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“She likes you”.
The Doctor fumbles with the boxes. “I like her, too”, she says, absent-mindedly. The words spill from her mouth on their own. It’s an automatic response, like telling your name to somebody that’s just introduced themselves to you or counting. None of her attention is diverted from her research. Her brain processes Dan’s words and emits the only possible answer. Her consciousness concentrates on her task.
“No, I mean”, Dan continues, his voice tingeing in a tone that is half frustration and half irony. “She likes you”. The Doctor scrunches her face, confused.
She isn’t really confused, of course. Once her consciousness steps in, she knows exactly what Dan is talking about. However, as soon as the thought begins forming in her head, the Doctor suffocates it like fire, closing it in her fist. While keeping the flames at bay, she mentally rereads the words one, two, three times; she decodes them, tries to evaluate different possibilities. Then, she recalculates their meaning based on Dan’s tone. No secondary interpretation is evident.
The thought doesn’t want to die out. The Doctor feels it relighting itself and burning her fist. She likes you. She knows Yaz likes her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be travelling with her. Then why must Dan always try to tell her things in the most inappropriate of times? Time. They have little time. So little time, and if she doesn’t use it wisely, they soon will all be dead.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Dan”, she blurts out, exasperated. The thought keeps poking at her. The Doctor ignores it. She’s used to ignoring things. She’s done that all her life. It doesn’t have to change now.
“I think you do”.
The Doctor looks up in a mere fraction of a second.
“But for some reason, you pretend to me, and to her, that you don’t”.
Her eyes fall back down on the box as soon as Dan mutters that word, pretend. The Doctor realises she’s never once truly looked at him in the eyes, not like that, and what she sees there sends a dagger plunging into her heart. She knows that expression all too well. It’s the same one she’s seen dozens of times in the eyes of those who loved and knew the people who travelled with her: the mothers, the siblings, the friends. The expression of those who have seen them in other situations, not just in the TARDIS, and who can read feelings and change more than she can. In a sudden realisation, the Doctor understands Dan has spent more time with Yaz than she has. She wonders what he’s seen. What he saw, now, to make him say these words. Moreover, she realises she hasn’t known him for more than ten days, but somehow, he has managed to look directly into her soul and see things many couldn’t even glimpse. The Doctor goes back to her research, pretends, even now that he’s just told her she shouldn’t.
Dan stays and looks at her for a second – she sees his shoes in front of her, still – and then turns around to walk away. When she feels she’s out of his sight, the Doctor drops the contents of the box and looks up. She can’t concentrate on what she’s doing if she doesn’t take a breath. She pants. Her hearts are thumping like a hummingbird’s.
He’s right. The thought makes her feel a dull ache in her chest. The thought she’s trapped in a corner of her mind, like a beast, breaks its cage and runs loose. But it isn’t strictly Dan’s words that hurt her. It is not even the realisation that not only she’s been lying to him, and to Yaz, but to herself, too. It’s the memories. Horrified, she watches as the fire runs wildly around her mind and ignites memory after memory. Rose, crying alone in Bad Wolf Bay, and Clara, dying. To travel with the Doctor is a risk. To fall in love with her, it’s a death sentence.
Thank Rassilon it’s fireworks, she thinks. She doesn’t want to take it for granted. It could have been anything else. It could have been oil barrels, for all she knows. In that case, they would be dead. Instead, it’s fireworks, and no other man-made effect could better represent how much she feels relieved. And it’s midnight on New Year’s Day, something that doesn’t happen too often to her. The progression of time doesn’t interest her in the slightest. Signalling the end of one year and the start of the following doesn’t mean anything when you’re a time traveller. And still, she finds it beautiful.
Her eyes fall on Nick and Sarah. They’re something, these two. Most importantly, they’re looking at each other like they’re seeing each other for the first time. An ending she would never have predicted, that one. An ending that’s also a new start.
Then, her glance trails to Yaz. Like everyone else she’s looking at the fireworks and smiling, no, laughing, almost, and if for one second the Doctor closed her eyes and concentrated, she would probably hear the slowing beat of her heart, sniff the adrenaline slowly dissipating from her blood.
She’s beautiful, she thinks. But then, as soon as the thrill of her success fades away, Dan’s words hit her. It feels like a new era for her, too, now that those words have sunk in. And the fire is still there, not the one that’s burning Elf Storage, no, the one that’s in her head, the one that’s eating her from the inside. Every time she remembers Dan’s little speech, it’s like blowing wind on it and nurturing it, and it’s a fresh stab in the hearts. Again, the faces of all the people that have loved her flash in her mind, one after the other. In the end, another person pops up. It’s bittersweet, this one. It’s Martha, looking at her tall and thin incarnation, and saying goodbye. “He never looked at her twice”, she’d said, pain in her eyes. “He liked her, but that was it”.
Does Yaz feel the same? Does she think that about her?
The thought of inflicting that kind of pain on her makes bile rise in her mouth. And still, Martha is alive. Not just alive, she’s alive and happy, while everyone else is either dead or has had their life crushed because of her. So, what? Would she be able to let Yaz go, to save her? Or would she let her fall in love with her, accept her love from her, even after all the experience she’s gotten?
The Doctor looks away. Her smile fades. She can feel Dan’s eyes on her. As the fireworks continue exploding and dripping colour in the sky, she wonders what he would say about her. Does she love Yaz? She doesn’t know. It’s such a complicated word for her, love, and it makes her head spin and go light. She hasn’t thought about love for so much time that she doesn’t manage to get a clear grasp of the concept, in general. It’s even more complicated when she tries to picture what love would mean to her. But as the fireworks subside and the last one shoots up in a weak, wobbling parabola, as the others turn to each other and awkwardly group in a circle, she moves and crosses eyes with Yaz, again.
She really is, beautiful. And she does like her, so much that it makes her whole body ache. Yaz smiles at her timidly and the Doctor notices that something has changed in the way she looks her, like there’s a timid fear, a sort of anxiousness. She wonders if Dan has talked to Yaz, too. But then Sarah begins babbling and Yaz turns to listen to her.
The Doctor doesn’t pay attention. The fire is still burning in her mind, and as it passes over a recent memory it sets it alight, bringing it back to her. It’s King James, looking at her ferociously, and the Doctor can hear her own voice. “You want to know the secrets of the universe?”, it says. “Start from the mysteries of the heart”.
Somehow, this sentence talks to her. She wonders if that’s the key, the key to understanding everything, the life she’s lost and the one that’s about to come, if what Time has told her is true. But sounding out one single heart is enough job for a lifetime, let alone two. And it’s not hers that counts – it’s Yaz’s only one, and she wants that intact and beating and alive. Would it help? Loving her? Would it make Yaz safer? The Doctor doesn’t know. Silently, she walks back to the TARDIS and sets new coordinates in. And again, she pretends.