles, already going off into the direction they’d come from, limping slightly. She’s spent, and a headache is slowly worming its way to her sinuses. “Must’ve been an imposter. Wouldn’t be the first by far.”
“Future self?” Yaz suggests, keeping closely to the Doctor’s elbow. She wouldn’t have spared the idea a thought if she’d heard a single word out of dead eyes Doctor’s mouth. The Doctor sighs, exchanging a tired glance with Dan.
“No,” they say, at the same time.
“No way,” Dan adds on.
“What then?” Yaz asks, frustrated. “Past?”
“I’d remember,” the Doctor insists. She’s slowly working up to straightening out her spine, even though exhaustion fastens weight to her limbs, her breathing still feels ragged, and her head pounds like anything. Her friends trust her more like this, even if they insist on the opposite.
Like her more, if she can fool them.
Only she’s promised—
“Can you become the same person twice?” Yaz asks dubiously. “Because remember, way back in Gloucester, you didn’t recognize yourself then, either. And Swarm said discovering the past you’ve lost, which you haven’t explained—”
“I couldn’t,” the Doctor insists tiredly. “Besides, when I died and became this, there was a distinct feeling of… newness. My body… my body would remember if it was just clay in the same mold. Either way, the exact same molecules, over all that time…” she inhales, noticing with sudden fright that she’s forgotten to. She hopes to pass it off as a sigh.
Going by Yaz’s look, she doesn’t quite manage.
“I’ve never been good at dying,” she manages, and Dan draws in a sharp breath to the left of her. Her mouth feels all odd, big, like her migraine’s seeping down into the rest of her. It’s just because she’s tired, and she’s good at being tired. But she can feel the filters sliding off of her, anyway, limbs too heavy to fumble them back up. “They erased my memories,” she tells Yaz. Feels the words sliding out of her, like they’re trying to use the opportunity while her throat’s not obstructed by that ever-present fear clawing into her.
Yaz notices. Yaz’s eyes are dark and very awake. “Of your past lives?” she catches herself a second later, too obvious a question to use in a moment like this. “Who did this to you?”
“You sound angry.” The birds still chirp, but the spring air doesn’t warm her anymore.
“Not at you,” Yaz answers gently, so close. The Doctor’s arm must have slid around her shoulders. She wonders where she was when it happened. “Not right now. Who took your memories?”
“Why,” the Doctor tells her, “my mother.” She feels her other arm being lifted, placed carefully around a taller shoulder, and her eyes slide close. She sinks into her friends’ arms, and lets herself be dragged home.
“You know, we don’t have to keep—”
“Shush,” Yaz says, slapping her whole hand over Dan’s mouth. “I haven’t seen them in months. Ryan’s not half sweet young. I’ll have to—” she reaches into her jacket pocket, snaps a photo. “Aw, but we’re not close enough. Did Ryan ever grow out his hair?”
The Doctor mm-hmms as a response. She grips the side of the market stand they’re covering behind, the wood digging into her palm. The owner shoots them a sour look, but Yaz is very persuasive now, apparently; and the whole timelines-ripping-apart explanation is apparently close enough to the owner’s cultural sphere to make somewhat of an impression.
“Don’t think he did, actually.” Yaz frowns. “Looks like it’s just slightly, I think, though. Maybe I didn’t notice. We had some pretty messed up days. Your hair’s longish, Doctor, so it’ll have to be—”
“Post-O,” Dan finishes for her, resignedly. “You know, Sheffield, you two don’t have to take me to all the places you’ve visited before. I’ve heard the universe is quite big, actually.”
“And don’t you go takin’ that for granted, Scouse.”
Yaz looks at the Doctor again, and she feels the skin of her knuckles stretching tightly across the bone. Wood splinters bury into her palm.
It’s an unspoken thing they’re trying, Yaz and her. Confessions come slow and in pieces and most times not at all, and they’re trying not to shatter over it. Coming back to familiar places feels like the breaking of a pattern that might help with lodging other pieces free, too, though so far it’s mostly been odds and ends.
She always times them for centuries before or after they’d last visited, at the fringes of the attractions they were so drawn to last time. It’s great conversation fodder, the way time tides around unfamiliar planets, and it has Yaz and the Doctor connecting over their history while Dan and Yaz are still tightly bound through theirs. Is the idea. And still, like clockwork, they stumble into familiar times, onto familiar Doctors.
Well. Twice, and Yaz’s apparition in the TARDIS, but that’s three times, and three times is a sign of something going wrong. Logic warps around the fact that dead eyes Doctor can’t be a thing from the past, can’t exist at all, and it makes the Doctor want to rip the hair from her head, makes her want to bury herself six feet into medical research and hunt down Karvanista’s ship for answers she won’t have to rip herself apart for.
“Doctor?”
She jumps. “Hmm?”
“This is fine, right?” Yaz asks, eyes searching. Worried. The Doctor is so sick of herself, so sick of always inciting worry and frustration when she’s meant to reassure and bedazzle, so sick of thinking these thoughts in circles and circles and circles again.
Maybe it would do to open the watch, just to wrench her head open and place some new thoughts inside, make new pathways instead of wearing these old ones thinner by the millennia. “This is the past, yeah?”
“Probably,” the Doctor mumbles. It’s alarming, how they don’t remember what shirts they’d all worn on Limirju. It’s part of the reason why she never goes anywhere twice, and this is the third time she’s taken them here. The only planet barring Earth she’d revisited with Yaz.
She suppresses a shudder.
It’s like a ritual, Yaz had told her the day before. They’d just come from the planet of pillows, lunging about for a day without running into blissed-out Ryan and Graham at all. Every team TARDIS went here! We’ll have bought up the place by the time we’re done with it.
And she’d smiled, and the Doctor had hugged her, tentatively, because Yaz was so good and full of ideas, and Yaz didn’t know about the imminent death, and she wanted not to worry her, and she wanted everybody to be happy and good, just this once.
She’d begged the old girl to take them to the right coordinates this time. As far out as Limirju’s interplanetary market would still be standing. New smells, new products, new people, and it’d be sunny, and Dan would get to know the galaxy’s most desirable tourist spot, and the TARDIS wouldn’t fail her, and the TARDIS did.
At least—at least it’s her post-O past self, not her post-prison one.
The Doctor’s hand is just a dull, throbbing ache now, and there’s a bucket full of foul-smelling oil placed right beside them, matched right with the ill-wishing glint in the stall owner’s eye.
“We’re fine!” she insists. “We’ll just let them pass by, and we’ll go to another part of the market. I told you it’s huge. Take the TARDIS until… the boating lakes, at least, and add on another bit, and that’s half the market here. We won’t have to run into ourselves again if we don’t want to.”
Thankfully they don’t mention that the ground’s made their trousers all soggy and dirty at the knees, and that the Doctor dropped their yogurt cup full of local currency when they’d spotted themselves haggling at a corner.
“Sounds good,” Yaz answers, smile wearing a bit thin when the stall owner’s child adds another oil bucket. “Maybe next time we want to show Dan some fun we just consult your children’s guide to the universe, though.”
The Doctor sputters. “I don’t—”
“Yaz!” Dan interrupts them urgently. Scratches the back of his head and adds, a bit sheepishly, “Doctor! She’s headin’ towards us!”
“Dive!” Yaz whispers, and pushes at the Doctor’s shoulder. She pries her fingers from the edge of the stall, and tentatively places them on the dirty ground. The Doctor drops to her knees, and waits until Yaz and Dan are in front of her to start crawling towards the next stall.
And there she is. Herself, striding into their direction with swishing coattails, all bluster and no substance. Sandshoes would be delighted to keep seeing himself acting important all around around the universe, but as it is, the Doctor’s getting quite tired of the outside view.
There’s been something niggling at the back of her mind.
She’s got another headache anyway, her vision blurring at the edges. The Doctor got half the recommended sleep for a Time Lord in a week, loads more than anytime after prison or before, and still, exhaustion tugs at her eyelids. It’s a perpetual thing, and she can’t find the cause of it; can’t, in fact, pinpoint the processes happening inside of her anymore. She doesn’t care for the experience, but she’s got the feeling the humans—her friends, her friends—will only receive her complaints as passive aggression.
When he’s stressed, he likes to insult species, she thinks with a smile and a stab through her hearts.
Shakes her head.
This other Doctor’s nearing fast. And there is something wrong about her—the stringy hair, the pinch around her mouth, the flat, dark eyes. Not dead eyes, but something determined that she’s only been able to muster in the last few months or so. This is not a Doctor that is going to wander around ruins, watch a planet burn for hours. Not a Doctor that will sink into herself in the medbay and wait for the burns marring her palms to fade away.
This is a Doctor who knows what she wants.
Familiarity spears her through, and with it a bitter knowledge of what’s to come, and a tremble that starts from her hearts and spreads out, needling through her ribs up into her shoulders, spreading down her arms, stitching into her neck until she can barely keep her position. Wind blows through the market. Lifts her hair from her shoulders, exposing the cold sweat on her skin. Her friends’ warm bodies are not far off, just in front of her, but she can’t feel them.
This other Doctor has almost reached her.
She’s heading to the stall just in the row behind her, the very last before the fields, and she should have—she has no excuse for not recognizing those burly hands, the delicate spires of glass placed beside each other on soft cloth, the brown shock of hair. The merchant is bent over his artworks, just to the right of her, and she should really—
She should really warn him.
