Archive of Our Own ^beta

The clinic smelled sharp and clean, like every other medical facility Yaz had been in. She leaned against one sterile white wall, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Ryan leaned his shoulder against the wall next to her, watching the door. Graham had claimed the small stool, sitting with an ankle crossed over his knee. They were all trying their best to ignore the Doctor.

“Doesn’t make sense,” she muttered from the cot in the center of the little exam room. Again. She was perched on its edge frowning at her sonic. She fidgeted with it a moment longer, before Yaz took two steps over and placed a hand lightly on her sleeve.

“Quit using that arm, will you? You’re making me hurt.”

The Doctor shrugged Yaz’s hand off without looking away from her sonic. “I’ve already told you Yaz, this is just an excuse to get inside. I’ve no intention of subjecting myself to such primitive medical practices.”

“You mean like band-aids?” quipped Ryan. He didn’t move from his position against the wall. Clearly, he was happy to let Yaz have this argument with the Doctor.

She was, in all honesty, a bit of a mess. Her bright hair was mussed and stained with blood from a long cut down the side of her face, and Yaz was pretty sure the bruising around her wrist meant it was broken. Yaz was pretty sure she shouldn’t be using it, anyways, alien or no.

“Band-aids,” the Doctor muttered dismissively. She returned to fiddling with her sonic, which had been crushed by the several tons of exploding concrete that had crushed the Doctor thirty minutes earlier. It fizzed in and out of life. Yaz suspected the Doctor might have broken some ribs, too. But she didn’t seem bothered; she’d picked herself up out of the rubble and carried right on running after the man who’d dumped it on her. He only got away via teleport; the Doctor had yanked out her screwdriver to do something – “reverse the polarity, Yaz, classic” – and got only a sad fizzing noise.

That had brought her up short. She’d looked very alien to Yaz, in that moment. Hair a mess, blood running down her face, bright bruises blooming on every inch of exposed skin – not that there was much of that, she kept herself covered, so many layers – and the only thing she seemed to feel was the loss of her sonic screwdriver. She had gazed mournfully down at it for a long moment while the humans caught up, breathing hard.

“He broke my sonic screwdriver.” She rapped it against her injured hand. Her sleeve was ripped to the elbow on that arm, displaying more of the Doctor’s skin than Yaz had ever seen. “I love my sonic screwdriver!”

“Ah.” Graham winced, looking her over. “That’s got to hurt, love.”

“Ah!” The Doctor echoed, suddenly cheerful again. She spun around. “Ten points Graham. Where was the last place we got those weird readings?”

Yaz frowned. “In front of that medical clinic, down the road?”

“Ten points Yaz!” The Doctor beamed. She lifted her injured arm. Yaz could see purple already spreading through the skin. That seemed… bad. But the Doctor only cocked her head with a bright smile. “Think they’ll let us in?”

“I think that’s one for A&E actually, cockle.” Graham looked concerned. Behind him, Ryan looked a bit queasy.

“No weird readings, no point!” The Doctor argued. “C’mon then!” She set off down the street, leaving the humans to trail after her. No amount of gentle questions or firm suggestions swayed her, and so the four had ended up in a tiny exam room in the little clinic.

The Doctor had resisted sitting on the cot at first; they’d argued her onto it and then she had apparently promptly forgot her objections. She was perched on it like a child, feet tucked up on its lower rung, hair hanging down around her head as she examined her screwdriver with total focus. Yaz and Graham had tried several times to get her to immobilize her arm, to absolutely no avail.

“Look, Doctor-”

Yaz’s next futile protest was cut off by the opening of the door. The sonic immediately disappeared into the Doctor’s pocket. She looked up, arranging her face into the open, innocently curious expression she used to eek answers out of reluctant witnesses.

Or, she tried to. Her face froze, her eyes locked onto the person entering the room.

“Hello,” the woman began cheerily. “What seems to be the problem today?”

Yaz looked her over. She wore a doctor’s white coat. She was young, perhaps about thirty, with kind eyes. She met Yaz’s gaze with an open smile.

“I’m Dr. Martha Jones. Who have we here?” She turned her gaze back to the Doctor, who stared at her, still frozen.

Martha moved closer to the Doctor. “Little bit of concussion, maybe?” She asked kindly, reaching her hands out. The Doctor jerked into motion, yanking herself backwards out of Martha’s reach.

“John! John Smith. Nice to meet you Martha Jones.”

Graham, Ryan, and Yaz all stared at the Doctor. She was looking at Martha with wide eyes. She stuck out her injured hand to shake.

To her credit, Martha took it all in stride. “You’ve really got yourself banged up, John. Let’s have a look at that wrist then.” She took the Doctor’s arm delicately. “Can I ask what happened?”

“Oh. You know.” The Doctor shrugged and did not elaborate. Apparently she’d been shocked out of her normal babbling.

“She fell,” Ryan suggested. Yaz winced. A fall could hardly explain the extent of the Doctor’s injuries. But Martha just nodded and continued her delicate examination.

“Well let’s do something about that cut first, and then we can see about that wrist. I’ll bet it’s broken, so we’ll do an x-ray to see if a straightforward splint will do.”

Instead of acknowledging this, the Doctor asked “Martha Jones, what are you doing here?”

Yaz frowned – was the Doctor concussed?

“Working,” Martha replied, quirking an eyebrow. “Well, volunteering. This clinic was set up to see the people in this neighborhood who don’t have a lot of other access to medical care. I’m just here a few days a month, when I have the time to help out.”

“Martha Jones.” The Doctor beamed at her. “Just my lucky day then.”

Martha pulled gauze out of a drawer and began to gently clean the cut on the Doctor’s head. They were by necessity close together, face-to-face, and the Doctor stared at Martha’s hairline, mesmerized.

“Lucky, hm? With a fall like this?”

“Just accident-prone, me.” They were still face-to-face. Martha, focused on cleaning the blood from the Doctor’s cheek, did not meet the Doctor’s eyes either.

“You know,” Martha began mildly, “I had a friend who used to go by that name. John Smith.”

The Doctor, already barely breathing, froze further.

“It’s a common name.”

“He was hardly a common person. Funny thing, he always wore a long coat. Not really like yours, but it’s funny how you get reminded of things.”

“Funny. Yes.”

“Only, the thing is.” Martha paused to exchange the bloodied gauze for clean, and resumed her work. “The thing is, I felt your pulse, just now. You’ve either got an impossibly fast heartbeat, as in you shouldn’t be awake and talking to me, or you’ve got two hearts.”

There was silence in the room.

“Martha Jones.” The Doctor made eye contact with her, finally.

“That coat is a dead giveaway,” Martha said conversationally.

“Love a good coat, me,” the Doctor agreed. Martha backed up a step as the Doctor stood. They were almost of a height. They stared at each other for a moment.

“Well?” Martha raised her arms in invitation and the Doctor stepped forward, catching her in a tight hug.

“Martha Jones!” She said brightly. She pulled back for a split second, grinning, then leaned in again, catching her in a second hug and turning her face into Martha’s dark hair. “My lucky day indeed!” Her voice was muffled against Martha’s hair.

Martha held onto her just as tightly. After a long moment, she pulled back, looking concerned. “Probably should’ve put a splint on you before that,” she said, glancing at the mottled skin of the Doctor’s wrist with a wince.

“No no, I’m fine! Martha, it’s me. We’re just here investigating. It’s brilliant we’ve run into you, actually… oh!” She wrapped an arm around Martha and spun them both to face the other three. “Martha! Meet Ryan, Yaz, and Graham.” She gestured to each of them in turn. Yaz and Ryan smiled uncertainly. Graham reached out to shake Martha’s hand.

“Good to meet you Dr. Jones,” he said warmly.

“And you.” She smiled at all of them. She turned back to the Doctor. “And you are not ‘fine,’ ma’am, not in my book. Back up there before you bleed all over us.”

To Yaz’s shock, the Doctor looked chagrined, and allowed herself to be bossed back onto the cot. Martha resumed cleaning the cut and taped it closed.

“So, John. About that wrist.”

The Doctor smiled sheepishly. “Suppose I haven’t quite got the hang of being a woman yet.”

“I didn’t know you could switch genders.”

“Oh sure. Regeneration reformats every cell in my body. Why not?”
“Wait a mo.” Ryan straightened up at this. “Wait, you weren’t kidding before? About- about bein’ a bloke?”

The Doctor looked at him curiously. “Told you that the day I met you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but…” He clearly had no idea how to continue this conversation. For all her questions, Yaz didn’t either. She stared at the Doctor, at her blonde hair falling around her face, the feminine slant to her nose, the small hands. She tried to imagine her as a man and couldn’t quite make the image come.

Then again, there was nothing particularly feminine about the Doctor, once you got past the obvious. Not the way she walked, or the way she dressed; Yaz had put it down to being alien. You couldn’t well expect an alien to dress like a normal person.

Martha stepped smoothly into the gap in the conversation. “You’d’ve upset my mum a lot less if you’d showed up looking like this,” she teased.

“Really? Why?”

“Seriously? Running off with a handsome stranger – that’s enough to upset anyone’s mum.”

Something had been tugging uncomfortably at Yaz for several minutes now, and the question burst to the surface before she could stop it. “How do you know each other?” She hoped it didn’t come out as desperate as it felt.

“Oh you know. Aliens dropped my hospital on the moon, the Doctor swans in and saves the day.” Martha grinned at the Doctor. “What’s a girl to do?”

The Doctor rubbed the back of her neck. “Martha gives herself too little credit. She saved my life and quite a few others.”

Yaz processed this. “Did she… did you… travel with her?”

The Doctor brightened. “Oh yes! Martha traveled with me. We met Shakespeare!”

“Why did you stop?”

It was as though she’d thrown a bucket of ice water over the room. The Doctor’s smile slipped; Martha’s quiet confidence faded and she looked, for the first time, uncertain.

“It’s complicated,” the Doctor said, quietly and firmly.

“If that isn’t the understatement of the year.” Martha smiled at the Doctor, who was back to avoiding her gaze.

