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It wasn’t fair.
The Doctor stood in her TARDIS with her two companions, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Usually this room felt like a comfortable pair of old boots, but today it pinched, painfully tight. She tried to breathe.
The Time Lord could feel Yaz glancing at her across the control console. She was probably completely unaware of how often she did it, but the Doctor was more than aware. There was a weight to that gaze. Those soft brown eyes held the Doctor like a pair of hands on a puzzle box. Yaz was desperate to crack her open to see what was inside, but terrified of damaging the delicate mechanisms that held her together. The Doctor had watched her companion’s blossoming affection with growing dread.
This was a cruelty she never intended to inflict, but somehow rarely managed to avoid. Rose, Martha, Captain Jack, Clara, and even Amelia Pond for a couple of minutes. It was honestly more surprising when it didn’t happen. And now Yaz.
The standard Doctor playbook dictated that she should simply ignore this sort of behavior in the hopes that it would simply go away, but Dan, good old Dan, just had to go and take that option off the table.
She likes you. She likes you. Three simple words in that infuriating Liverpool accent were all it took to completely destroy her equilibrium. He was forcing her hand. She shot a glare his way. He was leaning against one of the crystalline support pillars, flipping through a Liverpool guidebook, more than likely fuming over some minor inaccuracy. He looked up at her and cleared his throat with forced casualness.
“So, Doc, where to next?” he said. She ignored him and turned towards her other companion. Something had to be done about this.
“Yaz, I know. I know, but I just can’t. It’s not who I am,” the Doctor said, with focused intensity. Her voice filled the space, leaving little room for anything else.
Yaz looked up in confusion. “What are you talking about?” she began, before catching the Doctor’s expression. “Oh.” The word came out as a pained whisper.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you Yaz, but I just can’t. You have to understand.”
Yaz’s cheeks burned and her eyes darted around, willing to look at anything but the Doctor.
“Of- of course,” she stammered. “I knew you wouldn’t. It’s ok. Really, it’s ok. I understand.” Yaz let out the breath she had been holding. It was too much. “I think I need to go take a nap. Come wake me when we get to wherever we’re going.” Yaz didn’t wait for a response. With her back straight and her lungs crushed, she spun on her heel and headed towards her room. As she left, the Doctor couldn’t help but notice the tears trembling on her lashes. It was unavoidable.
The Doctor looked down at her hands. It was for the best. It was better this way. She flipped the levers thoughtlessly. Without a destination in mind, her head looped back in on itself.
“Right, I just remembered, Doc, I need to do some laundry.” The Doctor looked up at Dan as he spoke. She had completely lost track of the fact that he was still in the room.
“I think you should take me back home for a bit,” he continued.
“Laundry. Of course,” said the Doctor, her hands already moving across the controls, imputing the coordinates before she even realized she was doing it. “How long will you need?”
“Three days should do me.”
Three days? How long did laundry usually take in the early twenty-first century? She couldn’t remember. Three days sounded fairly reasonable, she guessed. The TARDIS clunked into place, arriving in a convenient alley behind the Museum of Liverpool.
“Do you need help?” She asked as he headed towards the doors, almost hoping he did.
“No, I think I can handle this one on my own,” he replied. “Don’t you go and forget to come get me though. You two promised me the stars, and I intend to see them all. Oh, and a proper beach trip.”
He paused with his hand on the door. “And Doc? Even if you can’t... you know… with Yaz, I think you probably owe her an explanation as to why. You probably owe yourself one as well.”
It wasn’t until the doors had shut and the TARDIS had taken off again that the Doctor remembered that they had a washing machine on board. And Dan hadn’t taken any clothes with him. Humans. Why did she even bother with them? The Doctor slid down until she was sitting on the floor and leaned her head back against the control console.
It just wasn’t fair.
The moment Yaz reached her bedroom, the door slid closed behind her, and she collapsed on her mattress. God, this was so embarrassing. Humiliating, even. She pressed a pillow to her chest and curled her whole body around it, as if to cushion her swollen, aching heart.
