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She takes you home before she dies. Her first promise to you, kept. The TARDIS is kind, this time, and drops you off the day after you’d left the last time. You’re older than Sonya, now, twenty-eight to her twenty-seven. You’d aged with the Doctor, living an entire lifetime in the too-short years you’d spent with her. You’d lost three years trapped in the past. Telling your family your age seems impossible, so you keep it to yourself, choosing to let them believe that you’re twenty-three and ready to settle after your youthful running. Your mum isn’t fooled, you think, but you’re both happy to pretend she is.
Some days, you barely recognize yourself. You can’t quite place it, but the reflection in your mirror doesn’t match your memory. You’ve changed in some incomprehensible way, and it’s not the soft lines that dust the space around your eyes, that frame your lips. Perhaps it’s your eyes themselves – full of lifetimes, now.
The flat you move into is small, empty. One bed, with stars stuck to the ceiling. You ache for the real thing, for the swirling colors of the time vortex and the bone-chill of outer space. You’d selected a purple sofa for the living room, too many pillows and blankets strewn along the frame, just in case the Doctor fell back into your timeline again. Pictures from your travels find their place on the walls, and an ever-present pack of custard creams settles in the cupboard. Slowly, your little flat starts to feel like home.
On the nights you miss her most, you steadily work your way through a pack of custard creams and remember your adventures, staring at the stars you’d stuck to your bedroom ceiling.
Ryan and Graham come once you’ve settled into your new routine, after what you’ve come to call Companions Anonymous. It’s a sad approximation of Tea at Yaz’s, but it soothes the ache you’ve felt since landing. You’d missed them, and you enjoy hearing about the adventures they’ve been getting up to without the Doctor. In another life, you’d have joined them.
You talk well into the night, just like old times, but you don’t tell them what happened on the Doctor’s last day, what happened when the Master stole her body. What he’d done in the time between the switch and what you’d done to make him undo it. The memories he’d forced into your head, and the searing pain after. You’d felt unmade, then made anew. You feel... unclean.
There’s this moment when you’re sure you’re going to die... and then you’re born.
Instead, you tell them about your last adventure. The ice cream is still bright on your tongue, and you describe the flavor with as much detail as you can, like you’re trying to taste it all over again.
You tell them how her skin had glowed with the golden, restorative energy of the time vortex, and the three of you reminisce about that first night, when you’d seen the soft glow for the first time. Neither of you had known what it was at the time, but it had been the weirdest, most beautiful thing you’d ever seen. Ever would see. Graham shares a knowing look with you, and you feel seen. Graham, too, understood the loss of a second-chance, one-time love.
Graham pulls you into a hug when he sets off for his own small flat, shared with only his grandson now. You invite Ryan to spend the night because after sleeping on the TARDIS for those years, the quiet of your tiny flat is deafening. Some nights, you swear you can feel the turn of the Earth, feel the passage of time.
The mattress from your bed had been dragged into the living room to share, and you force yourself not to think of the nights you’d spent curled up in the console room.
Ryan asks you what happened, and you hate him for it. There’s an unfair, burning anger spilling out from your chest and into your belly. He shouldn’t get to ask, doesn’t deserve to know. He’d made his choice after those ten months spent linear on Earth, had been contented to move on and believe her dead. Had mourned her while you worked in a desperate attempt to learn how to pilot the spare ship.
The anger cools, and you begin to talk. Once the words start, they pour out. You tell him everything that happened from the beach to the ice cream, and by the end you both have tears in your eyes.
You don’t know who you are anymore. What you are anymore. You don’t know if you want to know, now. If you want to be as alone as the Doctor thought she was. At least now, without knowing, you can pretend you have your family and friends. You can pretend you won’t lose them, too, one day.
Sleep doesn’t come easily anymore, and you finally understand what the Doctor had meant when she said she never needed sleep.
Slowly, you start to heal. You stop waiting for her to return. UNIT, reinstated now, offers you a position with the other former companions, and you take it. The work keeps you busy, and being with the others helps in a way you hadn’t expected.
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The Earth never stops needing saving. You’ve been promoted to leading the Former Companion Taskforce, and you no longer miss the adventure of the week you’d had with the doctor. Earth, it turns out, has been teeming with alien life from the start.
Acclimation is always the first goal of your team, taught through the years by your own respective Doctors, and soon you gain a reputation of your own. You keep your name – you'll always be Yaz.
It’s not until your thirtieth birthday passes that you realize you’ve stopped aging. The same lines you came home from frame your features, but they haven’t deepened. New ones haven’t formed. In the back of your mind, you know what this means. You choose to ignore it, pushing through your new adventures and finding Earth’s new lifeforms lodging.
The TARDIS reappears during one such mission, and you nearly cry with relief before apprehension sets in. She had told you, that last trip on top of the TARDIS, that she wasn’t going to be herself anymore. She would die, and a new Doctor would take her place.
You don’t think you’re ready to meet the new Doctor, and your hand hovers over the beautiful, blue frame, hesitant to knock. Uncurling your fist, you lay your palm flat against the door. Click. The door opens, like it knows who you are. Like it wants you there. The console room is empty, and you feel a warmth spread across your mind. She’s happy to see you, but she isn’t the Doctor’s TARDIS.
She’s your TARDIS, the one you’d tried to teach yourself to fly in. She’s been waiting for you.
You understand her now, understand the way your Doctor had always talked to her ship. The doors close, and your hands fall into place on the controls.
You’ll meet the Doctor again, you know. She won’t be your Doctor anymore, but you know you’ll love her in any body.