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Chapter Text

Yaz feels weird. Not that feeling weird is particularly weird when you’re in the TARDIS; but this is a different kind of weird, like that sensation you feel in your chest when a minor earthquake shakes the ground beneath your feet. And as always when things feel weird, she turns to the Doctor for an explanation.

She doesn’t have to look far, because the Doctor’s face is suddenly inches from her own, wearing an expression that’s a blend of stricken, nauseous, and relieved beyond the telling. 

“Doctor, what’s—”

Her friend cuts her off with the tightest hug Yaz has ever received, as if she’ll fly off into space if the Doctor doesn’t root her to the ground. Yaz has no idea what this is about, but she’s not about to pass up this vanishingly rare opportunity.

After who knows how long, the Doctor pulls away and blurts out, “You were dead.”

“Um. No?”

“You were. You were dead. You died. I watched you die.”

“Doctor…I’m right here. Very much alive. See?” Yaz spreads her arms and turns in a slow circle to drive the fact of her not-deadness home.

“Yeah.” 

“What’s going on? Did I miss a timey-wimey shenanigan?”

“Not a shenanigan. The furthest thing from a shenanigan. Opposite side of the universe from a shenanigan. Shenanigans are meant to be fun, and seeing you dead was…” She trails off, tears trailing down her face. And bloody hell, if the Doctor is crying, it must be serious.

Ever since that day on the beach, Yaz has quietly established a no-touching policy when it comes to the Doctor. No touching the woman she’s desperately in love with, who is very possibly definitely also in love with her, who’s made it crystal clear that she’s unwilling to ever act on it. But if Yaz’s years of mind-expanding travels through time and space have taught her anything, it’s that there’s an exception to every rule.

So she pulls the Doctor against her and runs a hand through her hair. “It’s alright. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can’t promise that.” 

Yaz guides the Doctor to sit down on the steps leading to the console. “Just tell me what happened, alright? Whatever it is, we’ll sort it out.”

The Doctor is staring down at the grating, but her eyes seem to travel far beyond, to the deep dark at the edge of the cosmos. “I did a bad thing. An incredibly reckless, potentially universe-annihilating thing.”

Yaz looks around her, at the familiar orange glow of the TARDIS struts and the blinking lights of the console. Everything as it should be. “Universe is still intact, from where I’m standing.”

“Only because I got very, very lucky.”

“Start from the beginning,” Yaz prompts, rubbing circles against the Doctor’s back. Even through layers of fabric, she can feel the cold sweat.

She takes a deep breath, then says, “You won’t remember this, but we landed on a planet. Orexium-77. You walked out first, because you’re cool and intrepid and wonderful like that.”

Yaz’s cheeks burn. If the Doctor weren’t so wrecked right now, she’d say something like, None of that. Not after what you said.

“I was only a few steps behind you when a shot rang out. Messed up and landed in the wrong time, see—smack dab in the middle of the Orexian War of Independence. Soldiers had surrounded the TARDIS, and one of their laser pistols was smoking, and you were lying stone-still on the ground. He’d shot you straight through the heart. The only heart you have.”

Yaz’s blood turns to ice, and she instinctively presses a hand to her chest. Still beating. 

“Doctor,” she says carefully. “What did you do?”

The Doctor looks at her with an expression Yaz has only seen her wear once before: when she first laid eyes on the Master.

“I couldn’t bear it.” She gulps like she’s swallowing back sick. “I pulled you back inside the TARDIS, shut the door, and traveled back to five minutes before we landed.”

“Are you saying you—”

“Crossed my own timeline, yeah.”

“But you told me that’s—”

“The one rule I can never, ever break. Yep.”

Yaz half-stumbles to the console and frantically checks the various screens. She can’t read any of them—all the text is in Circular Gallifreyan—but everything seems to be buzzing along as usual. No cloister bell, no warning lights, no panicked vwoorping.

Once she’s sure there’s no immediate danger, she rounds on the Doctor. “You idiot. You absolute fucking wanker. Do you know what could’ve happened if it went wrong?!”

“Of course I do!” the Doctor shouts, jumping to her feet. “Much better than you! The universe dissolving like cotton candy in a bucket of water. Countless lives lost. Reverberations through all of time and space. The Big Bang, un-banged.”

“And my life, my one life, was worth risking all that?!”

“YES!” The desperation in the Doctor’s voice makes Yaz go rigid. “And I’d do it again, a thousand times, as long as it took. And that terrifies me.”

In an instant, Yaz understands the gravity behind the Doctor’s words from a few weeks ago. If I do fix myself to somebody, I know, sooner or later, it'll hurt. She thought the Doctor had meant that losing Yaz would hurt her, personally; now, she sees she meant it could hurt the whole of existence.

She looks at the other woman through a haze of tears. “If the worst had happened and I’d somehow survived, do you really think I could go on, knowing what it cost?”

“You see it now, don’t you? I’m terribly, homicidally selfish.”

It’s easy to forget how much power this woman has at her fingertips—maybe more power than anyone in the whole universe. When Yaz looks at the Doctor most days, all she sees is a kind-hearted, gorgeous goof in short pants and suspenders, cracking jokes and tripping through life like a little kid and overcome with love for everyone she meets. But now she realizes that, in the hands of a god, love can lead to utter annihilation.

It kills Yaz to say it, but it’s her responsibility to the universe: “Take me back to Sheffield. Right now. And never, ever come back for me.”

The Doctor folds in on herself, as if she’s just taken a punch to the gut. “Please, please don’t ask me that.”

“You have to. You know you have to.”

“Without you, I’ll—”

“Carry on, just like you always have. It’ll hurt us both, unimaginably, but you’ll get over it, in time.”

“Never. Never. I’d—”

“ I can’t fix myself to anything, anywhere, or anyone. Your words, Doctor. I thought you were being a coward, but I see now that you were being brave.” Yaz closes the distance between them and takes both the Doctor’s hands in hers. “So do this one last brave thing. Let me go.”

The Doctor shakes her head, tears running freely down her face. “I was wrong, Yaz. I was so wrong. I fixed myself to you…ohhh, ages and ages ago. It was ridiculous of me to think I could keep my feelings at bay by holding them back.”

Yaz cups the Doctor’s cheek, undone by the sensation of peach-soft hairs against her skin. “I know. Which is exactly why you have to let me go.”

The Doctor regards her with naked affection. “Yasmin Khan. You brilliant, stubborn, self-sacrificing wonder of a human being.”

“One guess where I picked that up from.”

“Not me, certainly. That’s all you. It’s why I…” She looks up and swallows back a sob. “It’s why I love you so much.”

It’s all Yaz has wanted to hear for years and years—to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her feelings are reciprocated. But not like this. 

“I love you, too,” she says, never taking her eyes away from the Doctor’s, memorizing the dear face she’ll never see again.

