Chapter Text
Since the end of the Flux, the event that nearly wiped out the entire universe, the Doctor has gotten rather good at a few things she honestly never thought she would be.
First, opening up and sharing her feelings. It hurt that first time, of course. That night she sat down with Yaz and told her everything. It felt like waves and waves of grief and pain and despair and anger washing over her, again and again, only Yaz's hand in hers keeping her from being dragged out to sea. She still can't really look Yaz in the eye when she talks and she still has to bite back the instinct to dismiss it, ignore it. It's a work in progress, but she's made progress.
Second, staying still. Not completely still, mind. She still needs to keep her hands busy otherwise it feels like her entire body is buzzing with electricity. But she can sit and watch a movie with Yaz and Dan. She can sit in front of the fireplace with Yaz dozing in her lap, satisfied to sit there and run her fingers through her hair.
Third, cooking. Well, to be honest, the jury is still out on that one. But the last time she tried, neither Yaz nor Dan got violently sick, nor did she see any sign of that face humans make when they're utterly offended by the food but trying not to hurt the cooks feelings. So, she'll take that as a win.
Sleep, though. Sleep remains as evasive as ever. She's not trying to avoid sleeping. Not like she used to. She still gets nightmares, but with her newfound ability to open up and with Yaz at her side, she finds them easier to work through.
She just can't sleep sometimes, and tonight is one of those nights.
She sighs. She's getting restless, and if she gets too restless, she's going to start fidgeting and she'll wake Yaz up. She doesn't want to do that, so she carefully extricates herself from Yaz's arms. It's not an easy task, given that Yaz is wrapped around her like a koala.
She gets dressed quickly, leaving her braces hanging loose and her shirts untucked. She pulls on her boots and grabs her coat and heads for the door.
"Doctor?"
The Doctor stops and grimaces. So much for not waking Yaz up.
"Where are you going?"
She walks back to the bed and kisses her on the forehead. "I'm just feeling a bit restless," she whispers. "I'll walk for a bit and come back."
Yaz looks like she wants to protest, but then she yawns and closes her eyes again. She's asleep in seconds.
The Doctor sighs. "Well, that's just not fair," she says. She plants one more kiss on her forehead and heads out of the bedroom.
The corridors are freezing. The Doctor shivers, her coat still in her arms. "Turn the heat up a bit, mate," she says.
The TARDIS obliges.
She passes the kitchen, decides that some tea sounds good, and doubles back. She makes herself some tea and sits at the table, still sized for four people because the TARDIS is having a hard time letting go of Graham and Ryan just like she is.
"Right," she says to herself. "What's got you all discombobulated?"
The answer is lots of things, of course. There are a million different thoughts chasing themselves around her head at any given moment, any one of them enough to keep her up at night.
Your time is heading to its end.
Of course. Of course it's that.
She growls in frustration and presses the heel of her hand against her forehead. "I know," she mutters. "I know, I know, I know! Stop going on about it!"
"Doc? Everything all right?"
The Doctor nearly jumps out of her seat at Dan's voice. She looks up to see him standing in the doorway. "Hi," she says. "Sorry. Yeah. Having a bit of…it's a lot."
"Yeah, I figured that," Dan says. "You wanna talk about it?"
The Doctor's first instinct, of course, is to shake her head and start rambling about how she's fine, everything's fine, she just needs to drink her tea and then get started on a laundry list of repairs and maintenance, all of which she’s made up in the last thirty seconds.
She sighs. It's hard, talking to Yaz about Time's prophecy. She understands, of course, because the prophecy coming true means that Yaz loses the woman she loves. Her first love.
At the same time, it's tough getting herself to open up to Dan. She can tell he's a good guy. He's just new. He came aboard while she was still firmly in her can't ever let people in phase, and then her and Yaz's relationship took off, and there just hasn't been time to get to know him.
But these thoughts are going to eat a hole in her mind if they're left inside.
Dan seems to understand. He sits down across the table from her.
