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Yaz sits up on the bunk bed with a defeated sigh. She’s fully awake now and there’s no point in trying to get any more sleep, even if she still feels just as exhausted as she had been when she laid down. She can’t remember the last time that she hasn’t been exhausted, and every moment of rest feels like wasting precious time.
Before getting out of bed, she grabs the screwdriver from under the pillow — just a regular screwdriver, she found it in a repair kit, but it still seemed like appropriate, and it’s far better than the pen that she tried before — and adds another tally mark to the wall, moving her thumb over the dozens of others that are already there, the scratches on the metal her only way of marking the passage of time. She can’t even be sure if she’s counting the days right, her internal clock has been thoroughly ruined since she started travelling with the Doctor, and the station’s clocks can’t be trusted, which was why she started to keep track. The last time she checked, the station was claiming it had been three minutes since the evacuation, and the day before the timer had been at around five million years.
The Doctor would say… the proximity to the black hole is interfering with the system, which was designed to compensate for the gravitational pull, but only within a safety zone, and past this point the attempt at compensating is only making it worse. This is the computer trying to make sense of how it’s very slowly dying, and making a poor job of it while it takes Yaz with it.
“The Doctor will come back,” she says aloud, her reminder whenever she starts to despair over the circumstances, repeated so many times over the weeks there that she’s afraid that it’ll lose all meaning, but it hasn’t yet, and she’ll hold on to it for as long as she can.
The Doctor will come back for her, she’ll save her, she won’t just leave her there to die. In the meantime, Yaz has a new idea for sending out a signal that she wants to try, she knows how bad the Doctor can be at arriving at the right time and place, and having a beacon might make things easier. She's already trying to change the force field so the TARDIS will have an easier time landing, but having a way to signal out when that happens has to help. Something has to help, because she's running out of ideas, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can stand to be alone in this place.
-
The Doctor hits the display screen, losing the image to even more interference, and lets out a frustrated grunt.
“She’s right there, just a brisk stroll across space,” she says, shaking the screen until she can see the station again, barely a smudge on the screen compared to a massive black hole.
Not the biggest one that the TARDIS ever got close to, but that’s a much smaller ship, a much smaller target. And last time… She won’t let it end like last time.
“We can dematerialise and try to materialise closer, but that won’t work because the gravitational pull distorts the vortex time field, causing variation to both the time and the space axis, which we would need to compensate for, which we neither have the equipment to do, or to get the readings that we would need to calculate the variation,” she says, talking herself through the issue, but it doesn’t work as well when she doesn’t have someone to listen and ask questions, making her think of things that she wouldn’t otherwise.
She pulls up all the readings, from all the scans, all the sensors, and a few of these things she should have repaired a long time ago and so don’t offer the best results, but they’ll have to do for now. At least it’s enough to give her the numbers she needs to calculate some of the interactions of space and time, brushing up formulas that she hasn’t had to use since the Academy, trying them in a few different ways and still always getting more or less the same result. She might not have all the data, but ruling something out doesn’t necessarily require all that precision.
“I could manually fly towards the station, but using the flight controls under these conditions would destabilise the external dimensional field, and at internal mass you’re too heavy to maneuver so near a black hole with the necessary precision, even if we jetson as many rooms as we can do without,” she says, adding a hastily, “sorry,” when the TARDIS flickers her lights at her.
Not as useful for ideas as having someone ask questions until she explains herself into a solution, but it’s good to know that at least someone’s listening. Otherwise she would just be talking to herself, and that wouldn’t be good at all. It’s too early to be hitting the stage where she should be talking to herself.
There is a solution here, there’s always a solution, she just has to find it, and this time, time itself might actually be in her favour.
“It’s fine, we have time. At this rate it’s only been an hour for Yaz, we have time. We can get to her before she even has time to worry, I just need a plan, and I actually have enough time to come up with a plan. This is perfect, it’s all working out, time is on our side,” she stops, noticing that she repeated time so often that it doesn’t sound like a word anymore, which might be a sign that she’s starting to get anxious. She looks at the TARDIS expectantly, but she isn’t exactly of much help.
The Doctor rubs her eyes. She hasn’t slept in around five days, first trying to find a solution for the station’s failing systems and to save the crew from their own stubbornness, and now trying to save Yaz, who wouldn’t even need saving if the crew hadn’t…
“And we’re sure that she’s still there, right?” the Doctor asks, tapping the life signs monitor, which continues to give out no useful information. “Of course she is, because she was coming here and not to an escape pod, she was on the outside of the door when the evacuation started. Did you happen to see if any of the escape pods go out? I can’t find them on any of the monitors.”
The TARDIS doesn’t answer, and none of the monitors offer anything else that might help her find the answer for herself. She wonders if it’s because of the strain of being so close to a black hole, or if the TARDIS knows the answer and is keeping it from her. Escape pods trying to achieve escape velocity from this distance, even the TARDIS struggled to reach a stable orbit. But the station is still standing, that’s what matters, because Yaz will be in there, where she’s safe, not in one of the escape pods that may or may not have survived.
The Doctor just has to find a way to get to her. And this time, Yaz won't even notice how long the Doctor took to come back, because gravity is making sure that Yaz's time passes nice and slow. So it's only the Doctor that has to agonise over a solution. Yaz might have a couple of hours of wondering what happened, maybe a bit more than that, but she doesn’t have to know how many days the Doctor will take to save her.
-
Yaz doesn’t know how many hours she stands on that corridor, her hand still on the window that now shows only space outside, no trace of the pod they had landed on or the familiar blue of the TARDIS anywhere. It had all happened so fast, how quickly the pieces of the station blew away from each other, first the one with the TARDIS and then the other escape pods, one by one, until they all disappeared from view, and at least one that she could see from that window exploded not too far from the station, but it wasn’t the one with the TARDIS, the Doctor got out safely.
And Yaz is still here.
The Doctor will come for her, she said that, and even if she hadn’t, Yaz knows her, and knows to trust her. She might be late, but she won’t leave her there, so all Yaz has to do is wait.
When she wakes up, thirsty, with a headache, and not even having felt the moment that she started falling asleep, Yaz realises that the Doctor might be coming, but she has to survive until then. It might be a couple of days, the Doctor did say that the TARDIS didn’t like black holes, and that the station’s force field was interfering with the TARDIS too, so a rescue may not be so simple.
“I wonder if there’s a way to change the force field to make it easier for the TARDIS to come back,” she says to herself, wondering if thinking aloud would make it easier to find a solution, like the Doctor does.
