Chapter Text
…but falling in love is the easy part.
And Yaz can remember almost every time – every planet, every constellation, quick hop!, every lost civilisation or mind-achingly distant future - when for a few seconds the universe has stilled and centred entirely on her.
Every time she’s tripped toward or stumbled back into it, those moments where she’s fought or refuted or ignored it and worst of all: the moments when she hasn’t even wanted to but still does anyway..
It’s funny, almost. That night, the first time Yaz ever saw her, with the air bitingly cold and the bluish gloom all doom-laden and heavy in the wrecked train carriage, her brain spun for a full minute wondering what it was about the Doctor that didn’t quite fit, couldn’t possibly cohere; some essential unknown that seemed to pull at Yaz until she followed this stranger, and not for the last time, into the looming darkness.
PC Khan, just trying to do her job. Taking names, asking questions, assessing the situation, basic stuff:
"Why are you calling me madam?"
"Because you’re a woman?"
"Does it suit me?!"
And much later, another answer formed in Yaz’s mind which she would obviously never have been unprofessional enough to utter in the moment: Well, obviously it suits you - you’re beautiful.
It makes her cringe now, to remember that.
And not just because now she’s met more aliens than she can count, her Earth-bound conception of beauty now utterly transmogrified until her expectations no longer include a finite number of limbs..
But because she didn’t know the Doctor, then.
She could’ve been dangerous, she could’ve been the villain, the problem, the enemy –
(and maybe she was, maybe she is -)
But in that second, with childlike simplicity, Yaz basically just went ooh, pretty! and trusted her entirely.
Of course, now, she has every reason to trust the Doctor.
(A fair few reasons to be afraid of her too.)
*
The end of the world never ceases to amaze her.
This evening – or was it this afternoon/last night, since time phrases collapse meaninglessly in her current life – they watched from the safety of the escaping shuttle as the thirteen suns of Constantinople -1 burnt out in a hallucinogenic blaze of magenta and turquoise.
Strange how beautiful an apocalypse can be, though Yaz supposes it really all depends on your perspective.
This time it so happened to be only technically the end of the world, since the planet’s population had been evacuated long before the planet’s fiery destruction, all thanks to them.
Yaz almost pities her younger self, genuinely thinking she was fighting the good fight by spending her weekends ticking off drunk clubgoers and doling out criminal records to silent teenagers who had shoplifted cheap vodka, baby food, tampons.
She’d wanted more, and she’s got it.
Except, well, now she has no idea of how to go back.
And there’s no-one to ask, because honestly, she had tried.
She’d asked the Doctor if she ever got homesick and was met with a tight grin.
“Kind of the opposite with me, actually. I ran away from Gallifrey the first chance I got. And I don’t like to go back on myself, as a rule. Y’never know who you might meet coming the other way.”
A typical answer. Hinting at so much, yet giving exactly nothing away. Useless, basically, in terms of what Yaz was looking for.
And Dan always talks about his life, his friends as if they’re minutes away, still part of his present. As if this life – with her and the Doctor, the TARDIS and the universe – is just this little sojourn from reality, an adventure that, for him, will eventually circle right back home.
It’s not like Yaz never misses the steady certainty of Earth, of being with her family in that safe, dull, everyday way, you know?
Where they all just sit there together, on a rainy Sunday afternoon perhaps, breathing steadily, barely thinking, sending Whatsapp messages and Youtube links rather than talking, zoning out in front of telly..
That’s one thing the Doctor can’t give them.
A few adventures ago, as they caught their breath in a Saturnian hangar, on the run and a little singed from the sniper bot’s lasers, Dan had joked off-hand that, according to his phone calendar that the Doctor had synced to his Earth time-line, he was missing a big match right now.
In amongst all the life-threatening chaos around them, Yaz had seen the momentary shift in the Doctor’s expression which meant she was making a mental note on her endless internal to-do list..
Yaz had half expected a huge home cinema to pop up in the TARDIS, with that big squishy purple sofa that had appeared the night Ryan and Graham had left and they’d sat numbly for maybe a whole twenty minutes before the Doctor disappeared to ‘deal with the Triffid overgrowth on the swamp level-‘
But no. Instead, the Doctor had taken them to a planet formed of startling green Astro-turf where the greatest football matches of all time were recreated in perfect detail twenty-four hours a day.
Luckily, the games were helpfully categorised into planets and eras along its seemingly endless corridors, and Dan had a wonderful time popping his head into the greatest sporting moments of the past 50 years as well as some spoiler-heavy sneak peeks into the next few decades.
Unfortunately, they’d soon discovered some very serious ethics violations in the clone synthetisation sector and had to shut the whole thing down, but there was at least a good half-an-hour where Dan was ecstatic, the Doctor was properly smug and Yaz had studied the whole thing as if it was a nature documentary.
She watched the Doctor, watching Dan as he grinned, riveted, gobsmacked, celebrating: "did you see that!?"
She hadn’t really seen this particular gap in the Doctor’s armour so clearly before.
Yaz supposed she was usually in Dan’s position, entirely caught up in the moment, but now she thought about it, it seemed like every time either of them mentioned Earth with any kind of longing, the next adventure was somehow more bombastic, more beautiful, more brilliant than ever. As if the Doctor was giving them reasons to stay.
She’d never say it though. Not in any exact words. "Please don’t go."