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Like most revelations do, this particular one manifests itself to Yaz in the middle of the night. It’s three in the morning, Earth time, and the faint light of the TARDIS’ night lighting system gently propagates through Yaz’s bathroom, illuminating her mirror. The silhouette of her face appears in the glass, uncombed hair and skin slightly puffy for the contact with the pillow, and Yaz suppresses a yawn. Water. Bed. Sleep makes her movements mechanic and slow. Take the glass. Fill it with water. Shut the tap. Drink.
Yaz gulps a mouthful of water and puts the glass back on the edge of the sink. When she blinks, the shapes of the objects in the room tremble slightly, faded by her tiredness. Being this drowsy, still kind of somnolent but clearly awake at the same time, makes her feel a bit like she was drunk. Objects don’t stay still like they’re supposed to do but wander and falter and move around her vision at their pleasing. She’s about to get back to bed. But then her eyes catch the glimpse of something in her reflection, a colour that looks… off, in among the rest of her face. It’s a hair, grey, and Yaz immediately feels lucid at that simple realisation. A grey hair? This soon? Yaz reaches to touch it – not to pull it, of course, she knows what they say about pulling grey hairs – but the hair unexpectedly crumbles under her fingers, leaving a dusty coating on her skin.
Well, she must have imagined it. That, or maybe it wasn’t a hair – just dirt. Her eyes must have tricked her. Yaz shrugs, turns the light off and forgets it.
“- empty, scrubbed clean like a bowl of noodles, and you know what I said?” The Doctor pronounces these words as if they were a proper question, but no pause is taken when she finishes the sentence. “I said, call Aeschylus, tell him that tortoise wasn’t his to eat!”
“Yuk”. Yaz cringes and lowers the peach she is eating, squinting at the Doctor through her disgusted expression. “Did he really eat a tortoise?”
“Well, you’re talking, you and your weird eating potatoes habit”. The Doctor jokes.
“What’s wrong with potatoes?”
“Well, you know Columbus?”
“Aight”. Yaz throws the peach’s core onto the grass and stands up, wiping her hands on her jeans and then reaching her left one out to help the Doctor up. “Enough stories. What do you say we go for a walk? It’s beautiful here. I want to take a look around”.
It really is, beautiful, and she knows she doesn’t need to do a lot of convincing to get the Doctor to leave their picnic blanket to venture out deeper into the pastures. With their lime green grass and pink skies, the green lands of this planet make quite a striking palette, but it’s the moons that catch Yaz eye, their seven rounded, enormous shapes dangling over the pink vault of the sky and looking at them with craterous eyes. She’s never seen a planet with that many visible orbiting corps before, and surely not any as dramatically imposing as this one. The Doctor is really good at choosing picnic spots, and Yaz makes a mental note to remind herself to exchange the favour somewhen, somehow – because for once, the Doctor deserves to be the one who’s going to be surprised, and amazed, and who’s going to get her breath taken away.
“Of course”, Yaz hears her say, and the Doctor takes her hand and stands up beside her. “You know what – I’ll get my camera. It’s the right place to take pictures, this one. What do you say? Facebook pic? LinkedIn?”
“I don’t know, can you make it look fake?”
“Ha”. The Doctor smiles and heads for the TARDIS, and Yaz bends down to pile their plates and put them back in the picnic basket. But then, as her shirt’s collar rubs on her neck, an irresistible itch begins spreading through her skin – an itch that just doesn’t seem to go away when Yaz reaches for her neck and scratches it. Yaz frowns.
“These damned bugs”, she complains, scratching harder.
“Bugs?” The Doctor pops out of the TARDIS, a big, shiny camera in hand, and immediately starts pointing it around in search of the perfect photographing spot. “Haven’t seen any bugs”, she mutters, absent-mindedly.
“I think I saw a mosquito somewhere. Maybe it was on the TARDIS – don’t know”.
Yaz scratches her skin, again. This time, something happens – a weird sensation, like having sand on your neck and scrubbing it off. And indeed, when she retracts her finger, there’s dust on their tips, a grey, crumbly, sandy dust, almost the same one she’d seen when she’d tried to touch her grey hair.
For a moment, Yaz feels a hint of fear crossing her chest, like needles puncturing her skin. It takes her a few seconds to realise. Of course – they’ve spent the whole morning cleaning up the TARDIS. That’s where she must have gotten the dust from. Maybe some of it has fallen on her or on her clothes. No wonder she’s itching all over.
Relieved, Yaz turns back to the Doctor right on time to see her snap an instantaneous of the smallest moon. The picture slides gently out of the machine, and the Doctor catches it and puts it in her right pocket, shielding it from the sun.
Yaz smiles at her. “You were saying?”
