Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Light escapes them here. So dark, even shadows cannot fall. Instead they are hidden, burrowed so far into the black of it. Faces pushed down into it until they cannot breathe from it. Yaz cannot breathe from it.

She supposes the English countryside is whizzing past them. Trees, trembling, in the last of winter’s tendrils, reaching like silhouetted spectres over the winding roads. All the animals should be hunkered down for the long, cold night ahead—or, if not, then lurking, their nocturnal lives so incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

She barely gives them a thought. She cannot see them; she will not see them. Her head isn’t here, and hasn’t been—not for hours.

Her mind’s eye is somewhere else, so far away. Tethered to a heart she calls home. If it beats, and if it doesn’t, it is still home.

So far away. She can’t fathom it, this noir film a dark fantasy, surely a nightmare bouncing off the traumas of their recent adventures. Her worst fears coming true, and what remains is the inability to speak of it.

The dark, and the fear, and the loneliness. And the silence of it.

And even if she could verbalise this—this, this cracking—there would be no words fit for the purpose. Nothing to convey except the big eyes, the sad eyes. She was so close to tears and refused to let a single one spill.

Yaz was not so brave. She wasn’t even the one marching off to die.

Those big eyes will haunt her, she knows, in the days and nights to come. They will demand her attention in every face she sees. There will be no reprieve from it, and she can feel it already. When she stares at her own gaunt face in the car window, all she sees is the final look, the final things she never wanted to say.

When she closes her eyes, all she sees is that final look. When sleep eventually pushes her into consciousness, she will see them.

Sleep. Her bones feel like dust. Rest is the last thing on her mind.

Graham suggested, quietly, that she and Ryan could take a nap in the back of the taxi. The taxi driver agreed—at least, he hadn’t verbalised a complaint—so she heard Ryan adjust his position, and bump his head on the side of the car.

She tried to smile. Not that he’d see.

They’re just silhouettes now, black ghosts with purpose ripped from them. All she can see for their future is them floating, between work and home and work again, constantly waiting for a tethering that may never arrive.

Civilisation: after standing in the ruins of Gallifrey—and the ruins of the human race—she has almost forgotten what it feels like to be around people again. People from her lifetime, even. Cars and vans and lorries, engrossed in the daily. What would they be thinking about tonight? Gears and brakes and fish and chips for dinner, the endlessness of driving. She feels so disconnected from it, now, as if this was never her preoccupation—and is this what it is like, when you attempt to leave behind a permanent altering?

Was this always going to be the case, locked into her life as soon as she set eyes on the Doctor? Changed, and a step away, just a single step away, from who she used to be.

The sudden change from country road to pristine, illuminated motorway throws their faces into sharp relief. From where Yaz sits, Graham is just a shoulder, his head leant against the windows; as the rest of her senses tune back into the present frequency, she picks up the gentle sound of his snoring.

The light bounces off the crown of Ryan’s head, the source of the illumination being left behind to be replaced by another. His head is up, though his face has slackened, the corners of his mouth left to slump.

He looks to her, his eyes scanning her face to take in all the signs of grief. A friendly gesture, of course, of course—still, she wipes away free-fall tears and glares down at the cream leather of the driver’s seat.

Morose gaze. Platitudes of ache. Her bones are dust, and her heart is somewhere else.

‘You okay?’ Ryan asks. She can barely hear his voice over the thrum of the engine.

She looks back at him—the same morose eyes—and wonders what on Earth to say.

Ryan extends a hand across the middle seat. Wiggles his fingers for a few seconds. Keeps looking at her.

She takes it. Her ‘Thank you,’ gets stuck on the lump in her throat.

A minute of passing lights flashing like a film roll. A minute of Graham’s snoring and the eager engine.

Ryan turns back to her, and says, ‘Me too.’

Warm duvet, familiar walls. Pictures of life at home. A family holiday in Spain. Her mother, holding a very young Yaz.

Her and Sonya at their first Pride. Pink, purple and blue wrapped around her shoulders. Yaz looks terrified, but ecstatic. Sonya looks bored.

The next photo, the Doctor and her team on a trip to the beach. Vague enough a location to pass off for Earth; safe for the four walls of her home.

Her walls are less than bare: a poster displaying an examination of a sunflower, a film poster for Heathers; tickets from bands she’d seen live, most of them indie artists she’d seen by herself. Drawings and musings from her ten-year-old self that her parents refuse to let her take down. But in her mind’s eye, there is so much missing. She knows each wall could be filled, twice over, with pictures from her travels. There were so many they took, taken on one of their phones and sent over to the whole group. Some, also, taken on a camera from the 1890s that Yaz found in a storage room in the TARDIS.

In all of them, the stars are outshined, given something to shine for, by the Doctor. A smile so wide it could split the sky. Each of them sporting the same grin–the same relief that they were here, alive and together. A happiness that was so loud it almost deafened her.

Except at the end.

So many photos she has long lost count. Every new sensation was an excuse enough, every new planet an opportunity for a group photo. A commitment to memory. In each of them, a dazzling smile, and the sense that this was home, somehow. In many of them, Yaz’s hand is wrapped around the Doctor’s waist; she gives Graham rabbit ears with two fingers behind his head. This was home, somehow; though lacking a physical landmark in time and space, it nestled deep within them. And it left a ragged gash as it went.

Her phone gallery is full of photos, an entire folder dedicated to them. Perhaps she should protect herself, keep them somewhere safe—and not easily accessible—but she needs them. It claws at her throat. She needs them. Her fingers itch whenever she is not on her phone, her gaze roaming over every millimetre of the photo on her screen.

Swaddled in her duvet, she lingers on each picture. Feels her heart kick back into gear. That sad happiness, searching for a home that has evaporated.

Uncertain regal: this one, Yaz had snapped without the knowledge of her subject. With all the grace of kings, the Doctor stood, lost in thought and looking to the side, with her hair slightly ruffled from the wind. The workings of her neck, bared. The dip of her collarbones. The rainbow emblazoned bright on her chest.

Faraway eyes were focused on faraway lands, and Yaz had wondered if she would ever glimpse them. She indulged herself, for a moment, in the possibility that the Doctor would tell her—willingly—about her faraway fears, all the buried thoughts that burst into accidental grace in moments such as this.

Accidental grace, quiet in amongst the fervour of the day.

In truth, Yaz doesn’t remember much else about that day. Just the photo, and the quietening of her heartbeat.

It is her favourite photo.

Three days later, her phone has a temporary meltdown, and refuses to acknowledge her memory card.

Sonya walks in with last night’s lentil curry, to see her sister shouting at her mobile. Food is forgotten, at least for now; she hurries over to her sister. If she calms her down quickly then their mum won’t burst in.

Yaz barely notices her.

It takes a painstaking ten minutes, her heart howling the entire time, but the stupid phone finally sees sense. No photos are lost.

Together they sit, huddled in duvets, and watch the steam curl away from the curry, unhurried in the wake of the afternoon. On the mirror behind, there is a cloud of condensation, a patch of reality blurred. Yaz can’t see her reflection for it.

‘I almost lost her,’ she murmurs, neither to herself or to Sonya, ‘for a second time. I almost lost her.’

There is nothing to do except watch the steam, and hold each other.

‘How are you doing, cockle?’ Graham asks.

Already, it is starting to show: Graham and Ryan have been able to pick their heads up a little. Yaz continues to stare at the floor.

How are you doing? It is all people ask her, but the boys are never asked so much.

Yaz turns her head away from the phone to clear her cheeks of tears.

‘I don’t know,’ she sighs when she returns. ‘How are you?’

Graham ponders the question.

‘I’ll be honest, Yaz. I don’t really know either. I just never thought it’d be her. Never prepared for it to be her.’

She returns to work. Not without difficulty.

Sunder, frankly, looks offended at the idea of Yaz ending her sabbatical so suddenly. So much so, that he has carried that sour expression into her first day back.

She opens the door into the HQ offices and feels herself calm at the familiar blue and beige of the room. Dividers between computers plastered in photos of loved ones. Birthday and ‘New baby!’ cards. For a second, there is a flicker of relief. This is her home, too. She breathes in the musty smell of the old building, and the smile is genuine.

But when people are embracing her, Sunder frowns in the background, and the flicker is snuffed out just as quickly.

She barely registers the occasional hugs and the claps on the back, partly because the world is sluggish, now, and partly because she is trying to decipher his frown.

She reports to him at the start of the day, watches him watching her. Her bun is neat. Her work clothes are pristine and perfect.

Everything is as it previously was, except it isn’t. She stands to attention on dust pretending to be bones, and can’t believe she’s kept up the façade for this long.

(Is this how the Doctor felt? Every day, and especially at the end?)

Sunder sighs at her. ‘I want you back for good, Khan,’ he says. ‘No more messing around, understand?’ He thrusts a file in her hands, and slouches back into his chair.

He sets her on report-checking for the first week. It’s not a punishment, nor a gentle easing back into police life. It is somewhere between the two, an uncertainty to suit her own newfound uncertainty.

Whatever it is, it is a welcome distraction from the rest of her life. She misses the time when each moment was not a desperate jump to the next.

If she is given a second to think then she will think about the Doctor; her last goodbye and those big eyes. And she refuses, at the moment, to think about the Doctor. For she will surely break.

Eyes wide as the moon and a moon’s worth of grief in them. Take her back to a time before they latched onto her like that. Take her back to a time when she could breathe.

Reports are fine. They are easy to concentrate on, words and procedures and codes that resurface as quick as a click of the fingers. She blazes through them. Sunder is only too happy to offload them onto her, pleased she has stopped complaining about doing something more.

The bags under her eyes are deep; sleep does not come easily. Sometimes her hands shake with her exhaustion. But she drags herself out of bed and forces herself to work because her room is surrounded in memories, her phone is filled with memories, and she can’t stand her dad’s sad eyes following her around the room. And reports are fine.

It lasts one week.

Reports are fine, until they are not.

She reads PC Summan’s account about a stabbing, the victim a woman with four young kids. She has to go to the bathroom, and hugs her legs on top of the toilet seat, until someone else bursts in and Yaz has to pretend, again, that she is okay, she is okay, she is okay.

She asks to go out on patrol. Says she’d take parking disputes over this.

She doesn’t say that at least she’d have someone to shout at for wasting their time. She doesn’t say that she can’t shout at the words of them.

She doesn’t say that she is fooling herself, thinking she could shout at other people. Her voice dwells on a flatline, whilst the rest of her is restless.

Sunder tells her no. An age-old question: she finally decides she hates him.

She realises she doesn’t hate him.

She realises she is breaking, probably.

Yaz spends her day off at Ryan’s, swaddled in blankets. Ryan is playing Destiny 2. He tried to get her to play a while ago.

Through bruised rocks and burnt orange explosions, he makes sense of a broken world. When he kills a target he’d been obsessing over for the past half an hour, he looks to her as if to celebrate the win.

Yaz is too busy tripping over her realisation that the villain had the same grin as the Master.

She wonders if he’s dead.

It’s the first time she’s wished death on someone and truly meant it, but thinking of him fills her with a blind rage. She pictures his manic grin as he prances about in the ruins of his former home, taunting the body of the woman who gave them all so much hope. She thinks on the possibility of the Master living when the Doctor might not, and it infuriates her so much she cries.

Ryan pauses the game. Hands her a tissue. ‘Are you sure you don’t wanna play?’

She wants to say no. But thoughts are mutinous, and instead, what comes out is: ‘How are you so okay about this? About the Doctor?’

He drops the controller. In the background, the Destiny 2 music still plays, eager drums thudding against her ribs. Ryan’s chest expands, and the reward is a deep sigh that snakes its way out of his lungs to fill the air between them.

‘’Cause there’s nothin’ I can do, Yaz, except wait it out,’ he answers. ‘Grief only wins if you get it to stop. That’s how all this works. When—when someone…’ He can’t get the word out. ‘You just have to get on with life. You’re not avoidin’ it but you’re dealin’ with it.’

Lessons learned from the last time. Yaz swallows. There should never have been a last time. Or a this time.

‘I cry, too, mate. All the time,’ he confesses. Breaths in, shaky. ‘Cry when I’m at NVQ. Cry when I’m makin’ spag bol. Though that’s ’cause it’s just so much better than Graham’s.’ He chuckles at his own joke. Yaz manages a smile. Anyone’s bolognese is better than Graham’s. ‘But I don’t think the Doctor would want us to be… frozen. Like. You’re at work, yeah?’

She nods.

‘Yeah, and that helps, right? Got somethin’ to do?’

She shakes her head. ‘All I do is read about people dying and people falling out. And I wanna explode, all the time, when I’m there. I… want to shout at them. For being so stupid with their lives. Meanwhile the Doctor…’

She can’t think about it. Can’t think about the Doctor alone, ready to press that button, ready to die so others wouldn’t have to.

Ryan passes her the other controller.

‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘Killin’ some bad guys gets some of that anger out.’

It takes another week, but eventually Sunder gives her the green light to return to patrolling. That, or he has finally reached his breaking point, seven days after Yaz’s first plea.

Yaz can’t thank him enough. Sunder, it seems, feels much the same way. But she’s gone, into the car and away from words on paper, people she can’t help, so the chance to thank him again is gone.

She’s glad she lives in the comparative wilds of Yorkshire instead of built-up London. Miles and miles of the maze of roads and traffic. Here, it does not take long to escape the concrete grey, and disappear instead to pockets of community that strain, as best they can, to escape the city. Brown and green are her constant companions, and they do not complain about her untethering.

Clouds groan and threaten rain overhead, but Yaz does not blink at them. She just drives. She keeps her head straight and her foot on the accelerator. Never pushing past the speed limit, never being so reckless, but getting close.

She won’t break the law but, by God, does she want to speed away.

She takes a large detour, and loops round back to the city before she realises. Country roads leading straight home; it is with a jump that she recognises the location.

A train passes by. Same tracks as the one she’d been sent to, October last year. Same stretch of countryside, and she passes by the exact spot the carriage had crashed on.

She finds herself wishing the Doctor would fall again, fall here, and tell her—it’s okay, you’re okay, she’s okay.

I’m here. She hears it in the Doctor’s voice. Eyes not so wide and a smile not so weak.

She’s parked at the side of the road. Heads out of the patrol car to lean heavily against it, falling onto the chassis with a grunt. Everything is blurred. She can make out trees, though, and bushes. The lazy arches and swoops of a bird in a distance is a pinpoint of black against the grey.

She hears more birds. Three, four of them all singing separate songs warning each other of her arrival.

She sinks down to a crouch, hands crossed and gripping onto her biceps. I’m calling you Yaz, ‘cause we’re friends now.

She is so tired. A raindrop alights on her forehead. It glides down to the end of her nose. Then another. Then the heavens open, and it pours. She is so tired.

She wonders what they’d say to her, the birds, if they could talk.

Stop crying, maybe.

She hears the clop-clop of horses before she sees them. By the time they reach the patrol car, a safe distance away on the other side of the road, she is already standing up. Soaked by the rain, and shivering, she unwillingly meets the eyes of the two curious riders.

One of them is preoccupied by the horse she rides on—a jittery animal, with a light mottled coat and a black mane, it keeps trying to veer away from the car. It won’t stop staring at her, either. The brown horse snorts at her, but is otherwise complacent.

‘Are you okay, ma’am?’ one of them—the older woman, on the calmer horse—asks, and, God, Yaz wishes people would stop asking her that.

‘’Course!’ It’s so chipper she could easily pass as an amateur drama enthusiast. ‘Enjoy your ride, ma’am.’

She doesn’t stay for the woman to get the hint. She gingerly opens the car door and closes it silently, waiting for the two riders to move on.

When they’re out of sight, she switches on the heater and drives in the other direction as quickly as possible.

Get off me, Yaz, please.

She hadn’t known what else to do. She’d wanted to embrace her, but the decision had already made in the Doctor’s head: they were worlds apart, and it was to stay that way.

If she’d known, she wouldn’t have hesitated. She would’ve held on tight for the last time.

‘But you did the right thing,’ Ryan reminds her, not too loud lest he wake Graham up. ‘We all had to leave. Had to let her do her thing.’

Yaz snorts. ‘Ko Sharmus didn’t.’

Graham emits a snorting sound in his sleep, making the two of them jump. They watch, wide-eyed, as they wait for him to settle.

Yaz takes a sip of her cup of tea. Cradles it like a life source.

‘She sounded pretty certain,’ Ryan reminds her. ‘Dunno if she’d let him take over.’

Yaz frowns. ‘You heard him. He was talking about penance.’ When she pauses, he doesn’t interrupt. His brows are furrowed, concentrating. ‘What if it worked because of him?’

‘You mean, what if he let her go?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Even with the Master there?’

‘Yeah.’

The hypotheticals don’t reach her heart, but there is still a whisper of something there. A something being re-kindled. She can’t put her finger on the word yet, but she knows it is an old thing, from before they landed. An old, precious thing.

‘I dunno, Yaz. If she was alive, then she would’ve come back by now, wouldn’t she?’

‘Would it not hurt you just to think positively about it for once?’ she whispers.

The mugs clink together as Ryan fits them into the dishwasher. ‘I’m gettin’ tired of bargainin’,’ he says, a weariness older than their adventures.

Through the kitchen window shines the light of the moon. When he straightens up, he is awash in it. He is a man, earthly.

And Yaz is left in the shadows.

Still, he steps forward and envelopes her in a hug.

‘I’m getting everyone together,’ Graham says. ‘I know a mate, he’s got loadsa wood we can burn.’

Yaz blinks at him.

‘A bonfire, Yaz. I wanna have a bonfire.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah.’ He swaps his shopping bag to his other hand. ‘Wanna do it in the Doctor’s name, y’know. Give her an effigy even if we can’t have a funeral for her.’

The image blazes before her eyes—roasting meat and orange flames burning up all Yaz wants to know. She only allows herself to close her eyes briefly, and hope that it is enough to stop the lurching of her world, of her stomach. Graham is looking at her with wide eyes and all that sadness hurts just as sharply.

She knows it is what he needs as much as what he wants. She is not the only one who aches.

The whole idea feels wrong, so wrong, but he needs it.

She opens her eyes. Nods, quickly. ‘Sure.’

‘You can bring your family if you want,’ he adds. ‘We’ll be having a few snacks, chips, salad, that sorta thing.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘I’ll, uh.’ The wind rushes through his shopping bag, causing a cacophony. ‘Better let you get back to your patrol. I’ll WhatsUp you them details, alright?’

A drug deal in a main part of the city is a stupid idea. A drug deal in broad daylight is even stupider.

It is absolutely ridiculous, and Yaz can hardly believe her luck.

She finds these two women conducting the unsavoury business regardless, and for a moment, she wonders if either of these women are in possession of any brains—one brain, even, between the two of them. But even when Yaz steps into plain sight, they continue sorting out the price. Not without self-awareness: the dealer stares straight at Yaz. Psyching her out.

She still sees flames. Living white pillars and the darkness of teleports—wide eyes staring straight at her. Hearts breaking. She can’t believe how stupid some people are. How arrogant. How ungrateful. How wasteful—

She walks up to them.

The buyer is frozen between flight or fight. Yaz’s face screams murder, so she flees.

Yaz immediately radios for assistance, describing the buyer’s description to her colleagues at HQ: a purple fleece and silk blonde hair, crisp new Nikes, her face slowly being hollowed out by drug abuse.

‘That wasn’t very clever of you,’ she informs the dealer.

She is all primp and perfect from profiting off other people’s dependencies. Expensive clothes and an expensive sense of self-worth. ‘One-on-one, though, ain’t it?’ she hisses. She has apparently settled on fight.

Yaz’s voice is on a flatline but the rest of her has too much energy. Suddenly her bones are rock solid, and she is invulnerable. Inevitable. She is furious.

Disarming the dealer is a difficult process—she gets a boot in her face for her trouble—but as soon as the dealer trips, she is down. Yaz has her handcuffed and in the back of a police car, her rights read out to her, and her destination rerouted to the police station.

And all Yaz sees is flames.

They burn hottest on the swelling around her eye, but she doesn’t blink.

‘What did y’do that for?’ PC Terrence asks, afterwards. The ground floor kitchen leaves no room to avoid conversation. ‘We’ve got her complainin’ ‘bout bloody police brutality.’

Yaz scoffs. ‘What, for arresting her in the middle of a drug deal?’

‘Apparently you enjoyed it.’

And what if she did?

Still, she gives Terrence a look. ‘Does she really think I’d enjoy getting a black eye?’

‘You know some rough’uns do, though.’

She grunts. ‘That’s not me, Terr.’ There’s not much she can do for the swelling, save for an ice pack and sleep. The former, she can certainly do.

The kettle starts boiling. Terrence sets down two mugs, noticing a lack of Yaz’s own.

‘Are you going to caution me?’ she wonders.

‘What? No.’ He laughs again. ‘Suspects complain all the time, you know this. I’m just saying…’

She stares at him. ‘Go on, then.’

‘I’m just saying,’ he starts. Sighs. ‘Be careful. Interactions like that should always be conducted with a partner. She coulda had a gun, and then where would you be?’

In her mind’s eye, a bullet travels through her shoulder. Or her chest. Or her legs. Hits a vital vein, blood sprays. A hospital visit, and unconsciousness, and dreams.

The Doctor will not be there when Yaz wakes, but at least she would have her dreams.

Adrenaline still courses through her veins like marathon runners. She itches with it until dawn breaks and her brain finally gives in.

She dreams that every person in the world has the Doctor’s face—except for Yaz. And none of them look at her. Not one.

She wakes up, crying.

She invites her family to Graham’s bonfire. She’ll need them.

She can’t take a night of Ryan and Graham standing next to her, and feeling so far away.

Sonya almost groans at the prospect, but something in Yaz’s expression kills the action stone dead. For Yaz, the world is blurred again, until her mum guides her into a hug, and the fail-safe feeling of her mother’s touch calms the unfolding untethering.

There are no stars. At the very least, she wanted there to be stars.

For her.

They have talked and gossiped and laughed about spiders, and Yaz has kept to the edges of all these conversations. She has dished out jacket potatoes, crisps and salad. She has stopped Sonya from adding wine to her glass of Schloer. She has listened to Graham talking about his new hobby of painting watercolour animals, and she has listened to Ryan gush about his new lessons for NVQ.

She has listened to them move on.

The six of them pause in their festivities to reflect on the Doctor. Wrapped up against the chill of the night, the heat of the bonfire on their fronts splits their bodies into hot and cold. The light on their faces renders them burning, becoming new colours. Darkened skin is burnished bronze; Graham’s paleness closer, now, to an apricot colour. The flames play on their irises and they wait, and they think of the body they are burning in their heads.

The bonfire is double their heights and furious, flames desperate to consume the sky. Only the embers are successful, twisting and pirouetting up into the night until they are expended. Bright burning, dimming further and further into a content nothingness.

Yaz can only think of the orange-and-gold of the TARDIS, wherever she may be. Her brilliant crystals are reflected in the dancing flames. The groan and wheeze of the spaceship is loud enough in her head to drown out the crackle of the bonfire, of the flames licking over vulnerable, charcoaled, breaking wood.

She thinks of a TARDIS not so lonely with her pilot inside. How it should be. A warm smile emblazoned, as bright as the rainbow on her chest.

Yaz closes her eyes, and the only flames left are in her.

She feels a hand on her shoulder and jumps . Her heart leaps—the image in her head so solid, so true, so real—

‘Yaz, love, d’you want another drink?’ Graham asks, and the bonfire is in front of her, Sonya’s hand in hers, and her heart is tumbling.

All her bones are dust. But she is not convinced by these flames, what they are supposed to mean.

She still feels her own.

For the first time, she remembers what that old, precious thing was.

Hope.

For the first time, she thinks the Doctor might still be alive.

Yaz turns up to the trial. She can smell the woodsmoke here.

The dealer is charged with possession of Class A drugs and intention to sell. When she is stood in court, awaiting her fate, she glimpses Yaz in the audience, and glowers at her.

She is convicted, and taken away. But Yaz only feels embers.

If the Doctor is alive, then why hasn’t she returned? Why has she let them linger in uncertainty?

Yaz starts searching online for any clue of the Doctor’s whereabouts. There’s nothing. Nothing in Sheffield, nothing in London, and—wasn’t she a “white-haired Scotsman” once?—nothing in Scotland.

Nothing.

She keeps the tabs open on her laptop.

Graham makes another bonfire in his garden, this time just for the three of them. He and Ryan share a pack of ciders, and Yaz sticks to blackcurrant squash. Some of the ash lands in her drink and she spends five minutes trying to pick it all out.

Ryan talks the entire time about Tibo, so she heads back inside.

‘Bonfires are one of the easiest ways to produce emissions.’ She is thinking about Kate and Bella, and their bodies. How all ruins look the same in the end.

‘Didn’t know that,’ Graham shrugs.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘You’re welcome.’

‘Think Ryan wants you to go back outside and talk to him.’

‘Okay,’ she responds, though she wants to say, We’re not kids, Graham. But she doesn’t move and Graham doesn’t ask her to, so they watch a baby being born on Call the Midwife.

He does, eventually, interrupt the easy silence. ‘He thinks about you more than you realise, Yaz. And her, too. We both do.’

‘Graham—’

‘Nah, nah, hear me out,’ he implores. ‘I’m saying you’re not alone in this. You’ve got a lot here already. So hold onto it. Hold onto your family. Us.’

‘Graham.’

‘Grief is hard, cockle—why’d you think I jumped onto a spaceship?’ He chuckles. ‘But it’s not impossible—’

‘She’s not dead.’ The air in the room stills.

‘Yaz,’ Graham starts.

‘Don’t.’ She sighs. ‘She’s not dead. I just know.’ He doesn’t speak, and suddenly the warm air is too much on her bare shoulders. ‘I think I’d feel different. If she were dead.’

It takes Graham a minute before the right words come to him.

‘And how are you feeling?’ he asks.

She thinks of the embers escaping into the starless sky. Points of light floating, earthly. She thinks of her own flames. How desperate she is for them.

‘Abandoned. But I think I’m hopeful too.’ She turns to him. ‘It’s just the waiting. I can’t take it. She’s out there, somewhere, and no one is listening out for her.

‘Seems like it’s easier to accept she’s dead than to know she’s still fighting.’

Graham tuts. ‘What would we gain from thinking she’s dead, Yaz? ‘Specially with the way she went?’

Despite the indignation on his face, the rest of him has fully relaxed into his chair. One leg crossed over the other, his feet nestled into his slippers, and his torso nestled into his dressing gown.

‘Home,’ she answers. ‘You got to go home.’

‘You’re home, too,’ Ryan reminds her. ‘You do actually live here, y’know.’

‘I know.’ It’s more a sigh than a sound.

This night sky has stars, but they are struggling against the light pollution of the city and the bonfire. At her periphery, they can glimpse a few, even make out a few constellations.

‘All that travellin’ was amazin’, swear on my life, and I’d never change any of that. But it was always temporary. Was always gonna be.’

Yaz shakes her head. Her body—her self—is split in two, hot and cold.

‘I’m not there yet, Ryan,’ she admits.

Though he frowns at her, he doesn’t question it.

She can hear them; their voices travel from the living room to the kitchen. She stills, and for a second, gratitude flashes hot and bright through her.