He shines so bright, now that she knows. It’s blinding. He’s not a fixed point, not quite, but he’s crucial. He’s a key. One that she made him.
The Flux was going to eat the universe.
Still, this is not how she operates, this is not the kind of decisions she makes. Except she has, countless times. Except interfering in herself would be unforgivable hubris.
The merchant lifts his head, and smiles, crookedly.
He is not a good person.
But she is not a judge.
“Doctor,” Yaz hisses, “you’re too close,” and she grabs her by the coat and pulls her behind the stall. The other Doctor strides along, bumbling, stopping to admire the littlest spire, the one with the waving children. She’s smiling, and it’s got too many teeth to be friendly. Oh, but she thinks she’s so clever.
“We’re going,” the Doctor whispers back.
She takes Yaz’s hand, so dry in her sweaty one, grabs Dan’s, and pulls them up while her past self isn’t looking.
The Doctor runs, and they run along with her.
The sea breaks against the rocks below.
“See,” the Doctor says quietly. She closes her eyes, feeling the wind tear at her coat, playing with her hair. A bit strong, but they’ll be careful to keep from the edges. “Something new.”
“You’re sure this isn’t Earth?” Dan asks, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Cause it does seem a bit familiar, if you’re asking.”
The Doctor rolls a pebble across the ground with her shoe. She steps on it too heavily, and it lodges itself into sole of her boot. She drags it across the soil, but all she manages is to get more stones stuck.
“This is usually the point where you say ‘I wasn’t asking,’” Dan says. It’s good-natured, but with that undercurrent of worry. Yaz hmms along with his words, but doesn’t comment.
The wind grows stronger with every second, and the Doctor moves them all further away from the edge, towards the twisting shrubbery next to the path. The sun shines down on them. At some point, she digs in her pocket for sunglasses for Dan, but she thinks Graham might’ve kept her pair. She wonders if he still has it.
He was wearing it on the market yesterday.
“Doctor.”
Yaz makes one of those hand signs behind her back, the most subtle one, and Dan drops his backpack from his shoulders with startling immediacy. He starts rummaging through—“you go on, I’m just getting my soup!”—and it’d be embarrassing to witness their clumsy subtlety if the Doctor wasn’t much, much more ashamed that they have a need for it.
“That wasn’t you yesterday,” Yaz tells her, stepping to her left. Her eyes are on the Doctor, and she knows it means that this going to be the most unpleasant of conversations. When Yaz averts her eyes, it means she’s scared, or too vulnerable for comfort; when she gestures for Dan to join them, it means she’s trying to move them forward; tapping or drawing circles means that it’s the Doctor’s turn to talk. Staring—staring is an interrogation.
“It was,” the Doctor reassures, fumbling for the thread, trying to take control. “Yaz, I’m going to figure out what’s wrong with the TARDIS, I swear. I wasn’t lying when—”
“I saw,” Yaz interrupts her. “Yesterday, when your coat flapped in the wind. I saw your suspenders. Dark blue.”
The Doctor’s teeth meet her tongue.
“You only got those after prison.”
“We traveled alone after prison.”
“Don’t lie to me!” Yaz’s head flashes around, much too fast for the Doctor’s tired eyes to keep up with her, and she steps over the small gap between them, eyes glinting. The wind blows her braid around her shoulders, and the Doctor finds herself stumbling back a step.
Fury drips from Yaz’s balled fists. “You know,” she continues, knowing better than to expect an answer, “after we saved the universe, you didn’t ask if I wanted to keep traveling with you, like after four years, you still knew what my answer would be.” She bites her lip, smiling bitterly. “And you were right. I would’ve come with you either way, but you said you finally wanted to trust me, and I…” Yaz’s lip trembles, just the faintest bit, and the Doctor feels her eyes sting.
If she makes her cry, with her stupid, idiotic, empty promises, then she might as well blow the TARDIS doors wide open, let everybody out while they’ve got the chance. They haven’t said, they’ve been so kind to her, but if Yaz goes, Dan goes with her.
Maybe it’s best, she thinks, if her death is so imminent, so inexorable, maybe it’s best if she drives them away now. She demanded of herself to be better, but in the absence of that—
“I believed you,” Yaz finishes, eyes dry. “And I waited for you to be ready, because the last time we pushed, you were hiding the death of your planet, but you’re lying to me again. You lied.”
The Doctor takes another step backwards. Her head swims. She’s supposed to be good, and she’s supposed to be okay, but her arms are so heavy, and her legs are so shaky, and she so desperately, definitely doesn’t have an answer for Yaz, and Yaz—
Yaz tells her, “You said we were friends.” Her mouth twists, and the Doctor knows she’s not trying to be cruel, but pinpricks spread over legs, destabilizing her guts. “But I know what that looks like now, I do, and it’s not this.”
She takes another step, arms sunk by her side, looking determined. No, you shouldn’t have. This was the Doctor’s hubris, thinking that the words would come, that she wouldn’t have to cut herself open for them. That for once, being whole would be enough.
“Doctor,” Yaz says, her expression faintly alarmed. Still, she soldiers on. “Doctor, who is Tecteun?”
The Doctor feels the muscles in her legs give out on her. Her body is an unreliable, watery mess, a liquid that won’t fit into the cup. Yaz surges forward, arms flying in her direction, and the Doctor stumbles back, stumbles away from her, if they’re not friends then she won’t let herself be touched, if they’re not friends why does she know that name, and her ankle twists, and her arms pinwheel, and suddenly there is nothing behind her. There is no ground beneath her feet.
“Doctor!” two voices yell from the distance.
She’s caught.
Yaz’s fingers catch her wrist.
It hurts, her arm being wrenched forward, her shoulder twisting to follow, but the Doctor’s gravity center finds itself back over the cliff edge, on solid ground. She crashes forward into Yaz. They tumble to the ground, the Doctor rolling off her before she catches her in the stomach, and come to lie on the sharp little stones beside each other, breathing.
Beneath the ragged cliff’s edge, a body meets ground with a thud.
“Dan!” Yaz yells out with admirable presence of mind, but Dan’s reached them now with the backpack in one hand. He’s not breathing too hard—eavesdropping, she’d do the same—his mouth open in shock, the rest of him sagged in relief. He whirls around at the sound.
Yaz is pushing herself up by the elbows while the Doctor’s still catching her breath. Dan pulls Yaz up the rest of the way, then walks up to the edge before she’s properly upright.
The Doctor lies on the ground, looking at the sky. Stones dig into her thighs, and the breeze makes her shiver, but the sky is a pleasant, blurry blue-white, and the sun tickles her face. She drapes an arm across her eyes. The headache is pleasantly numb now. Pain spreads itself across her back, like a big bruise; she must’ve fallen differently than she thought.
It’s quiet.
It takes a minute to compute that it’s quiet.
It’s not about the birds, or the worms burrowing their way through the hard soil beneath her, but the fact that there was a sound—there was a sound, and her friends went looking, didn’t they? Now there’s only an undefinable, faint noise, like wood scratching against rock.
Or—
“Doctor,” Dan says.
It’s not wood, or rock.
Someone is retching.
The Doctor pushes her hands into the ground, standing up so quickly she makes herself dizzy again. She bites back a scream at the state of her back, chokes the noise back into her throat, and drops down on her knees next to Yaz.
Her friend—not-friend, Yaz knows what that looks like now, and this isn’t it—her friend is hunched over on the ground, braid hanging over one shoulder, retching into her open palm. There’s a thin, faintly yellow bit of mucus plastered across one of her fingers, but otherwise, she’s just making grating, empty sounds.
“Breathe,” the Doctor says, feeling her voice gentle. “Yaz. One out, one in, see?” She demonstrates. “One out, one in. It’s alright. You caught me.” She grins, half-hysterical. “I didn’t fall.”
Dan, hands braced on his knees behind her, makes a sound caught halfway between a sob and a laugh, or maybe a scream.
Yaz lowers her hand from her mouth. She wipes it on her red blouse, and the mucus sticks there in sprinkles and splotches. She sits up a bit straighter, fingers twitching in her lap, eyes going to the Doctor’s face, and she’s felt the consequences enough by now to know that Yaz is half-itching to hit her. She doesn’t take it personally.
“Look over the ledge,” she says.
Dan protests, “Don’t.”
The Doctor stands up on numb legs. Her back is almost entirely rigid now. She stumbles towards the nothingness in front of her. And as the sea crashes against the rocks below without regard, the Doctor looks over the cliff, to the shore, where a body lies.
She’s on her back. Her limbs twist around her in awful shapes, bones poking through the skin. The Doctor’s hair sticks to her face and neck, growing darker by the minute. Blood still seeps from her head. The stones around her look like a massacre.
She can’t stop looking.
If she’s got her tides right, flood will come soon, and her body will be dragged into the sea. The stones will look new again in no time. A few years, and this other Doctor will be just a skull at the bottom of the ocean.
The thought clamps around her hearts with the feeling of all her blood stopping cold at once. She is alive; she can’t feel it, not in her body, but she’s breathing, and pain paints itself across her back and head with broad strokes. The Doctor wills her legs to solidify, and takes off across the path.