“Well, of course we had to find another tortoise, but then nobody wanted to drop it on Aeschylus’ head…”
It’s out of tremendous luck that the Doctor has managed to find them tickets for an event like this, Yaz thinks, and if she adds this particular manifestation of luck to the already long list of wonderful coincidences that happened to her since the Doctor crossed her path, she gets a weird, warm kind of vertigo that makes her heart beat faster and her cheeks redden. It’s moons, again, but from a different perspective, now, and Yaz starts to think that the Doctor is doing it on purpose, that she’s planning some kind of thematic holiday through Time and Space, and that that theme is moons and colours and everything that this universe has to offer when it comes to beautiful things linked to these two elements.
It’s indeed a spectacle of colours, a triumph of red and purple and orange and burgundy shaped into moons and planets. The Doctor has tried to explain it to her – something to do with an asteroid impacting one of the moons and releasing gasses that interfere with this sun’s rays – but like it often happens with her, the explanation started off simple and ended in a sea of astrotechnicalities that made Yaz develop a headache. But somehow, not understanding it fully makes this sight even more impacting, more astonishing. Like there’s a bit of a fairy-tale, encapsulated in the crust of these giants.
They aren’t the only ones who are there to see it. It’s an intergalactic event, well-known, and species from all corners of the galaxy have come to admire the colourful gas spillage. Just in the visible portion of space, a dozen spaceships of different sizes float silently around the moons of Takorah, letting their passengers observe the moons. But their spaceship is the biggest one, and the most exclusive: elegant guests cross its bridge with impeccable strides, and their gorgeous dresses almost rival in splendour the colours of the moons. Yaz, herself, is wearing a wonderful red gown that makes her feel like a princess, and the Doctor has gifted her traditional flowers to embed in her braids.
A small, dark vessel passes in front of the window Yaz is looking out from, obscuring her view of the moons for a few seconds, and Yaz catches a glimpse of herself in the glass. The red ruffles of her dress and the orange petals stand out against the blackness of the sky and the metallic tints of the ship. However, there’s something that confuses her, a small speck of grey just under her ear, that evidently stands out against her brown skin.
Yaz frowns, but as soon as she tries to catch a better glimpse of it, the spaceship moves and her reflected image disappears. Quickly, she grabs her phone, pointing it in the direction of her neck. No, she hasn’t imagined it. It’s a big portion of her skin, expanding from her nuke to her clavicle, and it’s grey and dull as if that part of her was made of stone. She touches it. It’s cold, too, and rough and lifeless, like a statue.
“Doctor?”
The Doctor doesn’t reply, because as soon as she finishes pronouncing her name something crashes into the inferior part of the ship and makes it brutally shake for a few seconds. There’s a horrible sound, like creaking or rubbing the point of a knife against the surface of a pan, and the lights flicker uncontrollably. When everything stops and the emergency lights are turned on, not even ten seconds later, the emergency signals all begin to howl like an eery pack of wolves, pulsating in red light.
“Yaz? Yaz? You alright?”, the Doctor asks, and Yaz realizes the quaking has made her fall down to the ground as it did to the many other passengers. She nods, gratefully taking the Doctor’s hand and standing up, and looks around to see the room completely turned upside down by the quake. There are people on the ground, some sitting, others barely standing up and gripping tables and railings, a few unconscious on the floor; and then there are plates and food scattered on the ground, broken glasses and hats and shoes and paper laying abandoned all around the confused and scared guests, forgotten.
“What was that?”, she asks, her voice almost barely audible in among all the confusion and the voices of the people asking questions to the staff.
“I think that small ship crashed into us, I – ah”, the Doctor looks terribly disappointed, guilty almost, and she hits her forehead with her palm, “I knew something was off – it was too close. Must have astroplaned and hit us”. But then that uncharacteristic expression disappears in a second, leaving place for its more common counterpart of decisiveness and control. In a swift movement, she takes her sonic out of her pocket and scans the room; then, after reading the results, she puts her index finger and thumb in her mouth, and whistles – loud.
Everyone stops talking and looks at her. “Chief inspector for travel safety”, she explains, lifting her psychic paper up, “The shields have just been breached by another ship. I should be able to fix this, but I need all of you to move to the emergency cabin as quickly as possible. Don’t argue, just go”.
The guests look at her confusedly, but none seem to object to the Doctor’s order. When the Doctor turns around and begins scanning the nearest screen, Yaz takes the opportunity to try and approach her.
“Doctor, I need to tell you something”, she mutters, her voice strong but urgent.
