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“Oi! Where is everyone?”
Yaz looked up from her phone, craning her neck around the couch cushion to peer at Graham as he burst into the library.
“What’s up?” Ryan asked without looking up. He was draped over a chair and scrolling through his own phone of the week (his last one having ended up at the bottom of an astroid crater, something the Doctor still maintained as absolutely not her fault in the slightest).
Graham scowled at them, and Yaz’s brows lifted. He looked out of breath. “I’ve been yelling for you,” he said, jabbing an accusatory finger.
“You could have texted, mate,” Yaz yawned, turning back around on the couch and resettling herself into a more comfortable position. “How’re we supposed to hear you hollering and carrying on from half-way across the TARIDS?”
Graham didn’t respond immediately, but his indignation was a palpable thing. Yaz caught Ryan’s eye, and they shared a grin; downtime on the TARDIS could be boring, especially with the Doctor vanished as she was on some mysterious errand. Needling Graham into outbursts was a favored way for them to liven things up a little.
“What’s so important you had to yell at us?” Ryan asked, taking pity on his grandad.
“You won’t believe what I found in my closet,” Graham said, and Yaz blinked. She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but details on his closet certainly hadn’t been topping the list. She also couldn’t tell if he was outraged or excited; with Graham it could be the same thing. Especially if he was hungry.
“What?” Ryan asked, after a beat.
“You have to see it to believe - where’s the Doc? This is her doing, I know it is.”
“What’s up fam?”
Yaz sat up at that, swinging her legs to the floor and turning to watch as the Doctor appeared at Graham’s elbow. She had swapped out her coat for her favorite pair of goggles, which sat on top of her head. She’d pushed up her sleeves, and Yaz noticed her arms were spotted and smudged with grease. At least, Yaz hoped it was grease; with the Doctor, you could never take the most likely option for granted.
The Doctor’s curious gaze bounced from Graham to Ryan to Yaz, and Yaz felt the light of it touch her, filling her and brightening the room. She smiled automatically, and the Doctor smiled back, though the expression still held a quizzical air.
“Don’t know, Graham just burst in here and started shouting,” Ryan answered. Yaz noted the way he held his phone closer to his body as he spoke, unconsciously protecting it from the presence of the Doctor as if she might pull misfortunate towards it like some sort of blonde, chaotic blackhole. The thought made Yaz snort, and Graham shook off his torpor.
“I’d like a word with you Doc,” he said, and she turned, eyes brightening with interest.
“Just one?” she asked, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “That’s a lot of pressure, for a single word. Effervescent, maybe? That’s a good word.” She tilted her head as she considered Graham. He was goggling at her, cut off mid-steam. “Or perhaps voracious? That’s a good one for you Graham!” She beamed, waiting for his word, while he continued to goggle. Yaz stuffed a fist into her mouth, which did nothing much in the way of muffling her giggles. That made Ryan laugh, and the Doctor switched her beam to them, clearly unsure what the joke was but enjoying it regardless. She was just… like that. Genuine. Giving back more than she took.
Graham threw his hands up. “Do you know what I found in my closet?” he asked the Doctor, striving for ominous but ending up somewhere between sulky and indignant.
“That’s a loaded question,” Ryan muttered, and Yaz stuffed her fist farther in her mouth, for all the good it did. The Doctor looked Graham up and down critically, clearly taking the question at face value, something Yaz knew was rarely a good thing.
“A nice jumper?” she guessed, seriously, then considered his current clothing. “Wait, no, a bad jumper?” Graham’s face underwent a series of emotions in rapid succession, but the Doctor wasn’t done. “Couldn’t have been a sandwich, you’d be far less grumpy if it were. A tea set? Oh, did you find my scuba kit?”
“How about a lion or a witch?” Ryan asked, innocent.
“Maybe a wardrobe?” Yaz couldn’t help adding, dissolving into more giggles at the contrast between the looks the Doctor and Graham bestowed upon her and Ryan.
“You’re not so far off, you two,” Graham said darkly, turning and moving out of the doorway. “Come on, come see this.”
The Doctor shrugged cheerfully at Ryan and Yaz, obviously at as much a loss as they were regarding the contents that lurked so offensively in Graham’s closet. They followed in Graham’s wake, the Doctor cataloguing many of the varying things she had found in closets over the years, seemingly oblivious to Ryan’s increasingly pointed metaphorical suggestions. She had no idea why Yaz exploded into laughter at the thought of the Doctor herself emerging dramatically from a closet, and proceeded to regale them with all the times she had done just so. Yaz thought Ryan’s composure might break at that; she could barely breathe.