This didn’t really come as a surprise. Of course the Doctor wouldn’t want her that way. She was the Doctor, for goodness sake. She was an alien, over two thousand years old, and spectacular in every way. Yaz was just Yaz. She didn’t even know if Time Lords did romance in the first place, and even if they did, Yaz was punching well above her weight. She must look so silly to the Doctor; a child pining after something she could never have. Deep down Yaz always knew, so why did it have to hurt so much to hear it confirmed? She tried to swallow past the massive lump in her throat with little success.
What would happen now? Would the dynamic change simply because the Doctor said something out loud that literally everyone with a functioning brain could have worked out on their own? Even her mom had seen it the first time she met the Doctor, when Yaz was basically just a kid and hadn’t even figured it out herself.
Yaz could feel her whole world unraveling and there was nothing she could do about it.
No. Yaz was determined not to let that happen. Everything was still fundamentally the same. She was a confident, fully adult woman, not a kid with a crush in primary school. People survived this kind of thing every day.
Actually, now that she was thinking a little more rationally, Yaz would put good money on the Doctor having dealt with something similar in the past. She was brilliant, beautiful, and the very definition of mysterious. Who wouldn’t fall for her, at least a little? An unrequited crush was probably old hat to someone like the Doctor. It was basically inevitable.
The Doctor was still her best friend. She would understand. Wouldn’t she?
Yaz took a shuddering breath and closed her eyes. She really was extremely tired. She could deal with trying to shove the shattered pieces of her heart back into her chest when she woke up. As she drifted off, her last thought was a desperate hope that she hadn’t ruined everything.
The Doctor gently banged her head back against the console. An explanation? She had an explanation.
When you were a being as old and as deeply sad as the Doctor, your soul tended to lose its malleability over time. Certain aspects of her personality tended to solidify, to crystallize. The way she interacted with others became more and more rigid and predictable. People needed to fit into ready made spaces in her soul if they wanted any part of her life. Insert tab A into slot B. There were templates to her relationships now. Enemy. Ally. Companion. Child. Herself, with surprising frequency. And a great big hollow for the Master that could never be filled. When people started to spill over the edges of their predetermined slots, things got messy.
That’s how it had been for hundreds of years. It’s how it had to be. The Doctor had Rules .
Until River. There never was a template that could fit River Song. That woman, that remarkable woman, child of the TARDIS, was built to break the universe. She practically forced reality to bend over backwards to accommodate her. River Song had waltzed into the Doctor’s life and took a cosmic demolition hammer to her crystallized soul, splintering it apart until there was room enough for River to worm her way into her very bones.
But therein lied the problem. When River… died, she left those cracks behind. There was space now for something new, something terrifying.
And then along comes Yaz, this gorgeous, clever woman, so completely full of her painfully short life. All Yaz wanted was to press herself into those cracks like a balm on a wound. The Doctor could feel Yaz fitting herself into her broken soul like she was made for it.
The problem was that she was just so human. Humans were so very fragile, so very transient, and that vulnerability was a weapon. Yaz was a weapon that the Doctor didn’t think she would survive.
Sometimes “No” was a full sentence.
The TARDIS hurtled through the howling vortex, off kilter and a little lost.
Yaz rolled over, her mind sluggishly struggling back to consciousness. She reached out to flip on the lamp on her bedside table and blinked as it filled the space with warm light.
Wait. Did she always have a bedside table? She was pretty sure she hadn’t had one when she fell asleep. She squinted at this small new mystery, wondering what the hell the TARDIS could be up to. Curiosity was a much better way to occupy her mind than… other stuff. Like broken hearts and idiot Doctors.
Yes, magically materializing space furniture seemed like the perfect distraction. It was time to investigate.
Yaz swung her legs over the side of her bed and slid open the shallow little drawer in the table. Inside was a small velvet box. Was the TARDIS giving her gifts now? Yaz wouldn’t put it past it. The Doctor did say it was alive.
With not insignificant apprehension that she was about to lose a finger to an alien jewelry box mimic, Yaz reached out and gingerly plucked the box out of the drawer. Nothing. The box seemed utterly mundane. It was the right weight, temperature, and texture. She couldn’t detect the telltale fractals that would give away a psychic projection or perception filter. Everything suggested it was just a box.
