Chapter Text
The Doctor doesn’t feel right.
She definitely doesn’t feel like herself.
Navigating her cacophonous subconscious and threading together the disarray that lies within is like trying to wade through quicksand. Everytime she channels all her focus onto the task at hand, tries to work through a tricky question, or simply spares a moment to acknowledge the beauty of trimmed fields and flowing waters, she finds herself anchored; sinking, then yanked into the cruelest depths of her own mind. Like climbing a ladder through the downpour of a waterfall or swimming against the strongest of streams, the Doctor finds herself defenseless, unadaptive, and so very tired of fighting.
Yaz is off talking to Ronin and a couple others, and the Doctor straightens uncomfortably with the wave of discontent that settles over her like an eerie fog.
She could stand up off this tree stump, walk the four or five strides to the others and put her master’s degree in butting in on conversations she earned on Lucia Minor to good use.
But instead, for some reason, she just sits here.
Maybe she doesn’t think it’s worth it.
Maybe she’s simply unwilling to face the dampening of her dignity that comes with being ignored.
Look at you.
The shiver that runs down her spine is far too tangible.
Cowering in the background like a child.
The bass in his voice rumbles through her chest.
She doesn’t trust you, and she’s right not to, isn’t she? You don’t even trust yourself.
The Doctor glances at Yaz, then bows her head and presses her knuckles into her knees.
Who are you, Doctor, without your god complex? What’s happened to that healing hand ?
It was never a god complex. She was never a god.
Can you even continue to call yourself ‘Doctor’?
Of course she can.
You don’t deserve it.
Who ever said she did?
You’re vastly approaching nothingness, my dear.
He’s not really here. She knows he’s not really here.
But the distinct pleasure in the undertones of his voice is far too concrete to not cower beneath.
Impending demise comes stomping over the hills in the form of a titanium nightmare. The clink of heavy boots paired with the mechanical hiss of compression, over and over, again and again. Rising, nearing.
Yaz knows that sound.
No matter how much she wishes she didn’t.
Standing tall and stiff, silver and shining and numbing — “Is that…”
— Is a cyberman.
“What in the name of sanity…” Ronin raises the tip of his spear, trains it on the cyberman with a confidence that might be justified if that spear were just about anything but a spear. His men, white-knuckled and wide-eyed, do exactly the same.
The Doctor rises to her feet. Yaz can’t see her face, but there’s a visible stiffness to her shoulders and edge to her stance. One hand is curled into a tight fist while the other tremors around the sonic screwdriver, and Yaz witnesses her slip the device back into her pocket, then draw it out again with a dark cloud of uncertainty hanging over her head.
The cyberman hasn’t moved from its spot atop the hill, and the way rays of dawnlight glisten against its armour in a hauntingly beautiful manner send pinpricks of dread coursing along Yaz’s skin.
If the Doctor had a plan, she would’ve voiced it already, so Yaz doesn’t ask.
The cyberman takes a clunky step down the hill. Then another, then another.
Yaz’s first instinct is to run. The refugees’ first instinct is to let loose an almost animalistic battle cry, muscles braced to advance as a team, until Yaz shoots out an arm to lay across a couple of their spears and force them down.
“Don’t.” She hisses, gaze transfixed across the field. “Just run.”
Ronin yanks his weapon back into position and curls his lip disdainfully. “You don’t get to tell us what to do.”
“You don’t understand.” Yaz still doesn’t meet his eye, because for some reason the Doctor is walking towards the cyberman instead of bolting away from it, and whatever retort Ronin bites back is lost to the brush of wind as Yaz takes an alarmed step forward.
“Doctor!”
She’s not turning around, not stopping, and the pointed end of dread imbeds itself between Yaz’s ribs as the Doctor finally comes to stand toe-to-toe with the adversary.