“A right set of donuts,” Graham complained as they entered his room and he looked back over their hysterical faces. He moved to the wall across from his bed to stand beside a slim, unassuming door. “Now. Doc, explain this to me,” he said, and with a dramatic flourish, threw the door wide. The Doctor gasped dutifully. She then hesitated, and looked back to Graham.
A beat of silence followed.
“Wow, coats,” Ryan deadpanned.
“Behind the coats, you absolute -” muttering, Graham shoved several of the offending clothing articles to the side and, with a last baleful look at them, stepped through. He did not reappear, but his voice floated out, slightly muffled.“Come on! Look at this! Unbelievable -”
“Oh, I love a good trick closet!” the Doctor said brightly, and darted after him. Yaz and Ryan stood alone in Graham’s room for a silent, contemplative moment.
“You don’t er, think it’s actually Narnia in there do you?” Ryan asked, his brow furrowed. From somewhere inside, the Doctor’s voice rose in wordless exclamation. They exchanged a weighted look.
“I hope not, that white witch always gave me the creeps,” Yaz said. She squared her shoulders, and Ryan took a breath. “Here we go,” she muttered, and they stepped inside. They had to push past several old coats of varying and occasionally indeterminable fabric - they certainly didn’t belong to Graham, these coats. One felt like water woven into cloth as it slipped through Yaz’s fingers. She wanted to turn and examine it closer, but Ryan was close on her heel and she was pressed onwards.
Light bloomed just ahead, faint but growing brighter. And then Yaz and Ryan had stepped out of the dark. They were greeted by a blast of humid air and dappled light, and it felt viscerally familiar, almost like -
“A pool?” Ryan said incredulously, moving around Yaz. She was standing with her mouth open, speechless. “An actual pool? Oh my days - “
“You see?” Graham cried, vindicated. “In my closet? An olympic-sized pool? Who does that?”
“You found it!” The Doctor said happily, clapping her hands. “Oh, I was wondering where it had got to. Well done, Graham! I was starting to think she hadn’t given me the pool this go ‘round.”
“You have a pool. On the TARDIS.” Yaz’s voice was faint as it returned to her. She moved up next to the Doctor and they stared out across the still, silvery water.
“Usually do,” the Doctor said, hands on her hips and nose wrinkled in a delighted smile. “She likes to move it around, though, keep me on my toes.”
“Your toes?” Graham repeated. “What have your toes got to do with my closet?” But the Doctor wasn’t listening, instead kneeling and trailing her fingers through the glass-like water. Yaz watched her hands as they moved, pale flashes that sent ripples across the surface. The surface shimmered and fractured as the ripples spread far beyond the Doctor’s touch, shining and winking in the darkness almost as if they were -
Yaz looked up. “Oh,” she said faintly. She knew, in some rational and distant corner of her mind, that she was looking at a ceiling. She had to be, had to still be inside the TARDIS. Indeed, closer inspection later would reveal the delicate filigree and arching supports that lifted the curving, clear dome of glass (or something similar to it, anyway) above her head. But right then, all she could see was the stars. They twinkled down at her, reflected in the water beneath Yaz’s feet and suspending her between them. Between worlds. Her arms tingled, breath catching in her throat.
“Show-off,” the Doctor muttered fondly, standing back up and moving to Yaz’s shoulder as she too craned her head up at the cosmos spanning above them. “She really wants to impress you lot.”
“Wicked,” Ryan said, also staring up into the depths of space.
Graham however was still fixated on the offending pool, and had yet to look above him. “What’s that?” he called, realizing that they were no longer paying attention to the water. “I’d still like to know what this is doing in my closet, Doc. And now you’re not even listening to me -” he broke off, gasped, then continued in a voice that had gone distinctly strangled and, more importantly, distracted. “Is that space? Are we in space? Oh, no, I don’t like -” He was moving towards them, and not watching his feet. It was the first time he had forgotten about the pool, and the pool exacted swift revenge for the lapse.
There was a splash, intersected interestingly with the cessation of his complaints.
