Chapter Text
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
- Wilfred Owen
“How do you,” Yaz yelled, hanging onto the console for dear life, “get into a traffic accident in space?”
“It’s a timeship, not a spaceship,” the Doctor snapped, aggrieved, from across the console. “She’s not built for… staying within the lines, as it were…”
“It’s space!”
“It’s fine! It’s barely a scratch-”
The TARDIS jolted again, dropping the floor from beneath Yaz’s feet. She floated there, fingers tight to the console, for a breathless half-second before the fall. The jolt went through her knees; she barely kept her feet.
Beside her, Ryan hadn’t been so lucky. He landed awkwardly, arms flailing for a handhold. Yaz risked pulling one hand off the console to grab for him, hauling him back upright. Across from them, Graham was white-faced, clinging with all his might to a lever. The Doctor had directed him to hold it down five minutes ago; now, it seemed to be all that was holding Graham up.
“You, uh, sure you know how to drive this thing, mate?” That was Ryan, lips pressed bloodlessly together. The TARDIS dropped precipitously again. They all stayed standing this time, but it was a close thing.
“I’m sorry,” responded the Doctor, irritable. “Do you want to do the four-dimensional maths?”
She was making her painstaking way around the console, jabbing buttons, twisting dials, flipping levers. It seemed to be taking a long time; each time the TARDIS bucked or dropped, she had to grab on for dear life like the rest of them.
“Doc…” Graham began. His fingers spasmed around his lever. None of them could hold on for much longer.
“It’s fine!” she said, again. There was a feverish blush in her cheeks. Her yellow hair was a frizzy mess. “Peachy! Brilliant! It’s – oh, that’s not right…”
Yaz’s stomach dropped as her feet left the floor again. Across from her, the Doctor and Graham lifted too, floating for a heart-stopping second. The Doctor’s face rounded; her yellow hair standing on end like a frizzy halo. For an awful moment, Yaz recalled the blank terror of being zapped into vacuum, veins and tissue bloating with the loss of atmospheric pressure, lungs unable to expand…
Gravity reasserted itself and Yaz crashed back to the floor. The shock went through her knees and hips and she collapsed in on herself. Her fingers were frozen to the console, going numb.
“Hold on!” yelled the Doctor. Like they weren’t doing that already.
Again, the TARDIS bucked and jerked, doing its level best to shake the humans loose. Even the Doctor looked more flustered than Yaz had ever seen her; hands grasping at the console, her hair and her sky-blue coat askew.
The TARDIS gave a final, shuddering jolt and slammed to a landing, finally unseating Yaz’s death grip on the console and tossing her across the room like a doll. She hit the floor with a whoof of breath.
“Yaz!” the Doctor was already hurrying towards her.
“’m fine,” she mumbled, picking herself up. She scanned herself quickly: breathless and a little bruised, but fine. She’d narrowly avoided cracking her spine against a crystal column. “I’m…” as if in response, a cloud of smoke puffed out of the console right at her. Instantly, she collapsed into a coughing fit.
“Oh-” the Doctor changed course, darting back to the console. She ducked under it and jacked off a panel. More smoke came pouring out.
“It’s-” cough “-fine-” cough “-just-” wheeze “-adjusting-” gasp “-the-” she doubled over, gasping for breath as black smoke belched directly into her face.
“Doc…” Dismayed, Graham grabbed her shoulder to pull her away from the smoke. She tumbled sideways, sliding away from him. Graham tucked his hands behind his back in silent apology.
With the smoke out of her face, she cleared her throat and managed: “Looks worse than it is. We only grazed the other guy; shouldn’t have been a problem, honestly, only she’s still huffy at me about the whole regeneration thing…” The Doctor waved a hand vaguely. Then she collapsed in a coughing fit again.
“Can you fix it?” asked Graham, hands still behind his back. The smoke was lessening, but the air remained gritty enough to make Yaz’s eyes water.
“Can I-” the Doctor looked affronted. “Of course I can fix it! It’s my TARDIS!”
Yaz breathed a silent sigh of relief at that. Then choked as another hacking cough forced its way up her throat.
“But. Er.” The Doctor put a hand to the back of her head as Yaz recovered. “The smoke might be, er, toxic to humans…”
They all three looked up in alarm. Yaz could feel another cough itching up her throat.
“Not a big deal,” the Doctor assured them. “The ventilation should take care of it…” she glanced around. Black smoke had saturated the console room, dimming its usual golden glow. Behind Yaz, Ryan started to cough.
