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i.
The first time she asks her is also the one she finds out in the first place. They’re walking through an outdoor market on Jupiter’s biggest moon, Ganymede, and a being with tentacles sprouting from its face and a sort of organic ball in one hand approaches them and hands them a flyer.
“Ooh”, the Doctor chimes, “Ood concert! Love those”.
“Can we go?”, asks Graham, interested.
“Heh”, she grimaces, “Don’t think so. Oods sing through telepathic links. Wouldn’t be fun if I was the only one hearing them”.
Yaz has to think for a second over the Doctor’s words before their meaning finally becomes clear. From Ryan and Graham’s expressions and their sudden pallor, she deducts she’s not the only one who’s confused. “Wait. Are you saying you are telepathic?”
The Doctor doesn’t even pay a lot of attention to her words, and replies almost absent-mindedly, concentrated on a stand covered in festive decorations. “First of the class, I was. Well, at least until second grade. I’m a little bit rusty, now – oh, look! Souvenirs!”
Yaz is almost certain she can hear Ryan and Graham scrubbing their mind clean from their mental search histories, and quickly enough panic seeps through her body when she realises the things the Doctor might have heard her think. The first one to ask is Ryan, who reaches forward and takes the Doctor by the right sleeve of her coat and shakes her out of her Christmas enthusiasm.
“You can hear our thoughts? And you never even thought of mentioning that?”
The Doctor scoffs. “Oh, relax, Ryan!”. She turns around, clearly thinking Ryan’s the only one having those fears, but when she meets the faces of the rest of the fam she shakes her head and shows her palms reassuringly. “Seriously, guys, no need to worry. Psychic abilities are very easy to learn and very common in your future. And besides, I did say I was rusty”. She smirks. “First, I’m not as good as I was with telepathy, and second, I would never do that without your consent”.
Graham exhales in relief. Ryan lets go of the Doctor’s sleeve. But Yaz can’t help but think something.
“You can learn that, then?”
“Don’t even think about that, Yasmin Khan”.
Yaz stares at her with wide eyes. “What? Why not?”
“It’s a no”.
Yaz scoffs. This will not be the end of this.
ii.
The second time she asks it’s a whole different situation. There’s no festive mood on the spaceship they’ve landed on, because in seven minutes and fifty-five seconds it will crash into the rocky deserts of Gliese 876, killing its five hundred and seventy-seven passengers on the spot. The captain is lying half-dead on the pavement of the control room, numbed by the venom of an alien parasite that’s able to kill its prey in minutes, and the Doctor is trying desperately to manoeuvre the ship to safety.
“Ah!”, she screams, ducking when the upper part of the console explodes, sending sparkles and fire through the air. “Come on, come on, come on!”
Yaz is crouching before the captain and holding his head on her knees, comforting him while Graham and Ryan prepare the passengers for the impact, but the man is terrified and there’s not a single type of venom in the universe that can hide the expression of pure dread from the eyes of a man who’s about to die. “Shh, shh”, Yaz tells him when he whimpers, but the Doctor’s grunts are getting more frantic, the explosions more frequent, and she too is starting to share the man’s pure terror.
“Help us”, she mutters after a while, and she hates herself for asking a man who’s scared and weak to help them, but she can hear Ryan screaming and calming down the passengers and she’s not sure there’s anything else she can do.
The man understands and his hold on her hand strengthens. His lips move, but only a whimper comes out, then his eyelids flutter while he goes in and out of consciousness.
“Doctor”, she screams. “Doctor, he can’t talk”, she says. “He can help. Help him. Read his mind”, she says, desperate.
“No”, the Doctor says, without turning around, and her voice is dark and deep and it sends shiver running down Yaz’s spine.
“Doctor…”
“No”, she repeats, and her tone scares her this time, it’s an order and a warning and Yaz has never heard her talk like that before.
“But they will die, Doctor. There are children. Please”.
The Doctor doesn’t reply this time, and even if the ship quakes and the only light in the cabin are the occasional sparks from the console Yaz can see her holding on onto a railing, so hard her knuckles start to turn white.
“ᴀʟᴀʀᴍ - ᴛʜʀᴇᴇ ᴍɪɴᴜᴛᴇs ʟᴇғᴛ ᴛᴏ ɪᴍᴘᴀᴄᴛ”.
