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The trouble with stillness and quiet is that thoughts always get too loud. It's why the Doctor always does her level best to be active, or talking, or both. If she stops, if she takes stock, she starts thinking all the things she doesn't want to think. Remembering everything she wants to forget.
But the problem is, humans need so much more sleep than she does. And that means even when she's not alone, there'll be hours when only her own thoughts can keep her company, and sometimes no amount of tinkering or holding conversations with herself is enough to shut them up.
Yaz is human; Yaz sleeps. And right now, she's sleeping on the mattress the Doctor's started keeping in the console room. It's nominally for the times one of them's been injured or they've spent all day running and Yaz can't deal with the TARDIS shifting her bedroom around, which she's been doing a lot lately. The TARDIS won't tell the Doctor why, but she seems happier when Yaz sleeps in the console room.
The Doctor tries not to admit it to herself, but she's happier, too. She likes Yaz being close. She likes Yaz talking to her till she falls asleep, trailing off in the middle of a sentence. She likes the occasional, very very rare times she herself needs to sleep, or rest, and they lie next to each other.
The times that happens, they don't touch. The Doctor's not so good at touching, not in this body, but it's different when it's Yaz, she wants to touch Yaz. And that's exactly why she shouldn't.
The point is, Yaz is asleep in the console room, and it's not one of those rare times the Doctor lets herself lie next to her, so here she is. With just her own thoughts and Yaz's soft breathing for company.
She can't even tinker around in here, not really, not without waking Yaz up. She could pace the halls, could find some other room to be in, could pick a pool or a rainforest or– anywhere, really. But if she has to be alone with her thoughts, she'd rather be where she can see as soon as Yaz wakes up. Make the loneliness last for as little time as possible.
And okay, maybe there's a part of her, a silly, hopeless little part, that wants Yaz to wake up to her. Doesn't want her to wake alone.
It's not like she's watching her sleep. That'd be weird, and she is weird, but not that kind of weird, and anyway, she can't stay still enough just to watch someone. But she catches herself glancing away from the console several times anyway.
Yaz is pretty when she sleeps. Yaz is always pretty. The Doctor scolds her mind for that one. She's not, she's not going to fall into that again.
(She already has. She already is. But it's nothing she can't keep denying.)
Sometimes, Yaz is fitful in sleep, tosses and turns. Occasionally she cries out. Once or twice, she's said the Doctor's name, and the Doctor has tried not to think about that, tried not to wonder what dreams Yaz has about her.
Tonight – if it is night, but then again it's always night, somewhere – Yaz is peaceful, still, just the gentle rise and fall of her breathing. The worry that furrows her brow too often these days is gone, smoothed out. She's let her hair fall loose, a dark curtain around her face.
She looks soft. She looks young. Is young, all humans are so impossibly young.
One day, she'll be gone.
That's the kind of thought the Doctor keeps so busy for, the kind she never wants to have and can't stop having.
Of course Yaz will go. They all do, one way or another. The Doctor knows it, has been through it a thousand times, and it never makes it hurt any less.
This one, she thinks, might hurt even more. It's not because she hasn't loved them all, it's just sometimes a person gets too close, stitches into her heart and the fabric of her life, and she starts thinking words like forever, starts not being able to imagine a life without them in it.
Rose was like that. Clara, too. And now Yaz.
Nothing hurts more than that, than wanting forever, than the moments that make you forget it's impossible. Nothing hurts more than remembering that the best she can hope for is that Yaz leaves her by choice. That she doesn't die first. That she doesn't get her options taken from her, like Donna, like Rose. That the Doctor doesn't have to be the one to break her heart, leave her behind to keep her safe.
At the end of this, the best the Doctor can hope for is to be the only one of them left heartbroken.
She doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to, but she looks at Yaz and finds herself wishing, when the time comes, please leave me. Don't let me lose you. Don't make me leave you. Please be the one to go.
It's the wish in her head, the place where she knows nothing good lasts forever, but in her hearts, deep down where logic doesn't matter, all she's wishing is stay, stay, stay.
Yaz stirs in her sleep, and the Doctor half-turns back to the console, works on pasting a smile on her face, like she hasn't been watching, like her hearts aren't aching in her chest. Like she's not thinking please leave me and feeling please stay.
Yaz blinks, and pushes her hair out of her face, and sits up slowly, and the Doctor turns to her properly, grin firmly in place.
“Sleep well?”
Yaz smiles at her. It makes her eyes light up, dark brown and beautiful. Her whole face shines with it. She looks at the Doctor like she's some kind of a miracle, and the Doctor wants to tell her all the ways she doesn't deserve it. All the ways Yaz is the only miracle between them.
“Not bad,” Yaz says, running her fingers through her sleep-mussed hair, and for a moment, the Doctor wishes desperately to be somebody else. The kind of person who could do that for Yaz instead, run her fingers through her hair, lie down next to her and sleep a full night, every night.
She tries to shake off the thoughts, push them back into the box in her head where she keeps the stuff she doesn't want to think about. There are so many of those things right now that it's only a 'box' in the same way the TARDIS is.
“Ready to go?” she asks, all brightness. “I've picked up on this anomaly at the centre of the Spiral Cluster. Prob'ly nothing, but I should check. I mean, we should check. Unless you want me to drop you off somewhere? You could get breakfast anywhere in the universe and I'd be back to pick you up in time for pudding. Wait, you don't have pudding for breakfast, do you? That's borin'. I would. I do, it's very–”
“Doctor,” Yaz says, but she's smiling. The Doctor's never cared all that much about human social norms, but– she likes that Yaz smiles when she rambles. Likes that she doesn't sigh or roll her eyes or slap her out of it, because people have done all those things before. “'Course I'm coming with you. You really think I'd leave you just to get breakfast?”
The Doctor shrugs, makes herself airy and carefree. “Depends on the breakfast.”
Yaz laughs and rolls her eyes. “There's no breakfast in the world that'd make me leave you.” Her laughter drops, and she looks at the ground for a moment, like she's shy, or... the Doctor doesn't know. She's never been so good at reading people, not like this. “Nothing could.”
The Doctor swallows, and thinks of all the things she could answer.
Please leave me.
Please don't leave me.
Please stay.
I love–
“Right, then!” she says instead, and something changes in Yaz's face, and the Doctor feels a pinch of shame. She shut her out again. She can't stop. Letting Yaz in any further might break them both. “The Spiral Cluster. Did I ever tell you about...”
She rambles with only half a mind on her own words, rambles to fill the silence that grew between them like a wound in that brief second where Yaz held out her heart and like always, the Doctor pretended not to see.
The Doctor talks and talks to cover the thoughts she doesn't want to think. Thoughts like, I'm going to break her heart. Thoughts like, mine are already breaking.
Thoughts like, please leave me.
Thoughts like, please stay.