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“Looks like we’re gonna ‘afta make a little stop.”
“What-? Why’s that?”
“TARDIS needs a quick recharge!”
“The TARDIS needs recharging?”
“S’what I said, innit? If you were a poor, old time-space machine and you spent’cha whole life ferrying about useless ants like us, you’d get peckish now and then too.”
As the Doctor reaches a hand over the TARDIS’s console to pat the crystalline time rotor, comforting the box as it woos in offense to being called “old,” Yaz closes her mouth. Strange. It had fallen open without her knowing.
Of course TARDISes need to recharge. In all her research (and she did a lot) when she was alone with the spare TARDIS for ten months, Yaz never figured that for herself, though. It feels rather silly now. TARDISes are to Time Lords what cars are to humans.
Or private jets? That just makes the fuel concern twice as prevalent.
“Oh. How?”
“You’ll see!”
The TARDIS sufficiently quelled in its protests against the suggestion of its age, the Doctor takes to its native screen. She sticks her tongue between her lips. “Where’s good--where’s good--where’s good?” she muses to herself, “Ah- That’ll do!”
Her hands are on the year-o-meter and the yolk in a second. The TARDIS lurches as she steers them through the scar in the fourth dimension that is the time vortex, and Yaz’s stomach does too. She’ll never get used to the Doctor’s uniquely eclectic method of flying; that is, to make her feel like a sock in the wash.
There’s groaning and there’s wheezing, and with a hit of the brakes, they’re at a sudden stop. Yaz’s stomach lurches the other way.
“Wanna have another go at bein’ co-pilot?” the Doctor asks with a grin, and Yaz gives her a thumbs up. She doesn’t know what spawned the question - perhaps the queasy look on her face.
“Wait-”
But the Doctor’s already sauntering over to the TARDIS doors. She tugs one open, and steps out, and Yaz’s shoulders shiver against the chill that invites itself in.
“Doctor!”
A thick mist swallows Yaz’s ankles as she steps out after her - thick enough to trip her. The Doctor’s arms catch her. “Woah! Careful, Yaz. Mind ya step.” Yaz finds her feet.
Pointing her nose down, she wades her feet through the mist. For a moment, Yaz questions whether it’s mist at all, or murky ankle-deep water: Regardless, it carries a ghostly blue shimmer. Yaz has been here before, in fever-dreams, when her body has felt weightless but her bones have been lead, and her eyes have struggled to stay closed long enough to dream at all.
Yet she can breathe. She can breathe, and so can the Doctor. She can feel the Doctor’s breath against her neck, so cold, just like the air. She’s still holding Yaz, and Yaz realises only now that she’s holding her too.
Her arms go to her sides. She can stand on her own.
“Where are we?”
“Got any guesses?”
Yaz looks up. The sky is almost blue and almost isn’t. It cannot decide. As if it might help sway its opinion of itself, Yaz tilts her head. Clouds that are barely clouds pass in front of a border of stars. From all the way down here, she can see worlds - so very distant, and yet-
“Neptune?” she asks.
“Y’askin’, or tellin’?”
The Doctor sounds further away. “Neptune,” Yaz repeats, more assertively. This is her solar system - her home - and that planet; in fact, the furthest she can see in the row of all of them (and what a sight that is!) - is Earth.
Yaz has seen Earth from outside of its atmosphere before. Before the others left, all four of them would sit and just gaze at it from above - below - to its side -- semantics. Never has she seen it from so far away. Never has she felt so small.
That is her world. It’s so tiny. So insignificant. It’s a black dot in a black void, visible only because it is a particle of dust in front of the universe’s biggest lamp. Her eyes leap from astral body to astral body. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus- It’s uncanny to see them all in a blue (or not blue - again, undecided) sky. She blinks water from her retinas. She does it again, before looking away.
She’d been so captured by the sight that she’d forgotten… She was staring at the sun, too.
It’s worth it, to see all the planets of the Milky Way lined up in a row. She’s beginning to think the Doctor landed in this instance on purpose, and her suspicions are proven when she looks at her, and the Doctor has to quickly turn away to hide how affixed her own gaze had been on Yaz.
“I thought Neptune was a gas giant. How are we standing on Neptune?”
“A lot can change in four million years!” the Doctor goes romping around the TARDIS. She takes the sonic to a panel on the box’s side, and it slots open, revealing a jumbly mess of wires and tubes. She sticks her head in. “Lessee… Where’d I leave ya?”
Tempting fate, Yaz bounces on her toes. She doesn’t fall through the world.
“How d’you reckon the TARDIS recharges?” the Doctor asks, her voice somewhat muffled because now most of her upper body is lodged inside the maintenance hatch.
Yaz shifts from one foot to the other. She has taken in the floor and the ceiling of stars, but not yet the horizon, where they meet. The line of light that parses the border reminds her of the glow taken by the Earth when seen from space. She thinks that if she walked far enough, she might disappear into the light.
