Chapter Text
It had been a while since they'd last tried ice cream.
Yaz and Grace were strolling slowly, side by side, through a park. Grace was processing, in fits and starts, all the things she'd learned from a fob watch about how she'd come to be.
"So I know, now, that my memories are a mix of someone else's, but they're still mine," Grace said, perhaps for the fifth time, in the fifth way. "I'm still me. I know I can't remember my tenth birthday, but can you remember your tenth birthday?"
Yaz chuckled. "Only because I ate so much candy floss I got sick all over the dress my nani gave me," she said. "Sonya still takes the piss."
Grace shrugged. "Ah well. Then I'm not missing much, am I?"
"You're handling this kind of thing a lot better than the Doctor did," Yaz observed, even as she realized it was the first time referring to the Doctor directly in Grace's presence. "She couldn't stand not knowing everything about herself. Took it very personally."
"Well, I'm not an immortal time traveler who feels compelled to uncover history from eons ago, am I?" Grace gestured vigorously with her ice cream cone, and nearly launched it across the path. "Besides, she had hers taken away. I never had them to begin with. Makes it harder to miss it, I think."
They were quiet for a few steps while Grace thought that over. "I guess it's a bit like being adopted - which I was - and later meeting your biological parent - which I never will. I know a lot more about where I came from, but it doesn't change where I am now." Grace shrugged, and bumped lightly against Yaz. "Quite like where I am now," she concluded, shyly.
Yaz smiled, and bumped her back. "Me, too."
Grace stopped and turned toward her. "There's one thing I don't get, though. How did we manage to meet? I've never believed in any kind of 'fate,' but... that were no coincidence."
"Fate probably had a little help," Yaz admitted.
Grace scowled at that notion. She looked around, as if expecting a time traveler to pop out of thin air and nudge her life, again. "That sort of thing likely to keep happening?"
"It might," Yaz said. "But not... anything we can't choose, one way or another."
Grace seemed less than satisfied with that. Her brow furrowed while she finished her ice cream cone.
Yaz took a deep breath. "So. I want you to meet my friends," she said.
"The ones who would think I was her?" Grace guessed, then hesitated before adding in a softer voice, "Your fam?"
"Yeah," Yaz replied. "They're important to me. You're important to me. I... need them to know you."
"Hm," Grace faux-grumbled, as if she'd consider refusing. "I suppose. Good thing you're really pretty, Yasmin Khan."
Yaz felt her cheeks heat, and she suddenly thought she might combust, all because a pretty girl called her pretty. She managed a dopey grin.
"Not that you wouldn't be worth all the fuss if you didn't have that face," Grace appended. "But that face definitely makes the fuss a lot easier."
Dan Lewis, who habitually went to great effort to make difficult things easier for others, simply arranged to bump into Grace at Yaz's flat while under pretense of bringing over a pile of work notes to be digitized.
"Hey there. Grace, is it?" he said, with a broad smile, as he shook her hand. "Yaz talks about you non-stop, at our place of work, where we are definitely not spies. Pleasure."
Grace decided that she liked him immediately.
Graham and Ryan took a bit more arranging. They met up for lunch outside Manchester, to no one's great delight.
Grace kept staring at the menu, as if studying it would make food actually palatable and settle the anxiety making her fingertips itch.
Yaz patted her knee in comfort, but then started a bit herself when she saw Graham and Ryan arrive.
Both men approached the table slowly, wearing matching stunned expressions.
"Oh. That's just uncanny," Graham murmured.
"You look just like her," Ryan blurted in agreement.
Grace smiled, awkwardly, and looked like she might consider fleeing out a window. Yaz took her hand and squeezed.
"And you're called Grace?" Graham asked.
"Yeah," Grace replied, in a soft voice. "Named after beloved fam."
Graham teared up a bit at that, and managed a fragile smile. "Well, then. It is very nice to meet you, Grace."
Beside him, Ryan nodded in eager agreement.
They sat, and stared at each other awkwardly for a long moment. Ryan cleared his throat, realizing he hadn't actually greeted Yaz.
"Hey, all right?"
Yaz nodded. "Yeah, all right. Thanks for coming."
"Wouldn't miss it, cockle," Graham said, with a warm grin. And with that, the three were fam again, as if no time had passed, as if no distance had ever been between them. He turned to Grace. "So, go on, then. Tell us about you," he prompted, with a wave of his hand. "All we know is that you're a doctor and met Yaz in a train accident."
It felt like such an unusual request. Grace didn't talk about herself much to anyone but Yaz. She took a moment to consider what she would say, while Graham wore that open expression that was entirely patient and undemanding. A beat later, she noticed that Ryan was watching Yaz, with a knowing smile.
So she chanced a look over at Yaz, and saw that gentle, adoring look that made her insides flutter. That face definitely made all the fuss a lot easier.
Grace took a breath. "Well, I was living in Yorkshire..."
Lunch passed in an amiable blur, until eventually their plates had been cleared and Graham was not-subtly digging his elbow into Ryan's side. "Go on, son," he prompted. "He's got something to say," he told Yaz.
Ryan looked alarmed, and cleared his throat. "Yeah. So, Yaz. Whenever you come back around Sheffield, you should know..."
