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“Are you a real doctor, then?”
The Doctor frowns but doesn’t lose concentration. Eyes fixed on a spot on Yaz’s cheek, she leans in to pluck a minuscule shard of glass from one of the cuts.
“Mm?”
Yaz almost winces when the Doctor’s cool hand lays gently on her chin to move her head, but then she blinks it away. “Quite the steady hand you got”, she continues.
For a few minutes, the Doctor doesn’t say anything and Yaz thinks she’s too concentrated on her task to pay attention to what she said. She watches with the corner of her eye as the silver shimmer of the tweezers moves from one cut to the other, and she lets her mind wander.
But then the Doctor replies, in a soft murmur, as if not to disturb the silence. “I’m very old”, she admits. “I did get time to learn one thing or the other every now and then. Martial arts, technology, crafts, geography”. Her hand retreats and another piece of glass falls into the plate with a pling. “First aid’s useful”.
“Got a degree, then?”
The Doctor smiles, provokingly. “Some five or six dozens, you mean”.
Yaz’s mind is filled with images of the Doctor sitting by some table in the library, curved over manuals and books covered in foreign words, but then she can’t help but smile and shake the thought away. No, the Doctor feels more like an ad honorem person, and she can just imagine her dissecting alien bodies with Leonardo or discovering vaccines for future sicknesses with Alexander Fleming.
Pling. Another tiny sliver joins the other ones on the plate and the Doctor gently tucks a strand of hair behind Yaz’s ear to look at the last cut on the side of the cheekbone.
“Alright, seems like this should do”, she says, turning Yaz’s head gently from side to side to check all the wounds for any left debris. All the pieces of glass have been removed from Yaz’s cuts, now, and the Doctor leaves the med-bay briefly through a side door. When she comes back, she’s got a big bowl in her hands, a worn-out cloth hanging on its border and already half-drenched. Murmuring to herself, she puts it on the steel cart by Yaz’s examination table, wets the cloth, and then proceeds to rub on Yaz’s wounds gently.
“Sorry”, she says when Yaz winces, and Yaz feels mad she managed to hide the pain for the entire procedure just to give in at the last steps.
“Doesn’t hurt”, she lies, but the Doctor doesn’t reply. “So, where did you learn?”
There’s silence. The Doctor’s hand stops for a fraction of a second, lingering more than needed on a spot she’s already cleaned. Yaz doesn’t inquire. She hasn’t known her for long, but in the few weeks they’ve spent together she’s already picked up some things. It’s her police training that makes her notice the subtle changes in the Doctor’s behaviour, its uncanny shifts. Though it’s hard to decrypt some of her expressions and words, she has learned to remark her silences and moments of quietude, the way she starts blabbering to hide thoughts she doesn’t want to face sometimes, her coping strategies. Silence is just one of those. Often it means she’s captured deeply in thoughts she’s still not sure she wants to share.
That’s why Yaz accepts the silence and doesn’t repeat the question. Her eyes drift and set themselves absently on the rainbow stripes on the Doctor’s shirt. But then the Doctor breaks the habit, and, to Yaz’s surprise, she begins talking. However, it is not of Fleming and Leonardo da Vinci she speaks about.
“One of the best hospitals of your galaxy”, she admits.
Yaz frowns. Not ad honorem, then. She’s about to ask, but the Doctor precedes her.
“A friend of mine had gotten hurt, not so differently from you”, she says, dipping the cloth in the water again. Blood disperses through the water in a transparent red cloud, tinting it weakly. “That day I understood it could be useful to know a thing or two”.
Yaz ponders the Doctor’s words, and her eyes travel up to glance at the Doctor forcibly detached, concentrated expression. All of a sudden the weight of their distance falls upon her, and for the first time, she realises that though she lives with her and sees her every day, she doesn’t know a thing about this blonde, alien woman. Not where she comes from, nor who she’s travelled with before and what happened to them, not even how old she is.
The Doctor seems to catch her stupor because she sighs tiredly and puts the cloth back into the bowl. “I know what you’re thinking”, she mumbles, but what she says next makes it very clear that she doesn’t. “And you’ve got all the right in the world to think that. I should have protected you”. Yaz frowns. “But I don’t always manage, and travelling with me is dangerous. If you want to go…”
“I don’t want to go”, Yaz interrupts her. Because not knowing the Doctor doesn’t scare her – if anything, it strengthens her yearning for more time with her, for more moments like these. She’d want to say it, but instead, she sets for a weaker, rational explanation. “I know the risks. And life on Earth, as a cop, isn’t always safe, either”.
The Doctor nods, her expression worried and relieved at the same time, and smiles tiredly at her. She’s looking at her as if she were, too, a piece of glass, and she could shatter into a thousand pieces if she didn’t handle her with the utmost care. After a second, she turns around to rummage in a drawer and fetches some sort of yellow plaster. When she applies it on her skin, Yaz feels tingles spreading through her cheeks, and for a moment she’s not sure if it’s the Doctor’s hands sending electricity through her skin or the plasters. But then an itch makes her instinctively reach for her face, and when she does that she finds her skin smooth and free of injuries, as if they’d never been there.
“How…?”
“What? D’you think nobody would think of self-absorbing plasters in billions of years of history?”. The Doctor smirks. “Come on, off you go – places to be, food to be eaten, sleeps to be slept and all of your human things”.
Yaz jumps down from the table and walks through the door, but then, with her hand on the doorknob, she turns around to look at the Doctor. She’s curved over the sink, washing her blood-stained hands, and she looks tired and scared. Yaz has never seen her like this, and in a moment of lucidity in among all her sleepiness, she notes the Doctor, under all those layers of cheerfulness and serenity, must be a thoughtful and apprehensive person at heart. “Doctor?”
“Mmh?”
“Thanks. For taking care of me”.
The Doctor turns her head and finally looks at her in the eyes, and for the first time since she’s gotten hurt the worry seems to be at least overpowered by the usual warm, fizzing light. “Whenever you need it”, she smiles. Then Yaz closes the door.