“Doctor!” Yaz yells, voice gravelly pitched sideways. “Doctor—” she scrambles up, but the Doctor’s already turned around again, feet hitting against the ground. She keeps her head glued to the ledge, and she’d told them to take their swim suits, there’s got to be—there’s got to be—
—a path, twisting between the sharp branches clinging to the side of the cliff—
She makes a hard right turn towards it, feet skidding over the ground, hands already flying to the edges of the stone. She can see now that the path is not so much walkable as it’s been carved into the cliff face by more enthusiastic, more prepared travelers than them, but she has got to get down there, she has a body and it will be washed away, she has a chance while it is broken, while one of her selves is lying down there unmoving—
She swings over the side, curses herself for not looking out for the golden glow.
Is this how Tecteun felt?, she thinks suddenly. She wants to dissect herself; wants to see how it works, how she keeps showing up where she never went. There’s a curiosity sitting at the back of her head, wishing her other self would start to regenerate. She never gets to see it from the outside.
She might be able to see what she does wrong.
She chose not to take back her memories, but her body’s never been that kind to her, she doesn’t think. Maybe there’s blood mixed into the golden when she dies; maybe when her mother killed her over and over, and over again, something broke inside of her.
And it would be so ironic. Having something torn out of her, create her entire civilization, everything that her people have built themselves upon, and breaking so badly in the process that they could never bear to look at her without contempt.
Her limbs start shaking with anger, and more than anything, she would like a look, she would like to tear herself open without feeling it.
But a cold hand clamps around her wrist.
She screams.
Yaz looks frightened, or it might be something else, her face has become so alien to the Doctor. Yaz doesn’t let go; has never known to, or wanted to, and the Doctor is already over the ledge, but the thought of her mother froze her, Tecteun ruining everything with a frightening amount of skill for a dead woman.
“You’re not going down there,” Yaz says coldly, and the Doctor flinches. Somehow she thought after this, they might have abandoned the words, but humans have never been so sensible.
“I am,” she bites, sending the psychic equivalent of the words through their skin-to-skin connection so strong she hears Yaz’s teeth click together. “This is me! This is my right! I will not abandon my body!”
“Yes,” Yaz answers, “you will.”
“Why—”
“You will because I told you to,” Yaz says, her other hand waving at the figure speeding round the corner. “Doctor, you just almost fell off a cliff, and I saw your dead body. It’s your responsibility to make sure I make it out of here.”
“Thought you wanted to be equals,” the Doctor says, one hand already bracing back on solid ground.
“But we’re not,” Yaz answers her. Dan kneels down, and puts a hand on her shoulder, as if to reassure; eyes averting the shore below. “And you have a duty.”
They pull at her shoulders. She kicks at the rock.
And they’re right; when everything else burns away, the bones remain, and she has a duty of care.
The Doctor calls for her ship, and abandons herself.
That night, the TARDIS’ temperature is moderate.
It’s not cold; it’s not hot. Not dry, or humid, and the air doesn’t change even next to the pool, or in the deep ice chamber.
When the Doctor feels hungry, custard creams are ready on the dispenser. When the Doctor feels thirsty, a trapdoor in the ceiling opens and dunks her in water, then hastily dumps a towel on top, and then water in a battered thermos, narrowly missing her ankle.
“What are you trying to do?” the Doctor asks quietly, pulling at a glowing cable with bleary eyes. The TARDIS creaks and groans, but when she tugs at their psychic connection, there’s just a faint noise going in a loop—a bit like a burp. The Doctor makes a face.
“Who are you eating?” she asks, as if she’d be in any way ready to deal with it.
Well. TARDIS knows what she’s doing, anyway. The corridor isn’t strobing, but she has everything she needs right here, and she suspects her—co-travelers have been granted the same pleasure. Her ship is trying to tell her that confrontation isn’t a good idea, and the Doctor cringes trying to imagine how bad it could be.
She hopes they’re together at least. Yaz with Dan. Dan with Yaz, too, but really, she’s just hoping someone’s fulfilling her duty, adding comfort and processing; and she is such a hypocrite, she knows that, but she wants Yaz to find what she can’t. To move on, even if that means moving out.
The Doctor tries to find the words.
After a few days of staring each other in corridors, bumping shoulders, mumbling excuses, of the rings underneath Yaz’s eyes growing darker and darker, the door to the kitchens suddenly start looping round again, leading them to the same, tasteful room, clad in a lovely light wood.
It doesn’t help.
The Doctor isn’t being actively avoided. She lingers in the kitchen, just to get herself to do something that isn’t messing with the TARDIS’ controls more than they’ve already been messed with. It helps that her stomach’s been feeling like an empty void, more so than she can remember in a good few centuries, barring prison, where she’d always felt inconveniently full and empty at the same time. So she experiments with fried eggs and sandwiches and Portuguese breakfasts, but it all tastes blander than she remembers, like part of her taste buds just up and went away out of protest.
Yaz has been walking in. First time she saw her cook a proper breakfast was the first time the Doctor saw that light in her eyes in days, but even on her offer, she only made herself a small plate to eat in silence.
Dan comes in often enough, too. Mostly just when Yaz’s footprints have started to go cold, like they’re coordinating check-ups on her. He seems to be fed up with the soup again now, and the TARDIS has been endeavoring to cook him wildly differing dishes day after another. He’s even appreciative of the Doctor’s still mediocre attempts, which would scratch an itch for her if she didn’t feel vaguely patronized.
Sitting in the kitchen on the evening of the fourth day, the TARDIS quietly blabbering in the walls, clutching the most boring cup of tea she’s ever had the displeasure to try, on account of she never drinks the whole thing anymore anyway, just sits there with the cuppa for company—the Doctor mumbles, “Kitchen scheme doesn’t seem to be working, love.”
The TARDIS burbles at her, and the Doctor sighs.
“No, you’re right,” she concedes. “She keeps—” her tongue tastes the roof of her mouth, still a bit sore from when she bit on it on the cliff side path. “Lookin’ at me, like she does when she expects me to speak first, but when I say something it’s—” she sets aside her cuppa, rests her cheek on the cool wood of the table. “Not enough,” she mumbles, even though the TARDIS must’ve picked the thought from her brain as soon as she started speaking. Never did have any psychic manners. It used to infuriate her friends.
Well, those friends are all dead now. “Be ‘s rude as you want,” she tells her ship. “Besides, I did—I do try, it’s just I’m not sure what she wants from me anymore, is all. Easier when she asks questions, but…”
She probably wants to know about the body, the Doctor thinks, but she doesn’t know. It must have something to do with what Swarm did to her, like aftershocks, but that doesn’t explain the marketplace.
She owes them something. Something easy, maybe, like quickly writing a book about temporal echoes and placing it strategically in front of their rooms, something to assuage their worries, but it all tastes so bitter on her tongue now. She owes them the truth, and if she can’t give them that, she owes them a trip home.
The Doctor’s eyes droop close, and she’s asleep.
The breakthrough, a day later, doesn’t come from the placement of the kitchen.
The Doctor’s taken to working on the console again, after one of the TARDIS’ attempts to cook fish went quite spectacularly wrong, smoking her out of her current place of comfort. She’s just pulling at wires, reinserting wires at this point.
It’s not that she’s not enjoying the TARDIS’ weird gurgling sounds, or understanding that piloting is difficult, because she is, she doesn’t need to get shocked again, it’s just that she’s starting to get a little concerned about her oldest friend.
Fixing the Flux made the dripping goo go away, even if it didn’t mop it from the floor, that was her, thank you very much, and besides the door that’s still stuck in the floor to the TARDIS’ great amusement, there’s been nothing wrong.
Except the fact that their communication line is so still, and weird, and the Doctor, amidst all this noise, feels more alone than ever.
Until Yaz bursts in.
There wasn’t a door to the corridors before, but the Doctor has to admit it helps with the dramatics. It flings open, and her friend—friend, not-friend, because Yaz knows better now—stumbles out, eyes haunted, rings under her eyes looking like smudged coal.
The Doctor pulls herself up, fighting the urge to run to the other side of the console, instead stepping towards her not-friend. “Yaz?” she asks tentatively. “Are you alright?”
“I thought I heard another one.” Yaz walks the steps down slowly, coming to stand in front of the Doctor in the same way she had when she’d called her back to talk, weeks ago. I’m sorry I didn’t let you in to what I was doing.
At least she’d known what she was doing, back then.
“Another one?” she asks, swallowing, like it’ll make the words come. “I’m sorry!” she blurts, pulling at the first one that’s stuck in her brain, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you! I should have thought about your safety, I—”
“Should have done a lot of things,” Yaz says, but it’s only very tired. “I thought I heard another you in the corridor. Ran out of my room like the devil.” She scoffs at herself. “Like me not seeing her would make her go away.”
The Doctor flinches. Is that why she’s been avoiding her? To make her go away?
“It was just a recording, though,” Yaz says. She looks to the side. “A hologram, like the one…” she sticks a hand into her pocket, and the Doctor feels her face soften at what she’s pretty sure is a subconscious gesture. “Except it was glitchy. You were sittin’ in the kitchen, telling someone to be rude. Said that you were trying. Looked like—” she stares critically at the oil smudge on the Doctor’s cheek. “Yeah. Would’ve been yesterday.”
The Doctor cringes into herself. I’ll have you know that’s a bit beyond rude, she snipes at her ship, but doesn’t get an answer, predictably. Displaying a memory. Scared the wits out of Yaz besides.