The Doctor doesn’t turn around and opens a panel, pulling out a hank of cables that she begins to unravel. “Unless it’s information about the shields, it’ll have to wait, Yaz, sorry”. The cables just don’t want to untangle and the Doctor grunts in exasperation, pointing her screwdriver at them in a movement that sends minuscule red sparks of electricity flying from the panel. When Yaz opens her mouth to explain, the Doctor gently moves her aside, her attention caught by something at the other end of the room. It’s an old man, curved and thin, and he’s sitting alone on the ground, by a table, with a hand on a bad cut on his temple. “Here”, the Doctor says, kneeling beside him and offering him her elbow to grip as he stands up, until one of the stewards comes to help. “I’ve got to reinstall the shields, check there’s no breach in the oxygen layers. Yaz, it’s vital that everyone gets to safety. I’m counting on you”.
There are a thousand things Yaz would want to say, fears and suspicions and thoughts that have passed through her mind since she saw that grey spot on her skin a few minutes ago, but she just doesn’t manage to find the right words. Instead, when the Doctor turns around and skips towards the control room, Yaz just finds herself walking after her and calling her name. “Doctor, wait. I…”
She doesn’t expect the Doctor to snap, and when she does it’s still in a gentle, a bit desperate tone, not a cruel one, certainly not, but a frustrated, anxious one for sure. Still, when the Doctor turns around and yells “Now, Yaz!”, Yaz can’t help but wince a bit, but feel a little stupid for wanting to insist on her worries when there are so many people waiting for her help.
She turns around to join the other passengers, trying to repress her fears and to put them in a drawer, deep down in her mind, one that she can close and re-open once the right moment has come. But something in her chest just doesn’t feel right. It’s like a feeling of impending doom, pressing down on her, preventing her from thinking clearly. No, she just has to wait until all of this has finished, then she can tell the Doctor. Yaz puts her fingers through her braid and begins breaking it down as she walks towards the emergency cabin. Her hair falls onto her shoulder, hiding the grey spot from others’ eyes. One by one, the orange flowers fall to the ground behind her.
She hates them, journalists. She didn’t like them on Earth, when they kept bugging her every time she was on a crime scene, and she hates them now, as they follow the Doctor through the dusty hills of Takorah. They want to know about the accident, of course, about the woman that managed to repair the shields and guide the ship back to safety on the planet they’re standing on. But most of them are there for the other scandal, the one regarding the smaller ship that crashed into them, killing all its passengers. But the Doctor is having none of their microphones and cameras pointed at her face. As she tries to walk away from the scene as quickly as possible, heading for the TARDIS, at least a dozen journalists insistently walk beside her and try to draw words from her mouth.
“When did you realise the situation could be dangerous?”
“Just leave me alone, please”.
A woman presses her tiny microphone to the Doctor’s chin. “Were you scared when you understood the risks?”
“Go away”.
“What you did is heroic, miss. What do you want to say to the families of the victims?”
It’s this comment that makes her explode.
“This is not the work of a hero, nor a miracle. This is a tragedy, and one of the worst kinds. This is the tragedy of those who look the other way. The engineers knew the vessel’s shielding was poor and wouldn’t have protected the passengers from crashes. And I knew it was going to crash into us. What I did is nothing more than an act of decency”.
The words either manage to make the journalists back off, or they give them the content they were longing for. Slowly, one by one, they let the Doctor go. When they reach the TARDIS, Yaz lays a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, but she scrolls it off.
“This isn’t your fault. There was nothing you could do”.
“You’re wrong. I saw that the vessel was too close. If I’d reacted immediately, maybe they would still be alive”.
The Doctor’s voice is bitter and broken. When they enter the TARDIS, she remains silent for a few minutes, piloting the ship away, and then, without turning to look at Yaz, she mutters a number.
“What?”, Yaz asks, confused.
“The passengers. I counted them while I landed the ship. I counted every body I saw floating, lifeless”.
She pauses.
“Sixteen. They were sixteen.”
Yaz knows she feels the weight of them all on her shoulders.
When Yaz later goes to her bedroom, the patch of grey skin is still there. It looks at her, as if it was sentient. Yaz feels cold to the bone, a cold that feels impossible to heal.
She can’t tell the Doctor. Not now. Not now that she’s feeling like this. She can do better – solve the problem alone, without putting any more pressure and stress and guilt on the Doctor’s shoulders. After all, she’s seen her do it a thousand times, to her and Graham and Ryan, and she’s gotten the settings of the med-bay memorised. That can’t be too difficult, right?
The Doctor doesn’t need to know.
In the middle of the night, Yaz tiptoes to the med-bay and heads for the scanner. She knows she just has to press the central button and wait. As soon as her index touches the small circle, the TARDIS wheezes lightly. There’s a whirring sound, and blue light exits the screen and wraps around Yaz’s body. Then red strings of text begin forming on the screen.
“Shark?”