“Ah. Well. Martha Jones. We should be off… investigating. Got lots to… investigate…” The Doctor rubbed at the back of her neck with her injured arm. Martha sighed and grabbed it, gently, pulling it down to the Doctor’s lap.

“I’m not letting you run off and mess this up more. You don’t want to end up having to re-break it if it heals wrong.”

The Doctor just shrugged. Martha frowned.

“You could do to be a little more careful with yourself. You’re not actually indestructible.”

“Close enough.”

“He wasn’t.”

There was a long pause.

Martha rubbed a hand over her face. “Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

The Doctor tilted her head to catch Martha’s eye. “The last thing you should be doing is apologizing to me, Martha Jones.”

“Just…” Martha sighed. “Just let me help, okay? I know you won’t sit still for an x-ray, but let me at least get you a splint for that wrist.”

“From a supply closet?” The Doctor leaned over, elbows on her knees, a familiar lilt to her voice.

“Um. Yes?” By the look on Martha’s face, she knew that tone as well as Yaz.

“Right! Team, we’re splitting up. Martha, show me all the supply closets in this building.” The Doctor bounced off the cot but was brought up short by Martha, standing hands on hips between the Doctor and the door.

“You want to dig into every supply closet in my clinic.”

“Yes.”

“Looking for aliens.”

“Signs of. Yes.”

“With at least one broken bone and a concussion.”

“Well, who’s counting?”

Martha sighed. “There’s no stopping you, is there?”

The Doctor grinned and leaned in closer. “You know me better than that, Doctor Jones.” She tapped Martha lightly on the nose.

“Splint first. Then…” Martha sighed again, looking exasperated. “You’d better have that psychic paper and a cover story. I don’t want to lose my job.”

“Thought you were volunteering?”

“That’s not the point. You, stay. I’ll be back in a moment.”

The Doctor leaned against the cot, crossing her arms and adopting an innocent expression. Martha nodded firmly and left the room.

They stood in silence for a long moment, during which the Doctor started fiddling with her sonic again. It reappeared between her fingers like magic. Yaz hadn’t even seen her reach into a pocket.

“That Dr. Jones seems like she’s got a handle on you, eh Doc?” Graham had remained sitting on his stool. He leaned back against the wall, smiling.

“Oh Martha’s brilliant!” The Doctor looked up, beaming. “She saved the world! Well. You wouldn’t remember. Technically it never happened.”

“So you’ve… traveled with lots of people, then?” Yaz tried to sound casual but from the looks Graham and Ryan gave her, she hadn’t quite managed it.

The Doctor met her gaze with kind, steady eyes. “I’m older than I look Yaz,” she said mildly. Somehow, Yaz felt it as a reprimand. She looked away from the Doctor to focus on the floor.

Martha bustled back in a moment later, breaking the silence that had fallen.

“Right! Here we are.” She maneuvered the Doctor’s broken wrist into a splint and bandage, a process which Yaz felt the Doctor bore with uncharacteristic patience. Once done, Martha stepped back to survey the Doctor, taking in her bruises and torn jacket, and sighed.

The Doctor ignored her, bursting into a whirlwind of energy she had obviously been suppressing. “Graham, Ryan, you take the street. I need to know if there’s any dark scuff marks yay big” – she held her hands about a foot apart – “on the ground. Check both directions. Yaz, you’re on sonic duty.” She tossed her sonic to Yaz, who reached out reflexively to catch it. “Hold that and tell me if it turns blue. Or green. Or possibly pink. And Martha,” she turned with a broad grin, “show me the supply closets!”

Yaz trailed after the Doctor and Martha. The Doctor was more or less back to her normal self, though Yaz thought she detected a manic edge to the Doctor’s energy. It was hard to tell with her, though; for someone so open, she was frustratingly difficult to make sense of.

She made cheerful conversation with Martha as they strode down the halls.

“How’s our mutual friend, then?”

“The good Captain Jack?” Martha shrugged. “Same as ever. He calls me in every now and then. Tell you the truth, my days at this clinic are a nice break from the…”

“Aliens?”

“I was gonna say ‘complications.’”

“Oh. You mean the fun stuff.”

Martha shook her head and, instead of responding, paused at a door. “This is the medication supply for this floor.” It was the third closet they had checked so far. The other two had been pronounced unremarkable and unhelpful by the Doctor almost as soon as the door had opened and Yaz thought, grudgingly, that Martha was being quite patient with the whole process. Martha unlocked this new door with her keys – investigating with an insider had its perks. It was just as well, since Yaz wasn’t sure the sonic was up to unlocking doors. She was still holding it, but it shimmered sadly in and out of life.

“Hmm.” The Doctor bounded inside, sniffing the air. She circled the small room, eyeing the shelves, taking deep breaths through her nose. It was crammed full of shelves, with a few glass-doored refrigerator cabinets against one wall. “What’s that? Sort of… hm… metallic.” She dropped her head back and stuck out her tongue.

Martha caught Yaz’s eye and gave an exaggerated shrug. Yaz smiled back in spite of herself. She glanced away, around the room again, and then down at the sonic in her hand.

“Doctor!”

“Hm?” The Doctor pulled her face back from where she had stuck it deep into a shelf.

“What does this mean?” Yaz held up the sonic, which was pulsing gently green.

“Aha! That would be the metallic traces in the air. Aluminum residue.”

Martha frowned. “Aluminum?”

The Doctor held up several bottles from the shelf she’d been examining. “They were after these.”

Martha stepped forward and took one of the bottles from the Doctor’s hand. The Doctor watched Martha turn the bottle in her fingers, examining it. They were standing so close together that the Doctor’s breath stirred the little hairs at Martha’s forehead and around her ears. For a moment, watching the Doctor watch Martha, the Doctor was not hard to read at all.

“So tell me then,” Martha said, oblivious to the moment. She tossed the bottle back to the Doctor. “Who’s after our supply of migraine drugs and why? These are prescription, but even so. They aren’t exactly hard to get.”

The Doctor shrugged. She stepped away from Martha, pocketing one bottle and dropping the rest in a jumble on the shelf. “You’re probably just convenient. That lock wouldn’t be a problem to anyone advanced enough to be using a perception filter.”

“A perception filter?” Yaz asked. “How do you know?”

“The aluminum!” She grinned brightly at Yaz. It felt like the sun coming out. “Traces of aluminum in the air. Typical of a first generation perception filter from the Eridani system. This is the only place it’s been strong enough to detect, so they must have stood here for at least…” she licked a finger and held it up “… four and a half minutes.”

“Now you’re just showing off,” Martha laughed.

They ran into Ryan and Graham back on the first floor.

“You were right doc,” Graham said without preamble. Ryan pulled up his phone to show a picture of the sidewalk around the clinic; several pairs of scuff marks, exactly as the Doctor had described, were seared onto the grimy concrete.

“I usually am,” she said cheerfully.

“So what’s it all mean, doc? You find what you were looking for upstairs?”

“Oh yes! Martha, I don’t suppose you have a Bunsen burner, seven graphite pencils, a microwave oven, and a place I could work?”

“Oh,” Martha sighed. “I am definitely getting fired.”

Martha commandeered them an empty conference room down a quiet hall. By now it was after closing time for the clinic, she said, so they were unlikely to be disturbed. Ryan and Yaz were dispatched to the TARDIS for supplies. They returned to electrical chaos; the Doctor was sat on the floor, bits of circuitry and wires spread out around her. She was peering at some delicate bits held close to her face. Yaz couldn’t make heads or tails of what she might be doing. Graham and Martha had apparently been banished from the project. They sat talking softly at the head of the conference table, glancing occasionally over at the Doctor. Someone, Martha probably, had acquired tea and a plate of biscuits.

Martha waved them over after they deposited their things in front of the Doctor, who grunted in acknowledgement but didn’t really seem to see them. They joined Martha and Graham at the table on the other end of the room. Graham pushed two full mugs across, and Yaz smiled gratefully.

“So what’s going on here, then?” Ryan asked, accepting a mug for himself.

“Beats me,” Graham said, glancing over at the Doctor. From his vantage point, all he could see of her was her blonde head and the blue tip of her hood.

Martha propped her chin on her hand and smiled in the Doctor’s direction. “She doesn’t change, does she?”

“What was she like as a man?” Ryan asked, curiously.

“Pretty much like this.” Martha shrugged. “Always ten steps ahead of everyone else.” She paused. “Always moving.”

“Sounds about right,” Graham snorted.

“I guess… If you’d asked me, I wouldn’t’ve been able to picture him as a woman. But now…” They all watched the Doctor for a moment. Her hands were quick and graceful as she worked, assembling something that looked like nothing so much as a distracted child’s science fair project. It was a tangle of multicolored wires and metallic bits of the clinic’s break room’s microwave oven, disemboweled. “I guess he was never exactly a man either. He just looked like it, and it… scared you when he dropped the human façade. Because he looked so much like a man, you were never really expecting it.”

Yaz wanted to disagree, but memories flashed into her mind. Rare moments when the Doctor seemed suddenly remote and impossibly imposing; moments when her smile froze for a split second into something dark and chilling.

She saw a similar thought flash across Ryan’s face. Graham only looked sad.

“So tell me love,” he said kindly, pulling them away from the conversational ledge. “What is it you do when you aren’t here?”

“I work for UNIT – that’s the Unified Intelligence Task Force. Sort of the United Nations’ answer to alien contact. We investigate, deal with threats when needed.”

“I guess your resume looked pretty good for that job, didn’t it.”

Martha laughed. “You could say that.” She glanced sideways at them. “There’s plenty of opportunities for the Doctor’s friends. You can call me. If it… comes to that.”

“What, give this up?” Yaz asked indignantly. Her voice rose slightly, and it was very noticeable in the hush of the conference room. They had been talking softly so as not to disturb the Doctor, though Yaz figured a nuclear bomb could go off behind her head and she wouldn’t notice when she was wearing that particular frown of concentration.

Martha shrugged. “There’s only so many people on the planet you can talk to about this. We usually find each other.”

“That’s enough gossip, you lot.” The Doctor had risen from her seat and was pacing towards their end of the conference room, holding the mess of wires and dials. Martha wordlessly pushed the last mug of tea towards her. The Doctor smiled softly at her, and placed her contraption down on the table so she could lift the mug. “This would be easier with the sonic, but that’ll take too long to repair.”

