Chapter Text
When Yaz was much younger and had never been anywhere farther from Parkhill Flats than Huddersfield, let alone another galaxy, she nurtured an obsession with Greek mythology. It was the sort of thing you got into when you were a lonely weirdo in seventh year at Newfield Secondary, a girl who was different from the other girls in a way she had no language for—wouldn’t, in fact, for a very, very long time.
She liked myths because they were at once simple and utterly inscrutable, populated by stock characters whose actions didn’t feel predictable, but inevitable, like gravity. (Yaz would later learn that gravity was anything but inevitable.)
Her favorite was the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. (A cliché, maybe, but things that become clichéd often do because they feel universally profound, enduring after less popular tales have faded from collective memory.) The lovers’ tragic fate made Yaz’s heart hurt in the best way; because before you grow up and experience actual heartbreak, you must practice for it until it begins to seem almost delicious.
Twelve-year-old Yaz supposed that, as a girl, she ought to identify with Eurydice, the way the other girls identified with Princess Mia or Rapunzel or whoever. But she instead saw herself in Orpheus, the shy poet who sang the sweetest songs and suffered the profoundest loss. Like her, he was both too sensitive and too stubborn; he grew too easily attached and wouldn’t take no for an answer, no matter how many “reasonable” people told him he was doomed to fail.
Of course Orpheus scoffed in the face of death; he was brave and foolish, and Eurydice was the love of his whole entire life. That’s not something you just let go of if there’s even the barest chance you can do something about it. He was talented and clever, and what he didn’t know, he would learn along the way, or else die trying.
What not enough people properly understood was that, before it all went wrong, he won, with all the odds mounted against him. He defied the God of Death, breaking down Hades’ defenses and finding his weak spots in order to do the impossible. And he did; he brought his lover whom he hadn’t had nearly enough time with up from the ground, back from the brink.
But how exquisite that, in the end, Orpheus did fail, because he did everything wrong for all the right reasons. Because he was hopeful and romantic to a fault, of course he turned around to look at Eurydice. He wanted to share this triumph with her, to see her face light up with relief and delight.
Another thing Yaz loves about myths is that they aren’t fables; they don’t have any lessons to impart, bear no clear warnings. No, myths are more like tea leaves or tarot or augury; they reflect the person you are back at you, and who you are is always changing. Mythology is story in its purest form—and aren’t we all stories in the end?
But then she met the Doctor, and suddenly death didn’t matter; looking back didn’t matter. There was nearly always a chance to go back and fix what was broken. That is, until she finally found the language for the thing that made her feel so other all those years ago. And there was no stuffing that genie back into the bottle, time machine or no.
I don't know what to do, Dan. I've never told anyone. Not even myself.
The person Yaz was at… God, but she has no idea how old she is anymore; side effect of living in the TARDIS. The, let’s say, twenty- or thirty-something Yaz who sat at the edge of the China Sea in 1807, stealing forbidden glances at the Doctor beneath a slate-gray sky, began to formulate a different interpretation of her favorite myth. Maybe Eurydice didn’t want saving, no matter how much she loved Orpheus. Maybe she was relieved when he turned his head and she faded back into comforting darkness. Maybe she wanted to accept what the Fates had wrought, because maybe it felt too painful to try and fight it. Maybe it was easy for Orpheus to laugh in the face of annihilation because he himself had never experienced it. But Eurydice had. And Eurydice knew.
Auguries; stones skipped across choppy waves; one heart breaking, or maybe three. Turns out her early practice hadn’t helped Yaz at all; there was nothing delicious about this.
The thing is, Yaz loves the Doctor down to the very depths of her, so mad with it that she’ll do anything that wonderful, melancholy alien asks of her—even if it means not doing anything at all, even when every atom in her body pulls her toward the Doctor like the moon drags the tide to the shore to crush itself against the rocks.
But she stayed where she was that day on the beach, pebbles digging uncomfortably into her skin, because the Doctor needed her to. And really, isn’t that its own form of showing how much she cares? Only Yaz can make the most extraordinary woman in the universe feel this way, and only Yaz can give her the gift of letting her pretend that she doesn’t.