The Doctor takes a breath, staring firmly at her hands. "Do you remember what I said about…regeneration?" she asks.
"Yeah. That thing where you regenerate your body if you're close to dying, right?"
The Doctor nods. "During the Flux, when I was trisected across realities? One of me ended up speaking to the manifestation of Time." Her voice breaks and she clears her throat. "Time told me that…that I don't have much time left. In this body. This life."
"Oh," is all Dan can say.
"It's not just my body that regenerates," the Doctor explains. "It's my mind, too. My personality. Everything down to whether I prefer custard creams or jelly babies." She blinks, and there are tears in her eyes. For just a moment, she can see Wilfred Mott sitting there with her. "It's like I become a different person. Who I am now dies, and then a stranger takes my place." She rubs her eyes and clears her throat, because she can't bring herself to cry in front of Dan just yet.
Dan doesn't seem to know what to say.
The Doctor doesn't blame him. It's a lot. "I've wasted so much time," she whispers.
"Hey, that happens sometimes," Dan says. His gaze grows distant and she knows he's thinking of Di. "And it's okay to be upset about it, so long as you keep going."
The Doctor nods, her gaze fixed intently on the table.
"How's Yaz doing?" Dan asks, picking up on the hint that she doesn't want to talk about that anymore.
The Doctor clears her throat again. "Better," she replies.
"I'm glad she got to say her piece to who sent her that text."
The Doctor makes a sound at the back of her throat. "I still wish I could've said my piece," she mutters. "Tell her off for hurting—" She winces. "Am I coming across as overprotective?"
Dan chuckles. "Nah," he says. "Maybe a bit…like you're new to these feelings and not quite sure what to do with 'em yet, so maybe they get a bit intense at times.”
The Doctor smiles faintly. "I was married before," she says. She thinks of River and laughs. "Oh, how she would hate the suggestion that I had to protect her. Quite the opposite, really." But talking about River makes her sad, too. She wipes away a stubborn tear. Why is everything in her life always tinged with this sadness? How is that fair?
Dan hesitates. "You've lived a long time, haven't you?"
The Doctor shifts her weight and stares at a point over Dan's shoulder. "Yes," she whispers. "Too long, I think, sometimes."
A long silence passes before she decides she needs a total change of subject. "You know, you've been traveling with me for a while and I don't really know much about you." Old habits. She was still thoroughly in her don't get attached mindset when he ended up on the TARDIS, and then her and Yaz's relationship suddenly took off, and there just hasn't really been time to get to know him.
Dan looks flustered at this. "I don't know that there's much to tell," he says. "To be honest, I don't even know why you asked me to come. I'm not important."
The Doctor raises her eyebrows. It's sad, she thinks, how many humans she's met who are utterly convinced they're nothing special. "I'll have to disagree with that," she says. She taps a fingernail against the table. "Yaz told me how much you helped her, in the past. Said that she almost gave up so many times, but that you were the one to help her keep going. That makes you important in my eyes."
Dan offers a faint smile. "Thanks," he says. "I appreciate that. I really do."
The Doctor gets to her feet. "I should go back to bed," she says. "I don't want Yaz to worry."
Dan nods. "Good talking with you, Doc."
And that's when several things happen in quick succession.
One, a loud, resounding crash echoes throughout the ship.
Two, the ship lurches violently to one side.
Three, both of them are thrown to the floor, hard .
The Doctor rolls onto her back, gritting her teeth against the pain that shoots through her left wrist.
"What's happened?" Dan calls out.
"Something hit us," the Doctor replies. She scrambles back to her feet, trying to avoid using her left hand. She digs her sonic out of its pocket and scans her wrist.
"Are you all right?" Dan asks as he gets to his feet.
The Doctor breathes a sigh of relief as the readings tell her there's no serious damage. "I'm fine," she says. She looks at him. "Or at least there's no time to worry about it. I need to figure out what hit us. Get dressed and meet me in the console room." She turns on her heel and charges out of the kitchen. She doesn't tell him to get Yaz, because she knows Yaz is already out of bed and getting dressed.