“This isn’t working,” she tells Yaz, feeling herself sway back and forth. She tries to suppress it—nervous habit—but her fingers start twitching instead, and she really doesn’t need another round of indents in her palm.
“No. It isn’t.”
“You’re not sleeping,” the Doctor notes.
“More than you,” Yaz retorts with a frown, but it’s half-hearted. Four hours a night, the Doctor guesses, looking at the slump of her shoulders, and feels her face draw downwards. Not proper human maintenance care at all.
Yaz inspects her, up and down. “I want to go back to the market place.”
The Doctor flinches. She allows herself to back up, step towards the console, twiddle with a pair of levers she told Yaz never to touch, ‘cause sooner or later she would’ve noticed they’re almost completely for her distraction. They make a nice clang, just like she installed them to do, and the TARDIS grumbles at her.
“I don’t,” she says quietly. Yaz looks unimpressed, and she thinks of reminding her that what she wanted was honesty, but it’s been a lonely four days, and there’s a lot she’d do not to have to drink an unsweetened cup of tea ever again. “It feels—” she begins when Yaz doesn’t say anything, just moves towards the console, hands going to the same spots that she would if she wanted not to mess up anything, except hers ghost over the clangy lever, unsure.
“There’s a tightness,” she says, “in my chest, like I can’t breathe. And I keep havin’ these headaches, real mood killer.” Yaz looks at her with a frown, half-skeptical, half-concerned. “I’m really tired, as well,” the Doctor finishes lamely. She spins a couple of steps to her left. Her hand comes to rest on Yaz’s, and she guides it downward gently.
The lever makes a clang.
The Doctor smiles.
“You told me that was dangerous,” Yaz says, uncertainly.
“It is,” the Doctor answers, breathing in. Skin-on-skin used to burn, and she doesn’t know what’s changed, but right now, when she knows about as well what’s happening to in her cells as she does in her own head, it’s nice to have someone else confirm she’s there. A hand beneath hers, shifting her back into a context where she exists.
“It felt dangerous, for me, not to have anything to do with my hands.” She pushes Yaz’s down again, and another clang sounds, rattling the floor. She feels it deep in her guts. “I didn’t want you to know I wasn’t doing anything. Proper sound, though, isn’t it?”
Yaz pushes down again, clang, a smile tugging at her eyes. Clang. Clang.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor repeats, very quietly. Yaz turns her hand, palms up, and their fingers fit together; the Doctor stares at them, and can feel Yaz looking at them too.
“Nothing’s alright, Doctor,” Yaz whispers.
“Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor whispers back, and doesn’t say a single other thing.
“How’d you get her convinced?” Dan stage-whispers as they leave the TARDIS to throw themselves into the masses.
“She’s havin’ breathing troubles,” Yaz answers, almost evasively. “Medbay said nothing was wrong with her. TARDIS was sulking.”
“She just sounds like that now, I think,” the Doctor corrects, shielding her eyes from the sun. Spices clog up her nose, and she wheezes discreetly. Great idea, Yaz, and wishes she could erase the thought, just ‘cause she’s trying to be better, still.
“And we are not going back to the bloody corpse,” Yaz continues sharply. “So market’s gotta do.”
“Could’ve done Tescalcado,” the Doctor mumbles. She sticks out a finger, half-hoping the TARDIS is on her side for once. The acidity tastes right; just that touch of umami, and the Eastern wind; regretfully, they must have hit the exact spot.
She makes a face, shoving and shoveling the fear back into her limbs, where it spreads, ice-cold. She shouldn’t be here. She can’t be here. She might as well have plunged a knife through her guts and slurped them up through a straw, like the lovely lady from the moon. She might as well have dropped them home.
Seeing this past self, if it is a past self, will mess it all up again. Typical, typical, typical. It’ll be ruined, and far beyond the mention of her mother’s name.
Yaz elbows through the masses with a face of authority at ease, which only serves to set the Doctor off more. She’s trembling by the time they’ve made it to the outer row of stalls, her heartbeats going rogue in her wrist when she spots the familiar coat.
Ryan, Graham, and Yaz are walking off laughing a few rows further—and Yaz was right, Ryan’s hair is a touch too long on his head. Younger Yaz throws a skeptical glance over her shoulder, resigned when she doesn’t spot the Doctor, and this—
—this is not a memory.
This is not the first time they’re at the marketplace, so many years ago. She went here with Yaz having given up being better, the cheer sliding off her face when she tried too hold it long. Relying on the dazzle, relying on the journey, on the surprise of returning to a place they’d already been to. Her lead festering at the back of her head.
It’d been far more difficult to slip away with only one companion to look after, but she’d lost her at a stall of video games that’d advertised themselves as ‘playable on any device’. That had been shortly before the Flux, when she’d long stopped dropping Yaz off home every week, and they’d both looked guilty at the reminder of their friends at home.
She doesn’t even remember why she’d stopped doing it. If she’d just forgotten, or if Yaz had asked her to.
“Good hiding spot, there.” Yaz gestures with her chin to a stack of boxes towering haphazardly into the sky, just at the edges of the field behind the market. She takes the Doctor’s hand, warm and dry in hers, and the edge of Dan’s sleeve, and they tiptoe around the stalls.
Yaz throws a pebble, distracting the last stall keeper before the stacks, and draws them into hiding. They’ve got an unfortunately good view, the Doctor notes, feeling a cold smile tug at her lips. Good hearing, too. There are no fights happening on the market today—or at least there weren’t when she checked for Yaz—no explicit thievery, nothing that’d make the headlines on some nameless day in summer. Nothing except what’s about to unfold. Nothing—excepting what her friends will feel when they witness it.
The Doctor’s vision blurs at the edges.
There is nothing wrong with her, nothing that anybody can see, and still, her body feels on the brink of existence.
Her other self reaches the stall.
Her hands clasp behind her back. She flashes the merchant a smile, leans down to admire the little spire with the waving children. It’s exactly as the Doctor remembers; every step, every casual motion, every well-placed, friendly word, and she’d thought herself so clever. Finally, at the cusp of discovery. It’d been a thrill, like clicking the first gear of a new invention into its place.
“Yaz,” she whispers, suddenly urgent. Tears her eyes away from the slot between the boxes, flapping at her hand. They’re all crouched behind the stack, on the assumption that no one will sneak up from behind; Dan, awkwardly sat on the Doctor’s left, one eye pressed close as he peers through his own sight hole, and Yaz, in a comfortable position the Doctor just knows she could hold for hours. “Yaz, Yaz, please, don’t make me,” she whispers, teeth clacking together in her mouth. Yaz turns to her, an odd, determined look in her eyes.
“We’re doing this for you,” she hisses. “Doctor, I’m not just going to let you ignore what’s wrong. If we find out what she’s saying—”
The other Doctor’s finished with the small talk. She leans over the counter, rattling quite a few of the vitreous sculptures. She says, quietly, and the Doctor curses, curses, the placement of these boxes, “Tell me about Tecteun.”
No wonder Yaz’s curiosity sparked.
She’d be like a dog with a bone, too.
“I know what she’s saying, Yaz,” the Doctor hisses back, trying to suppress the panic that’s rolling over her in waves now. “She’s me. I don’t know how history got rewritten—” and oh, if that only were the problem, but there is something much, much worse at play here. “But this is not something you want to see.”
“It’s not something you want to see,” Yaz tells her quietly, not looking away from the scene. And the Doctor realizes, when the words drift over to her—ma’am, the merchant says, a bit sleazily, and it’d rubbed all the wrong edges. I don’t know a Tec… what’d you say again? And I’ve never even heard of a Gat. He snorts. Sounds like a weapon. And oh, he shouldn’t have said that—that she is not above begging.
“Please,” she whispers, trying to drown out the next set of questions. “Please, Yaz, please don’t make me.” Her voice cracks, and she swallows, trying to pull the mask back on, trying to will back the water behind her eyes. “Don’t make me relive this.”
She feels Dan looking at her, even as Yaz maintains her laser focus. The Doctor feels him searching her face, and when she doesn’t meet his eyes, he puts a hand on her arm anyway.
“Yaz,” he whispers sharply, “Yaz, I think you might want to…” The Doctor feels tears prick at her eyes, one getting loose, rolling gently down her cheek. She can’t look. She doesn’t want to hear.
“Doctor,” Dan says, with increasing alarm. She can feel his arms twitching, like he wants to reach out so badly, but is afraid to. Circles and patterns, feeding each other. “Doctor, will you—oh, god,” he says, a hand reaching out and wiping the tear from her cheek, as if on instinct.
“I know you worked for Division,” the other Doctor says, low and threatening, and she can just picture the glint in her eyes. “I know because I did, too. And you will give me every. Piece. Of information that you have. ”
“Lady, no offense,” she can hear the merchant saying. Bile rises in her throat, joining the bitterness, almost making her retch. “But I’ve never heard of you.”
She doesn’t even know his name. Just the code: Operative #966753, Section seven-point-O. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t wondered about him as a person much at all. Selfish, she thinks, burying a nail into her palm, selfish. Selfish. Like she was the only ex-operative who deserved to live a free life.
“I’m the Doctor,” her other self says, and this Doctor feels something shatter inside her. A sob breaks free from the broken mess, clambering up her throat, and Dan’s hand tightens, and suddenly, his arms are around her, her head tucked under his chin as she releases sounds she’s sure her other self must hear.