It was followed almost immediately by a series of gurgles, curses and exclamations, all of them half-muffled by mouthfuls of water.
Also by choked, howling laughter from Ryan. The lights at the edges of the room pulsed and brightened, the TARDIS reacting to the sounds of laughter bouncing off her walls. Yaz wondered, idly, if she absorbed it somehow, made the shadowed joy a part of her makeup. It was a nice thought, and Yaz wondered then why it made her feel an ache, the shadow of some unknown emotion. She blinked, focused again on the people around her. The Doctor had moved to the edge of the pool to watch Graham.
“Bit keen, aren’t you?” the Doctor observed as Graham kicked his way murderously to the ledge. “Though you might’ve taken some clothes off first, that seems a bit difficult to swim in. Or is that the point?”
Graham spat out a mouthful of water. “I’m done, no, I am, I really mean it this time, I have had it with pools in closets and nonexistent space ceiling and murderous turtle armies and ungrateful grandsons - ”
“You should see the look - on your face -” Ryan wheezed, also moving to the edge and grinning down at Graham who was searching, futilely it seemed, for a way out of the pool. Ryan pulled out his phone and centered it on Graham. “This is so going on my story.”
Yaz found her eyes straying to Ryan’s shoes as he filmed Graham… and the way they poked just the slightest bit over the pool’s ledge. They almost seemed to be daring her to do something about it, those shoes, hanging so precariously over empty air and with Ryan’s laughter echoing around the room.
Yaz glanced up, and met the eyes of the Doctor from Ryan's other side. A silent moment of perfect understanding stretched between them. An inevitable choice was made.
When they moved it was together, as seamlessly as if they had rehearsed. And the teetering, arm-flailing, caterwauling cacophony that was Ryan’s entrance to the pool was a thing of beauty. Unnoticed by all of them, the TARDIS lights pulsed and flared again, as if capturing the sounds and emotions before drawing them back into the shadows.
Even Graham was laughing, leaning back and kicking away from Ryan as he surfaced in a fountain of water and indignation.
“My phone,” Ryan spluttered. “My new phone!” Oh, Yaz thought. Oops. She was still smiling, and knew she ought to feel bad. But it had really been worth it.
“Ah, sorry Ryan,” the Doctor said cheerfully. She pulled the goggles off her head and tossed them aside, not looking sorry in the slightest. “We’ll get you a new one! There’s this planet that makes mobile devices out of semi-sentient crystals, they’re amazing.”
“Sort of like the TARIDS?” Yaz asked, watching the Doctor hop on one foot and then the other, tugging off her boots and socks.
“Sort of,” the Doctor said, then followed it immediately with “a bit. Not really.” Yaz rolled her eyes, still smiling. “Now listen up boys,” the Doctor continued, stepping back to the edge with her hands on her hips. “This is how you make a splash.” She had delivered the words in one long, rapid breath, and thus the boys were caught largely by surprise as the Time Lord proceeded to launch herself into the air with a truly shocking roar of “Cannonball!”
Given her relatively diminutive size, the resulting splash was impressive; it certainly swept over Ryan and Graham in a deluge that left them yelling anew and scrambling away.
The Doctor surfaced with a laugh, the stars that wheeled above flashing in her hazel eyes and reflecting joy and life and something else, something uniquely her. Yaz had no other way to describe it, that light in the Doctor’s eyes. She sometimes saw shadows of it in other places, places like the plunging depths of a rockface, or the burning of a star, or the sinking sun glittering on an ocean’s horizon. Things that were never quite the same, no matter how many times you looked at them.
Ancient, ephemeral, wild things.
The Doctor and Ryan had reached a sort of truce, and were harassing Graham as he swam towards distant stairs, complaining the whole way. The light shifted on the Doctor for a moment, and it threw Yaz back in time, a visceral memory gripping her and sweeping her away. She saw the Doctor, not hauling herself laughing and joyful from a star-studded pool with friends, but dragging herself instead from a grim and uncaring lake, the mark of chains still printed on her arms, still lurking in her gaze. A grim, unyielding gaze, something of the lake in its depths. A chill bites into Yaz, the memory of an icy wind knifing through her and revealing her a coward as she stands and watches a friend drown. The iron-hard ground is cold, beneath her feet, seeping through her shoes and into her bones.