The Doctor turns around but doesn’t look at her. In a swift movement, she kneels beside the captain, whose eyes are now vacuous and lost. “I’m sorry”, she mutters, and then presses her fingers to his temple.
When she’s done, she opens her eyes and goes back to the console without saying anything or running. In fact, she does that slowly. Her eyes are empty. She mentally scouts the information she’s just retrieved from the man’s memories and activates the emergency systems to pilot the ship back to safety. In a few minutes, she’s got the vehicle stabilised; in half an hour, they’ve landed on Gliese 876 and the passengers are quickly coming out, scared but unharmed.
“You did it!”, says Ryan, running to Yaz and the Doctor with a big smile on his face. But Yaz shoots him a sad glance and the Doctor doesn’t look at him or Graham. Instead, she turns around and ventures back into the ship to get back on the TARDIS. She doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the night.
iii.
The third time she asks the Doctor about her abilities is not so distant from the second; in fact, barely a week has gone by. The Doctor has not been the same since the day she’s landed the ship on Gliese. Better said, she’s not been the same since the day she used her abilities on the captain. One day, Yaz wakes up early and heads to the console room to see if anyone else is awake, and finds the Doctor sitting by the TARDIS’ doors, legs dangling over the edge. They’re floating in outer space and Yaz can recognise Earth in the distance.
“Can I sit?”
The Doctor doesn’t say anything and smiles weakly at her, then turns back to look at the stars.
“Can’t sleep?”, the blonde asks after a while, without looking at her.
Yaz scrolls her shoulders. “Not really”. She turns to look at her and she can’t help but think she looks so very tiny and so very old at the same time, like a scared child and a wise, immensely old woman stuck in the same body. She remarks that’s a surprisingly very accurate description for her. “Penny for your thoughts?”
The Doctor’s face darkens and Yaz painfully acknowledges she’s told her what she’s thinking about without even moving her lips.
“It’s not your fault”, she mumbles, laying a hand on her shoulder. Surprisingly, the Doctor doesn’t retreat, but actually leans in to the touch.
“You don’t understand”, she says, and her voice is thin and weak like she was exhausted.
“Then explain”.
The Doctor turns to look at her, then takes a breath. Her eyes turn back to the sky. “Do you remember I mentioned consent? When we were at that market?”
Yaz nods. “You did nothing wrong, Doctor. He did want to help us. He just couldn’t manage to talk”.
“That doesn’t mean he gave me his consent”, she cuts her off. “Psychic contact is a delicate procedure. It means entering the most intimate portion of a person’s space. It requires calm. And consciousness of what is about to happen, from both sides”. She pauses and her lips tremble. “I could feel him, Yaz. He was scared. He was terrified of dying and on the brim between life and death, and then I came in and scared him even more”. She inhaled. “He didn’t know what was happening. And then he died on me, while I was inside his mind. I gave him a scaring dead and I felt it all”.
Yaz doesn’t know what to say. She is speechless and she’s not even sure that appropriate words do exist, in this context. Everything she can think of seems stupid and superficial and empty and she’s terrified of making it worse, because it is very clear she does not have the knowledge needed to understand.
It’s the trolley problem, only packaged in a different wrapping. Would she hurt someone, if it meant saving many others?
There’s no right solution. But this is as much of a happy ending as they can get. So Yaz tightens her grip on the Doctor and decides the only thing she can do is ride it out with her.
The Doctor leans her head on Yaz’s shoulder. Before their eyes, Earth continues to spin.
iv.
The fourth time Yaz asks her is when she and Dan realize the intruder who’s followed them and hid on the TARDIS, accidentally ending up with them in the Cretaceous, is Dante Alighieri himself. She realizes this might be a problem when he sees him kneeling in front of an iguanodon in a preaching position and hears him blabbering about a new scheme for his new project, the Comedy.
“I don’t remember dinosaurs being in Dante’s Inferno”, Dan observes, watching him from afar.
“Maybe it was in the Purgatory”, she says.
The Doctor still doesn’t know and thinks she’s picked up one or another noble, and when Yaz goes to find her she’s observing ginkgo leaves through a big magnifying glass. “Well, look at these colours!”, she says, in awe. “They don’t look that good in your present! Well, they do. They look exactly the same. But I do love some foliage”.
“Err, Doctor?”, Yaz says, cautiously.