‘D’you think the Doctor believed in an afterlife?’ Ryan wonders.

Graham chuckles. ‘I bet my life, she is getting all the custard creams she wants right now.’

Ryan laughs. ‘She deserves ‘em,’ he says warmly, ‘more than anyone.’

Her tea is ready, but she can’t leave the kitchen, not now. The world spins and she has to breathe slowly until the tears rescind their threat.

She dreams the same dream, of all the Doctors, except Ko Sharmus is there with Yaz.

He presses a button and dies, and all the Doctors scatter until there is no one else left. No one else in the world, except for Yaz, who stands over Ko Sharmus’ body, and wonders what to do with it.

She stays up all night thinking it over. Wondering whether he was successful.

What if dreams are conversations as much as they are reflections? She hopes so much it hurts. The moonlight streams in through her bedroom window, but she feels unearthly. Like the power of it alone could lift her out of this heaviness and into the wilds of space. Wherever the Doctor is, her moonlight will find her.

Wherever the Doctor is, she is with her.

Her voice is on a flatline, but the flames rise and fall like the pillars of the TARDIS.

She thinks it was Sunder who put her with Terrence. Her black eye is fading into shadow now, but her colleague glances at it every once in a while. It makes her want to run.

Not that running would help right now. She could traverse the world and it still wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be where she wants to go.

Sheffield is celebrating itself this Friday night; all the lovers and the drunken revellers are out in force. From them, passers-by can glimpse the best and worst of themselves. Blurry, gorgeous, soaring delight; and the very depths of feeling. Jealousy and misery and loneliness, goaded on by the temptations of alcohol.

Their shift is busy. They are being called to deal with drunken altercations every ten minutes, more incidents than the Force can cope with. They are so busy calming down hysterical people that Yaz barely has time to think. Nor does she have any energy to speak to Terrence.

‘You’re the quietest partner I’ve ever had on shift,’ he comments.

She doesn’t respond to that.

The clock strikes three and they are dead on their feet.

Then there is shouting, and there is a fight between two gangs, and as soon as the two police officers turn the corner, they are spotted. Squeezed in by the narrow road and the towering buildings, they are unmissable, and they are trapped.

And all Yaz sees are the flames.

She doesn’t think, which is exactly the problem. And that is exactly the point. All she wants is to see these dangerous, stupid men run away from the fire on their heels—and she doesn’t think.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ PC Terrence hisses, trying to stop her from confronting the five or so men whooping and eager for a fight. ‘You’re gonna get yourself killed!’

He radios in for backup, unable to ascertain whether the gang have guns or not.

He also radios for an ambulance.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Sunder says when he finds her.

She’s been awake for an hour now, has sat through a teary lecture from her dad and from Graham. She doesn’t want another one from her superior officer.

Her head is hurting—concussion, she was told, severe but no brain injury—and it is loud enough to almost drown the sound of Sunder’s voice. Not that she thought that were possible, until now.

She has to be careful moving, too. Her head will split open and so will her guts and all that will be left of her will be her mistakes.

She’s thinking too quickly, too much.

‘Hi to you too, sir,’ she croaks.

‘No, you don’t get to be clever with me now, Yasmin.’ He stands up and moves closer to closer. Full police regalia, the police hat left on his chair. He should be on his shift. Why did he come? Why does he care?

She trains her wavering focus on the chair. Her mum had sat there for three hours until she’d woken. Apparently. After they were reassured, and told to get something to eat, it was Ryan and Graham who had waited with her.

‘Sir—’

‘What you did back there was stupid, and dangerous, and highly unprofessional,’ he states. ‘It was reckless. You endangered yourself. You endangered another colleague. And you exacerbated a situation that didn’t need it. It was stupid, Yasmin, and it’s a miracle you got off with as light an injury as you did.’

‘I couldn’t see a way out, sir. I can’t see a way out.’

‘The way out was falling back, or dying. I could’ve lost one of my best recruits,’ Sunder responds, ‘and I don’t mean Terrence. None of us want that to happen. Your—your mother was in tears the entire time!’

Reckless. She was chasing flames.

Her head hurts. Her heart hurts. This is too much. Let her sleep.

‘Are you going to fire me?’ Her bottom lip is trembling and her cheeks flare with embarrassment.

Just as he opens his mouth to speak, his radio crackles to life, requesting another pair of hands to deal with a break-in. Yaz winces; the sound bounces off too harshly in this room, cushioned as it is from the rest of the world by four white walls and mint green blinds.

Still, too loud, too loud. Too much.

Sunder confirms his response into the radio and clips it back into its holster. Striding back to pick up his hat, he finally answers Yaz’s question.

‘If I thought you were acting normally, then you would’ve been suspended on the spot.’ There’s a but in there, and Yaz can’t wait for it.

She can’t stop her quiet inhale. In this room, it sounds so loud.

‘Your mother tells me you lost someone close to you,’ he continues. ‘And I want to…express my condolences.’ This is also leading up to a but, she knows.

She tries to nod.

‘But you should’ve told us,’ Sunder insists, ‘so you could take time off if you needed. I knew you’d been affected by something but I had no idea it would affect your mental health that much.’

‘No,’ she interrupts. ‘I needed to be back.’

‘Which landed you in hospital,’ he scowls.

She burns with it. ‘Only recently.’

‘But that could’ve happened—’ He stops himself, shaking his head. He snatches up his hat, places it onto his head with rough hands. ‘You have a responsibility to yourself and to the public to look after your health. Otherwise you can’t serve.

‘I’m putting you on sick leave while you grieve. I also recommend therapy. Your family have already been notified.’

No, no. Too much time in the day. Too much time to think. Not enough opportunities to find the flames.

‘For how long, sir?’ she asks, when he moves to leave the room. He stops to look at her, blinking. ‘Please. I just need to know.’

‘Until you’re better,’ he says, his tone saturated with the obviousness of the statement. ‘I can’t have my best recruit risking her life needlessly. I need you back, but I need you safe.’

He leaves the room with nothing more than a gruff, ‘Get well.’

The panic rising. She can’t put a date on when she’ll be back. She can’t even make a vague assumption. Her breathing quickens around the revelation, pushing the knowledge onto her chest and crushing it.

She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.

Chapter Text

She hates Sunder.

No, she doesn’t. But Terrence probably hates her.

Guilt drowns her as she languishes in the hospital bed. The dizziness is clearing, but there is no medicine for the dread crushing her organs.

She returns home the next day, the headache persistent but no longer so loud. Her mother insists on waiting on her hand and foot for the next couple of days. It’s the medical advice they received, but Yaz sorely wishes she wouldn’t.

‘What possessed you to do that, eh?’ her mother witters. ‘It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, you know, getting a phone call from the police—especially when you are the police! And you always said you’re too careful, that would never be you, but look at you! And that lovely policeman Sunder said—’

‘Mum, shut up!’ she snaps. ‘Please.’

And then, ‘I’m sorry.’

And then, ‘I’m really sorry.’

Still, she can feel the embers.

Sonya returns home from college and goes straight to Yaz, clamping her arms around her big sister. Then she leaves for her bedroom, without saying a word.

She doesn’t need to.

They put a Netflix film on, some Bollywood film about an identity mix-up. She can’t concentrate on it. The world is too bright and Yaz is too tired. She is unearthly, and unbelonging, and stuck in it.

It has taken her three minutes to type out a one-sentence text, and she has to rest her eyes for five minutes afterwards.

Yasmin From Work (16:14): Pete. I’m rrally srrry about Ffriday..

Ten minutes later, her phone vibrates and reverberates in her head.

Peter Terrence (Work) (16:25): I understand, would be more annoyed if you were any more hurt. Heard the news—hope you get well soon, we’re all thinking of you! X

And again.

Peter Terrence (Work) (16:26): Now stop reading your texts, get some rest!

Yasmin From Work (16:32): Ok. Thanky ou.

It makes her cry. When her mother asks, she blames it on the concussion.

The forty-eight hours are up. Her mother pops out to buy some teabags, even though her father offers.

She acts as if she is leaving for the foreseeable future. Yaz tries not to roll her eyes at this, at her melodramatic family in general.

‘Promise me you won’t do that again, okay?’ her mother pleads. Wide eyes and determination.

Yaz hates how much of her life reminds her of wide eyes.

But there is a fire in the night, and ashes call for ashes.

She starts going for walks. The first is only ten minutes long, all she can manage with her unreliable head and her lack of balance. The second is longer, a half an hour trip. She takes it slow, submerging herself in the green of the surrounding suburbia and straining her ears for the sound of birds.

She avoids the build-up, the imposing, the reminiscent. The ruins of cities were still cities once, no matter the colour of the ground they stood on. Orange is grey is brown is burnt. Gallifrey is destroyed and Sheffield will crawl with Dregs. If she listens to the birds, she can tether herself to life while it still exists.

It is nice to know she can hear some of what she knows is real. The rest, of course, will come in time.

She doubles back to Park Hill to find three strangers arguing. She can’t make it out; she’s not close enough. But she has to pass them to reach the closest lift to her apartment. She walks slow, so as not to throw her balance off, and keeps her eyes trained on the path. All grey.

‘But what he’s doing is illegal. Shadow Proclamation, Stira, come on!’

Her head snaps up. Shadow—she’s heard the Doctor use that phrase before.

It’s too quick a motion, and her brain pangs in retaliation. Clutching it doesn’t do anything to stem the onslaught of pain, and she groans out loud as a wave of sickness slams into her.

Then the three strangers are in her line of sight, and misshapen, unhuman heads are all she can see. They’re out of focus as the world tilts around her, but she can definitely see that one of them has bared his teeth.

‘Wait—’ the one on the left, the one who had spoken, smacks an arm across the aggressive one’s chest. They sniff, curiously. ‘Artron energy. That can’t be—’

‘Time traveller?’ the middle one asks.

‘Time Lord?’ the aggressive one wonders.

‘Human,’ Yaz gasps. She needs to be inside. Dangerous, though her heart is singing. ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

Sonya hugs her again, hard. Without a word.

Time Lord. Her heart is singing.

The concussion takes its time to disappear. When it fades, so does the disruption to family life. Their lives mould around Yaz’s sudden semi-permanence as if this were always the case.

It makes her restless.

Terrence informs her, via text, that he has taken over any outstanding duties she had. She tries to tell him not to bother, but Sunder overrules her. Stipulates a need for her to attend therapy sessions, again.

She doesn’t tell him that she can’t. That she is stuck with knowing things she won’t even tell her family.

Then again, she’s been there before.

The closest thing she has to therapy is her time with Graham. He invites her over for a cup of tea and a ‘quick word’.

He starts by kindly telling her to get her act together, until Yaz distracts him by looking at his watercolour paintings.

They start painting together.

Graham’s animals are decidedly abstract—‘On purpose!’ he insists—but Yaz obsesses over detail. The running of two colours together can make or break a piece. She needs it to work. She needs this something in her life to be something beautiful. Just this time.

Whilst Graham paints animals, Yaz likes to paint the night: the Moon and the multitudes inside the black of the sky. She pores over exact placements of the stars and constellations, adjusting her knowledge when they move across the sky in real time.

‘No offence, Yaz, but I’m really glad you got a hobby,’ Ryan grins one evening. His clothes are dirty from working with greased mechanics all day. He elected not to tell Yaz this when he hugged her in greeting.

‘Oi, don’t be cheeky!’ Graham reprimands from the living room.

Yaz laughs along with them, but it falls flat, somehow.

She doesn’t tell them about the walking.

She paints the Doctor too. At home. Only at home. She’s no good at drawing at people, but the Doctor is her exception.

Sonya joins her in her room, sometimes. They co-exist better than they ever did. Sonya scrolls through her phone whilst Yaz tries her hardest to commit every memory to paper. She tries her hardest to make her Doctor happy; without those wide eyes that still plague her.

Her painting does not replace her walking. She would go mad without it, close as she is already.

It is like disappearing off the face of the Earth for a while, and Yaz prefers that. It has always been part of the problem, ever since they left the Doctor behind. She didn’t want to be on Earth. So she pretends she isn’t.

There are always more aliens living among humans than she expects. Some of them do a good job of blending in. Others don’t.

She is discovering that most of them can sniff her out. Some look human, and some hide their features, but she will pass by and see the confusion on their faces. As if she is familiar, a something on the tip of their tongue. It is just the right amount of obscurity and familiarity to stoke the flames, to keep her feeling close to her.

She catches a bus and walks through Meadowhall. She catches another bus and walks through the inner city. She watches a play she can’t pay attention to. She wanders when light gives way into evening, and ducks out of the way when she spots police cars roaming the streets. She lies to friendly faces that she’s off to meet a friend, that she is more than okay, and she doesn’t look at her phone.

She goes into the rougher parts of the city, and emerges mostly unscathed.

There are flames on her feet, but the untethering is still there.

Every time she arrives home, Sonya is close to shouting at her. And Yaz can take that, she will, if Sonya won’t tell their parents. Again.

The guilt is not enough to stop her.

‘You’re slipping, Yaz. Look, you’re hurt.’ Sonya takes her sister’s arm in her hand. Two bruises, new.

‘I know,’ Yaz mutters.

‘You need to stop doing this.’

‘I know.’

Graham catches her doodling blonde hair and held hands.

Yaz prays he doesn’t mention it.

He offers her another cup of tea. She declines, mouth dry.

‘Are you looking for her?’ Sonya asks, handing Yaz the pack of frozen peas.

She hisses in relief when the ice-cold material makes contact with the swelling on her thigh. Oh, heaven; it comes in small places. ‘I think so,’ she answers lightly, too concerned with soothing coolness to pay too much attention to anything else.

‘You think so?’ Sonya snorts. ‘Wow, mate. Brilliant. Super helpful.’

‘Stop being sarcastic,’ Yaz snaps.

‘Stop being an arsehole,’ her sister retorts.

Ryan has found the bruises on her arms. ‘Is anyone doin’ this to you?’ he asks quietly.

Aliens, she wants to say. She has a trace that they follow. Nothing is more tempting than an answer you almost know.

Or, she thinks, they’re being lured by her guilt.

It haunts her when she sleeps.

She can see it out of her window. Buildings grasping at the night sky, the thrum of cars a constant temptation. Get out there—she needs to be there. Searching.

In every building she finds a danger. In every unknown face there are wide eyes and a soul adrift. It hurts so much, pain like a wound in her chest, but she keeps searching it out.

Park Hill doesn’t hurt quite so much. But the city…

She stares at its silhouette in the night, and counts down the hours before she can return.

‘Are you gonna tell her?’ Sonya asks. ‘Y’know, when she returns.’

This is the benefit of hiding away in her bedroom. They can have these conversations without their parents overhearing and sending Yaz the most pitying gazes she’s ever received.

She knows them well. They make her skin crawl.

At least Sonya will entertain her. Even if she doesn’t believe the Doctor is alive, either.

Yaz presses her nose up against her bedroom window. The tree she is trying to paint keeps swaying, keeps growing, keeps infuriating her.

‘Tell her what?’

Sonya groans. It last for ten seconds longer than Yaz can stand. ‘Yaz—’

‘I don’t know,’ she sighs. ‘I don’t know.’

The hypocrisy slams into her with all the force of a car crash. All the times they had watched the Doctor hide herself away under layers of unconvincing cheeriness. The beginning of the end. They just wanted to know her. They just wanted to understand.

Another piece of guilt to crumble her.

She spots a quick movement in her periphery—someone dashing between buildings. She sees blonde and blue and her mind—her heart—jumps to conclusions.

She blinks. Sees the figure again. Blonde, yes. But a suit. Too tall, too lanky. Suspicious, but not her. Not the Doctor. Yaz couldn’t care less about the person.

Mute, she feels her heart tumble in free fall. All she does is watch.

‘Are you gonna tell her?’ Sonya repeats another time.

‘I don’t know—’

‘That you love her?’ her little sister interrupts.

Yaz stares at her.

Sonya looks bored by the revelation.

It makes sense. It comes quietly, without feeling. It was all already there.

It makes sense.

She wishes, more than anything, that she didn’t.

‘Everyone knows,’ Ryan shrugs. ‘Like, a long time ago.’

Yaz squeezes her legs tighter. Crushing her chest. ‘Does she?’

‘I dunno. Hard to tell. Never knew what she was thinking about.’

She starts wandering later, the light of the stars a second skin to her. The weather is turning colder again, the evenings falling earlier, but all Yaz wears is a raincoat. Maybe the chill will keep her inside.

It doesn’t. One time, she escapes with her life after a run-in with the drug addict from earlier in the year. She comes prepared, this time, with a knife. Decides to fight instead of flee.

For one moment, when Yaz is as close as she dares, she sees the wild desperation in her eyes. But these are her own eyes: left to rage and break in the bodies of other people, and it makes her skin crawl.

Yaz loses her raincoat.

It is hard to keep all of her feelings in one place. All of her missing the Doctor; it escapes into the city and she must collect it. She finds it unfamiliar eyes and unearthly citizens. She finds it in the birds that tell her the Doctor is still alive. She finds it in the flames she knows in action, and fury, and finding purpose.

She finds it when she breaks up an argument on one of her walks. When she brings lost strangers back to shelters, or uncovers their crashed ships. (It happens, she realises, far more than she ever thought.) She finds it when aliens follow her throughout the streets of her city, out of fear; when they intimidate her, threaten her.

She finds it in her untethering. She finds she is missing the Doctor, still, after all these months.

And she doesn’t think that will stop.

‘So, are you?’

Yaz sighs. ‘Am I what, Sonya?’

‘Are you gonna tell her you love her?’

It’s said in a rush. Her sister has never been one for patience.

‘No. Maybe.’ Yaz frowns.

Sonya pats her shoulder as she leaves the room. ‘That was better,’ she says, ‘but keep trying.’

Ryan breaks up with a guy Yaz didn’t even know he was dating, and she spends every night of the week in his bedroom, playing Destiny 2 with him.

At first, he refuses to play, but Yaz is stubborn.

‘Killing some bad guys gets some of that anger out,’ she echoes him, and he has to agree.

It hits her that she has fallen away from his life, far enough to be unaware of so much. When he opens up, she learns about everything she missed. Her stomach is laden with stones that night, and every night after.

Yet the relief she feels, when Ryan is too busy to play games with her, is palpable. It worries her. She should not be so far away.

She keeps her head down, this time. New streets are becoming old haunts, and fires are so hard to keep alive when all she seems to do is put them out.

She braces herself against the bitter wind, against her bitterness. Even in the hotspot, in the north of the city where most of the aliens gather, no one is paying much attention to her. The novelty of a human seeking out aliens wears off after a while, especially one who wears her association with the Doctor as both a scar and a badge of pride.

She has been told, many times over, that she is no different to the rest of them.

For some, merely hearing the name would be enough to make them skittish. But what the Doctor has left in her place is a grieving girl—a very human girl—and where is the fun in that?

And yet, there are always one or two spoiling for a fight. Happy to take offence to her existence. A previous encounter has taught her that this lady is a bounty hunter, disgraced for being too bloodthirsty. If, Yaz thinks, that is even possible. One mention of the Doctor from Yaz’s mouth and her value shoots right up. Yaz can see the bounty on her own head.

She tries to lose the bounty hunter’s trail in the winding streets, but she is tough to shake off. Yaz has to wrack her brain for her memories of this particular area. It’s a relic of a society gone by, when industry was king: here are dilapidated factories, haunted by stolen livelihoods. Sheffield steel—a lot of it was made on these streets.

As soon as the bounty hunter reappears at the end of the street, Yaz ducks into an abandoned factory. She has to use her phone torch—she has to ignore the message notifications from her sister, all twenty of them—just to be able to see, and it’ll act like a beacon, but she’d rather not be blind while fighting for her life.

The place is falling apart, massive beams creaking overhead. She can’t pinpoint them easily, even with her torch. Nothing toys with space, and all perception of it, quite like the dark. Everything is expansive, endless, but still small enough to be contained in darkness’ clutches. It doesn’t bode well for her—none of this does, except for the fact that most of the machinery that has been left to rust, she can work with.

No electrics will be working, but pulleys will. And someone appears to have set up a rudimentary pulley system more recently; she has probably stumbled upon a facility used by a gang, but as long as they’re not here then she is not going to have any qualms about it. From her vantage point, she can cast her torchlight across the dead air of the factory floor and figure what can be moved. There’s a conveyor belt, and a vat that needs to be hauled. With the hunter’s boots clanging on the stairs further back, she descend to the floor and gets to work.

In position, she switches her torch off. Lets her ears do the searching. All sound left is her breath, and her heart pumping. Her bones are solid for the moment; Sheffield steel.

And she wonders if the Doctor would be proud of her.

The bounty hunter lets loose a snarl as she reaches to grab Yaz from behind, but Yaz drops to a knee and rolls her attacker over her shoulder—onto the conveyor belt. Pushing a button repeatedly gets the conveyor belt to work, throwing the hunter’s balance while she struggles to right herself. Before she can succeed, Yaz runs over to the rope and unties it. The vat swings precariously, and tips, and crashes down on top of her target.

Like trapping a spider in a glass. But she can’t see the hunter’s furious expression, can’t gloat, can only hear the snarling and howling of a person closer to a wild beast than anything else in this moment.

Her own breath is ragged as she escapes, feet pounding, emerging from the warehouse and back onto the streets. Another brush of death: she can feel it on the back of her neck, so she adjusts her collar. She can feel all the danger of the hunter there, inviting her.

She must live in flames. Yaz could see them in her eyes, the constant flickering. She’s seen it before, in the eyes of those she’s chased, those behind bars. She’s seen it in her own.

Yaz wonders at what point she started to venerate the livelihoods of those like these bounty hunter.

If, in fact, she really does.

She thinks it’s time to go home.

Only, turning a corner means shedding on another tense situation. Two men hounding another—a man in a suit, blonde hair. Yaz blinks. Blonde hair, is it—?

It doesn’t matter. Her presence is enough to unsettle the attackers, who flee as soon as they catch sight of her. She is left with the road, and the helpless man.

She rushes over to him. Both his eyes are bruising, his lip split. But blue eyes fix on hers with a singular clarity. ‘Oh God, are you okay?’ she gasps.

Gently, she feels a presence at the corner of her mind. She jolts back, and the feeling recedes.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he rushes, sitting himself up. His accent is Southern English, just, but carefully devoid of any other regional allegiance. Except for his own dialect, in whatever part of the universe he comes from. It creeps up to him in the vowels, the softening of his consonants. Quite a few of them here speak that way. With that in mind, it makes sense he wouldn’t be from Earth. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thank you for coming to my aid.’

He straightens up. ‘Are you okay?’

Kya’s okay. He’s nice, actually. She thinks he’s too polite, and she’s pretty sure he thinks she’s too quiet. But there are worse people to save.

They walk, and it’s nice. Much less risky with someone else.

‘—I’m afraid, I don’t know this city,’ he confessed. ‘I only arrived last night—’

‘You mean crashed,’ Yaz interrupts.

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’

Yaz only realises she may have blundered into that topic after the fact. She kicks herself. ‘I’m sorry—’

But Kya puts a hand up. ‘No. I insist. No pity. My experience of Earth thus far has been exponentially better than what I’d been led to believe. So I ask for no pity.’

She frowns at him. ‘You just got beat up,’ she reminds him. ‘How is that good?’

The lights of the night frame his head as he considers his next words. With the streetlight in front of him, the blackening skin around his eyes is thrown into sharp relief. ‘My knowledge of this planet was rudimentary,’ he answers, ‘saturated with violence. Great aggressors, inciting war in other regions for no purpose other than retaining dominance over a struggling mass. I had not planned to stay here, knowing this, but.’

She waits for him to finish the thought in his eyes. She sees ashes, in amongst the lightness of his irises.

‘What I have seen so far is community in small spaces, and acts of kindness. It’s much better than what I come from,’ he continues. ‘So, yes, this—’ he points to his eyes, ‘—is much preferred.’

‘I suppose I’m asking you whether you could solicit me a tour of the city—your city.’

She would honestly rather do anything but. Still, she thinks.  The night is young.

‘Well, it’s dark.’ She gestures to the empty space of night. ‘Nothing’s open ‘cept bars and clubs, and I try not to go there if I can.’

Kya stuffs his hands in his pockets. It makes him look more awkward, as if all his limbs had outgrown the rest of his frame. She can’t vouch for the timeframe of his lifespan—he may be middle-aged, for all Yaz knows—but the impression he gives is still a young man who will never quite grow into himself.

‘But it’s so pretty at night!’ he responds. ‘All the lights. All the people.’ There’s a pause. ‘I must profess I’ve missed it.’

‘What about it?’ she asks. All manner of things exist here, all waiting to be clawed out of the woodwork by any poor fool curious enough. He could miss any of it.

Or all of it.

‘When people were happy.’

She takes him to the Peace Gardens. Water gushes up from fountains, illuminated. She remembers running her hands over the shoots of water as a child, one of an endless many. As long as Sheffield stands the way it does, there will be a child perplexed by the water jets of the fountain.

A drunkard falls into the water, taking a running dive, and Kya laughs.

‘Where did you come from?’ Yaz asks, and the laughter stops.

The drunkard recovers himself, sopping wet, and stumbles out of sight. Yaz watches him leave, cheeks burning.

‘That’s for another time, I think,’ her new friend answers eventually.

‘How d’you know there’ll be another time?’

‘Why don’t you?’ he counters.

She looks at him. Takes in the delicate nature of his features. Big eyes and thick-set eyebrows not quite hidden by his mop of blonde hair. ‘You might never see me again,’ she frowns. Abhors the idea immediately. ‘And you’ll be stuck wondering about who I was. Who you were to me.’

‘Do you want that?’ he wonders.

There is nothing concealed in Kya’s gaze. He is patient, Yaz is learning, as ever. Cool blue stark against his developing bruises, against the dark red of his busted lip.

She shifts in her seat, the stone offering no warmth against the night.

‘Why d’you wear a suit?’

His smile is small. He glances down at his attire, his once-white collar brushed with blood and dirt. ‘Oh—I just thought it might help me fit in,’ he admits. He looks back up at Yaz—‘Has it worked?’

‘Honestly?’

He nods.

‘Not at all, mate.’ And she laughs. It’s genuine, and it’s enough for him to join in too.

‘Do you have anywhere to stay?’ It’s almost one a.m. ‘For the night, I mean.’

He shrugs. ‘It’s not a priority.’

It’s amazing, she thinks, how easy it is to forget that aliens are not human. Especially those who look so similar to her own species.

‘How is it not a priority?’

‘I don’t sleep. Not compared to humans, rather,’ he explains, walking even though Yaz has stopped. He only notices this four paces after, at which he spins around. ‘Yasmin?’

She wouldn’t know. But there are three possibilities for the question she’s about to ask, and each one would break her heart in different ways.

‘What species are you?’ she demands.

He startles. ‘Yasm—’

‘Please, Kya. You don’t know how much I need this. Just tell me. Just a name. I probably won’t recognise it.’

If it’s him, he’ll still lie. Like he did before. Though he was proud of his connection to the Doctor. Still mad enough to gloat about it to the three unsuspecting humans. I control…everything. Just not this, she hopes. Not this one thing, not this one good thing.

She’d much prefer Kya not to be him. But if Kya is her—

She thinks she might break down, right in front of her new friend.