Well, there was only one thing to do, really: open it up.
Yaz slid a fingernail into the crack between base and lid in order to lever it open without damaging the velvet veneer. It felt quite high quality. As the box began to open, she was suddenly hit by the intense feeling that she shouldn’t be seeing what was inside.
But it was too late.
The box snapped open, almost like it wanted to reveal its contents. Inside was a ring. A gold wedding band with an offset green gemstone, fashioned so it almost appeared to be missing a piece. Like part of it was lost.
Did… did the TARDIS just propose to her? No, that was ridiculous.
Yaz gently pulled the ring from the box to examine it more closely. It was old, very old, and well worn. It had been on a finger for ages, perhaps passed down through generations. Whose was it, and why did she have it now? She lifted the ring into the light. Was that an inscription? Hang on, did that say “Sweetie”?
The realization of what she was holding hit Yaz so suddenly that she nearly dropped the ring. This was the Doctor’s ring. The Doctor was married, and the TARDIS wanted Yaz to ask her about it.
This was going to hurt.
The Doctor heard familiar footsteps approaching and scrambled to her feet. She began flipping levers and turning dials, mostly as an excuse so she didn’t have to look her companion in the eyes. It kept her hands busy.
“Doctor, I need to ask you something.”
She ignored that.
“Where’d you like to go next? I hear Gandhi's cat is actually an alien. And I’ve been meaning to catch the migration of the Phasmids in the Horsehead nebula for ages now. It’s just the two of us, so wherever you would like to go.”
She could practically hear Yaz frowning at her back.
“This is important. Stop trying to distract me,” she said. “Wait, just us two? Where’s Dan?”
It wasn’t the distraction the Doctor had been aiming for, but she’d take whatever she could get.
“Dropped him off back home. He needed to do some laundry. Why? Do you think something bad could have happened to him? Polymorphic laundry monster perhaps? Yes, I definitely think we should go check. He could be in serious danger.”
The Doctor reached out for the atom accelerator but was stopped by a hand on her arm.
“Doctor, stop. First of all, I’m pretty sure we have a full laundry room off the far end of the zero-g gym. It’s coin operated for some reason. Second, you must seriously think I’m thick if you're trying the same deflection twice.”
The Doctor’s shoulders slumped, and she gave a heavy sigh. Well it was worth a try.
“Yes, well. I expect the laundry thing was a clever excuse. Probably a strategic retreat if I’m honest. Rats fleeing a sinking ship, and all that.”
“Did… did you just call Dan a rat?” Yaz smiled gently, but it didn’t reach her eyes. The Doctor hated being pitied.
“Yaz, I told you, I can’t.”
“I know, it’s ok. I still have a question.” As she said this, the Doctor noticed her companion was holding something small in her left hand. She held it with the same careful consideration as Yaz’s eyes whenever she looked at the Doctor. She extended her arm and uncurled her fingers.
“Tell me about this. Please?”
There was a glint of achingly familiar metal.
The Doctor’s breath hitched. Her left heart skipped a beat. The hair on the back of her neck lifted. Fury rushed into her chest. How dare she? How dare she hold the Doctor’s history in her hand, her very soul, and just ask for an explanation? Like she deserved it. Like she was owed.
“Who gave you this,” the Doctor snarled. Even to her own ears her voice sounded cold. “You have no right.”
“Your TARDIS gave it to me. I think it wanted us to have a conversation.”
“Fine then. Give it to me. It doesn’t belong to you, and it doesn’t belong to the TARDIS either.” She’d have to have a stern talking to with her faithful time machine. That box always did think she knew best, but this was a step too far.
Yaz reached out and dropped the ring into the Doctor’s outstretched palm. “I won't force you if you don’t want to tell me. I still think you should, but I won’t force you.”
As Yaz turned to leave, clearly too tired to push this further, the doors to the TARDIS swung open. A very familiar sound filtered through the doors… and all the blood drained from the Doctor’s face. The Singing Towers.
The lights on the TARDIS’s console blinked off. That couldn't be good.