The cyberman stomps to a halt. An armoured hand whirrs as it curls into a fist and releases, and it’s head slowly tilts forward as if to meet empty, black sockets to the Doctor’s vibrant hazel eyes. The exaggerated height advantage from the cyberman’s place on the incline leaves the Doctor looking horribly small, with her head cocked back to compensate and stance far less steady than usual. She’s poised with confidence, but not enough for Yaz to not take another helpless step forward out of fear for her friend, and fear for her friend alone.
She’s never had to worry about the Doctor like this, as if her life is just as malleable and limited as a human’s. As if her body could be snapped in half and stepped across, as if Yaz could look away an instant too long and lose her forever. As if the slightest push of wind might knock her right over.
Her coat and her hair flap and sway madly in the breeze, restless hands curl and uncurl, and she shifts unsteadily from heel to heel while the cyberman remains stoic. It seems to witness her sway, stumble inside her own mind, and deem her as no threat.
If only it could have seen her before.
It’s almost… undignified. That’s the first thought to pop into Yaz’s head when the cyberman walks around the Doctor, and trains an intense focus on the group of ragtag refugees all poised for battle.
The Doctor turns around, disheveled, billowing blonde cascading across half her face, but not enough to hide the look of confused dejection that makes Yaz’s heart plummet.
Her gaze is yanked back to shining silver as, only a dozen or so paces away, the cyberman continues its advance.
Ronin braces his stance, raises his spear, and hisses to his comrades. “Ready?”
In one final fruitless, desperate attempt to make them see reason, Yaz reaches out to grab the scratchy fabric at the man’s shoulder to draw his eye.
“Listen to me.” She releases him abruptly when he yanks away, eyes trained on his target. “You’ve never fought one of these things before. You can’t fight these things, period. You’ve got an entire station to hide so please, please, just run! ”
The gap is closing as the cyberman marches. Clunk, clunk, mechanically rhythmic and increasingly numbing as it draws closer and closer.
“You don’t understand—”
“— You don’t understand!” Yaz hisses, hand instinctively reaching to pull him out of harm’s way again only to flop against her thigh with irritation. “Come on, we all need to leave.” She leans sideways to catch sight of the Doctor who, unsurprisingly, hasn’t budged. “Doctor, lets go!”
“Just because our friends have turned on us does not mean we’ve turned on them.” Brow knit tight with ferocity, Ronin winds his white-knuckled grip tighter around his spear. “Secunda is our home, and we won’t leave it vulnerable to one single pawn of the Kakovis.”
Yaz’s mouth falls open, a final ditch at a plea dying on her tongue as the glisten of titanium catches the corner of her eye. She gasps, and lurches backwards.
The refugees howl something animalistic and bracing, and as the cyberman comes to a halt only inches away, they all lunge forward.
Spears bounce hopelessly off reflective armour and when the misdirected momentum sends Ronin and his men spiralling, the cyberman doesn’t miss a beat. The top of its wrist pulses blue as it raises a menacing arm, and a mere touch to the shoulder of the closest target renders him screaming, twitching, and crumbling to the ground with a fizz of electricity and the scent of burning flesh.
Like a lion surrounded by house cats, the cyberman easily picks them off one by one while Yaz is left to watch from an unsafe distance. For a moment, the bloodbath is mesmerizing in the most sickening, bone-chilling way, Yaz can do nothing but stand in place with muscles tensed and arms pinned tight to her sides.
Bodies litter the space around the cyberman in a haphazard circle, singed and horrifyingly still. The four remaining alive, Ronin amongst them, all finally decide to heed Yaz’s order.
They run. They run so fast.
Ronin comes staggering her way, tripping over his own feet, and the cyberman is directly on his heels with a closed hand outstretched and energy pulsing in preparation. Just as he whips past Yaz’s shoulder she sees the energy build, readied to burst at the back of Ronin’s head — and acts accordingly with not a single rational thought contributing to the chaos.
Yaz steps in the line of fire.
The blue is vibrant — beautiful, almost, glowing and growing until the cyberman abruptly tightens its fist.
