Chapter Text
The Doctor wakes with a start. She groans softly, raising a hand to press against her forehead. There's a dull ache there, the one that forms when she gets too overwhelmed or worked up. It's never a pleasant thing to wake up to. At least, she assumes that's what woke her up, because neither the TARDIS or her own brain seem to be in the sort of distress that usually wakes her up.
No. Wait. It's something else, too. Her head hurts, but she's also far too warm. For a brief moment, she wonders if she picked something up during the whirlwind rush to save everything from the Flux. She doesn't get sick very often—her body usually wipes out anything before it can really affect her—but it's been known to happen and if getting sick in this body is anything like getting sick in the others, she's about to be miserable.
A soft sigh distracts her from her slowly spiraling thoughts, and she turns her head to see Yaz sound asleep, curled up against her side.
So, not sick. Just sharing a bed and not quite used to how that feels. She lets out a breath and closes her eyes. Now that she knows the cause, the extra warmth is actually quite nice.
It's been a few days since they finally made it out of the Flux. And while, at first, the Doctor was preoccupied with getting the TARDIS back in shape—the multiple doors seem to have disappeared at last, though a lot of the weird cobweb material remains—last night, she'd finally made time to sit down and fulfill her promise. She told Yaz everything.
At first, she told Yaz about the life she knew. Growing up on Gallifrey. How she and the Master were best friends. Why she left her home. The Time War. About what happened to Rose, Donna, Amy and Rory, Clara, Bill. About River.
She told her how, after the Master had shown up, she'd decided that it was easier to just keep Yaz, Graham, and Ryan at arm's length because maybe if she wasn't that close to them, it wouldn't hurt as much when she lost them. And how wrong she'd been, as Graham and Ryan's departure had not only broken her hearts completely, but filled the void left behind with regret at how much time she had wasted.
And then, she told her about the parts of her life that she's only just discovered. How she's the Timeless Child, the origin of the Time Lords. How Tecteun found her at the boundary and took her without knowing how or why she was there. How she'd raised the Doctor as her daughter—until a tragic accident had revealed the Doctor's innate ability to regenerate, and how she'd gone from an adopted daughter to science experiment. How Tecteun became so obsessed with discovering the source of regeneration that she had tortured the Doctor to the brink of regeneration—to the brink of death—over and over again.
And then, the rest. Division. How Ruth, the Judoon fugitive they'd met was actually not only a Division operative, but a forgotten regeneration of hers. How she'd apparently worked for them until she chose to leave, at which point they had erased all of her memories up until that point.
And still, there was more. Prison, and how long she was really in there. What little Karvanista had told her. How her stolen memories are in the fob watch now buried in the depths of the TARDIS.
And finally, what Time had told her, and how she doesn't know how much time she has left in this regeneration.
Yaz had stayed with her through the whole thing, sitting cross-legged across from her on the bed. When it got hard for the Doctor to speak, she held her hand and waited patiently for her to be able to continue. And at the end of it all, she'd pulled the Doctor into her arms and held her tightly.
They must have fallen asleep soon after.
Yaz sighs in her sleep again and drapes an arm across the Doctor's stomach.
The Doctor wriggles a little bit, because now that she's awake, she wants to get up, move around, starting doing things. But at the same time, this is nice.
The TARDIS makes up her mind for her when the entire ship suddenly plummets, like a carnival ride gone haywire, and then slams to a halt.
Yaz startles awake, blinking frantically as she sits up. "Whoa."
"All right, Yaz?" the Doctor asks.
"Yeah, I just got that thing where it feels like I'm falling—"
The TARDIS plummets again.
Yaz gasps and instintively grabs the Doctor's arm. "What's happening?"
"I don't know," the Doctor replies. "Sorry, Yaz, I gotta…"
Yaz nods and lets go.
The Doctor climbs out of the bed and grabs her boots, hopping on one foot and then the other as she pulls them on and runs to the console. She must look a mess, in only her trousers—braces hanging loose at her hips—and an untucked white shirt, but there's no time to worry about that.