She really wishes that this was one of those cases of computers that she could talk to. At least it would make things easier, but from what she saw of the crew controlling the station, everything had to be typed in the command centre. She just hopes that the TARDIS is still close enough that she can understand what’s written there, since trying to understand these systems will be hard enough already without having to learn a new language on top of it.
She’ll see the Doctor again soon, this is just a way to keep busy until then, and maybe help her come a little faster. They’ll be laughing about this in the TARDIS in no time, and then it’ll be like Yaz never had to fear being alone there, and never even cried at all.
-
It feels like giving up when the Doctor finally considers the question, but the thought has been at the back of her mind for weeks now, and she needs to get rid of it so she can concentrate on what’s really important. By now she knows that this won’t be a problem with an easy solution, and it’s already been a couple of days for Yaz, and a few months for the Doctor. Time might be working in her favour, but it’s not working miracles.
If the station had been working perfectly, then she wouldn’t have to worry about anything. She would have years to rescue Yaz, not that she would need it, she’ll solve it before then either way. But the station was badly damaged, that's what started all this trouble in the first place, it was malfunctioning and sending out a distress signal that the TARDIS caught. And it’ll only be worse now, having been further damaged with the proximity to the black hole.
“Any clues as to how to find how many life signs we’re dealing with? Well, we could try to measure background telepathic emissions, if we invented an equipment that could measure the emissions, and found a way to get closer to the station, and knew the values of every person on the station, and their current level of social activity,” she says, and having to come up with flaws to her own plans is exhausting, she already dismissed a few hundred ways of detecting life signs. “So I think I’ll just calculate assuming that everyone is still at the station, and then that it’s just Yaz, those two numbers should give me a good idea of how much time there is, since you’re not being of any help.”
A failing station with broken down systems, not the best of circumstances. The distress signal mentioned weeks of life support, and what the Doctor saw when she was there should be enough detail to calculate exactly how long life support would really last, assuming everyone stayed and is still alive, and assuming that Yaz is all alone in that station with no one to help her. As terrible as that would be, the second option might be better, less competition for the life support, less strain on the systems, they should last for longer, even better than a linear progression since it’s not a matter of consuming a finite resource but rather of rate of degradation of the damaged parts.
She wastes almost ten minutes running all possibilities, and reaching the most likely numbers, but at least this gives her a limit. If the crew didn’t leave on the escape pods, then Yaz has seventeen days to live at most, and the Doctor already burned through two of them. If she’s alone, well, she’s clever so she’ll try to follow the maintenance instructions to fix what she can, and she’s brilliant and determined enough to make that work for a while considering that modular stations usually have comprehensive training manuals and are designed for any of the crew to be able to pick up the mantle of engineer, but she can’t keep it going indefinitely, not without replacement parts, so under the best of hypothesis she would have about twenty years or so until the station falls apart.
The Doctor won’t let it get to that, she knows that she can’t leave Yaz in isolation for so long, and she’s not even sure if Yaz is alone. She has to treat the seventeen days as her deadline, because even if it isn't, even if Yaz is alone… the Doctor knows far too well what loneliness can do, even if she tries not to think about this, and that it’s worse for humans. Being alone isn't as urgently terrible as not having enough oxygen, but that doesn't mean that it isn't deadly in the long run.
Seventeen days is plenty of time, that's over four years if they keep the same relative distance to the black hole, and she never had a problem that took this long to fix. A few hundred years, yes, but that was for calculations, not to think of a solution, and if she had to get some calculations faster she could just send the sonic screwdriver away from the black hole and the TARDIS, and then pull it back, since the TARDIS is also being affected by the increased gravity, only to a smaller degree. Her people made themselves what they were — at least the part of their history that they’ll admit to, and she doesn’t want to think about the rest — by undernstanding black holes and harnessing their power, she knows how to use this to her advantage.
“Until I can think of a plan, I have to stay here, I'm locking the temporal flow at this rate, and I'm not sure what the rate would be if we materialised away. Time locked in events with different temporal flow rates, I had a test about this once, didn’t pass the first time, can’t remember what I did after that. Don't you have a manual on time locks and relative temporal dynamics?”
The TARDIS actually answers that, with a few flashes of the Doctor opening the doors and tossing several manuals away in space, over a few different faces. Right, that's what happened to all the technical manuals, not that they would have helped much, since her TARDIS is far from having factory settings, and it was mostly their fault for being full of errors anyway.
“That's better, I think, this way we're not going to bother with wrong information. We just have to construct the theories from the start, in practice. That's how I like it anyway, and we have some experience with this, so let's put it to good use. Back to work, now, how much weight do we have in the internal dimensions…”
-
Yaz is running another simulation on the force field, and over time she came to think that this is the second worst part of the day. The worst is having to sleep, laying in bed alone, in that quiet station that becomes impossibly loud when she has her eyes closed in dark, metal creaking and intrusive thoughts. But this is a close second, how the computer will lock with the strain of running the simulation, shutting off the non essentials like light and ventilation, and she worries that something will jump out of the dark and attack her, or that the systems will crash and not return, and she'll have to keep working only with the red emergency lights and the stale air that makes her anxious about the life support shutting down.
If the Doctor was here, she would have found the right modulation months ago, but Yaz doesn't know what she's looking for, so she's just trying to find any setting that will allow her to decrease the force field without breaking the station apart.
If the Doctor was here… Yaz covers her mouth with a hand, and presses her eyes shut. Even thinking of her hurts, but not thinking of her is even worse. It’s been so long since Yaz last saw her, and it’s not the first time, but that doesn’t make things any easier. Or maybe it does, but only because she knows that the Doctor might lose track of time when she left Yaz on Earth, where it’s safer, but she won’t do that with a broken space station that is threatening to fall apart.
The Doctor is coming, she won’t leave her there. If she hasn't arrived yet it’s because she can’t, and Yaz just has to find out what’s keeping her and then everything will be fine again. This force field is her best bet, and if she can find a way to deal with it, then maybe she’ll see the Doctor again.
“Hurry up, Doctor. I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” she whispers in the empty room, knowing that there’s no one there to listen.
Not much longer now, she’s running out of possibilities to test, so she has to find the frequency that she’s looking for soon. Then the Doctor will smile and call her brilliant, and all these months will be washed away, because a single moment with the Doctor is worth a lifetime of waiting. She can do this, it’s just a little longer, and then she’ll be back with the Doctor.
The computer beeps and the lights turn on again. The screen reads: “Catastrophic failure: 100%”. Yaz grabs her notepad and crosses out another frequency, flipping through the ones that she still has to test. She still has enough time today for one more simulation, she’s not too tired yet, and the sooner she can find the right one, the sooner she’ll see the Doctor again. It has to exist, she knows that, or they wouldn’t have been able to land in the first place. So she just has to find it.