‘I’m a Xtando,’ he spits out. But he rushes to be close to her again, hands out and searching, quietly. ‘Yasmin, are you okay?’

She can breathe. She can breathe. But, of course. It couldn’t be her.

She actually laughs. How untethered she has become. How… furious.

‘I’m fine,’ she smiles, through tears, ‘I’m fine.’

‘Let me,’ he requests. Already, there is a gentle knocking at the corner of her mind, as if waiting to invited in. ‘I can sense your distress.’

‘I’m fine,’ she snaps. She is already deflating.

He nods, and bows slightly as he takes a step back.

‘Telepathy, yeah?’ she asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken in five minutes.

‘Emboldened by emotional signals,’ he confirms. ‘I never went to war. I could keep the gift.’

‘I just thought she’d be back.’ Half an hour later. Nearing home. No buses or trains at this time, and she’s too stingy for a taxi. Kya is here now, anyway, and it is safer. Easier. ‘I thought she’d come back. For m—for us. Her fam.’

The brick of the houses are quiet in their witnessing. This is suburbia: if anyone is listening—and if they are awake at this time, then they are listening—then they won’t speak.

‘Who?’ Kya enquires. ‘A love?’

‘Don’t,’ she says.

He tuts. ‘What now?’

‘Just don’t.’

The door to her house groans as she hedges it open, two of them peeking over the other side to spot anyone waiting. But the coast is clear. They are free to continue sneaking around, a single bead of perspiration running down her face.

Yaz decides against putting Kya on the sofa. Her mother has had enough surprises in the past few months. A potential boyfriend—even if absolutely not the situation at hand—may very well finish her off.

‘Remember,’ Yaz whispers, ‘my family don’t think aliens exist.’

She sets up a yoga mat and a sleeping bag on her bedroom floor for him, apologising for being unable to make it any comfier. When Kya brushes it off with a reminder that he won’t sleep anyway, Yaz’s polite smile is tight, too tight.

‘Will you be okay sleeping while I’m awake?’ he asks. ‘I can always go, if you’d prefer.’

Yes, now she would prefer that. Let him wander the street aimlessly while she licks at her wounds. But she won’t back down.

‘I’m fine,’ she says, no tears this time. ‘I’m used to it.’

‘Ah,’ he responds. Pauses. The early morning air is heavy in the few feet between them. ‘Your… person.’

She nods, though it’s dark. He probably sees it.

She doesn’t really care either way.

She goes into the bathroom to change into pyjamas. When she re-emerges, Sonya is standing on the other side of the door, scowling. Already ready for bed.

‘Where were you?’ Her eyes scan Yaz quickly, and her shoulders slacken when she can’t spot any visible injuries.

‘Out,’ Yaz whisper-snaps. Her entire body feels vulnerable, all of a sudden, all of it gangly and uncouth. ‘I’m going to sleep, Sonya, leave me alone.’

Sonya follows her anyway. ‘You know we had that Graham round asking for you?’ she hisses. ‘And then I had to lie for you in front of your weird granddad friend and Mum and Dad—’

Yaz tries to shut the door in her face, silently, but Sonya wedges her foot in the doorway. And gasps.

‘Oh, my God, you brought a man home—Yaz, are you kidding? I’m in my fucking pyjamas!’

Kya’s head pops up from one of Yaz’s books he is attempting to read. To her horror, she reads the title: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, emblazoned across in its bright orange front. ‘Good morning, also-human.’

Sonya deflates. ‘You always pick the weird ones.’

Yaz almost groans. Now, really? Now? ‘He just needed somewhere to stay for the night.’ Her tone takes on an edge of desperation, used far too much in her sister’s presence recently. ‘Please, Sonya.’

So much of her life she doesn’t tell her. But she needs this.

Sonya, finally, relents. ‘You owe me so many favours,’ she reminds Yaz.

Sonya rushes into Yaz’s room before their mum can get there. All three awake, in an hour too early after their late night, they take in the pleasant brightness of the morning. Blue sky is becoming an increasingly rare sight as the weather turns cold.

‘It might help you, y’know.’ Sonya nudges Yaz conspiratorially. ‘To move on.’

‘I’m not going to date Kya!’ Yaz scowls.

Kya turns another page in his book—Wuthering Heights, this time—but his whole face is flushed red. ‘I—I don’t—find attractive those whose expressions are aligned with the opposite sex, and certainly not those of another sp—’

‘He’s gay,’ Yaz interrupts.

'Oh,' Sonya says. She turns to Kya immediately. ‘Have you met Yaz’s friend Ryan yet?’

‘I saw you once before,’ Yaz says. Back to the city, with the shops and the bustle of sober people. Back to pretending and wishing everything was normal.

‘Hmm?’ Kya is barely paying attention to her. He has become transfixed by the gaudy displays in a card shop, particularly the postcards boasting of the landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales. He leans right up to the window, shielding his eyes from the light to get a better view.

‘I said I saw you before,’ she repeats. ‘Close to Park Hill, actually.’ She frowns. ‘What were you doing?’

He straightens up, adjusting his collar. ‘Trying to find help. Anyone with a ship. Anyone with a working knowledge of…complicated technology. I could sense them there, but I must have been fooling myself,’ he explains. He adds, jauntily, ‘So I’m stuck!’

‘And you’re happy about that?’ she wonders. ‘Being stuck?’

His bruises are dark rings now. He’d pressed frozen peas to them last night, but these things, even for a Xtando, must take time. At least his lip is healing, a patch of dark where a jagged rip had spilled dark blood. ‘Very,’ he smiles. He throws his arms out. ‘I mean, look at his place!’

‘Don’t you have family?’

‘Not in the way you assume.’

‘Friends?’

‘I have you.’

There’s a lightness in her chest, blossoming. It hits her, unexpected, unprecedented. That hidden little thing—self-worth—emerges from the shadows.

Still, she has to ask. ‘And that’s enough?’

Kya nods. ‘It’s the fight I choose,’ he says. ‘Finding home.’

She almost smiles properly, then. She is so close.

She buys foundation and concealer from a beauty shop, explains the light colour away as ‘for a friend,’ and panics at Kya’s possible reaction to them.

He loves the makeup, and it covers the black eyes nicely. She buys him some eyeliner, too.

‘Don’t humans have jobs?’ he asks.

‘Most of us,’ Yaz responds. They’re back at the Peace Gardens again, at Kya’s request.

‘Do you?’

She sighs. ‘Sort of.’

‘What happened?’ he asks, but she can’t answer.

‘What’s your planet like?’ she asks, halfway through a salad.

Kya pauses in his devouring of a BLT sandwich. ‘What happened to your job?’ he throws back.

Yaz closes her eyes, and remembers it would not be best to hit her new friend.

Another play she won’t pay attention to. At least this time, she can recognise the narrative. It’s Shakespeare—Othello. He sweeps his wife up in her arms, while Iago seethes in the background.

‘My planet was a workforce,’ Kya whispers to her. ‘A war planet. We made guns for the stealth ships. That was our purpose. And nothing else.’

‘But you got out,’ she reminds him.

She sees him nod, more a blonde blur than a face. ‘I built my own ship. It took seventy years.’

They don’t speak for the rest of the play.

She hugs him, afterwards, witnessed by The Crucible. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, because she can’t think of anything else to say.

‘I know.’ His response is muffled by Yaz’s shoulder. ‘I know.’

They buy ice cream even though it’s October and it’s cold. Kya begs to get three more, and covets them.

They went to the beaches of Fota, the four of them, long before Daniel Barton and what became of them. The sea was purple and the sand was black, a pure obsidian black. It was cool on their feet, where the sun was not.

Hot and cold. Always hot and cold.

Ice creams crop up in all cultures that experience sunny climates, according to the Doctor, and she intended to make full use of that. Yaz hadn’t been able to think of the food for a while afterwards, but during the event it was nothing less than bliss.

Pure gluttony; they languished in it for days, until everything was too sweet, too perfect. The sun unrelenting, the water too bright, the sand like ice on their feet. Her bones were fizzing with a readiness, a neediness, calling out to the roaming mountains they’d been warned away from.

The story ends with rabid creatures in the mountains and ice cream as the only medicine for a bite wound. It’s not one of their stranger stories she could recount. But it’s all she can think about as she stares down at her Magnum. Even in October, the vanilla is adamant in melting, seeping through the cracks in the chocolate casing.

‘I’m on sick leave,’ she tells Kya, ‘from my job. I almost got myself and a colleague of mine killed.’

To his credit, Kya only takes her melting ice cream away from her. There are worse punishments.

Through a mouthful of Magnum, he asks why.

For a while, ‘Grief,’ is the only answer she can muster.

And then, ‘I just wanted to feel her again.’

The disapproval comes later. She knew it would come; it always does. This time it is not in the rushed words of a distressed mother. It is not in a glower from her sister as she eases frozen peas on yet another bruise. It is not her friends, Ryan and Graham, grabbing onto home while they can.

It’s the kindest disapproval she’s got. Of course it is.

It comes quietly. Half-imposed on them by the nature of the place, the museum atmosphere a chokehold on an arbitrary set of rules. It’s in white and gleaming wooden floor panels, and twisting figures more grotesque than anything she’s seen.

And Kya is quiet.

‘I can’t imagine she would’ve wanted you to do that,’ he notes. There’s a draught from an open door they pass; the breeze ruffles the fringe of his hair, and he slaps both his hands on it in an attempt to calm the hair down.

‘Probably not,’ Yaz retorts, her insides already pricking with the sting, ‘but she’s not here, is she?’

He keeps walking. Doesn’t blink. ‘Is that what you’re trying to do? Find her?’

‘Maybe.’

‘By putting yourself in danger?’

‘Maybe,’ she repeats.

Kya leans on the glass case of an art piece. A stone sculpture of an outdoor fire, the carving so exact they can see every ripple. Yaz coughs at him, though, and he jumps off.

‘Is it working?’ he asks, and it stops her short. No one’s ever asked her that before.

‘Have you told him he looks like that kid in Sex Education?’

‘No, I haven’t, Sonya.’

‘Can I call him “Ender” now?’

Yaz sighs. ‘Why not.’

She finishes a final piece of hair on her painting and inspects her work. The Doctor is surrounded by the light of a New Year supernova, before all that business with the Dalek.

The first word that comes to her head is ethereal. The second, holy. In lights like these, it could be easy to forget how fallible the Doctor can be; how vulnerable.

Though they learnt that soon enough.

She thinks the Doctor is owed this moment, then; this one moment of shining, beautiful inconsequence. Child of the universe, forged in its stars. Battered by its cruelty. For this one moment, a lifetime of scars are lifted. All that remains is her hope.

Yaz sees it in her painted eyes. Wide eyes, hoping.

Then the scene blurs. But Yaz won’t collapse, not this time.

She starts sharing them with Graham and Ryan. They stand in silence, taking the blending and fading of colours: bleeding lines that sculpt the same face, over and over again.

‘They’re beautiful, Yaz,’ Graham gapes. He’s a little choked up. So is she. ‘You really get her.’

She realises, then, that she hasn’t spoken to either of them for weeks.

‘Heard you got a new boyfriend,’ Ryan jokes.

Yaz groans. ‘Not you too.’

He sniggers. Presses a few buttons on his controller, and the game starts to load.

His bedroom doesn’t feel quite so claustrophobic now. Cluttered, still, but it reminds Yaz that Ryan is fine back on Earth. The hurt of it is lessening now she can see what good it is doing for him. She sees his new pictures, Tibo amongst many of them; group photos with his basketball squad, and selfies on cinema trips. And she smiles.

‘You ain’t replacing me, are you?’ he asks suddenly.

Yaz looks up at him—his smile is just a little too tight to be casual. She frowns at him. ‘’Cause this dude sounds chill, but…’

‘Never, Ryan. God. No. Never.’ She knows he’s been texting her as well, with no reply. Well, no wonder. ‘You’re always my best friend.’

He nods. ‘Good, good, yeah. You’re alright too.’

She laughs. She’ll take that.

The game loads, and immediately their hands are a blur of movement. Intense, and immediate, Ryan’s even more so. There’s an art to it, one he is only too aware of.

‘What’s his name?’ he asks. ‘Is he human?’

‘Kya,’ she answers, ‘and no.’ She pauses. ‘Which helps.’

‘So you’re telling him? About… everything?’ The cries of slain villains fill the room. Gunshots and fire and brimstone.

She thinks of the world Kya grew up in. Gunfights and constant war; he’d divulged a little more since the theatre. His easiness came not from privilege but gratitude. Earth must be a paradise to him—yet here she is. Desperate to escape it.

The alternative is not exactly working.

Ashes call for ashes, but they are not in the build-up, the imposing, the reminiscent. They are where she knew they’d be all along: up above, in the impenetrable night.

And she is stuck here, unearthly. But calling for her.

She remembers that Ryan spoke to her, and wracks her brain for the memory. ‘Eventually,’ she answers honestly.

It if makes the Doctor real, if it makes her closer—then she would tell the whole world.

‘Will he know ‘bout us?’ Ryan continues.

‘Of course.’

‘Cool.’ He grins at her, and she smiles back.

She stops going for walks. She tells no one except Sonya.

Sonya cries, so she cries at Sonya crying, and she almost regrets the entire conversation.

He appears in Park Hill again, crouching down in front of the fountains at the front of the flats. Yaz leaves a half-poured brew in the kitchen to greet him, protecting herself against the cold in her slippers and fuzzy pink jacket. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the effort.

‘Here,’ he points to the ground. ‘Artron energy. This is what I was trying to find!’

Yaz’s stomach drops. ‘Why?’ On loop in her head—please don’t be him, please don’t be him—

‘Time Lords, they smell of it. After they go through the Time Vortex. There aren’t any left, only one, after the Time War, but my people—we had a deal with them,’ Kya rushes, pacing excitedly. ‘We made some of the parts for Time Weapons, in secret, but we withdrew from the War when we almost got found out. When it all blew over, we carried on as normal. Picking off the survivors whilst they were down.’ He stops just in front of her, the nervous excitement unable to be contained inside his body. It escapes in jitters, though his face never changes from his content expression. ‘The Doctor is here, Yaz, and he can help me fix my ship.’

She thought hearing her name in someone else’s mouth would shrink the distance between them. The more real she is to the universe, the more the universe would fight for her to come back.

But this conversation is miserable.

And Kya has not noticed.

‘Although I find it strange,’ he continues, ‘because you smell of it too. Yet I know you’re human, you’ve shown me as much. Perplexing. But this spot is—it’s brimming with it! Like he’s been here multiple times.’

‘Kya,’ she says.

He looks up at her. ‘Yes?’

‘Telepathy,’ she instructs.

He startles. ‘N-now?’

Yaz closes her eyes. ‘For God’s sake,’ she says through gritted teeth, and Kya jumps into action.

‘So.’ Kya swallows down his disappointment. ‘Grieving.’

‘Abandoned,’ she corrects. ‘But hopeful.’

Her head is woozy. Hurts again. She needs to lie down. She thinks she’ll dream of her again, watching another moon, thinking of home.

Kya smiles at her softly. ‘I think that’s all we need.’

Ramesh Sunder (07:13): Morning Yasmin. Wanting to check up. Have you signed up for some therapy like I requested?

Yasmin Khan (09:59): Hi Sir. I’ve been talking to someone.

Ramesh Sunder (18:14): Are you sure that’ll do?

It is raining again when she returns to the roadside. She can see the stretch of train track in the distance, and her shoulders tense up.

Kya turns off the CD player on his way to push Yaz’s shoulders back down again.

They get out of the car, an umbrella each. Kya asks if they are to walk anywhere, but she simply leans against the side of the car, staring at the bushes. The leaves are rotting underfoot, gorgeous yellow and burnt orange browning as time marches on.

‘We’re making this a positive memory, remember,’ Kya murmurs.

Yaz is just trying not to let the clouds overwhelm her.

Smashed train carriages and unsteady horses and a white-haired Scotsman and a public dismay. We’re friends now. The light in her eyes, slightly manic, the promise of a brilliant future. Trusting her, implicitly, from that moment on, because there were sparks in her fingertips, and Yaz was desperate to see what that felt like.

She just needs that again. Fingertips brushing over sparks in the Doctor’s palms. Reignite the embers and build her bones back up again.

She is so tired of waiting, she thinks.

And, she thinks, I’m sorry for all of this.

I miss you, she says to her.

Come back, and find home again.

Kya holds out his hand, and she takes it, letting a tear fall.

‘She’ll find you,’ he says, and she believes him.

Graham and Kya get on astonishingly well, despite Kya insisting the Doctor is not dead. One slightly tense conversation later, and he has undone all of their emotional labour, but so politely that they can hardly fault him for it.

Ryan introduces Kya to football and is gutted when he takes to it like a duck to water. Kya, also, loves Graham’s spaghetti bolognese, which almost brings grandfather and grandson to tears—for very different reasons.

But Kya talks to them about the universe, and he is still confused when Ryan calls him ‘Victorian ghost kid,’ so Yaz thinks he passes in Ryan’s books.

And she loves how easily Kya integrates into this part of her life, she does, until she is hit with the vision of herself and the Doctor standing back as the three men talk. And then it all feels horribly wrong. Incomplete.

It always will be, she knows, while the Doctor isn’t back. While she hasn’t let them go—or given them any indication, of anything. They exist with her question mark over their heads: like the bounty, she can feel it as if it has a presence attached to her own physicality, and it is just out of reach of her hands. No matter how many months have passed, this uncertainty abides.

She misses the Doctor, and she is marked by it.

It doesn’t take long for Graham to invite Kya to stay.

He takes the sofa, litters it with ice cream wrappers and, according to Ryan, snores just as loudly as Graham.

He washes his shirt so many times it reduces to rags, though the blood stays on the collar. He buys a Hawaiian shirt. He doesn’t change the suit.

Kya is thriving in the sudden stormy weather. With Graham’s blessing, he has converted their spare room—once a storage room—into a workshop of sorts, filled with scrap metal and wiring, and mechanical parts that look human in one light and strangely alien in another.

‘It’s my hobby!’ he proclaims over Ryan’s phone. She can hear a few things fall off a table, the clink of metal colliding dulled by the phone connection. ‘That’s a human thing, isn’t it? Ain’t it?’

‘You’re picking up our language,’ she grins. ‘Going native.’

‘Oh, really?’ He sounds delighted. ‘That’s… peng.’

It sounds so wrong in his voice, that Yaz can’t help her laughter. When it dies down, she notes, ‘You’re in a good mood!’

‘There are much worse places to be native,’ he answers honestly, ‘and much worse people to spend my time with.’

Yaz braves the weather to visit, managing an entire half an hour sat down with Graham until Kya insists she takes a look. She spends the rest of her time in his workshop, pouring over every little piece with her friend as he tries to explain its relevance to his ship.

She doesn’t understand even a little bit. She’s happy for him, though.

An hour later, she is finally able to leave. As she moves to do, she spots something over in the corner, behind the opened door: a smooth, circular platform that has been propped up against the windowpane. It doesn’t seem connected to anything else.

‘Spare part,’ Kya explains, rather quickly, when Yaz gestures to it, and moves the conversation on.

She leaves the room frowning.

Dreaming of the Doctor never fails to ache. This time, she is underwater, unable to break the surface. She wakes up crying.

Thinking of her visit to the roadside helps. Repeating the words like a mantra: come back, find home again, find us again. In the light of the moon, they evolve. I am listening for you, so you can find home again.

She knows humans don’t have the power of telepathy—not unless instigated by someone else, she amends, thinking of the way Kya had gently gleaned every morsel of knowledge Yaz had to offer. She knows this. But she refuses to let her hope die. She wants the idea of her thoughts to be enough, to travel in whispers across time and space. Just to be with her. If dreams can be conversations, then why can’t this?

Can she be enough?

Ryan Sinclair (03:14): yaz come collect ur friend

Yaz K (04:12): What?

Yaz K (04:12): What happened? Is everyone okay??

Yaz K (04:13): RYAN

Ryan Sinclair (04:13): fuck i dont mean like literally hes alright dw dw dw

Yaz K (04:14): Oh thank God

Ryan Sinclair (04:15): he jus gave me the fright of m life

Ryan Sinclair (04:15): came back to the house in the middle of the night

Ryan Sinclair (04:16): swear down thought we were bein robbed

Ryan Sinclair (04:17): n when i went down n asked him he was like

Ryan Sinclair (04:18): its for my parts!! sorry!!

Ryan Sinclair (04:18): c3po_times_like_this_i_feel_like_shutting_down.jpg

Ryan Sinclair (04:18): for his fckin workshop

Yaz K (04:19): He doesn’t sleep remember. And that’s his ticket home

Ryan Sinclair (04:20): ik ik im just tryna not die

Ryan Sinclair (04:20): also happy 420

Yaz K (04:21): Ryan

Yaz K (04:22): Leave me alone and go to sleep

‘So are you gonna tell her?’ Sonya asks.

It is pouring down outside, thick sheets of rain that render all movement impossible. They are no more than 15 minutes away, but she already misses her time with the boys. She tells them so—messages them. Seeing the message send, she pockets her phone and settles down further into the yellow blanket around her and Sonya’s shoulders.

‘Yaz.’

She looks at Sonya, wide eyed. ‘What?’

‘Are you gonna tell her?’

Oh. She’s surprised it’s made a return, but now Kya has disappeared over to Ryan’s, there is not much else to say on that front. Nothing she can divulge to Sonya, anyway. She may find all of her sister’s friends weird, but Yaz doesn’t think she’d accept news of Kya discovering the uses of a kettle quite so easily.

‘Yaz.’ Sonya shoves her leg.

‘Yes,’ Yaz snaps. ‘Yes, fine. I’ll tell her, just… shut up.’

Her sister snorts loudly. ‘Okay, this time with feeling.’

‘Shut up!’ she repeats.

What would she even say? The thought plagues her, chews her up inside like an infection. Overtaken and under its influence, all she does is paint in silence.

She gets no further than find a home in us, and one day it breaks her. Stir-crazy from the house, and God-awful weather, and the planet.

She walks again.

The bus is empty, except from one old biddy who appears to have fallen asleep. She always does. The bus driver—the one with the handlebar moustache, familiar from all her previous excursions—glares at her for bringing in so much water. She glares back.

She hates the build-up. She’d much rather be listening to the birds. But the rain is still heavy, and she can’t hear them.

She panics. She can’t hear them. This is why she comes to the city instead—any feeling is still a feeling.

What would she say to the Doctor?

‘I’m sorry, I just need the part, I don’t mean any harm, I truly don’t—’

‘Am I correct in saying this is your second time this year that you’ve landed yourself in hospital?’ the nurse asks.

Yaz opens her eyes again to glower at the nurse, though the world is still bleary. And loud, too, like her head is a speaker producing its own vibrations. Too big and too loud. Let her sleep.

She’s here again. Immobile, this time, with a funny feeling in her leg. Like there should be pain.

She looks down at the rest of her body. Her leg is in a cast. Fucking hell.

She spies a friendly, suited alien sat by her bedside, head ducked and shoulders hunched. His face looking about as beat up as she feels. Those eyes—those are puppy eyes. Begging for forgiveness. Well, tough.

‘Blame him,’ she croaks, and Kya looks guiltier, somehow.

‘Oh, it was you, was it?’ The nurse tuts. He adds, ‘Please tell me you’re getting your face checked out too.’

‘Already have, also-human,’ Kya smiles quickly.

Yaz groans. The incompetence of the man.

‘…Right,’ the nurse responds uneasily. He turns back to Yaz. ‘Everything’s as expected, Yasmin. Just please be a little less reckless in the future.’

She doesn’t realise he has left until after the fact. Her brain is pudding, mush for dessert.

‘What’s your saying?’ Kya asks her quietly. ‘Knight in silver?’

‘Shining armour,’ she grunts, squinting at her cast.

Another setback to returning back to work. Her heart has taken a permanent residence several below where it should be, she thinks, and yet she still feels the drop of disappointment every time. Surely one human can only take so much disappointment.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘That part,’ she interjects, ‘better be life-saving.’

Kya nods vigorously; winces afterwards. ‘Thank you, Yaz. I mean it. You don’t know what that will do. You really don’t.’

He owes her, for sure. She should remind him of that. But she is tired, and the world is heavy. ‘Shut up,’ Yaz says instead.

When Yaz finally arrives home, Sonya hits her lightly with a handbag, muttering, 'Don't be fucking reckless.'

Her mum and dad are horrified, but Yaz and Ryan find it hilarious. It may be the painkillers still in her system, but she finds it so funny she cries.

In sleep, she doesn’t dream of the Doctor. She just watches her death.

She thinks about it, about what she nearly experienced. She thinks about almost leaving the Doctor behind. Everyone behind.

This time, the bonfire would be in her name, and there would be a gravestone and a funeral and a uniform without a wearer. There would be her mourning family, frozen together from the point of her departure—and no ability for Yaz to begin again, no chance to say sorry, and thank you for everything else.

It is nice to know, at least, that she does not want to die.

It flashes hot in her head, grips at her insides from within her, and squeezes, squeezes until she bursts, once again, into tears. This is a glorious misery, to realise she is still alive. She is real. She will keep on putting life into the world, having consequences follow her, simply because she is real.

That is what they got when the Doctor sent them home.

They got life. They got a chance to say thank you.

It turns out that being stuck in a cast with a headache is not very inducive to creativity, or recklessness. She can’t walk into the city, where she had turned the tables on the shadows and chased them instead. But she doesn’t want to anymore. Her own shadow is heavy enough.

She can’t draw. Concentration is not her strong point at the moment, won’t be for the rest of the week, though every day she shows some improvement. Neither can she stare too long at her phone, at all her pictures.

Kya has recently got into selfies. They save automatically onto her phone, and when she feels well enough Yaz moves them into the folder for the fam. Scrolling through the photos, she journeys down memory lane for as long as she can, before her head hurts too much and she has to close her eyes.

She thinks it will always ache until the Doctor returns. There will always be a part of her, ready to ache.

She can’t look at her phone, so when the boys want to speak, they call her. It is calming to co-exist in this way, their voices a raft in the silence.

Ryan and Kya bicker on speaker about the proper way to make a salmon meal. Ryan is sharp but light. Kya is always overly polite, perfectly passive-aggressive. And it is good. It is so good.

‘Sometimes he reminds me of her, y’know,’ Graham says. ‘He’s a bit out there, ain’t he?’

‘I know.’ She’d come to the same conclusion a while back. ‘No wonder I get on with him.’

‘And that helps?’ His question is so eager. ‘S’pose it is a bit late to ask, but I do like to check in on you.’

‘Yeah. He helps.’

‘D’you remember that conversation we had when I put on the bonfire?’

The storm has cleared, and left behind are the fires in the night.

‘That home fires are a waste of emissions?’ she recalls.

‘No…the…I was just saying to Ryan, I think you were right.’

‘About the emissions? I mean, you should really look into the numbers—’

‘Oi, don’t be cheeky,’ Graham warns, and she can feel his grin from the other end of the line. She smiles, too. ‘I mean, you were right about us getting home. And we were right, too, about you having a home here. But it’s occurred to me, Yaz, I see you with Kya—when he talks about all his space wizardry, you know I can’t keep up with half the things he prattles on about—but it’s made me realise something. You find home in a different way to us. It’s people, ain’t it? The Doctor, mostly?’