The Doctor nods, and doesn’t stop nodding. After who knows how long, she collects herself and walks to the console as if to the gallows. Her hand is frozen on the dematerialization lever for a long, long time before she says, “Be my copilot?”

Yaz barely stops herself from saying, Always, because the entire point is that this is the last time. Instead, she wordlessly joins the Doctor at the controls and punches in the coordinates she has countless times, when she’d visit her family before heading back into the stars with the Doctor at her side.

They move in sync as they pilot the TARDIS to its destination. The ship lands so softly, as if it’s already begun mourning an unimaginable loss. Yaz lays a hand on the Time Rotor, feeling its familiar, tingly warmth. She knows it’s impossible because she’s not a Time Lord and this isn’t her ship, but she swears she can hear the TARDIS saying goodbye.

Yaz stands halfway out the door, looking out on the familiar gloom of Sheffield rain in early winter, her legs stubbornly refusing to carry her a step further. She turns around to find the Doctor standing less than a foot away, hands in the pockets of her coat. She’s so beautiful. In the whole wide universe, nothing and no one will ever be more beautiful than her.

Yaz lets her eyes fall to the Doctor’s lips. “Would it make it worse if we…”

“Oh, Yaz,” the Doctor says thickly, “it’s already the worst it could possibly be.”

The kiss is even better than she’d dreamed, somehow both gentle and insistent, all-encompassing, impossibly vast in its intimacy. A contradiction, of course, but that’s what life with the Doctor is all about. 

Finally, Yaz forces herself to pull away and sees her own agony reflected in the Doctor’s expression. Something breaks inside her when she steps out into the Sheffield rain.

The Doctor gazes back, bathed in the watery glow of the TARDIS—the only companion she’s ever been allowed to keep. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Let’s not say anything.”

“Alright.”

In spite of herself, Yaz lets out a snort. “You just said a thing.”

“Can’t be helped.” 

“Chronic.” 

Yaz allows herself one final, long look, memorizing every inch of the Doctor before she turns away for the last time. And once she hears the TARDIS wheeze out of this world, she falls to her knees, rain soaking into her jeans, and weeps.

Chapter Text

Though Yaz’s friends and family are unerringly sympathetic to her plight, they don’t get it. No one does. Ryan, Graham, and Dan left the Doctor by choice; and her parents (and Sonya, despite her best efforts to hide it) are just happy to have her home again. 

She makes it less than a month in Sheffield before she pulls up stakes in search of something to drown out the din of her broken, restless heart. Though she misses the Doctor like a torn-off limb, she misses life aboard the TARDIS just as much—hopping from adventure to adventure, solving problems and saving lives everywhere they went. 

The problem is, she needs someone with the inside scoop on where the latest extraterrestrial incursions are going down, and she has no idea where to start. UNIT is the obvious choice, but something about the place just rubs her the wrong way, with its hierarchical, militant approach. It would feel like going back to the police force—and she’s done with all that, thank you very much.

Then, one bright summer day as she’s watching the Sheffield Pride March wend its way through the city, Yaz has a brainstorm. 

For an intergalactic man of mystery, Jack Harkness is a very easy man to track down. She finds him at the third gay club she visits in Cardiff, wearing only a leather harness and skintight trousers that leave nothing to the imagination. 

She pushes her way through the throng of shirtless, glitter-spangled boys and sneaks up behind him. “You know, I’d really hoped I would make it my whole life without knowing the exact shape and size of your knob!” she shouts in his ear over the “Call Your Girlfriend” remix blaring through the speakers.

Jack grins hugely when he claps eyes on her. “Yasmin Khan! As I live and breathe!” 

He follows her out front, vodka fumes coming off him in waves. Once they’re on the sidewalk, he asks, “Does this mean you and the Doctor have finally admitted you’re extremely gay for each other?”

“Yeah, actually. But that’s not why I’m here.”

Jack looks around eagerly. “Where is she, anyway? Off recharging the TARDIS on the Time Rift?”

“She’s…” Yaz has been dreading this part. “I’m not with her anymore.” 

“Oh, kid,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

Once she’s filled him in, he regards her with profound understanding; it’s a pleasant change from the pitying look she usually gets. Though he didn’t go into it in detail the first time they met, Yaz recognized the signs: Jack experienced his own Doctor-related heartbreak, and plenty of it.

“For what it’s worth, that’s a hell of a brave thing you did, letting her go,” he says. “Don’t think I would’ve had it in me.”

“That’s what she called me, too. Brave.”

He leans in conspiratorially. “I’ll let you in on a secret: The Doctor always finds people to travel with who are braver than she is—because she’s never trusted herself to do the brave thing, when it comes down to it.”

“Kind of an open secret, mate.”

“And here I am thinking I’m being all insightful,” he says with a sad smile. “So did you just come here to commiserate about the most heartbreaking alien in the universe? ’Cause I’m happy to oblige; but I’m guessing there’s more than that.”

Yaz cuts right to the chase. “I need something to do. I’m bored to death in Sheffield, and you’re the closest thing to an alien I know, and I’ve discovered I’m quite good at solving alien problems. So. Any alien problems I can help you solve?”

Jack looks like the cat who caught the canary. “My friend, you’ve come to the right place. Gimme your phone?”

She does, and he punches his number into her contacts. “Call me tomorrow, and I’ll show you.” 

“Why not tonight?”

“Because there’re at least three guys in there whose dicks I wanna get into my mouth before the E wears off. I love you, but from the bottom of my heart: Scram.”

Yaz is immediately taken with Gwen Cooper. Not in a crush way, because she left her heart behind in the TARDIS, and who knows where it is now. No, she likes Gwen because she recognizes in her a fellow capable woman who cuts through bullshit like a hot knife through butter. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re both ex-cops. 

They’ve been talking for less than half an hour when Gwen turns to Jack. “She seems like Torchwood material to me.”

Jack claps Yaz on the arm, grinning from ear to ear. “Welcome aboard, soldier.”

Six months later

“How about you step away from that bomb, mate.”

“Why the fuck should I listen to you?”

“Because I’m the one pointing a gun at your head.”

Yaz doesn’t bother to tell the tweaker with six tentacles that she’s refitted her sidearm to shoot, not bullets, but an electrical current that will only knock him out. (Gwen’s taught her many things since they started working together—among them, that the threat of death is every bit as effective as actually delivering on it.)

“Bitch,” he mutters, but retracts his tentacles back into his belly button.

“Call me that again, and I’ll shoot you in the bits.” 

They tracked the guy to an abandoned shipping warehouse next to the docks thanks to a tip from one of Jack’s contacts. As far as extraterrestrial crises go, this one isn’t exactly the Flux. But a bomb is a bomb. 