-
As soon as she realises where they are, the Doctor wants to turn back. Gravity dictates the flow of time, and given enough mass, it can confuse even her internal clock, like a human trying to keep balance in their inner ear while spinning in place — if they were spinning in a centrifuge trying to reach the speed of light —. She knows how bad it can get, and she knows the consequences of even small mistakes under these circumstances.
“The station is leaking air, isn’t it? That’s the noise? The message said they were losing life support,” Yaz says, stepping into the corridor, with no fear that she might suffocate there.
Why would she? Yaz knows how the TARDIS’ air bubble works, how it can be extended to the whole station if necessary. And she’s right, the station is venting atmosphere, but at a slow enough rate that the auxiliary air filtration system should be able to compensate by increasing air flow, with only minimal extra strain to the systems. If they’re losing life support, it’s because the systems either aren’t working, or are starting to break down, which might be the least of their concerns when they`re dealing with this much gravity. They are close to a black hole, they have to be, and now she regrets not having checked any of the reading before leaving the TARDIS. She likes to be surprised, likes the adventure of it, but surprises aren’t always a good thing.
“This is a modular station, if they’re having localised problems it might automatically close off some sections, so don’t wander off,” the Doctor warns as she falls into step with Yaz. “It's a brilliant little trick to make building them in space easier, you can decide exactly what parts you need for your station, and if something goes wrong, it's easier to keep it from killing everyone. And they’re easier to operate, designed to be user friendly, a bit like building legos.”
She can’t allow them to be separated, that’s the most important part. This is only a small station — a mobile station, closer to a slow ship than to a stationary station, and small to keep maneuverable despite the weak engines, only about the size of a block with all the escape pods —, so the effects of the gravity differential shouldn’t be too drastic, but that’s not a risk that she’s willing to take. The best thing to do would be to find the crew, take them to the TARDIS, and give them a ride to a safer place before this station falls to pieces, or maybe try to tow it away if they refuse to leave, although she’s not sure if she can pilot the TARDIS so close to a black hole without dematerialising. She would have to shut off a few more of the security systems, but she never uses them anyway.
“I wonder if we can get one of these computers to tell us where the crew is. If this is a station, it must have some sort of control room, right?” Yaz asks once they pass an interface screen in the corridor.
It’s worth a try, and the sooner they find out what’s happening there, the sooner they can leave. There are a few adventures that she just wouldn’t care to repeat, and being near a black hole is one of them.
“Brilliant, Yaz. Let’s see what it can tell us,” she says, pointing the sonic screwdriver at the screen to take control of the interface.
The system is struggling with something, and it’s slow to respond, but when it does, it shows the life sign readings. Only a few around the whole station, but there’s a cluster of them in what looks like a reasonably sized room. A station this size would need at least five people on the controls, so that seems like their best bet for a place that might have someone who knows what’s happening.
With any luck, this can be over in ten minutes and the biggest problem will be returning these people to the right planet on the right date. It’s not very likely, but she can dream. At least that would be better than thinking of how the same force field that nearly kept the TARDIS from materialising is on a fluctuating modulation frequency, and if they don’t leave this place soon, it might change to something that the TARDIS can’t materialise away from, not while having to compensate for the increased gravity due to the black hole. It’s one more complication that they just don’t need, and she doesn’t even know how long they have, as the internal systems seem to be having problems with the passage of time.
They shouldn’t have landed there, but she can’t turn her back to people who need help.
-
It's hard to keep count of the days, and the computer's clock jumps through random numbers, so she has to trust her own memory. It's been about two weeks, she thinks, or maybe three, since they've been separated. She can’t have gone to sleep much more than a dozen times, but she’s not sure if she’s keeping to twenty-four hours days, and the station doesn’t have a working day and night cycle, which only adds to how disorienting all of this is.
Yaz isn't worried. She knows that the Doctor can be late, that she doesn't think of time as they do. Or, well, as Yaz does, now that it's just the two of them, travelling together. Yaz knows this, knows the effect that it can have in her life, and still she chose to stay, so she can't be surprised that the Doctor is late. It's probably been five minutes for her, and she'll be shocked when Yaz tells her how long it's been inside the station.
And Yaz has a plan, she has been studying the station's systems, and she thinks that she understands how the force field nearly kept the TARDIS out. If she can change how that works, then maybe the Doctor will come back faster.
“I really wish you were a talking computer, I'm getting tired of just my voice,” she mumbles to herself as she checks the specifications again.
Just changing something without being sure of the effects is too dangerous, but maybe she can get the computer to run a simulation. She just needs a higher level of access, but she's seen the Doctor bypass security often enough, and not only with the sonic screwdriver, so she has a few ideas.
This station isn't from Earth, but the program still follows a familiar logic, and one of the most curious things that she learned travelling with the Doctor is that more often than not aliens are just people. Superficially different, sometimes in a few ways that make them harder to understand, but deep down, most of the time people just act like people. They hide snacks that they feel guilty about, they take short cuts, they want to make their job easier, all those little things about people that aren’t true one hundred percent of the time, but repeat themselves often enough that she can count on them.
“You ask for too many passwords, no one remembers that,” she says, pointing at the computer, then starts to look around.
Whoever makes these systems always thinks that more complicated is better, and they never seem to realise that people aren't going to remember huge passwords and what they’re for. They'll just write them down instead. She finds pilot credentials attached to the front of a monitor, medical credentials slipped behind the case of a pad, security credentials in a drawer, and finally the station's captain credentials hidden under a sort of snow globe filled with pink glitter. No one remembers so many long passwords, no matter the planet, people are just people anywhere in the universe.
With all of these, she has complete access over the systems, rather than the read only access to technical specifications that she has been using for weeks. Maybe she should have looked for these earlier, but she didn't want too much access before she understood how the systems worked. And now that she does, she can carry on with her plan.
The force field might be security, so that’s what she tries first, and when she inputs the credentials, the computer opens what must have been the last thing that the security people used before leaving the ship. It's a still image of one of the cameras, and it shows her and the Doctor walking down a corridor.
The Doctor isn't even looking at the camera, it's just the back of her head, and she's turned towards Yaz. Yaz closes her eyes, trying to remember. The Doctor was telling her a story about a modular restaurant in space that ejected entire sections if the dishes weren't popular, and sent them to burn on a nearby star. She had found it ridiculous then, but it wouldn't be weirder than some of the things that she saw with the Doctor.
“How long, Doctor?” Yaz asks, touching the image.