Yaz slams her eyes shut, braced for the blow, but it comes from another direction entirely.
The Doctor crashes into her side, arms clasped around her middle, and slams the both of them to the ground in the instant a bolt of blue zips over Yaz’s head.
She gasps, winded, instinctively moving to push the Doctor off her shoulder so she can follow the blast, but she never sees it hit. She hears a body hit the ground instead.
Yaz wants to scream. Ronin’s eyes don’t close as he exhales his final breath, they stare lifelessly in Yaz’s general direction as if his ghost is asking for a second chance.
With a burst of impatient energy and a disoriented grunt, Yaz rolls the Doctor off of her and stumbles to her feet. In the distance, she can see the few remaining refugees all taking off into the hills, the trees, or disappearing over the horizon. And to Yaz’s horror, but no surprise, the cyberman turns on its heel to pick a figure out of the lot and advance in its direction.
Yaz doesn’t know what to do, but she knows that standing in its path isn’t gonna do any good. The Doctor on the other hand, tries exactly this — sprinting around to its front to brace her hands against its chest and dig her heels into the dirt.
It just keeps on going. Pushing through her, around her, and knocking her about with its resiliency, and the Doctor’s miniscule efforts fall embarrassingly flat.
Dirt caked and winded, Yaz takes a slight step forward with eyes squinted, head tilted, as she catches a flash of red on the side of the cyberman’s neck. Neural transmitter.
The Doctor’s eyes light up, noticing it herself, and as she backpedals blindly to keep the cyberman from stepping on her toes, she reaches forward.
But wait — wouldn’t that mean —
She yanks the tab off its armour, and the cyberman goes stock still, head drooping with the odd twitch as if powering down.
Yaz allows herself a full inhale, and a slow exhale.
Did that… actually work?
Its head lifts and its stance straightens with a mechanical whirr and an unnerving amount of grace.
Of course it didn’t.
“ You will be deleted. ”
Oh. Oh no.
Oh, she really shouldn’t have done that. Stupid Doctor — stupid.
With the neural transmitter removed and deactivated, nothing stands in between the Doctor and a cyberman’s base instincts.
She should probably run.
Instead, the Doctor finds herself leaning backwards, all but cowering beneath the cyberman’s distorted threat and the armoured hand that rises to her eye level. A fist forms in slow motion, and a bubble of ghastly blue emanates from the top of its wrist.
The Doctor doesn’t step to the side, doesn’t back away, doesn’t run.
For reasons unbeknownst to herself, she merely watches.
Against all natural instincts, she waits.
There’s a sudden clunk of stone on metal, jolting the cyberman’s head with the impact and snapping the Doctor out of her daze.
“Oi, over here!”
Yaz has a rock clamped in her fist, arm raised and ready to fire another distraction at the back of the impenetrable helmet.
“I said, over here!” She chucks the other one, and the Doctor flinches without meaning to.
The cyberman turns a slow, menacing circle, the light on its wrist dying down as it loses interest in the Doctor’s passive behavior, and fixates on Yaz, who goes wide-eyed at the realization.
“Doctor, we’ve got to run!” Yaz ducks and side steps with remarkable speed as the cyberman takes a large step towards her with its arm outstretched. She loops around to the Doctor’s side, grabbing the edge of her sleeve urgently when she doesn’t earn an immediate response. “Doctor?”
If they run, there will be nothing standing in between a rogue cyberman and a station full of cowering, unprepared civilians.
If they run, then by the simple laws of cause and effect, dozens more will die.
The Doctor is well aware of Yaz’s anxious eye burning a hole into the side of her head, but never brings herself to look up.
Clunk, clunk, as the cyberman advances on them again.
“Yaz, we…”
“We what? ” Yaz slides her hand down the Doctor’s arm to grip her wrist and tug her out of the line of fire when the cyberman stops, and raises its arm again. Stumbling for cover with repeated glances over her shoulder, Yaz wheezes, “Doctor, we can’t take it down without any weapons! We just have to hope the first sector it finds is equipped to deal with it.”