“Mm?”.
“We might have a problem”.
The Doctor drops the glass and her shoulders fall. “Oh, no, not another problem, why are there always problems?”
Yaz smiles sympathetically. “Well… not a big problem…”
“Come on, just say it”, says the Doctor, but just as she’s finished her sentence Dan’s screams break the peace and quiet of the jungle.
“DANTE – put that down, now! For the love of – ah! Dante! Dante!”
The Doctor looks at her in shock. “It’s not…”
“Yep”.
“But not the…”
“Yep”.
The Doctor sighs and rolls up her sleeves. “Why is it always the important ones who do this?”. She puts her hands on her waist. “Alright. You catch Dante before he gets eaten, I’ll try to see how he got in”.
I can’t believe she’s just said this sentence, Yaz thinks, then she nods, but just as the Doctor starts to walk back to the TARDIS a thought crosses her mind. “Doctor?”
The Doctor turns around.
“I don’t remember dinosaurs being in the Divine Comedy. Will you…”, and she lets the question linger because she doesn’t have the heart to ask it properly, to say those words, after how it ended last time. But the Doctor is still serene and her eyes are barely shadowed by sadness before they return to their usual cheerfulness. “Would be fun to let him write it this way. But I think a memory wipe will be needed, this time”.
Surprisingly, Dante doesn’t resist or protest when the Doctor explains she can’t have him hanging around the thirteenth century with memories of dinosaurs and giant insects. Apparently, giant lizards don’t match his poem’s aesthetic, or at least that’s how Yaz likes to put it.
When Dante’s incertitude manifests just before the procedure, the Doctor’s eyes pool into beautiful golden warmth and Yaz glimpses a speck of distant bitterness at the bottom of her irises. “I promise I won’t hurt you”, she says, “You will be back to your Beatrice in a jiffy”.
That seems to convince him. Dante nods and tells her to proceed. It’s only the second time Yaz sees the Doctor do it, and it’s the first one for Dan, who still can’t believe this is actually something she can do. Yaz watches as the Doctor’s eyelids flutter when her fingers touch the skin on Dante’s temples, and in the second it takes her to wipe down his last memories she can’t help but think this is the most beautiful she’s ever been. Then the Doctor opens her eyes again and Dante falls into Dan’s arms. While they lower him gently to the ground, the Doctor smiles. “I found a memory of Beatrice and showed it to him while I deleted his memories”, she admits, proudly. “He was happy”.
v.
The fifth time Yaz asks, it’s when the Doctor finally opens up about her time spent in space jail. It is not at all near the day of the Dalek invasion. Actually, it’s many years after, and months have gone by since they’ve had to face the Flux. The Doctor has started to talk to her more, since the day they’ve been reunited in 1903, and many memories are resurfacing during their conversations, both hers and Yaz’s.
It’s in one of those moments that the Doctor admits she was tortured. Torture isn’t the word she uses, because she likes to downplay the things that happen to her, either to reassure Yaz or herself. But she describes in detail how the Judoon used to get her out of her cell just to force her into psychic contact, and how they tried to break her psychic walls to find out information about her past. She hadn’t yielded, of course. The wall hadn’t been breached. As much as she likes to say she’s rusty in her psychic abilities, her Time Lord training clearly proves the contrary. But if the psychic wall hasn’t tumbled down, her hearts have done otherwise. Yaz can see it in the way she reminisces, in the way she closes her eyes when she’s remembering certain days.
“Would you forget?”, she asks, at a certain point. “You said there are other telepaths out there. You could ask them to remove those memories”.
The Doctor shakes her head, and when she does that it is clear she doesn’t even have to ponder the possibility, because she’s done so many other times before. “Never, Yaz”, she says. “I understand why anyone would do it. But it’s still me. I never want any other memory to be taken from me”.
Yaz just nods. She thinks of the years she spent without the Doctor. If Jericho and Dan hadn’t been there, would she forget? It’s not the same situation as the Doctor’s, not at all. But faintly, even if it’s a completely different thing, she thinks she can understand. She would never forget any of what she’s lived through in her life. Not Izzy Flint. Not the ten months spent sleeping in that other TARDIS. Not the days she spent looking at the Doctor’s statue, after her transformation into a weeping angel.
Yaz squeezes the Doctor’s hand and the Doctor smiles weakly. Yeah, she does understand.