Maybe it’s Time, protecting itself, putting them in a safe pocket, or maybe she’s not crying at all, maybe Dan isn’t there, maybe it’s just her alone watching herself on a loop, making bad choices, messing everything up—
Another sob breaks free, and she squeezes her eyes together tightly, trying to at least stop the tears. No crying, she tells herself frantically, feeling so selfishly, selfishly soothed when Dan’s arms tighten around her.
Crying means trying to get attention, trying to get absolved, and she is the villain in this scenario, she is to blame. Sometimes her actions have consequences, and this one will haunt her up and down her timestream. Nothing had to happen here. Even now—even in this moment, she could have relented, could have told him that she was the Doctor and she was here to help.
She could have found the Lupari another way.
Could have protected Earth, another way.
But now—
—now it’s too late, and Time has fixed itself here, with the universe restored.
She presses a hand over her eyes, feeling herself shaking, the headache eating and eating away at her brain. “It’s alright,” she hears Dan murmur, a bit helplessly, and she is absolutely conscious enough to feel deeply, deeply ashamed of herself.
She hasn’t properly cried for anyone dead, for any of the children, and she’s really—
“I can’t,” the merchant says, after a long pause, and she remembers the way his face had shifted at her name. From a practiced, easy conversational tone that made her suspect Division had let him go willingly, but hadn’t made her smart, or cautious enough to think about the measures they would have taken on one of their own, loose across the universe. “I’ve heard of you. But I can’t tell you what was done to you.” His next words adopt a loose sort of slur, the pauses between them longer.
She should have known.
“I’m sorry,” the merchant says, and she doesn’t have to listen to remember the way he’d suddenly become serious, sincere. “But stop asking. You don’t know what they’re capable of. Keep digging and you’ll knock on your own grave.”
She hadn’t taken him seriously enough.
A long life comes with such insensitivity to death threats.
Or it had—then, when she’d felt she had so little to lose.
“Yaz,” she whispers, throat hoarse. Dan is obscuring her sight line, and everything’s swimming anyway. Someone is hitting her head with a hammer. “Please.”
“Yaz,” Dan repeats, no-nonsense, and that’s when she can see the movement, Yaz tearing her eyes from the scene with so much reluctance. Her shoulders are tense, and freeze when she looks at the image—how strange it must seem, the Doctor thinks distantly, her dragged into Dan’s arms, tears dried on her cheeks. She feels catatonic, like she can never move her limbs again.
A minute or so, and they’ll all bear witness to her mess.
“I’ve never seen her like this before,” Dan says firmly. “I’m alright if you want to stay, but I’m getting her out of here.”
The Doctor feels a dry, warm hand on her cheeks, suddenly. “Doctor,” Yaz whispers, her face swimming into her field of vision. “Alright,” she decides, biting her lip, throwing a glance back at the hole behind the boxes. “Alright.”
Dan lifts her up, and she doesn’t even think to protest—her limbs are aching, and she only wants away, she only wants not to be responsible. Time put Graham and Ryan here, where they don’t belong, so maybe Time will set this right, if only she doesn’t look.
Yaz throws another small package, crackling as it hits the ground, and when the merchant next to the stack of boxes is distracted, they start making their way through the market. The Doctor can already feel her tears drying out, the broken mess inside of her close up her throat again as they make it to the TARDIS in a brisk pace.
Yaz, behind them, does the damage control. The Doctor slides out of Dan’s arm at some point, standing shakily on her own two feet, and has to focus too much on keeping upright to look back; when she does, just as they’ve reached the TARDIS, who’s being eyed by two nasty-looking security guys, commotion’s broken out at the edges of the market.
And a figure in a light blue coat is breaking away from the spectacle.
Yaz eyes her, hands on both their backs as she flashes security a hard smile, pushing them towards the TARDIS doors.
The lever goes clang.
Yaz walks around the console with offensively slow movements. She doesn’t put in coordinates, just goes through the motions, more cautious than the Doctor knows she has to be by this point; and every time she walks by that lever, she makes it go clang. Clang. And every time it does, the Doctor feels herself flinching, tensing up until the lever goes clang again.
They’re sitting on the steps, her and Dan, and she doesn’t feel like the pilot at all.
Her knees gave out again halfway through the doorway, which is tenderly placed in the wall again, and Yaz hadn’t let her lean on the console. Dan had brought her a worn, well-loved blanket, and a sandwich that she hasn’t touched, and a deathly sweetened cup of tea, and she’d almost felt the tears come again, hot behind her eyelids.
She doesn’t feel like a pilot. She doesn’t feel in control.
“What,” Yaz asks, “happened back there.”
The TARDIS shifts, vibrates, settles in the Vortex. Yaz stays standing at the console; near the lever, almost like a warning.
“Yaz,” Dan says, in kind.
“Doctor,” Yaz asks, back still to the stairs. So tense, and imposing, friend-not-friend, and the Doctor has to take all her bravery and plaster it on her hand where she can see it not to run away. “Are you dying?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, cautiously, like treading on someone’s glass sculptures, only she doesn’t know how to mind all of it because it’s all around and above. “I will—I will,” she repeats, “I’m not invincible,” the TARDIS gurgles at her, and she is trying to be honest. “But not right now. I don’t think. I’ve never had this happen to me before.” She smiles at Yaz’s back, like it could assuage her mood. Dan is very close to her, looking concerned.
She smiles at him, too, because she doesn’t want him to think bad of Yaz—he hasn’t lived the things she hid from them. He doesn’t know the person the Doctor can be.
“Then answer me!” Yaz yells, making her flinch again. She turns around, one hand still at the edges of the console. Angry tears glint in her eyes. “What is Division? What did they do to you? Who is Tecteun?”
“I can’t—” the Doctor stumbles over herself. The blanket slides from her shoulders, and she stands abruptly, swaying on the spot, “I don’t know,” she bites out, frustrated. “They are dead. You said there wouldn’t be any answers even if they weren’t, but—” she staggers towards the console, bracing an arm against it next to Yaz’s. “They have their hands in everything,” she bites. “Division originated on Gallifrey, and they spread, out and out and out. They’re their own secret. I didn’t know they existed until the Master told me.”
These words aren’t the right ones, but they’re revelations nonetheless, bombs going off and off and off and she will not be able to take them back.
“They’re a secret organization that your people created,” Yaz concludes, and the Doctor sees her trying to pull emotions behind the calm, teeth pressing down on her lips, almost as if she’s ashamed. “And you were a part of, but you don’t remember. Because they—” she stares. “They took your memories?”
This is so much farther-reaching than they can ever go.
It’s so big, the Doctor thinks, despairing, clutching tighter to the console. This is the bare bones, and she is already exhausted. It’s not helping. It’s not getting her any answers. It’s just information she could have told Yaz long ago. Just facts. Just a story.
“Yeah,” she says.
The Doctor turns her head to the side, and sees Dan sitting on the steps, one hand around the cup of tea she left behind. Regarding them with sharp eyes.
“You were trying to get answers from that merchant,” Yaz says. “Doctor. I have never seen you cry.” She takes a deep breath, her own eyes watery. “What did he tell you? What did they do to you?”
“It’s not about what they did,” the Doctor answers numbly.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know!” she shouts, so sudden she startles herself. “All I know about Division is what the Master told me and from when I broke Time, and you can see how those wouldn’t be reputable sources, would they, Yaz?” her hand makes a fist. “But it’s not even about that, because they were all right, I shouldn’t have gone digging. I can’t face the truth anyway, and that merchant—”
“I don’t care!” the Doctor had hissed, anger burning through her, searing her from the inside. “Let me take responsibility for my own life, operative nine-six-six-seven-five-three. I’m capable of more than you can possibly imagine.”
“You don’t understand,” the merchant had said, leaning close. His eyes hadn’t been able to properly focus anymore, and she’d thought him drunk—a fool—someone who must have been involved in the deep trenches of the Division, who must have done such terrible things that he didn’t want to tell her about—
Deeper, later that night, she’d wondered what reputation it was that proceeded her.
“Ask the Lupari,” he’d wheezed, eyes widening, “Karvanista, he can explain. You don’t understand. Your mother—”
His eyes had rolled into the back of his head.
She wonders who he’d been. ‘What was done to you,’ he’d said, which might have been flattery, or fear, but it wasn’t ‘what you did,’ and that might have reassured her if not for the price that came with it. ‘What was done to you’ coupled with ‘mother,’ and she hadn’t thought him Gallifreyan, but anything was possible with a good bit of Time Lord technology.
She hadn’t reacted where it mattered.
She caught the merchant by the shoulders.
Frantically, with shaking hands, she’d taken his stilled pulse. There wasn’t anything wrong that she could see; a quiet, quick brain death. Entirely unnatural.
Synaptic collider, she knew now, of course. Talk about what Division doesn’t want you to say, get poison injected directly into the brain. I’ll be dead in three seconds, Karvanista had told her, and she hadn’t wanted to believe.
“He’s dead,” she finishes flatly now. “I pushed too far. He would have had a lifespan into the thousands if I hadn’t made him talk about Division.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dan says, setting down the cup, and she can’t see, it’s all becoming so hard, breathing, her vision narrowing down, her limbs weighing tons and tons. Yaz reaches out to her, and still can’t help but ask, “What set it off? What was so important that he died for it?”