It takes her a moment to answer, pushing the, ‘I s’pose,’ through a thick lump in her throat.

They settle into her answer.

‘She’s your person, ain’t she?’

She looks out onto Park Hill, the city teeming in the distance. She has tried, so many times, to get her head around the sheer number of people living in the spaces she can see just from her window. All of these little people with their ginormous lives. Cities are nothing without those lives.

All those lives, and all their own people.

She would’ve missed all this. Missed, also, this chance at familiarity, of sharing this one thing in common.

There’s a quiet euphoria in it. Knowing she is known. Knowing where her love is, where it stands in this huge, heart-stopping life.

‘Yeah,’ Yaz says, ‘she is.’

When she is not phoning Ryan, or Kya, or Graham, she is spending time with Sonya. Sonya goes on her phone and Yaz scowls at the TV, and feels restless. Her cast itches, and her leg is sore, and her head is sore, and her wheelchair is nightmare. She is mostly grumpy, but she tries—really tries—to be on her best behaviour. She owes her family much.

Sonya takes great delight in scribbling rude words on her cast until the sound of their mum arriving home forces her to scribble them out. The two sisters can barely hold in their laughter. It is as if they are kids again.

Yaz snaps a photo of her leg when Sonya isn’t looking, black polka dot and ugly and so absolutely worth it.

She gets bursts of texts from Ryan complaining about Kya making even more noise in his workshop, and it makes her laugh. But it comes with the knowledge that he is working on his ship. Soon it will be finished. It will only be a matter of time before he leaves, to a planet not so riddled with violence and desperation—and then they will be back to a three, back to gaping wounds and too-long silences.

And she won’t think about that, not yet.

She doesn’t text Ryan back.

‘D’you think you could be a little…quieter when you’re working on your ship?’

She hears the clang of metal on metal in the background.

‘Sorry?’ Kya almost shouts down the phone.

She tuts. ‘I’m just asking—’ another clang ‘—could you be quieter at night? Please?’ She pauses, hears him take in the request. ‘Only, you keep waking Ryan and Graham up.’

‘Graham sleeps like a log,’ he answers. This time a mechanical groan, something bending that perhaps wasn’t designed to.

She concedes that point. ‘Ryan, then. Usually humans try to go to sleep from about midnight to eight in the morning.’

‘I know, Yaz, it’s just—I have to get this done. It’s time-sensitive.’

She can’t begin to pretend she knows the ins and outs of fixing a ship. She does, however, know what Ryan gets like when he’s sleep-deprived.

‘I’m not saying stop,’ she counters, though part of her rebels against that. Stay forever, she thinks. ‘Just…keep it down?’ She adds teasingly, ‘You do owe me, remember?’

She can feel his frown through the phone, but he can’t exactly back down.

And, well. She’s trying.

If she’s not with Sonya or on the phone, then she is thinking.

Mostly, she is thinking that she will not have to say much to the Doctor at all, about anything: love, grief, and the mess in between. Even the Doctor, oblivious as she can be, must surely be able to ascertain the depths of everything. One question about how Yaz has coped—or not—and the truth will be clear.

There is an inevitability there, and it hinges entirely on the Doctor’s return. That uncertainty undercuts its entire existence. She hates it. Fate has never been so conditional for her.

It makes her utterly, awfully restless.

What can she even say instead?

I waited for you. Terribly.

Sorry, decides. She’ll say sorry, for not realising what the Doctor has given them. There is still life without the home she wants, but there can be no home without life.

She wonders, often, if the Doctor will forgive her.

Her nani has a fall and breaks her arm. Yaz’s mother is beside herself, caring for a daughter and visiting her mother in hospital.

But she’s free and out a week later—well enough, in fact, that Yaz’s mum brings her to visit the family. Two wheelchairs, two broken limbs. She takes one look at Yaz’s leg and sighs.

‘Bheti,’ she tuts. ‘I know you’re my favourite granddaughter, but you don’t have to copy me.’

Sonya slams her phone down on the tabletop. ‘Nani, I am right here, you know!’

The—abridged—story behind the cast has made Yaz a semi-hero to some in her extended family. Of course, this is the story with plenty missing, leaving ample room for gossip. Aunty Jili swears Yaz was jumping to the aid of a boyfriend—now only if he’d marry her to say thank you. Yaz snorts as soon as she hears this version of events. The truth would devastate her aunt.

A hero to some, and reckless to others. As long as she lives a life obscured by secrecy, there will always be different versions of herself in the family: the perfect daughter, the wild child, the unhappy spinster. They see what they want to see.

Yaz sees all these versions crowding round her bedside, ghosts clawing at the duvet. They howl through the ether to demand a reckoning.

Hasn’t she reckoned enough? Aren’t two near-death experiences enough? Can’t she be enough?

Her nani has been watching her all day. No, Yaz decides—regarding her.

At first, she put it down to the painkillers till in her system. But her nani’s sharp, always has been. It’ll take more than one broken arm to debilitate her, and more than one reluctant granddaughter to conceal her from the truth.

Yaz feels seen. She tries to ignore it, tries to engage in the family chatter as much as she can. She knows the futility of it.

A lull from the madness: tea is brewing and so is the conversation Yaz wishes she could avoid.

‘You’ve changed, bheti,’ her nani starts. ‘Pushing yourself too far.’

Yaz closes her eyes. Tries to will herself away.

When she doesn’t answer, her nani looks back out of the window. ‘I always thought it’d be your sister getting into scraps.’

‘I can still hear you!’ Sonya shouts.

She chuckles. When she turns back to Yaz, she watches Yaz’s hands fiddling with the ends of her hair. ‘First you were suspended from the police.’

‘Nani, please,’ Yaz tries. Nothing sears into her quite like disappointing her grandma.

‘I’m sorry, Yasmin, but all this…friend business.’ Her daughter must have told her everything. Yaz would glower at her mum if she could. ‘Yasmin, you cannot punish yourself for something you can’t control.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Yaz snaps. Grips onto the sides of her chair, to head for her bedroom.

‘But you will have to! Maybe not with me, but her, certainly.’

‘I know, I know, but I don’t—not now.’

‘Bheti.’

Yaz stills.

She’s looking into the same eyes of a girl long ago, who was married and widowed in the same day. Unspeakable grief.

And such joy, since.

This is a woman who understands.

‘You’re heartsick,’ she says. As if Yaz doesn’t know. ‘But it’s still your heart. I think your friend would want you to know that too, yes?’

Kya brings over flowers. When Yaz’s mum takes them off his hands to put them in a vase, she sends Yaz a look that screams, Marry him. Yaz rolls her eyes.

‘How’s fixing your ship going?’ Yaz asks, when they are in the relatively safe confines of her bedroom. The transition from wheelchair to bed is getting easier by the day—Kya doesn’t even need to help.

He jumps onto the other end of the bed, tucking his legs underneath him. She notices that his socks have watermelons on them.

‘It’s…getting there,’ he admits, his words heavy with the sigh that releases them. ‘Always so many complications. I haven’t even started taking them to the crash site.’ He adds, frowning, ‘Of course, I never planned for this to be a one-man job.’

Yaz nods. Entertaining the idea of the Doctor’s death is so alien to him—she wonders if it’s the same across the universe. So many others who hear nothing but silence—yet keep their patience. Waiting for the grand return.

What a world he must have come from, Yaz thinks, to have such an unbreakable belief in an impossible woman.

It occurs to her, then, that Kya might think the same of her.

She looks at him now. This is the first time she has seen bags under his eyes. He rakes thin fingers through his hair, but it remains scruffy, longing to see a pair of scissors. On the corner of his ghastly Hawaiian shirt, there is a brown oil stain, dull against the neon greens and pinks surrounding it.

‘Are you sleeping?’ she asks. Kya opens his mouth—‘I mean, obviously, you don’t sleep as much,’ she rushes, and his jaw snaps shut. ‘I mean, enough? For you?’

‘Possibly not enough,’ he concedes with an awkward shrug. ‘Busy building. Conducting. Building.’

‘And you’ve not even gone to the ship yet?’ Yaz asks, to which Kya shakes his head. She frowns. ‘That’s taking a long time.’

‘Oh, yes.’

She can’t really find any regret in that response.

The dread will remain for her, as long as he is working on it, knowing his time here is not permanent. But there is relief, too, that he is not leaving yet. Sheffield will never be the same without him.

‘I don’t think I’d particularly enjoy departing ,’ Kya announces to the room, forcing Yaz back into the present. ‘Especially now I know the three of you. And your family too. Your mother is really rather lovely.’

Yaz laughs. ‘Oh, no, please. If I tell her that then she’s gonna nag me to marry you.’

‘Marry you?’ Kya repeats in a shout. Yaz jumps, cheeks immediately burning.

‘Keep your voice down—I bet she heard that!’ she hisses.

Kya reddens. ‘My apologies, Yaz, honestly.’ He can’t stop the small laugh that escapes. ‘But no. Your marriage is a…union, yes?’ Yaz nods. ‘I am not the marrying type.’

‘Please tell that to my mum when she interrogates you.’

Kya has taken to reading Normal People. The inaction, for once, is pleasing. Silence is less suffocating when Kya is around, and so she lets her eyes droop.

She hears a soft thump, the sliding of pages against each other, and sits up to see the book face-down on Kya’s lap. Leaning against the wall, his head has lolled back, his eyes shut, his mouth open.

Slowly, so as not to disturb him, Yaz reaches to pluck the book from his lap. Gently, she sets it aside on her bedside table. Next is the gentle coaxing of his sleeping form to squeeze onto the bed next to her. Finally horizontal, he turns away from her and curls into the wall almost immediately.

She stares at the back of his head, counting the flecks of brown shot through the blonde. And she thinks of nothing. Nothing more, for the first time in a while.

It’s okay. She’s okay, and she means it.

The next time Yaz sees her mum, she barks out, ‘He’s gay,’ not waiting around to see the disappointment.

Her cast finally comes off. It takes a while, and she thinks she sees the medic smile at a rude word Sonya hadn’t managed to fully scribble out.

Her leg looks weird and thin and pale compared to the rest of her. But it’s free. She’s not healed, not free from using crutches just yet, but she’s freer now, and lighter than she has felt for a while.

She doesn’t go walking again.

She paints, instead.

She paints Kya looking up at the stars.

She paints Ryan tinkering away at his latest assignment in Kya’s workshop.

She paints Graham tending to the plants in his garden, the rain pouring down around him.

She paints the bonfire. Flames like snakes, slithering around each other to greedily guzzle up the black night. Darkness fades after layers of paint are applied, blended by water, until the black is chased away into the corners of the page.

It takes her a while. When she looks up, the evening has fallen and Graham is snoring in his chair.

She takes in his living room, the lamp light and all the patterns in the décor. Everything is homely. Everything is warm.

She glances back down at her painting, and feels drawn to the flames in the centre. Starting at the opposite ends of the page, they bend surely towards each other.

And she is okay.

She wakes up all of a sudden. For a moment, she is in Kya’s workshop, an incessant humming—but then she blinks, and the world around her sharpens.

Bedroom. Bed. Normal. She groans and slams a pillow over her head.

‘You left your painting here,’ Graham tells her. The line crackles. ‘The bonfire one.’

‘Oh! Sorry about that.’

‘No, no, it’s no problem, cockle. Think it’s one of the best you’ve ever done.’

Yaz smiles at that. ‘Thanks.’

‘And, um—’ Graham clears his throat. ‘It inspired me. D’you fancy another bonfire? Just a small gathering, the four of us.’ As if hearing Yaz’s heart drop, he explains, ‘Not an effigy, not like last time. Just Kya being curious.’

‘About that night?’

‘S’pose. But it’s another human thing, ain’t it? He wants to learn.’

She can’t deny him that, can she? The nights are cold and there are embers here, safer, in the company of her friends.

Make it a positive memory, Kya told her.

She resigns herself to it. ‘What food do I need to bring?’

Kya specifically asks for the bonfire to be arranged for the weekend.

When Yaz asks why, he shrugs the answer away, tripping over another metal shape in the process. His hand splays out onto the table and he knocks over a cardboard box of nuts and bolts, spilling them onto the floor.

Crouching down is difficult, but she manages it despite his protestations.

His thank you is flustered, and he slams down the refilled box on the table.

She eases herself up, putting a palm on the table. Her hand lands on a design of a ship, co-ordinates and measurements sketched by an expert eye. ‘So?’ she announces.

‘So?’ He smiles at her quickly.

‘Why the specific…?’ She starts to pester him, but her gaze wanders right onto the platform in the corner of the room, just behind the door. As soon as she notices it, she hears—rather, feels—a low humming in her head. When she glances away, it disappears, only to return when she fixes her sight on it again. It is an entirely alien sensation to her, as if the humming is not stopping and starting, but continuing without her. It is incessant, but she is simply moving out of range most of the time.

Kya follows her gaze to where the platform rests against the wall, and his eyes widen. ‘I seem to recall Ryan having an excursion with his friends on Friday,’ he is quick to respond. Yaz looks back at him. The humming stops. ‘That was all. Oh! Did I show you my makeshift packaged explosion?’

It takes her a second to decode what he means, but when she does, her confusion melts into a smile. ‘You mean a firework?’

Two storms and the threat of snow. And somehow, Kya has picked the perfect night for the bonfire. As the evening dissipates into the evening, and the temperature plunges further, so too do the clouds fade. The skies and its stars are out in force, open for them once more. The four of them, exposed to all the universe has to offer.

She can see Orion, and the Plough, and more besides: she, Graham and Ryan spend half an hour making out their shapes to untrained eyes. Kya’s own patch of the sky must look so different to theirs.

The concept is not unique. ‘Ours are ancient figures too!’ Kya chirps. ‘People from great tales, yes. Excellent metalworkers, mostly, and their inventions. Heroes that never existed. You call them—’

‘Constellations,’ Ryan supplies.

Their breaths are steam, visual proofs of their presences. Temporary, but real.

Kya nods. ‘Right. Our name for constellations is harder to translate. But I believe it’s something close to “Eternal Glories”. There is eternal glory in the stars, don’t you think?’

Ryan shrugs. ‘Depends if you’re aimin’ for that,’ he decides, burying his head further into the fur of his coat. ‘Nice to be remembered.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ Yaz asks, and her two friends watch her, falling silent, contemplative.

Graham beckons them in for bread cobs and salad. As Ryan and Kya bicker amongst themselves over the food, Yaz takes the moment to step back and breathe. Outside, Graham starts the bonfire: the flames begin to shine through the window, casting both of the boys in its light. Yaz is too far back.

Incomplete still. She takes a steadying breath. Positive memory, she reminds herself. But she misses the Doctor, terribly.

She misses her in the way Ryan laughs at Yaz’s joke. She misses her in the way Graham mentions past adventures. She misses her in the way Kya surprises them with an ice cream each. They melt quickly in the heat, so it becomes a competition of who can finish them first. Yaz wins.

She misses her in the hot and cold, the embers straining to join the stars. She misses in the cool of Kya’s hand in one of hers, in the warmth of Ryan’s in her other. They are a comfort without the thrill of the Doctor’s touch, the spark that Yaz wants to feel electrify her blood. She misses her in the way she knows she will always miss her: when she breathes out and closes her eyes, and sees the Doctor’s last look on the insides of her eyelids. Even after all this time—especially after all this time.

She misses her like nothing else. Yaz is a home waiting for the Doctor, and she misses her.

But she is okay, too.

Outside, as the fireworks scream and explode above them, Kya squeezes her hand. The fire is still dancing in front of them. She feels him lean to her. ‘Positive memory,’ he reminds her.

And—there. Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but for a second she swears she can see two flames, from opposite sides of the bonfire, bending surely towards each other.

Yaz nods. ‘I know,’ she says. And smiles.

This conversation with Ryan has woven through the night, dropping off only to continue again later. Whilst Yaz’s career is in stagnation, he veers towards a milestone in his NVQ. ‘Kinda brickin’ the last test, to be honest,’ he admits, before taking a swig of cider from the bottle. Liquid luck, she recalls quietly. She wouldn’t know. ‘I know I’m good, but I guess it’s the pressure of it.’

‘You’ll be great,’ she reassures him. ‘You’re capable, and hardworking, and you’ve found your place. We’re all really proud of you.’

He grins at her.

The grass is cold and wet beneath them as they sit, but it’s worth it, she thinks, for these moments. She casts her mind back to the last time they were sat here like this; how she couldn’t stand to think about the Doctor. How she couldn’t stand not to think of the Doctor. She’d caught Ryan and Graham up in it.

She’s been a mess.

‘Oi,’ Ryan says, ‘you’re thinkin’ too loud.’ Yaz laughs. When it dies down, he declares, ‘I’m proud of you too, yeah?’

She furrows her brow. ‘For putting myself in danger?’

‘Oh, so it was on purpose!’ Ryan laughs. ‘Knew it.’

Shit. She panics. ‘No, no, I just meant—’

‘Yaz, Yaz, Yaz.’ He puts a hand up to calm her. ‘We knew, ‘kay?’ He makes sure she is looking at him when he adds, ‘Course we knew.’

‘Course.’ It makes sense. The revelation comes with a rush of heat to her cheeks, and she glowers at him. ‘You couldn’t’ve said?’

Ryan snorts, then sips from his bottle again. ‘What, like you were gonna listen?’

‘Touché.’

They let the sounds of the dying fire fill the air. Snapping and crackling, the insatiable hunger.

‘We did what we could,’ Ryan continues quietly. ‘Paintin’, messagin’, y’know. You’re proper stubborn, though. Just like her.’ He points up at the sky, all the stars.

Gratitude, she thinks, is a beautiful sensation. She cloaks herself in it, wears it over her like the black of the night.

‘You’re here, right now. Strong as you are,’ he continues. ‘Think you’re amazin’, actually.’

She looks at him. ‘D’you wanna say that again?’ she teases.

He glares at her. ‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear it the first time.’

‘Shut up,’ he grins, pushing her lightly. It makes her laugh.

It settles down into a smile, wide and free. And yes, it is gratitude she wears, but also hope. Freeing and real.

‘You too,’ she says.

There’s a sudden crash—like a localisation of sound, all of it around them pulled into event in time and space. Accompanied by a deep hum, surrounding her. Yaz jumps nearly out of her skin, twisting her torso round to find the source. As far as she can guess, it came from the house.

‘Graham!’ Ryan murmurs, but they can see him in the kitchen still. Startled, he clutches a dirty plate about to go into the dishwasher.

When he makes eye contact with Ryan and Yaz, he points upwards, at the ceiling.

No, Yaz corrects herself. The room above him. The workshop.

Yaz looks around the garden, but no one else is out here with them. She hadn’t even realised he’d disappeared.

‘Kya!’ she and Ryan cry in unison.

Ryan is up at once, and he lends a hand to Yaz as she attempts to stand too. Then they are rushing indoors, joining Graham at the foot of the stairs to uncover the cause of the crash. Yaz is behind them, hobbling, but she doesn’t care; her heart is pounding. She needs Kya to be okay. This one good thing—she prays and needs him to be okay.

There’s smoke drifting out the doorway to the workshop, but it seems safe enough to go inside. Ryan and Graham move forward first, to find Kya leaping away from a remote device, his gangly limbs askew but entirely unharmed.

He exclaims in delight, his gaze trained on something on the floor. When he spots the three of them at his door, he beams at them. ‘It’s okay!’ he reassures them. ‘We’re okay. I believe.’

We?

Ryan and Graham have frozen where they stand. Yaz has to push by them, her leg already complaining.

And she stops.

Feels the universe tilt on its axis, rush towards her. Feels her heart jolt so dramatically she fears it may leave her body altogether. Her untethering come undone.

In the middle of the room, lying in a scruffy heap on Kya’s platform, she is returned at last. Blinking solely at Yaz, her mouth slightly parted, is the Doctor.

‘Oh, my God,’ Yaz breathes.

Kya grins. ‘Surprise!’

Chapter Text

Crumpled and forlorn.

So this is how it goes: three quarters of a year apart. Three quarters of a year of anguish, of the questions she had to ask but could never answer—and this is how it starts.

It starts with a wreckage, and Yaz falling to her knees.

It is immediately the wrong action. Her leg is still weak. She is able to haul herself up, wincing, so she can gravitate towards the wreckage manifest in the centre of the room. Yaz moves; the Doctor blinks. Her face gaunt, her mouth unable to close.

There is a surge—a fireball, hot in her chest, so intent on stealing all the oxygen in her lungs. She can’t—won’t—look away from those sad eyes that tether her. From it, the fireball burns brighter.

One step more and she is there, the destination of a thousand awful nights. Finally complete. It is done. The Doctor is trembling. Her hair is unkempt and dull, grown out of its shape and into split ends. On her lovely face are the marks of neglect: a new thinness, a new haunting. Bags under her eyes deep enough to hold all of Yaz’s worries.

Yaz wonders when the Doctor last slept. She wonders if she could.

And on that lovely face, cuts and grazes. Bruises. Hardship unimaginable. The whole of her cries out for some recuperation, for a moment of peace.

‘That was… not planned,’ Kya breathes.

The boys have finally found their voice.

‘D-Doc?’ Graham stammers from behind them.

‘Can’t believe it’s you,’ Ryan adds, little more than breath escaping frigid lungs.

Yaz kneels down slowly, painfully. She daren’t let it show; the Doctor is watching her. Blinking, still.

Kya’s quiet tinkering with something metal is the only sound. No—Yaz corrects herself. Breathing. Hers and the Doctor’s are the quietest, in time with each other.

That, and her pounding heart. Two-beat for the Doctor’s four. Can she hear it? Can she hear all the ways Yaz missed her?

I missed you, terribly. And I’m sorry. I don’t know where to start.

She says the only thing she can.

‘Doctor,’ she says in a whisper. She says it like a prayer, a blessing, a conjuring; like a ghost in the mirror she’d dared to believe in.

Except this time, when wide eyes stare back at her, they come with a body just as real. Her hand reaches out to find a burning cheek and the sensation of it brings tears to her eyes.

Dreams are never so kind.

A multitude of grievances flash across the Doctor’s face, Yaz’s resolve crumbling at every one of them. But she settles on something like wonder, something close enough to it as she swallows and lifts up a shaking hand to return the favour.

The tip of the Doctor’s thumb presses against the tears running down Yaz’s face, caught in a momentary fascination. Then the wide eyes are back on her, haunted but released, and the Doctor is mumbling, barely making a sound.

Yaz moves closer. To be closer; to be felt. And she hears the Doctor’s words.

‘You’re real, you’re real, you’re real,’ over and over again.

Shouldn’t Yaz be the one saying this? After almost a year of dreaming of her, fearing the worst and hoping for the best? When the question of realness is so tied up in the question of presence—shouldn’t she be the one barely believing what she sees, hears, feels, in front of her?

The thought comes to her, loud as an echo. What has the doctor been doing—where has she been—to call into question Yaz's presence?

She wants to know. She doesn't want to know. Doesn't want anything but the urgency of this present moment, wants to live in this second forever where the doctor is here, is real. She wants to cherish it like a sunrise, a sunset; an inevitability no less essential, no less breathtaking.

She brings her head forward so their foreheads rest gently against each other. Breathes out, hears the shake in it. The Doctor's own breath is a tremble; with their eyes closed, the other's inhalations and exhalations are all they need to hear. There is no proof so permanent as a breath.

Yaz has the Doctor's breath in her own lungs now. No proof so permanent, so necessary.

"I'm real," she whispers. Feels it burn through her. This is what she closes her eyes against: a truth so bright she must shield her eyes against the light of it.

Like a bonfire, them both in the middle of it.

And Yaz smiles.

It’s not much of a journey from Graham’s house to Yaz’s, not by car. It must be a few minutes at most. But the urgency of the night rattles in the air, its very own set of soundwaves vibrating in their ear drums. It twangs at them whenever they so much as glance at the Doctor; at the tiredness that clings to her every limb, every hair, every pore.

The sooner she can rest, the better.

It is a half-light that subsumes them here, the night’s onward march halted in small, unwieldly rebellions. This is suburbia in December: the reassuring glow of warm-and-white streetlights is joined by a smattering of Christmas lights; wrapped around singular trees in the drives of houses, or fixed into Santa shapes and fastened onto the brick fronts, these lights glare at them as they pass through, audacious enough to be devoid of any festivity. These garish lights find purchase on the surfaces of the car, and expose them to their worries. The lack of Christmas cheer is writ large on the red and green glow lashed onto their faces.

No place to hide.

Graham drives, his foot married to the accelerator despite the short distance between his house and Yaz’s flat. He sits aside from Kya, who looks back from the passenger seat every half minute. In the back, Yaz has been bundled in with Ryan and the Doctor; Ryan, who’s shock has closed his mouth and loosened his brow.

The Doctor is woozy, barely conscious, but she is still here. This is the safest place to be.

She has curled up, as best as she can, into the car door. Closest to the window, she bears the brunt of the exposure, white and green flashing all too quickly into blaring red. Yaz thinks of alarms blaring on alien corridors, their feet hitting the ground as they ran, and ran, and ran. In red flame, the down-turned corners of her mouth make ruby shadows into her cheeks. So too are the sharp edges of her—cheekbones, collarbones, the dip of her jaw—but these are interrupted, blurred by the presence of bruises.

Yaz didn’t even know she could bruise.

The memory of another car journey—three quarters of a year back—flashes in her head for a moment. So dark. She wonders if it would be better for them not to see at all, to have nothing but the car lights guide their way. Then there would be no Christmas lights to throw their disapproval onto them. There would be no bruises for them to glimpse. They can’t answer questions that haven’t been asked.

It’s a stupid sentiment. No amount of country road was enough to shield Yaz from her own grief.

She feels each bruise on her own heart; feeling a deep, dull throbbing is not new to her, but tonight the source is. So this one is not dull. It stings. She knows, too, that the stories behind each hurt will pain her too—if she ever hears them.

She never told Sonya so much, she realises with a sudden clarity. She never said anything of any worth.

She still doesn’t think she can. Not yet, not yet. Sonya will have questions even Yaz cannot respond to. Looking at the Doctor, she thinks, it all comes down to her. It always comes down to her.

What breaks her heart the most, however, are the wide eyes.

The Doctor stares at everything and nothing. She watches Graham drive, the steady guidance of his hands. She watches Kya watching her, catalogues how he worries his bottom lip whenever he glances her way. She watches the flash of illumination on the back of the driver's seat not a metre from her face, able to find a rhythm she can tap from the repetition of the outside world. She blinks out the inconsequential lives of those around them; houses and apartments filled with people she doesn't know, won't know, won't ever know her.

She whispers one word, just one.

'Christmas,' she says, her voice still raw, still wielding her breaking.

And she takes Yaz's hand.

Whenever she has been, whatever she has endured, has not been enough to snuff out the spark. The inherent feeling of her. Yaz finds inhalation a challenge as soon as fingers find her own, searching on the back seat to reach for her. The slotting is urgent. Pale fingers thread through brown and when Yaz’s fingertips grace the Doctor’s skin, she feels the spark jump to her.

It is quiet. Of course it is. Subdued. But it is unmistakeably there. She is unmistakeably there. She is real.

She’s real.

Yaz has never had relief like this, so potent it could choke her.