“You gonna fill us in yet, Doc?”

“Patience Graham!” She sipped her tea, regarding her… whatever it was. Yaz hadn’t the faintest idea. It looked as though she had disemboweled several electrical appliances and reassembled them in Frankenstinien fashion, propped haphazardly on one metal microwave panel.

“So who are our thieves, then?” Martha asked.

“Regulans. They’re humanoid, but a couple extra fingers. And eyes. And blue skin.”

“Hence the perception filter.”

“Right.” She smiled over the rim of her mug. “Wouldn’t do to cause a panic on a Level Five planet.”

“A what?” Ryan looked up, confused.

“Earth in this century is still designated Level Five by the Shadow Proclamation. That means – oh, I suppose it’s like a wildlife preserve. If there’s, say, a particular species of turtle you want to protect, it won’t do to have people tramping all over the place, having picnics on the turtle highways and kicking footballs into their nests.”

“And… we’re the turtles?”

She beamed. “Yes you are!”

“That’s… humbling.” Graham settled back in his chair, looking disturbed.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think they’re intending to cause trouble here, these Regulans. But they’re going to.” Her mouth twisted as she considered her tea. “Those scuff marks you found. There were a lot of them?”

“Uh. Yeah. Maybe… twenty or thirty, just that we saw.”

“That’s what they need the medicine for. Martha, did you see how much they took?”

“I’m not sure how much was there before…” Martha hesitated. “But given that the rest of the closet was close to fully stocked, we can probably guess. There was almost a whole shelf missing.”

“They probably took everything they could carry. Enough to distill into – well, there isn’t an English word for it. It’s basically the space equivalent of heroin. Only, Earth’s atmosphere is… hm… incompatible with the chemical compound they’re trying to create.”

“Great. Sounds like trouble to me, Doc.”

“We need to track them down. I’ll offer them a lift home, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it.”

“What, they’re making space heroin and we’re just gonna give them a lift home?”

Ryan grinned at Yaz. “I don’t think you have jurisdiction over the space drug trade.”

She frowned. “Someone must.”

“Someone does.” The Doctor shrugged. “Though to be honest, interfering with a Level Five planet is the bigger crime as far as the Shadow Proclamation goes.”

Ever the pragmatist, Graham asked the pertinent question: “So what happens if we don’t get there before they finish making their ‘incompatible’ space heroin?”

“We-ell…” She drew the word out, rocking back on her heels. “Minor explosion. Not a big concern, only, it is the middle of London…”

Martha sighed. “I should really call this in.”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t realize you’d gone full military on me, Dr. Jones.”

Martha straightened and met her eyes. “Have I stopped any of this?” She demanded, sweeping an arm around the room, taking in the chaotic remains of the Doctor’s project on the floor. “You don’t get to do that, Doctor. I know the rules don’t apply to you, but they apply to me and I’ve broken enough of them for you today. As usual.”

The Doctor tensed. They stared at each other for a moment, during which Yaz felt the breath freeze in her throat. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen someone match the Doctor like that – glare for glare. Not for long, anyways. But Martha didn’t blink, didn’t back down. After a moment, the Doctor relaxed, energy visibly uncoiling from her frame.

“Call Kate Stewart. She’s sensible.” She spoke shortly, but Yaz had the feeling that it was as much of an apology as Martha could hope to get. Martha apparently had the same thought, because she relaxed too, and nodded.

“She won’t thank me. She’s supposed to be having a weekend away.”

“I’ll make your apologies,” the Doctor said, looking distracted again. She poked at her machine while Martha excused herself to make the call out in the hall.

“That’ll help you find them, then?” Graham asked calmly, nodding to her mess of wires. He had a way of speaking that felt to Yaz like a comforting blanket being pulled over the room. Even the Doctor responded to it, usually, and she did now. She looked up with a smile. Yaz could see tiredness etched around the corners of her mouth for a moment before it was smoothed away.

“More or less. Like I said, the sonic would be quicker, but needs must.”

As soon as Martha returned from her call, the five of them tramped out of the clinic into the cool night air. A few pedestrians passed them on the opposite side of the street, but this part of town was not much of a destination in the evenings. The white noise hum of London traffic, car engines and calling voices and beeping machinery, seemed dim and muted through the fog that was settling slowly over the city. The Doctor held her contraption close, occasionally twisting dials and flipping switches with her splinted wrist in a way that made Yaz wince. Martha walked half a step behind the Doctor, and Yaz was close enough behind them to hear her ask:

“So how long’s it been, then? For you.” She glanced sideways at the Doctor.

The Doctor ignored the question, focusing on rearranging some of the wires one-handed.

“Because it’s been about five years for me. Since the… that year.”

Still not looking at her, the Doctor spoke. “I suppose it’s… been a bit.”

“With you that could mean anything,” Martha smiled, but the tension was back in the line of the Doctor’s shoulders.

“Been… well. A few years… a few… centuries.”

From the way Martha hesitated, she hadn’t quite expected that. Yaz hadn’t expected that either, to be honest. She realized she had had no idea how old the Doctor was; another question that had been put on the very crowded back burner.

“Way to make a girl feel special,” Martha groused. Her tone was light and teasing, but it held an undercurrent of something heavier.

The Doctor frowned. “Hard to keep in touch, when you live the way I do.”

“’Course,” Martha said, glancing away.

The Doctor stopped in her tracks at that, then rounded on Martha. “What, should we be pen pals?” She snapped. “You want me to pop round for tea or something?” Martha blinked in surprise. Yaz felt herself shift back away from the Doctor’s sudden surge of anger. “You ought to know me better than that by now, Dr. Jones.” With that, she stalked off down the block, alone. The rest of the group stayed frozen beneath a streetlight, watching her go.

Martha tore her gaze away from the Doctor’s back, a pale figure disappearing down the dimly lit street before them. The pale blue coat swirled around her ankles; a lonely image in the nighttime fog. The four humans stood in silence for a moment. Yaz glanced over at Graham, but he was watching Martha with concern.

“How long have you been traveling with her?” Martha asked, apropos of nothing.

“I suppose… a few months? Hard to keep track,” Graham answered.

“How many have there been?” The words left Yaz’s mouth unbidden; she winced when she heard them echo back at her in the cool night air.

Martha seemed unperturbed. Yaz hated that about her, suddenly. The way nothing seemed to faze her. Martha only sighed, tucking her hands into the pockets of her overcoat. “I’ve been where you are,” she said, gently. “And I get it – trust me, I get it.” She glanced down the street where the Doctor had almost vanished. “She – he, at the time – has that effect on people. He swept me off my feet, quite literally in some ways.” She laughed; the sound landed gently around them in the fog. “Charming and brilliant. Quite handsome, if we’re being honest.” She leaned conspiratorially towards Yaz on that last, smiling slightly. But her smile vanished after a moment. “I don’t know how many. But she’s old, and. Well. We don’t last the way Time Lords do.”

“Time what?” Ryan interrupted.

Martha looked thrown then. “Time Lord. That’s what she is. You didn’t know?”

“No.” Ryan exchanged looks with Graham. “What’s a Time Lord, then?”

“I’ve met two of them, and to be honest, I’m still not totally sure.”

Graham smiled slightly. “And here I thought she was one-of-a-kind”

Martha smiled wryly back. “I think she is. The other one was… a lot different. I wouldn’t ask, if I were you.”

“She never talks about where she’s from.” Yaz felt the words like a betrayal, but couldn’t quite figure out why.

“He never did. The little I learned, I had to force out of him. Matter of fact, I sat down on an alien planet and refused to move until he explained some things.”

Graham and Ryan both snorted at that.

“You’re her match for stubbornness, alright,” Graham said with a smile. “’s probably good for her.”

Martha smiled too. “She needs someone to rein her in, sometimes. I’m glad she’s got you all,” she said sincerely.

“Oi! You lot!” The Doctor’s voice called from a block ahead. She was dimly visible in the fog; her bright coat had faded to a smoky gray.

Graham sighed. “Alright then. Space drug dealers to catch. No rest for the weary and all.” He and Ryan hurried ahead to catch up with the Doctor. Yaz hung back. Martha gave her a knowing smile.

Yaz fumbled for her words. “How did you…” She wasn’t even sure how she wanted that sentence to end. Martha took over for her.

Martha smiled sadly. “Get over him?” She shrugged. Paused. “I’m not sure you do. You just make the choice to move forwards. And he couldn’t do that, when I knew him.” She glanced ahead, to where Ryan and Graham had met up with the Doctor. The three were in animated conversation; the Doctor always spoke with her hands, whether they were full of incomprehensible homemade machines or not.  “She’s always moving, isn’t she? But she never gets away from her demons.”

Yaz, unsure what to do with that last, ignored it. “You seem to be doing well.”

“I made my choice.”

“To leave.”

“To put myself first in my own life.” Martha smiled that sad smile again. “The Doctor eclipses everything else. Doesn’t mean to, he… she just is. Larger than life, you know? The brightest person in any room. I don’t hold that against her. But I also couldn’t live like that. Not even for the universe.”

Yaz glanced sideways at Martha, trying to parse her own feelings enough to come up with a response. After a moment, she gave up. “I can’t imagine trading the universe for anything,” she said simply. She glanced ahead at the Doctor again, and when she looked back, Martha had that sad, knowing look on her face.

“We should catch up,” she said, nodding her head at the others. But Yaz hesitated.

“What happened?” She asked. The question had been burning in her chest since meeting Martha. She searched herself for any inkling of understanding, any scenario in which she could imagine herself walking away from the Doctor.

Martha was silent for a long moment, long enough that Yaz opened her mouth again to say forget it or maybe I’m sorry.

“We met another Time Lord,” she said into the stillness. “He killed millions of people and enslaved the rest. He captured the Doctor, and my family. I spent a year walking the Earth alone, dodging armies and killer robots, and at the end of it all the Doctor turned back time. That year never happened, except for me it did.” She was silent for another moment. “He tortured my family for a year. He tortured the Doctor for a year. He almost destroyed the entire human race and you’d think that would be unforgivable but.” She paused again, pressing her lips closed against a story that Yaz was suddenly sure she didn’t want to hear. “But that’s not the scale the Doctor lives on,” she finished in a whisper. “He almost destroyed the Earth, the whole human species, just to get the Doctor’s attention. The way you or I might buy a drink for someone we fancied at a bar. How do you stand next to that sort of power and not lose yourself?”