The Doctor had held the dead man in her trembling hands, his body slumping over the counter, crushing his beautiful, delicate sculptures.
The reason she was here for, the reason she was here for was a lifespan reaching beyond the birth of her civilization.
That life, she’d summoned it into her hands, her hearts pumping it rapidly through her veins. Regeneration energy had burnt through her with a golden, cleansing glow. The Doctor had barely been able to hear the bustle of merchants and customers alike realizing that something sketchy was going on over the rush of blood in her ears; she’d positioned the merchant against the side of his stall, and gently placed her fingers to his temples.
She had poured, and poured, hearts beating faster and faster in a quick staccato rhythm. Her regeneration energy flowing out of her in a wave, and it had felt like a turning point, like she might finally, finally twist and turn the Master’s words, the story he’d told her, and mold it into something good, something that would give back meaning to herself—
“Why, he mentioned my mother,” she tells Yaz, word biting on her tongue. She knows Yaz hasn’t seen hers in a while, but she’s still afraid it will make her tell her to, foremost, forgive and forget, don’t speak ill of the dead, there are so many rules —
Her fingers had dripped with energy, with this life that she’d ripped from her chest, and the dead merchant’s skin had reflected it back to her.
A safeguard, worked into his cells from the very essence of her.
She’d stared at the body in horror.
Someone had to have gotten a hold of her DNA for this, injected it into this man in a procedure that couldn’t have been anything but painful and experimental and entirely, awfully specific.
“Tecteun,” she says.
Someone—and who would it have been, poking needle after needle after needle in her skin, making sure that every time she turned around, there was another child sitting on that stretcher, their eyes becoming bigger and more fearful with every new death, the Doctor chose not to reclaim her memories because who would want to have this in her head, a thousand bloody murders?—someone had prepared that merchant either against her healing him, or dying in front of him.
The people had started to turn.
The Doctor brings her fist down on the console.
So she’d run.
Sprinted across the entire marketplace and right onto Yaz’s side, and didn’t say a single truthful word to her that day.
First she does it gently, and Yaz’s eyes widen another fracture, her mouth open with all the questions the Doctor isn’t stable enough to answer.
She raises her hand again and hits it against the pillar, exactly where it hurts, her and her ship, and the TARDIS groans deep in her belly as she brings down her hand again, feeling her bones give out. Her skin’s torn already. The sea won’t wash the blood from these rocks.
“Stop, Doctor,” Yaz shouts, hand coming down on her wrist in that iron grip. Dan’s arms come up to her from behind, pressing her arms to her body. She struggles against him; her vision is almost entirely black now. The TARDIS screams in her head, apology overwhelming her, like she had anything to do with this, like she has anything to account for, “stop, stop, stop,” Yaz demands, then begs, her voice sliding into something desperately low. “Stop fighting us, who—”
The ground gives way under her feet. Everything happens at once. Her migraine spikes; her limbs go slack; her hand starts hurting; she forgets to breathe.
“Who are you?”
The other Doctor now standing at the console hunches over in the exact moment that she does.
“Can’t breathe,” she wheezes, one hand thumping at her chest, in the very midst of where her pulmonary tube is supposed to be. “Head hurts. Yaz? Have you got the pills we picked up on Elmar-7? And who—” she presses out, “is she?”
“You remember me?” Yaz says, at the very edges of her.
The Doctor can’t exactly—see too well, but still, it’s not a problem to know what’s going on around her. The TARDIS pushes at her mind, and she gets the peaceful, barely smug feeling of being the one she’s chosen to keep a connection to. Take that, she thinks at her other self, resentfully.
The TARDIS makes a half-grumbling, half-snorting sound that echoes across the room.
The other Doctor looks up confusedly, touches her hand to the central pillar. “Love?” she asks. “You alright? I can’t— aghh,” her head falls down to her chest, “hurts, ” bites out through her teeth. “Can’t feel you. Have you chosen her? ” she asks, tone full of offense.
The TARDIS chirps, insecure.
“Don’t you dare,” the Doctor says.
“But she’s all messy! ” complains her other self, and Dan snorts. If he’d stop holding her like someone who can’t be trusted now, that’d be great, even if her legs aren’t exactly having a four star experience right now. “Look at her, she’s hit you! She’s bleeding! I haven’t done that since before the Flux.” She wrinkles her nose.
“You remember then!” Yaz says excitedly, hands dropping from the Doctor’s wrist. Her other self’s face softens so obviously that the Doctor shudders in embarrassment. Yaz preens.
Traitor.
There’s no reason, none, to dislike this other self at all; in fact, in any other situation, and if the universe hadn’t overindulged her in looking into a moving mirror, she’d find her quite fanciful. But something about her is infuriating—her hair’s just that step up to perfect, very nicely dried and layered, and the oil smudges around her mouth add to a charm the Doctor’s sure she, herself, must have had at some point. She’s wearing a maroon shirt, instead of her own dark blue, which is already a suspicious indicator of her excessive put-togetherness. This, out of all the others, must be a genuine imposter.
The Doctor is just about to articulate this, wiggling herself out of Dan’s grasp, when the TARDIS sends a wave of reprimand-apology-stupid-idiot. It’s so caring, so communicative, that the Doctor, embarrassingly, feels tears well up behind her eyes again.
Is this how Yaz felt when she told her—
Nope, the Doctor thinks, not thinking about it.
Other Doctor, meanwhile, is bumbling around the room, shoulders only drawn slightly inwards, despite the breathlessness she knows she must be feeling. A total and obnoxious picture of fine-ness.
She walks up the stairs, almost pushing over the abandoned teacup, and the Doctor feels her migraine seeping away like so much relief. It’s still there, but with every step her other self takes, her eyes manage another bit of focus, and she breathes more easily.
“Good, isn’t it?” the other Doctor says with a smile.
“Figured. It seems like something must have gone wrong when we were trisected last month. It felt alright.” She flashes a smile at Yaz from the top of the stairs. “But that event … it’s possible it encouraged a tear in our timestream. Like a frayed cloth. So what do we have to do?” She swishes to the Doctor, pointing a finger.
“Cauterize it.”
Her other self makes a face. “Clothing metaphor,” she mutters. “Too daft for a clothing metaphor. Alright. We can do medical.” Her face lights up. “Like an open wound that won’t stop turning the host inside out.”
The Doctor stares at her, slowly drawing her mangled hand to her stomach and holding it still.
“Terror, it is, lookin’ at you,” her other self says. “Can’t expect me to be good at words at the moment. Anyway!” she claps her hands. Rassilon, and she’s about ten seconds away from giving her a point and a gold star, the Doctor thinks resentfully. Great moods come with great obnoxiousness and so on, and so forth. “When we were last trisected, there was no notable physical difference between us. Now, on the other hand, ” she gestures, broadly and offensively—
“Can you stop?” the Doctor bites through her teeth. “I don’t know where we split off to make you like this, but you’re infuriating.”
She stalks away from the console, Dan making an alarmed sound at her, and walks up the stairs, coming nose-to-nose with the blank face of the other Doctor. “If you’d just seen what I have—do you remember? Huh? Remember the day at the Limirjan marketplace? We murdered someone,” she wheezes, suddenly remembering, a certain feeling of doom pounding in her chest, why this is a bad idea.
The other Doctor doesn’t back off.
She doesn’t offer a smug remark. Her eyes drift sideways. Breath hot on the Doctor’s mouth, an uncomfortable, sticky sort of déjà vu. “That wasn’t our fault,” she whispers. “We couldn’t have known.”
The Doctor snorts. “Who told you that?”
“Yaz did,” her other self says sadly. “but looking at her, I don’t think yours even knew.” She bites her lip, and when she blinks, a tear catches in her lashes. “I thought…” she smiles, an exact replica of the Doctor’s when Dan had interrupted them that day, teary, eyes locked onto the ceiling. “I thought you were the aberration, but it’s me, isn’t it?”
She meets her eyes.
“Oh, this was never us,” she says, fast, taking a step back. “I walked away just now because I thought it would hurt less, and… Rassilon,” she smiles again, cynical this time. “When have we ever done that.”
“We could!” the Doctor protests, reaching out with her good hand, and touches a finger to her mirror’s cheek, wiping away the tear. “Yaz, you told her everything, didn’t you? Just like we promised?”
The other Doctor nods.
“Did it make her happy?” the Doctor whispers. “Was it the answer to all our questions?”
Her other self shakes her head. “Nah,” she answers, a hand bracing against her chest again as their breathing becomes more difficult. “But oh, it felt good. I have memories… where I wonder where I found these words… but I was so relieved,” she says. “That they were there at all.”
“Yeah,” the Doctor says quietly. She feels her tongue twist, and adds, “I’m sorry,” in Gallifreyan. It’s one of the simplest, shortest statements you can make, something her people have always wanted to get over with, but she makes an effort to pitch her voice in just the right way, slightly to the left.
It’s an archaic form to talk about your self in an alternate timeline, a simple phonetic shift, and still, when her other self sinks into her arms, and says their name in the exact same pitch, just to echo anything at all, it feels like coming home.
The Doctor’s head goes almost still.
Her vision blacks at the edges, such a meaningless thing now, because she can just close her eyes against it; her own arms are around herself, both ways. She could die here, she realizes, her breathing going slower and slower. It was a miracle she’s surviving now; the trisection happened in a controlled environment, within a tear in the fabric of space and time, whereas she and her other self are dancing around the frayed ends.