“Maybe we should wait outside,” the Doctor decided. “We’ll just… give her a few…”
Once outside, Yaz sagged against TARDIS as the Doctor pulled the doors carefully shut behind them. She took a few gulping breaths of fresh air... Well. Fresh-ish. They’d emerged into black night; it was so dark that she could barely make out the outlines of Ryan and Graham beside her. The air was less foul, but still gritty. And her feet squelched when she moved.
“Where are we?” came Ryan’s voice; a low whisper.
“Er. Well…” the Doctor turned. Yaz’s eyes were adjusting, slowly, to the night; the Doctor’s pale face loomed moonlike from the dark. “It’s definitely Earth. Early twentieth century-” she licked her lips; the motion was all but lost in the darkness. “-from the taste of it. But…”
But. They’d crashed without warning. Yaz tucked her arms around herself. They could be anywhere.
“Who goes there?”
The voice issued in a hiss from the black night, startling Yaz. She froze, pressed against the warm wood of the TARDIS, squinting through the darkness.
“Ah!” The Doctor detached herself from her ship. She stepped out in front, feet spread, hands on hips. “A witness! Excellent. I want it noted that I was going a reasonable interatmospheric speed…”
Through the dark, Yaz’s eyes could just about make out the bulky form of a man. She tilted her head, trying to catch him out the corner of one eye like she’d learned in secondary school bio. It actually worked; the image was fuzzy, but she made out the outline of him. Once she’d identified where he stood, he was easier to see head-on.
“Who are you?” he pressed. His voice was low – more of a whisper, really. “What detachment?”
“Just travelers, us,” said the Doctor cheerfully. “But we’re in a spot of trouble, I’m afraid…”
“Travelers?” Yaz could just make out the bob of his head as he looked them up and down. Whatever he saw, they must not have looked like much of a threat; he relaxed by inches. “You are in trouble,” he said, sounding a little astonished.
“Right, well-”
“How did you even get here?” he asked. He was holding something. Yaz squinted. Her eyes were adjusting, slowly, but it was hard to make out details…
“Listen,” the Doctor said, grinning. “You didn’t happen to see a, er. Very specific sort of explosion? Would’ve been roundabout here, within, oh… considering the temporal flux… an hour? Two, at the outside.”
The man grinned back. In the dark, his teeth flashed white. “Might’ve seen something like that, ma’am.”
“Brilliant. Mind pointing us towards it?”
He snorted. “Sure. If you have a death wish.”
Something was sinking in for Yaz. She wasn’t quite sure it had penetrated the Doctor’s single focus yet, but she was starting to feel it might be kind of important.
“Um…” she tried, tactfully, to interject.
“Well I’m not exactly sure who we hit! Can’t help but feel a little responsible…” Even in the dark, Yaz could make out the chagrin on her face. “Though I want it noted that I was following all the applicable traffic laws…”
Yaz doubted that – if, indeed, there were applicable traffic laws. She’d spent only a handful of days with the Doctor, but it didn’t take much time to tell she was a liar through and through. Yaz didn’t mind, though. The Doctor talked a big game, but she’d lived up to it, so far.
“Um…” Yaz tried again. “Doctor?” She kept her hands to herself. It was hard to resist the urge to tug on her sleeve, though. Especially since she was getting the sinking feeling that they needed to go, now.
The Doctor rounded on Yaz. “Well they deserve some of the blame, if we’re bein’ honest – no business flying a cruiser that low…”
“Okay, but-”
“I’ll be the bigger person about it, of course, but only if they haven’t scratched my paint job…”
“Doctor!”
The Doctor paused at Yaz’s tone. She turned her head; Yaz could see the pale gleam of her blonde hair in the faint moonlight.
“Er.” Yaz sidled towards the Doctor, careful to keep a polite distance in the darkness. “I think he’s a soldier.” Yaz didn’t dare pursue that thought to its logical end. Where there were soldiers, there were usually other things. Things that Yaz, feet squelching in the thick mud, didn’t really want to think about.
The Doctor evaluated the man for a moment. It was dark indeed, and under the faint light provided by the sliver of moon he looked a black muddy mess. But Yaz’s eyes had adjusted now. If you looked closely, you could make out the military-straight lines of the muddy jacket; the soft cap; the blocky shape of extra ammunition at his belt. The outline of a rifle in his hands, pointed loosely at the Doctor.
“Excellent observation, Yaz. Ten points.” The Doctor grinned, but a whisker of tension threaded through her tone. She turned back to the man. “British army?”
He tipped a sharp nod. “Captain Edward North, ma’am. With respect, may I suggest we remove ourselves to a safer location?”
“Right,” she murmured. She looked dazed, glancing around the muddy field. “What year is it, Captain North?”