Yaz watched as the Doctor stumbled towards the open doors of the TARDIS. She looked like she had seen a ghost, like she might be about to collapse. Yaz ran forward and caught her by her ridiculous yellow suspenders, just as the Doctor slumped against the door frame.
“Doctor! What’s wrong?” Yaz exclaimed, taking the Doctor’s full weight and slowly lowering her into a seated position on the floor.
Yaz looked outside. They were hovering in a cloud layer in an orange sky, high above an unfamiliar planet. And could she hear… music?
She crouched down and placed her hand on the plane of the Doctor’s cheek, turning the Time Lord’s face towards her own. Yaz stroked her thumb along the line of the pale cheekbone, trying to soothe that shocked look away. It seemed to take the edge off.
“Doctor, where are we? Has someone intercepted the TARDIS? What do you need?”
“No, it's fine.” The Doctor shook her head slowly back and forth, as if trying to dislodge a cobweb from her hair. “Just the TARDIS having… opinions.” The Doctor swung her legs out the door and let her feet dangle in the alien sky.
“It seems to be doing quite a lot of that lately. Having opinions, I mean.” Yaz cleared her throat, a little afraid of asking the next question. “Where are we, Doctor? Why this planet?”
“It’s called Darillium. And I expect we are here because it's where I was happiest. Maybe the only place I was truly happy. I also expect she won’t let us leave until I talk to you. Dan said I owed you an explanation, and it seems the TARDIS agrees. I can’t promise to make you understand, but I’ll try.” The Doctor shook her head again, blond hair falling across her eyes.
“Ships with souls,” she mumbled. “More trouble than they’re worth.”
The Doctor was silent for multiple minutes, looking out across the world below them and listening to the eerie sound of singing that permeated this place. Yaz could see her trying to weather the storm in her mind. It was like she had lost all of her fight. She didn't think she had ever seen the Doctor at a loss for words before.
After a long while, the Time Lord spoke. “I need to tell you about a friend of mine, a girl named Rose.” The Doctor threaded the fingers of her two hands together around the ring, gripping it so hard her knuckles went white.
When she didn’t continue, Yaz prompted, “Was that her name? The person you were married to?”
“No, that’s not important.”
“Doctor,” Yaz reproached, her eyebrows knitting together. “You're my best friend in the world. I’ve known you for years. And you never mentioned being married once. Not once. Don’t tell me that’s not important.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Of course it’s important. Maybe the most important thing in the history of creation. It's just not the story I need to tell. It’s not the one you need to hear.”
Yaz didn’t press the point, sensing now wasn’t the time. Sometimes the Doctor was like a cornered beast. Approach too fast and you’ll get bit. You have to wait and let her come to you.
Realizing she was still crouching, Yaz moved to sit alongside her friend. She tried not to think about the fact that they were very, very high up as she swung her legs out into space. Almost on instinct she shuffled closer, until their knees touched. The gentle contact seemed to lend the Doctor a bit of strength.
“It was hundreds of years ago, thousands. Maybe billions depending on how you count. I was a man so broken by war, twisted by guilt and isolation,” the Doctor began. She lurched from word to word, as if each one took a terrible effort.
Wait, did she just say man? Yaz could never tell when she said stuff like that if it was a joke, or simply a looser sense of sex and gender. Apparently it was not a joke, she meant it literally. Ok, Yaz would have to tuck that one away to unpack later. It didn’t really matter anyway.
“I was barely a person, just a wisp of a broken soldier, trying to fix the universe instead of myself.” She closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of the world.
“And then, suddenly, out of nowhere there was this girl, shining brighter than all the stars in the sky. And I just thought, if I can give this girl the stars, maybe she can give me back my soul.”
“And did she?” Yaz asked, nearly a whisper.
“No, of course not,” she said. Paused. “Maybe a little.” A massive sigh ripped free from the Doctor’s lungs.
“She was barely more than a child, even by human standards, and I expected her to change everything. She… she fell a little in love with me, I think. This ridiculous man with asymmetrical ears, far too much nose, and two broken hearts. It felt good to have someone look at me like the focal point of the universe, like the most important thing in existence. Part of me wanted to be that for her, but it wasn’t right. Those feelings came from desperation. Still, there was a part of me…” she faded off.