"Oh, you are not," she said, definitely anticipating what he was about to say.
He shifted uncomfortably. "Sonya and I have been seeing each other for a few months."
"Ryan," she snapped.
"She's great," he insisted. "I really like her."
It was hard to be mad at his sincerity. Yaz huffed and slumped in her seat for a pout, but didn't snap at him further.
Grace snagged her hand under the table and squeezed it in comfort.
Graham just smiled and shook his head, then politely changed the topic and flagged down the server to get some dessert.
A bit later they'd exhausted food and conversation for the day, and they split up to return to their respective cities.
Graham hugged both women goodbye, and gave Grace a fond pat on the shoulder. "You take care of our Yaz, eh?"
Yaz immediately thought to snark at that, saying she didn't need caring for. Instead she just offered a wry smile and kept her mouth shut.
Grace waved back to Graham. "I will," she promised.
She and Yaz wandered slowly back to Yaz's car.
"So, was that okay?" Grace asked.
"More than," Yaz said, immediately. "I know it were hard to do. Thanks for doing it."
Grace heaved a sigh of relief. "Good. So, Ryan and your sister..."
"Yeah," Yaz said with a glower. "That won't last long."
"You can't actually murder him," Grace chided, with a smile.
Yaz glared at nothing, doubting that. "Well, They liked you. I knew they would. But they liked you."
Grace tilted a bit as she walked, acknowledging as much. "Felt a bit like meeting the in-laws," she said. Then she drew to a stop. "Oh. I have to meet your parents, don't I?"
Yaz chuckled. "Someday, yeah. My dad has been asking after you. Wants to make you his pakora."
"... which is terrible," Grace remembered.
"Absolutely the worst."
"But he inflicts it on your friends..."
"As a rite of passage," Yaz confirmed. "Yep."
Grace shook her head, a bit bewildered as she started walking again. "Family is so complicated. All these little rituals. You have to tell me when I'm messing it up."
"You're doing great," Yaz assured her.
They'd almost made it back to the car, but for some reason neither were inclined to wander out of that moment. Grace stopped walking again, and Yaz stopped half a step later. They turned toward each other.
"Hey, Yaz?" Grace said, quietly. "Did you notice that Graham said you 'seem happy' like, four separate times?"
Yaz smiled. "Well, I am happy," she replied.
They were so close they could feel each other's breath. There weren't any remaining secrets between them, threatening to lever them apart.
"You make me happy," Yaz added, in a whisper.
Grace was breathing shallowly. "Yaz? Could I kiss you?" she whispered.
Yaz nodded, and Grace tilted in.
And so, after adventures that spanned time and space and the unraveling of the universe itself, after wanting to die and then learning to live, in a restaurant carpark outside Manchester, wind-whipped under cloudy skies, Yasmin Khan finally kissed her girl, who kissed her back.
They laughed, tugged each other closer, and kissed again.
One time, when Yaz was seventeen, she'd realized she had a crush on a classmate. They'd been partnered in chemistry lab, and every single day she'd spent in close proximity to that girl made Yaz feel like she was soaring across the sky.
Speaking her feelings into existence had, of course, gone horribly wrong.
But here she was, years removed and soaring again, and this time she knew without doubt she was strong enough to weather anything else that might come her way. She plunked down on the sofa and pulled out her phone to text Grace and tell her so.
It took her a moment to notice the hologram "sitting" on the chair across from her. The Doctor was watching her, with a quiet look of satisfaction.
"So this message is tuned to your emotional state," the Doctor explained. "Specifically, to you being happy. Also set up a bit of automation on your behalf. There is an entire galaxy about 700 million light years away from Earth lighting up in rather remarkable quasi-natural phenomena right about now."
The image switched to a view of brilliant fireworks blazing across an alien sky, then switched back to the Doctor.
"I know you haven't always been okay, Yaz. But I am so glad you are today. And now billions of people are celebrating Yasmin Khan Day, even if they don't know it. They'll celebrate it for centuries to come. I made sure that your happiness will echo across entire civilizations."
The hologram flickered, and switched to a different contingency path.
"You can deactivate the holo-AI, by the way," the Doctor continued, gently. "Don't want you to feel like I'm haunting you. And if you happen to fall for someone with a familiar face, I don't want to intrude."
She made a face. "Bit awkward, that. Anyway, you'll still carry this little bit of me with you. Just like I'll carry you with me, as long as I go on."
She pressed her fingers to her lips, as if blowing Yaz a kiss. "Happy Yasmin Khan Day," she said.
The Doctor flickered away, and Yaz managed a teary smile.
Grace wrote her name on a name tag, and smoothed it across her lapel.
"Oh, now - you've got a story," came a voice behind her.
Grace turned to see a woman with "Ace" scrawled across her own lapel.
"Yaz's girl, right?" Ace said, with a twinkle in her eye. "We've been dying to meet you."
Grace flushed a bit. "Ah, well. Afraid my story's fairly dull, actually. I didn't do any of the traveling."
Ace nodded. "The traveling ain't what made it special," she said, with a shrug. She cast her eyes around the room, across friends old and new, and beamed. "We're glad you've joined us."
Grace, of course, could see nothing but Yaz, who was joking with Dan and Graham.
"Glad to be here," she said, with a smile.