The TARDIS falls again, and the Doctor has to grab the console to stay upright when she slams to a stop. "What has gotten into you?" she says.
Yaz appears at her side, looking just as disheveled. "What do you need me to do?" she says.
"Go find Dan," the Doctor says. "Get him somewhere safe."
"Doctor?"
"Found him," Yaz says without missing a beat.
The Doctor whirls around to see Dan standing at the top of the steps, looking completely baffled. "I thought you said you fixed the TARDIS," he says.
"Yeah, well, sometimes she doesn't get the memo," the Doctor says with a pointed glare at the time rotor.
The TARDIS makes a series of sounds that can only be translated as a long string of profanity.
Dan starts down the steps, but a violent sideways lurch sends him tumbling down to the floor.
"Dan!" Yaz calls out, doing her best to rush over to him.
The Doctor grimaces as she struggles to stay on her feet. She reaches for the dematerialization lever, but pulls her hand back at the last second. There's no telling what trying to jump anywhere would do with the ship behaving like this. She can't risk it. Not with the humans on board.
The console suddenly spits a fountain of sparks and she yelps as a dreadful shock shoots up both arms. She yanks her hands back and frantically flaps them.
"Are you all right, Doctor?" Yaz calls out.
"I'm fine!" The Doctor kicks herself for that; she knows Yaz, for good reason, doesn't like those words, but it's an instinctive response. "It's just a malfunction, I just have to—"
The console room plunges into darkness.
The Doctor looks up, at the ceiling, at the spot where all of the crystalline pillars should converge. "Oh," is all she can say.
"What's going on?"
"It's gonna be okay, Yaz," the Doctor says, responding to the waver in the young woman's voice. She squints in the darkness, trying to see anything. "Have either of you got your phones on you?"
"Nah, left mine in my room," Dan replies.
"Mine's in my jacket pocket."
The Doctor pats herself down. "And my sonic's in my coat," she says. "Dan, are you hurt?"
"No. I'm all right."
"Okay. Stay there. Yaz, stay with him."
"Got it."
The Doctor feels her way around the console. "Why'd I stop here?" she mutters to herself. "Could've at least stopped somewhere where there's outside light."
Finally, her foot nudges the mattress. "Yaz! Where's your jacket?"
"Probably up by the pillows."
"…you two sleep in the same bed?"
"Not now, Dan."
There's something in Yaz's voice that pings it as something the Doctor might want to come back to, and she makes a mental note to do so when they're not all stuck in a malfunctioning TARDIS.
Finally, she feels the familiar leather jacket. She digs through the pockets and finds her phone. "Got your phone, Yaz," she says. She accidentally hits the button on the side and the screen lights up to show a very old photo of the two of them. The sight gives her pause. "How long have you had this as your lockscreen, Yaz?"
"…not now, Doctor."
There's that something again. The Doctor shrugs and shoves the phone into her pocket as she rummages around in search of her own coat. She finds it, digs her sonic out of the inside pocket, and uses it to make just enough light to make her way back to Yaz and Dan.
Yaz takes her phone, not quite meeting the Doctor's gaze.
"When did we take that photo?" the Doctor asks.
"Um…just after the charity shop," Yaz replies. "You kept stopping to look at yourself in shop windows, so I offered to take a photo of you and—"
"I assumed you meant a selfie," the Doctor finishes. "Yeah. I remember that."
Dan meekly raises a hand. "Uh, sorry to interrupt the moment, but—"
The Doctor blows the air out of her cheeks. "Right. TARDIS." She kneels down.
"What are you doing?" Yaz asks.
"I need to find the edge of the floor panels," the Doctor replies. "I need to get down there to see if I can fix this. Give me some light, please."
"Got it."
Now that she can see, the Doctor finds the grooves and lifts the floor panel, setting it to the side. She darts around the console and grabs her welding gear before lowering herself down into the hole. "Can you come down here, Yaz?"
"Sure thing." Yaz drops into the hole.