Yaz had no response to that. Martha didn’t either, it seemed; once she’d spoken, she seemed to deflate.

“She thinks I hate her for it but I don’t,” she continued, after a moment, heedless of the chaos that was building in Yaz’s head. “I’ve never once regretted knowing her. But I learned in that year that standing next to the Doctor is like standing next to the sun; it’s warm and bright and wonderful, but stay too long and too close and that brightness will kill you.”

“I can’t think that,” Yaz whispered.

Martha smiled sadly. “I know.” She turned away from Yaz. Yaz stayed frozen for a moment, then followed Martha up the street to rejoin the others.

The Doctor was talking a mile a minute, seemingly oblivious to the quiet drama of Martha and Yaz’s conversation. Not as oblivious as she appears, though, Yaz thought. She felt the Doctor’s eyes flick over them, assessing.

“… so the Fourth Altrian moon is technically a commonwealth of Russia. They have currency with the Grand Duchess Anastasia on it and everything, although it shows her with two heads which is hardly historically accurate. Now that we’re all here,” she continued without missing a beat, “the trail leads this way. Kate’s not sending in the cavalry?”

Martha met the Doctor’s gaze evenly. “Kate is trusting you.”

“Good.”

“And calling in the cavalry would be a lot of paperwork on her weekend off.”

“Ah.”

Martha strode forward, past the Doctor, glancing down the side street she had indicated. It seemed, as far as Yaz could tell in the weak light of the streetlights, to lead eventually to a small open space; a park, perhaps. “What’s the Regulans’ opinion of arms?”

“Ah. Favorable.” The Doctor winced.

“Great,” Martha sighed.

“They got her with some kinda… what was that, Doc?” Graham gestured towards the Doctor’s injuries.

“Disintegration ray.”

“Disintegration ray? That’s very scifi, innit?”

“Well. It disintegrated stuff, and it was… you know… a ray…” The Doctor trailed off, then beamed at them all and hefted her machine. “Lucky for you lot, I’m very clever. Along with tracking the perception filter’s signature, this should cancel out disintegration beams, rays, and lasers of all sorts.”

“And what’s the chance it works as planned?” Ryan piped up from Graham’s shoulder.

The Doctor looked affronted. “I just said I’m very clever, didn’t I?” She looked appraisingly at her machine. “I give us 70-30 odds. Well. 65-35. Well…”

Ryan winced. “Nevermind, I didn’t want to know.”

The Doctor winked at him. “Onwards and inwards!” she declared.

The group fanned out behind her, in a roughly triangle formation, Martha at her shoulder looking as calm and competent as Yaz wished she felt. Yaz clutched the broken sonic screwdriver in her pocket, feeling traitorously uncertain. Her conversation with Martha had rattled her. She wanted to be angry with Martha for that, but she couldn’t be. It was only her own questions and her own fears, after all; Martha had simply voiced the things that Yaz had been carefully suppressing. Maybe that should have been a good thing, but right now it felt like a bubble had been popped. Yaz had been shoved rudely out of a fantasy she hadn’t even realized she’d been cultivating.

They emerged into what was, indeed, a little park. A very little park – perhaps an acre of land, dotted around its fringe with trees and what might have been flowerbeds in warmer months.

There was nothing there.

This did not dissuade the Doctor, who hoisted her machine into the crook of her injured arm and stepped forward with a bright smile.

“Hello hello!” She said cheerfully. “You can stop bothering with the cloaking, though it is nice. Barely a shimmer. Color me impressed.”

Nothing happened.

The Doctor’s smiled slipped into a slight frown. “Look, we’ve been all over London today and my friends are a bit knackered, if we’re being honest, so come on out like the polite fellows I’m sure you are and let’s talk this through.”

Nothing happened for another moment. The Doctor’s face slipped a little deeper into a frown.

Something whooshed, and a gap in the air appeared, with two men standing in it. The Doctor must have been right about the cloaking; it looked like a doorway into an invisible ship. Yaz recognized one of them from earlier that day – the one with the disintegration ray. He was holding something now, and Yaz shifted uneasily. A small part of her mind, the bit that wasn’t focused on the man holding the gun, wondered how big the ship was; it certainly wasn’t parked in a large space. None of the trees around them looked to be flattened.

The Doctor, on the other hand, regained her cheerful smile. “There you are! Nice to meet you, officially.” She sketched a loopy bow that Yaz supposed must be some sort of Regulan greeting.

“Who are you?” Asked the one with the gun, suspiciously. “How did you know we were here?”

“Ah well, my friends and I are very clever. I was just saying that, wasn’t I?” She turned to the humans behind her, beseeching.

Martha shrugged casually. “You were saying you were very clever. I don’t remember anything about the rest of us.”

“Martha Jones!” The Doctor looked scandalized, melodrama dripping from her tone. “It was implied!”

Martha, Yaz thought, was obviously as used to this routine as Yaz and the boys were.

“How did you find us?” Asked the other Regulan.

“The ion signature of a Class VII Eridani cruiser is unmistakable,” the Doctor said conversationally. “Tastes like…” she stuck out her tongue thoughtfully. “Hm. Rather like lemons, actually.”

Something seemed to sink into their heads, finally. “You’re not from around here, are you?” Asked the one with the gun.

“Ten points to… what’s your name?”

He scowled. “What’s it to you?”

“I like to know who I’m doing business with.”

“What business?”

“The sort where I convince you to abandon your business and go home instead of alerting the Shadow Proclamation to your activities. Drug running on a level five planet? Tsk tsk.” She shook her head in mock sadness.

The one without the gun settled back, looking irritated. “And what exactly are you going to do about it? You hardly have proof.”

The Doctor shrugged. “I have some credit with the Shadow Proclamation. They’re inclined to take me seriously.”

“A human woman?” He sneered.

“Woman, yes,” she said cheerfully. She glanced back at Martha and winked, tossing her contraption towards Martha in the same breath. Martha threw up her arms and caught it, just in time. “Human… well.” She flung out her arms and spun, coat flaring. “You must have scanners along with those disintegration rays.”

“Right, which brings us to a good question,” said the one with the gun, hefting it. “Why shouldn’t we use this?”

The Doctor came to a halt. Her coat swirled around her ankles. She gave a disappointed sigh. “Because that would be boring,” she said, matter-of-factly. “But alright, if you must.” She lifted her arms high again.

The two Regulans exchanged uncertain glances. It was not every day people swanned up to their ship offering to be disintegrated.

“Oh! Blue switch, Martha.”

They stared at her.

“What?”

“Nothing. What was that about disintegrating?”

There was another pause, then the one with the gun raised it. “Have it your way, then,” he said, and fired.

Yaz flinched in spite of herself.

The Regulan with the gun frowned, and checked it. He aimed again. Nothing happened.

“Oh! Silly me.” The Doctor waved a hand. “Forgot to say. I’m pretty familiar with disintegration technology, and it’s nothing a .7 omega pulse of gamma rays can’t take care of.”

There was silence for a moment as the two Regulans took in this new development.

“Who are you?”

The Doctor bared her teeth in a smile that gave Yaz shivers.

“I’m the Doctor. And I don’t take kindly to people making explosive chemicals this close to human homes. I’m fond of them, you see. Humans.”

One of the Regulans was still glaring, albeit in a confused sort of way, but the other paled rapidly.

“The Doctor is a man,” he said after a moment.

“Oh is he?” The Doctor tilted her head. “Seems to me you can never be sure, with Time Lords.”

The other Regulan glanced at his friend, confused. “Time Lords? Aren’t they a myth?”

His friend had gone white. “I had a friend at Demon’s Run.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the Doctor said evenly.

“He said the Doctor took out an entire army of clerics, and half the headless monks, with nothing but words. He said he barely escaped with his life.”

“One of those days. Wrong side of the bed. You know how it goes.” The Doctor waved a dismissive hand. Her smile was like a shark, sharp and cold.

The Regulan grabbed his friend’s gun and dropped it down the ship’s ramp. He raised his hands in the air.

“What-” his friend began to protest, but the other Regulan grabbed his wrist and raised it too.

The Doctor just sighed. “None of that, I’m not here to hurt you. Frankly, I don’t care what you want to cook up in there. Just do it on a different planet. Or an uninhabited moon. Jupiter has several with less reactionary gasses in their atmospheres. Go there.”

“Yes, anything,” babbled the one. His friend eyed him, disgusted.

“She isn’t even armed!” he protested.

His friend grabbed his arm. “If she is the Doctor, she doesn’t need to be,” he hissed. “We’re going.”

That seemed to be the end of it. Yaz should have known, as soon as she had that thought, that nothing would be that easy.

The second Regulan wrenched his wrist out of his friend’s grip. “So you’ve disabled this,” he said, irritated, tossing his gun aside. “Do gamma pulses work on teleports?” His hand dived into his pocket. Yaz felt everything slow, as though the whole scene had been plunged underwater. He lifted something small and metallic out of his pocket – another gun – her brain insisted. He aimed it towards Ryan, standing off to one side. Yaz saw the Doctor’s head turn towards Ryan, but she was too far; Yaz wasn’t.

Yaz lunged towards Ryan with a yell – and everything vanished.

She woke with a headache. It felt like a drumbeat in her head, a pounding ache in time with her pulse. She took a moment to run a quick check, all body parts present and accounted for. She curled her fingers and wiggled her toes inside her boots. After reassuring herself that all her limbs seemed to be attached and functioning, she decided that she should probably move. It was an effort, and she groaned softly as she rolled herself over, bracing herself with one palm against the floor. It was cool and metallic, and she rested her forehead against it for a moment, gathering the strength to push herself up.

Someone else groaned nearby. Yaz felt her heart freeze; she lifted her head and opened her eyes. Inches in front of her face was another face.

“Ryan?” She whispered.