The Doctor points at Graham and widens her eyes, jumping on the spot. Her coat flails with her movement like a big, lilac flag.
“Shark?”, Graham repeats, and turns around to Yaz, but she just smiles and shows her open palms, shrugging. “Is it shark? Did I get it?”
“Mmh!”, the Doctor mutters in a desperate attempt to get Graham’s attention back, and then holds her hand out, parallel to the floor, rocking it slightly.
“So and so? It’s a fish? No? An animal! An animal, with…”, Graham frowns as the Doctor’s hand ventures back to stand vertically on her neck, and Yaz can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of this gesture. “A… fin? Crest? Uh, hand? Krishna?”
beep beep beep
“Krishna?”, says the Doctor, disappointedly, putting her hands on her waist.
Graham shrugs. “Well, what was this even supposed to mean?”, he asks, imitating the Doctor’s crest-gesture.
“Come on! Spikey nuke? Feathers? You’re telling me you’ve never seen a pentapod before?”
Graham frowns. “Pentapod?”
“Ah”. The Doctor scrunches her face, scratches her head, and turns around, embarrassed. “Thought there was some in India. Sorry, memory glitch. Want another match?”
“Oh, no, I want a change of team – I’m not having it this way for another round”.
“Oi!”
“You keep mixing up planets!”
Yaz smiles. Oh, how much she has missed this – the banter, the jokes, this… squabbling. Of course, she loves being with the Doctor, but there are dynamics that can’t be replicated when it’s only the two of them hanging around the TARDIS, and Yaz feels tremendously glad that Graham and Ryan have invited them over for Christmas. It was just a few days after Takorah that they’d called – Yaz remembers finding a couple of missed calls and feeling terribly scared and excited at the same time, because why would they be calling them and not text? – and though Yaz was a bit unsure in the first days preceding the dinner, nervous for how the Doctor, still so affected by the spaceship’s accident, would react, she realises coming here is probably the best decision she’s taken in the last days. Immersed in her round of charades, the Time Lord finally looks… serene, in a sense, and for once genuinely so. Like nothing has happened. With a corner of her mind, Yaz wonders if that is the truth – whether she really feels more relaxed, now that she’s gotten some distraction, or she is just pretending to feel so.
“Hey, you can take off the scarf, you know”. Ryan’s voice wakes Yaz up from her inner discussions, and Yaz politely smiles.
“No, it’s alright – I think I’ve caught a cold, it’s better if I stay covered”.
Ryan pokes her with his elbow. “Been in some nice places?”
“Sure”, says Yaz, but even though she knows Ryan is curious about where she could have gotten the cold from, she decides not to elaborate. It is not that she doesn’t want to share with him or feed his curiosity, and God only knows how much she would want to vent with him, to tell him everything that has happened in the few days, since Takorah – but she knows if she tries to fabricate a lie about icy planets and alien cases of flu there’s a big possibility the lie will get too big to manage and will backfire against her.
Then, of course, there’s the other possibility – revealing to him that there’s no cold, that she hasn’t gotten sick on this or that planet, that she’s only wearing a scarf so that the Doctor doesn’t see the grey spot of rocky cold skin on her neck – but Ryan is so bad at keeping secrets and the Doctor is so good at spotting liars that she really doesn’t want to risk it.
She’s about to say something that might make the discussion move to safer planes, but suddenly there’s ringing at the door, and Ryan shoots up from the sofa. “Finally, pizza. Pause!”
Yaz sighs. Safe. For now.
“Alright, but we’re still changing teams afterwards”, Grahams mutters, and The Doctor rolls her eyes.
There’s a ruffling of paper as Graham picks up the pieces of paper they’ve abandoned around the room, and Yaz decides to head for the kitchen to set the table. With the corner of her eye, she sees the Doctor following her, and she can’t help but feel a weird sense of tension in her stomach.
“Are you alright?”, says the Doctor, looking dubiously at Yaz as she sets the tablecloth.
Yaz smiles but doesn’t look at her, pretending to be concentrated on her task. “Mmh? Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’re sweating”
“Well, you try miming a helicopter”.
“What about the scarf?”, the Doctor insists.
Yaz shoots her a nervous glance, then walks to the other side of the table to straighten the tablecloth. “Why are you being so paranoid?”, she asks, purposely cruel because it’s the only way the Doctor will stop inquiring, and when her eyes involuntarily shoot up, meeting the Doctor’s for a brief moment, a shiver runs down her spine. There’s something wrong – she is feeling nervous, yes, but her stomach is acting up, and the Doctor is true: she’s sweating, profusely so, a cold sweat that doesn’t feel natural to her. Yaz gulps.