The Doctor pulls on her gloves before opening a panel. She scans it with her sonic and the reading makes her hearts sink.
"It's bad, isn't it?"
The Doctor glances at Yaz. "It's…"
"Doctor, we've talked about you and the word fine." Yaz gives her a pointed look. "I can tell from your body language that we're not fine."
The Doctor raises an eyebrow. "You spend a lot of time lookin' at me, do ya?"
"I'm a former police officer. I'm observant."
The Doctor pouts. "I thought it was because I'm cute."
"Well, you are cute."
The Doctor promptly drops her sonic.
"Can I make a small request?" Dan's voice filters down from above. "Maybe a little less flirting and a little more making sure we don't all die in here?"
Yaz's eyes go wide. "I'm not—"
The Doctor can't figure out what to say any of this, so she resumes her work, carefully examining the internals of the console.
"Like I said, it's bad, isn't it?"
The Doctor swallows heavily. "It's…not good," she says. "If I can rewire some stuff, divert and reroute power to the backup systems, it should be enough that I can make an emergency landing somewhere. Of course, I'll still have to come up with a fix to get you two back home, but…"
"It's a start," Yaz says.
"It's a start."
The Doctor gets to work, rewiring the console to divert power from the main engines to the backup systems. It's a long, tedious process; her back and legs ache from crouching by the end of it. Finally, she wipes her brow with her sleeve and climbs back out of the hole, offering Yaz a hand up before she feels her way along the console again. She finds the crank and winds it. "C'mon, old girl," she whispers to her ship. "I know you're not well, but you've gotta help us out here."
Slowly, the lights come up, the console room once again bathed in a warm amber glow. The Doctor lets out a laugh and spins around to face her friends, arms held wide.
Yaz smiles and shakes her head. "All right, bighead," she says.
"Excuse me?" the Doctor says. "I just brought us back from the brink of disaster."
Yaz reaches up to ruffle her hair.
"Oi." The Doctor scronches up her nose and bats Yaz's hand away, but she can't deny that the gesture makes her feel warm inside.
"So…are we okay now?" Dan asks.
"No. Not really. I've got some backup systems working, and that's enough to get us on the ground. But it's the best I can do until I can take a look at her."
The TARDIS is still unstable, still threatening to knock them over with every switch flipped and lever pulled. But the Doctor manages to wrestle her into a landing sequence.
Yaz, beside her at the console, looks at the display. "We're landing?"
"Yeah."
"And you're not noticing anything strange?"
"Like what?"
Yaz cups a hand to her ear.
The Doctor's mouth falls open as she realizes her ship isn't making its usual landing noise, and she doubts it's because she's finally learned how to take the brakes off.
"Hang on, you two!" she calls out. "This could get rough."
Sure enough, the TARDIS doesn't so much land as crash, landing at an angle and tipping over onto her side. The impact throws the Doctor back into one of the pillars, and she barely has time to recover from that before Yaz lands directly on top of her. Hitting the pillar and having a full-grown human land on her leaves her winded, and for a long moment, she struggles to catch her breath.
"Sorry," Yaz says as the ship's gravity is restored.
The Doctor rests her hands on her knees. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah. You broke my fall."
"You're welcome."
The Doctor straightens up. "Dan? You all right?"
"Slightly regretting my life choices, but I'm okay."
The Doctor rubs her neck as she trudges back to the console. Most of the displays are blank. A few flash warnings and alerts at her. "All right, don't go on about it," she mutters. She flips a few switches and flinches at the defeaning grinding sound.
"That's not a good sound, is it?" Dan asks.
"No, definitely not a good sound," Yaz replies.
The Doctor sighs and steps back, planting her hands on her hips. She spins on her heel to look at the humans. "What do you say?" she says. "Shall we go have a look around while I think about this?"
Yaz's face lights up. "Of course," she says. She nudges Dan. "First proper alien planet that's not trying to kill you, yeah? Let's go."
The Doctor waits until they've gone before she trudges back to her own room to get changed. Something tells her that Yaz is going to regret those words.