“Come on Yaz, don’t be spoilsport,” Ryan called, and his voice was a ray of light, pushing away the shadows clinging to Yaz. He launched himself back into the pool in a much more credible cannonball than the Doctor, not that she seemed afraid of the challenge as she stepped back to the edge and swung her arms back and forth, limbering up. Yaz blinked, anchored again in the present, the cold wind and grim lake retreating.
“Yeah, come on then Yaz,” Graham said, backstroking his way across the pool to make room for the Doctor who, despite her size, could jump quite the distance when she put her mind to it. They’d learned that about her the first day they’d met, when she had hurled herself across two cranes into the unknown, just to save a stranger. And, Yaz realized, even earlier, when the Doctor had crashed through the roof of the train. Yaz hadn’t been there, but Graham still talked about it sometimes, about the tiny, mad woman who had splintered her way through metal and glass and untold distances. How she had bounced to her feet without a scratch, and had immediately acted to save complete strangers. She had seemed impossible in those moments, invincible. Was invincible, there, preserved forever in the triumph of memory.
A tightness gripped Yaz as she watched the Doctor let out a whoop and plunge into the pool, surfacing with wild, water-plastered hair in a field of stars and friends and laughter. Yaz tilted her face up, again looked at the stars that wheeled overhead, and felt that tightness increase, draw closer around her. It wasn’t pain, exactly. Perhaps the memory of it. But that wasn't quite right either. Could you remember something that hadn’t happened yet, Yaz wondered? Could you regret it? She watched the Doctor, and she knew the answer.
A sudden weight against her shoulders, gone in a breath and followed immediately by a weightless moment that hovered in the space somewhere between instantaneous and eternal, stars shining above and below, tethered neither to the ground, or the sky, or to time. Her ams spreading, reaching, as if her grasping fingers might gather the ephemera, or else leave trails in it of their passage. A breath, caught between her lungs before it can be born, or die.
It was a moment frozen in time, and space, and possibility; it had not yet happened, might not yet happen, has happened a thousand times, in a thousand universes, was happening now.
Clear water, closing over her head.
Time snapped back into place with not so much a bang as a splash. Yaz surfaced, sputtering and choking. She could see Ryan through her streaming eyes, doubled over on the ledge of the pool and entirely too pleased with himself.
“I’m going to kill you,” Yaz gasped, though the words were somewhat undercut by the smile spreading across her face.
“Oi,” the Doctor scolded from where she was kicking herself leisurely through the water. She was gazing up at the clear ceiling as she moved, perhaps imagining that she swam through the stars. Well, who was to say she didn’t? The TARDIS was drifting through space after all, cradling them all within the infinite void. Yaz watched as the turning of the cosmos painted shadows on the Doctor’s upturned face, panes of shifting light and darkness writing themselves across her skin. Or maybe it was the opposite, Yaz thought, watching as she treaded water and bobbed up and down. Maybe it was the story of the Doctor, painting itself across the universe. Again, she saw the Doctor diving into a cold grey lake after a stranger, saw her place her body between theirs and a sonic mine, between theirs and a bomb on a plane, between theirs and so many things, over and over. Saw her face down an enemy stripped of the trappings of a friend, betrayed but resolute. Saw her help dozens, hundreds, thousands of people who neither knew nor appreciated her, would never know what she did for them.
Yaz watched the stars play across the Doctor’s face, and saw her hurl herself through the cosmos, a trail of good intentions and bad decisions in her wake, heedless to the ripples that spread behind her but striving, always, to be better.
Heavy thoughts, not best suited to a time-and-space traveling swimming pool. The spray hitting her face as Ryan attempted a flip into the water was a sharp but welcome distraction, and Yaz laughed as Graham shouted at Ryan for nearly squashing him. The Doctor hauled herself out of the pool, ready to best Ryan’s flip, and Yaz cheered her on as she leapt - and bellyflopped - in truly spectacular fashion.
Light and shadows still danced over the surface of the water, but on its turbulent, wild surface they were fleeting and unnoticed, banished to the corners of the room by by laughter and shouting and water, and they were all of them interwoven into something more, not less. Shadows without light were flat, inescapable things, but so too was light without shadow rigid and unyielding, blinding in its arrogance.
The balance between them, Yaz thought, was found best in the stars. Shadow and light, past and future, ancient and new. She looked to the Doctor, whooping her way through a splash-off contest with Ryan, and she smiled.