He mumbled something incoherent in response. She expected they had the same headache, by the way he was holding his forehead.

“Ryan,” she whispered again. “We’ve gotta get up.”

Together, they managed to uncurl themselves and roll upwards into a seated position. They were in a deserted hallway, and to Yaz’s experienced eyes it looked like they must be on a spaceship. It was classic scifi – all gleaming chrome, rounded ceilings, and arching metal support beams. It was entirely silent, except for a faint hum that seemed to come from the floor. Engines, probably.

“How long do you think we’ve been out?” Asked Ryan. He was looking around, dazed.

“Who knows,” Yaz sighed. “Could be seconds. Or hours.” Or days, she didn’t say. There was no way to tell.

“You pushed me out of the way,” Ryan said, looking dazed. He frowned, trying to piece the memory together.

“Well,” she shrugged. “I didn’t do a very good job, apparently.”

He reached over and grabbed her hand. It was warm and human and so comforting that Yaz wanted to cry.

“I’m glad you’re with me,” he whispered.

She leaned her forehead on his shoulder. “So am I.”

They stayed that way for a moment, gathering strength. But common sense won out, and Yaz eventually found the courage to lift her pounding head and lever them both upright.

“What do we do now?” Asked Ryan. He spoke softly. They hadn’t heard or seen anyone since they’d regained consciousness, but why take chances.

“I guess…” Yaz paused, looking around the hallway. “Find some kind of communications equipment? We can try to get a message to the Doctor.”

“He said teleport, right before he aimed that thing at us. Where do you think he teleported us to?”

“A spaceship?” Yaz guessed. “Maybe they had a bigger one hiding in orbit.”

“Maybe.” Ryan looked doubtful. “But why would he send us to his spaceship? Seemed like he just wanted to be rid of us.” He looked around the hallway, as though something new and useful would jump out at them any moment now. “He couldn’t disintegrate us because the Doctor was blocking it… maybe he sent us up here to kill us? Suck all the air out, or something.”

“Then why hasn’t he already?” An uncomfortable thought flitted through Yaz’s mind. “Maybe we’re hostages,” she suggested.

“The Doctor will find us,” Ryan said confidently.

Yaz felt for her usual, comfortable confidence in the Doctor; that absolute child-like certainty that things would turn out alright as long as the Doctor was out there. She found it cracked and yanked her mind away before she could cut herself on her own sharp-edged feelings.

“Well, we aren’t getting anywhere by standing here,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.

They flipped a coin from Ryan’s pocket to decide a direction, and set off down the corridor. Their footsteps echoed off the metal floor. Yaz cringed at the noise, at first, trying to soften her footsteps, but she relaxed slightly as the minutes went by with no sign of life. They saw no one and nothing – just yards of blank, metal corridor dotted intermittently by oval doors. They tried a few, but each one was locked.

After perhaps twenty minutes of walking, Yaz was ready to give up. She sagged back against the curved wall. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said, frustrated. Her head was still pounding, and the cool metal felt soothing on the back of her neck.

Ryan shrugged, and she felt a flash of anger at his unconcern. “Don’t have much of a choice, do we? Just have to keep goin’ and hope this hallway is leadin’ somewhere.”

Yaz closed her eyes. It wasn’t like she had a better plan, but she wasn’t quite ready to move.

“So what’d’ya think of Martha?” Ryan asked. Yaz started at how close his voice was to her ear. She opened her eyes to see that he’d settled back against the wall next to her. He was staring at the oval door across the hallway. It was a darker metal than the wall, but still sleek and shiny. Futuristic. This was a spaceship that really lived up to Star Trek standards.

“She seems nice.”

“Yeah.” They were quiet for a moment. “Weird though. Been tryin’ to imagine our Doctor the way Martha knew her. But...”

“Yeah.”

“Yaz?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell do you think a Time Lord is?”

“She hasn’t changed,” Yaz retorted, her anxiety and confusion mutating to anger as soon as she gave it voice. “She’s just who she’s always been. Whatever Martha says doesn’t change that.”

“Yeah but… we don’t really know her, do we? The Doctor, I mean. We just kinda… jumped in. Didn’t really think about it, did we?”

Yaz stuffed her hands deep into her pockets, willing the doubt away. Her fingers closed on something cool and smooth. She pulled it out in shock, the anger melting away.

“Is that…”

“Sonic screwdriver,” Yaz whispered, amazed at their good luck. It still looked sad and a little beaten up, but Yaz tightened her fingers around it and felt some of the heaviness leave her chest. She took three steps across the hallway, facing the oval door. Point and think.

The door clicked open.

Behind Yaz, Ryan gave a silent fist pump. She grinned over her shoulder at him, then reached out and pushed the door open.

The room beyond lit up as they stepped inside it. The lights gave off a cold, white glow just like those in the hallway. The room was disappointingly empty of communications equipment. Although, as Ryan pointed out, it was, also, reassuringly empty of people brandishing weapons.

“Where do you suppose everyone is?” He asked, as they perused the space. It seemed to be some kind of lounge, and designed for humanoids. Which made sense, if Regulans were indeed relatively humanoid. A few chrome couches were arranged in a semicircle around a kind of water feature. It burbled gently. This struck Yaz as a very zen touch for aliens.

“Woah.”

She looked over at Ryan. He had pressed a button next to a large oval patch on the wall. It rose up like a window shade. She stepped up next to him, and together they stared out at the view.

“You were right about space,” he said, after a moment. Outside the window was the dark expanse of space, dotted with a million diamond stars. It was a view that had become very familiar to both Yaz and Ryan over the past few months, but it never failed to inspire in her a slight echo of the mortal terror of that first, accidental trip with the Doctor when they had been whisked out into the depths of space, breathless and freezing cold and utterly, completely helpless.

“Great,” she said, pushing away the twinge of fear. “Do you think there’s a… I don’t know, a map? Or a… star chart?”

“I think that would be too easy,” Ryan grinned at her.

They looked around the lounge room for a bit longer, but nothing useful offered itself up to them. Ryan turned the window shade back down, and they returned to the hallway. Yaz used the sonic to lock the door behind her. Apparently it was sturdier than she’d given it credit for.

They roamed the deserted hallway for a bit longer, occasionally trying doors. They never found another person, but they also didn’t find anything particularly useful. They never found another hallway, either; it seemed like there was only one, curving gently, endlessly, to the left, with an endless number of locked rooms on either side. Ryan fancied that the ship was shaped like a giant donut, with their one hallway at the center. Yaz tried to imagine how a donut-shaped spaceship would fit with the laws of physics, until Ryan reminded her that they were traveling the universe in a police box and she should probably assume that the laws of physics were more complicated than she’d learned in primary school.

They had been wandering for at least an hour, perhaps more, when they stumbled into a room with some promising boards of switches and blinking lights lining its walls.

“That’s more like it!” Ryan said, striding over to the nearest panel. He surveyed the rows of unlabeled instruments. “Now. What are the chances one of these is the self-destruct?”

Yaz raised an eyebrow. “With our luck today? I wouldn’t risk it.”

“What about that?” He gestured at the sonic in her hand. “Do you think we can… call her? Or…” he waved a hand vaguely at the panels.

Yaz started to shake her head, and then paused. What did she know about Time Lord technology? “Let’s find out,” she said, shrugging. She aimed the sonic at the blinking lights, thinking hard. Where are you, Doctor.

When nothing happened, she tried not to feel too disappointed.

Ryan seemed to feel the same. “Okay,” he said, struggling to keep hold of his optimism. “Maybe there’s a… like a manual, or…” He trailed off staring past Yaz’s shoulder. Panic flashed through Yaz, but she kept hold of herself and turned, calmly, to face whatever was coming their way.

Martha stood in the center of the room, blinking. “Well. I really didn’t think that was going to work.”

Once they’d gotten over their shock, Martha explained. It had been about three hours since they’d been teleported, and they were indeed in a Regulan ship in orbit near Earth.

The Doctor had gone ballistic when they vanished, Martha told them wryly. Yaz couldn’t even imagine that of her affable, gentle friend.

“How did you get here?” She asked, instead.

“You helped,” Martha said cheerfully. She held out her open palm; on it was a small metal disc. “Regulan teleporter. The signal was scrambled; it took the Doctor an hour just to get it working, and then we couldn’t lock onto you. The Doctor remembered that you had the sonic, but it’s damaged, so that was a long shot too.”

“What’s happening down there?” Asked Ryan.

“Your granddad is quite scary when he wants to be,” Martha replied, with a touch of admiration. “He convinced the one guy – his name is Jaff, by the way, the one who tried to surrender – into admitting this ship existed. The other one jumped with you. We’re not sure where he ended up. Actually, we thought he’d be with you.”

“We haven’t seen anyone else,” Ryan said.

Martha hmmmed under her breath. She glanced around the room as though the switches and dials and blinking lights made sense to her. As though she did this sort of thing every week. For all Yaz knew, she did.

“So, how do we get home, then?”

Martha glanced at Ryan. “The teleport would be easiest. But we need coordinates and the right base code, otherwise we could end up materializing inside a wall or something.”

Ryan shuddered. “Let’s not do that,” he said, glancing at Yaz. “Why aren’t we just taking the TARDIS? If the Doctor knows where we are now, she can just come get us, right?”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Martha said. “This ship is in cloaked orbit around the moon. Something about solar flares makes it hard to lock onto the right coordinates – I wasn’t really listening to that part, you know how the Doctor goes on – and anyways, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the TARDIS isn’t the most reliable ship. And she isn’t designed for short jumps.” She grinned at them. “I’d like to make it back to my family tonight, not next century.”

“Right. Teleport it is,” Ryan said, raising an eyebrow at Yaz. She smiled briefly at him.

“So how do we get the base code?” Yaz asked. Martha held out a hand, and Yaz reluctantly passed over the sonic.

Martha fiddled with it for a moment, frowning. She looked very like the Doctor in that moment, Yaz thought, to her own dismay. She wondered if she would ever have Martha’s calm competence, as though being stranded on a hostile alien ship was simply par for the course.

Ryan seemed to be wondering the same thing. “Is this what UNIT does, then?”

