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“NO!”
Yaz’s scream echoed into the air as she tried to run towards the Doctor. Dan held her back before she could reach the fracture in time that separated them from the future, from the Doctor and the look of terror that had taken over her face. Yaz watched in horror as stone crept up the Doctor’s body, as she sprouted wings and covered her eyes, and then she was gone.
Yaz had barely had time to process what was happening before the future disappeared leaving them standing in a field in 1901. She sank to her knees, staring at the space where the Doctor had been standing as a single tear trailed down the side of her face. She was vaguely aware of Dan and Jericho arguing behind her but it was distant, as if she were under water, her brain still trying to make sense of what had just happened.
She can’t be gone.
She looked down at her hand, at the letters written in permanent ink, fading now but still visible. WWTDD.
What would the Doctor do?
“Right,” Yaz said as she stood up, brushing the dirt off her knees. “First things first, we need to regroup and get Peggy here somewhere safe.” She glanced down at the young girl who had been so brave. “That means contacting the authorities.”
“Might want to have a change of clothes then.” Dan looked at his jeans pointedly causing Yaz to glance at her own attire. She had a feeling a woman wearing pants in 1901 might raise just as many questions as an entire village of people suddenly disappearing – questions they did not have time for.
“Point taken. Let’s head back into town and see what we can find. Then we can get Peggy situated.”
And then we save the Doctor.
~
It had been a long few days. After finding more era appropriate clothes, Yaz and Dan had had to walk 10 miles to the next town over where they spent a long while convincing the right authorities to accompany them back to Medderton.
Yaz had been right to suspect there would be questions about the disappearances. What she hadn’t counted on was the officers believing they were the party responsible. It had taken three days, her best impression of the Doctor at her cockiest, and a little bit of psychic paper she had swiped from the TARDIS after the last time she and the Doctor were separated, to convince the officers that she, Dan, and Jericho, were just travelers who had happened upon Peggy and the village on their way to a neighboring town. The officers had taken Peggy into their care and the three were left to contemplate – or rather argue over – what to do next.
“But the Doctor has touched every part of our history! All we have to do is find someone who knows her in this time period and get them to help us.” Yaz looked at Dan and Jericho pleadingly, knowing she was grasping at straws.
“And how are we gonna do that? There’s barely any telephones now, let alone the internet. It’s not like we can just Google ‘Doctor, blue box, TARDIS’ and even if we could we’d probably find some nutjob conspiracy theorist before we found someone with any actual information.”
“I know that Dan! But there has to be something to go off of! Some small piece of history we’re not thinking of or-“
“My dear,” Jericho interrupted, “Why don’t you go have a lie down? You haven’t slept in days, none of us have.”
“I can rest once we’ve found her!” Yaz tensed her jaw, mentally kicking herself for letting her voice break. She knew she was being irrational, but she was so desperate to get the Doctor back she wasn’t thinking clearly. She saw Dan and Jericho share a worried look and she let out a shaky breath. “Fine, you’re right. I ‘spose a few hours sleep couldn’t hurt.”
~
Yaz did sleep, but it couldn’t exactly be called restful. She was plagued with nightmares, images of Swarm and Azure, of the Sontarans, and of the fear in the Doctors eyes as she turned to stone. That last one was the worst. Monsters and aliens trying to kill her, she could handle. But seeing the Doctor so terrified, so alone, and not knowing how to help her, that filled her with a kind of pain she had never felt before. It was as if her lungs were filled with shards of glass, tearing apart her insides whenever she tried to breathe.
As these images whirled through her dreams, a word began to join them. A name she had all but forgotten learning about.
Sweetville.
Yaz woke with a start and ran down the hall to the room Dan and Jericho were sharing at the tiny inn they had been staying in for the past few days. She swung the door open without bothering to knock. “I know where we need to go!”
“Oi! What are you on about? And what time is it?” Dan sat up in his bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He looked to his left and saw Jericho in the bed adjacent to his with a bewildered look on his face.
Admittedly, Yaz hadn’t realized quite how early it was. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and here she was bursting into their room. Her guilt over waking them, however, was overshadowed by her need to tell them what she remembered.
She launched into a long-winded explanation about a town in Yorkshire called Sweetville. She had learned about it in a year seven course on local history. According to local legend, it was a town in the 1890s that had been running experiments on people. No one really knew what they were doing because the town had been shut down.
“But not by the proper authorities,” Yaz said. “Someone came in, drove everyone out, and cleared up every trace of what they’d been doing.”
“And you think that someone… was the Doctor?” Jericho’s voice was full of skepticism.
“It had to be. Who else could swan in and save people like that? Who else would?” Yaz looked at them with a defiant glare.
“I dunno Yaz…” Dan looked at her hesitantly. “Seems like a bit of a long shot doesn’t it? I mean you said yourself the towns gone. All traces cleared out.”