Suddenly the Doctor’s hands are on her right wrist, and when Yaz makes to pull away her grip fastens. She’s noticed – of course she would notice, and she did it before Yaz herself could take note of her worsening symptoms. Yaz looks up to meet worried hazel eyes staring at her, the Doctor’s lips pressed into a thin line, and she blinks, trying to hide her nervousness.
“Alright, everyone at the table!”, says Graham, entering the kitchen with four cartons of pizza in his hands, and Ryan follows straight behind carrying a bag of fries and drinks. It’s a wonderful sight, really, especially if she thinks about all the time she usually spends waiting in restaurants for this kind of Christmas party – but for some reason, the smell makes her stomach revolt and bile rise up in her mouth. Yaz gulps, feeling cold sweat wet her forehead. A shiver trails down her spine, giving her goosebumps.
It’s okay, Yaz thinks, trying to reassure herself. She remembers reading all of these symptoms on a book she’s consulted after running the med-bay scan. If she closes her eyes, she can almost see the cover in every minute detail and read the title and subheading as if the manual was there, before her. Lapimorbs: treatments and risks. Recent studies over petrifying illnesses. In the last few days, she’s opened it so many times it has started to feel familiar, and she can easily skip to the parts she needs without longing onto useless paragraphs. Yes, cold sweats, shivers, headaches and nausea were all there; they’re common symptoms in these kinds of syndromes. But she’s got nothing to worry about. The book was very clear and reassuring in its description – the virus can make the subject develop stone-like splotches on their skin, but it isn’t risky if treated, and even without medicine it usually goes away on its own. And Yaz has been taking the medicine the book recommended for days. Nothing bad can happen. Right?
A fuming pizza is laid on the plate before her, and Yaz tries to gulp away the nausea. She can feel the Doctor’s eyes on her, no matter if the Time Lord seems to be participating actively in the conversation. She has to be more cautious.
“So, anything to tell? Nice places you’ve been to?”, Ryan asks, munching on a slice of pepperoni pizza. “You guys never tell us anything”.
“Ah, enough with us. You should be the ones talking”, The Doctor says, and Yaz reads this sentence like an open book. No, of course the Doctor wouldn’t want to speak about what they’ve been doing in the last days – not when every memory of those days is coated with her guilt over Takorah’s events. And then there’s the other option – that the Doctor is choosing not to talk about it so she can concentrate on Yaz. It’s when her eyes shoot up to her, just after finishing this sentence, that Yaz starts curving towards this possibility, because the Doctor observes her as if she was communicating with her silently, as if she was telling her: I’m not done with you. “You should be the ones telling us stuff. How’s human life going? Having fun?”
“Ah, well, same old, same old”, Graham mutters, opening a can of soda. “But it’s a good old, you know. Being in the TARDIS kinda makes you see stuff with different eyes. Like I’m imagining what I would think, if I was an alien visiting Earth and not just Graham, the bus driver”.
Yaz listens to the conversation absent-mindedly, and she takes her fork and knife to try and slice the pizza. If she does this first, she thinks, maybe she can buy herself time, maybe she’ll feel better and hungry in a few minutes. But when she takes the knife in her hand, a strange sensation spreads through her skin. It’s like she can barely feel it, the knife, and she can’t really tell if it’s cold or not or feel its shape under her fingers. They’re not tingly, no, but it’s like their sense of feeling is being… cushioned. Quenched. Nervously, Yaz tries to cut it anyway, but when she lifts the knife, it falls from her hands and falls loudly to the ground.
Everyone’s eyes shoot to her, and Yaz feels her heart thumping faster in her chest. “Gosh, these hands”, she says, trying to act normal, but there’s the slightest falter in her voice. Nobody seems to notice, anyway, and when she bends to grab the knife Graham stops her and stands to get a new one.
“It’s the old age, comes to us all”, he jokes, and Yaz laughs. Alright, she thinks, no knife. It’s nothing. I’m just anxious. I’m just panicking. It’s not that she’s scared because of how she’s feeling; she knows the illness is not dangerous, she’s run scans every day in the med-bay. She’s healing. No, it’s the Doctor’s eyes on her that are making her anxious – that risk of being discovered, of worrying her, of giving her more stuff to think about. Leaving the knife aside, Yaz opts for her fingers, grabs the edge of the pizza, and starts breaking the crust. But her hands are shaking, and she just can’t manage to get a straight line.
Yaz looks up. No one is looking at her. Even the Doctor has stopped staring at her and seems to be deeply lost in her conversation with Ryan and Graham. Nothing will happen – you will eat the pizza, and everything will be alright. She won’t notice. Maybe you just need more meds. Taking a bigger breath, Yaz reaches for the pitcher and starts pouring water into her glass. Alright. It is alright. I’m fine. My hands are fine.