-
One day it’s Yaz the Doctor uses her abilities on.
Dan isn’t there. He’s left the two of them alone for a day and taken a few hours to catch up with his friends. Yaz and the Doctor, too, have decided to take a pause from adventures and chill for a couple of days in the TARDIS. But it is in the quietest moments that demons resurrect; there’s no time to remember and process information in the Doctor’s frenetic and hectic life, and as soon as time stops and Yaz breathes in, her fears capture her and engulf her.
Night is about to fall in Europe, and the Doctor observes as darkness slowly moves to swallow the Kazak steppes. The wheezing of the TARDIS is the only hearable sound in this portion of space.
“Why won’t you go home?”
“Mmh?” Yaz pretends she hasn’t heard the question well, but the Doctor’s words come like an invisible punch to her stomach.
“You always asked to go home every now and then, before”, explains the Doctor, not bothering to specify which before she’s talking about. “But you haven’t been home in months. Why?”
“Hadn’t noticed”, Yaz just says, turning the page of her book and crossing her legs on the mattress.
The Doctor frowns, but doesn’t say anything and turns back to look at the Earth.
Not even thirty minutes must have passed when she hears it. It’s a whimper, so tiny and feeble that the Doctor first thinks she’s just imagined it. Then there’s ruffling, and she thinks it must be the book – Yaz is particularly vocal when she reads, and this wouldn’t be the first time she expresses her disappointment for a scene out loud. But then, merely seconds later, her breathing quickens. There are no sounds in outer space and the Doctor has excellent hearing, so when they do, she catches it immediately. She turns around and she sees it: Yaz’s eyes closed and trembling, her book abandoned on her thighs, her hands fallen limply on the pages. And, most of all, her expression of tension, her quivering lips.
“Yaz?”, she calls her, a little embarrassed, because she’s seen her sleep many times, but she’s never seen her having a nightmare. She kneels on the empty space of the mattress and awkwardly grazes her shoulder. “Yaz”.
There’s no reaction. If anything, she made it worse. Great. The Doctor skims over the possibilities, and at last, she decides that maybe she’ll just let her go through it. After all, dreams are part of a human’s way of analyzing memories and thoughts, even bad ones. But then – then Yaz talks.
“Doctor”.
It’s the most feeble sound, the weakest her voice has ever been, and if she hadn’t been looking at her lips she almost wouldn’t have noticed. A few seconds later, as if to confirm her doubts, she says that again. “Doctor?”
“I’m here”, she says, but Yaz’s contrite expression doesn’t soften and the Doctor’s hearts fall.
“Come back”, Yaz says, louder now, almost at a normal volume.
The Doctor stutters. Back, where? She tries to imagine what she could possibly be dreaming about, but Yaz fast breaths distract her and make it harder to concentrate. “I am here”, she repeats, but Yaz isn’t hearing her and she’s starting to struggle. Her arms flail, her breath quickens, the book falls from her lap and its pages crease against the cover, and Yaz’s eyes move restlessly under their lids, seeing –
“Doctor!”. Yaz shoots up with a gasp, her eyes wide open and watery, and the Doctor just manages to catch her by her shoulders before she bumps against her.
“Hey, hey – it’s alright. It’s alright, see? TARDIS, me, t’was just a dream”.
It doesn’t seem to work that well. Yaz blinks, and tears escape rebelliously. Her eyes wander through the room as if she wasn’t really seeing it. Then, her mouth opens and she draws a shaking breath that doesn’t quite manage to fill up her lungs, because then she takes in another and another until her hands begin to tingle.
“Yaz. Yaz”, the Doctor calls her, taking her face in her cool hands. It’s enough to shake her out of it a little, and a spark of lucidity flashes in Yaz’s irises, but then it is submerged by terror. “You’re hyperventilating – easy, love, easy – “
“Please – please help me”, Yaz suddenly blurts out between one breath and the other, and more tears fall from her eyes. She’s shaking like a leaf, now, her face paler than it ever has been, and the Doctor’s hearts feel as if they’d been torn in a thousand pieces and then stuck back together.
“Just tell, me, Yaz”, she says, desperately. “Tell me how”.