He gave her a strange look, but answered with true British politeness. “Nineteen-eighteen, ma’am.”
The Doctor didn’t move. She stared out at the lumpy black landscape. After a long pause: “We’re unarmed.”
“Yes ma’am,” he responded. He eyed their twenty-first century clothes. What they must look like to him, Yaz had no idea. “Alright if I don’t take your word for that, ma’am?” he asked.
“Oh…” the Doctor stuck a hand in her pocket. Edward swung his rifle up at the movement, and she froze. “Just… getting some ID,” she told him, voice steady. After a moment, he nodded. She rummaged in her pocket a moment and withdrew a badge.
Edward hesitated, then dropped one hand from his rifle and reached out to grab it. In the watery moonlight, he had to bring it close to his face, squinting, to make out the letters.
“Is this…” he dropped his other hand off the rifle, letting it swing to his hip. He fumbled in his own pocket for a moment and produced a matchbook. He had to use both hands, the Doctor’s badge scissored precariously between two fingers, cupping the flame carefully to coax it into life. Matches burned fast, but he read faster, holding it low over the open badge, eyes scanning.
“All proper?” the Doctor asked.
Edward dropped the match and squashed it under one heel. He handed back the badge. “You don’t look like military intelligence,” he said, frank.
“Of course not!” the Doctor retorted, indignant. “What kind of intelligence agents would we be if we looked it?”
Edward looked bemused as he hoisted his rifle back up. “We still ought to get moving, ma’am. Where are you headed?”
“I told you,” she said, serious. “We’re lookin’ for an explosion.”
“Those aren’t hard to come by, here.”
“It would have been an unusual color,” she pressed. “Over thataway,” she made a vague gesture east, “and within the past hour or so.”
“As it happens…” Edward frowned. In the dark, all Yaz could see of the expression was a shadowy crease in his brow. “I did see something like that. Forty, forty-five minutes ago.”
“Could you take us there?”
Edward hesitated. Yaz didn’t blame him; they were asking a lot of this young man. Instead of heading for a bunker, they were asking him to strike out across a battlefield, in the middle of the night, shepherding a bunch of unarmed strangers.
“Lives may depend on it,” the Doctor said, voice low.
“Don’t they always,” Edward said. He eyed them a moment longer, then let out a low sigh. “Right then.” Suddenly, his face broke into a grin, teeth flashing bright. “What’s one more midnight run?”
The Doctor matched his grin. “Brilliant!”
They struck out across the muddy field, the young Captain North in the lead. The Doctor hung back a moment, gesturing to Yaz, Ryan, and Graham.
“Stay close,” she murmured. “Right behind me at all times.”
They nodded; no one was inclined to argue right now.
Yaz did her best to follow precisely in the Doctor’s footsteps as they walked. The ground was churned mud, broken with shards of metal, coils of razor wire, and motionless grey lumps at which Yaz, very carefully, did not look close. The cloying smell of rot sat low over the land, threaded through with the gross, gritty taste of gunsmoke. A small, anxious part of her wished they could have waited in the TARDIS – alien planets were one thing, but stumbling through battlefield mud was quite another. But, with the toxic smoke, it wouldn’t hardly have been any safer.
“You just happened to have a military intelligence badge on you, Doc?” murmured Graham, when Edward was far enough out front not to hear.
“No,” she admitted. She fished it back out of her pocket and handed it over.
Yaz peeked over Graham’s shoulder as he opened the badge, stepping carefully so as not to trip on his heels.
“It’s blank!” she said, surprised. The white page shone shockingly bright in the dim moonlight. Graham shut it hurriedly.
“Psychic paper,” the Doctor said over her shoulder. “Shows you what you want to see. Very handy.” She put a finger to her lips, grinning.
“I’ll say,” muttered Graham. He passed the badge to Ryan, who studied it, turning it over and back, before handing it back to the Doctor.
“Proper cool,” he breathed.
Up ahead, Edward had paused behind a low hillock. The Doctor made a beeline for him, heels slipping in the mud.
“You said it’s 1918,” she said, once they’d all gathered ‘round, “but what’s the date? What month?”
He glanced at her. “Are you joking?”
“Been out in the field awhile. You know how it is…”
Edward eyed her skeptically. “Ah. It’s spring. Going on May. Been a muddy April,” he said, rueful. He wasn’t wrong – the grey mud was everywhere. Thick grey globs coated Edward’s trousers and a grey film obscured his face. Great dried flakes of it shed from his cheeks and brow at every twitch of his facial muscles.
“But you know what they say,” he continued, “‘April showers bring May flowers,’ and all that.” Edward smiled, but there was something wistful in it. He glanced at the torn, muddy ground around them. Yaz wondered how many years it would be before this land would see flowers.
