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They finish their ice creams in silence, and Yaz gazes out at planet Earth. Slowly rotating in front of her, over seven billion people living down below. And she’s here, gazing down at it all, sat on top of the most mad machine she’s ever touched, with the most mad woman she’s ever known.
The most amazing woman. The most frustrating. The most fantastic. The most inspiring.
The most loved.
The Doctor crunches through the cone with a quiet snap. One of her hands rest on her leg and Yaz’s so close she could reach out and touch it. If she only looks at that hand, it’s almost normal. Not like the other hand, where she would brush her fingertips against the Doctor’s glowing skin. Lace her fingers through too, and would it burn her? The orange-gold glow ripples like sunlight through water, like fire bubbling in the heart of the Earth. How can something so pretty be the bringer of Yaz’s greatest horror?
A life without the Doctor.
A life without- well.
Yaz chews her second to last bite. A life without the Doctor, and it’s been inevitable really. She’s even been lucky enough to get test runs. She’s known the pain of being left, of being stranded with less than a word. Now, at least, she leaves knowing she was there to the end. That she’d have always been there, come whatever. Nothing could have stopped her.
She’d do – has done – anything and everything for the Doctor. Her Doctor.
Inevitable was what it was always going to be, with a person like the Doctor. Someone who runs through the universe, sparing no time for answers, always afraid to stop and face the truth. To commit, fully.
It’s not okay, and somehow, it’s okay.
Yaz knows with a sad sort of certainty that she’ll be okay. She’ll take her first step into a life without the Doctor – and she’ll be okay.
It’s a heavy certainty. One that makes her eyes sting with yet more unshed tears. But not one she can avoid. She’ll be okay, because at the end, it was her and her Doctor.
She’ll never forget that. And she’ll never forget the Doctor either.
The last bites are chewed, and Yaz’s hands are left empty, if not a little sticky. She’d chosen one of the first alien ice-cream flavours she’d ever tried, if only to remember that day again. One of their early adventures, on a bright planet with three amber suns, and Graham had somehow gotten involved in a water bomb fight with the locals and promptly dragged Ryan in with a well-aimed throw. Yaz had sat on a bench – nothing like the TARDIS roof, but something like this, because the Doctor had been sat next to her.
Legs splayed a little out, shoulders rolled back and a massive beam on her face. There’d been a smear of ice cream on the corner of her mouth and Yaz had tried not to stare. And then tried not to laugh when the Doctor had tried to lick it away in the most ridiculous of ways.
And Yaz had laughed in the end, because of course she had, a little snort bursting forth and then the rest, pouring out of her like a waterfall at sunset. And the Doctor had laughed too, grinning in a self-satisfying way, and had said, “Knew I could make you laugh.”
The taste of her ice cream had coated her tongue when she’d taken another lick. Binding the memory to the taste. That bright grin, the way those eyes had lit up. The feeling inside of Yaz’s chest, something warm and expanding, like a firework or a sun, warming throughout her skin until her cheeks had felt a little hot to the touch. A feeling that had mystified her a little, then, and now she knows exactly what it was, what it is. It’s the feeling she gets when she thinks about the Doctor. When the Doctor impresses her, or is impressed by her, or when she takes Yaz’s hand or when she looks at Yaz with that gaze, or when she smiles.
It’s love.
Yaz doesn’t know if she’ll ever love anyone in the way she loves the Doctor.
Doesn’t know if it’s even possible. The feeling’s a supernova, bright and exploding and all encompassing. The feeling loving a universe gives you.
But. Yaz thinks, maybe knows, maybe she’s seen in the looks and the touches and the smiles, and the way her voice had sounded behind the glass, the you saved my life, and how her forehead had pressed into the bare skin of Yaz’s neck when she’d carried her and the way her eyes had softened when they’d found hers after being shot –
That the Doctor loves her too. That much.
Like a universe.
It’s not fair, really. It’s not. Because they’re on a precipice and Yaz loves her and the Doctor loves her back in her own way, and they needed more. More time, more universe, more of each other. More, and it’s been taken. Snatched from Yaz’s hands for a second time in one day, a fourth time in her knowing of the Doctor. Snatched from the Doctor, and the way her voice had broken and the emotion crashing down on her face had told Yaz it was the same for her. Snatched and stolen and taken: but isn’t that just life? You find someone you love, and you want everything. But life doesn’t always do that.
Life surprises you.
Not all surprises are good.
But at least they’d had this. Not a lifetime. A million different adventures though, a million lingering looks and trusting glances and angered moments and frustrated yells and horrible desperation. More than some ever get in their lifetime, and it isn’t enough but it’s something.
It’s something.
After this, the Doctor will die, and someone else will take her place and Yaz could argue to stay. She could, if she wanted to, but she knows it’d just waste their time, tint it worse. All journeys come to an end. Seeing Ace and Tegan had proven that. Seeing how Ryan and Graham and Dan had left had proven that. It all comes to an end and this is Yaz’s.
A way to escape the eternal cycle of wondering for answers and following for more. The Doctor will always be the Doctor, and Yaz will always love them, she thinks, but they won’t quite be hers. They won’t be her Doctor.
So this is why she should leave. End the pain on a good note. Turn the back cover on this adventure, because who knows if Yaz would even fit in with what’s coming, and maybe-
Maybe this Doctor should have someone leave with her. This Doctor dies, and Yaz leaves the story to its conclusion. They both end, together.
As it’s been. Yaz and the Doctor. From beginning to end.
The planet turns, ever so slowly. Yaz takes a breath and basks in that glory. Her world, safe.
The Doctor swallows, just about audible, and turns to Yaz.