She wouldn't trade travelling with the Doctor for anything in the universe, but sometimes she wished it didn't involve so much waiting and uncertainty, and that she didn’t have to feel so alone.
-
Sometimes, the Doctor wishes that she could lose track of time on command. It might make things easier, or at least make them hurt less.
“They said that they wanted to evacuate, and they must have expelled us by accident when trying to do that, they were leaving when that happened, I’m sure of this. Yaz told me that they were leaving. So Yaz has to be alone there,” she says, and the TARDIS offers no reaction.
The TARDIS must be tired of this sort of argument, the Doctor has made it too many times over the years. She wonders if she repeats it enough time, it’ll be easier to believe in it.
“If even one person left, or died early enough, not that I want them to die but it could happen, that would be nearly thirty days, it's not just a linear subtraction of how many resources they would have used, it's the strain to the system, it was still in production, decreasing the needed production would make the systems last longer. And it hasn't even been thirty days yet, so Yaz is fine,” she continues, the progression of time too easy to keep track of even when it's at a different rate than the one she's living.
The one that she and the TARDIS have been living with for years, as she refuses to give up even after so many failed plans. She won’t abandon Yaz, no matter what happens, she won’t let her die alone in that station thinking that the Doctor abandoned her. If there’s any way to save her, the Doctor will find it, and if there isn’t, she’ll invent one.
“She's still alive, and she has time. We just have to find a plan that actually works and that won’t risk destroying the station and sending her to space unprotected. How long until you can resonate with the force field?” she asks, inputting the commands to bring the background calculations to the forefront, but there's still well over a century left, and these particular calculations are too complex to be done on the sonic screwdriver, at least if she wants them done in less than a few thousand years. “Oh, well, that's a terrible plan anyway, why would we even do that? We can't leave Yaz in space with no force field and next to a black hole. The window to pick her up would be too small, and we can’t even count on materialising around her, so it’s not going to work.”
The problem isn't a lack of ideas, it's that she can't trust any of the ones that she did have. So far, Yaz is safe, but the Doctor can't think of a single way of rescuing her that wouldn't come with a high risk of killing her instead. If she could leave, have more data on that particular black hole, or the station, or anything, maybe she would have found a solution already, but if she does, she doesn't know what relative time she would return to.
All that she can think about is Yaz alone on that space station, dying alone and thinking that the Doctor didn't care, or at least didn’t care enough to come back on time, that she left her there to die alone and abandoned. She can't do that to Yaz.
She shouldn't have left her behind, she shouldn't have crossed that door, she shouldn't have…
“We need a better plan.”
-
“What are you planning? Why are you taking this long?” Yaz asks, staring at the pad screen supported against the wall next to her bunk.
She searched everywhere that she could think of, and this is the only picture saved of them. The security manual says that the cameras are kept on a live feed to save resources, and so to screenshot anything suspicious. Whoever was responsible for security — she thinks it was the nearly round, dark blue man who kept complaining about the Doctor to the captain and saying not to trust her — didn't take any better images, or any other images for that matter. Only one picture of the two strangers who boarded the station out of nowhere, and their faces aren't even visible. If security is representative of the rest of the crew, then it's no wonder all of this happened.
They didn't get to the point of hearing much of what happened, only that there was a collision and they were struggling to keep the station functioning while most of the electronic systems were overloading, and the station couldn't keep a stable distance from the black hole anymore, and that promiximity was only making things worse. Still they were too stubborn to trust the Doctor and leave with them in the TARDIS, first refusing to leave the station at all, and then leaving without caring about Yaz and the Doctor, not thinking twice about leaving them to their deaths.
She doesn't know if any of them survived, and at this point, she's not entirely sure that she cares anymore. All of them could have left this place safely together, and instead she's trapped there and she doesn't even know where the Doctor is or if she's safe. Yaz knows that the TARDIS can resist a lot, but the Doctor wouldn't have had time to go back to the console before the escape pod was ejected, and if the TARDIS decided to leave, Yaz doesn't know if the Doctor can find her again. Or if she will find this place, but it'll be too late. Yaz has to believe that she'll come back in time, she has to believe in the Doctor.
“Goodnight, Doctor. Please don't be too long,” she says, touching the image, and hoping that this won’t be the last that she’ll see of the Doctor.
-
“There's no other way, is there?” the Doctor asks from her position laying down next to the console.
She presses her wrists against her eyes, yelling in frustration. Over two decades, and the best solution that she can think of is exploding the station and hoping that she can catch Yaz in time, before the vacuum of space or the proximity to the black hole kills her, and she knows how fragile a human body is to being exposed to the cold and the vacuum. She did all the calculations, she spent years on them, tracing the perfect route, adjusting the TARDIS’ internal weight to the nanogram, ejecting rooms and loose objects until it was just right. If she can fly better than she has ever flown before, towards a black hole, with the perfect speed, and all variables stay within their predicted parametres, she might be able to do it.
As long as the station breaks a fraction of a second before she gets to that point, asuming that she has a way of destroying it safely. It'll take too long to wait for the TARDIS to find a way to resonate the force field, but beyond not having the calculations, it wouldn't work. Resonating takes time, and she wouldn't be able to keep close enough to the station to do it without overshooting, and it's entirely possible that the partial dematerialisation necessary to do it would throw them out of temporal phase with the station and Yaz. About four of those years were spent trying to calculate her way around that, and it only took the Doctor three to realise that it would be impossible.
“I might be killing her,” the Doctor says, dropping her hands to the side.
The station has to be destroyed, and she only has one chance for a rescue. If she misses, then Yaz won't just be dead because she failed, the Doctor will have been the one to kill her.
“But she's safe right now, isn't that better? She could live there, she could live, maybe she’ll get lucky with the repairs, then she could even live a full life.”
But Yaz can't. Not alone in a small station, having to fight with the damaged systems to try to keep it working, with no perspective of ever being rescued, either holding up to an empty hope or believing that the Doctor gave up on her. That isn't living, that's surviving, and the Doctor won't do this to her. Yaz wouldn’t want her to, she would want to take the risk.
She promised Yaz that she would come back for her, and that's what she'll do, no matter the risk for both of them. She just has to find a way to destroy the station first.
-
Yaz wakes up, and the first thing that she does is tap the pad screen to say good morning to the Doctor, but the screen is black. She frowns and takes the pad, trying to pull back the image, but the screen just beeps.
“No, no, no, please don’t do this to me,” she says as she searches for the image and there’s nothing there.
No, she saved it, she made a copy, it has to be there somewhere, it can’t be just gone.