When the Doctor finally looks at her, for the first time since they were bundled into the car, it takes a concerted effort for Yaz to keep all her words at bay. She smiles instead—a sort of smile that comes with wet eyes, the sort of smile that is necessary even if gutting—and so she gets something close to a smile in return.

For the first time tonight, it is just a little bit more than the straight line the Doctor’s mouth does when she is not sure of her own accountability. As if any action from now on may blow up in her face. (Even a smile haunts her? Even a reassurance?) But it is eye contact, it is something, and Yaz will have to take it.

The squeeze of her hand the Doctor offers is more of a reassurance, anyway.

(It is not. The black pit Yaz is well-accustomed to, has had three quarters of a year to be accustomed to, is growing. She thought she’d had enough time to gauge the its depths and walls. And suddenly it is deeper than she had guessed.)

She tries to breathe in, tries to blink away the questions building up in her chest, and thinks of the bed they can rest on. Warm, comforting: enough for the two of them.

It has been so long. They deserve, at the very least, a good rest.

Her breaths are still shaky. The Doctor squeezes her hand again, just as Park Hill comes into view—and shouldn’t it be the other way around?

What good is Yaz if she cannot comfort the blighted?

Against the backdrop of the flats, white and rainbow cladding thrown elusive under night, Ryan turns to look at her. The mustard yellow cap he’d donned for the journey to the car stands out against the black of the car interior. It catches her eyes when she turns to his side. All the lights between their destination throw it into sharp relief. Underneath, they highlight his brow, the sharp jut of his cheekbones. Sudden green illumination—a particularly enthusiastic set of lights—and he looks as strange as anything. Yaz has to blink.

He watches her, sympathy he cannot help but feel. He knows the hardship. When the rug is pulled underneath her feet, he trips with her.

He knows what to do.

‘You okay?’ he asks.

Of course, now just as before, Yaz has absolutely no idea what to say.

Maybe she doesn’t need to. Maybe this will be their tradition, a lifeline in the frantic air.

She smiles at him, at the patience in his eyes despite the questions she can see forming in his own eyes. Her attempt to wipe away a free tear only strengthens his resolve.

He brings forward his right hand for her to take. Wiggles his fingers for a few seconds.

Yaz clasps them. Warmer than the Doctor’s, who runs a few degrees below her. Grounding, still. There’s a thank you in her throat somewhere—for both of them—jostling for space somewhere in amongst all the questions she’s desperate to ask. But she can feel the end of this moment with every second that passes, and she walks on eggshells around herself. Especially now, especially tonight.

‘Me too,’ Ryan murmurs, his eyes glinting with a sort of sad mirth. Too many miserable car journeys. She’s tired of miserable car journeys.

He squeezes her left hand just as the Doctor grips tighter on her right, and Yaz thinks that maybe Ryan doesn’t understand. Not really, not fully.

But when has that mattered?

Ryan, Kya and Graham don’t leave the car, at Yaz’s request. They have the rest of the night to enjoy; a bonfire to clean up and their own beds to return to. She is perfectly fine to guide the Doctor through the car park on her own, like a young shepherd tugging along a lost lamb. She is fine to face the demands of her family alone.

She is fine.

They ask if the both of them will be okay, and Yaz replies with an, ‘Of course.’ Too confidently. There has never been a certainty about this, about them, and definitely not about the Doctor.

A lie is as good as a truth, however; only if she can believe it.

For the Doctor’s sake, she is trying her best to tell herself that she believes it.

So she is fine.

The journey in the lift is the quietest she’s ever had. She watches an absent-minded Doctor to distract herself from the pungent smell of weed, from her free hand she doesn’t know how to hold. She counts three particularly long lacerations on the Doctor’s face—all shallow, no scarring—and her lungs almost burst with her indignation.

It’s not the time though.

‘I can feel you watching me, Yaz,’ the Doctor says, and it makes her jolt. The Doctor turns her head slowly to face Yaz’s gaze head on, hazel eyes dimmed by her disappearance now shining bright at her.

It’s the most she’s said in one sentence this entire night. Her conversations with the boys were mostly single utterances, quiet ‘Yeses’ and ‘Nos’ and quick ‘I’m fines.’ For Kya, there were deep-felt thank yous, and an offer to help with the customary code inputs to seal off the teleport for good.

All three of them were gracious, however. And concerned. Taking one sweeping look of her gauntness, her haunted look, and insisting that she would be better off resting. And, well, all their beds were full for the night, and wouldn’t she want to spend time with Yaz instead?

Until now, she has said more to the three of them than to Yaz.

Until now.

‘Your thoughts are really loud right now,’ the Doctor continues. The humour doesn’t quite land. ‘And I’m not even trying to hear them.’ Her eyes widen. ‘I mean. I’m sure they’re lovely. They’re your thoughts, after all. I mean—’

‘Doctor,’ Yaz interrupts her rambling. Watches the way the Doctor’s fingers twist around each other, her shoulders hunched and her wrists joined at her front.

‘Sorry.’

Yaz attempts a smile. ‘Don’t be. Please. I just…’ She doesn’t know what to say. ‘I don’t want to overwhelm you,’ she tries. Hopes it’s enough. Hopes it’s close enough to the truth for her to believe it.

Walking across eggshells around yourself, she thinks, comes with the disadvantage of knowing you’re doing it.

‘Right,’ the Doctor nods entirely unconvincingly. ‘Yeah.’

The lift shudders and groans as they reach the floor of Yaz’s flat. It’s not a dramatic shake, but it still upends the Doctor’s delicate sense of balance. She crashes into Yaz’s side and her arms flail as they reach for something to hold onto. Yaz’s waist appears to do the trick.

The lift doors open. They close. The two of them do not move.

I missed you, terribly.

Come home. To us. To me. You have a home here.

Come home to me.

Is she home? Yaz doesn’t know.

Sneaking yet another person into her flat is significantly harder when the clock has not even struck midnight. Even harder when Sonya has friends over, and all four of them have taken over the living room. Guiding a mostly hapless Doctor across the threshold and quietly into her bedroom was never going to go to plan.

They make it three steps in.

‘What…’ Sonya says, ‘the fuck?’

Kya Gerao (22:13): How is she? It is best we keep an eye on her, considering the extraordinary distance she’s been forced to travel.

Yasmin Khan 😊 (22:14): Currently she’s reading Little Women so I think she’s okay. Just not

Yasmin Khan 😊 (22:14): Talkative

Kya Gerao (22:20): If she’s in fine physical condition then that’s the most we can do. Apologies, Yaz, but there are no codes for emotional trauma.

Yasmin Khan 😊 (22:21): I know. Did you know where she was? Before she teleported?

Kya Gerao (22:22): Just coordinates. Surely this is information she would divulge herself?

Yasmin Khan (22:24): Yeah yeah. Thanks again, Kya

‘Sonya, please. I need you to trust me on this.’

Her little sister is all movement and no rest; three thousand ideas forming behind bright eyes. Yaz is the most physically active of the two, but Sonya isn’t just on the ball; she lives for it.

Tonight she is holding herself tight. Her hands are clasped on her biceps, anchoring herself to the spot outside Yaz’s bedroom door. Of all things for her gaze to be, she is unreadable.

It is never a good sign, Yaz believes, when Sonya is concealing herself.

‘What are you going to do?’ Sonya wonders, eyes squarely holding Yaz to the spot. ‘How are you even going to…talk?’

‘We’ll figure it out,’ Yaz answers, unable to keep her gaze for long. Her fingertips press on her scalp and push back, undoing loose knots as they move. Where her head rounds off, her hands break free of the hair that proceeds to travel down her back. ‘But I need to give her that time, Son. I don’t know where she’s been, but…’ She has to breathe out. ‘I don’t think it was good.’

And Sonya is impassive.

Yaz frowns. ‘What?’

‘Will she give you that time?’ she questions. ‘I mean, let’s face it, Yaz, from the way you talked about her it doesn’t sound like she was honest with you before.’

Hackles raised. So much Sonya—Yaz, even—doesn’t know.

‘That’s not fair.’

Sonya shrugs. ‘Isn’t it? Why not? She pretended she was dead for almost a year.’

And this is where the façade cracks: where the hands on her arms try to rub away the excess thoughts, where the straight line of her mouth twists for a single moment into a sneer. This is where Sonya’s crackling energy and fizz gets so emboldened that it flashes out, and wounds.

And Yaz can see why, for once. She can understand.

But Sonya knows so little. There is so much Yaz wishes she could say, but can’t, won’t. So they are left to fester, navigation faulted by missing information.

‘Look at her, Son,’ Yaz hisses. ‘Does she look like she wanted to go missing?’

‘Missing,’ Sonya repeats.

‘Yes, missing.’

‘Has she told you that?’

Yaz almost leaves there and then. The urge to slam her foot down like a petulant child is unbearable. Instead, she makes do with a withering, wandering look at the space around them, appealing for God to imbue her sister with some compassion, any compassion.

‘What does it matter?’ she snaps.

And the rage in her sister’s eyes has been diminished—at least for now. What it leaves behind is not something softer, but scarred.

‘It matters,’ Sonya answers, ‘cause she can’t be relied on. She doesn’t tell you shit, Yaz. I remember that. And I remember how you went to pieces. I remember how you…’ Sonya closes her eyes briefly, the fizz dissipating to expose her wounding. ‘I know you’re different with her. You’ll tell her eventually. Obviously. I just can’t trust her.’

The click of her door shutting feels so much louder now. She keeps one palm on the door, letting the sound reverberate through the space between her and the Doctor.

She can feel every centimetre between them.

She can hear her breathing become incrementally quicker, listening in as an onlooker, an impassive body floating above.

The universe is spinning around them. It has been a long, long time since it has felt like that.

A moment more, and she wills her legs to turn her body around. The request is almost an echo in her head, disembodied, but she is successful. She is facing the Doctor.

It still doesn’t feel real. The Doctor in her room, curiously inspecting all of Yaz’s things.

She must be a phantom, come to trick Yaz just as she was relearning how to live. There is no way this can be the real Doctor peering at her perfume bottles, her collection of necklaces. There is no way this can be the real Doctor, stepping over a lone pile of dirty clothes to face Yaz. All five foot six of her awkward and ungainly, suspended without the confidence Yaz is used to.

She can’t even be embarrassed by that state of her room. Of herself. This can’t be real. None of it. The Doctor can’t be here.

She thinks of her sister, her reluctance to trust the Doctor, to tell the truth. To look after Yaz. One and the same, aren’t they?

But there are bruises and cuts on porcelain skin, and a hand is reaching out for her own, thin and trembling and cautious, marvelling, and Yaz cannot even trust herself. She swallows, stares down at interlinked fingers.

The spark is still so alive. Her heart swells with it.

And then the Doctor whispers, ‘You’re here,’ and it the final straw for Yaz to break.

She crashes into the Doctor before she can register the decision. A warm body; less of the softness she has snatched stolen moments to encounter, consider, remember—but still the Doctor, still the Doctor, still her.

Yaz cries.

Her arms reach up to bracket the Doctor’s back, fingers clutching tight onto her shoulders. She feels arms on her waist once more, unsure at first but tightening as the seconds blur by.

Yaz cries into the Doctor’s shoulder, the sobs hard enough to empty her lungs, breath after breath. Her own shirt is dampened by tears. They are warm and they are alive. Heaven lives in the large moments, too. The broken moments the most.

When the sobs finally subside, Yaz murmurs, ‘You’re here, too.’

Heaven has too many bruises and too many tears, but it’s still here, it’s still them. She is still her.

She shows the Doctor her bathroom and offers the shower, leaving her with a spare set of pyjamas.

Alone in her room, she stretches out her leg, wincing as she massages the muscle around the healed fracture.

The Doctor has left her coat in the room, hung it on the hook behind her door like it is always meant to be there.

She’d like to think it is. She indulges herself, just this once.

The Doctor returns with wet hair, looking only slightly less bedraggled than when she’d emerged, victorious, from the lake at Bilehurst Cragg.

Yaz’s heart sings just the same. That same relief, that sense of home returning.

Home. Always home, from the start.

She gave the Doctor her space pyjamas, little planets dotted around the fabric in a repeating pattern. Her own bedclothes are spare; a huge tie-dye top from a primary school trip that still hangs awkwardly off her frame, and biking shorts that have never been used for their intended purpose. Still, she’s not sure who looks—or feels—more mismatched.

She scoops up the Doctor’s signature outfit and bundles them with her pile of dirty clothes, sending them straight into the laundry basket. She returns to the Doctor leafing, once again, through Yaz’s copy of Little Women, crossed-legged on the bed, eyes devouring every word and her tongue jutting out just so.

And not a word when Yaz hauls herself underneath the covers. Not a word as Yaz lies there, staring up at plastic stars, wishing she could speak. Wishing she didn’t have almost a year’s worth of grief clogging up her throat.

The midnight hour creeps up onto them. It does not ask permission; it makes itself known in the weariness of her muscles.

Bones of dust, Yaz used to think. Not quite, she decides; not anymore. Dust is not so heavy.

The clock must have already struck twelve by the time the Doctor finally puts the book back. Sits there, still crossed-legged, fingers fidgeting in a constant rhythm, as good a method as any to mark the linear passage of time.

Yaz realises too late that the Doctor is watching her. She musters up the energy to sit up, and decides to watch her back.

She wonders if the Doctor will say anything. Doesn’t hold her breath.

The Doctor does not.

Her eyes start to harden every now and then, only to droop momentarily. An emerging pattern.

Yaz caves in. ‘Think you should sleep,’ she starts. Her own voice is lower now, dogged with exhaustion. ‘It’s been a long day.’ A long year, she wants to add.

‘Don’t need to sleep,’ the Doctor grunts, still watching, as her eyelids relax yet again.

Yaz sighs, but at least there is a sense of familiarity in this exchange. She flips open the duvet, the corner closest to the wall inviting the Doctor in, and motions pointedly to the pillow.

‘Doctor,’ she responds, ‘there’s no point fighting to keep awake.’ It makes the Doctor frown, so she tries a different tactic. ‘Besides, I’m knackered too. I’ll sleep better—I’ll actually sleep—if I know you’re getting a bit of rest too.’

After the last of the hesitation, Yaz adds, ‘Please.’

The Doctor crawls over on her hands and knees, slowly, slipping under the duvet gingerly. Immediately she rectifies that mistake, settling instead on laying atop the bed. Her pale feet poke out from the end of her pyjama bottoms, light pink against the yellow of Yaz’s sunflower duvet.

It does not take long for either to start succumbing to unconsciousness. The Doctor’s wet hair soaks through the pillow, but truthfully, Yaz doesn’t mind.

She only remembers to turn off the lamp at the last moment. For a moment longer, she stares in the dark at the body she knows is there—the presence she can feel, the even breaths her ears pick up. Wide eyes in the black and nothing feels real except the feel of the Doctor barely an inch away from her.

It is only for a moment: the day has been long, and she has found heaven with too many bruises and not enough words. It is exhausting, and sleeps takes her quickly.

There is little space in a single bed occupied by two people.

In the night, the two bodies gravitate towards each other. Hands on waists and an arm flung over to Yaz’s side of the bed. It is an arm on which to lay her head, until the Doctor turns over and it is Yaz’s turn to embrace.

They sleep for ten hours.

Ryan Sinclair (12:03): how r u

Yaz K (12:10): I don’t know

Yaz K (12:10): How are you?

Ryan Sinclair (12:11): idk either

Ryan Sinclair (12:12): how is she

Yaz K (12:15): Quiet.

Whilst her clothes are spinning in the washing machine, the Doctor tinkers with the tumble dryer. Apparently, she increases its efficiency by approximately three thousand percent.

Yaz leaves her to it.

‘Is she safe?’ Yaz’s mother asks. Her hair is still a little messy from the overeager hug she’d received from the Doctor not ten minutes ago.

‘I think so,’ Yaz answers, because it is all she can attempt. It is hard to tell when she doesn’t know where the Doctor has been all this time. But isn’t that life for the Doctor, anyway? Each moment simply part of the process, the quiet before the next storm, and the next, and the next. ‘No less safe than usual.’

Yaz’s mum isn’t sure how to answer that. Yaz does not blame her.

‘How long will I be shopping for five, then?’ Yaz’s dad asks.

The question catches her off guard. She hasn’t had a chance to think of that, yet.

She doesn't know.

She wants the Doctor to stay forever. She wants to go back, to a time before the Doctor’s disappearance. She wants never to ask but always to know everything. She wants to start again.

She wants. It’s too much. These thoughts flutter around her head and peck at her chest, but fly just out of reach when she tries to grab at them.

It is exhausting. It is only the beginning.

She takes the carrots out of her dad's shopping bag and breaks open the packaging, taking in the sound of snapping and ripping. She chops three of them, then takes a large onion and does the same. It stings her eyes. Then the same with the paneer, and a handful of garlic cloves. Rote actions, invisible in her brain but enacted all the same.

Behind her, her dad potters about the kitchen; restocking the fridge, refilling cupboards, his movements indicated only by the rustle of his shopping bags and the slam of cupboard doors. He hip checks Yaz out of the way of a drawer, and when she grants his silent request she stands there, dumbly, waiting and then forgetting to wait for something, garlic on her fingertips and a knife in hand.

She wants, she wants, she aches. It is already devouring her.

‘Yaz, sweetheart.’ Suddenly her dad is there, right in front of her, his palms on her cheeks and his kind eyes calming her. ‘You're doing so well,’ he reminds her, ‘so well. I don’t want you to throw that away now. We'll do whatever we can to help you, okay?’

She nods.

‘And you know your Doctor is welcome to stay here for as long as she wants, yeah?’ he continues, brushing away a loose tear. ‘For however long she needs. However long you both need.’ She nods again. ‘We know you’re close. I don’t think there’s anyone who could look after her half as well as you, Yaz.’

Yaz is not so sure.

‘Come here,’ he says, looping his arms around her. The weight of his head on top of hers is soothing, a welcome pressure to keep her small, keep her protected. Loved.

‘I have garlic hands,’ she tells him.

‘Good thing this shirt needs a wash already.’ It is half-spoken, half-laughed.

They stay like that for half a minute, in warmth, in silence, in reassurance.

‘Your mum will insist on an open-door policy,’ he tells her. ‘Just so you know.’

Around the table, the Doctor is a different person. The perfect performer, for the humans still ignorant.

She is the quickest to eat Yaz’s vegetable and paneer pilaf, wolfing it down as if she hasn’t eaten for months.

For one awful moment, Yaz believes that to be the case—but one look at the Doctor dismisses the possibility. She is thin, but not malnourished. Whatever she has eaten has kept her alive. Yaz is thankful for that, at least.

The Doctor has nothing but praise for the very standard meal, and Yaz takes the compliment as gracefully as she can. That is hard, of course, when the person beside her seems—for want of a better word—alien.

She seems delighted to talk about every subject under the sun, though thankfully she is receptive to Yaz’s gentle guidance away from extra-terrestrial tangents. She treats Yaz’s dad’s conspiracies with the same vigour as before. If not more. She asks Sonya how college is going, and marches on valiantly when Sonya replies with little more than one word sentences and non-committal shrugs.

It’s like she never disappeared.

It is almost disconcerting how easy it is for Yaz to play along. She feels herself slipping back into old habits as if they never left her. When the Doctor shines, Yaz is brightened.

If she forgets the year they’re in, if she forgets the year they’ve survived, then her heaviness lifts from her. She mixes it in with her pilaf and chews it down until it is nothing, watching it disappear along with the rest of her meal.

If she doesn’t look at the Doctor’s face, she can pretend the past year never happened at all.

But she can’t avoid looking at her forever. Yaz watches her animation pull at the hardening cuts on her face.

It is an excellent performance.

Of course, the return to reality is always painful. Lead balloon, meet floor.

After lunch, the Doctor goes back to reading Little Women, and not talking.

Yaz is choking on the words she can’t say. Not yet.

And still, the Doctor is not talking.

But she does reach out.

Tiny movements. Small moments. Consigned to repeat in Yaz’s head on a loop.

The Doctor latches on, incrementally.

It starts with their feet entwining underneath the table at lunch.

Yaz think it is an accident, the first touch, but she glimpses the Doctor’s shoulders loosen.

It continues on the sofa. Curled up, the Doctor reaches out, the flat of her food finding rest against Yaz’s thigh.

There is no show on Earth that could enthral her so much as this, Yaz thinks. A simple touch resting on a year’s grief. She finds herself glancing down at her leg every few minutes.

She sees Sonya raise a critical eyebrow at her, but no one says anything. Especially not the Doctor.

It continues with their closeness in the evening, a gravitation during dinner, during their relaxation on Yaz’s bed.

The Doctor is on her second reread of Little Women—and Yaz aches to draw, to run, to walk into the city and disappear into the night.

They do not talk.

Amongst the Doctor’s near-constant fidgeting, the sides of their arms align and rest against each other. She does not take it back, and Yaz dares not draw attention to it. It is enough to keep her from taking flight. Even if they do not talk.

The Doctor keeps reading in the dark whilst Yaz eventually attempts to sleep. There’s nothing in the air to listen to except the consistent turning of the page, and their breaths rising and settling in time with one another. Sometimes the wind outside swells, a great lurching that never lasts. And Yaz cannot sleep.

‘I missed you,’ she whispers into the dark.

The Doctor does not answer back.

But her hand finds Yaz’s, and it’s something, she realises. It is something.

In the early light, she glimpses a rare moment of the Doctor napping beside her. This has only ever happened to Yaz once before, close to the very start of their adventures together. Every second in this moment, then, feels stolen sacred; so delicate that one wrong move could shatter this gift forever. Yaz barely moves, barely breathes, just takes the sight of her in.

Through the slit in the curtains, morning rays sneak in, and wash them in soft luminescence. In the light of the sun, the Doctor is unearthly ethereal.

Yaz takes all of her in. Most of her covered by clothes, still, but from this angle she considers the jut of the Doctor’s collarbones, sharp enough to slice butter. Then the curve of her neck. The slope of her jaw and the slight opening of her mouth. Her eyelids flutter gently as she thinks, unconscious.

Like this, she could be anyone. Her body is so young, compared to the mind that inhabits it. Everything her mind is, was, will be, is held in those eyes; all emotion wizened. All the love and loss a near-infinite life brings; when she sleeps, it all falls away.

Rose petals falling off a flower. They will be replaced yet.

Yaz wonders if she should indulge herself this once. She feels the need to trace the outline of the Doctor’s face like a physical ache, a buzzing in her fingertips that keeps her wide awake despite her fitful night.

Heart thrumming. She is so close.

But Yaz has no idea where she’s been for the past year. There are things she won’t say and, in any case, Yaz won’t remind her of them like this.

This moment is for Yaz, and her only.

Then the Doctor’s eyebrows pinch together, and her face constricts until her eyes blink open, and she shoots upright. Fast pants of breath for a few seconds—Yaz tightens herself rigid—until the room becomes familiar to the Doctor, becomes safe.

She glances down guiltily at Yaz and resettles, shoulders up.

Yaz smiles patiently. ‘You’re here.’

‘Yeah,’ the Doctor murmurs. ‘Yeah. Sorry. Was just… resting my eyes.’

Yaz snorts, despite herself. ‘Long rest,’ she says lightly.

The Doctor harrumphs at her, folding her arms and pouting. ‘They’re very busy eyes!’ she protests. ‘Still weren’t asleep.’

Her pout does not last for a moment longer.

It is the first time they’ve laughed together for months—genuine laughter. Yesterday’s performance does not count; this is genuine laughter, the sort of freedom that lightens the weight of their bones. Here with her, the Doctor is calm, and safe; something Yaz wouldn’t trade for the universe.

‘Did you sleep well?’ the Doctor asks afterwards, swallowing away the dryness of her throat. Early morning Doctor talks softly, Yaz notes, and lowly. Trying not to scare the day off, a cautious animal unsure of its abilities.

Yaz shrugs. She does not tell the Doctor that she has almost forgotten what it is like to “sleep well”. ‘Did you?’

‘No—’ Yaz’s heart drops ‘—‘Cause I didn’t sleep. Told you, I were resting my eyes.’

The Doctor’s eyes, when they hear Yaz laugh—they shine.

‘Yaz.’

They’re holding hands again.

She thinks that’s a thing they do now.

‘Yaz.’

Yaz looks up. The Doctor is not looking at her. Not quite.

‘Yeah?’ She can hear the shake in her own voice. So fragile—she wants to be anything but. For the Doctor. For herself. Especially for herself.

She wants to stop walking on eggshells around herself.

‘I’m glad it was you.’

Yaz lets the confession colour the air between them. Lets it grow until it presses onto her. She watches her skin bloom red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple—

‘What do you mean?’

‘Being the first one I saw, I mean. When I got here. And when—when I woke up. At Gallifrey.’

The closest thing yet to talking. Talking. Any other moment, and Yaz would be concentrating on that—but in the here and now, all that exists is the touch that blooms a riot of colour, and those words over and over again.

I’m glad it was you.

Yaz realises, too late, that she wants to paint the Doctor sleeping.

I’m glad it was you.

When they see the boys next, the Doctor takes the opportunity to lose herself amongst the rubble of Kya’s workshop. Yaz does not have the energy to listen to them nerding out over mechanics, or for much else at all. She curls up on Graham’s sofa and together the three humans watch Countryfile.

Ryan is constantly on his phone. She’s fairly certain there’s a new man in his life, or there is about to be.

Halfway through, Graham does a tea round. Ryan declines. They are left in silence. No talking. When Graham ambles in with two cups of tea, he offers one to Yaz and she gently takes it from him, cradling it like the lifeline it has suddenly become.

They watch a section about robins and their significance during Christmas. When she takes a sip of her tea, it burns her tongue.

‘Are you doing okay?’ Graham asks. ‘Y’know, since she came back.’

She’s not sure how to answer. There’s too much to say. There always is.

‘Have you two been talking?’

She has to shake her head. Says, ‘We’ve been close,’ instead, knowing that it will fail to clear the worry on her friends’ faces.

Ryan Sinclair (19:15): u know u need to talk to her bout things soon rite

Yaz K (19:15): Ryan I’m in the same room as you

Ryan Sinclair (19:17): yh i know

Ryan Sinclair (19:17): but gramp’s sleepin

Yaz glances at Graham just as his first snore of the night rips through the room.

Her phone lights up again.

Ryan Sinclair (19:17): wanna go on my xbox

He could’ve picked a happier game.

‘Your fault,’ Ryan shrugs, as he guides Ellie and Dina through an underground subway. The inherent menace of the game sings in the air like an echo, coiling itself around Yaz’s shoulders, her neck. ‘You didn’t wanna play.’

Yaz is shrouded in blankets again. She’s here too much, feeling like this too much. And though everything has changed, she is still none the wiser about it.

Sonya’s words, and her distrust, float back to her as she loses focus of the world in front of her. There is time to heal, and there is wilful omission. Where the Doctor will land is up to time to reveal. Only, Yaz wishes she knew: she is starting to itch with her restlessness, with the need to help in any way she can.

She can only hope the Doctor will relieve her of this uncertainty. She tells herself that she has already been through the best part of a year without answers—but it did almost kill her. Quite a few times.

Chasing flames and dust for bones. It plays in her mind’s eye as if on a movie screen: montages of her feet hitting the pavement as she ran from danger in the city. Walking when her head hurt so much that it could have split open. Seeking out the reminders of her existence even if it threatened it.