But her hands are not fine at all. When her fingers try to wrap around the pitcher’s handle, they remain stubbornly half-open in their original position, and the pitcher falls from Yaz grip hitting the table with a thud and spilling water everywhere. There’s water all over the table, on the tablecloth and on the pizza and on her clothes, and Yaz realises with horror that there’s water on her hands too, but she can’t feel a thing.
Moreover, her thumb’s skin is starting to turn into a dull, stony grey.
“Excuse me”, she mutters, her voice trembling, and in a couple of seconds, she’s left the kitchen, her chair falling to the ground loudly. She can hear the voice of the others calling her, but she ignores them, she must not let them see, she must not let her know, and as soon as she reaches the door of the bathroom she gets in and slams the door shut and turns the key with her knuckles.
Yaz slides to the floor, shaking, then drags herself to the full-length mirror, and with trembling, cold, stiff hands she inspects the skin of her forearms, awkwardly pulling the sleeves up. Greyness is spreading rapidly from the tips of her fingers to her elbow, leaving her skin senseless and rigid.
Now she is anxious.
“Yaz”, a gentle, firm voice says, and though it seems to Yaz like hours have passed it’s merely been seconds since the door has been shut. “Yaz, let me in”.
“I’m alright”, she says out loud, still trying to sound calm, but her voice sways in a highly uncharacteristic and fake way. “Just sick. I think I have a fever”.
“We both know that is not true”, the Doctor’s voice says, and Yaz feels a stab to her stomach. Bile rises faster than before. “Yaz, whatever it is, I can help. Just let me help you. There’s no use hiding things from me”. There’s silence for a second, and then Yaz hears a soft thud, like someone has rested their head on the other side of the door. “Please. For me”.
Yaz doesn’t reply for a few seconds. She takes her head in her hands, but her fingers are incredibly stiff and cold, and the realisation makes a wave of frustrated tears round up in her eyes. She’s so cold, she feels so cold, and so terribly weak. A shaky breath leaves her lips.
“I can’t”, she mutters, and for a second, she’s not sure the Doctor has heard her, because her voice is low and muffled from the contact of her mouth with her hands.
But when does the Doctor not hear her?
“Why not?”, the Doctor urges her, her voice tense.
“I can’t feel my hands”, Yaz admits, lowly, and angry tears begin spilling from her eyes.
Barely a second passes, and Yaz hears the doorknob rattling. Then, a whirring sound coming from the other side of the door – but to no avail. It doesn’t do wood. After, muffled voices join the Doctor’s – Yaz makes out bits of conversation, but her nausea is worsening and her head is spinning and she feels so cold, so cold –
“What’s happening?”
“ – spare key?”
“No, don’t – in the drawer –“
“Step back”.
Yaz is not sure if it’s her that the Doctor is talking to, but then the Time Lord repeats it, louder this time, and Yaz shuffles back against the wall opposite to the door. It takes her all her strength, because her arms, too, are starting to feel stiff, now, and her whole body is beginning to ache, begging for release. But no matter how hard her heart is trying to pump – blood just doesn’t seem to be reaching her limbs and Yaz is starting to feel even colder than before.
Something impacts with the door, making it tremble on its hinges, but else it doesn’t move. The person makes a second try, and this time it seems like a stronger attempt, but it isn’t enough to move the door. It takes a third time for the upper hinge to break, and the door slams open under the impact with the Doctor’s shoulder, almost making her fall inside the room.
The Doctor is at her side in seconds, her hands trailing on hers rapidly and touching her skin, and though she tries to hide it, her terror rapidly surfaces in her irises. The Doctor’s hands expertly move Yaz’s, lift the edge of the sleeve up, examine the grey tint of the skin. Then, when she realises it’s not just her hands that are affected, the Doctor looks up to Yaz’s face and her fingers reach for the scarf, stopping there for a second as if asking for permission. Yaz is looking at her, now, tears filling her eyes and escaping rebelliously, and she nods almost imperceptibly. She is trying so hard to keep it cool, to keep calm, but staying strong is a fight against all parts of herself. The Doctor removes the scarf, and gasps.
“How long?”, she inquires, horrified, tracing the silhouette of the grey speck on Yaz’s skin, wincing when she feels her skin cold and stony under her fingers.
“I think a few weeks”, Yaz wheezes, her lids droopy, her breathing shallow. “N-not – not sure”.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”, the Doctor asks, heartbroken, and she cups her face with her left hand, stroking her cheek with her thumb. “Why wouldn’t you?”
Yaz doesn’t reply. It would take her too much energy to try and explain, and she doesn’t want to tell the Doctor she did that to protect her. But if she isn’t to tell her the truth, then she doesn’t know what else she should say. She can’t think of a single lie that could repair the damage she’s done, and therefore she doesn’t say anything and instead keeps staring at those deep, glistening pools of gold that are in front of her. The Doctor sighs, squeezes her eyes, lost deep in thought, and when Yaz’s breathing gets quicker she retreats her hand. Yaz’s skin is left colder than the parts of her that are turning to stone.