As soon as he steps away from the device, Jack rushes over to it.

“Does he actually know how to defuse a bomb?” Yaz whispers to Gwen.

“Good question.”

“I heard that.” Jack is trying to sound harassed, but the pallor of his skin tells her he’s shitting his trousers.

Yaz passes the gun to Gwen and nudges Jack out of the way so she can have a look at this thing for herself.

“Excuse you, familiarity with 51st-century tech over here!” he cries.

“Experience solo-piloting the TARDIS over here,” Yaz replies matter-of-factly.

“Can’t believe you’re still playing that card,” he grumbles, but steps away to let her work. 

She feels inordinately smug when she disarms the device in less than a minute. Piece of piss compared to a bomb she and the Doctor once came across that was powerful enough to blow up an entire moon. 

“What should we do with this bloke?” Gwen says, weapon still trained on the tweaker.

“Mmmm…kill him?”

“Jack…” Yaz says. “What’s my one rule?”

“One? You have, like, 30 rules!”

“The main rule.”

He rolls his eyes theatrically. “No killing unless strictly necessary. Man, if you weren’t so goddamn competent, I’d kick you off the team.”

“You’d have to go through me first,” Gwen says, throwing an arm over Yaz’s shoulder.

Jack smirks as he fits the would-be bomber with a pair of iridium tentacle cuffs. “Don’t like those odds.”

They’re walking the perp outside when Yaz’s phone buzzes with a text from Dan. She’s expecting one of his cheesy memes, but it’s a selfie of him with his arm around Di, both of them looking incandescently happy; she’s holding up her left hand, a diamond ring shining on her finger.

Yaz cries out in delight. She’s busy finding the perfect string of celebratory emojis to send back when someone runs past and shoulder-checks her, hard.

“Oi! Watch where you’re—”

“Sorry, miss! I’m in quite a—”

Yaz looks up from her phone to see the Doctor, gaping at her open-mouthed.

“Shit.”

“I—”

“Bomb’s defused, guy’s in custody,” Yaz says automatically. 

The Doctor’s eyes go wide. “Oh! Good. Good. Excellent. Grand, even.”

It’s painfully obvious that she’s stalling for time. This is exactly what wasn’t meant to happen. But maybe Yaz was inviting a run-in when she decided to join Torchwood.

The Doctor’s eyes dart over Yaz’s shoulder. “You’re working with Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. That’s… I didn’t know he started up Torchwood again.”

“Yep.”

“Well.”

“Well.” 

The pull between them is impossible to ignore, and it takes every cell in Yaz’s body to fight against it. It doesn’t help that the Doctor is starting to lean into her space, consciously or not.

“Dan and Di got engaged,” Yaz blurts out. 

The Doctor’s face lights up. “Dan and Di! Good on them! Tell them I said, erm…that thing humans say when nice things happen.”

“Congratulations?”

“That’s the one!”

Silly, stupid, gorgeous idiot.

“Anyway, I should go, uh…help…with the…tentacle guy,” Yaz says lamely.

“Yeah. Of course. Same. I mean, not helping with a tentacle guy. But, y’know. Go find…other things to…help with.”

“Right. Yes. You should definitely do that.”

“I’m going to.” 

“Good.”

If Yaz doesn’t leave right now, she never will. So without another word, she jogs off to catch up with Jack and Gwen. The entire time, she can feel the Doctor’s eyes burning at her back.

Chapter Text

The second time it happens, Yaz is on holiday with her family in the Tyrolean Alps, thanks to an all-inclusive resort package Sonya won in a work giveaway. Yaz has never been skiing before, but she picks it up immediately; she’ll take any adrenaline rush she can get. 

Three days into their trip, she and her mum are riding to the top of Mount Penken when the chairlift stops abruptly, jolting them in their seats. 

“That’s odd,” Najia says, craning around in her seat to see what’s happening. The other skiers appear equally confused.

“Probably just an electrical glitch,” Yaz tells her. That’s when a massive shadow falls across the mountain, and she looks up to see—yup. That’s a spaceship. A massive hatch opens up in its belly, and a shower of hulking figures begin to parachute toward the slope, mounted on vehicles that look an awful lot like snowmobiles. 

When one of them pops open their visor to reveal a large horned nose, Yaz hisses, “Judoon!”

“Gesundheit…?” Najia says. 

“Have I ever told you you’re the best mum in the world?”

“You could stand to say it a little more often.”

Yaz raises the crossbar and gives her mum a peck on the cheek. 

“Yasmin, please don’t do anything r—” 

But it’s too late: She’s already falling toward the ground, aiming her skis at the snow 20 feet below. 

“I’ll be fine! See you back at the lodge!”

It’s not the easiest thing in the world to ski down a black diamond slope on a wonky ankle, but Yaz has been through worse. Besides, she’s far too distracted by the small avalanche racing towards her, triggered by the Judoon soldiers a few seconds after she landed. Her main concern is catching up to the bloke in front of her—a high-ranking officer, judging by the fanciness of his armor—who’s making a beeline for the lodge at the base of the mountain.

It’s risky, but Yaz aims her skis toward a massive mogul, praying she hits it before the wall of powder catches up to her. Then she’s airborne, thrilling in the icy wind whipping the fur on her hood, the sensation of weightlessness she hasn’t felt since the last time she was in zero G. Her delight is short-lived, because as soon as she lands on her skis, pain radiates up her leg from the base of her ankle.

There’ll be time to worry about that later. Right now, the only thing that matters is that she’s nearly upon the leader—and that there’s a loose strap dangling off the back of his snowmobile.

Yaz drops her poles just in time to catch hold of it. Suddenly the world is zipping past her at a hundred miles an hour, the lodge rapidly screaming into view. Not to worry, though—it’s all part of the plan. 

Hang on, she thinks. You haven’t got a plan.  

That’s when a seventy-foot-high wall of ice shoots up from the ground directly in their path, scattering bystanders to either side—a further wrinkle in the plan Yaz doesn’t have. She’s about to jump ship so she won’t end up a pancake when she realizes her quarry is probably thinking the same thing.

And there it is, at the very last second: a plan. She grabs the cord and executes a hasty double fisherman’s knot around one of his wrists, offering a silent thanks to Zheng Yi Sao for teaching her how to tie it. “Sorry, mate, but I figure that big old head of yours can handle the impact!” 

He shouts back something to the effect of “Sco cho blo po!” before Yaz dives to safety. She gets the wind knocked out of her, but looks up in time to see the Judoon smash into the wall like Wile E. Coyote. Once she’s sure he’s out cold, she lets her head fall back against the packed snow, laughing in delirious relief.

“That was dead brilliant! Don’t think I could have stopped him without your help.”

Yaz doesn’t need to open her eyes to know that the Doctor is standing directly above her. With a beleaguered sigh, she pulls off her ski goggles and lowers the hood of her anorak.