The Doctor doesn’t notice the burst of energy sound from behind her back until Yaz is pushing down forcefully on her shoulders and a flash of blue is wisping overhead. Before she can land her disoriented gaze on where it came from, Yaz is dragging her out of harm’s way again.
She nearly trips over a body, fingers loose in Yaz’s grip as she stares down at a dirtied pale face and lifeless eyes that never slid shut. She doesn’t catch herself in time when she stumbles over another, and lands heavily on her knees close enough to the corpse that she catches a whiff of singed flesh.
Choking, cringing and against all odds, tearing, the Doctor scrambles away on her hands and knees until she bumps into Yaz’s leg.
Two arms immediately hook under hers and help drag her to her feet, and while the Doctor struggles to catch her breath, Yaz is maintaining a fierce focus on the cyberman that’s dangerous;y near.
“Doctor?” Yaz says through anxiously gritted teeth, winded herself, as the cyberman draws nearer. The frantic plea, laced with fatigue and almost defeat, sends a spark of awareness through the Doctor’s synapsis.
A good sprint away, a wide stack of chopped firewood catches her eye; the closest thing to any form of proper cover in a foreseeable range. She shoves a hand deep in her coat pocket until her fingertips meet the deactivated neural transmitter, and she toys with it absentmindedly as a plan fully forms.
Not an ideal plan, but these days she’ll take what she can get.
Yaz isn’t gonna like it, for more than a couple reasons.
“Yaz?” The Doctor looks her way. “Distract it.”
“ What? ” Yaz’s jaw drops about as far as it can, because that’s not something the Doctor has ever asked of her before. Not to this degree.
“Go!” She gives her the slightest of shoves and takes off in the opposite direction, hurrying for the wood stack as her fingers wind tight around the neural transmitter in her pocket.
Yaz will be fine. Until this next bit is over.
Pulses of energy sound at the same time as Yaz’s yelps as she narrowly avoids them. The Doctor casts an apologetic look over her shoulder as she runs, pleading with the universe to keep her friend alive.
The Doctor dives behind the pile, momentarily hidden, and doesn’t waste a beat. She draws the tiny transmitter from her pocket and holds it close to her face, squinting her eyes for the briefest analysis before retrieving her screwdriver.
“ What are you doing? ” Yaz calls out of sight, audibly winded, the clunk of the cyberman’s boots sounding over her voice.
“Just a minute!” The Doctor hollers.
Her eyes slide shut and she exhales slowly in preparation, fisting her sonic in one hand and pressing her knuckles to her forehead.
“I’m sorry, Yaz.” She whispers, loud enough for only herself to hear.
When she opens her eyes, her vision is once again filtered by the slightest haze of tears.
She doesn’t want to do this, not really.
But a part of you does.
She swallows hard.
A part of you knows you deserve this, and an even bigger part of you cannot wait for all this to be over.
A tear rolls down her cheek, traitorous, villainous as it splashes onto her knee, darkening the blue of her trousers. Her white knuckled grip winds tighter around the sonic.
She doesn’t want to do this.
But maybe he’s right.
Maybe she does.
The Doctor startles when Yaz suddenly slams down to her knees behind the barrier.
“What are you doing?” The Doctor bites.
“Whatever you’re planning, it’s gotta be now.” Yaz pushes herself to a crouch to peer over the top of the wood pile, shooting back down after a peak. “Like, now now. I can’t catch my breath… hold on.”
The Doctor bows her head to shield her face from sight, lifting her fingers one by one to reveal the neural transmitter in her palm.
“Doctor, are you… are you crying?”
The Doctor swallows audibly and doesn’t dry her eyes, instead lifting the sonic with her jaw firmly set and eyes narrowed with intent.
Yaz’s hand flies forward to snatch her wrist. “What are you doing?”