“Yaz,” she says, and Yaz memorises the way the Doctor says her name, in all the glory of three letters, imprinting it onto her brain forever. She turns after a beat, glancing away from a world to a universe, who’s looking a little drained at the edges and maybe, if it’s not just a trick of the light, a little glowy.
“Doctor,” Yaz replies, and she thinks the Doctor’s doing the same as she had. Memorises all those glorious letters, her vowels and consonants, the voice of Yasmin Khan saying the Doctor’s name.
The Doctor looks at her for a good few seconds, her eyes darting around every single line in Yaz’s irises, all the colour that completes them, and then she very deliberately brings a hand up to cup the side of Yaz’s jaw.
Yaz’s breath catches in her throat.
The Doctor’s hand is vaguely sticky from the ice cream too, just enough for Yaz to notice. But it barely registers under the gaze she’s caught in and the feeling of the Doctor’s skin against hers, slightly hotter than usual, and her heart beat is pounding, pounding, pounding.
“Yaz,” the Doctor says again. Softer. Quieter.
“Doctor,” Yaz replies again. A barest whisper into the vacuum of space.
The Doctor swallows again, and her hand stays on Yaz’s jaw, and she dips her head in slightly. So slowly, like a leaf falling in slow motion, and Yaz doesn’t know whether it’s the Doctor or herself, slowing the moment down so it’ll last forever. It is milliseconds, eternity caught between two beats, and then Yaz shifts in and-
And the Doctor kisses Yaz.
Her lips taste like ice cream.
The first thought Yaz has, and it hits her like a stone to the stomach. Her lips taste like the ice cream she’s just eaten, slightly sweet and slightly glazed over her lips. Some sort of weird flavour combination, par the course for the Doctor, and it’s such an absurd taste for a kiss that Yaz could almost burst out with rib-aching laughter.
Or soul destroying sobbing.
Either or.
The flavour is vaguely familiar though, like a memory Yaz has dropped and hastily shoved back in her head, all jumbled up in every other piece of the Doctor, all squashed by one thought.
The Doctor. Kisses. Yaz.
Absurdity mixed up in long held perfection. A story that ends with some sort of victory. Some sort of happy end.
Yaz kisses her back, of course. Like it’s instinct, like it’s breathing, like her body has always known and will always know exactly how to do this. Not desperately, though, despite the previously frantic beats of her heart – her heart that is silent, frozen in this moment, eternity between the best –; not desperately like she’d probably always imagined it would be like, if she’d ever imagined or admitted to herself that she’d like to imagine. But instead sweetly. Softly. Sadly. How it should be, for this moment, this time. To make it easier for it to end, as all journeys most. To make it easier for her to leave.
A goodbye kiss without the goodbye.
Salt mixes with ice cream, and Yaz realises she’s crying, a few tears rolling down her cheeks to demonstrate the inevitability of this all, like gravity calling the droplets down. Her hand comes up unwittingly and places itself against the Doctor’s cheek, her fingertips touching the Doctor’s hair and her palm basking in the Doctor’s skin, and that’s when she realises she’s not the only one crying.
Her hand is gathering some salt of its own.
A sweet, soft, sad kiss in the light of their home. Yaz squeezes her eyes so shut no light could even hope to get in and she throws herself into this. Committing every detail into memory: the way the Doctor’s lips are faintly chapped and maybe a little irritating; the way the Doctor’s hand is gently curved around the line of her jaw; the way the Doctor’s leg is pressed right up against Yaz’s, as close as it can get without melting into the other. Like them all over, really, because in this moment Yaz can’t tell where she ends and where the Doctor begins, and it’s just them. The Doctor and Yaz, Yaz and the Doctor, in their last moment.
Their sweet, soft, sad kiss.
The one Yaz will remember for the rest of her existence.
She never wants it to end. But-
Isn’t that just what life with the Doctor is like? Never wanting it to end and yet, someone always has to go. Inevitable.
The Doctor will die, thousands of years old and barely a handful at the same time, and Yaz Khan will go on, twenty-something and bound to a human eighty or so years, and still with all her best years to come, in theory.
Nothing will ever come close to her time with the Doctor, but there’s practically eons stretching out in front of her compared to what this Doctor, her Doctor, has. Inevitably, there will be something great waiting for her. Not like her time with the Doctor, but something great.
Yaz places the taste of the ice cream finally.
It’s the flavour the Doctor had on that early adventure. Sat side by side on a bench, with a grin so bright it was the sun and a laugh so free it was all the birds in the world.
They part, eventually. Like teardrops to gravity’s domain, they must. The moon only covers the sun for a short while in an eclipse. They have to drift out of sync.
They don’t move too far away however. The Doctor’s forehead nudges against Yaz’s, pressed against Yaz’s skin with all that heat and weight and beauty, and Yaz finally leans forward and takes the Doctor’s hand. The one that doesn’t burn and change, because she’s not sure if she can take the other.
This one’s perfect, though. Yaz traces her fingertips over the skin. The sharp hills of the knuckles, the dips in between. Her fingers seem to fit perfectly when laced with the Doctor’s. Like this is what they were both made for.
“Shouldn’t have waited so long,” the Doctor murmurs after a while. A second, maybe? Time’s a commodity right now. Yet it’s while to Yaz, and it’s probably a while to the Doctor too, scraping out every last moment they can get before the last page is turned.
Yaz smiles a little, and salt edges the corner of her mouth again. “Always the problem, right? Don’t know what you’ve got until it’s-”
“Gone,” finishes the Doctor, soft and sad. Her eyes flutter open slightly, and she gazes at Yaz through lashes glinting like stardust. Like Yaz’s eyes are the stars, a whole galaxy being born and made, like the universe.
Like she always did, really.
Yaz can still taste the Doctor’s ice cream on her lips.
She thinks that maybe, she always will.