“Again?!” the Doctor cries.

“You’re not making this easy, y’know,” Yaz shoots back. 

“You think I did this on purpose?”

“I dunno! Maybe!”

“How the hell would I have guessed that you’d just so happen to be in Tyrol in the middle of a Judoon invasion?”

“You tell me! You’re the one with access to all sorts of weird information!” In her exasperation, Yaz stumbles on her bad ankle and automatically steadies herself against the Doctor’s shoulder.

The Doctor’s expression turns grave as she takes Yaz’s weight. “You’re hurt.”

“Not a big deal. Twisted my ankle, is all.”

“Yes, a big deal.” She helps Yaz to the ground and pops off her ski boot with a swipe of her sonic.

“Really, you don’t have to—” 

Ignoring her, the Doctor removes Yaz’s sock and grasps either end of her foot. “I’m going to try moving it around a bit. Tell me when it hurts.”

“I forgot how you get all clinical when you’re— Ow!”

“Sorry,” the Doctor says with all the gentleness in the world. Yaz would turn her ankle a thousand times if it meant she could hear the Doctor speak to her like that, could feel the touch of her clever hands against her bare skin.

Her hands which are unaccountably toasty, despite the freezing temperature. “How are your fingers not frozen off?”

“Self-warming circulatory system. Kind of like a self-cleaning oven, only with blood.” The Doctor scrunches up her face. “Well, that analogy fell apart fast.”

Yaz laughs. She knows they shouldn’t be spending any more time together than strictly necessary, but she’s only human; she’s only in love.

“Minor sprain to the anterior talofibular ligament, I believe. It’ll heal up on its own, but you should stay off your feet for the next few weeks. No running about with Jack and Gwen. Oh! Hang on a tick…” The Doctor pulls out her sonic with a flourish and runs it up and down the length of Yaz’s ankle. It tingles, but not in an unpleasant way. “There,” she says after about twenty seconds of this. “How’s that feel?”

Yaz rotates the ankle experimentally. Not only is the pain gone, but it feels stronger than it did before. “Amazing, actually.”

“For some reason, I always forget about the ligament re-sealing function. Daft old Doctor.”

“Now, now. You’re not that old.”

“Cheeky,” the Doctor says with a smirk. 

“Don’t suppose you know why an army of Judoons were trying to storm a ski resort?” Yaz asks as she pulls her sock and boot back on.

“I do, actually! There’s a high-ranking member of the Shadow Proclamation staying in the chalet that the Judoon have a vested interest in neutralizing. Big snowboarding buff, believe it or not.”

“Should you go check on them?” 

The Doctor makes a dismissive gesture. “She’ll be fiiiiine. With the general out of commission, the rest of the army will turn tail back to Judoonia—classic weak spot of martial hierarchies. Never trust a martial hierarchy, Yaz.” 

“Haven’t heard that lecture from you about a hundred times before.”

“You can never hear it too many times! Maybe I’ll hire a prop plane to put it in sky-writing. Bit wordy, though.”

“Don’t suppose you also have an explanation for why we keep running into each other?”

The Doctor gets her thinking face on. “Well, assuming neither of us is stalking the other…” She gives Yaz a pointed look.

“Oh, my god. I’m not stalking you.”

The Doctor looks disappointed for a microsecond before continuing. “Ruling that out, there’s only one likely explanation for whatever spatio-temporal anomaly has brought us to the exact same location in the universe twice over.”

“I’m all ears,” Yaz says.

“The explanation, Yasmin Khan, is that there is no explanation. Random chance, combined with the fact that we both have a tendency to rush into the fray whenever weird things are afoot. It’s statistically improbable, but not impossible.”

“That’s incredibly unhelpful.”

“Most explanations are!”

Yaz looks over to where the Judoon is spread-eagled in the snow in front of the ice wall, bystanders circling with their phones. Probably it’ll be all over TikTok within the hour.

“How’d you do the ice wall, then?”

“Another sonic feature I forgot about,” the Doctor says brightly, flipping the screwdriver in her hand. “Wouldn’t have worked without your badass rope trick, though.”

“Don’t know how you manage without me.” The words are out of her mouth before her brain can catch up to their implications.

She watches the Doctor’s smile melt like a snowman in the sun. 

“I should go make sure my mum’s alright,” Yaz says rapidly. “She got trapped halfway up the lift.” 

“Oh, no, Yaz’s mum!” The Doctor sounds half concerned, half trying to conceal how flustered she is. “Can I help?”

“You probably shouldn’t.” 

“No, I suppose not.”

Yaz feels the Doctor’s disappointment as her own. “I hate this.” 

“Me, too.” The other woman looks as if she might be about to hug Yaz, but she stops short. “I’ll, erm… Yeah.” 

And this time, it’s the Doctor who walks away without saying goodbye.

As she turns to trek back up the mountain, Yaz feels a twinge in her ankle that has nothing to do with the sprain and everything to do with the lingering sensation of the Doctor’s hands.

“Yaz…”

“What’s up, Gwen?”

“It’s only, most people come back from holiday looking all refreshed, but—and don’t take this the wrong way—you’ve come back from holiday looking like you got the shit kicked out of you by a sad ghost.”

“Is there a right way to take that?”

Chapter Text

Yaz is beyond grateful for her work at Torchwood, because it keeps her too busy to devote much time to brooding over the Doctor. As the organization’s reputation grows as a boutique alternative to UNIT, calls start coming in from far and wide. And though Jack’s Vortex Manipulator is too damaged to travel through time or beyond the bounds of the planet, it is able to take them anywhere on Earth—albeit with dubious accuracy and a great deal of discomfort. 

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad,” Jack tells Yaz and Gwen, who are both on their knees, retching their guts out. 

“Next time, we’re flying commercial,” Yaz groans between dry-heaves.

“Can’t. Not with all the alien tech we cart around,” Gwen says. “Though I am open to investing in a private jet.”

“Bad for the environment.”

“Your vomit is bad for the environment!” Jack shouts. 

“Eh. Northern Mongolia can handle a little Sheffield sick,” Yaz says.

The Doctor shows up in Mongolia, too—and in Argentinian Patagonia, Seoul, Easter Island, and Amarillo, Texas. The space between encounters is seemingly random, but Yaz seldom goes more than a month or two without having a run-in with the woman she’s running from. It’s both mad and maddening.

Oddly, Jack and Gwen are never around when the Doctor appears on the scene, as if something out there were contriving scenarios to get her and Yaz alone together. These random meetings have grown so commonplace that the whole thing has become a running joke between them.

“PC Khan! Fancy meeting you here.” 

“Doctor! You’ve shown up at a time of world-threatening peril. Must be Tuesday.”