“The only thing I can.” The Doctor holds the button on the sonic until the neural transmitter flashes orange. Yaz abruptly releases her wrist to lean forward with her knuckles pressed into the dirt, eyes wide.
“Doctor!”
“When this is over,” She sniffs once and hates herself for it, but dying with dignity is an ancient concept at this point. “Find the control center. I’ve been half expecting, half hoping the TARDIS will be there. If she’s not, she’ll find you sooner or later. She knows she has to.”
“Wait, where are you gonna be?” Realization is beginning to knit itself between Yaz’s brows, but she seems reluctant to accept it. “Doctor, why are you telling me this?”
The clunk of heavy steps is far closer now. There’s no way the cyberman doesn’t know where they are.
“I’ve reprogrammed the transmitter. Assigned it a new target.”
“What target?”
The Doctor moves to stand. “Me.”
Yaz clamps her hand around her wrist again and tugs her back down. “ What? Why? It’s already targeting us!”
“No, it’s targeting any living being in front of it because that’s what it’s designed to do.” The Doctor hardens. “But if it completes its given orders, it’ll shut down. Probably. If not, hope you’ve caught your breath.”
The Doctor manages to rise to her feet this time while Yaz, entirely dumbstruck, stares blankly at the ground as the full impact of the Doctor’s words washes over her.
“You’re gonna let it kill you just to stop it?”
The Doctor squares her shoulders and faces the adversary head on. It stops moving when it sees her.
“Suppose I am.” The Doctor rounds the barrier, neural transmitter pinched between two fingers, and raises her arm with eyes trained on the cyberman’s neck.
This is it.
This is her purpose now.
If a productive death is all she has to offer to the thousands of suffering refugees on this station —
Then maybe she’s not the Doctor anymore.
Hopefully, Yaz will remember her as she used to be, not who she was in the end, because this isn’t her.
This isn’t her.
She’s better than this. She’s cleverer than this.
Well, she used to be.
The transmitter pulses an indifferent orange between her fingers, drawing her clouded eyes. It’s been programmed for her, specifically, meaning if her calculations are correct, (which is debatable nowadays), the cyberman won’t allow her to regenerate.
Death, in its purest form, stares her down and raises a closed hand.
The Doctor, readied and nimble, raises her open one a bit quicker.
But before the transmitter can fuse to smooth metal, in the nanosecond before she can apply the tab to the cyberman’s neck, something knocks into her arm and sends the device spiraling to the ground.
As the Doctor struggles to process what’s happened, there’s a flash as Yaz lunges across her vision to stomp on the neural transmitter with both feet, digging it into the earth with her heel.
There’s a snap, and flashing orange goes dark.
“Yaz, no! ” The Doctor jolts backward, one hand fisted in her hair. “What are you doing?”
“Taking the reins.” Yaz yanks the Doctor out of the line of fire, and her momentum never stops.
Awestruck, breathless, and nearly stepping on Ronin’s broken body, the Doctor finds herself running. Yaz is stopping for nothing, dragging the Doctor by her coat sleeve towards the distant cover of another dead forest. “ Yaz , stop.” She can hear the cyberman advancing on them, feels a deadly flash zip over her shoulder, and fights the grip on her arm in an attempt to face her enemy, because she’s so tired of running. So very tired of leaving people behind.
Yaz trades her sleeve for her hand, squeezing so tight it’s almost painful, and the Doctor begrudgingly accepts that struggle is fruitless. As she’s dragged away she spares repeated, yearning glances over her shoulder as the cyberman steps over and around body after body, disregarding them while the Doctor sears every face into the most untouchable part of her memory.
“I’m so sorry…” She mutters under her breath, choking around the final syllable until Yaz’s speed increases and the Doctor is forced to focus her efforts on running away.
Running away and consequently dooming hundreds of lives to the hand of a cyberman .
The Doctor doesn’t recognize herself anymore.