She tells Ryan about Sonya’s response. He bursts out laughing at her initial reaction.

‘I won’t lie, Yaz,’ he says, ‘when I first met her, I thought she didn’t give a damn about you. Genuinely.’

‘She’s too good at selling that,’ Yaz gripes.

Ryan chuckles. ‘But she must really love you. Wants you safe, happy, all that soppy stuff, you know—oh shit.’ Ryan is breathless as the building falls down around them on the screen, a cacophony of brick and mortar collapsing.

And then the zombies come. One lashes out at Ellie suddenly—Yaz and Ryan jump as one—and holds her down until Dina shoots it in the face. A few seconds later, a crowd of them charge at the two women and the awful clicking gets louder and louder. This time, he panics and slams at the buttons on his controller to deal with the onslaught, swearing under his breath in a constant stream the entire time as Ellie weaves and climbs her way out of the subway. ‘Shit shit fucking hell shit shit shit—’

Yaz’s heart rate is off the charts. And she’s scowling. She’s not even bloody playing.

Whatever he’s doing seems to do the trick, and he manages to get the situation under control. Just.

When their hearts are no longer in their throats and their hands have stopped shaking, the two of them look at each other and laugh. She forgets they were interrupted at all.

She remembers five minutes later.

‘I know she’s looking out for me,’ she says, ‘but I don’t know how to do that for myself when I don’t even know what’s going on.’

She watches the Doctor work with Kya, leaning against the doorframe for support.

The two of them have already developed a dynamic in the workshop that leaves no space for interruption: within hours, they have been able to find a rhythm that lets them weave through the assorted mess of mechanical parts. They parry conversation in a constant back-and-forth of question and answer, question and answer. The Doctor is getting to grips with Xtandonan technology—nothing too taxing for her, of course it isn’t, but the condition of the ship will keep them preoccupied.

Neither her or Kya miss the delight in the Doctor’s voice.

Yaz makes no move to interrupt. This is not her moment. Briefly, there is a flare inside her, given little time to hotten up—how many of these moments will she not be privy to? How many aliens will Yaz have to trail behind, wordless and dumb?—before she stomps it out quickly. There is no changing her planet of birth.

She hates this part of her, this blackness that strives to strip her of her self-worth. It is an uphill battle, and all the bushes along the walk sprout poison fruit. But she will not let it get the better of her. There is no changing her planet of birth, and there is no point in inserting herself into the Doctor’s every situation just because she’s missed her.

I’m glad it was you.

Kya deserves these moments too, she thinks. Moments of existing. She wouldn’t wish his story on anyone.

Flowing their interactions may be, but Kya still stands tall and deferential. Truthfully, Yaz expected to see a little more wonder in his eyes—not unlike the first night they met, not unlike the first time he mentioned the Doctor—and though it is there, it is almost underwhelming. Whenever he is still for more than a second, his hands drift over the metal boxes and screws lining his workshop table, never quite touching but always close. When he talks of reaching home, his words are perfectly enunciated.

And Yaz wonders who made these parts. Who toiled over them and tested them. If that was Kya himself, or someone else; a stranger or a friend. She wonders, if they knew Kya, what they think of him now.

Yaz thinks, If they could see him now, and smiles.

She’ll leave them to it.

‘Can you see the decay on that? I don’t think this polarised thrustshift lock is going to do the trick, I’m afraid, Kya. Must be the Earth’s atmosphere; too nitrous, it’s an extraordinary rate of rust…’

Except as Yaz pushes off the doorframe to leave, the Doctor’s head turns just so, and she catches sight of Yaz standing there.

And she stills.

Yaz is caught on that. Not even the light in the Doctor’s eyes or the half-smile that springs up so suddenly—but the way she stops. The fact that she stops.

She knows Kya is looking at them now, watching them both without a word. But it happens in a somewhere else. Another place, another time.

Sometimes a moment is left for two people, unlocked and locked by them. I’m glad it was you, Yaz remembers—and how strong she feels, now her bones are made of flame.

Ash is similar to dust.

The Doctor has moved onto a different book tonight. Yaz didn’t even catch the title before she got into bed, but she knows the Doctor is still there, still in the dark, reading.

Yaz’s leg is starting to ache and it snatches her away from the murmuring lull of sleep. So she lies there, listening to the Doctor read. Her bones made of ash and she hates it.

The difference between ash and dust is the heat still emanating. In the silence she is sweltering.

But the Doctor is reading, so it dissipates into the air between them.

She can feel something shaking next to her. It jolts her awake, an unpleasant knock at the base of her spine as her eyes fly open.

There’s no noise but ragged breaths, and before Yaz’s sleep-added brain can register the movement, she is sat up with her hands close to the Doctor’s folded arms.

‘Doctor,’ she croaks, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ In the low light, she can just make out the Doctor’s head turning to the sound of her voice. Her breaths are still so quick—too quick. ‘Can I touch you?’ Yaz whispers.

For a beat, Yaz is sure the Doctor will not respond. But she hears a tiny, ‘Yes,’ and scrabbling hands find her form in the black of night, hands with a grip so tight it is as if the Doctor fears Yaz letting go. As if Yaz would ever want to.

Yaz’s hands seek out the shape of the Doctor’s position; she places one hand on her knees and loops her arm around the Doctor’s back. From touch there is presence, and from presence there is relief. ‘I’m here,’ she says again into the night.

‘You’re here,’ she gets in response.

The Doctor moves further forward until their foreheads are resting together. Even closer, Yaz can hear the erratic rhythm of the Doctor’s breaths, so she closes her eyes and matches the pace until she guide them to a slower rhythm. In and out, and again, in, and out, again. A constant giving and receiving, a gifting of purpose.

Though the breaths calm, the swelling and constricting of her chest is still intensifying, stealing away her attention. It begs her to touch, keens for a caress. Granting the wish indulges the habit; when her hand moves from the Doctor’s knees to her face, and she feels the Doctor lean into her palm, it only presses down on her organs harder. Being on fire has never felt so fragile—and she is burning with this, burning in it, drowning. Someone help her, heaven is drowning her.

The tears spring up with no remorse, no consideration of anyone else. She must be relieved of this. She drowns in between the previous breath and the last, thrashing in the discontent; it has been three quarters of a year and she has been untethered for all of it.

‘You were gone so long.’ The words break free from her throat before she can stuff them down. Already they are clogged, ugly things, devoid of all the elegance she’d dressed them in during the long nights without knowledge, without hope. ‘At first I thought you were dead but then it didn’t make sense. Ko Sharmus… he went for you. So you weren’t dead, but he was, and you were just gone.’ She is crying now, gasping in between her attempts to crush her sobs down to nothing. ‘And I waited for you but I didn’t know you would ever come back. I just wanted you to come back, Doctor. How do you grieve someone without closure? I tried so hard. I tried so hard.’

The Doctor’s hands tighten in her shirt.

‘Where did you go, Doctor? Where have you been? Where did you—’ Her throat wobbles entirely without her permission—she has to breathe in and try again. ‘Why did you leave us?’

She can count the centimetres between them on one hand. But there is no emotion captured in that thought; all that exists to Yaz is the sensation of the Doctor being so close.

Every cell in her body seems to feel all the spots where the Doctor is resting against her. They scream with necessity of this moment.

They were never close like this—never physically close. The Doctor made sure of that, if Yaz didn’t. But their heads lean against one another and arms are draped around backs.

When her lungs threaten to buckle and sob again, the Doctor squeezes her waist and murmurs those same words. ‘I’m here.’ When it is the Doctor’s turn to slip into awful reminiscence, Yaz will repeat the words back to her, again and again, until the trembling stops and they can talk once more.

Deprivation has nothing on the return of touch.

‘Ko Sharmus activated the Death Particle. He died so I could live,’ the Doctor says.

‘I think I dreamed about that,’ Yaz responds without thinking. Immediately she wants to kick herself, for such a trivial thing, but there is no recession of limbs from the Doctor beside her.

There is no punishment for spilling her thoughts. They make a mess all over their legs, ankles resting on top of another. But that is a job for the morning. In the black, she can’t see them.

‘Me too,’ the Doctor admits. ‘Almost every time.’

‘Not always?’

‘No. You know me—I don’t sleep much.’

‘But you still dreamed a little.’

‘Yeah.’ Her pause is long enough for Yaz’s hand to stroke the length of the Doctor’s arm. ‘Mostly it was…that. All the times it could’ve been me.

‘But sometimes I dreamt of you.’

Dawn is creeping in and Yaz has not slept. Will not sleep.

There are words on her tongue that have nestled dormant, their subject a universe away. This morning she is still here, but the entire conversation feels just as expansive.

She cannot think about it when she looks at the Doctor. It terrifies her like nothing else.

That one, burning question aches. She doesn’t believe herself to be brave enough to ask them—but didn’t she run into the city and come back with bruises? Didn’t she try?

Dawn is creeping in. It has taken hours, yet still feels like an interruption. Let the world cradle them in a bubble all on its own; let the world leave them to it.

It would be a long time coming; being left to be.

She falls asleep before she can ask.

When she wakes, she is alone. The realisation of being alone slams into her, a hammer to the gut. It takes her half an hour to tear her eyes away from the ceiling. Lead balloon, meet floor. It can join her heart.

But then the Doctor holds her hand sometimes, and the question aches a little less.

The bruises on the Doctor’s face are fading into yellow. The rings around her eyes are deep as ever—but perhaps it is the shadow from the lightness returning to her eyes. A gentle coaxing of life, abetted by nuts and bolts and thrustshift locks; eased into being by paneer and the books in Yaz’s room.

Sometimes Yaz will find her sight locked on where yellow dusts her jaw, her cheekbone. Sometimes when they are alone, she will find herself reaching out to place a cooling hand on the abraded skin.

She will murmur, ‘I’m sorry.’

The Doctor will reply, ‘It’s not your fault.’

And she knows this, of course she does.

‘I’m not any less sorry.’

Soon they will be gone, and the cuts will heal in time. Then all that is left of the Doctor’s pain will be the haunting that flashes in between moments of joy, the shake of her shoulders in the night that Yaz can’t prevent. She can only hold her until they subside; they can only remind each other of their presence until reality spins away from them again.

‘So have you told her?’ Sonya asks, and Yaz is plunged into memories of sunnier days; of longer, lonelier nights.

This time there is a kettle bubbling and three mugs of tea waiting to be filled up. Yaz thinks of her father holding her close in the kitchen. She steps away from the counter.

‘What do you think?’ Yaz responds.

Her little sister tuts.

‘I’m trying, Son, for God’s sake.’ Yaz closes her eyes and breathes out.

The kettle boils.

This time, Kya does not come over with flowers. Yaz is glad to have avoided any questions about marriage.

Sonya is the one to let him in. She greets him with a crooked eyebrow and an, ‘Alright, also-human?’ and clears off before he can confuse her anymore.

Yaz doesn’t miss the glance Sonya sends her way before she locks herself in her room. Half of it screams the usual, Your friends are weird, at Yaz. The rest of it is an unknown, trapped behind the shortness of the moment and the anxiousness that has manifested over all their reactions lately.

She’s always trying to infer other people’s reactions. She is tired of trying to infer other people’s reactions. She is exhausted enough trying to navigate around her own.

Still, she hopes Sonya is not angry still. It is not only the Doctor who keeps her—or not—on this Earth.

He takes them into the city. He takes them walking.

Yaz doesn’t say no, but neither is her yes very enthusiastic. She feels haunted here. She keeps her eyes down so she can see all their shoes as they slap against black tarmac, grey pavement. They step over spots of white gum long assimilated into the ground, dried vanilla milkshake of a child’s McDonald’s tragedy, a bouquet that has tumbled from a bin. She keeps an eye on their feet so she can catalogue every sound.

On the few times her attention is grabbed somewhere else, all the steps are the sounds of her phantoms—running towards the rubble of a ship, dodging the arms of an Earth-grounded alien, limping away with adrenaline throbbing heavy in her bones.

Here she haunts herself. How awful, then, for her to be so loud so close to the Doctor.

She had not told her yet.

What would she say? The Doctor’s own words left her blooming in riot, but she is in danger of being painted, instead, in shame.

She has waited three quarters of a year to face her. She could not take that shame.

All of this, entirely her own fault. If she’d just stayed at home, this would not be gnawing at her.

They have been knocking shoulders for the past five minutes. Finally, the Doctor’s fingers link with hers.

‘Adventuring with Yaz,’ she says. ‘Amazing.’

If she keeps her gaze on the Doctor, maybe she will be able to push back the shame tight on her throat. If she sees the Doctor smile, she can forget she’s in a chokehold.

Maybe.

‘Did you know Yaz saved my life on the first night I got here?’

Walking through the Peace Gardens brings her back to that evening. Everything was touched by the night then—the thrills and the falls. Now the drunkard tumbling through the fountain has been replaced by youngsters, unable to resist the tantalising risk of getting sopping wet.

The three of them sit in the exact place Kya and Yaz sat before, and Yaz can feel the phantoms like a physical presence. Her past self wraps her arms around Yaz, but where those arms should feel soft with muscle and skin, they are as sharp as the edge of paper. There is a ghost around her obstructing her mouth and Yaz is struggling to breathe.

Kya has been content to talk for England, and never stray from the anything elses and anything buts. Now, he walks back on the unspoken agreement—tentative, personal, but a secession all the same.

And Yaz stares at him, wide-eyed. Not betrayed, not yet. His gaze does not have the same urgency—even worse, there is too much concern.

The conversation has begun; she cannot stuff it back into the mind it came from. Time is fickle but what’s done is done.

‘That sounds like our Yaz,’ the Doctor responds. Her mind is far away, but her hand is still entwined with Yaz’s: so present, undeniable.

The universe will spin around them but the blurring, the tilting, stops when Yaz can focus on the touch. Simple sensation above all else.

‘You were proper annoying,’ Yaz says lightly, turning her head to see Kya grinning at her. Much better. ‘Always asking questions.’

‘As were you,’ he answers, ‘because you never answered them.’ Yaz laughs. ‘At least I had the excuse of being a newcomer.’

At the sight of the Doctor’s puzzled expression, Yaz stops smiling.

She always used to ask questions, she realises. Like that, the wall starts crumbling.

The rest of the conversation is lost to her. She watches the water in the fountains surge upwards, only to slam onto the ground once more. Here, gravity rules absolutely.

She keeps her hand locked in the Doctor’s.

Who is Yaz to the Doctor if she does not ask the questions?

Who is the woman returning to the TARDIS? The signs of leaving behind a permanent altering—she is changed yet again.

They buy tickets at the Crucible for a play they’ve never heard of. They have hours before it commences, so they kill time in the café. Out of the corner of her eye, Yaz glimpses a woman from two tables over watching in mute wonder at the amount of sugar the Doctor spoons into her teacup. At the eleventh spoonful, Yaz sees her visibly pale.

She looks over to Kya; his tea is not faring much better, though he stopped at eight.

The woman from two tables over spots Yaz’s bottled water and sighs in relief. Yaz even hears it.

For the moment, Yaz is content to gaze out the window to the street. She can breathe in the smells of cinnamon and hazelnut, look past the backs of festive stickers plastered on the glass panes to glimpse the Christmas lights adorning nearby buildings. Here and now they are merely existing; not proving to each other that they are fine, they are coping, they are coping together. Not attempting to prove that to themselves.

Walking on eggshells is a constant endeavour, a constant process. She wonders how soon she will stumble.

It is already deafening her. She knows it is coming.

‘I’ve been trying to figure out how you did it,’ the Doctor announces bringing Yaz out of her head. When she turns to look at the Doctor, she sees her levelling Kya with a firm stare.

The Doctor asks at the wrong time; he is still gulping his tea down. She won’t wait in silence; Yaz knocks back the last of her water until not a drop remains, and feels the Doctor watching her as she drinks.

She looks back at her, trying to understand. The Doctor offers nothing else, nothing except that same stare.

Yaz swallows.

Kya coughs. It brings the Doctor back to their conversation—she turns back to him, and continues, ‘Telepathikinetic, weren’t it? With a whopper of an amplifier, I might add. Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed. But did you even ask her?’

Yaz gets the feeling she might be the her. ‘What?’

‘Of course!’ Kya glowers. He is the first person, or at least the first Yaz has ever witnessed, to successfully take a sip of tea angrily. The placement of his cup on his saucer is still perfect, with a chink Yaz could be forgiven for making up. His next words are far too soft for the weight behind them. ‘I’m not on Xtxapiri anymore.’

The Doctor’s expression mellows.

Glancing at Yaz, he continues, ‘If I remember correctly, you were the one who asked to connect with you, telepathically, yes?’ He adds for the Doctor’s sake, ‘This was—before the teleport was constructed, I should clarify. The connection was already established.’

She remembers—her pink jacket needing a wash, a brew in the kitchen going cold. Stood there in the unforgiving morning—rattled and unforgiven. Unforgetting.

Of course she remembers.

‘You used…that,’ she frowns, ‘for the teleport?’ Is it a violation of privacy? She’s not sure; retrospect is a little too far away.

‘Yes.’ He bows his head. ‘Well, no. You see, what I’d previously established with the Doctor was not enough. And my technical capabilities have rusted somewhat. Understandably so, given the status of that practice.’

‘The illegality of it, you mean,’ the Doctor jumps in, eyebrows raised. ‘Very invasive practice, using a telepathic connection to transport someone somewhere else. No wonder the Xtando banned it.’

‘As a war crime,’ Kya specifies. He finishes the rest of his drink, placing his cup down with a flourish. ‘But we are not at war, nor are we in the right galaxy for it.’

‘So it’s justified?’ Yaz argues.

‘It was a rescue mission!’ he responds. He pleads with the Doctor, ‘I am deeply sorry if I caused you any sense of a violation of—’

‘Oh, no, you’re fine!’ she waves it off. ‘Although, I would’ve preferred a little forewarning. In a perfect universe, you know.’ She remembers only now that she has tea to drink; and gulps it down in one go.

Kya has shrunk a little in his seat. ‘It was meant to be the forewarning,’ he admits. ‘This was only the test run. I was not meant to deliver you here, not yet.’

It is the Doctor’s turn to look haunted. Unforgiven. ‘No, you made the right choice,’ she responds lowly. ‘Would’ve been detected otherwise.’

‘Detected?’ Yaz repeats. Morsels and crumbs, gleaming in amongst information that won’t help her.

But the Doctor ploughs on. ‘You could’ve used yourself,’ she tells Kya. But she takes one look at his surety, and tilts her head. ‘So you did.’ She glances at Yaz. Eyes wide.

Not for the first time, Yaz feels lost. Not that she isn’t used to the feeling.

Kya clears his throat. ‘As you said—I needed a…whopper of an amplifier. Our previous connection was enough for the locator. Not enough for the distance. And what else—’ he turns to Yaz ‘—but your bond?’

He takes another sip of his tea.

‘I wondered if you would hear me,’ Yaz says quietly.

Her words are nestled in the nooks and crannies of these buildings they walk by. Slotting in the part of the brickwork. They are her witnesses. She is no longer the only one to know the content of those thoughts. She has been witnessed: she was willing the Doctor to life.

Never let her say that she wasn’t brave. These buildings will hold her to account: she has emerged from the city with bruises and the wind in her coattails; she is brave. Ghosts of herself swirl around her and she has been witnessed.

‘I used to think about you a lot,’ she says, ‘imagined I was reaching out to you. Used to wonder if you could hear me.

‘I knew it was impossible but I wanted you to hear me.’ She takes a steadying breath, and lets the next thought rush out of her at once, ‘Cause if you were alive, then you’d hear there was someone looking out for you. And if—I didn’t believe it but—if you had…if you had died then I wanted there to be someone thinking of you anyway.’

They’ve stopped walking now. Kya and the Doctor watch her as the tears build. There is heartbreak smoothed into their skin: death creeps so constantly in their lives.

And the Doctor reaches out. Looks fit to break, the softest, ‘Yaz,’ she’s ever uttered slipping past her lips.

But Yaz breathes. Stupid shuddering breaths—but breaths all the same. ‘I’m fine,’ says, and she will be. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. You have nothing to be sorry about,’ the Doctor pleads.

There’s so much yet to unearth. Yaz can only shake her head.

‘I was trying to say,’ she announces, a little out of nowhere, ‘that it sort of happened, didn’t it? If I was the amplifier—’ a slight dizziness emanating from her chest ‘—then it means I really did reach out to you.’ She looks to Kya, his wide smile.

‘I heard you,’ the Doctor responds. ‘I promise you, I heard you.’

Yaz can see someone standing too still.

This is the busy city, where everyone has a destination. No dawdlers please—there is never reason to stop.

Yet in among the common sense of the city, there is someone who has stopped.

She can’t chalk it up to anything but gut instinct. Even in the state she’s been in—especially in the state she’s been in—she’s never doubted the feeling. She has come away with her life too many times in recent months, all because of it.

And it is telling her: this person is standing too still.

They keep walking, and maybe she should, but Yaz does not raise the alarm. Not yet. They are just a silhouette haunting her, malintentions pungent from miles away—but the three of them are too far away, and too exposed, to investigate, interrogate and subdue.

She has to let it sink into the back of brain. Let it eat away at her. They are allowed to walk.

They continue on. She can feel the warning whispers on the hairs of her neck.

Maybe this is a worry for all of them. Maybe it is for her eyes only. She is straining to see amongst all her ghosts, but she watches just in case.

Perfect shop fronts bow to the dirt of the city as they make their way to Kya’s wrecked spaceship. Sure feet tread firmly into the back ends of Sheffield, out of place but determined even so. These hidden ends have never pretended to be pretty, and in that they succeed.

She would’ve called herself a positive person at one point. And maybe she is on her way back. Still—today as with yesterday, she cannot dress up these rougher edges in rose-tinted glasses. There is no sentimentality worth its weight in salt for these industrial workplaces, their historical dumpsites.

Kya’s shoulders seem to slump the closer they get to their destination, as if the air is weighing on him with every passing inhalation. Strangeness produces strangeness in the unaccustomed—but he has been a resident of Sheffield for months now.

All of a sudden, his halting demeanour in their previous conversations makes more sense.

Yaz lets go of the Doctor’s hand to stroll closer to him. She knocks her arm against his.

‘We don’t have to stay long,’ she reminds him.

Not much of a statement, but enough to inflate his posture once more. The light in his eyes changes when he looks at her. He is clearer here.

‘I know,’ he nods. ‘We can excavate my past…quickly.’ He sighs. ‘Delightful.’

His trepidation stings her chest, but she manages a smile. ‘Were you just sarcastic then?’

And despite himself, Kya preens. ‘Yes! I’ve been taking cues from Sonya, mostly. Did it work?’

‘It was great,’ she reassures him. ‘But don’t learn all your social skills from Son.’

‘Oh?’

Yaz snorts. ‘If you’re wanting to be friendly, she’s not the person to ask.’

The sharp drone of an industrial drill hollers in the distance. For accompaniment, in an almost rhythmic pattern, the sound of a skip being filled ricochets off the dense walls of the warehouses around them.

They stand close together, sizing up a gently smoking bulk of metal languishing in a pile of rubbish and brick. Like the wrong sort of nest—it has taken residence here, moping in an Earthbound parody of its own destruction.

It is a sorry sight.

It seems a miracle Kya even survived. A grateful look passes between him and Yaz, a harmonious wavelength of shared relief.

But then the Doctor hums. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ she announces, ‘I was expecting worse.’

A lot of the damage turns out to be surface; a compromised hull and chassis; little connections that can be fixed in days. Kya assures them that they will not die of radiation leaks or any sudden explosions. But there are still a few mechanical failures, more substantial than a snapped wire, from parts premade before Kya patched his ship together.

He is learning as he works, he says. Growing from it.

The only other time he looked so dark, Yaz thinks, was the night he told her of the life he’d come from.

Thunderous—indignant. Outraged, but almost as if it were for someone else. Somewhen else, too. For all this time, it had been too far away to dwell on. Now it is inescapable.

He and the Doctor get to work, inspecting the breakages and compromises. Yaz accompanies them as much as she can, but returns to the cockpit when she feels—adeptly—like a spare part.

A quieter time. She stares at cracked screens and thinks of the man who put them together. Thinks of the fire and brimstone in his eyes, given to him by other damaged lives.

There’s a sparking socket at the cockpit door. Kya wedges the cover over and quells the nuisance swiftly. He leaves without a word.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d met the Doctor before?’

Thunderous misery returns to the cockpit. It takes the energy out of him—that wondrous, nervous enthusiasm Yaz has found herself accustomed to.

He looks past her when he answers.

‘Reminiscence would’ve confused the telepathikinetc teleporter. My skills were not up to scratch and I could not afford to make the task harder.’

Yaz’s brow furrows. ‘But—me being the amplifier—’

‘Was entirely different,’ he interrupts, closing him eyes. ‘The locator was exactly that. The amplifier was a differently technology, based on strength of emotion, not certainty of space-time coordinates.’ His eyes open again, locked on her. ‘Was that an adequate response?’

Yaz feels his irritation prick her skin.

He comes back a few minutes later, softened.

‘I apologise. I was short with you. It’s this place, I am stressed about every little—’

‘I know,’ Yaz brushes his apology away. She knows what it feels like, intensely. He won’t calm his puppy eyes down, so she adds, ‘Kya. D’you remember how mardy I was ’round you when we first met?’

He nods hesitantly. ‘I would’ve liked to have told you more,’ he confesses, ‘very much so. Perhaps it would’ve helped.’

‘I don’t know,’ Yaz says honestly.

She joins the Doctor at what Yaz surmises to be the software engine. They’ve been in places like this before, surrounded by computers and AI interfaces. Here, only three of the screens are on, the rest of them on standby, if functioning.

The Doctor stands encased in green light, cooling her warmer colours. She is in her element here: she hungrily absorbs the streams of coding like it were a test—all of it in a different language entirely unknown to Yaz. No TARDIS to translate, Yaz realises; the Doctor must be fluent regardless.

‘The Time Lords have a history with Kya’s kind,’ is the explanation she gives, and only that.

‘He told me,’ Yaz responds. ‘Something about a… Time War. He wasn’t very generous with the details.’

The Doctor does not reply, so Yaz crosses her arms. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘’Fraid not. This won’t take long. Your company’s always welcome though.’

Yaz fights the urge to roll her eyes. Bored of sticking out like a sore thumb, with nothing she can grapple with. But when has any of this ever been fair? She can feel her disgruntlement heating up. If she’s not careful she’ll say things she doesn’t mean. But can’t she get angry just this once? So much side-stepping and avoiding the question, and she’s tired, she’s tired.

‘Bit easier when you talk to me,’ she says, and it’s a statement, it’s not accusatory—she understands—but it is also not not accusatory.

The Doctor’s hackles are immediately raised.

Yaz can feel every inch of the space between them. Cold and stale—and she hates it. Hates how they are pinging from tears of relief and gripped shoulders under starlight to too many questions between them. But Yaz is trying—hasn’t she been trying? The walls are her witnesses—she has grieved and she has dreamed and she has told the Doctor as such. She must know how lost Yaz became.

But Yaz can’t know the same of her.

‘Bit easier when I’m not concentrating on an entire database’s worth of data.’