“It’s Wednesday, actually. Which you ought to know better than me, living in linear time and all.” 

“It’s Saturday.”

“Wow. Can you believe either of us ever get our shit together long enough to save the universe?”

“What’s the sitrep, Doctor?”

“Well, currently, I’m covered in Sycorax puss, which is dreadfully tricky to wash out.”

“Ah, so that’s what it is. Thought you might be trying a new look.”

“I mean, I’m open to it. Does lime green suit me, d’ye think?”

While Torchwood is investigating a factory in Spokane that manufactures evil coffee, Yaz closes herself in a utility closet to hide from the prying eyes of a passing security guard. But once she closes the door, she runs directly into something that’s definitely not a broom. In fact, it’s the Doctor’s breasts, which are attached to the Doctor, who is wedged between a pair of dirty mops.

“Hullo,” she whispers.

“Sorry about the—” Yaz begins.

“Accidental knocker-touching? I don’t mind. I know I’m supposed to mind, but…”

Yaz holds a finger to the Doctor’s lips when she hears footsteps passing just outside the door. Pressed against each other in the narrow space, she can feel the Doctor’s double heartbeat reverberating in her own chest, her breath blowing back a lock of hair that’s come undone from Yaz’s braid.

They stay that way for a long time after the footsteps have passed—just to be safe, of course. But there’s nothing safe about the heat building inside her with the two of them this close.

Finally, the Doctor whispers, “Though I cannot reiterate enough how much I don’t mind this scenario, it might be prudent if we…”

“Yes. Right. Of course.” Yaz extricates herself from the tangle of cleaning supplies and warm Time Lord and exits the closet without another word.

“There you are!” Jack says when she jogs onto the factory floor, keeping watch as Gwen collects samples of evil coffee beans.

“Sorry. Got caught up in something.”

Yaz doesn’t like the suspicious look he’s giving her. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Pretty sure disclosing every detail of my personal life isn’t stipulated in my employment contract.”

“What aspect of your personal life is coming up in an evil coffee factory at 3 a.m.?”

“Jack, with the amount of people you’ve bum-fucked on the job, you’re the last person who should be asking anyone that question,” Gwen says. 

“Listen, some of that bum-fucking was in the name of science!”

Gwen stops what she’s doing and puts her hand on her hips. “Go on, name one scientific bum-fucking you’ve had whilst on assignment.”

Yaz is grateful for the distraction of their banter. But try as she might to force her thoughts back to the question of what exactly is so evil about this coffee, all she can feel is the phantom sensation of the Doctor’s body against hers.

Yaz should never have agreed to the Casablanca assignment. Sorry, Jack, she should have said, But Casablanca is far too romantic a place for me to visit at this particular juncture in my life.

It’s an even dumber idea to visit a cocktail bar in the Old City. But her feet are throbbing from chasing Tritovores through the narrow streets all day—and dammit, she deserves a drink.

Yaz senses a certain Time Lord sneaking up behind her before she even speaks. 

“Don’t say it.”

“Say what?” the Doctor asks innocently.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”

“…She walks into mine.” 

“Well, now you made me say it!”

“You are, very occasionally, quite easy to prank,” the Doctor says with a shit-eating grin that Yaz wants to suck right off her face. Instead, she drags her to the bar.

“You remember back in Tyrol, when I told you it was statistically improbable that we would keep running into each other?”

“Yeah…” Yaz drawls. She’s on her third gin martini, and she’s definitely feeling it.

“Well, I’ve officially upgraded it to statistically impossible. ”

“So what do we do about it?”

“I’m open to ideas. Because I’ve got zilch. Zippo. Nada. The big zero.”

Yaz considers the question. If the Doctor crossing her own timeline did affect the universe in some way, it would follow that the laws of spacetime would want to keep them apart, not bring them together. Yet over and over again, it’s shoving them against each other like a couple of Barbie dolls. That’s when she comes to a terrifying conclusion. Or, at least, a terrifying hypothesis. 

“What if the universe or fate or whatever keeps bringing you to wherever I am because it’s trying to, like, course-correct?”

The Doctor looks momentarily confused, but then her eyes go wide in horror. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Think about it, though. I’m not meant to be alive, so maybe the timeline is trying to, y’know, repair itself.”

“Time isn’t a line, Yaz. It’s a—”

“…Big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.”

“Which means that time folding in on itself wouldn’t necessarily muck up anything. I mean, it very well could, but…I think if my bringing you back had well and truly screwed the cosmic pooch, we would know by now.”

“Or maybe the universe is just giving you another chance to fix what you broke before it’s too late.”

“ Stoppit, ” she says in a low, dangerous voice. As it always is, the Doctor’s anger is abrupt and earth-shaking. 

Yaz isn’t cowed, though. “Don’t you see that we’re right back where we started? Me trying to make sure we don’t fuck up the universe, and you only thinking about what you want?”

“What I want? Do you honestly believe that my love for you is the only reason I kept you alive?”

“I mean…yeah?”

“I’ll be the first person to tell you that I make a lot of selfish, short-sighted decisions. But it’s not just me who needs you, Yaz. The world needs you. The universe needs you. I mean, look at all the good you’ve done even without the TARDIS! Every time we meet, I find you saving lives, making the world better.”

“I’m only doing what anyone would,” Yaz says with a shrug.

The Doctor leans forward in her stool, nearly knocking over her Marrakesh mule. “You really have no idea how special you are, do you? The vast majority of people don’t run into danger for the sake of others unless someone forces them to. But you, Yaz—you do it because it’s who you are. Do you have any idea how vanishingly rare that is?”

“S’pose I never thought of it that way.”

“But even if you did nothing but sit on your arse all day watching telly, you’d still be very much worth having around. It’s not about whether you deserve a second chance. Everyone deserves a second chance! You make the world a better place just by being you, just by making it through the day. You don’t owe anyone an ounce of your courage.”

Yaz has never thought of herself as courageous, but hearing it all laid out like this makes her think otherwise. 

“So, no,” the Doctor continues. “I’m not going to kill you on the basis of some barmy notion that ‘fate’—which is nonsense, by the way—wants me to. Maybe us running into each other again and again means nothing, or maybe it means something we haven’t worked out yet. But I’ll tell you right now: It doesn’t mean you’re meant to die. ”

“A part of me wishes it did.” There’s something sickly satisfying about the devastation on the Doctor’s face at Yaz’s words. “I know you feel the same way sometimes. You can’t tell me you don’t. I’ve watched you throw yourself to the wolves more times than I can count.”

“The difference is that I don’t actually die, Yaz.”

She shakes her head. “I’ve heard the way you talk about regeneration—as if you become a whole different person. Seems to me like it’s as good as death.”

“Nothing is good about death,” the Doctor says, voice soft and breaking.