“What happened to her, Doctor?” Yaz asked, dreading the answer.
“What always happens. I lost her. She became trapped in a parallel world. I stole her life, and the guilt of that nearly destroyed me. And then, the universe handed me a way out. Literally. Before the walls closed for good, I was able to give her the part of me that wanted to love her. It was the perfect solution. She got a Doctor who could love her like a human, and I got a clean exit. She did manage to give him his heart back, I think… even if he only had one. It was the perfect solution, but it was also a cheat. I got to move on, but at the expense of depriving this universe of a truly wonderful being. The Big Bad Wolf. She was lost, and I was alone.”
Captain Jack had mentioned Rose, all those years ago when he had given Yaz back her Doctor. It was still almost incomprehensible to her without the proper context. The Doctor told so many mixed up anecdotes that it was hard to keep track. Still, Yaz didn’t really need to understand the finer details of her history, just its consequences.
“Why are you telling me this, Doctor?”
“You have to understand, Yaz. She wasn’t the first. She certainly wasn’t the last. It always ends badly. I can’t, it hurts too much.”
Yaz shook her head. For an ancient alien time traveler who could change her face, the Doctor could be pretty stupid sometimes.
“Of course it always ends badly. Every relationship, friends, family… lovers,” a prickle of heat rose to Yaz’s cheeks, “Someone always dies or leaves in the end. Every human in history knows that’s the score. We’re mortal after all. But we choose people anyways. We love, despite knowing it will end in grief. And I can promise you, Rose didn’t regret a second of it.”
“Yes, but Yaz,” the Doctor said, her voice trembling, precariously close to tears, “I’m always the one that’s left behind. If you don’t get eaten up by this crazy life in a magic blue box, you’ll find someone else. Someone more… human. And that will be good, Yasmin Kahn. Better. But it always leaves me a little more broken.”
“Stop calling yourself broken. You’re a person. People don’t break. And I’m never leaving you, Doctor. Hate to tell you, but you're stuck with me.” Yaz bumped their shoulders together.
“Yaz, you don’t understand. They all say that, every single one of them, but it doesn’t matter. I burn through you, just the same.” The Doctor’s hands clasped even tighter in her lap. “The people that travel with me, they always suffer. And I let it happen. It’s my fault, but I keep taking people with me, one after another. If you're lucky, you’ll leave with a dead family member and an unrequited crush. If you’re not lucky, you burn up like a match. Warm and beautiful one moment, cold and black the next.”
The Doctor called her beautiful. Yaz chose to ignore that for now. It was very much not the point. The butterflies in her stomach could just jog on. She’d have to humanely euthanize them later.
“Doctor,” Yaz said, catching those deep hazel eyes as they darted her way. “You do this thing where you get caught up in complicated metaphors. I used to think it was just a condescending way of dumbing things down for us little people. But it’s not that, is it? You do it all the time, even when you’re alone. You wrap things up in pretty allegory to dull the edges… to ignore how messy life is. I think I do it a bit too now. You’ve rubbed off on me. But I’m not a match, Doctor. You can’t simply use me up and toss me away.”
“It might be better if I could.”
“If you are so crushed by all this guilt over taking people into your life, why do you keep doing this to yourself?”
“Because I’m dangerous alone. You remember the Master? Tuxedos? Bomb on a plane? Excellent beard? Totally evil? The only difference between them and me is you. I can’t see the guard rails when I’m alone. So I choose people. Knowing how it will end, I take you along to protect the universe from me. And I use you up.”
“Wow, Doctor, thanks for taking away all my agency.” Yaz rolled her eyes. “You don’t just choose us, we choose you. We know how dangerous this life is. We know how it’s likely to end. We stay anyway. I stay anyway.”
“I had this friend, Donna,” said the Doctor, clearly ignoring what Yaz was trying to make her confront. It was like she needed to put some space between herself and too much intimacy too quickly. Like she needed to get her feet back under her. “She made me promise not to be alone too long. She saw what I could be without a companion.”
Yaz shot her the barest of smiles, trying to bring a little levity back. “Did she fall for you a little too?”