Martha glanced up.  “Well. We don’t do a lot of invading alien spaceships. That’s more the Doctor’s kind of thing,” she said with a smile. “To be honest, this reminds me of the good old days,” she laughed.

“When you traveled with her?”

Martha smiled down at the alien technology, the panels of blinking lights and the sonic screwdriver. “Well. They were mostly the stressful old days, I suppose,” she said wryly. “It’s like the Doctor has a sixth sense for trouble.”

“Tell me about it!” Ryan gripped. “We can’t even visit a beach without running into an invasion or a deadly alien plague or somethin’.”

“What are they doing?” Asked Yaz. “Graham and the Doctor.”

“The Doctor is repairing their shuttle. That’s what they had, down in the park,” she explained. “A ship this size isn’t practical to land; it has to have a couple of shuttles to ferry people to and from the planet. Something had blown out in the engine and they didn’t have the skill to fix it, and this teleport isn’t any good for carrying anything more than what you can fit in your pockets, so the Doctor figures they went down to do their thieving and then got stuck.” She smiled at Ryan. “Your granddad is babysitting Jaff, and neither of them looked pleased about it when I left.”

Something whirred on the banks of controls. Lights lit up and flashed at them. Yaz glanced at Ryan and Martha with a flicker of panic.

“That wasn’t me,” Martha said, taking a step back.

“Great,” Yaz sighed. “More surprises.”

Martha and Ryan flashed grins at her. Yaz felt the familiar warm rush of adrenaline as she glanced around the room, looking for any sign of what was coming.

Martha leaned down over the ship’s console, studying something. “I think…” she paused, frowning. “I think it’s a teleport. But I didn’t activate it.”

“Can you stop it?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never seen a set up like this before. But it can’t be locked onto us…”

Yaz caught onto Martha’s train of thought. She darted to the door and yanked it open. The hallway was empty as before, but it was no longer silent. Footsteps and a low murmur of voices met her ears, drawing closer.

She shut the door again, as quietly as she could, and searched for something that looked like a lock. Nothing presented itself. She turned to Martha and Ryan and leaned back against the door.

“I think I found the crew,” she told them, pressing her weight into the door as though that would help against an armed mob.

“Brilliant,” Ryan muttered. He glanced at Martha, who shrugged helplessly.

 They waited in tense silence for several long moments. The heavy door blocked out most of the sound, but with their senses on high alert they could make out the low shuffle of many footsteps coming closer, and then moving past. No one tried to enter the room, which Yaz found strangely disappointing. The fizz of adrenaline in her veins begged a confrontation.

Perhaps it was for this reason that she found herself reaching for the doorknob, moments after the last of the footsteps had died away. She arched an eyebrow silently at the other two. Ryan looked exasperated. But Martha grinned.

“No time like the present,” she whispered, and gestured at Yaz to open the door.

The corridor was as deserted as it had been earlier. The three of them exchanged glances, and moved off silently in the direction the footsteps had been heading.

For a few minutes Yaz thought that maybe they’d imagined the whole thing. Some sort of stress-induced group hallucination. Then a man appeared out of a doorway in the hall ahead of them.

He was young, almost human except for the blue skin. When he moved, he swung his arms ponderously at his sides, and Yaz noted the extra finger.

Yaz tensed – to fight, or to run, she didn’t know. But the man only glanced at them. His eyes slid incuriously past them, and then he turned and began ambling in the other direction.

Okay... Yaz glanced sideways, and saw the same confusion echoed in her companions’ eyes. Martha shrugged, and their little group continued forward.

They followed the Regulan down the featureless corridor for several minutes. He didn’t look back or give any sign that he noticed three aliens trailing him. He paused eventually at a blank door, opened it, and went in without a glance in their direction.

Ryan halted, looking uncertain. In lieu of reminding him that they were this far in and there was no point in turning cautious now, Yaz elbowed him and started forward with Martha in lockstep.

They reached the door the Regulan had entered, and pushed it open. Yaz froze in momentary panic.

There were perhaps two dozen of them, all Regulans. Without perception filters, Yaz could see that their skin came in varying shades of blue, from the dull, pale gray-blue of a cloudy sky, to the vivid turquoise of a tropical sea, to a deep midnight blue-black. They were sitting in what must have been a lounge or a cafeteria. Most of them had trays of food in front of them. They sat alone or in small groups, but, except for the quiet shuffle of bodies and the plastic scrape of alien silverware, the room was entirely silent.

Some of them glanced up at the humans with the same incurious expression of the first Regulan. Most of them didn’t even do that much. As Yaz’s initial shock of adrenaline wore off, she realized they all wore identical looks of apathetic exhaustion.

She looked over at Martha, who was frowning. At her glance, Martha looked up and touched two fingers to her neck. Yaz glanced back at the scene in front of them and realized another thing the Regulans all had in common – identical black collars.

Maybe the collars were a Regulan fashion statement, but Yaz didn’t think so. They were a heavy, matte black plastic material and, looking closer, Yaz could see that the skin around the collars was chaffed and tinged with an unhealthy greenish shade.

Slowly, the three humans backed out of the room. Yaz wanted to talk to the Regulans, but couldn’t think of what to say. Instead, she let the door fall shut and turned to Martha and Ryan.

Martha looked grim. “I don’t have a great feeling about this,” she said. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

Ryan, his face uncharacteristically serious, voiced what they were all thinking: “We need to get off this ship.”

Yaz nodded wordlessly. As her headache had faded over the past hour, so had her anxiety; it had started to feel like a thrilling adventure to be alone on an alien spaceship. Seeing the silent room of Regulans, exhausted beyond the capacity for interest in the sudden appearance of three human strangers, had toppled her back down to reality.

Silently, the group retraced their steps back to the control room. A sudden anxiety seized her.

“Which door was it?” She whispered. She wasn’t sure why she was whispering; the awareness that they were not alone on board made it feel necessary. Identical, evenly-spaced doors loomed out of the wall ahead of her, endlessly.

Martha shook her head grimly. “If we know roughly how far we walked, we shouldn’t have to try that many.”

“And hope no one’s hiding there,” Ryan added. Yaz made a face at him.

They had just about reached the part of the corridor that they all agreed was approximately where they had started, when a metallic clang echoed down the corridor from ahead of them.

“Quick!” Ryan hissed, pulling at a door at random. It was locked, of course, as they all were – Yaz fumbled for the sonic for a half-second before remembering she had given it to Martha. She held out a hand, gesturing uselessly for it.

Martha looked confused, and Yaz risked hissing “sonic!” under her breath. Martha instantly fished it out of her pocket, passing it over without comment. Yaz winced at the whirring noise it made when she aimed it at the door. For a terrifying moment, nothing happened. The sonic whined louder; maybe it was losing what little life it had left. Focused on the door in front of her, Yaz didn’t see who came around the bend. 

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” Asked the last voice Yaz had expected to hear.

“Gramps!” Ryan stepped forward, sighing in relief, to slap Graham on the shoulder.

Beside him, the Doctor was looking utterly pleased with herself. “Well that was a tidy bit of search-and-rescue, if I do say so myself. Do you lot have any idea how haphazard the construction of those Eridini shuttle engines is? The telepathic interface alone is a nightmare, nevermind the incompatibility of the shuttle’s cloaking with its mothership’s. There’s no excuse. It’s shoddy, is what it is…” she trailed off as she caught sight of Yaz. Or rather, the sonic in Yaz’s outstretched hand. “Oh dear, what have you done to it?” She asked mournfully, apparently oblivious of the fact that she was the one who had been holding it when it was crushed earlier. Well, ‘earlier’ was probably ‘yesterday’ by now, Yaz supposed.

Yaz held the sonic out to the Doctor with a smile of apology. “It’s been a help, regardless,” she said optimistically. She ignored the slight brush of the Doctor’s cool hand against hers as the Doctor accepted the sonic from her.

“Right. Well then. I guess Korax isn’t with you?”

“Who?”

“The other one. Regulan.” Graham piped up. “He vanished when you did.”

Yaz shook her head. “As far as we can tell, this place is almost deserted. Or, it was, until…” Briefly, she detailed their strange encounter with the group of Regulans down the hall.

The Doctor’s face grew grim as she listened. When Yaz paused in the story, she turned without a word and marched up the hall. The four humans, surprised by her abrupt start, hurried to catch up with her.

The Doctor did not seem to have the trouble navigating the ship that Martha, Yaz, and Ryan had had. She stopped at a door that, to Yaz’s eyes, looked no different from any of the others, touched an indistinguishable spot on the wall beside it, and swung it open to reveal the cafeteria they’d walked into earlier.

As earlier, only a couple of the Regulans even bothered to look up. Yaz waited for an explanation from the Doctor, but she moved into the room as though she had forgotten the humans existed. She paused in the center, her mouth a flattened line, her eyes carefully expressionless.

“If I’m not mistaken, it’s the year E.17852.” At this, more Regulan eyes turned towards her; Yaz caught a flicker of something move through the crowd, but couldn’t identify the emotion from the alien faces. The Doctor continued. “Indentured servitude has been outlawed for – what, a generation? More?”

Silence, but all of the faces were turned towards her now. She tucked her hands into her jacket pocket, carefully casual.

“I happen to dislike slavery, so I’ll make you all a deal. Everyone gets off this ship and dropped off on the hospitable world of their choice. You tell me whose done this, and why, and I’ll make sure they are… dealt with.”

In the silence that followed, Yaz began wondering exactly who the space police were and if they had jurisdiction over space slavery.

“What’s the deal?” Asked a rough voice. Yaz picked out the speaker, a Regulan with skin the deep blue of the open ocean.

“That’s the deal,” the Doctor returned.

“He means, what’s in it for you?” Asked another. Yaz couldn’t decipher signs of age on alien bodies, but from the tenor of the voice she pegged this one as young and surprisingly belligerent. Perhaps they were not so cowed as they first appeared.

“I get to see the universe running the way I like it to.”

Something about the Doctor’s casual delivery of this shocked Yaz; an unexpected shiver seized her. The words, the Doctor’s hands-in-pockets posture. Her nonchalant confidence and her blank face. Martha’s voice echoed in her head – it scared you, sometimes, because you weren’t expecting it…

“It’s a nice thought,” said the ocean-skinned Regulan after a moment of contemplation. “But you see we’re sort of stuck.” He made an aborted gesture towards the collar on his neck.