Yaz is so in love, and so miserable, and so tired. She wants to believe the Doctor, she really does. She wants to believe that she’s worth saving at any cost, that she’s meant for life above the ground regardless of how many lives she’s saved. But she feels stretched thin as an old rug, and all she wants is to give in—to death or the Doctor, whichever comes first.

She’s pulled from her thoughts by the woman in question pressing her hand over Yaz’s. “Hey.”

“Sorry. Guess martinis make me maudlin.”

“Can I cheer you up?”

“Are we talking clown tricks, or…?”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow, looks around, and flips up the collar of her coat. “I’m very sorry about this,” she tells the bartender, who looks wary. Then she treats the whole bar to the worst Humphrey Bogart impression the universe has ever witnessed.

“I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday, you’ll understand that.” She takes Yaz’s chin between her thumb and forefinger and finishes, with maximum ham, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

They hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, the Doctor’s lips quivering with the effort of trying to maintain her Bogie scowl. Then they both break at once, bursting into the kind of laughter that lights up all the dark places inside.

After another ill-advised round, Yaz says, “It’s probably getting about time for us to not say goodbye again.”

The Doctor scoffs. “Oh, to hell with that. Aren’t you bored of doing the same thing over and over again? You know what they say about insanity. Plus,” she adds, reaching for Yaz’s empty martini glass, “you haven’t even eaten your olives yet!”

Yaz narrows her eyes at the Doctor as she pops each one into her mouth, while staring unblinkingly at Yaz.

“I know what you’re trying to do, and it won’t work.”

“Oh, I’d say it’s already worked,” the Doctor says, sucking olive juice off her fingers with a wicked grin.

Chapter Text

It’s hard to describe sex with the Doctor, but if Yaz had to pick a word, she’d go with ridiculous. The Doctor is as ardent, playful, and experimental between the sheets as she is everywhere else. When she works out how to “optimize” Yaz’s orgasm, she thanks all the likely nonexistent gods that the Doctor is so passionate about engineering.

“Universe didn’t explode,” Yaz says, grinning up at the ceiling of the dingy hotel room they rented for the night. 

“Would you say that the Big Bang wasn’t unbanged by our banging?”

Yaz erupts into wild laughter. “God, I’ve missed you. Daft jokes and all.”

“And I’ve missed you having a go at my daft jokes.”

As Yaz comes back down to Earth, her logical brain kicks back into gear. Obnoxious, that. 

She turns to the Doctor (the naked Doctor) with a rueful expression. “We’ve just made it so much harder to go our separate ways, haven’t we.”

“Who said anything about separate ways?” she says in a tone that’s both manic and alluring.

“Doctor. Nothing has changed. You know that, right?”

“Counterpoint: Everything has changed. Seismic shift. I’ve had my mouth on your clitoris, Yaz!”

“Yes, and it was fucking amazing. But we still have the same problem we started out with.”

“You mean the thing about how I love you so much that there’s a high risk of me destroying everything that ever was, is, and/or will be?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mmm…don’t think I care for that hypothesis anymore.”

“I don’t care for it either. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth worrying about.”

“Far too much worry out there in space. Probably more worry than dark matter.”

Yaz has a delirious vision of worry binding the cosmos together, keeping planets in orbit around their suns, forming galaxies and star clusters of fearful anxiety.

“One of us has to be the pragmatic one here, and I know it’s not gonna be you,” Yaz says gently.

“You’re not a pragmatist. You’re a dreamer, like Kermit the frog.”

Yaz looks into the Doctor’s shining green eyes for a long moment, then buries her face in the pillow and screams. 

“What’s wrong?” the Doctor asks, as if Yaz’s frustration was a complete non sequitur. 

“How about that everything you say and do only makes me fall more in love with you, you berk.”

The Doctor smiles and runs her fingers through Yaz’s hair. “You look so pretty with your hair down.”

“You’re the worst.”

“Worst like a fox.”

“I am absolutely not going to laugh at that one.”

“Yaz?”

“Hmm?”

“Will you stay? Just for the night.”

She absolutely will not. Yaz knows that if she wakes up beside this woman, she won’t have the strength to tear herself away. But the Doctor doesn’t need to know that.

“Alright.”

It kills her to lie, but it would kill her more to tell the truth—especially with the way the Doctor is looking at her right now, soft and open and adoring, no walls between them except the ones they’ve built themselves.

It’s a bad idea—this whole night has been one long bad idea—but Yaz permits herself the luxury of studying the Doctor in repose: her expressive face gone slack, the worry line between her eyebrows smoothed away. This woman who makes an art of concealing herself behind layers of henleys and secrecy, so completely exposed and trusting, nothing between her and Yaz but a few inches of hotel mattress.

She considers leaving a note, but decides against it. Maybe this will be the thing that smashes the Doctor’s hearts enough to sever this tie between them—maybe even enough to stop the TARDIS from landing wherever Yaz happens to be.

Once she’s slipped her clothes back on, she stands over the bed and wills herself to abandon the love of her life yet again. You’d think she’d be used to it by now—it must be their twentieth meeting since that day on the wharf in Cardiff. But the Doctor is right—everything is different now, and not just because they’ve shagged. It’s more about what the shagging represents: that their long-simmering feelings for each other are now a physical fact.

In the dim light of the street lamps leaking in through the thin hotel curtains, the Doctor looks not like Humphrey Bogart, but Ingrid Bergman—heartbreakingly ravishing, impossible to abandon.

But Yaz abandons her anyway.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, then vanishes out the door like a passing shadow.

Chapter Text

Despite the burning in her legs, Yaz opts to walk the two-odd miles to the much nicer hotel where Gwen set them up in a swanky suite, complete with separate bedrooms and a minibar. There’s a gentle rain falling on the cobblestoned streets, each droplet fine as film grain. She hasn’t got an umbrella, but it’s warm out, and she’s feeling more than a little melodramatic.

Jack is still awake when she gets back, sat on the sofa in his shirtsleeves with a book and a glass of scotch. 

“You were certainly out late, Ms. Khan,” he says. But his wry expression falls when he sees her, soaked to the bone and miserable as an abandoned puppy. When he throws his arms around her, Yaz loses it, weeping into his shirt collar with the kind of abandon she rarely allows herself.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Jack murmurs, holding her tighter. “You wanna talk about it?”

“Not really. But I probably should.”

He guides her to the squashiest armchair in the room and sets a tumbler of scotch and a box of tissues in front of her.

“I’m guessing this has something to do with the reason why you randomly disappear all the time, then come back all flustered?”

Might as well tear off the Band-Aid. “It’s the Doctor.”

Jack freezes. “Um. What?”

“We’ve been runnin’ into each other all over the world—usually when I’m on missions with you lot. But not always. At first, I thought she was doing it on purpose; but she’s not.”