Yaz doesn’t even leave a space for breath. ‘Where did you go?’ Feels the question putrefy in the stale air. Tries to push past the inevitable regret. ‘You’ve been back all this time and you still haven’t told us. And—’ she frowns ‘—I’m not trying to say you’re obligated to. But I—we can’t help if you avoid it.’ Her heart forms a lump in her throat. ‘You did that the last time. Before.’

‘I don’t need help.’ The Doctor sounds so defeated. She watches the code streams down the screen, unseeing.

‘Are you sure?’ Yaz asks, pushing down her trepidation to take a step forward. The Doctor flinches, so she stops. ‘Can you honestly tell me you were completely fine the entire time you were gone?’

‘I was fine,’ the Doctor snaps.

And Yaz bristles. She knows it is not true. They saw the cuts and the bruises, the way the Doctor folded in on herself. But the thought of it—the thought of the Doctor abandoning them, unaffected whilst the rest of them—

It’s not true. They have the nights embraced to prove it.

‘Doctor,’ Yaz interrupts firmly. ‘Look at me in the eyes and tell me you were fine.’ She steps forward again.

Waits.

Watches.

There is more heartbreak in the Doctor’s gaze than Yaz could ever truly quantify.

No words come forward.

How much heart the Doctor must have to break it all so deeply. The echoes of aeons bring with them their devastations—soft-sounded screams dulled only by time.

How many times will Yaz hurt for her? Sometimes sympathy is the hardest thing to bear. Its own dissuader. And yet, a drop in the ocean compared to the Doctor’s own anguish.

It cools Yaz’s irritation. The prickle of abandonment recedes again and she is left with regret. She sees the Doctor hunched the way she is and she can’t stand it. Can’t stand the fact that she triggered it.

But the question still burns.

‘Where were you?’ she asks again, the whisper above the thrum of computers.

The Doctor looks away.

Chapter Text

So much for reassurances—a thunderous bang—and the ship rocks with the force of the explosion. They fall without warning, limbs pushed onto gritty metal floor with the shock of it.

The shockwave ebbs, all catastrophe settling. When the world returns to them, Yaz registers an urgent throb in her still-healing leg. But her priority is—always is—the Doctor.

A few coughs and splutters—none her own.

‘Are you okay?’ she asks, as the dust settles and the room comes into view.

The Doctor is crouching, a little shaken. No visible injuries, no signs of desperation except in the way her eyes search Yaz’s own.

Yaz keeps them on her, hoping to be a tethering, and shuffles forward to regain contact. It is as if their argument never existed, or at least fizzled into nothingness; when Yaz reaches out a hand, the Doctor clasps it on instinct, the both of desperate for the reassurance of the other. So inherently attuned to another.

Strength regained; the world resuming. Now the reverberations no longer shoot through their bones, their absence is urgent.

Fear and heartbreak in their eyes take on a new light; a new subject: Yaz and the Doctor stare at each other, horrified.

Half of his forehead raw and burnt. His entire hand—the skin of it—is blackened and sizzling, the smell of roast meat clogging their airways. Yaz dare not breathe, is not sure she even could. Kya is not waking up.

Kya is not waking up. Please, God; she does not ask for much.

The Doctor checks his pulse. ‘He’s alive,’ she confirms, ‘and breathing. But I think it knocked him out.’

Yaz’s heart stops its freefall. It is still pounding, though, questions circling around her head like wasps. Is the ship safe? When will he wake—

‘Yaz.’ She looks up at the sound of the Doctor’s voice. ‘I promise he’ll be alright. He’s more resilient than most of his people. Trust me on that.’ The Doctor’s gaze flits around, already gauging the situation.

It’s not a question of whether she will. One deep breath in, and one hand on the side of the ship to steady herself, and Yaz keeps herself focused. She takes the Doctor’s position beside where Kya lays as she lunges towards the offending mechanism to stop it damaging anything else. ‘I’m gonna phone Graham so he can get Kya to the sofa,’ Yaz announces, mostly for her own benefit. ‘Keep him comfortable. In a familiar space. We can look after him.’

Dragging him to the car puts more pressure on her legs. It aches with its own narcissism. She pushes it aside, and waves off Graham’s look of concern when he sees her limping.

Kya can’t settle in the sofa; once horizontal, his burns flare up enough to warn the others away from him. They settle him in Graham’s chair and treat his wounds as best they can: Yaz, with her basic first aid; Ryan and Graham using their patchwork lessons from Grace; the Doctor with all her mysterious experiences. Every hurt, every worry, every pain is cast away for Kya’s comfort. He is paramount, and none of them would think to disagree.

His burns are preventing him from slipping into a coma, is the Doctor’s official diagnosis but he still won’t wake. Something is preventing that.

‘How long d’you think he’ll be out for?’ Ryan asks. It is the first thing he’s said to them.

The Doctor puts it at a day to a week. ‘Excellent by Xtando standards,’ she reminds them. ‘He’s a warrior, Ryan. He’ll surprise us yet.’

‘And his ship?’ Graham asks. ‘Is all that safe?’

‘I’ll look tomorrow,’ the Doctor decides. ‘We did what we could—’ she looks at Yaz, the gaze quick, all-encompassing ‘—but I need to watch him tonight.’ At the curious silence, ‘First night’s always crucial.’

Curiousness turns to gravity.

‘If anyone needs to be on hand, it’s you,’ Graham says. ‘You’re his best chance.’

The Doctor’s response is a short-lived smile. Already, the burden of responsibility being traded for recent shadows.

Both of them, now, taken out of reach in one way or another. However temporarily, it plunges deep into her.

He looks so frail like this. So mortal. Even beaten up, she has never seen him as frail.

She has not learnt her lesson from the Doctor. The crumpled heap of her in the ruins of Gallifrey, the devastation in wide, teary eyes. Get off me, Yaz. Fragility doesn’t have to be physical.

She is done asking why—why him, why the Doctor. She is not God; she won’t claim to know and she never will. Instead she wonders, What next, and hopes she can still prove to herself that she can weather it.

By God—she wants to weather it.

Ryan’s eyes are bleary. Well past midnight, and he has work tomorrow. It is his first proper day at the garage, as an employee rather than an apprentice.

He sits himself up in the chair, rubs his eyes. A yawn escapes unbidden.

Yaz smiles, but does not move.

There is such a thing as outstaying your welcome, but the thought of leaving Kya freezes up Yaz’s insides. She doesn’t know what she would say, should Ryan bring the subject up.

But he knows her well. He leaves without fanfare, to return with a blanket and pillow for the two women, placing them down in the space between them on the sofa.

The Doctor barely acknowledges him, instead focusing on twisting some sort of circuit with a plier, face gaunt but jaw set.

Yaz is the one to look up at Ryan. Gratitude floods through her, and she thinks: the two boys, the steadfast earthly.

‘Sleep well,’ she says.

‘Rest your leg,’ he reminds her. Pats her knee.

He drags his tired feet up the stairs to bed, and leaves them with their unspoken searing the air between them.

The Doctor’s shoulders have long since drooped, but she is attentive to Kya again, eyes flitting over his sleeping form to check for any irregularities.

Forceful sleeping can be forgiving sometimes; there is less restlessness, fewer chances to interrupt the healing process. He does not slip further, but they both know it could change.

The only time the Doctor does not look at Kya, she looks at Yaz instead. All heart and vulnerability.

‘You should sleep, Yaz,’ the Doctor murmurs. ‘You need it more than me.’

Yaz shakes her head. ‘You were in that ship too.’ But she knows that won’t stick; knows they both know how differently the Doctor works. ‘I just need to see him get through the night.’

Every time their eyes meet, it is a small attempt at healing. For there to be no rift and no uncertainty. They are here, together, even if it sears the air between them.

The Doctor nods.

‘He means a lot to you,’ she notes.

Yaz’s phone is buzzing with new messages, but she pays it no mind.

‘He looked out for me,’ Yaz explains. ‘Listened to me.’

The rest of it—all her history, all the unspoken—strains at her lungs. She knows the dam will break and she will be washed away with its tide. But hasn’t she tried? Would it not help but hinder?

She is so tired of trying.

Her own ghosts are weakening it with every near-miss.

Back to the Doctor’s eyes; the widening and the hurting.

‘He kept you safe?’

The look on the Doctor’s face ruins her.

‘He helped,’ is all Yaz offers. Any more would ask for an avalanche.

She has to keep her leg horizontal; it whines for her attention, and she is only human. Whilst the Doctor hunches around her contraption, a circuit encased by bent metal, Yaz takes the time to massage the aching limb.

Sonya Khan (01:32): hey yaz

Sonya Khan (01:32): where tf are u

Yaz (01:34): At Ryan’s. We’re looking after Kya

Sonya Khan (01:35): uhhhh is he ok?????

Yaz (01:37): Tell you more tomorrow

‘What happened to your leg?’ the Doctor asks.

It is past three, and time’s grasp on the world is blurred. Yaz feels so sparse here; even as sleep threatens to muffle her, it seems as if her particles are spread out into the air, dusted over Kya and the Doctor, coating them in her attachment. No matter how hard she tries to gather herself up, they are unwilling to leave, unwilling to let her forget.

‘I was protecting Kya,’ Yaz says eventually. ‘He needed a part.’ She was so angry when she woke up. A broken leg and nothing else to show for it. The payoff was Kya alive, and whatever the part was for. You don’t know what that will do. You really don’t. Her eyes widen as it finally hits her. ‘For the teleport.’

She can see the Doctor stuff down her response. Fingers gripping the bulky device now drum on its metal sides.

And in the pause, Yaz bites the bullet.

‘Can you come here? Can you...’ She squeezes her eyes, embarrassed. ‘Can you be here?’

The Doctor startles.

‘Please.’

She’s at Yaz’s side in an instant. Her, ‘Of course,’ is a murmur escaped into the air between them; softening, enlightening.

Yaz moves further into the sofa to accommodate for the Doctor, but her arm latches on.

‘You’re here,’ she says, and the words hearten her. They will always hearten her.

‘I’m here,’ the Doctor agrees.

The Doctor disappears for a few moments, to get a few extra parts for her device, Yaz supposes. In those moments, consciousness disappears easier.

The world dips into unreality, and emerges with a fuzziness on its periphery. She is dragged upwards by the ache.

It’s become too much. Yaz sits herself up, scowling both at the interruption and her audacity to fall asleep, on this night of all nights.

‘I could help, if you want,’ the Doctor says, gesturing to Yaz’s leg. ‘I’ve picked up a few different techniques in my time. Very interesting, how many spas there are across the universe.’

Yaz nods her head, and tries to calm her heartbeat. Closes in her eyes, in the knowledge that no sleep will come.

Kya is seized by a bout of coughing, and their hearts jump into their mouths. But he settles into sleep calmly, almost as if it never happened.

The Doctor does not retract her hands.

‘Can I just ask?’

The Doctor tenses. She hates how quickly the Doctor tenses.

‘How d’you know Kya?’ A pause. ‘Only, he’d said you’d met before. That was how he could work the teleport.’

Together they watch the strokes of the Doctor’s fingers on the fibres of Yaz’s jeans, the comfort almost hypnotic.

Yaz suspects it may be just as much of a comfort to the Doctor.

Seconds pass, and with each stroke, she is more and more convinced she will not receive an answer. But the tense shoulders relax, and in that she finds hope.

‘We both attended a training session, a long time ago. Training for emotional strength, and recognition.’

Yaz frowns. ‘But he’s telepathic.’

The Doctor nods. ‘This was for hearing emotions. As wavelengths. A rare ability, but something our species have in common. Needs to be refined.

‘I was there for fun. Kya wasn’t.’

‘What was he there for?’

The Doctor shrugs. ‘We never asked.’ She frowns, ‘It would’ve been rude. He was different. Serious. Determined. He had… so much on his shoulders.’

Yaz gazes over at his sleeping form; the bandages wrapped on his head, his blistering hand.

She wonders what he sounded like then; all his thoughts and feelings. She wonders how much happiness would have been discovered.

She wonders what he would sound like now.

Now more than ever, she wants to hear him.

‘He said he’d escaped,’ Yaz says, to no one and nothing in particular.

‘I think he was very lucky to find Earth,’ the Doctor concurs. ‘But luckier to find you.’

‘Can you do that, then?’ Yaz continues. Her words peter off into a yawn. When she recovers, she pushes on. ‘Emotional wavelengths?’

‘Yes.’ The Doctor’s hand, still on her leg, a sure weight. ‘You need to rest, Yaz.’

When sleep does take her, she dreams a humming. Something so despondent she could fall to pieces in it. So she runs, and runs, and runs, just to find the source. Just to soothe and reassure and let light grace it.

She moves mountains for it. Worlds whir beneath her. And when she stops, she is faced with the Doctor, crumpled and forlorn, in Kya’s workshop.

Yaz takes the Doctor’s face in her hands, and hears, with every tear that falls, that same soul-breaking sound.

She wakes up with the dawn in despair.

But the Doctor is there to hold her.

‘What do I sound like?’ Yaz asks.

Kya stirs in his sleep. Above them, the first signs of a house waking up; footsteps, Yaz has learned, from Graham’s bedroom, gingerly facing the day.

‘No,’ the Doctor says immediately. ‘Yaz, I won’t.’

‘Why not?’ Is she the one asking questions now? Is it coming back to her? ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I couldn’t do that to you. You’d have no guards. I’d hear everything.’

Well. Yaz pulls the blanket up to her chin, but it feels as if everything is spilling out of her regardless; all her particles and all her past mistakes. Haven’t they led her here?

‘D’you always ask for permission?’ Yaz asks. ‘Or is that just a Doctor thing?’

‘People should ask permission,’ is the only answer she gets. Not a full response, Yaz thinks, but enlightening all the same.

‘What if I gave you permission?’

‘Yaz. Please.’

She can see the idea of it latch onto the Doctor, pulling her back upright and tightening the tendons in her arms.

Not for the first time, Yaz wants to pull away at the thread of her. Fluttering; let it all come undone. All the walls would fall down, stone cascading like silk strips in slow-motion. Let it shed light on recollections refused healing.

Let it uncover her, and the light cover them both.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t want this to be the only thing we talk about.’

The pause is permission enough to continue.

‘I wanna ask you normal things—normal things for you—like… what do you want for Christmas? And what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? And do you wanna keep my space pyjamas?’

‘Haven’t thought about Christmas.’

Every breath is a deliberation, a musing of great consideration. Drip, drip feeding answers; slow and unsteady, but better than nothing.

‘S’pose what I want is company. Fish fingers and custard has to be up there as one of the weirdest. And only if you’re okay with me keeping them.’

The contraption in the Doctor’s hand chirps into life. Not much to it, only a light and a small screen in the metal encasement. When it spurs into life, so does the Doctor—if only to place it on the coffee table nearest to Kya, and to press a button.

Yaz asks after it.

‘Official diagnosis,’ the Doctor announces grimly. ‘I could be right about Kya but I could also be very, very wrong.

‘I don’t want to find out too late.’

Their legs are entwined, each leaning against the arms of the sofa. Facing each other, both staring at their entanglement. They know their purpose in the weak light of morning, but for a few seconds at a time, it feels as if the universe is spinning around them again.

The Doctor’s foot twitches, spasming onto Yaz’s thigh—involuntarily tickling her, and Yaz jumps.

A flash of brilliance breaks through the moroseness in the Doctor’s eyes—shafts of clarity breaking through deep grey, heaven in the sunbeams—and Yaz feels it shoot through her. Giddy nervousness—she has been so tense, so ungrounded, in all her effort to conceal and uncover; the anticipation cuts through like relief.

When are you gonna tell her? Sonya asked.

And, Yaz thinks—how can she not know? After everything, how can she not guess?

Through concentrated effort, Yaz leans forward; reaches out for a hand to cherish. She can feel eyes on her, even as the Doctor meets her halfway.

Porcelain skin, a criss-cross of elements to make this hand exactly what it is. The many surfaces touched, winds rushed past, rhythms coursing through, making their mark on the sensation of her touch.

Yaz grips it like she never wants to let it go. It is truth; it would be a truth she gives willingly.

Finally, she looks up at the Doctor. Eyes attentive as ever; clouds breaking just for this moment. Just for her.

She could say it, right now. Fulfil her promise to her sister; make these walls a witness as well as the city.

She breathes in. Clears her throat.

But truth is difficult. It isn’t easy to give willingly.

She almost wouldn’t mind the Doctor hearing all of her—hearing her unguarded. Perhaps it’s easier in wandering hands and wavelengths.

Yaz frowns. ‘Are you scared I’m going to ask you the same… that I’ll hear you?’

The Doctor stills.

‘Is it ‘cause you don’t want to do the same?’

After the silence; Yaz’s confession.

‘I think I just wanna say… I wanna listen.’

A re-hashing of grievances, allowed to dim in the dim morning light.

‘So much happened,’ the Doctor breathes. ‘And there was too much time. Too much and no time at all.’

‘I know,’ Yaz says. ‘I get that. I felt that when you were gone.’

She can barely breathe through each word. Truth is difficult.

Her hands have cradled the Doctor’s for the past five minutes; now they ache to move, to dust her reassurance on the Doctor’s shoulders, the flat of her chest, her cheeks. She wants to communicate through touch, through kiss, through tears—the untethering and the return, the running and the sudden standstill, the clawing back of reality after its disdain for her. Words are numb on her lips. Should it not be easier, to evoke understanding however it works best? Emotions, and sensation, over verbalisation? Would it not be enough to listen, to beat her heart and listen?

And now there is despair in the Doctor’s eyes again. Tears for her—tears for Yaz. A shuttering despair—Yaz can almost hear it—but with every second that passes a new chunk of light streaming through.

Empathy, and all its hurt.

Barely a breath between them. Olive branches never so intimate.

‘Were you okay?’ the Doctor asks. Her hands grip now. They plead in place of words.

‘I was here,’ Yaz responds. She has to hope it is good enough. ‘I got through it.’ Pain still illuminated; another shot of light. ‘But were you?’ she asks. ‘Where were you?’

Ache personified. The Doctor crumples.

‘I wish I could’ve returned. I wish I could’ve told you I were alive. I wanted—I wanted to see you. I wanted to know you were okay. There was no way… No…’

Their foreheads come together. Yaz does her best to take all of it, embolden the both of them. Freed by the confession—empathy and all of its hurt returned, nestled in their embrace and held hands and a determination of presence.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor whispers.

‘It’s okay,’ Yaz says. Pulls away to look at her. ‘I mean it. It’s okay now, Doctor. I need you to know that.’

Graham takes one look at Yaz and tells her to go home. It is a sentiment the Doctor echoes: emotionally bruised, she is nonetheless alert.

Yaz cannot say the same of herself. The thought of leaving Kya still feels wrong, but bed calls and they know to contact her.

At Yaz’s questioning remark, the Doctor reassures her. ‘I’ll be fine. Got plenty of work to do.’

Graham gives her a lift; he offers no complaints, only the promise to pass along Yaz’s well wishes to Ryan. He watches her leave in the Park Hill car park, and despite the expansiveness of the grey and the uncomforting, Yaz feels emboldened by the reassurance Graham has come to mean.

She just wishes his eyes weren’t so big and sad either. Of all the people to deserve it that pain the least.

Returning home is a commotion of concern and fury, but it happens on a different level of existence. Yaz does her best to explain, the explanation diluted as always, then to wave it off and sleep.

It takes an hour for sleep to arrive, regardless. The space in her bed feels enormous. Her arms fold around the thought of the Doctor; today, as always, it is not enough.

Sonya ambushes her on the way to the shower. Livewire, suppressed. Yaz frowns, as much as she can manage.

Then Sonya hugs her. She has to drop her towel. Sonya’s arms wrap around her middle, and Yaz folds herself into the hug.

‘I’m sorry about Kya.’

Yaz thinks she responds with a, ‘Thank you.’ It is hard to tell between sobs.

‘Where’s the Doctor?’

The smell of fish and turmeric fill the air, senses entertained by the quiet hiss of the pans. Yaz had forgotten she was hungry.

‘Looking after him,’ she responds, rubbing her eyes. ‘She hasn’t slept.’

Sonya nods haltingly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sonya says, over washing up bubbles.

Confessions always happen over the kitchen sink, Yaz notes.

‘Why?’ she asks, keeping her head forward. Betraying nothing.

‘Didn’t react right about the Doctor,’ her sister explains. ‘I think it hurt you and I didn’t mean to do that.’

Yaz breathes out. ‘Thanks, Son.’

For a few moments, it is just them, sisters, washing up their pots together. If their mum could see them now.

Sonya shrugs. ‘Think I were just scared.’ She passes a clean plate for Yaz to dry. ‘Part of me was scared you were gonna, like, go mysterious again. Leave us without warning. And the Doctor made that happen last time. Then I thought, well, if it’s what helps, makes you happier, then I can deal with it. It’s better than you moping, innit?

‘And seeing her better convinced me of that, I guess.’

Yaz looks at her. Sonya’s trying so hard to be nonchalant; calm and collected over brewed frustration. It heartens Yaz: her little sister, growing up.

‘You think she’s getting better?’ she asks, not without surprise.

‘Well, yeah. Come on, Yaz. Remember how she was before? D’you think she could’ve stayed with Kya then?’

The determination and clarity on the Doctor’s face fills her mind’s eye. There was one moment where she seemed to recede into herself, Yaz remembers.

But it didn’t last long.

So Sonya’s right. And she knows it, too, if the self-satisfied smile on her face is anything to go by.

And despite the day, Yaz smiles back.

‘You really should tell her, though. I mean it. Everything.’

‘I know, Son. And I will. Soon.’

‘Good.’ Sonya nods. ‘’Cause this emotional constipation isn’t a good look on either of you. Oh—’ she grabs the fresh flowers from the kitchen table. ‘Mum bought these for Kya. From all of us. Tell that weirdo we’re thinking of him, yeah?’

Graham sets them on the coffee table.

Five minutes later, Yaz gets up to pile the open ice cream wrappers beneath them.

Months before they would’ve sat in near-silence, nothing but the TV chatting to them and the occasional swell of wind whispering at the window.

Now they have a charge, and a duty, and multiple preoccupations. But no paints, this time.

She wants to paint. She wants to paint the Doctor sleeping, still. She wants the preservation, the notion that their time together means something. As if it could ever mean nothing to Yaz.

‘I think she’s getting better,’ Yaz says.

Graham looks up from his book, surprised.

‘The Doctor, I mean. Sonya said so, and I think she’s right. She’s opening up.’

Carefully, Graham closes his book. Half the pages are dog-eared, creases an almost permanent feature for the paper, as if they were a fundamental part of its creation. It must be a book well-loved, well-understood.

‘So did she say where she’s been?’

Yaz shakes her head. ‘But she wasn’t there by choice. She was sorry. For not being here.’

‘That ain’t her fault, then, is it?’

‘I know,’ Yaz says. ‘I know.’

The last thing she needs the Doctor to feel is guilt. It already eats her up from the inside—she sees it every day, in the weight of her shoulders and the gaze just out of reach.

She needs the Doctor to know she doesn’t blame her. Not anymore, and she never did by much, anyway. The relief of life is all that matters, especially when they were so close to it being taken away.

Whatever indisposed the Doctor, it did not stop them from hearing each other. She takes heart in that.

They go from a quiet afternoon to calamity—all at once.

Three things happen at the same time:

The first is that the Doctor’s device pings, the screen lighting up yellow with words in an alien language. Yaz can’t decipher it. It doesn’t fill her with any hope.

The second is that the Doctor returns to the house: five polite knocks on the door to announce her arrival. She has no sonic and no TARDIS to let herself in with.

The final event is that Kya’s peaceful sleep is interrupted—another bout of coughs that make him convulse. Yaz is by his side in an instant, with little more purpose than to be there if he needs a hug. But there’s nothing she can do—his movements seem jagged, painful, yet she won’t interrupt them. All she can do is hope for the best.

Then, when they subside, he wakes.

The Doctor is just walking in, coat flowing behind her.

‘What?’ is the Doctor’s first word. ‘He shouldn’t be awake! What?’

His eyes are fluttering rapidly, brows knitted together. His face is shallow but his grip on the arms of his chair is like iron. His burned hand must be agonising him, Yaz thinks, but he pays it no mind.

He attempts to rise out of his chair, for Yaz to push him gently back.

‘Hey, hey,’ she says. ‘Kya, you need to stay seated; you’re going to hurt yourself.’

Instead of listening to her, he scowls at her.

He is soon distracted by the interior of the room, however—the warmth of Graham’s living room apparently not what he was expecting. That iron grip is tighter now—and he shakes, though out of weakness or fear, Yaz cannot tell.

‘Get off me,’ he mumbles, swiping her hand away.

Yaz is rooted to the spot. Only capable of wide eyes and plummeting, the lurching feeling.

‘Where am I?’ he gasps.

The Doctor has rushed over to her device, taking in the alien words with no small sense of alarm. ‘Oh,’ she sighs. ‘Oh, that makes sense. That makes… awful, awful sense.’

‘Doc?’ Graham asks, wary but safe where he stands in front of the door. ‘You gonna key us in at any time?’

‘Hold on,’ she says, giving her device a few thumps on its side.

‘Who are you?’ Kya asks. He tries, again, to stand up, but his legs are weak and they won’t support him. ‘Where is this? I thought I… Is this it—did you capture me?’ There is little else except contempt in his eyes—contempt towards Yaz, or whoever he thinks she is. Where her eyes widen, his narrow. ‘And this is your version of a prison cell?’ The volume of his voice is rising as he looks around, panicked. ‘So my crimes were not enough? You weren’t satisfied with hunting me down—you made this sick illusion of freedom to torture me further?’

‘Kya, that’s not what’s happening here,’ Yaz tries to reassure him. ‘Your ship exploded.’

‘I don’t have a ship!’ he roars. ‘I can’t have a ship! Do you think I had time to build a ship?’

She doesn’t understand this. She doesn’t understand anything.

No—nothing, except the words of a trapped man.

She looks over to Graham. ‘Keep the doors shut but the window open,’ she instructs him.

‘Hey!’ Kya shouts. ‘I’m talking to you, xtatsa! I said get off me!’ He attempts to push her away, feeble though he is. Yaz still lets herself stumble backward; keeps herself upright, but gives him the satisfaction.

Even though this is breaking her.

The Doctor winces.

‘But… people will hear,’ Graham protests. But Yaz won’t back down, so he strides over to the front window and inches it open.

She hopes it will help. ‘I’m not Xtando,’ she starts. ‘I’m human, and you crash-landed on Earth—’

‘I have never heard of Ughth,’ he interrupts. With great effort, he hauls himself into a half-standing position, attempting to lean into Yaz’s personal space. ‘I will not comply,’ he hisses. ‘You may have captured me, tortured me, but I will not be moulded into your toy.’

This close, she can see the severity of his burns, the sweat from his exertion—and how quickly he is starting to heal. The gristle of flesh, shielding itself from further harm. It is too close for comfort. She takes another step back—knocks into the flowers.

‘Do you not recognise me? Any of us?’ she asks desperately.

‘Why would I recognise my jailers?’ he shoots back. ‘Why would I want to? Spineless, each of you. Serving a reign that only cares for itself. Spineless.’

‘Hey!’ the Doctor announces. ‘You’ve got no business talking to Graham and Yaz like that.’ Another beep from the Doctor’s device—reading it, her eyes widen further.