Yaz doesn’t know how. But then, in between the scenes of a dream, a good memory emerges, one filled with green plants and sweat. She remembers the Doctor’s trembling eyelids and her pale hands on Dante’s temples, and then his calm, pacific smile as they lowered him on the ground.
Yaz takes the Doctor’s left hand with hers and drags it from her cheek to her temple, silently, crying.
The Doctor shakes her head and her eyes fill in regret. “Yaz…”
“Please”, she says, interrupting her, cupping the Doctor’s hand with hers, barely feeling it because of the numbness. “Not – n-not forgetting. I don’t want that. Just”, she draws another shaky breath in, but oxygen just doesn’t want to reach her lungs, “just like you did with Dante, to calm him – with Beatrice…”
The Doctor’s eyes fix on Yaz and scout her face, conflicted. They’re shiny in tears too, now, but the Doctor’s good at keeping them at bay, and they don’t manage to spill. She feels Yaz’s fingers trembling against her, her chest, so near hers, moving hastily while she hyperventilates, she observes her red eyes and her pale skin.
“Of course”, she mumbles, and then, gently, gentler than she’s ever done this, she presses her forehead against Yaz’s.
It’s a battleground. Literally, and figurately. It stretches for miles to the horizon and it’s covered by a vault of grey clouds. There’s wind so strong it carries everything away and sends trees and rocks and houses and weapons flying in the air, and at the corners of her vision field, she catches a glimpse of the Flux, nearing them quickly, dissolving anything that may be around them. In the midst of it, of all her memories and fears, immobile and terrified, is Yaz. No, wait, there’s not only her – there’s someone else in the middle of the storm, a grey, curved figure, it’s –
It’s her.
The Doctor recognises herself, her stony figure and the wings sprouting from her back. Of course, she has never seen herself like that from the outside, and it is terrifying. It’s to her that Yaz is screaming, it’s to the statue that Yaz is asking to come back, and to see that breaks her hearts.
“Yaz”, she says, and her voice echoes in amidst all the destruction. “Yaz, I’m here”.
The Doctor pushes the memories down with her mind and suddenly the battlefield disappears, and the statue of the Doctor is substituted by her own living form. Instead of the wind, a gentle breeze begins to caress Yaz’s body, and the trampled grass curls back to life tinting itself in a warm, reassuring red hue. The clouds disperse, freeing orange skies and two suns.
Everything stops.
“Hey”, says the Doctor, and Yaz realises she’s laying on her back on the grass. The Doctor lays down next to her and pulls her close, stroking her hair. Faintly, Yaz notes her panic attack has subsided, her breathing has turned back to normal, and a strange, warm sensation of calm has begun seeping through her muscles.
“Glad that helped”, says the Doctor, softly. Of course – if she was in her mind, she could hear what she was thinking.
“Where am I?”, Yaz whispers, her voice still creaking.
The Doctor ponders for a second, then replies.
“I grew up there”, she says, pointing at a small barn at the feet of a hill. “Over two thousand years ago”.
Yaz doesn’t reply, just watches. With her ear on the Doctor’s chest, she can hear both of her hearts tumping, and the melody they create together with the sound of the breeze produces a calming lull in her mind. She doesn’t quite understand how it works, if the feeling of the fabric of her tee against her cheek is an illusion the Doctor is creating in her mind, but she doesn’t have the force to think. The Doctor waits patiently for her to recover.
“I didn’t want to go home because I’m afraid”, Yaz admits, after a while. “When I’m alone”.
“Of what?”.
“That I’ll lose you again”.
The Doctor’s hearts thump faster, and her left hand presses Yaz’s head to her chest, stroking her hair.
“They’re all dead”, she says, looking at the barn. “My family. My friends. My own race. I’ve lost everyone”. Yaz listens without moving. “You are the most important thing in my world. The only thing I’ve got left. I won’t let anything take you away from me ever again”.
It’s exactly like she thought it would be, being in the Doctor’s mind. It’s warm and reassuring, and everything has found its place. While Yaz falls asleep, she acknowledges sleepily that she got it wrong – it’s not her who is in the Doctor’s mind, but the opposite. But the boundary seems so unstable, now that they are alone together, now that everything else has stopped. Like somehow, they’ve shared so much they’ve become parts of the same being. Tomorrow, it will all go away, they will go get Dan and everything will go back to normal. But not now. Yaz leans in to the Doctor’s touch, and drifts peacefully to sleep.