“You take energy from stars,” she tells.
“Mm-” and the Doctor’s little hum tells her that she’s wrong, “We could do, but chargin’ up a whole TARDIS? We’d ‘aff to go through a lot more stars’n just yours.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah -- greedy beasts, these things.” There is a clonk of metal meeting head, and Yaz winces as the Doctor exclaims, “Ow! Oi! Well, you are!”
The light atop the box glows blue, and she howls unhappily.
“Oh, here it is! Corr. When’s the last time you’ve ‘ad a refill?”
Another sound from the TARDIS - less of an offended howl and more melodic, like a spaceship’s I-told-you-so, or else another phrase of vindication. It makes Yaz smile.
The Doctor wriggles her way out of the compartment, lifting a big metal box with her. She breathes in the Neptune air, then with a grand huff, sends dust flying from the contraption. “Any more guesses?”
Coming over to watch a little more closely, Yaz leans on the side of the box. “From rifts in time, then?”
“A-ha! Bingo! Smart girl!” and Yaz’s cheeks flush. Luckily, she thinks she can blame the cold for that. “Infinite energy for an infinitely hungry time machine. Which I admit is somewhat my fault - a little bit.”
The TARDIS makes no noise of protest, nor appreciation. Yaz imagines it giving the Doctor a very stern, silent glare. Based on the pursing of the Doctor’s lips, she is imagining something similar. The smile on Yaz’s face that had relaxed comes back.
The Doctor likes it when Yaz smiles. It’s just as nice as watching the stars reflect in her eyes.
“Need a hand?”
“No, I’ve already got two, thanks.”
“Funny - I mean, do you need help?”
No, but the Doctor shifts to the side so Yaz can kneel next to her anyway: “Go on. ‘Ow else are you gonna learn?”
“Well, I had a look for a manual-”
“Ah, no. Don’t do manuals. Don’t do index files, neither. Not anymore. Rules’ll give ya no end of grief.” Yaz takes up her place next to the Doctor, and tries to assess what she’s meant to be doing. “Right, ya gotta clip this plug-” her hand finds a plug from the TARDIS’s open panel, “And plug it into this bit ‘ere. Give it a twist for us?”
“Which way?”
“Either - dun’t matter. No! Not that way!”
“You said either!”
“I was wrong!” Yaz offers a laugh of bemusement, but the Doctor isn’t entertained, so she twists the other way. “That’s better!”
“Are you sure there’s no manual?”
“I don’t need a manual! Trial n’error’s never done me wrong.”
Yaz looks at her. The Doctor won’t meet her gaze - instead, her tongue flicks at her lower lip. She knew it was a lie the moment it came out of her mouth, and she freezes in the moment of acknowledgement.
It takes a second for her brain to move past it. “Anyway.”
“Yeah -- anyway, what next?”
“Now, we push the red button. Red buttonnn…” she turns the box over and over, “Red button-- Ah, right. Gotta pop it open.”
She hooks her fingers around a little port in the underside of the box, her tongue once against getting sandwiched between her lips as she tries to tug it open.
“Want me to have a go?”
“Nah, I got it.”
Seconds pass, and it becomes evident that she does not got it, so Yaz reaches for the box. “Here-”
“Arright, you take a crack.”
“Done.”
“Oh- Thanks, Yaz! Red button. Red button! Wanna do the honours?”
“I would be delighted.”
There is a hearty whirring sound as power floods through the device, and through Yaz’s fingertips. She pulls her hand away, and the friction of that brings her all the way backwards onto her butt. “Ah! Sorry, Yaz!”
She flicks her wrist. “It’s alright- I’m not gonna end up supercharged, am I?”
The Doctor’s lips crinkle as she fights a chuckle, “Supercharged?”
“With time rift energy in me?”
“Well, I should ‘ope not. Regular Yaz is already brilliant enough - I dunno ‘ow the universe could manage Super Yaz.”
“Charmer,” again, Yaz thanks the cold for concealing the darkening of her cheeks.
“Course! S’what I do semi-best.”
Picking herself up, Yaz searches the sky again. “There’s really a time rift on Neptune?”
“Oh,” a little more clumsily, the Doctor follows her up, “There’re time rifts all about the gaff. I wish you could see ‘em.”
“You can?”
“Course! I’m a Time Lord, ain’t I? Bein’ lords’a time stuff is sorta what we’re all about.”
“Sorta,” Yaz half-agrees.
“Mmm-- I’m ignorin’ that.”
“How long’s it gonna take, do you think?”
“Err. Little while. Hour or two. Tea?”
Yaz wonders if this’ll be the first cup of tea ever drank on Neptune. No - she can’t imagine so. Four million years in the future, a cup of tea must have been digested in every corner of the universe - on everything in the sky from planet to rock to nothing at all. Still, to sit under a not-so-blue-but-also-it-might-be sky, on a floor that’s not a floor, and drink tea with the Doctor-
Well, no-one’s done that before. She’s sure of it.