The Doctor’s expression cleared, and Yaz felt equilibrium return to her personal universe. She fished the sonic out of her pocket and flipped it in the air, smiling broadly. “Trust me,” she said cheerfully. She winked at Martha. “I’m the Doctor.”

In short order, the Doctor had proved she could indeed deactivate the slave collars, and the Regulans had proved they had more spirit than Yaz had given them credit for. Faced with a realistic prospect of escape, some of them became downright chatty.

Apparently, Jaff and Korax were involved with the Regulan equivalent of the mafia. The ship they were on was a decommissioned military ship, which presumably had been stolen to use as a hideout.

“Didn’t say what he wanted from us, just said to show up at the appointed hour and he’d clear our debts,” the ocean-skinned Regulan was saying. His name had turned out to be Dav. The Doctor had removed his collar first, and he was holding it now, turning it in his six-fingered hands as she worked on the others. She was perched on a table, brow furrowed in concentration, her fingers deep in the circuitry of someone else’s collar. He stood patiently in front of her while she worked.

“Debts?” she asked, without looking up. “Ah! There we are. Next!” She pulled the collar off, tossed it to the man she’d been working on, and beckoned the next person forward with a dramatic wiggle of her fingers.

Dav shrugged. “It’s been a tough few years on Regulus, with the droughts. Sometimes there aren’t any legal options.”

The Doctor nodded sympathetically.

“Anyways, I figured he wanted some work done outside the law, but none of us figured on being knocked out and waking up a few light years away from our families.” There were emphatic nods and grunts of agreement from the others.

“And he has you making…” she waved a hand vaguely. “I forget the name. Got a lotta ‘rrrs’ in it.”

Dav just shrugged again. “I think they had a closer operation, but they must have been attracting some… er… unwanted attention. I know we’re far out, but he hasn’t let us near the nav equipment. We don’t even know which sector we’re in.”

“Oh! I can help with that.” The Doctor beamed. “He’s got you parked in orbit around a moon in the Sol System.”

“Sol?” Dav looked surprised.

“You ever met an alien, Dav?” She asked cheerfully. She nodded to the humans.

“Sol is Level Five,” he said, glancing at the humans with a look of concern.”

“This moon is uninhabited,” she reassured him.

“This moon?” Graham asked skeptically. “I think you mean all the moons. ‘least in this solar system. Don’t you, Doc?”

She grinned at him and paused in her work to tap her nose cryptically. “Spoilers!”

Dav shifted, obviously still uncomfortable. “He has us working down on the moon,” he said, anxiously.

“On the moon?” The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

“Shall I show you the coordinates?”

She pulled the collar off the last Regulan and hopped off the table. “Please,” she gestured grandly to the door. “Take me to your moon base, Dav.”

Dav showed them back to the control room that Yaz and Ryan had met up with Martha in. He didn’t seem to have any trouble navigating the ship either, and Yaz wondered what he and the Doctor could see that the humans could not.

Inside the room, he brought up a chart of complicated lines and angles on one wall. The Doctor peered closely at it. He pointed her attention to a small cluster of lines down by the bottom left corner. “That’s it, right there. Not a big operation – there’s only nineteen of us.”

“Sounds plenty big to me,” the Doctor said grimly. She glanced over at the humans. “Who wants to bet that’s where we’ll find Korax?”

Graham smiled at her. “I’ve always fancied a trip to the moon, myself.”

The Doctor beamed at him. “Right then! Back to the shuttle it is.”

Once they were reasonably sure that Korax was not on the ship and Jaff was safely secured in a holding cell, they left the ship to the care of Dav. It was in full working order, and he figured that the reward for it’s return would more than clear the debts of the men on board. He waved them off into the shuttle, shrugging his shoulders when Graham asked, in a concerned tone, if the shuttle would be missed.

The Doctor herded them all inside without any fanfare, other than a playful salute to Dav.

Inside, the shuttle was spare and utilitarian. It was clearly intended for nothing more elaborate than as a practical, short-range transport. It was oval in shape, with a round console towards one end, covered in the same incomprehensible array of switches and blinking lights as the bridge of the main ship. Whether this was the front or back Yaz couldn’t tell; each end of the oval seemed equally rounded, with the same oblong view windows. Benches were bolted around the edge. With five of them, the shuttle already felt crowded.

“What do the Regulans have against straight lines?” groused Ryan, tucking himself onto a bench under the low curve of the ceiling. Only in the very center of the ship was it tall enough for him to stand upright.

Yaz hovered behind the Doctor, who smiled tightly at her.

“A shuttle like this wants a couple pilots. You, hold this; Martha…” she pointed Yaz to a dial, then grabbed Martha’s shoulders and positioned her a quarter-turn around the console. “Watch this, tell me if it dips towards mauve.”

She stepped around to the other side of the console and, with a few flicks of her wrist, pulled up a 3-D hologram out of the console’s center.

Yaz exchanged startled glances with Martha. The Doctor noticed, and grinned at them.

“That’s neat,” Ryan said, leaning forward to peer at it. It seemed to show their shuttle, suspended in a geometric network of lines.

“Telepathic piloting,” the Doctor explained. “You link in here-” she placed a palm carefully down on the console “-and drive via the hologram.”

“What, you’re psychic?” Ryan asked, sounding skeptical.

“Telepathic,” she corrected without taking her eyes off the hologram in front of them. “Enough to use this tech, anyways.” Yaz glanced away from the hologram, out the window, and noticed that the shuttle was rising smoothly away from its docking bay. From above, she saw the spaceship was indeed donut-shaped, and absolutely huge; a great, dull gray hulk against the black void of space. It was amazing she and Ryan had managed to stumble on anything useful in the short time they had been wandering.

As the ship receded into the distance, she returned her gaze to the console. The Doctor’s eyes were fixed on the hologram. It dipped and tilted in its web; what those movements signaled, Yaz couldn’t decipher. Slowly, the moon rose into view in their window; simultaneously, it seemed to take shape before them in the form of complex curves and angles in the hologram web. The Doctor landed them without incident at an empty docking bay.

“Well then,” she said, removing her palm from the console. The hologram vanished. She glanced around at her friends, grinning. The manic glint was back in her eye. “Onwards and inwards!”

With that, she headed out the shuttle door and into the building. The four humans followed.

What had been an almost unnoticeable speck from the spaceship turned out to be much larger when you were standing in it. The group glanced around the space. It was about the shape and size of a small airplane hangar – a cavernous, warehouse-type space. It was cluttered with machinery that Yaz could only guess at. Well, she could make a pretty educated guess, actually.

“So I was wrong.” The Doctor paused thoughtfully, then grinned. “I don’t get to say that much. Kind of a novel experience. Huh.” She gazed in the direction of the ceiling, apparently savoring the novel experience of being wrong, until Yaz elbowed her.

“Are those guns?”

“Yes Yaz. Those are guns.” Her face slipped into a quieter expression as she stared around. “Neuro-weapons from the Epsilon system. There was this – well, it doesn’t matter.” She picked one up and examined it briefly, before tossing it aside with a grimace. “Totally illegal by about five minutes after they were invented. These’ll fry your brain stone dead, only it’ll take you about five minutes of agony to realize it.”

“How did you miss this?” Ryan asked, staring around the space. The Doctor scrunched her face into an offended scowl.

“How did I – it’s the moon, Ryan! It’s big!”

“Alright,” Graham stepped between them. “So what’d we do about this then, Doc?”

She didn’t respond; she was staring at the crates of finished weaponry, stacked along one wall, labeled and ready to ship. There were dozens. Her face had frozen into an expression Yaz couldn’t quite identify; Martha, on the other hand, clearly could.

“We burn it,” she said, softly, her eyes never leaving the Doctor’s face.

The Doctor did not acknowledge her at first. She just continued to stare into the depths of the warehouse.

“Doctor?” Martha asked, quietly.

The Doctor started. “Hm? Oh. Yes. Can’t leave this lot lying about...”

Graham caught onto the odd energy in the room. “Doc? Everything alright?”

“Just peachy! I say that now. Peachy.” She tested the word again, frowning. Yaz expected her to speak again, but instead she turned abruptly away from Graham and strode to a metal panel on one wall. She threw it open to reveal a mass of wires and circuits. “Just have to circumvent the safeties and override the…”

Yaz had stopped listening. “Um. Doctor?”

“… of course, that will trigger a failsafe deadlock, but if we just cross this blue wire with the…”

“Um.” Graham had noticed too. “Hey, Doc?”

She pulled her head out of the circuit board, scowling. “Didn’t I give you a job to do?”

“Well no, actually, but-”

“But what?” She spun to face them.

The second Regulan, Korax, was standing at a short distance, gun in hand. He waved his free fingers cheerily.

The Doctor sighed.

“Step away from that wall, if you don’t mind,” he said, gesturing with the gun. It looked just like the ones being produced in the warehouse; he’d probably grabbed it as he came in. Goodness knew there were plenty of them lying around.

“I don’t like having guns pointed at me,” she said flatly. “Put it down and we’ll talk.”

“One problem with that, Doctor.” He grinned nastily. “I seem to be holding all the cards. Namely, this card.” He gestured with the gun again. “So we’re going to do this on my terms. Now. Move.”

The Doctor stared at him “‘Namely this card?’ You can’t be serious.”

He bared his teeth. “Deadly.”

The Doctor looked affronted. She appealed to Graham, standing just a few feet away. He looked paler than usual, but mustered up a bit of humor for her.

“A bit cliché, eh mate?” he said, aiming for flippant and landing a few yards short.

Korax ignored their ribbing. “I’ve got big plans for this place. There’s a couple of border wars in the Omicron sector, just waiting for the right arms dealer to fan the flames.”

“And you’ll be there to profit off of every dead man.”

He shrugged. “They’ll kill each other anyway. Someone oughta profit.”

“Can’t say I’m loving that logic,” the Doctor said. There was an undercurrent of tension in her tone. Korax didn’t seem to notice.