She practically jumps off the bed, running to the control centre, pad still in hand, for the first time since she started marking the days forgetting to do so before leaving the room, but this is more important. She uses every credential to try to access the files, but in each case she sees the same error message.
Storage cells corrupt, purging all non essential files.
Non essential.
The only image that she has of the Doctor, the only thing that she has to remember her by, non essential.
Yaz throws the pad away, hears as it crashes against one of the other computers and shatters the monitor, but she doesn’t care. Non essential files, it just deleted the one thing that she had that still…
She can’t trust those computers, she should have known that already. The station is damaged beyond repair, and all that she’s trying to do is make it last long enough for the Doctor to arrive, but it might be past the point of being useful. She can’t trust it at all, at any moment it can take everything from her, and if it did this, then it might steal the lights, or throw away all the air, or stop producing those bland rations that she’s sick of eating.
She’s on her own, and she can’t do this alone. She needs the Doctor, she needs her to come back, Yaz can’t do this anymore, the Doctor promised her, she promised her.
Yaz lets herself fall under the table, crying. How is she supposed to do this without the Doctor?
-
The Doctor hits the door, and when it won’t budge — of course it wouldn’t, it’s the other door of a module, it’s made to seal up and withstand the vacuum of space without compromising the rest of the station —, she tries the sonic screwdriver, but the security is too strong. If she had five minutes, she could open it, no problem, but she doesn’t have five minutes, she doesn’t even have two.
“Doctor, they didn’t listen, they’re launching all the pods, I couldn’t stop them,” Yaz says, her voice full of despair, and she’s looking to the side like she’s trying to open the door from her side as well, using the controls next to the door.
Even if she had the codes, which the Doctor doubts that she would have, the door wouldn’t open, not now, with the countdown under sixty seconds. It’s a security feature, it won’t risk opening and exposing the entire station to space, they would lose atmosphere too quickly and the life support system wouldn’t be able to pressurise it again fast enough. Nothing that they can do from there could open this door now, or stop the pod from being forcebly ejected from the station.
“Do you still have life support working on the station?” the Doctor asks, because from here she can’t tell.
She estimated that they had about two weeks of life support left when she checked the systems, and she couldn’t fix it without some extra parts from the TARDIS. Even then, the repair would only be temporary, but perhaps enough for them to take this station back to a safe place, which is the best that they could hope for with the extensive damage. She only asked for ten minutes to go back to the TARDIS and take the supplies that she needed to make the repairs, and they couldn’t even give her that, those bastards. From the moment that she arrived, they did nothing but get in the way and refuse her help, even though they would die without it. She doesn’t understand why she’s always meeting people so eager to die rather than accept her help, but she still couldn’t give up on them while there were still things that she could try.
“Yes, but it’s still failing. Doctor, you have to get back in the TARDIS, this pod is defective, we heard it leaking air before, it won’t work now,” Yaz insists, hitting the window.
Oh no, the Doctor hadn’t even considered that, but she remembers it now. When they arrived, it was the first thing that Yaz noticed, and if she pays attention to it now, the Doctor can hear the venting of the atmosphere on the other side, where it has an opening to connect to another module that should be sealed. If the pod leaves the station now, the sudden change in pressure it’ll only increase the leak, and even a Time Lord can’t withstand that for too long, and that’s assuming that the damage isn’t too extensive. If the pod breaks on separation, then she would have at most a few of minutes to get back to the TARDIS before she risks losing consciousness, and that’s not considering the black hole affecting her senses, and how hard it is to navigate space even without the momentum of a launch.
Yaz is right, the Doctor needs to be inside the TARDIS. And that means leaving Yaz behind.
“I’m coming back for you, stay somewhere safe, don’t let these people near you, and seal every section that’s leaking oxygen,” she says, grabbing the door and touching the window as well.
She can’t open this door, not now, there’s no way to do it, and not even enough time to explode it, not that that would help. This pod will be ejected with the TARDIS in it, and Yaz will be on the other side of the door. The only thing that the Doctor can affect now is if she’ll be in the TARDIS or possibly in space when this happens, but either way she’ll be leaving Yaz.
Yaz touches her hand through the window, and this feels like abandoning her, even if there’s nothing else that the Doctor can do. She needs to have the TARDIS to rescue Yaz, and she needs to survive to be able to do so, but it still feels like saving herself and abandoning Yaz to die.
“I’m coming back, wait for me,” she says, just as the computer starts the ten seconds countdown.
Yaz nods. “I will, always.”
When the Doctor drops her hand, it feels like goodbye, but she won’t let it be. She runs to the TARDIS, and risks one look back at Yaz, who’s still looking at her through the window. The escape pod releases just as she closes the door, and the force pushes her back against the console.
-
Yaz types the numbers on the screen, and hovers her hand over the confirmation key.
If she's right, then this frequency can support the force field for less than two minutes, and after it drops, the station is going to fall apart.
It's not too long at all. She won't have long to regret it.
The Doctor promised that she would be back, and after months, Yaz wonders if she’s not just allowing her mind to play tricks on her. Isolation does funny things to people, and she has been alone for so long.
How can she know what’s the right thing to do? All she has is this, her trust in the Doctor and a feeling that this is true. It’s nothing to go on, nothing serious, nothing that proves that this isn’t just in her head.
It’s a leap of faith on what might just be a dream.
“Please, Doctor, I need you to catch me,” she says, closing her eyes.
She hits the key. Either way, this is over now, and she did everything that she could.
-
“Now you’re just being mean, I know you have her there,” the Doctor says, hitting the side of the screen. “I need to talk through my ideas, and you aren’t helping, so offer me an interface that can. You did that before, where is it?”
The Doctor knows the answer, of course, which is that she butchered the holographic interface to get the parts that she needed for a hologram that she’s thinking of doing. A hologram of herself, a more advanced way to leave a message to whoever might be in the console room, capable of interacting and answering questions. Well, she started working on it, and then she got distracted, but she’ll get back to it eventually. In the meantime, that means that she doesn’t have the TARDIS’ original module, the one that can disturbingly use the appearance and the voice of anyone that the TARDIS ever scanned to talk directly to her, but she doesn’t have her own hologram either, which is a shame as it might have offered some useful conversation. Or at least felt a bit less like talking to herself, which she has been doing a lot of these days.
“How about video then? You have a telepathic impression of everything to send to the matrix, and the matrix is gone but that wouldn’t change your base programming, it would just make it so you have to only keep the recordings locally, and Susan set you to record, I remember that, she did that for me, so you have all the recordings somewhere. Can you just show me the video? Anything, although if you could, questions would really help right about now,” she tries, but she knows that the TARDIS won’t help her with this, because she asked before, and tried finding the videos herself, but the TARDIS changed the paths to them to keep her from accessing anything.
