Chapter Text
“I love you,” says Yaz.
The Doctor smiles and Yaz waits for her to say something wonderful and heartfelt. But all she says is “Thanks,” and turns her attention back to whatever she’s doing at the console.
“I love you,” Yaz repeats.
“You said.” The Doctor inspects her ship's controls and pulls a lever down.
“I mean it.”
The Doctor looks up, her expression somehow unreadable. “You probably shouldn’t,” she says.
“Why?” But then Ryan appears in the doorway that leads to the depths of the ship and now the Doctor has an excuse and a distraction.
Yaz fights down her irritation and greets her other friend with a nod and a fake grin. There’ll be other times, and it’s not like her feelings are going to vanish if she has to wait a few days for an answer. Yaz loves the Doctor. Absolutely loves her. Best person she ever met, and she’s met a lot of people.
Is the Doctor into women? Is the Doctor into anyone? It seems like something Yaz should have worked out ages ago, but it’s a mystery along with everything else. Maybe that’s part of the attraction – here is a puzzle she can’t solve, here’s someone who slips away from any attempt at investigation.
She’s convinced herself that she doesn’t need the Doctor to love her back, but it’d be nice to know. It hasn’t escaped her notice that she didn’t get a rejection, just a warning. Maybe that’s the Doctor’s way of letting her down gently, but it’ll do for now. The Doctor, after all, is always stressing the importance of hope.
So Yaz waits for another opportunity, and tells herself that she can live with whatever the answer will be when it arrives.
-
“I told you,” says the Doctor, “you shouldn’t get too attached. Not to me.”
“But you never told me why.” Yaz winces as the Doctor wipes the cut on her forehead with an antiseptic swab.
They’re alone for once, in the poky little room full of alien medical equipment (though for all Yaz knows about medicine at least half of it could just be stuff from Earth and she’d be none the wiser). She’s got herself injured saving the world, and more to the point saving the Doctor (who in turn will save the world again, almost certainly).
The Doctor is silent, so Yaz prompts her with a jokey “Are you secretly a serial killer or something?”
The antiseptic seems to sting more this time, which must be an illusion but it takes her breath away.
“That should do for now,” says the Doctor, and presumably she means that Yaz’s wounds are sufficiently cleaned and bandaged, but there’s a hard edge to her voice that suggests otherwise. Maybe it’s best not to ask right now, maybe she’s got something on her mind. That happens sometimes, after all, strange dark moods that last for days and then vanish as soon as the gang get into trouble again.
She wonders if the Doctor’s hiding something, then corrects that to ‘hiding something else,’ because there’s a lot she doesn’t tell them, when you stop and let yourself think about it. The Doctor manages to talk and talk about hundreds of topics without ever giving any information about herself, or at least not any information that matters.
Yaz’s thoughts are interrupted when the Doctor says, “You’re getting reckless.”
“I’m not,” she protests, even though it’s true.
“I’ve seen it before,” says the Doctor, “and it never ends well. I don’t want you ending up like...” and there she stops and falls silent.
“Like..?”
The Doctor shrugs. “Just be careful, okay?” And then she’s through the door and gone, leaving Yaz with a dozen new questions that she knows she’ll never get answers to.
Yaz pushes herself up from the medical couch and gets to her feet. The cuts on her skin still hurt, but she’s getting used to it, and at least it’s something to feel.
-
It’s just the two of them now, Yaz and the Doctor, on a hot planet in another galaxy, trying to get the TARDIS back so they can run away to somewhere new when they’ve saved these people. For once the Doctor has taken her coat off, handed it to Yaz to hold while she examines a huge alien machine half sunk into the desert sand.
Yaz watches her work, admiring the view as well as the intelligence. “Can you fix it?” she asks.
The Doctor turns to look at her, the reflected light of two suns in the opaque lenses of her sunglasses. Yaz is dazzled, as she so often is these days.
“Good question,” says the Doctor. “I like questions.” And then she launches into an explanation of how the device is supposed to work and how she plans to repair it with the sonic screwdriver and some string.
You don’t like questions when they’re about you, thinks Yaz, and then she bats that thought away as traitorous. Sometimes it’s just best not to ask, if you want to keep the Doctor happy and stop her avoiding eye contact for the next few hours.
“Have you got any string?” asks the Doctor, and Yaz drags herself back to the present.
“I don’t think so,” she says, and that’s the wrong thing to say so she hastily amends it to “I’ll check my pockets.”