She’d learned about the war in school, of course. Had skimmed the requisite memoirs; dutifully written the papers. Had seen the photographs, all neatly numbered and notated in museum collections, projected up on the white board by a secondary teacher with a regrettable habit of interspersing every three words with um, until it was all you could pay attention to. Yaz remembered counting, once, ticking each um off on a sheet of notebook paper. By the end of the lesson she had two hundred and thirty-six tic-marks on her page, and she hadn’t heard a word about the war.
Looking Captain Edward North in the face, Yaz felt a wash of guilt. It was 1918, and Edward must be hardly older than Yaz was. How old had he been when he’d enlisted? Eighteen, barely?
Yaz had always, always yearned for something exciting; something more. These days with the Doctor – spaceships; alien planets; time machines; time machines that were bigger on the inside – well. It had been an adventure and then some. But here, now, faced with young Edward in his muddy greys, Yaz felt an awful pit open in her stomach. She tried to imagine what it must be like for him, commanding a company of equally young men. Stuck out here for days, weeks, months in the mud.
“Tell the truth,” Edward was saying, when Yaz tuned back in, “summer’s worse by far. The brass expects movement, without the weather to slow things down. And there’s the smell…” he drifted off.
The Doctor was nodding. She’d crouched beside Edward, one knee in the mud and her coat thrown back. Like Edward, she had her head turned out, scoping the ground around them. She looked, to Yaz’s discomfort, quite comfortable in the grey mud of the battlefield.
Graham was perched awkwardly beside them, doing his best to keep the knees and hems of his trousers clean. “So, Eddie-” he started.
“Only my mum calls me Eddie,” Edward cut in, bemused.
Graham’s mouth quirked down a little at that. "Course." He paused. “I’m sure she’s proud of you, your mum.”
Edward shrugged. “She hasn’t got a choice, has she? Suppose she’s got to be proud, otherwise she couldn’t stand it.”
Yaz glanced away. Unfortunately, she glanced straight at the Doctor. The shadows hid her expression, mostly. But there was a painful tension in the lines of her face.
Unbidden, thoughts of her own mum hit Yaz. Out there, decades in the future, she had no idea the danger her daughter was in. Yaz wasn’t sure if she’d be proud – she thought it more likely her mum would be furious with worry. Yaz had to believe that ignorance was bliss, in her mum's case.
“Still,” Graham tried desperately, “she must be. Your age, and a captain already?”
Edward snorted. “Promotions are easy to come by when half of every regiment end up dead or missing. Been waiting on our relief for near a week now.”
“You’ve been out here a week?” asked Yaz. She couldn’t imagine this muddy wasteland was any more bearable by daylight.
“Thirteen days, this time 'round,” Edward responded. "Everyone’s run thin, lately. They’re runnin’ out of troops – not that they’d say so.” He gave a grim little smile. “I’ll make general any day now, at this rate.”
Graham gave a sick smile at the joke. Yaz didn’t know what to say, so she stayed silent, and stared at the mud.
“But you were asking?” Edward prompted to Graham.
“Oh – ah.” Graham fumbled with the casual shift. “Will I jinx us if I ask where the enemy’s at?”
Edward looked a little confused, but he seemed to understand the question. “Enemy lines are that way-” he gestured over the hillock “-and ours are back there.” He waved a hand back the way they’d come. “Here is no man’s land.”
Yaz might not have remembered much of her history lectures, but she knew about no man’s land. She shot Ryan a nervous look.
“And… what are the chances that some of the enemy’s strapping lads are out and about tonight?” Graham asked back, in a muted whisper.
Edward shrugged. “Some are, I’m sure.”
“Which is why we should keep movin’,” suggested the Doctor, a smidge testy.
They kept moving.
Edward led them, slowly, with frequent pauses, around the side of the muddy hillock. Halfway around, Yaz recognized it for what it was: the corona of a great crater. No man’s land was dotted with these – bomb craters splashed out of the Earth. Some were small enough to turn an ankle in; others, like this one, were so big that Yaz had to think they’d been made by huge, heavy bombs dropped from airplanes. This was yet another worry to add to the pile she was rapidly accumulating; once she’d connected the dots, she kept an ear out for distant airplane engines.
But the night remained mercifully silent. The only sounds were the harsh grate of their breath and the squelch of their muddy footsteps as they forged onwards.
Yaz’s eyes had adjusted by now, enough to see with relative clarity the outline of the Doctor’s pale coat weaving before her. She tried, for a brief, panicky moment to recall if they’d had landmines in the First World War, before deciding that it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she knew how to avoid them, if there were any.
