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It felt like purgatory. Sat on a beach with the Doctor by her side, it felt like purgatory. Every word that was said to her bounced around in her skull and engraved itself a place in her mind without her being able to properly hear it at all.
And it wasn’t the seagulls, or the blood rushing around her ears, or the way that she was beginning to be able to feel every thread of her shirt. It was the stones in her chest where her heart once was as she realised exactly what it was the Doctor was saying.
Can we just live in the present of what we have, while we still have it?
It was a rejection. It had to be.
As much as the pain stabbed through her ribcage like the thousands of daggers wielded by the thousands of days she’d spent without the Doctor, she put on as brave a face as she could.
Yaz leaned over to the side and handed the Doctor an ideal skimming stone. “Make a wish and skim it.” She hopes that the movement hides her face in the split seconds afterwards, when she’s less likely to be able to control it.
The Doctor reaches across her hunched knees and takes the stone. Their hands both linger on it for a moment, just long enough for the pain to be ripped afresh, before the Doctor gently pulls it from Yaz’s grasp and stares down at it like it holds all the answers to every question ever asked.
Slowly, the ancient Time Lord stood.
“I wish…”
“You can’t say your wish out loud!” Yaz protests. Even in her misery, she finds joy in the Doctor.
“You can where I’m from.” She turns back to the sea and arches her arm. With an ease of skill acquired over hundreds of years, the stone skips over the ocean once, twice, five times, before sinking into the inky blue depths. Yaz watches it as it goes, then looks up at the Doctor. “I wish that this would go on forever.”
And that’s when she realises. Like her stomach has fallen out from underneath her, she realises.
Would . As if the Doctor has already resigned herself to the fact that Yaz is gonna die.
They stay like that for a minute, Yaz hoping her smile hadn’t faded too quickly, the Doctor knowing it had, before the older woman sank back down into the spot on the rock next to the woman whose hope she’s just destroyed.
For a split second, there’s a resentment between them. Yaz despises how the Doctor had jerked her around in the last five minutes. She doesn’t look at the blonde with her chin on her knees next to her, instead thinking about how much her heart had been broken and retaped together only to be broken apart once more. A rejection, followed by a resignation to her death wrapped in a hope for forever.
Yaz fought a sigh and picked up another stone, twirling it in her hands as she avoided the Doctor.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor says.
Yaz is still angry.
“You deserve-”
“Don’t.” Even Yaz is surprised by the edge in her voice. “What the hell does that mean? Would go on forever?”
The Doctor remains silent and Yaz fights the urge to storm off back to the TARDIS.
“I met Time,” she eventually says.
“Time’s not a person.”
“It’s a big universe.”
Yaz casts the stone at the beach. From the corner of her eye, she sees the Doctor flinch away from the crack that sounded as it met the other stones.
“I haven’t got much longer left.” Her voice is smaller and weaker than Yaz has ever heard it. That and the words she says causes panic to build in her throat, forcing the anger aside.
“But you can regenerate-”
“ I haven’t got much longer, Yaz. That’s what Time meant.”
Silence, punctuated by the sucking of the waves, falls over them. Yaz can’t tear her eyes from the Doctor. She’s crying. Yaz has never seen her cry before.
It takes her a moment to catch up. It wasn’t Yaz ’s death that the Doctor feared. It was her own. She didn’t want to put Yaz through losing her.
The realisation hits her like a brick to the face and sucks the air from her lungs.
“You may love me now-” Yaz feels her breath hitch at the mention of the L word “-but there’s no guarantee I’ll be me in six months.” Her voice went very small again. “Tomorrow. I can’t ask you to commit to that.”
Agape, Yaz stares. “You haven’t given me the choice.”
Confused, the Doctor turns to look at her. Furious, Yaz stands up and begins to pace. She hears the Doctor scramble to her feet behind her and follow along at her heel the entire time she strides across the stones.
“I do love you, Doctor.” She’s shocked to hear the words come off of her tongue. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. But you never gave me the choice. ”
“Yaz, what do you- What do you mean?” The Doctor had paled. She looked like she was ill.
“I would rather be loved by you now and face the pain of losing you later than never have the chance to love you at all! And I would much rather be given the chance to know who you may become before I make a decision on them.”
The Doctor lost step with Yaz, so she swiveled around to look at her. Four years of pining came spewing out of her at once, along with enough pain compressed into one afternoon to run the whole of the Nottinghamshire grid for a month.
“You think that you know it all, that you’re so different to us humans, but you’re not. You feel the same as we do and you have lost so much more.” She didn’t know where the words that left her were coming from. She didn’t think she’d ever run out. “Doctor, we all change, and we all hurt. Pain is how we know we’re alive. Pain is how we know that we did the right thing. You’re already in agony now, I can see it, and you’re only opening up because you know you’ll regenerate soon and then it wasn’t you that said it. And I would much rather feel the pain of losing you than suffer the pain of almost having you.”
The Doctor shook her head, as if trying to clear her thoughts. She didn’t raise her eyes from the sand afterwards.
Something in the action made Yaz run out of steam. With a renewed softness, she tried a different tactic as the salty breeze whipped the tears from her eyes. “I know what it feels like to think that you don’t deserve to be happy, and I want you to know that you’re wrong.”
The sun had started to set behind her, and the Doctor was bathed in a halo of yellow light. “Do you really think you could still be with me if I was a completely different person?”
Yaz almost laughed. With a crooked smile, she said, “Depends. Will you keep the egomania, God complex and bizarre insistence on making yourself suffer?”
The Doctor almost cracked a smile back. “Probably.”
“Then I think I’ll manage.”
Yaz sighed one final time, watching as her Doctor wrung out her hans and tried to think of something worth saying. “It hurts me, too,” she decided on. “All I want to do is be with you, and I have to restrain myself all the time.”
“Then don’t.”
The Doctor had always had a gravity about her, and Yaz found herself being pulled towards her across the beach.
Above them, a bird screamed. Yaz ignored it. The Doctor followed it with her eyes. “I said I wanted to keep what we had,” the Time Lord said cautiously. “If today was a date, then going on dates could be what we already have.”
Yaz broke into a chuckle. What an oblivious, dumb little cretin she had fallen in love with. “Then today was a date.” She found herself standing very close to the Doctor, close enough that she could raise her hands and take the Doctor’s wringing ones in her own. “Call it the first of many.”
The Doctor looked up her then with a very small, very shy smile.