It’s not jealousy, this time. She thinks that the TARDIS might even like Yaz, or at least like her well enough. Or at least she didn’t complain when the Doctor was teaching Yaz the basics of how to pilot, which is usually a good sign. She must know, maybe better than the Doctor does, that seeing her now would only hurt more, but the problem is, right the the Doctor doesn’t care if it hurts. She just needs to see her.
“You know I don’t need your help, you would just be making things easier,” she says, closing her eyes.
If she concentrates, she can imagine that Yaz is there with her, from the way that awe made her eyes shine to the smell of perfume, but when she tries to think of her asking questions about the Doctor’s plan now, the spell is broken. She can’t both convince herself that Yaz is here and have that mental image of Yaz help her rescue the real one, and she knows which one is more important.
“Oh, don’t be smug. You could have given me a few minutes to get there,” the Doctor says, turning the screen away as she knows now that the video wouldn’t be any more help than her own memories.
She has only been there for a couple of years, and she already feels like she can’t stand her own company anymore, and she has practice with isolation and surviving out of sheer stubbornness. It’s been much less time for Yaz, but the Doctor can’t help but worry about how she’s doing there. Humans are social creatures, not meant to be alone for extended periods of time, and Yaz is completely alone, while the Doctor at least has the TARDIS with her.
Even if she rescues Yaz now, no, not if, she will, she’ll still rescue her, but when she does, she’ll already have failed Yaz. She’ll have failed her again, after promising herself that she wouldn’t make Yaz suffer like she did when the Doctor sent her fam back to Earth, not knowing if she would find a way to survive and return for them. It seems like no matter what she does, she’s always hurting the people that she cares about the most, and it should be enough reason to know that she can’t get too close to anyone.
That’s why she can’t… she told herself that it would be better never to fall in love again, and she’s so stubborn that she can’t even listen to herself. But if she can’t stop her own feelings, at least she can stop herself from making things worse by letting Yaz know. She thought that this would make things easier when she inevitably lost her, but as she faces the prospect of never seeing Yaz again, she wonders if she was wrong.
-
Yaz dreams of the Doctor every night, and that’s the only thing that can still convince her that it’s worth it to sleep.
Most of the time, she can’t even remember what she was dreaming of, exactly. It’s only impressions, the Doctor’s smile, the way that she would be so excited to explain how something worked, or to tell a story about something interesting that she encountered on one of her previous trips, those moments they realised that they just escaped certain death and would laugh together, and she would look at the Doctor and be absolutely sure that there’s no other place in the universe that she would rather be.
And then she wakes up, and it’s all taken away again. She does wonder sometimes if maybe that’s how it was always meant to end with the Doctor. It’s too perfect, too wonderful, Yaz could never have that forever. So maybe it always a dream that she would have to wake up from eventually.
The worst part is, if she had known that this was how it was going to end. If she had been told just before this trip that she would spend the rest of her days alone on a dying station, waiting in vain for the Doctor to save her, and given the chance to leave just then, just a few hours before they were separated, she still would have chosen to come. Even those few hours running around the station with the Doctor, arguing with the crew, trying to save those people who wouldn’t listen to the Doctor, would have been worth this. And she knows what this means, even if she has always been too afraid to say it, afraid to admit it even to herself.
She worried that the Doctor would push her away, or that maybe she herself would be afraid to be close to the Doctor. Now that it was just the two of them travelling together, the Doctor has slowly started to open up to her, even if she still has so many secrets, and Yaz didn’t want to lose that. She didn’t think of it exactly in those terms, but that’s what it was, fear that things would change, which makes her wonder if she’s not more like the Doctor than she thinks, because the Doctor might not want to spend more than a handful of days in the same place, but she doesn’t like change where it matters to her, she doesn’t like saying goodbye to her friends, she doesn’t like having to stop what she’s so used to doing.
Yaz wonders if the Doctor will mourn her, or if she’ll just keep going, because that’s what she has to do, because she can’t stop and feel the losses or she’ll be buried under them. She wonders if it’s selfish of her to hope that the Doctor will feel something over losing her, that she'll allow herself to feel something.
-
The Doctor closes her eyes, a wave of calm washing over her for the first time in over twenty years. Calm seems like the last thing that she should be feeling now, all things considered, but there’s something comforting about extinguishing all her options and only having one left. At least she can tell herself that she tried everything, even if that won’t be of much comfort if she fails.
“I don’t even know if we can connect to her once, let alone twice. And without a signal and the right data, it’s impossible to fly there,” she says as she holds Yaz’s jacket tightly, and then places it over the TARDIS’ telepathic interface.
Even using the TARDIS to amplify the signal took so long to get right, to make the adjustments as this isn’t what the telepathic interface was made for, and she won’t be sure that it works until she tries. If it doesn’t, she might be shoving her brain in a blender and hoping to survive, but she has done worse.
“I need her to give me an unstable frequency that can last at least ninety seconds, and tell me exactly how long the force field can last with that frequency. Any suggestions as to how she can find that? After three months, there’s no way to know if the station systems are still working,” she says, unable to resist the habit of poking holes in her own plans.
She doesn’t even know if life support is still working, all of this might have been for nothing, but she was always too stubborn to give up, even when something seems impossible. She doesn’t dare saying it aloud, but she tells herself that even if she can’t connect to Yaz, that doesn’t have to mean that Yaz is dead. It could simply be that this plan didn’t work, and it’s a desperate attempt anyway, trying to connect to a low telepathy species from so far away and with this much interference in between.
But if she can, if she can get a message to Yaz, and have Yaz give her the information that she needs to know, and do what needs to be done to sabotage the station, then she has a plan. A terrible plan that might get the both of them killed, but it’s still a plan.
-
Yaz dreams of the Doctor every night, but there's something different about this time.
It's bright and loud, like the station's alert system, but when she tries closing her eyes and covering her ears, it still hurts just the same.
The Doctor is away from her, and for the first time in one of the dreams, she looks panicked, and Yaz tries to make sense of how she can see that if she closed her eyes, but dreams don’t have to make sense.
“Yaz… open your… stop fighting… I need you to…” the Doctor’s voice comes broken through inference, like a message through the radio, but at the wrong frequency.
Yaz tries opening her eyes, fighting through the pain, but it’s hard, like her eyelids don’t want to obey her. She winces, dropping her hands from her ears, and grinds her teeth as she finally succeeds in opening her eyes. The pain makes her bend over, and she can't see the Doctor anymore. All she can see is white, pain burning through her, and she tries screaming, but she can't.