She would love to know how this was caused, because the tear had been staring to close, she’s sure of it; there was a day, an hour, where she felt whole, where all of her was together and her body wasn’t failing under the pressure, but that’s gone now, and something, someone must be very amused.
The TARDIS chirps at the back of her mind.
The other Doctor lets go.
“Someone’s got to take care of us, eh,” she says, stumbling back and onto her knees.
“Doctor!” someone yells behind them—
“I’ll take her,” Dan says gently.
Tears brim at his eyes; she has never seen that lad cry, but the other Doctor looks up at him from the floor with so much affection that this one aches, aches, to know what kind of relationships she could build with her honesty. Dan smiles at her brilliantly, probably freaked out but going with the flow, and he claps a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder before kneeling down next to her other self.
“Where do you wanna go?” she can hear him say quietly. He slides an arm around the other Doctor’s back back and helps her up, stumbling towards the corridors. “I bet you could show me so many places the Doc keeps from us. Ye?”
Her other self nods shakily. She throws a look over her shoulder, grave with a hint of a smile, and the Doctor nods back. Her hair slides over her eyes.
She is left alone with Yaz.
Her friend-not-friend walks up the steps, where the Doctor’s collapsed against the sides. She wrings a smile from her lips. “Mm,” she says, so tired it runs a circle around itself until she’s almost not tired anymore. “Yasmin Khan. Get it?”
“Your timeline is splitting,” Yaz answers. She crouches down in front of her, fumbling for her key ring. It’s got a little flashlight fastened to it. “Look at me. That Doctor’s from an alternate timeline, one where you told me what was going on with you.”
“Yeah,” the Doctor smiles, squinting against the light . “Heard her talking about headache pills? I’d never take those.” Yaz sours at her, pocketing the light, and she sputters, changing course. “There must have been something, though, some trigger to get this all going. All those selves. Like something’s…” she hesitates. “Like someone’s been messing with my memories.”
The TARDIS gurgles at her, insistently, like she’s trying to express her sympathy.
“Swarm?” Yaz asks, and she shakes her head. “Your mother?” and the words sound foreign to her ears.
“Dead.” She lets her injured hand fall from her stomach. “Dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Yaz says, with those rough, human sounds, and the Doctor leans closer to her until they’re almost touching. “I’m guessing we have to fix it.”
“Could be dangerous,” the Doctor agrees. She crosses the last bit of space between them, and leans her forehead against her not-friend’s. Breathes in, breathes out. Dan and her other self must be moving at a comfortable pace, because her chest untightens in painfully slow increments. “Mm.” She detaches herself. Lets her head fall back, and Yaz catches her face in her hands just before she impacts with a hexagon. “I don’t know where to start.”
“We start with the medbay,” Yaz decides. She moves her hand down when she’s sure the Doctor’s neck will hold itself up, supporting her armpits until the Doctor’s legs decide to become solid again.
“Yaz,” she reminds her as they stumble into the corridors together, and takes an immediate, sharp turn to the left to lead them as far away from herself as possible. “I’m… ” her words are so slurred she’s almost ready to admit herself into the TARDIS’ care—can’t have the talking leave, too, or she’ll have nothing going on for herself—if only she thought it would help, “I’m… tired,” she tries, and Yaz stares at her unimpressed, quickening their pace. “I’m sick because of all the… splitting, it’s taking a toll on me, and I’m not even being tortured,” she grumbles. “TARDIS can’t help with that.”
The TARDIS grumbles, and she waves at her, reaching out to lay a comforting hand on the wall.
“I am talking about your hand,” Yaz corrects, but the grumbling only grows louder, louder, like a nearing train; Yaz lets go of her to cover her ears, sinking to her knees when everything starts to shake. The Doctor does the same, cries out when her hand meets her ears with a bloody squelch.
Her healthy hand, meanwhile, braces against the wall.
And sinks into goo.
Her whole body slides sideways; the walls becoming a sticky, treacly mess. She gives up standing and lets herself be submerged, the floor transforming beneath her, quicksand-like.
The Doctor sinks into the arms of her oldest friend.
When she wakes up, there is nothing but darkness around her.
For a moment, she thinks her eyes have given up focus entirely. And it’s nice, she has to admit, it’s lovely, it’s really quite beautiful. She’s lying in a soft, sticky heap, like a marshmallow, only with a faintly sour smell. A corner of her sight illuminates slowly.
She can now see that she’s lying in a landscape of thin, high spires, ranking far and wide under the dark ceiling. Light starts pouring in, making its way down to the ground. Everything is pleasantly blue.
It reminds her of something—some other place; the Kasaavin’s dimension—it has that certain, liver-y quality to it, but the room stretches pleasantly only to the end of her line of sight. She doesn’t feel lost. Her senses feel cool and clean, like someone’s gently ran her brain under a tap of cool water.
There is movement behind her.
“You alright, Yaz?” she asks gently. The goo pushes against her arms, and she groans at the pain in her hand, but it’s such an isolated feeling it’s almost pleasant. A bit of adrenaline, rushing through her veins.
“I’m good,” her friend-not-friend answers. The Doctor turns in the goo, and the light breaks through in two places. Yaz’s face looks gloomy in it, and she shields her eyes, but there’s something wondrous in her expression. “The gravity,” she says, carefully lifting a finger. “It’s different.”
The Doctor sticks out her tongue. “Not by much. Surprised you noticed it.”
“Yeah.”
The goo shifts again, pushing at the Doctor’s shoulder blades this time. “Alright,” she mumbles, the goo slowly detaching herself from her fingers and clothes, leaving behind blue smears.
The TARDIS chirps at her, and panic spikes momentarily in her chest as she can’t figure out if they’re sounds or if her friend is in her mind. Yaz smiles very slightly, though, so she figures she must be hearing it, too.
“Wherever Dan’s brought other me,” the Doctor starts as they trudge through the spires. It must be some kind of forest; whatever it is, its sun has risen, and it’s not getting much brighter than this gloomy half light. “We must be at the furthest place the TARDIS can take me from her.” She marvels at the light spring in her step, the ease of taking a breath. “That’s the explanation I’ve got for… this,” she gestures, a bit ashamedly.
She makes her way around another spire. Unlike most trees, they’re all made from one material, the same blueish goo that’s shifting under their feet, except solid and partially crystallized, like fancy glass.
“Proximity was elevating the strain on your body, right?” Yaz asks. “From being split apart?”
She’s half a step behind her, always carefully placed in a way that means she’s making her own path beside the Doctor’s, taking her own risks. The Doctor’d rather she didn’t; and that’s always been a problem of hers, because if anyone else told her to keep in a line, she’d go zigzag, out of spite.
“Yeah, it’s…” she steps over a particularly chunky part of goo growing at the foot of one of the spires. Must be a mushroom, formed a bit like a torso without the limbs and head. Quirky, she thinks strainedly at her ship, careful not to make a face when it breathes at her. “It’s like… the trisection hurt me the first time, but that was just a cut in my timeline. Now someone’s put a new wound into the old one, and it’s bleeding, and festering, and spilling bad stuff everywhere.”
The TARDIS groans deeply.
“You’re alright, love,” she says softly, then goes on. “The pain’s just a symptom. My body’s not literally split apart, but my timeline is embedded in me, and it’s sort of… tearing.”
“At you?” Yaz asks, shuddering at an eye staring at them from a spire. “Or tearing you apart?”
“Bit of both!” the Doctor answers. “It’ll be fine once we figure out the source.”
They walk by another chunk of goo fused to a spire; this one looking suspiciously like an arm. The fingers flex at them through frilly edges.
“We are,” Yaz says dryly, “currently lost on the way to the medbay.”
“I told you she’s trying to keep me safe.” The Doctor grimaces. “Sorry you got caught with me. My girl’s telling me something, I’m just not getting it, so… love?” they walk past a pair of glasses, shining yellow beneath a thin, skin-like layer of blue gunk. Suspicion hits her like a freight train. “Did you eat someone?”
Again, that low grumble. The spire they pass has pieces of wooden boards in it, covered by the goo; drifting upwards, as if trying to escape.
She’d thought the TARDIS was behaving oddly because of the repercussions from the Flux. Just like Time, just like the universe and her own body and mind and the air around them, but with all the grumbling and groaning and the creaking and the temperature changes telling them where to go and what to avoid—
Yaz makes a noise of alarm.
The gunk starts blubbering around them.
“You didn’t,” the Doctor protests, horrified. “You’re not creating another problem, are you?” Yaz steps beside her as the spires start leaking, blue liquid running down from so far above, dripping and dripping, tinged orange, “You’re not—” and the Doctor presses her injured hand more tightly to her stomach as bubbles start breaking free, obscuring her sight. “Digesting people,” she whispers.
She wiggles her good hand beside her, and Yaz’s slides into hers.
The temperature drops.
“Yaz,” the Doctor whispers, “can you be my friend again for a little while?”
“The Doctor I met in the corridors,” Yaz whispers back. They twist until they’re back to back, the sudden wind blowing bubbles into both of their faces. Them against the world, amidst the dripping of the goo. “She was bleeding so badly. She was you if you’d gone to get the TARDIS from the lizards, wasn’t she?”
The Doctor nods, a movement against Yaz’s hair.
“The Doctor on the market was you if Ryan and Graham hadn’t left.”