“Fine! Yeah, it’s a long shot. But it’s the only one we’ve got. What’s the alternative? Forget about her? Move on and build a life in 1901? I can’t do that, I-“ she bit her bottom lip, willing herself not to cry. “I need to get her back.”
Dan looked at Jericho briefly, then back at Yaz. “All right,” he said gently, “we’ll go.”
~
It took them nearly a week to reach the town once known as Sweetville. They had realized fairly quickly that the money they had taken from the deserted homes in Medderton would not last much longer. They had had to hitch hike the majority of the way there, and once they arrived they found a new town had sprung up in its’ place. The three of them stood at the entrance of the town for a moment before Dan looked over at Yaz.
“Where to boss?”
The question made her falter for a moment. She wasn’t used to being in charge, that was usually the Doctor’s job.
What would the Doctor do?
The ink on her palm had faded completely at this point, but the thought still lived in her mind constantly, a mantra fueling her will to keep fighting.
“If I remember right, the experiments were taking place in an old match factory.” She pointed at a large factory building in the distance. “If anyone has answers, my guess is they’d be there.”
They made their way over to the building where they spoke with the foreman. When questioned about the towns’ history, though, he claimed there had been nothing there but a small cluster of homes until the factory began production in 1898.
“1898?” Yaz asked. “I thought the factory was built in 1893.”
“You are mistaken, madam. This factory has only been in production for three years.”
Everyone they talked to in town fed them the same line. The factory had opened in 1898, before that there wasn’t much there. It was as if their minds had been wiped, or their memories replaced.
That’s probably exactly what you did, huh Doctor? Wiped their minds and replaced everything with happy memories.
When the sun began to set and they had spoken to everyone they could, Yaz suggested in a rather defeated tone that they retire to an inn. She used the psychic paper to get three rooms for the rate of one. She knew it probably wasn’t what the Doctor would do, but they were dangerously low on money and she needed to be alone tonight. Once they acquired the keys to their rooms, Jericho said goodnight and headed up to bed quickly. Yaz began to follow him up the stairs when she felt Dan tug at her arm.
“We’ll figure something out Yaz. Don’t give up hope yet.”
Yaz looked at him sadly. “No we won’t. That was our last hope.” She turned away before he could say anything further and went up to her room, slamming the door behind her.
~
Yaz changed into the clothes she had been wearing back in Medderton – her last comfort from her old life now – and sat on her bed feeling drained and defeated by the past two weeks. This had been her last chance – a last ditch effort to get back to the Doctor, and she was out of ideas. Last time she had been separated from the Doctor, she had held onto hope for ten months, never doubting she would get her back. But this time felt different. This time felt permanent.
I’ll never see her again.
The thought broke her, and she began to cry for the first time since she had seen the Doctor turn into an angel. The shards of glass in her lungs threatened to tear her apart as her body was wracked with sobs. She sat there sobbing for a long time, what felt like hours, until she had no tears left.
She laid back on the bed, exhausted, and began contemplating what she would do now – not many options for a woman in 1901 – when she felt something hot pressing against her hip. She looked down and realized there was something glowing in her pocket. She pulled the offending object out and examined it. It was some sort of metal, the size and shape of a small egg. She turned it over in her palm, wondering what it was and how it had made its way into her pocket, when it made a soft beeping noise, and a hologram appeared in front of her.
“Doctor!” Yaz cried. The Doctor – her Doctor – was standing there speaking to her. Yaz couldn’t even process what she was saying at first, she was too stunned and relieved by the sight of her. When she started talking about the planet called Time, though, Yaz began to listen in earnest.
“I’ve just pulled you out of your own timestream, ‘cos I’m good at doing stuff like that!”
“All right big head!” Yaz laughed.
“Did you just call me big head? Bet you did.”
Yaz suddenly felt overwhelmed. Here she was talking to the Doctor, something she never thought she’d do again. She was full of relief and joy, but there was something else too, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on but that left her with an ache in her chest. She listened as the Doctor talked about the evil they were facing, about how she had recorded the message and smuggled it into Yaz’s coat because she was afraid they would be separated. She listened as the Doctor gave her a mission, a new purpose to keep her going: find out when and where a battle for ownership over the Earth would occur.
Yaz was so grateful for this. It filled the void that had been left behind when she had lost hope, but it didn’t fix the aching in her heart. That was only getting stronger as she watched the Doctor’s message.
“I’m probably worried for you if you’re hearing this… and I’m sure I miss you.”
Yaz felt her breath catch in her throat as bittersweet tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
“I miss you too,” she whispered back.
“I know you do.”
At that, the tears fell from Yaz’s eyes once again. Her mind was reeling and her heart was pounding in her chest. She barely registered the end of the Doctors’ message over the sound of her own pulse beating hard and fast in her ears. She lay back on the bed, feeling the aching in her chest grow until she finally realized what it was. She looked up at the ceiling above her, and whispered.
“I love you.”