“How long has this been going on?”

Yaz braces herself for a dressing-down. “First time was that day with the bomb on the wharf.”

“Jesus christ. That was, like, a year ago!”

“I know.”

“And you’ve been keeping it a secret from us this whole time?”

“It’s terrible. I’m terrible. I’m so sorry.”

Jack kneels in front of her and lays a hand on her knee. “You don’t have anything to apologize for. I just wish you’d let me and Gwen in on it. Believe me, I know from star-crossed workplace romances.” When he says this, Yaz sees an old wound shining in his eyes, one that’s never quite healed.

“We tried our best to steer well clear of each other at first, but it’s bloody impossible. She’s my best friend, Jack. How could I keep myself away?”

He sits beside her on the sofa and takes a swig from her untouched glass of scotch. “Has anything…paradoxy happened since all this started?”

“Not really. Just your regular old garden-variety heartache.”

“No wonder you were so weird about going to Casablanca.” 

“She did a Bogart impression, Jack! A Bogart impression!”

“Wow. You and I have very different turn-ons.” 

Yaz’s laugh is half sob. “We’d been good. I’d been good. Arm’s length, and all that. But then tonight…”

“You fucked.”

“Yeah.”

He leans toward her with an unnerving degree of interest. “How was it?”

“Oi! You’re meant to be telling me off!”

“I will, I promise. But deets first.”

“Absolutely not, you perv.” 

“I can’t believe you’re holding out on me like this! I thought we were friends.”

“Yes, and I wouldn’t tell any of my other friends about what it’s like to shag the Doctor, either.” (That’s not entirely true. Gwen will be getting the full download.)

“Fiiiiine,” Jack says. “So you and the Doctor did the deed—then what happened?”

Yaz lowers her head and murmurs. “I told her I’d stay, but then I waited for her to fall asleep and I…I left.”

“You did the right thing,” he says, pressing a hand to her knee.

“It didn’t feel like the right thing. I lied to her, Jack. She has such a hard time trusting people, and I lied right to her face.”

“The Doctor’s a world-champion liar. She can handle it.”

Yaz downs what’s left of the scotch. “I don’t want to hurt her. She’s been hurt so much already.”

“This is the life we signed up for, Yaz,” Jack says, perching in front of her on the coffee table. “We get to see and do the most amazing things, but we also have to make the hardest choices.”

“Sometimes I just want to say screw it. Screw the fate of the universe. Like, just let me have this one thing, y’know?”

“I knew someone else like you once. A long time ago, when the Doctor was a very different person. But also very much the same.”

Yaz’s ears perk up. “Another companion?”

Jack nods. “He thought he could keep her, and she thought he could keep him. The whole thing was doomed from the start. But those two were like wildfire when they were together. I’d never seen him so happy. And she was… Well, what can I say? I loved her. She brought me back from the dead.”

“Without breaking the universe apart?”

“I mean, no. She absolutely did. Did it again, too, years later. Stubborn as hell, and twice as brave.”

“What happened to her?”

Jack’s laugh is barely a breath. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Frustration flares in Yaz’s chest. “Is there meant to be some life lesson here, or are you just tryin’ to make me jealous?”

“No lesson,” he says. “Just wanted to let you know you’re not the first person to try your best to hold onto the Doctor despite all the alarm bells.” 

It’s true—she is glad to know she’s not the only one who’s ever been in so deep with the most powerful person in the universe.

“What was her name?”

“Rose.” The way he says it, Yaz can tell there’s so much love behind that single syllable.

Yaz racks her brain: Has the Doctor ever mentioned a Rose? No. She never mentions anyone from her former lives—not if she can help it. And she wonders how soon it’ll be before the Doctor buries Yaz’s name, too.

“What will you do if you see her again?” Jack asks, pulling her out of her thoughts.

Hold on tight and never let go. Snog her rotten. Follow her to the ends of the multiverse. 

“Run,” she says.

Everywhere they touch down, Yaz braces herself for an encounter with the Doctor. But a month goes by, then two, then six, with nary a sign of a sunny, blond-haired Time Lord or a big blue box. Yaz is relieved at first, but as time ticks on with no sighting, she starts to fear that the Doctor’s regenerated and left their time together behind her—or worse, that something’s happened to her dire enough to stop the cycle altogether.

Or what if it’s just that Yaz hurt her so much that she’s keeping her distance? What if she’s found someone new to travel with and has forgotten all about Yaz? That’s the whole point, you idiot, she schools herself. For her to never want to see you again.

“It’s a good thing,” Jack tells her when they’re preparing to teleport out of Kyoto one gorgeous spring day. (The cherry blossoms falling around them do nothing to quell Yaz’s longing.)

“It doesn’t feel good.” 

Gwen takes her place on Jack’s other side. “Love never does,” she says. “Except when it doesn’t.”

“Oh, are we doing Zen koans now?”

“I thought maybe if I said somethin’ all wise and mysterious-sounding, you’d stop moonin’ over the blasted Doctor already.”

“You’ve got no right to talk, Mrs. ‘I’m Married to a Lovely Teddy Bear of a Man Who Cooks Me Dinner Every Night.’”

“That’s because I had the good sense to fall in love with a nice bloke from Wrexham instead of an immortal time-traveling wanker,” Gwen says sensibly.

“Arse,” Yaz grumbles.

“Drama queen.”

“Guys!” Jack interrupts. “What have I said about going into the Time Vortex mad?”

Before Yaz knows it, six months have become more than a year. Along the way, she learns a difficult lesson: You never get over losing a great love; the best you can do is forget how good it felt when you had it. 

Shutting the door on her feelings for the Doctor has hardened Yaz into a person who acts and feels much older than her 29 years. She’s resigned to a life less extraordinary than the one she once had, the days duller for the knowledge of what they once were. Some mornings, she wakes up feeling alright—chipper, even. Others, when her alarm jolts her out of a dream of an alien world or the Doctor’s smile, she wonders what the point is of getting out of bed.

Jack and Gwen have learned to recognize the warning signs of these black moods. If Yaz doesn’t show up at HQ, one or the other of them will appear with Pad Thai and a bottle of wine and make her watch a stupid movie until she cheers up. She becomes a regular at Gwen and Rhys’ dinner table, absorbing the borrowed warmth of their love—and the flavor of Rhys’ incredible cooking.

Some weekends, Jack drags Yaz out to gay bars and points out likely prospects. She’s never interested, but she appreciates the effort. The one time she does bring a woman back to her place, she winds up shutting down midway through sex. Apparently, one night with the Doctor has ruined her for anyone else.

When she can’t sleep, she goes on long walks through Cardiff and imagines what the Doctor might be doing now—who she might be with, what she might look like, what extraordinary sights she might be seeing. Maybe she’s also wandering sleepless through the night, in a city on some distant planet a thousand years from now, thinking of Yaz. Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight.