The Doctor holds a hand out for her coat and after a minute of increasing gloominess she yelps in triumph, holding up a bright green yo-yo. “This’ll do,” she says. “Shame to damage a good yo-yo but we can book it in for repairs next time we’re on Earth.” She’s back to her cheery self, which Yaz chooses to believe is her real self even though the evidence against that is steadily mounting. Yaz has never met someone who can give such rousing speeches about hope and then dive into pessimistic despair in the next moment.
She worries about that. She worries about a lot of things these days. Little things that she never noticed before, and bigger things that must be new because she couldn’t have missed great big flashing neon signs like those, surely?
But this time there is string, and the day is saved again. The worries can wait.
-
A few questions are answered and replaced by new ones when she finds out that the Doctor’s been sneaking out of the TARDIS at night.
Yaz’s own ongoing failure to sleep (not a problem, nothing she can’t handle, probably just hormonal) takes her to the console room, where the glowing crystal in the centre is still and the background hum of the ship sounds like it does when they’ve landed somewhere.
“Doctor?” she calls, and gets no response.
She tries the door and finds it locked. She frowns, turns around to head into the endless corridors to find the Doctor, and when she hears the sound of a key in the lock outside she ducks behind a pillar without knowing why she’s hiding. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, after all.
That the Doctor might have been doing something wrong occurs to her only when she steps back into view, and by then it’s too late.
“Where were you?” she asks, trying to sound like she isn’t concerned.
The Doctor steps towards the console. “Went for a walk. Humans sleep too much, I get bored with nobody to talk to at night.” She moves her hands over the controls far too casually, like she’s trying to hide something.
“A walk? On your own?”
She shrugs. “Like I said, you were asleep.” Their eyes meet briefly and before the Doctor can look away again Yaz sees how guilty she looks. And there’s more than just guilt: she looks defeated. It hurts just looking at her.
Yaz steps towards her, psyching herself up to make a move and kiss the sadness away. She’s almost close enough when she catches the faint scents of alcohol and of someone else’s deodorant and she remembers standing next to O, him leaning against her, arm pressed to hers while they roll the dice and she inhales this scent for the first time, but surely that can’t be right, surely it’s a mistake, surely -
She stumbles backwards, her heart pounding. The Doctor wouldn’t. She’d never. She’s good. She’s so very good. Yaz can’t let herself imagine her being anything but good.
The Doctor just nods. “I told you,” she says, tired, “you don’t know me.”
“And he does?” asks Yaz, but she knows the answer before she’s even formed the question. Someone the Doctor hates knows more about her than her best friend does. Her supposed best friend. Her very much disillusioned and heartbroken best friend.
“Yeah,” says the Doctor, “he does.” She moves to leave the room but Yaz grabs at her arm as she passes.
“You need to explain this. You need to tell me what you did, and why.”
The Doctor tries to shake Yaz’s hand away. “I don’t.”
“I love you,” says Yaz, for the first time in months. “I love you and I don’t even know who you are. Do you know what that feels like?”
The Doctor moves suddenly, pushes her back against the column and kisses her, quick and hot. Yaz feels like she’s going to melt, or explode, or maybe somehow both. She’s just getting started when the Doctor pulls away enough to speak.
“This is what we do,” says the Doctor, and kisses her again but this time it’s half-biting.
“You wouldn’t,” says Yaz, and the Doctor’s hand is at the front of her jeans, pulling at the zip. “Not with him.”
“Why not?” The Doctor pauses, stares into Yaz’s eyes. “You don’t know me. I’ve made sure of that.”
“I know you well enough.”
The Doctor rests her hand between Yaz’s legs, thumb hooked into the top of her knickers. “Do you want this?” she asks, almost as if she’s afraid of the answer.
Yaz nods and says “Yes” so quietly that she can barely hear her own voice.
“You shouldn’t,” says the Doctor, slipping her hand under thin cotton fabric. Yaz clutches at the column behind her for support, lifts a leg to give the Doctor better access. It’s awkward and a bit too rough, but it’s also good, even with the unwanted running commentary about why this shouldn’t be happening: “I’m not a good person”; “you shouldn’t trust me”; “I’m ancient and my hearts have gone cold.”
She almost sobs. “I don’t care.”
“Well you should,” says the Doctor, and then everything is undone. Yaz gasps and loses her grip, sliding down onto the floor. Nobody tries to catch her and there’s nothing to break her fall.
After a long silence the Doctor says “Sorry,” and steps away, leaving Yaz shaking at the foot of the column. She pauses in the doorway that leads to rest of the ship, and says, “I do love you, you know. If that helps.”
The worst thing is that it does.