“I can’t say I care,” he responded. And shot her.

There was no cobbled-together gamma-pulse machine to protect them this time, and the gun went off without a hitch. The laser bolt hit the Doctor right in the chest.

She doubled over, grabbing at her stomach, face twisting in pain.

Yaz heard someone scream – it might have been her. It might have been all of them. But the Doctor had bought them a precious second, and they weren’t going to waste it.

Yaz tackled Korax to the ground. Her weight knocked the gun out of his hand; it spun across the floor until Ryan swept it up and out of reach. Out the corner of her eye, Yaz saw Martha and Graham converge on the Doctor, who had collapsed to her knees on the floor.

She and Korax were dazed by their fall, but only for a moment. She leaned her full weight over him as he struggled beneath her, twisting an arm up behind his back to keep him restrained. Ryan appeared over them a moment later and helped her wrestle something that looked like zip ties onto his hands and ankles. She had no idea where he’d produced those from and she didn’t care. Once he was taken care of, they both darted to the Doctor’s side.

Five minutes, she’d said. How many had already gone by?

The Doctor was hunched on her knees, arms wrapped around her stomach. Martha knelt beside her with a hand on her back, and Graham sat on her other side. Fear was written all over his face.

Yaz and Ryan dropped to the floor in front of the Doctor.

“Is she…?” Ryan couldn’t force the rest of the words from his throat.

Martha shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, her face drawn.

“’m I dying, you mean?” The Doctor mumbled. They could barely hear the words, with her face bent almost to the concrete floor. But slowly, slowly, she lifted her head. Inch by inch, the Doctor straightened up. Her face was tight with pain, but she lifted herself until her spine was straight and she settled back on the heels of her heavy boots. “No,” she answered, finally. “But I am right cross.”

With that, she stood. The four humans watched in shock as she pulled herself to her feet. Tremors wracked her body, her lips were pressed tight together, but she stood on steady legs. Her friends only stirred when she began to step ponderously but purposefully towards Korax. They followed her across the floor, hovering around her, exchanging anxious looks. Martha looked especially worried; she kept glancing between the Doctor and Korax as though she wanted to say something.

Korax lay bound and muttering what Yaz presumed were obscenities that the TARDIS was kindly leaving untranslated. The Doctor paused with her boots inches from his head.

“I’ve been patient.” Her voice rang clearly in the silence of the warehouse. “More than patient. I’ve been merciful. You don’t know me, so you don’t know what that means.” She squatted down, peering at his face like a child examining a peculiar insect. “You fancy yourself an arms dealer, a merchant of death. Only you can’t possibly know what that means.” The Doctor spoke flatly, coldly. Hearing her animated friend so utterly devoid of emotion made a shiver run up Yaz’s spine, like a mouse catching a glimpse of a predator through the brush.

“Know this,” the Doctor continued in that cold, distant voice. “I’ve seen war, on a scale that you” – she reached out to gently touch his forehead with one finger, a curse; or a benediction – “you cannot comprehend. I don’t care to see any more. That is the only reason you are leaving with your life.”

The Doctor rose to her feet. She stood over him like a cold statue. The idea that perhaps he wasn’t about to be killed in some painful way seemed to penetrate Korax’s mind; he lifted his head slightly, staring up at her.

“You want to know why your friend told you to run?” She tilted her head. “It’s because I ended the biggest war in the universe and trust me – trust me – you do not want to know how. Don’t think we’re done, you and me. If you have any sense, you’ll run back to whatever petty crime you were pulling before this. Next time I might not be so merciful.”

With this, she turned and walked back towards the open panel of circuits. She did not look at anyone.

They stood dumbly as she finished her work. Something sparked, and an urgent beeping began somewhere in the far reaches of the warehouse. The Doctor crossed back to Korax, produced a small tool from nowhere, and cut the zip tie on his ankles.

“That’s the self destruct. You have three minutes.”
He needed no further urging. He didn’t even glance at the weapons around him; he just ran.

“That’s our cue, too,” she said with forced brightness. She did not meet anyone’s eyes as she walked back between them towards the door they’d come in, ten minutes or an eternity ago.

They all seemed to agree on escaping first, asking questions later. They trailed the Doctor to the shuttle. Once inside, she made a beeline for the console and paced around it, silent and contained. The tight, uncharacteristic grace of her movements reminded Yaz of a caged tiger. She wondered suddenly how much of the Doctor’s affable clumsiness was for show. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, Yaz shook it out of her head. She eyed the Doctor instead, noticing the slight tremor that remained in her hands, and the exhausted way she leaned over the console. Still, she took off smoothly enough. Yaz only noticed the facility’s destruction because she was looking out the rear window when it blew, a silent orange shock wave. What would NASA make of that.

“It wasn’t fair of me, Martha.” The Doctor’s voice rang out, surprising everyone. She hadn’t asked them to help this time. She had one hand on a lever and the other on the telepathic interface, her face turned down to the console. Her blonde hair hung down, just long enough to hide her face. “To be angry at you for joining UNIT. If either of us has the moral high ground, it’s always been you.”

Martha took several careful steps forward, pausing beside the console. The Doctor looked up finally. Her bright hair fell back around her ears.

“I never apologized, for that year. What he did.” Pause. “What I let him do.”

“I wanted an apology five years ago,” Martha told her. The Doctor looked at her feet, but Martha reached out and seized her shoulders, forcing the Doctor to meet her gaze again. “You can be so thick sometimes,” she said, frustrated. “Is this really why you’ve stayed away all this time? Because you don’t think I can forgive you?” She peered at the Doctor’s face, which was a miserable riot of emotion. She seemed to see something, and sighed. “Or is it because you can’t forgive yourself?”

“Martha-” the Doctor began, miserably.

“Let’s settle this. I forgive you. And I would like to still be your friend.” They stared at each other for a long moment before Martha gave a small smile and put her hand out over the Doctor’s on the shuttle console. “And I would like,” she said, “for you to stop using that bloody wrist.”

They arrived back on Earth with the dawn. The Doctor set the shuttle down in the small park she had flown it out of hours earlier. They filed out into the cool London dawn, all except the Doctor, who hung back to set the shuttle’s autopilot. She assured them that in fifteen minutes, when they were well clear, it would lift itself silently back to its mothership. Gone just like that.

Yaz caught the sounds of the city waking up around her. It felt dreamlike, as though those desperate minutes on the moon were real life and the gentle mutter of an early city morning was a passing illusion.

Graham placed one hand on Ryan’s shoulder, and smiled tiredly at Yaz. “I could fancy a cuppa, after all that.”

Yaz smiled slightly back. His words reminded her of how long ago tea and biscuits at Martha’s clinic had been. Her stomach growled lightly at the thought. The sensation anchored her to the present moment.

The Doctor emerged from the shuttle. She strode down the ramp and paused in the dew-soaked grass; her eyes focused on something far away, over their heads. Yaz took the opportunity to study her; her distant eyes, her sturdy figure illuminated on one side by the first foggy rays of sun lifting over the city skyline. The Doctor raised an absent hand to her head, gently massaging her temple just above yesterday’s cuts and bruises. They looked more livid in the growing light. She turned toward her friends with a carefully casual smile.

“Well that’s that then. Anyone else getting a headache?”

In the gray light of the London dawn, Yaz couldn’t decide if the Doctor looked triumphant or just tired.

They returned to the stretch of lawn where the TARDIS was parked, looking, as always, like it had never been anywhere else. The group paused outside its doors. The Doctor faced Martha, tension settling in her shoulders. Martha, however, looked calm. Settled, in a way the Doctor never did.

“It’s been how many centuries, and still a police box?” Martha remarked, eyeing the TARDIS.

The Doctor shrugged. “I think she likes it that way,” she said thoughtfully. She was looking at the TARDIS too, avoiding Martha’s gaze. Again. “Well. Best be off, lots to see…” She trailed off, looking surprisingly uncertain. After another moment of staring at the blue wall of her TARDIS, she looked over at Martha.

“Wouldn’t kill you to visit once in awhile, would it?” Martha teased gently. The Doctor stiffened and her face flickered through anxious uncertainty before it set into an expression of determined pleasantness. Martha sighed and pushed her gently on the shoulder. “I mean it. Come for tea; I won’t set my mum on you.”

“Tea?” The Doctor looked bemused for a moment. Then she stepped forward and caught Martha up in a tight hug. “Tea it is,” she said, softly, into Martha’s hair.

They stepped apart, and Martha grinned, open and kind. “It better not be a few more centuries before you take me up on that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” the Doctor assured her seriously.

Martha stepped towards Yaz, then. Before Yaz could react, Martha had reached out and pulled her into a hug. She held onto Yaz tightly for a brief moment before letting her go, stepping away. “Call me sometime, when you’re back on Earth,” she said to the three humans. She tossed a playful salute to Graham and Ryan, who responded awkwardly in kind.

“Martha Jones,” the Doctor said. She stood in front of the TARDIS, one palm on the door. Yesterday’s scratch still ran bright red down one side of her face, closed with butterfly bandages; her sky blue coat still drooped, torn, from her splinted wrist, but despite this she looked lighter than Yaz had ever seen her. She beamed at Martha. “Be fantastic.”

“Oh, I plan on it, Mister Smith.” Martha said, grinning back.

Yaz’s last sight, before she filed into the TARDIS with the others, was Martha Jones striding off alone across the park. When she turned back into the warm interior of the TARDIS, the Doctor was waiting. Her hand hovered over the dematerialization lever; she was saying something to Graham, but as Yaz shut the door, she looked over and gave Yaz a bright, warm smile.

“Where to, Yasmine Khan?”

All Yaz’s questions, pressed up against the back of her teeth, seemed to dry up and vanish in an instant. Maybe Martha was right, but Yaz could wait to find out. She jogged up to join the others at the console, and smiled back at the Doctor. She remembered Martha’s gentle smile when she’d said, I’ve never once regretted knowing her.

Maybe Martha was right, but some things are worth getting your heart broken for. Maybe Martha thought that too.

Yaz leaned over the console; the Doctor leaned over too. Her hand closed over the lever.

“Anywhere,” Yaz heard herself say. “Absolutely anywhere.”