“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” the Doctor says, holding her by the arms. “I know it… but I need… stop fighting me… I can't keep… only a little time.”
Her voice is clearer now, but it's still hard to understand, but she understands what the Doctor wants of her, and she tries to stop shielding herself, to let everything come to her, despite the pain. It doesn't even occur to her to question it, to keep on trying to protect herself, or even to wake up. The Doctor is asking something of her, and she has to do it.
“That's it, Yaz. Just keep… to listen. I'm trying to… but there's too much… I can't stay long… to know the fre-... need you to… -liant, Yaz! You've already… stay still, I can get… thirty-six point two, that's… you have to set the… to this frequency… wake up,” the Doctor says, and the barrage of information makes Yaz hurt even more.
This feels like the Doctor in a way that none of the other dreams had, and there’s so much that Yaz doesn’t know about the Doctor, but she knows that the Doctor can talk to people in their minds, can see their memories and even change them. She just never expected the Doctor to talk to her without even being near her, but if this is what it feels like, she can understand why the Doctor didn’t do it before.
“That’ll destroy the station!” she shouts, once she realises what the Doctor is asking of her.
She recognises the frequency, one of the hundreds that she tried already, but she did them in order, and all had the same result, so she knows what this means.
“I know… will collapse the force… can catch you. It’s the… it’s a risk, but I promise… just don’t hold your… let out the air and… trust me, I will catch you, I’ll…” the Doctor’s voice grows fainter, and she starts to disappear.
Yaz tries to hold on to her, but when she moves her arms forward, her hands hit the bed above, and she wakes up.
-
She falls, hitting her head on the console, and everything glows too brightly as she tries to stand. The connection broke like a rubber band snapping back into her brain, and she has to fight to hold on to consciousness as the scrambling of her time sense make her dizzy, but she doesn’t have enough time to wait for it to recover naturally.
If Yaz believed her, then that station is in its last half an hour of existence, and the Doctor can’t count on two days because she still needs to get there. The last leg of the flight is the one that requires the most precise flying, but she has all the data she needs for that, what the frequency of the force field will change into, and how many relative seconds afterwards the force field will fail, thanks to Yaz trying a plan of her own. Yaz’s plan would be good, if the Doctor could find a way to dematerialise and still keep the temporal relation between them, but right now that’s an even bigger risk than the Doctor’s own plan. Still, the information is exactly what she needed, and no matter the danger, it’s too late to turn back now.
“I need you to help me now,” she pleads to the TARDIS, and starts her flight plan.
The TARDIS shakes as she approaches the black hole, and the Doctor has to grab the console to try to keep herself standing.
They’re out of time now, she won’t have another opportunity to talk to Yaz, and she won’t be able to stabilise the TARDIS without leaving. This is the end, and she only has one chance to get it right. If Yaz didn’t believe her, she’ll either crash on the station and get stuck to the force field, or she’ll have to leave before the TARDIS is pulled to the black hole, but this won’t happen. Yaz will do the right thing, the Doctor knows that she will.
-
Yaz is dying. She tries to gasp, but there’s nothing there, and the only thing that she can think of, maybe the last thing that she’ll ever think of, is that this is just like the first time, when she went away with the Doctor by mistake, and all of this started.
Maybe she was wrong, maybe it was just a dream and she just made the biggest mistake of her life. At least it would be the last one, and she’s glad that she still trusted the Doctor to the end.
And then a hand grabs her boot, and suddenly she can breathe.
-
The Doctor fights with the controls, running around the console, cursing her smaller arms and legs as she can’t reach the ones she needs at the same time. It won’t work, she planned the perfect route and now she can’t steer properly and that doesn’t even matter because she made a mistake, the collapsing force field pushed the station even closer to the black hole, and now Yaz is suffocating in space and the TARDIS can’t get close enough.
“Just give me as much of an oxygen bubble as you can,” she says as she pulls a conduction cord from the console, since she doesn’t have enough time to input the command, and has to trust that the TARDIS will want to help.
The TARDIS knows what she means to do, and opens the doors without being told to as the Doctor rushes towards them and jumps.
She gets past the air bubble, and tosses things off her pockets to increase her momentum, but she feels the cord tensing just as she’s about to reach Yaz, and lets go of it just as it threatens to pull her back, and that’s enough to get her to wrap a hand around Yaz’s ankle. She kicks off one boot and then the other, and that’s enough to get her within grabbing distance of the cord again. She pulls at it once, and the TARDIS retracts it fast, pulling them into the console room.
She only has enough time to see Yaz coughing before they’re both launched to a wall as the TARDIS struggles to remain in control, and the Doctor drags herself to the console. Yaz is in the TARDIS, and she can worry about her once they’re not all about to be dragged into a black hole. The gravity inside shifts axis three times before she can close the doors, and the TARDIS struggles to dematerialise. She holds down the lever, excess energy flowing through her, and then it all stops.
Gravity stabilises, the TARDIS stops shaking, and they’re in the vortex.
The Doctor falls next to the console, and she knows that she needs to get to Yaz, but she can’t move.
-
As the Doctor still looks shaky, and insists on checking the controls to make sure that they’re out of danger, Yaz doesn’t know what to do with herself. She has to resist the impulse to just hold on to the Doctor and never let her go, to yell at her for taking so long to come back, to thank her for coming for her, she wants to do so much that she can’t decide on anything. So she stands in the console room, watching the Doctor run around the console doing a million things at once, smoke and sparks coming out of it, but when Yaz tries to offer any help, the Doctor doesn’t seem to listen to her, talking to herself or maybe to the TARDIS.
Yaz tries to keep out of the way, and she doesn’t know what she was expecting from this reunion, but it wasn’t this. For a moment when she woke up, struggling to breathe normally after nearly suffocating, the Doctor seemed so happy to see her, but she immediately ran away to deal with the crisis at hand.
It’s fine, maybe they’re just not out of danger yet. She’s sure that the Doctor is happy to see her, she just jumped through space to grab Yaz, of course she cares.
She touches one of the pillars and has to bite her lip to keep from letting out a sob. She’s really here, she’s really back, and now things will go back to normal, and it’ll be like she was never alone. She’ll just have to learn to leave those months in the station behind her.
As she’s trying not to look at the Doctor, fearing that it will truly make her cry, she can’t help but notice that the console room is an even bigger mess than usual. Parts and wires all over the floor and on every surface, tables of all sizes with carelessly tossed tools, black and white boards full of notes, some with maths that she can barely recognise, but most of them with symbols like the TARDIS’ when she’s not being friendly. She thought that the Doctor had just jumped back and missed the date, but this shows time, the Doctor must have struggled to come back.