“Alright. I need to get you to the med-bay. Can you stand up?”
Yaz nods, panting, and the Doctor crouches beside her to help her up, holding her by her waist.
“Here, let me…”, Ryan says, coming in, and Yaz realises they must have watched the whole scene from the door. But as soon as he tries crossing the doorsill, the Doctor shoots an index up and blocks him. “No, out. This is contagious to the touch. I don’t want you anywhere near us”.
“What about you?”, Yaz says, anxiously, and tries to retract, but as soon as she does that her balance falters and her face comes dangerously close to the jamb of the door. The Doctor is quick enough to catch her, holding her tight against her.
“Time Lord biology. I’m immune. Now, come on, I – Yaz? Yaz?”
Yaz realises two things next. The first one is that her legs have given out again, and she’s fallen against the Doctor awkwardly, half limply, half stiff. The second is that suddenly, she can’t move her lips. They stay half-open, and when the Doctor calls Yaz doesn’t manage to reply. Like in the worst of her nightmares, more and more parts of her body stop replying to her impulses. Then, like tidal waves, a weird sleepiness tugs at her consciousness and begins dragging her down.
She wakes up to the feeling of fire, pure fire running through her veins, and all she can think about is that she most surely is being burned alive. There’s no trace of that gelid feeling inside her bones, no signs of her stiffness and of that feeling of lethargy. No, she’s wide awake, now, and her limbs are flailing and hitting and fighting, completely out of her control, and everything is so, so, hot.
In a brief moment of lucidity, she realises there are people around her, no, not people, a person, singular, but that person is moving so fast in her blurred field of vision that it feels like a dozen people are running around her body. She’s talking, that person, but Yaz can’t hear her. There’s an annoying sound in the background, so loud that it’s covering every word the woman tries to pronounce, and it’s making Yaz’s head hurt even more than it already does.
Yaz tries to concentrate on the woman’s lips, to make out what she’s saying.
“Yaz, I need you to stay still”, the woman is mouthing, and just as she finishes the sentence she climbs on top of her to pin her legs down.
Oh.
It’s her. She is screaming, herself, because the pain and the fire are so strong it is impossible to keep still, and the more she moves, the more painful it gets. It’s lava, boiling hot water, being pumped by her heart into every single centimetre of her skin, and there’s no relief to the hotness, no relief at all.
The Doctor is still talking. Yaz can hear her because the realisation has made her stop screaming and take a breath. But she can’t manage to concentrate on her voice, it’s just small pieces of her monologue that she manages to grasp.
“Few more minutes – on to me – alright, sssh – “
“I can’t”, she manages to blurt out, and even her tears are boiling hot. It feels like she’s being pulled out of her body, like she’s being killed. Why is she doing that to her? Why?
“Course you can”, the Doctor says, stroking her cheek in desperation. “Only a few more minutes. I know you can do it”.
Yaz winces and squeezes her eyes, she doesn’t want to scream, she doesn’t want to, she wants to be strong, but the pain is so strong it’s making it hard to concentrate. Every inch of her is so, so, so very hot. So hot. She can’t do it anymore…
Suddenly, something new touches her cheek. Yaz opens her eyes again, but there’s nothing new, the Doctor hasn’t moved from her position and her hand is still cupping her face. It takes her a few seconds to register what she is doing. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, she’s concentrating like she often does when she uses her psychic abilities; but the Doctor is not in her mind. Yaz would feel her. Instead, her hand on her cheek slowly begins to change. It’s its temperature: it’s lowering, slowly but steadily, to the point that Yaz begins to feel extreme cold in the Doctor’s fingertips. The Doctor opens her eyes, submerging her in liquid gold, and begins to press her ice-cold hands on her cheeks, on her forehead, on her eyelids, on her neck.
Slowly, Yaz’s pain starts to subside from her face. The rest of herself is still burning, but now she can take a full breath, she can relax some of her muscles. Absently, Yaz realises the Doctor has altered her body temperature to try to distract her until whatever shot or medicine she’s given her begins to take effect. And, like magic, her touch eases the pain from her skin.
Seconds, or minutes, or hours pass, she can’t tell time anymore, and then something else changes. It’s a sort of feeling of pressure rising from her legs and arms to the centre of her chest. When the pressure gets there, her legs begin to cool down, but the hotness in her torso is getting unbelievably high, and irresistible, and Yaz begins to scream again.
“Here it comes”, the Doctor says, and quickly moves from her, freeing her. In that exact moment, Yaz shoots up from the ground and gives a big cough, and a small, grey mass is sputtered to the ground.