It is as if a bolt of lightning animates him—as soon as his eyes land on the Doctor, his whole body jerks with intensity. Fear and hatred, real hatred, flash across his face.

With each word, each glare, Yaz slips further into confusion, the stone in her stomach sinking deeper and deeper.

‘You,’ he spits. Wobbles on his legs until he regains his balance. ‘Time Lord! Time Lord here to witness me! Of course you would—you would—nothing is ever enough for you, is it? Nothing ever satisfying except obedience—I spit in the face of that obedience—I spit at you—you witness me rebuking you, your people, I spit at the Order and the Reign—how dare you how dare you how dare you—’

He collapses onto his chair, groaning.

‘—so many died for your people and this is my thanks—’

Wide eyes and wondering at the Doctor.

She is extremely still.

She takes three steps forward, the tension suppressed, and stops in front of him.

Kya—this strange version of him—breathes heavily, a whimper through each exhalation, but with each breath he forces himself to glare up at the Doctor.

‘They’re gone, Kya,’ she tells him, voice all stone and recent suffering. ‘Yes, I’m a Time Lord. But the rest of them are gone. I will not pester you. You never have to deal with us again.’

Kya’s heavy breathing fills the air for a few moment as he processes this information.

‘Gone as in… dead?’ he wonders, eyes searching hers rapidly for the truth.

The Doctor nods.

‘Hm.’ And Kya smiles. ‘Good.’

Enough exertion, at last, to tire him out. Closed eyes and a wicked smile, he is pushed into sleep once again, unable to deal with the fallout of his revelations.

‘I’m sorry you had to relive that,’ Yaz says.

The quietness in the air is too loud. It wraps around their ears, crawls down to their mouths, and suffocates them. It is the constant reminder of inadequacy: all of the words they need to say—all their bewilderment. All of it clogging up the room like a fog. In it, she fumbles around to find the Doctor.

The Doctor leans over the sink, hunched shoulders and bravado in tatters. The tap water streams into a glass, filling up and overflowing. The only sound to break through the searing quiet.

Yaz wishes she could say the right things, wishes she could dial back the clock to unmake those moments, their memories. Something—anything—to help the Doctor’s state of mind. She hates feeling so helpless in the face of time. Always time, always that notion of it controlling her. There are so many things to say and so few ways to say them. But emotion can be conveyed in other ways, can’t it? Aren’t they both a testament to that?

‘Doctor,’ she says again.

It seems to bring the Doctor out of herself. ‘Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.’ The tap is turned off a little too forcefully, its protestation short-lived.

‘Don’t be, please.’

Yaz steps forward to wrap her arms around the Doctor’s middle. Hands clasped at her midriff and touch warming. It does the trick; the Doctor relaxes into the embrace, bringing her hands to fit over Yaz’s own, interlocking.

They breathe together. Sometimes the universe is just for them. The quietness too loud but at least it is theirs.

‘What was that?’ she asks, later.

Kya is asleep now; he’ll be out for a while. They can talk of him and not expect a rebuke. It is a good thing: the Doctor is pacing the length of the living room, hands stuffed in pockets and brain whirring at three thousand miles per hour. She would make him feel dizzy.

Yaz can hardly catch up—and what a difference that makes, she notes. Three quarters of a year and only now are they returning to this dynamic.

‘I think that was the bomb,’ the Doctor says. ‘I went to the ship, and it was definitely tampered with. Kya didn’t lie to us—he just wasn’t expecting someone to have got there first. And what they’ve done is…’ She shudders. ‘They tried to reset him. Take him back to the worst moment of his life—literally, rewrite his cells. Forced degeneration.’

‘Awful,’ Graham recalls. ‘So they made him think he never escaped?’

‘How do we fight it?’ Yaz asks.

She is the person who asks questions again. She is sure of it now.

‘We don’t,’ the Doctor responds. ‘Not yet. I’ll see what I can find in his workshop but until then he’s on his own. But has a chance. He’s a warrior,’ she repeats, ‘and he’ll get through it. In the meantime, we wait.’

Yaz nods. Waiting she can do. He has to get through it. He just has to.

Graham volunteers to replace Kya’s bandages. The others are too wary: they confide it in one another, arms around waists.

They are holding each other so much at the moment. Deprived alike, they fall into it more. Soon their limbs will be indistinguishable from each other; this morphed creature of fear and comfort, reaching out in a hope they don’t dare speak. They are each a flame calling to the other.

She hopes it never stops.

Their reprieve does not last long.

An awful convulsing—Graham shouts for the both of them in alarm and they come running forward, wary. But Kya is always paramount.

This time, when he wakes, he is more attuned to this reality. Through pants of exertion, he can focus on the people in the room and reach out for them.

‘Yaz,’ he gasps. ‘Yaz. Help me, help.’

And heaven sings in the broken moments. Not gone forever—at least, not yet.

Yaz wants to sob. There are tears in her eyes already but when he grabs her arm, she smiles.

‘Hi, Kya,’ she responds, almost laughs.

‘You’re you again,’ he notes, eyes all astonishment and forming tears. ‘I know you. I’m sorry. I know you.’

‘D’you need anything, lad?’ Graham asks. ‘Water? Blanket? Anything?’

Kya shakes his head vigorously. It makes him wince.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Yaz says. It cleaves her in two to see him suffering. ‘Not a good idea.’

‘Just—’ He grunts. ‘Head hurts.’

‘It will for a while,’ the Doctor tells him. ‘But you’re safe here. We’ll look after you.’

He is already crumpling under the weight of it. His fingernails are making indents on Yaz’s forearm.

‘Make it stop, please,’ he weeps. ‘I don’t want to be that man anymore. I don’t want him. Please. Please.’ The begging takes it out of him, and his eyes start to droop.

‘You need to sleep,’ the Doctor instructs him. ‘We’re here and we’re doing everything we can. But don’t use your energy to talk to us. You need to rest.’

‘You’ll be okay, I promise,’ Yaz adds. ‘We’ve got the rest of Sheffield to see, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ he mumbles. ‘Absolutely, yes. I suppose I’m asking you whether you could solicit me a tour…’ His next words are lost to disarray, jumbled by the loss of consciousness.

‘He told me it took him seventy years to build his spaceship. The night we met, he said that.’

The Doctor nods. ‘He’d have no love for his jailers. No reason to speak the truth.’ She turns to Yaz. ‘He wouldn’t have lied to you, Yaz, unless he thought you were dangerous.’

Leaning against the workbench, twisting a bag of bolts in her hands. The Doctor continues pottering about, inspecting gadgets and parts to throw behind her onto the floor.

Yaz thinks back to their first conversation. He asked her if she was okay. He was the one bruised and bloody, but he asked if she was okay.

Yaz smiles at the thought. He had her sussed from the start.

Ryan recounts his first day at garage as he helps Yaz to swap Kya’s bandages. Already, Kya’s hand is healing at an extraordinary rate. There will be no scars.

The more he talks, the more Ryan sounds confident about his day, and his work. She can see it wash over him, scald the apprehension so it comes off like smoke. As he stands up, he is suddenly enormous; an angel of the north, a beacon for reassurance. It is like she can only gaze up at him in wonder, watch as he goes from strength to strength.

‘And you thought you weren’t ready,’ she teases.

He shrugs it off. ‘Nah. Always doubts, ain’t there? But I’m good now.’ He grins. ‘I’m good.’

‘When are you taking me to trial?’ Kya demands.

‘Dunno, son,’ is Graham’s answer, ‘but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear word.’

Yaz watches from the dining table. Graham is adept at this; able to roll with the punches anyone wants to throw at him. Especially with Kya. Life experience, it must be life experience.

Gratitude settles in her stomach like a stone.

Kya narrows his eyes at him. ‘How oddly courteous,’ he notes, ‘for a jailer.’

‘They don’t make ‘em like me anymore,’ Graham quips. ‘Now, you gonna eat the spaghetti I made for you or are you gonna sulk still?’

Kya glares at him in stubborn silence.

Graham looks so tired, Yaz notices.

‘This prison food is…surprisingly satisfying,’ Kya notes.

Yaz and Ryan turn to look at each other in exasperation.

‘Yaz,’ Ryan starts later. Gentle, this angel of the north.

They are in the kitchen again, cleaning up. Confessions always happen over kitchen sinks.

She looks up at him, pushing down the panic.

‘I don’t think I’ll be coming back to the TARDIS,’ he admits. ‘Whenever that happens. I’ve got my life here now. I was gone so long and I missed all my mates. And I think… I think I’m done with life or death.’

Yaz nods.

‘And I think Graham will wanna stay too,’ he continues. ‘For himself too.’

‘I know.’ She tries to smile. ‘I kinda knew anyway.’ He looks up at her. ‘You two got to go home. I think as soon as I realised that, I knew you weren’t coming back.’

‘Is that alright? I mean, if you ever wanna drop in, you know we’re here, yeah?’

She frowns. ‘It’s your life, Ryan, not mine.’

He concedes that. Still, when their hands are dry, he is the first to reach out for a hug. Yaz takes it, gratefully, and squeezes tight.

She sleeps alone in her bed again, the Doctor too busy to sleep.

The emotion of the day drowns her, and she is alone for it. She does not want to be alone for it.

‘How is he?’ Yaz’s mum immediately asks.

‘Too early to tell,’ she responds.

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Another all-encompassing hug.

It is both a relief and a frustration. Kya should be the one getting these, Yaz thinks.

Ramesh Sunder (12:41): Yasmin, have you had chance to think about returning to work?

Yasmin Khan (13:50): I thought that was your decision, Sir

Ramesh Sunder (18:13): Don’t be cheeky. I know that means no.

Ramesh Sunder (18:14): You need to ask yourself whether you really want to return.

The Doctor spends more time in the workshop than anywhere else. She is at home with metal and circuits, calculations beyond Earthly physics and ministrations none of them in the house can keep up with. She will spend an hour trying to find a singular part she chucked behind only five minutes before; or stand in silence for twenty minutes as three ideas hit her at once and unfurl in real time.

As an outsider, the process is both maddening and entertaining. It becomes less entertaining when Yaz realises the workshop has not been hoovered in months. She is less keen to sit on the floor and keep the Doctor company.

But the Doctor asked. Who is Yaz to decline?

She could sit and paint, but that is something she reserves for her time with Graham. She could sit and read, but the anticipation of a sudden outburst from the Doctor keeps her from fully focusing. Instead, she splits her time between being the Doctor’s lackey, holding things she could not name on pain of death, and simply watching the chaos unfold.

Sometimes the Doctor forgets she is there. Yaz can see the transition from awareness to losing herself; the way her shoulders tense just so. Her muttering quietens, deepens, the pitch lowering. Her eyes dart to the door, to the corners of the room, as if to check the parameters, even as her stream-of-consciousness rambling continues, uninterrupted.

In those moments, Yaz wonders where the Doctor thinks she is.

Those are the times Yaz will return to the desk. She’ll put the Doctor’s latest contraption in her hands, and present them to her. Fingers clasp around gesticulations suspended mid-thought, soft touch stroking the backs of her hands. She’ll look straight at the Doctor, and announce, ‘Tell me about this.’

The Doctor’s eyes are so far away in these moments, clouded over with some grief incomprehensible, something unknowable, seemingly unlockable. But gentle words and gentle hands help to ground her. Clouds clear and here she is again, in the present day. Welcomed.

Yaz will think back to their first embraces; how they fell into each other so inevitably. How that will happen, again and again and again, until they can witness this permanent rooting for themselves.

‘I wanna listen,’ Yaz adds. Always.

Sometimes, she’ll flit downstairs to check on Kya.

He sleeps a lot, still. But he wakes more and more, rest less important even as the bomb savages his cells. She waits for him to wake to catch a glimpse of their Kya—to reassure him they are still there, they still believe in him—but most of the time, it is the wrong Kya who surfaces.

Ryan has taken to calling him ‘warped’—right, but not quite right.

Every time he stares at her with no small sense of hatred, it stabs at her like knives.

She never stays too long when that happens.

It tears at her insides.

After one such instance, the image of his animosity seared into her head, she fails to compose herself before returning to the workshop. She takes one look at the Doctor and it hits her—hard—that it could have easily been either of them. Yaz could’ve been the one in that chair right now—unable to understand who she is, or why she is there, in agony and unsupported. The secrets she could spill, with no chance for damage control. Her whole life, unravelled.

Or it could be the Doctor there, reduced to a former self. She could be a world away from the Doctor she knows, and Yaz would have to go through the process all over again: the grief, the coping, the return to a semblance of normality. And, by God—this one nearly killed her. She couldn’t do it again, not so soon.

One quiet gasp between sobs. It is all the Doctor needs to hear.

The Doctor drops her tools immediately and sweeps over to Yaz in the doorframe. With arms like wings, she shields her from her own thoughts, the doomed what-ifs. Her arms wrap round Yaz’s midriff as Yaz’s reach up and hook onto shoulders. Tighter and tightening, they press into each other, in the hope of never letting go.

‘You’re here,’ is the quiet murmur between them, gaunt and gentle.

The Doctor pulls back only to press a kiss to Yaz’s forehead, and Yaz falls into it.

‘I think I’m terrible at sleeping alone,’ Yaz announces.

The Doctor looks at her. She has clamped a screwdriver between her teeth—and despite her nerves setting alight with the words she has uttered, Yaz still finds the mental capacity to find this particular action more attractive than is strictly fair.

She swallows it down and tries not to look at the Doctor. Pretends the pliers in her hands are the most interesting thing in the world. She’s extremely unconvincing. She’s not even trying, at this point.

The Doctor hums, food for thought.

‘Me, too,’ she says eventually.

Yaz is all wide eyes and desperate hope. When she looks up, she sees the Doctor smile at her.

It’s not all bad. Not always.

Sometimes Kya comes through—the right one. She pauses when she enters the living room, caged animal watching the watcher, but then he will smile at her and her rocketing heart rate will settle.

‘Yaz,’ he’ll smile, and the day isn’t so bad, suddenly.

‘I just wish you didn’t have to go through this.’

Kya shrugs. With no sense of decorum, he stuffs a buttered slice of bread into his mouth, chewing quickly until he swallows. Eating is a race against himself—the next time he wakes, it is likely he will refuse it. And, truthfully, he needs all the energy he can get.

‘I’d rather it be me than you,’ Kya admits.

‘Don’t.’ She wraps her arms around her knees. ‘That’s not fair. You’ve got so much to deal with. So much… pain.’

‘And you haven’t?’

When he adjusts his position in the chair, he does so gingerly. He is reluctant to move his head—treats is as a painful, precious thing. And Yaz supposes it is. A skull more fragile than a duck egg; the only thing holding it all together is a thin membrane of awareness. Tear that apart, and what does he have left? A past come to ruin him.

Yaz hopes she is a little tougher, now. After all, she is not the one on the edge of death.

‘We all have our demons, Yaz,’ Kya continues. ‘And yes—I will admit mine are… specific. But I would rather face them here than anywhere else.’

He beckons for her, and she obeys, willingly, perching on the arm of his chair. When Kya takes her hands, pats them twice, his limbs shake. ‘I take heart in that,’ he adds. ‘I take heart in you, Graham, Ryan, being here, waiting for me to return. I take heart in you.’

‘Can you tell me, what your planet was like? The good bits. Before you had to escape. Just the bits you like.’

‘Don’t think that’s the best idea.’ They hear the Doctor’s voice before they see her.

When she appears, her coat swishes around her legs, a movie scene trapped in a jar to be released into reality. It comes with a rather unusual look for the heroine: two tubes of plastic hooked round her shoulders, goggles pinning back the sweep of her hair.

Yaz loves it. But now is not the time for those sort of thoughts.

 ‘If he talks too much about his past, we risk triggering the degeneration again,’ the Doctor continues, bringing Yaz back to the conversation. ‘He needs to stay in the present.’ Her gaze switches from Yaz to Kya. ‘I’m sorry.’

He puts up a stilling hand. ‘No need. There will be plenty of time.’ He turns to Yaz. ‘I assure you—all the time in the world.’

Yaz nods in an attempt to break free of her disappointment. When she looks back up at Kya, her smile is fixed in place. ‘Earth, then,’ she says. ‘The best bits.’

The Doctor’s latest invention is a friendly little device, a globular robot made from all manner of mismatched spare parts. Wheeling around barely two centimetres off the ground, when the Doctor first sets it free it spends most of its time apologising profusely to every part it bumps into, on a floor absolutely covered by them.

Ryan takes one look at it and asks the Doctor, ‘Did you accidentally make a Roomba?’

He then has to explain to her exactly what that is.

‘That’s your own fault,’ Yaz tells him afterwards, patting him lightly on the shoulder.

Its use becomes more apparent when Kya wakes—the wrong Kya, this time. He doesn’t trust it at first, but the Doctor allows him to inspect it. There are no hidden traps or weapons for him to discover, so reluctantly he lets it stay.

He calls it Runda.

He asks it what the time is, and it replies incorrectly. But it seems to calm him down.

Its voice is similar to his—almost southern English, but with just enough of a difference to set it apart from the rest of the human world. The inflections are all the learned patterns of an alien language.

And Yaz gets it. She understands why this had to come first.

She feels less guilty for not being able to stay, now.

Later, when she thanks the Doctor, she thinks she understands all the way Yaz means it.

‘What is the time, Runda?’

‘The time is 3:30 AS, Xterao.’

He asks to be addressed as such from now on. Make no mistake: if this is where he is finishing his life, this is how he wants to be remembered.

He doesn’t like Kya. They are fine with that. He is not Kya, not yet.

Xterao. She lets the name linger in her brain like fog. It seeps into all the corners of her mind—until it comes in contact with all the ways he made himself Kya.

Fundamentally the same person. She can see him in Xterao. She can see him waiting, patiently, for his chance at living.

She can see Xterao in her memories, too. The quiet way he would consider things. The stiffness of his posture when detailing the fire and brimstone of home. The order and the sense of duty.

The fog mixes, not beckoned into recollections, but emerging from it.

‘What is the weather like on Xtapiri?’

‘There is rainfall on the Northern Territories. Most of Hapita is clouded, except for Hapita Xiti, which is foggy.’

‘Always,’ Xterao grunts.

‘Large parts of the Southern Territories are experiencing floods, as it is undermonsoon.’

‘Is that where you’re from?’ Graham asks. ‘Hapita Xiti?’

Xterao frowns at him. ‘Are you not supposed to know?’

Graham shrugs. ‘Must’ve forgotten. I’m not as young as I used to be.’

A pause descends, and Graham leans back on the sofa to return to reading his book.

‘All I’ve known,’ Xterao says. ‘The fog and the smoke and the poverty. Fumes so black you can lose your loved ones in them. The soldiers pass through on their way to die. Yes, Graham. It is where I am from. It is where you will kill me.

‘But it was worth it.’ He makes sure Graham is watching him now. ‘When you sentence me, I want you to question if it was worth the pain and poverty you put our people through. I want you to remember what we did. I want our black smoke to fill your lungs so you remember the uprising with every breath.’

The Doctor emerges from the dining room, and when Xterao spots her, he shuts up. He still looks at her with detestation, but it is shot through with a poisonous satisfaction, her presence a reminder of the loss the other side has endured despite the many casualties to his own.

Yaz understands Xterao is Kya, with all his wounds on display. Real and fresh traumas compounding a lifetime of wrongs made against him. It would make any man mad.

It still makes her skin crawl, however, to see such venom on his face. It almost doesn’t compute. How deeply buried is their man? His carers, his colleagues—what was the man they knew best?

What were his wavelengths? How did he sound? Would she sleep easy after hearing them?

She doesn’t think so, somehow.

Enlightenment has been etched so strongly onto the Doctor’s face they have seemingly permanently opened her eyes. She puts Runda down on the floor—newly upgraded, it scuttles towards Xterao with a pleased little beep—to stand, stock still, staring at him.

‘What do you want?’ he snaps.

‘Xterao,’ she states. ‘Xterao Gera. That’s you, right? Gera?’

‘What is your problem, Time Lord?’

‘Yeah, Doc, you’re speaking inside your head again,’ Graham notes.

She looks at Yaz and Graham to jerk her head upwards. Upstairs.

‘I know why he was targeted,’ the Doctor announces, moving at three times the speed of the human world. She glides over to the workshop desk to snatch up a seven-sided copper box, only to throw it behind her a second later. ‘I still don’t know who but it does help narrow it down, quite concisely, actually. Now if we can just…’

Graham gingerly pads across the floor of the workshop. Slippers are no match against the various metallic parts splayed about, all pointy corners and small dangers. He does an excellent job of avoiding them, however. ‘You’re speedin’ ahead again, Doc. We ain’t in that busy brain of yours.’

‘Right, yes, sorry, yeah.’ She spins round, fixing her gaze on the both of them.

For a moment, it is as if the past year never happened. Here is the thrill of the adventure; the build before the crescendo, when a puzzle piece slots into place and the solution is finally in sight. Every second not spent dissecting the next steps is filled with beautiful anticipation. It burnishes Yaz’s veins with adrenaline.

She can see it in the Doctor’s eyes—laser focus, the cobwebs and dust of self-doubt brushed away.

‘Xterao wanted to escape his past, so he changed his name as soon as he touched down on Earth. He chose Kya, something new, unattached. But the Roomba used his name from the database. His real name is most likely obscured from that, but he’s known—very well known—as something else.’

She stares at them, waiting.

‘Xterao?’ Graham asks.

‘Yes! And that, in Kya’s language, means first.’

Yaz frowns. ‘So… he was the first of something. A leader?’

‘Exactly,’ the Doctor enthuses. She is back at the desk, turned away from them whilst she scours through nuts and bolts.

‘And he mentioned an uprising,’ Graham continues. ‘And he thinks he’s in prison for it, whatever he did.’

‘Exactly,’ the Doctor repeats.

No wonder he ran from it. ‘He led it,’ Yaz realises. ‘Sick of the wars, the soldiers going off to die, sick of… the Reign, he called them… He felt it all so he fought against it.’

The Doctor turns around, looks squarely at Yaz. ‘And they lost.’

Yaz nods. That would explain the prison.

‘They lost that time,’ the Doctor corrects her. ‘His was the first, but not the last. The Reign only carried on for a hundred more years. No backing from the Time Lords, they pulled out, distracted, just when the final uprising began. But way back then, when the first uprising started, Kya knew they might lose, so he built his ship in secret, stole from the factories, dismantled some of the Time Weapons he had to help create. He set it to travel into the future and fled for his life. It’s all documented—it’s all in the Book of Celebrants! The Roomba would’ve got information from that, most intergalactic databases do. But he wasn’t the only one who fled here, so I couldn’t be sure it was him…’

Yaz has to bring the conversation back on track. ‘So whoever targeted him knew he’d escaped. They were part of the Reign.’

‘Or hired by them,’ the Doctor adds. ‘They wouldn’t let him slip through their hands so easily. They’d need someone ruthless, but not likely to kick up a fuss. Best not to bring attention to the fact that they couldn’t kill him the first time round. Someone they could easily disown if pressed.’

‘So what do we do, Doc?’ Graham asks. ‘Fight some Xtando we find on the street? How does this get him well again?’

‘No.’ She frowns. ‘I’m working on getting Kya stable. I’m getting there, I am. But I’m saying to keep a look out. And keep your guard up. They were clever enough to find him in Sheffield. They’d be clever enough to find him again.’

‘We’re going to find them,’ Yaz murmurs to Xterao. He won’t care that it is her speaking to him; he is far gone into unconsciousness.

He frowns as he sleeps, she notices. Kya never frowns so much, she thinks, not while he is not in pain.

‘We’re going to set this right for you,’ she continues. ‘I promise. Then we’ll have all the time in the world.’

She moves to get up. She spots the Doctor watching over, arms folded. Quiet grace and silent determination. When their eyes meet, she smiles at Yaz, patient and locked in it.

And Yaz loves her.

Brief respite. Knowledge only carries them so far.

The worst thing about walking on eggshells, she thinks, is the inevitable failure.

They crack underneath her feet, and it deafens her.

In the murk of sleep, she watches a woman at the window.

The woman cannot actually be there. They’re too high up, with nothing to hold onto except the window sill. There cannot be a woman, standing there, as if this were the front door, and she is simply waiting to be let in.

A simple request, a simple action. Yaz is in half a mind to obey as soon as the thought comes to her. But there cannot be a woman at the window, so she hesitates.

This woman at the window is more of an outline, in truth, but Yaz feels as if she knows her regardless. She knows how she looks as she runs. She knows her smirk; the way her tongue darts out like a snake’s; human only in appearance. She knows how strong the woman can be; how ruthless. She knows that many are warned away from her, on account of how merciless she has been.

Not many people associate with this woman. Yet here is, the woman at the window.

She cannot be here.

It’s revenge. She’s come for revenge; Yaz is sure of it. Maybe she is planning something, or maybe paranoia is enough. There is delight on those shadowed features, at the way the fear grips Yaz’s throat like a vice. Yaz cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot think of anything except for the doom that rolls off this woman like perfume. Bad tidings at Christmas. This woman wants her dead.

There is a woman at the window who wants her dead.

Then Yaz blinks and the window is clear. Nothing to the world except the crisp December breeze.

But there is still a woman who wants them dead.

And Yaz can’t move.

‘You’re here, you’re here,’ the Doctor repeats. One hand on Yaz’s cheek, another palm calming her frazzled hair down. In the dark she is a vision; concentrating all the light available onto her.

In moonlight, she is the unearthly, the most unearthly thing Yaz has ever been honoured to see.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ It is all Yaz can say, her voice no higher than a whisper for fear of bringing the woman back. Each time, the Doctor shushes her, but she has no idea, no idea, what Yaz has done.

Kya is asleep—Yaz knows, from Graham’s text this morning, that it is Kya speaking. His neck is cocked to the side as he snoozes; it can’t be a comfortable position, but he must be pretty dead to the world, if the snoring is anything to go by. It reassures her.

He won’t overhear.

‘Graham,’ she hisses into the room.

At the sound of her voice, he emerges from the living room, usually perfect hair ruffled from last night’s tossing and turning. In striped pyjamas and a complimentary fluffy dressing gown, he looks to be like any other slightly disgruntled grandfather, displeased at the quick coming of the day.

But then again, there is Kya on the chair, fighting for his life.

Graham takes her the sight of her in, her fear formed in slight shakes and the guilt brushed across her cheeks like blush. The subtle grimace on his face disappears in an instant.

‘You alright, love?’ Eyes searching and finding nothing reassuring. ‘Where’s the Doc? What’s going on?’

‘I think I know who attacked Kya,’ she admits. Pauses. ‘Probably.’

Graham’s eyebrows raise. For a moment, he flounders.

‘Right, well,’ he nods. ‘Lot to take in on a Saturday mornin’.’

Yaz nods.

‘Is that… ain’t that a good thing?’ he asks. Concern softening his features once more.

And, God, doesn’t he deserve better than this? Can’t they give him a peaceful Saturday morning, just once?

Yaz takes a breath. Tries to speak. Tries again. Almost gives up.

But there’s Kya lying there, locked in a struggle for his life, and the Doctor just upstairs, giving her all to help him. Despite her own demons. Despite the unlockable, the unforeseeable.

For exactly the reasons she is scared, she knows she has to say it.

‘I think… I might have trapped her in a vat.’