The monitor closest to her beeps, catching her attention, and Yaz steps closer to it. It reads M.S.S Alpha 17: 92 days, 5 hours, 12 minutes, 03 seconds. TARDIS: 9104 days, 13 hours, 19 minutes, 05 seconds, with the last five starting to flicker into a six.
“Sorry, I just need to stabilise these oscillations,” the Doctor says, pulling the screen away from her and moving around her to keep what she was doing, but Yaz is frozen in place.
She recognises the name of the station, it was on the walls of every module, Modular Space Station Alpha 17, and although she couldn’t be sure of her counting of the time, three months feels about right. So it’s the passage of time for her, and for the Doctor and the TARDIS, and if they were further away from the black hole, then time passed faster for the Doctor.
Nine thousand days. That’s… twenty, twenty-five years. While Yaz was trapped in the station for months, struggling to keep herself together as the isolation ate away at her, the Doctor was trying to find her for over two decades, and the TARDIS wants her to know this because the Doctor won’t tell her. Even now the Doctor won’t say, she’ll just pretend that everything is fine.
Yaz steps back, putting a hand to her chest, and she feels like she’s suffocating all over again. The Doctor was looking for her, the Doctor hadn’t forgotten her, or lost track of time, even if she’s acting like she just saw Yaz a couple of days ago.
Yaz is shaking, she’s suffocating, she feels dizzy, her eyes sting. It hits her all at once, she almost lost the Doctor, but the Doctor almost lost her too.
-
The Doctor doesn’t quite lose consciousness, but her body wants to shut down, and she has to fight to keep awake and push herself to move.
The TARDIS isn't in free fall through the vortex, but she's flying aimlessly and too fast. The Doctor still has settings to adjust before they're forcibly ejected somewhere, but first she drags herself across the floor to get to Yaz.
Yaz is still breathing, she’s hurt, but it’s nothing serious, and she’s alive. The Doctor did it, she saved her.
She shakes Yaz, needing to see her awake to be sure that she’s ok, and when Yaz finally opens her eyes, the Doctor feels lightheaded with how fast her hearts are beating.
“Yaz…” There’s so much that she wants to say, decades trying not to think of her feelings, so many missed opportunities, and she wants Yaz to know how important she is to her. But she also had enough time to see what losing Yaz would feel like. “Great, just have to stabilise our course, and then you can pick any destination, my treat,” she says, practically jumping upwards which makes her nearly lose her balance and have to hold the console, losing her vision for a couple of steps there.
She doesn’t have to say anything, things can just go back to being how they were, and Yaz doesn’t even have to know how long it took the Doctor to find a solution, only to land on a terrible one like that. At least it worked, that’s what’s important. Yaz is safe, and she doesn’t have to know how hard this was, or how close the Doctor came of failing her.
“Doctor, do you need…?” Yaz starts, getting to her feet.
The Doctor waves a dismissing hand at her, not daring to look at her direction. “I just need a few minutes, just some minor adjustments. The TARDIS really doesn’t like getting so close to a black hole.”
This is better, if things don’t change, then she doesn’t have to deal with losses, it’s just better this way, for everyone.
-
“Yaz, can you hear me?” the Doctor asks, holding her by the arms, finally looking at her and not the console, concerned for her. The voice is enough to cut through the panic, but not to push away the realisation that the TARDIS helped her reach.
Yaz looks at her, and thinks of all the times where it seemed like the Doctor wanted to tell her something and then changed the subject, or when Yaz was so taken over by her feelings that she almost said something that she didn’t even know what would be, almost voiced feelings that she hadn’t even named to herself.
“You spent a hundred times longer to rescue me,” Yaz says, trying to make sense of what’s spiralling in her head.
It wasn’t that she thought that the Doctor didn’t care, but she knows that the Doctor cares in her own way, which sometimes makes it seem as though her friends are only important as long as she can see them, and she won’t even talk about them afterwards, like she’s trying to forget them.
The Doctor winces. “No, not nearly as much. The conversion rate was only, oh, ninety-eight something, point seventy-three. Give or take, even a millimetre makes a difference with a mass like that, and the station was in a decaying orbit,” she says looking away, something of her lively tone back in her voice, but it doesn't sound true.
She’s trying to keep Yaz from asking, or from worrying, she’s trying to make it seem like this wasn’t much, but that’s still three hundred months.
“And you were here alone,” Yaz says, and it's not a question.
That's what the TARDIS was trying to tell her. The Doctor spent all this time alone, trying to find a way to save her, and was going to pretend like this was nothing. That's what she does, she tries not to think of the things that hurt her, of people she lost, of being alone. She deals with the pain and with her own feelings by not dealing with them, and that can’t be good for her.
The Doctor closes her eyes, and her fingers dig in Yaz's arms tighter.
“Oh, I had the TARDIS keeping me company, and time flies when you're working on a problem, I felt like I was right back at the Academy, working on a project. It's alright, where should we go next?” the Doctor says with a tight smile, her expression still tense.
She wants Yaz to stop asking her about this, but Yaz spent so long wanting to see the Doctor again, only to learn that it took the Doctor even longer to find her. Over two decades, even for the Doctor, who has lived so much already, this has to be a long time to be alone, and she still won’t admit that this hurt her, that she was lonely.
Yaz raises a hand to the side of her face, and the Doctor leans against her touch.
“Doctor…” she doesn’t know what to say, but she has to say something.
“I can't,” the Doctor says, letting go of her arm to cover Yaz's hand with her, even as she holds tighter with the other. “It'll hurt too much when I lose and I will lose you. You'll leave or… I can't stand that.”
How often has the Doctor loved someone and lost them? How many times were enough to make her think that this just wasn’t worth it? How many times did it take to convince her that she might be better off ignoring her own feelings?
“Didn’t it hurt already?” Yaz asks, because she can see that the Doctor is trying to hide it, but she’s clearly hurting.
The Doctor’s hurting, and the TARDIS wants Yaz to know so she can do something about it, because the Doctor won’t.
“Yaz, you don’t know how much I missed you.”
“I’m here now, I’m…”
Yaz’s words are lost in her lips, because the Doctor leans forward and kisses her. Yaz pulls her closer, holding on to her, afraid that the Doctor will disappear from her arms if she can’t keep her close enough. They can’t have forever, and maybe this will make it hurt even more when something takes her from the Doctor, or takes the Doctor from her, but they were denying themselves by trying to avoid the pain, and that’s its own sort of hurt with none of the joy.
They have now, for however long that lasts, and that will have to be enough.