“Yeah.”
“Was she very different?”
“The scene with the merchant was exactly the same,” the Doctor whispers.
Yaz lets her head fall back against hers with a bonk. The Doctor winces, then snorts. “Other me was right, though,” Yaz tells her, shifting closer. The wind howls around them. “It wasn’t your fault.”
The Doctor squeezes her hand.
“The one on the cliffs—” Yaz draws in a shuddering, shaking breath. “She died when I didn’t catch you. And the one that you and Dan talked to?” Yaz asks. “The one on the sunny path who didn’t know me. Who disappeared.”
“Vortex manipulator,” the Doctor smiles. “I think,” she says, “that me must have landed somewhere else but in that train.”
“She had dead eyes.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m your friend,” Yaz whispers. “As long as you keep that in mind.”
The wind tears at them.
Yaz’s braids have long since become loose, whipping around their faces, and the Doctor feels their energies dwindle down into the abyss. It’s dark and peaceful in the land of the very tired, she’s found, her hand a very dull, distant ache, covered in blood that looks black in the gloom. With the TARDIS groaning up a storm around them, making noises she can only now classify as digestion, the only way standing was to move forward; and move forward, they do.
She keeps howling, mournfully. Her ship’s whole demeanor is so much like an apology that the Doctor doesn’t dare think about what she’s gotten herself into; the armada of people and body parts they’ve passed by in the timeless hours they’ve been stuck between the spires.
Only the bodies have been getting smaller and smaller. Hundreds of them, at least; children’s fingers reaching out to them from all corners. The howling’s starting more and more to sound like crying, sliding into begging, until all the Doctor can do not to pull out her teeth is keep tightly by her friend’s side.
“You don’t think she actually ate people,” Yaz whispers, stepping over a heap of gunk looking a bit like wires, plugged into some great, unidentifiable machine. “Where would she even get them from? We’ve been right here.”
The spires are like a wall in front of them, getting denser and thicker. “Rassilon, no,” the Doctor answers quickly, “I wasn’t saying she just liked to eat people. It’s just, sometimes she finds anomalies where we are, and just sort of—” she cranes her neck, trying to see an easy way through. “Gobbles them up. Odd space-time events. She could break the universe if she wanted to, so sometimes she just likes to help with the odds and ends, the things that usually take care of themselves. This is a bit bigger, though. And I can’t feel anything wrong about this place, it’s all just sort of… stuck,” she says. “Like Time, like everything, is clogged up, except—”
Except memory.
Memory drifts easy, here, like dust in the sunlight. Something makes her feel at ease, like every moment is truly in flux, instead of the usual mess of twists and turns. She’s usually so aware of consequences. Tell her friend one thing, it’ll never be untold. Let her story be loose, she’ll never stuff it back to where it came from.
Open the watch, she’ll never be the same.
It’s not a bad thing, inevitability.
Yaz nods, like she knows, and the spires clear.
They don’t disappear; it’s just like they’ve taken another step, and the dense walls are behind them, a clearing ahead.
There, on a table of blue goo, sits a watch.
It’s beautiful, intricately inscribed with Gallifreyan, set in the characteristic simpleness of something that should always be noticed only on the edges of your vision.
The watch is almost untouched by the goo, except for a thin, blue stream running from its side, like a tear drop.
It’s leaking.
The Doctor’s hands tremble. Possibility dances in the air, fragile as dust.
“They’re your memories,” Yaz says.
She steps forward in wonder, so much braver than her. “Hundreds of thousands of millions.” Yaz turns to the Doctor, and tugs her forward by the hand. “They were taken from you.”
The Doctor can feel it; the knowledge in the air. Like ripe fruit, practically falling into your hand, and Yaz is so careful only to take what she is owed. The information that the Doctor should have told her long, long ago, the night after she told Ryan, when their absence beat a hole in her hearts and she’d told herself that it wasn’t worth it.
Told herself that she’d opened herself up to Ryan and he still hadn’t stayed, and pushed deep, deep down how good it had felt to be seen.
“By Tecteun,” Yaz says, sidestepping another set of words with a care that brings tears to both their eyes. “By Division.”
Her hand falls from the Doctor’s just as the touch is starting to overwhelm her. The sheer scale of psychic sensitivity in the air threatens to overwhelm her, and she doesn’t need to bring her own into it; except, of course, her ship’s is her own, her own beating, bloody heart, and she—
“She’s digesting them,” Yaz says. “She’s been digesting your memories.”
The Doctor walks across the goo.
With every step, it becomes a bit more solid under her feet, quicker to detach itself from her, flaking from her feet, until, in the middle of the clearing, the ground is solid as stone. She reaches out to the watch.
“I didn’t think I’d see this again in a while,” she says quietly. Sits, on the crystal slab, and takes the fob watch into her hand. It glints in the blue light. Her skin makes contact with the cool metal, and her fingers try to tear themselves away on instinct, like touching the edges of an explosion. The psychic epicenter. No wonder the TARDIS hasn’t been talking, no wonder their line’s been so empty, their travel so lopsided, no wonder Yaz saw that memory echo; this is a massive amount of energy, this means—
—this is a massive number of years.
SAFETY, her ship screams in her head.
The Doctor feels her body lurch to the side, and Yaz hurries to her, a hand on her back, keeping it steady, a warm touch through the cloth. SAFETY. The Doctor feels a jolt through her system, adrenaline, panic, the TARDIS getting literal, SAFETY, safesafesafesafe —
Unless I really ask for it, her own voice says in her mind.
SAFETY, the TARDIS screams. APOLOGY. SAFETY.
The Doctor sinks into Yaz. A tear drips from her eye, coming so easy here, on the backs of all the children she’s been, crying for their mother to stop hurting them.
“The person who took me as a child,” she says hoarsely, “Tecteun, saw I wouldn’t stay dead and killed me, over and over again until her experiment proved a success. She built Division, and I worked for them.” She activates her muscles to sit on her own, sets the watch beside her, carelessly. Turns around to her friend, whose eyes are shining so brightly, face wet with tears.
“I think the TARDIS was afraid I would want those memories back in my head,” the Doctor whispers. Wrenches a hand in front of her mouth, breathing hard, sobs pressing up against her lips, wanting out, out, out, like she always knew, that once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop, the exact, exact thing her ship was so scared of that she’d rather have run millions and billions of memories through her system than ever just hand the Doctor that watch. “So she…” she sobs, and Yaz bites her lip and looks away.
“She wanted to process them for me, she wanted to make them safe, and she…” the Doctor lays her other hand out on her lap, splaying the fingers out, bloody and torn. “She hurt herself, and she hurt me.” APOLOGY, the TARDIS starts up again, unregulated, just a scream caught in the back of her throat-not-throat as the landscape around them, a liver-y, slippery mess of body and memory, shifts and bubbles with her emotions.
The Doctor’s memories, being wrenched open and digested. The Doctor’s timeline, still connected with her erased lives, twisting itself to fit; the Doctor’s body, losing itself, losing touch, losing, losing, and the Doctor— “And I hurt you.”
“I wouldn’t want those memories back,” Yaz says. “If I were you. I don’t think anyone would.” A bubble drifts upwards from the ground, catching in her hair. It pops without leaving anything behind, as a white glow comes into the landscape. “It’s okay to make mistakes,” she says to the ceiling, a bit too loudly, and the TARDIS gurgles. “But we’ll leave the stirring up to when we’ve rested, won’t we?”
“You mean—”
“Rested,” Yaz says tiredly, shielding her eyes against the steadily more brightly glowing lights. “Processed. Healed.” She sways on her feet. “I want to go see my family.”
“Yeah,” the Doctor says, wriggling off the crystal slab. The watch is forgotten. She sends FORGIVENESS into the TARDIS’ mind, in case she could ever doubt it. She wraps an arm around Yaz’s shoulders, guides her head down to shield her eyes from the light. She presses a kiss to her forehead, and the landscape fades away.
She wakes lying beside her sleeping friend, blinking against the dimmed lights of the medbay.
There is a banging on the door.
The Doctor sits up, taking the time to stretch her aching muscles. Her hand is dressed in a clean bandage. She stands from the mattress, smiles down on it.
Thanks, love.
Sleep-rest-care-tired, the TARDIS sends, blearily. Their connection goes on humming gently, monotonously. The Doctor’s got the feeling they won’t be going anywhere today.
She takes a few steps, presses down the door handle, and Dan bursts in, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. “I’ve lost her!” he yells, wheezing, taking the Doctor by the shoulders, trying to catch her gaze, “Doctor, I’ve lost the other you! She just…” he frowns, catches his breath, “I turned around and she was gone, like the walls ate her up or something, or… oh.”
Yaz’s hair is spread over her pillow. The blanket is tucked lovingly around her, boots placed neatly at the end of the mattress, her jacket folded up beside them.
“She’s not even snoring,” Dan whispers. “I’m seeing wonders every day.”
The Doctor ducks out from under his hands, takes a few steps back, and lets herself fall onto the mattress. She looks at the ceiling. Blinking. Already half-asleep again.
“You coming?”
Dan kicks his shoes into a corner. She feels a dip in the mattress as he tugs at her blanket, draping it over himself, shifting and turning. “Good night, Doc.”
Beside them, Yaz starts to snore.
“Good night, you two,” the Doctor whispers.
The ceilings lights dim some more.