“What was – what is that?”, Yaz coughs out, terrified, but as soon as the thing is out of her mouth the Doctor blatantly squashes it with the heel of her left boot.
And just like that, the pain is gone.
“Are you alright?”, asks the Doctor, worry filling her every feature, and she frantically scouts her sweaty body in search of signs she’s still in pain. Yaz shakes her head and tries to talk, but her throat is feeling itchy from the screaming and the coughing out that thing.
The Doctor sighs in relief and hugs her tight to her chest. “Oh, thank Rassilon”.
“What –“, Yaz fumbles, “What was it?”
“A lapigen parasite. Nasty fellow. They usually live in caves in a lethargic state until they sense the proximity of a compatible species. You must have gotten that when we visited the Cassiopean Caves”, she explains, her lips tensed in a thin line.
Yaz frowns. “Parasite? I thought –“
“Yes, Yaz, tell me. What were you thinking, exactly?”. The Doctor is angry, now, Yaz can see it, and the weird combination of her exasperation and their position, hugging and still half-sprawled down on the floor, makes Yaz highly uncomfortable. “Because when I dragged your unconscious body in the med-bay and ran a scan, I saw the recent history. Three weeks full of scans, research, exams done behind my back”.
Yaz gulps silently, but the Doctor’s anger doesn’t scare her. If anything, seeing her preoccupation makes her feel stronger, somehow. In a small corner of her mind, she registers she might be acting stubborn and stupid, but her consciousness doesn’t want to give in. “I was just trying to be independent – “
“Well, you clearly can’t!”, the Doctor snaps at her, and she lets go of her suddenly. In a swift movement, she stands up and starts walking from one side to the other of the med-bay. “You wanna know where you got it wrong? There was a virus filter on the scan. You scanned yourself and got the closest match for a possible virus, based on your symptoms”.
She’s never seen her that angry. Not at her. Not even at the enemies they’ve faced. It’s a whole different kind of anger, this one, one that screams frustration and worry more than disgust and hatred. “This thing, this parasite, it can plant spores in your blood and turn you to stone in just a few weeks, if not treated correctly. I had to burn it out of you, Yaz. Do you understand?”.
Yaz bites her lip, trying to keep in her tears, and her eyes land on an empty syringe by the floor, near her. “I just –“, she begins to say, but when she tries to stand up her chest is hit by a deep, stabbing pain, and she lets out a whimper, clutching her heart.
“Hey, hey”, the Doctor mutters, grabbing her in an instant, and when Yaz wobbles on her feet she is quick enough to catch her and support her, holding against her chest. Her voice has completely changed now, she’s kind and gentle, and when Yaz’s face sinks in her t-shirt she holds her tight and begins stroking her back in circular motions. “It’s alright. You’re still a little weak. Take it easy”.
“I just wanted to be brave”
“But you are brave, Yaz”, says the Doctor, frustratedly. “You don’t need to prove it to anyone, let alone me”.
“I didn’t want you to worry”.
“Hey”. The Doctor takes her by her shoulder and distances herself just enough so that she can see her face. “Two hearts, remember?”, and just like that, she takes Yaz’s right hand in hers and pushes it to her own chest. “One is more than enough to deal with all my existential dreads. I think there’s some free space for worrying for my favourite human”.
For a second, Yaz doesn’t say anything. To hear these words doesn’t completely make her feel better, and she knows exactly why. She doesn’t just want to not be a nuisance – she wants to help the Doctor overcome those existential dreads, but she can’t. It’s like being petrified, seeing someone you love suffer, and she wonders if that sensation she feels when she sees her distant, that feeling she’d gotten when the Doctor refused to talk to her about her thoughts after Takorah, is the same one the Doctor felt when she saw her in Graham’s bathroom, somnolent, stiff and unable to talk, like a living statue.
“I have space, too”, she says, and she turns her head away to look at the Doctor in the eyes. The Doctor frowns, confused.
“Please, talk to me”, Yaz pleads. “Since Takorah happened…”, Yaz feels the Doctor stiffen in the hug, “you’ve never talked to me about it”.
“Yaz…”
“All that you felt today, the anger, the fear, I feel it every day”, she reveals. “Please. I know you want to be brave, but you don’t have to prove it to me, either”.
For a second, the Doctor ponders Yaz’s words. Yaz can see the indecisiveness in her eyes, her inner mechanisms moving, considering.
“Alright”, the Doctor says, and smiles.
She tells her everything.
When they’re done, the Doctor falls asleep on the mattress in the console room, and Yaz stays up to look at her in the dimmed lights of the TARDIS.
Sometimes she feels like she’s got two hearts, too.