But she tried even harder to step directly in the Doctor’s footsteps, after that.
Eventually:
“Ah!” the Doctor darted ahead, pulling her sonic out her pocket in one smooth movement. “Here we are!”
Edward paused, midstep, looking bewildered.
“Er…” he glanced around. “Are we?”
But the Doctor was already heading up a steep incline. Yaz followed, the mud dark and fresh under her heels.
The sonic shone bright yellow in the darkness – a clear and obvious target. The Doctor must have realized this, because she tucked it back beneath the folds of her jacket almost immediately. But it was rapidly becoming obvious where they were headed. A sickly green tinge lit the drifting mists of grey smoke that belched from the cavernous impact crater. And at the bottom…
Yaz couldn’t make out much. Twisted metal fins and the tinny whine of damaged engines. But the Doctor was already skidding down the slope, heedless of the heat and the danger. The hem of her coat dragged in the grey mud behind her.
Yaz exchanged glances with the others. Edward looked aghast. The boys just looked resigned.
Well, Yaz thought, philosophically. Ladies first.
She launched herself after the Doctor. It was almost impossible to keep her footing on in the slick mud; she slipped to one knee, then the other. By the time she struggled back to her feet, the Doctor was yards ahead, and Yaz was as muddy as she’d ever been in her life.
“She don’t do things by halves, does she?” came Graham’s voice in her ear. Yaz glanced up to find Graham and Ryan right there with her, ankle-deep in the sucking mud, braced against the fall. She hadn’t fully expected them.
“What gave you that impression?” she muttered. Graham gave a slight, lopsided smile in return.
The Doctor reached the wreck well before them. Yaz sped up as much as she dared, the boys right on her heels. By the time they caught up, she was already crouched by a battered hatch, sonic clenched in a two-handed grip, lips pressed together in concentration.
The heat was awful. It hit Yaz like a tidal wave, scalding the skin of her face. Greenish-grey steam wafted off the damaged metal hull in great gusts. She reached out a hand, but couldn’t get closer than a meter before her palm began to burn. She snatched her hand back and tucked it into the armpit of her jacket, wincing.
“Doctor!” she called from behind the heat barrier, in as loud a whisper as she dared. “How can we help?”
There was sweat beading on the Doctor’s face, and all her exposed skin had gone a worrying shade of red. She didn’t respond; she was too focused on whatever she was doing with the sonic. Something clunked within the machinery of the door and a grim, fleeting grin touched her face. She shoved her sonic in her pocket and grasped the wheeled handle of the door with her bare hands. Yaz cried out – it had to be scalding hot. Too hot even for the Doctor’s superhuman constitution – she yanked her hands away, wincing.
Yaz thought fast. She tore off her jacket and balled it up tight.
“Doctor!” she yelled, heedless of their precarious position on the battlefield. When the Doctor glanced up, Yaz chucked the jacket with all her strength.
It caught the heat draft off the ship and unfurled immediately, drifting anticlimactically down. But the Doctor took two great steps and snagged it out the air.
“Brilliant!” her voice was almost lost in the rush of air and steam. She wrapped Yaz’s jacket ‘round the wheel and yanked sideways. After a heart-stopping moment, it grated open.
A cloud of scalding green smoke billowed out and the Doctor jerked back, wincing. Yaz leaned forwards; Graham had to grab the back of her t-shirt to steady her on the incline. But the Doctor was already moving again, balanced with her feet on either side of the gaping doorway, hands reaching in.
Through the billowing smoke and steam, Yaz could make out a small hand reaching out.
One by one, the Doctor pulled three aliens from the steaming ship. They were vaguely humanoid, but with scaly skin and knobby knuckles. They wore dark globe helmets and dark jumpsuits, the fabric singed and frayed in places.
One by one, the Doctor helped them from the wreck, handing them off to Yaz and the boys. The feeling of their cool, knobby hands in hers was viscerally alien, and even in the midst of the emergency Yaz had to suppress twin feelings of fascination and discomfort. The people on Desolation might have been technically alien, but they were, at least superficially, people.
Up at the lip of the crater, Edward was gesturing furiously. He’d dropped low on his belly so as not to stand out against the faint green glow of the ship. Between that and the billowing smoke, Yaz couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Beside her, Ryan squinted. “Air? Yeah, we know the air’s foul, mate,” he muttered.
Air… Yaz stared. Edward was gesturing at the sky. With a sudden sinking feeling, Yaz looked up. It was probably inevitable, really: above her, growing larger by the second, was a bomb. It was fast losing altitude. And it was headed right for them.
It was too late to do anything but brace for impact.