“Donna?” The Doctor grinned back at her, like she had just heard an unexpected joke that was a little too clever to be funny. “Never Donna. She used to call me a long streak of alien nothing. I think she was maybe the best friend I ever had.” Her head dipped and the smile faded. “I lost her too, of course. And in the process, she lost herself. The Doctor-Donna. I made so many mistakes with her.”
Yaz placed a hand on the Doctor’s knee. “You’ll lose me too one day. But not today, and not for as long as I can possibly manage.” She moved her hand to stroke the back of the Doctor’s straining knuckles. Yaz was slightly worried the woman might shatter at the contact. She didn’t. “I’ll give you every day that I have.” The words came out more like a plea than a promise.
“You really shouldn’t, Yaz. You should leave, find someone who can love you with everything they are. You deserve a better life than this one, detached from the universe, never settling. You deserve better than me.”
Yaz dropped her gaze and withdrew her hand. “There is no one better than you,” she whispered.
“Oh, Yaz.” The Doctor looked at her with such anguish.
Yaz knew her friend couldn’t give her what she wanted, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to give the Doctor everything she was with no hope of reciprocation.
“I understand that you can’t… can’t be what I want,” Yaz said, the words cutting her lips like knives. “But I also can’t change how I feel. My heart, it feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to you.”
“Yaz,” said the Doctor, peering at her like she had just grown a second head. “Did you just quote the movie Stardust as your great declaration of love?”
“Um…yeah? I think I might have done,” she answered, cheeks burning. “It’s not my fault! You only have 17 DVDs on this ship for some reason, and that one is the most recent! It’s not like I get Netflix all the way out here in the middle of nowhere deep space.” She blushed even harder. “Plus, I like it. It’s sweet.”
The Doctor smiled. A real one, lighting her face from within. ”A love story between a lonely immortal from the stars and an earth born lad with a destiny he can barely fathom? Of course you like it, you big sap.”
Yaz reached out again to stroke the Doctor’s hands, easing the rigid tendons, coaxing them to relax. The fingers began to open, and she turned her palm up, cradling the ring. Yaz couldn’t help but wince a bit at the angry welts on the Doctor’s palm from where the metal band had been forced into her flesh. A self inflicted wound.
“I never should have let this slip away.”
“What was their name?” Yaz asked, seeing if she could press, just a little bit. “The person that gave you that ring.”
“River. Her name was River.”
“Did you lose her too?”
“Maybe. I think maybe she lost me this time. River never was one for following the rule book. She did keep one though. Practically wrote it herself. You know, the two hundred years we were together, I never was able to convince her of how much I loved her. She was everything, and she never knew.” The Doctor stood, pulling Yaz up with her.
“Do you think she would have wanted you to hide yourself away like this?” Yaz asked, “Wrap yourself in loneliness like armor?”
The Doctor gave a wistful smile as she met Yaz’s gaze. “Probably, she was a bit of the jealous type.”
Yaz smiled back, gently shoving the Doctor’s shoulder. At least the Doctor’s deflections had lost some of their bite.
“You liar,” Yaz said, full of good humor.
“Rule Number One,” the Doctor countered, “the Doctor always lies.”
“Not always. Not when the TARDIS is holding her hostage, at least.”
Yaz took the Doctor’s hand and drew her back into that magic Blue Box.
The Doctor looked down at their two clasped hands. The contrast of their skin. The age of their bones. It had been such a casual gesture before, but now it seemed… dangerous. Yaz really did want to crawl right up into her hearts and set up shop. A tiny voice in the back of her mind asked, would it really be so bad if you let her?
This was a terrible idea. One she absolutely couldn’t indulge. And yet, completely without meaning to, she found herself pulling Yaz into her. She wrapped her arms around this fragile human woman and pressed Yaz’s body into her chest. The Doctor leaned her forehead against her companion’s and closed her eyes. She could feel the woman’s single heart race.
“Yaz, I still can’t do this.” The time lord’s breath danced across Yaz’s lips as she spoke. “But ask me again, tomorrow.”
The TARDIS’s engines whirred back to life, and the console lights blazed back on. It sounded like hope.