Sure enough, her girlfriend appears in the console room less than a minute after she does. "What was that?" Yaz asks, adjusting her collar as she jogs down the steps. "Felt like an impact."
"It was an impact," the Doctor replies. She leans in to check a display. "I don't understand what hit us. It's a totally uninhabited part of space. Unless—" She stops.
"Unless what, Doctor?" Yaz says in the most long-suffering voice she can muster.
"Unless we came out of the Time Vortex at the wrong time," the Doctor replies. She checks the readings. "Right. One hundred years too early."
Yaz shakes her head. "It's a good thing you're cute," she says. "So what do you think hit us?"
The Doctor blows the air out of her cheeks. "Generation ship," she says. "Human ship, searching for a new home. If I'm guessing right, they'll have just woken everyone up and—"
Her next words are drowned out by a series of deafening alarms from the TARDIS. The Doctor rushes around the console.
"Attention, rogue vessel." The voice booms out of the console. "You have fifteen seconds to identify yourselves and explain why you just flew your ship into ours."
The Doctor scronches her nose as she hits a button to transmit back. "I'm the Doctor, this is my TARDIS, and I will have you know that you hit us ."
A pause. And then. "We will be bringing your vessel on board, at which time you will answer for your actions."
"Again, your fault, not ours."
The line goes dead.
"I take it we've gotten into some trouble," Dan says as he walks into the console room.
The Doctor is about to answer when the TARDIS suddenly goes into a violent spin. She grips the console as tightly as she can, yelling out in pain when the ship slams to a halt. "Got us in a tractor beam," she mutters.
"We can get out of it, right?" Dan says, clinging to a railing for dear life.
"No," the Doctor says through gritted teeth. "And honestly, not sure I want to. Someone on the other end of this needs to understand that this is uncalled for."
The TARDIS finally comes to a stop. The Doctor tucks in her shirts, wrestles her braces back up, smooths out her hair, and pulls on her coat before marching to the door. She yanks it open—
—and comes face-to-face with several shocked human faces looking back at her. "Right," she says. "I'm guessing you're not the ones who've been really quite rude to us."
"Doctor?"
The Doctor starts to tell Dan that she's busy, but she registers the strange tone in his voice and turns around. She can almost hear her hearts stop when she sees him stumble through the door with an unconscious Yaz in his arms. "Yaz!" she cries out, rushing to them. "What happened?"
"I think she hit her head when the beam got us," Dan replies.
"You shouldn't have moved her."
"You think I should've left her in there?"
The Doctor glances over her shoulder to see the console room of the TARDIS filling with smoke. She clenches her jaw and fights back her frustration as she looks around for a flat surface, finally spotting some kind of work table. She hurries over to it and sweeps the tools and scrap metal onto the floor, ignoring the protests she gets. "Set her down here," she says.
Dan does so.
The Doctor scans Yaz with her sonic, hearts pounding furiously in her chest. When the sonic doesn't turn up anything, she leans in close and gently touches her cheek. "Yaz? Can you open your eyes for me?"
Yaz groans and her eyelids flutter.
"That's it," the Doctor says.
The moment is interrupted by the sound of footsteps marching. "Where is the pilot of this vessel?!"
The Doctor grits her teeth. "Not now," she snarls over her shoulder. She catches a brief glimpse of men in uniforms before she turns her attention back to Yaz.
"Madam, is this your vessel?"
The Doctor exhales forcefully through her nose. "I said not now ."
The security guards don't listen. Instead, they storm forward and grab her by the arms, pulling her back, dragging her away from Yaz.
"Hey!" Dan shouts, taking a step forward, stopping short when one of the security guards aims a weapon at him.
"Let me go!" the Doctor shouts, struggling against their grasp. It's a futile act, because there are at least four of them holding her and dragging her. She meets Dan's gaze and holds it.
"I'll look after her, Doc," Dan says. "I promise."
The Doctor looks back at Yaz, just in time to see her open her eyes before the door slams shut.