All told, it’s not a bad life. Yaz has a job she enjoys, a steady group of friends, adventures to fill her days, and a cozy flat to call her own. Really, there isn’t much for her to complain about, except the gaping hole where her heart should be.

Chapter Text

Everything changes in Orlando—which is in a very stupid place for one’s whole life to change. One second Yaz is tailing a pair of Toy Story-obsessed Sontarans through the tunnels beneath Disney World, doing her best to make out their shapes through the mesh eyeholes of her Bo Peep suit; then the next, she’s very much not.

She wakes up (when did she fall asleep?) in a large, squashy bed, looking up at a ceiling dappled with stars. Her first thought is, That’s a very impressive trompe l’oeil; her second is, Where in the entire fuck am I?

Her head is pounding, so she closes her eyes and tries to get her bearings. Did the Sontarans spot her? They did. One of them ripped off her mask, while the other bayoneted her in the gut. And then… And then what?

Nausea hits her in waves when she sits up too fast, but she manages to keep the contents of her stomach in. There’s a flurry of movement somewhere off to her right, and then a familiar figure is crouching at her bedside.

“You’re awake!” 

The Doctor’s face is pale and drawn; Yaz can’t tell if it’s because two years have passed or because she’s been running herself ragged. Probably a bit of both.

Yaz wants to cry. She wants to kiss her. She wants to punch her. She wants to stay here forever. She wants to run screaming for the hills. She packs all those two thousand emotions into a little box and ties it off with anger. 

“You did it again. I can’t fucking believe you did it again.”

The Doctor’s bloodshot eyes go wide. “Yaz, no, you don’t understand—”

“We were finally rid of each other, and then you came back and did it again.”

“Please, just listen for a—”

“You’ve got to get to the TARDIS to see if there’s any anomalies,” she says, willing her aching joints to move. (She doesn’t remember it hurting this much last time the Doctor pulled a rewind.)

“Yaz. We’re in the TARDIS.” She gestures around her and adds, “This is my bedroom. S’pose you wouldn’t have seen it before.”

Of course. The stars on the ceiling look real because they are real. Everything impossible is real in this infinite, marvelous labyrinth of this ship. Even in her panic, she can’t help but marvel at the privilege of being in the Doctor’s bedroom. It’s gorgeously appointed, but absolutely covered in mess—books, gadgets, squashy pillows, clothes from every century, and…is that a cat skeleton?

Yaz forces herself to remember the direness of the situation. “I can’t be here,” she tells the Doctor. “It’s going to make things even worse.”

“In the TARDIS, or in my bedroom?”

It’s enough of a come-on to ignite Yaz’s rage. “Both, you irresponsible prick! Honestly, what has all this been for if you were just going to faff off and—”

“Now hang on—”

“No! You don’t get to talk your way out of it this time. Exactly how many times have you broken the universe at this point?”

“Yaz, just—”

“You had no right to make this decision for me. It’s my fucking life, Doc—”

“SHUT! UP!”

Yaz has seen the Doctor angry plenty of times before, but she’s never seen her lose her temper quite like this—not godlike and thunderous, but with profoundly human frustration.

“Sorry. Sorry,” she says, taking a step back. “I just really need you to listen to me. Yes, I was following you. Yes, you looked extremely adorable in that costume. Yes, you died before I could intervene. And yes, I was sorely tempted to do what I did last time. But I didn’t!”

Yaz’s head is spinning. “But then, how am I—”

“I found another way to bring you back. Good old-fashioned tech! Well, new-fashioned tech, actually. Don’t get upset with me, but I had to steal a few eensy, weensy stem cells from your iliac crest.”

“Doctor. The point.”

“I’m getting there!”

“Not fast enough.”

“Long story short, I used your stem cells to 3D-print a missing portion of your kidney, then flash-healed the wound with some equipment I nicked from the Sisters of Plentitude. It’s fine, they won’t miss it. Then I restarted your heart with a classic 21st century Earth defibrillator, and Bob’s your aunt!”

“Are you saying you brought me back to life without using time travel?”

The Doctor’s face lights up. “Ten points to Yaz!”

Yaz leans back against the headboard and tries to process the meaning of all of this.

“Sorry,” the Doctor says, true desperation in her voice. “I know I wasn’t supposed to.”

Yaz turns to her with a mixture of exasperation and amazement. “You’re marvelous, you are.”

“You’re not cross with me?”

“Why on earth would I be cross with you?”

The Doctor seems to shrink into herself. “Y’know…because I did that thing again where I let my emotions get in the way and acted recklessly.”

God, but this woman has made an art form of self-recrimination. Yaz grasps her hands and says firmly, “Let me be very clear about this: I’m very glad you saved my life. As long as you can manage it without putting all of existence in jeopardy, please fucking always save my life.”

“Yeah?”

“Also, who says there’s anything wrong with having emotions? You care about people. That’s a very, very good thing.”

The Doctor seems caught in some kind of anxiety feedback loop, so Yaz presses their foreheads together and says, from the bottom of her heart, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the Doctor whispers, as if she’s scared that talking too loudly will shatter the moment. 

They stay that way for a brief infinity, during which all of Yaz’s defenses melt into the warmth of the other woman’s skin.

“You smell nice,” the Doctor says.

“Liar. I smell of blood and costume sweat.”

“Like I said. Nice.”

“How’d you find me, anyway? I thought that, after Casablanca…”

“Oh, Yaz. I never stopped finding you.”

“What do you mean?”

The Doctor looks like it’s going to cost her something vital to answer, but she does it anyway. She’s brave like that. 

“The TARDIS never stopped sending me to where you were. I just, y’know, kept my distance, because I reckoned that’s what you wanted.”

Yaz thinks back to a few inexplicable occurrences over the past few months: hostile aliens mysteriously getting dispatched, a flash of blond hair disappearing around a corner. And once, a bag of her favorite flavor of crisps she found sitting on a lab table in an underground bunker.

She turns to the Doctor in wonder. “You’ve been followin’ me this whole time? Even after the way I—”

“Couldn’t stop if I tried. And believe me, I tried a lot. One time, Jack spotted me and gave me a good talking-to. Really makes you reassess your life choices, getting lectured by Jack Harkness.”

Yaz feels tears come to her eyes. “God. I’m so sorry.”

“What for?”

“What for? I pushed you away, lied to you, abandoned you, and still you were forced to see me again and again.”

The Doctor cups her cheek. “It’s alright, love. You did what you had to do. I was the one being daft, thinking I could keep you.”

Love. The Doctor called her love.

“Couldn’t lose me if you tried,” Yaz murmurs.

“Literally true.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Sitting beside the woman she loves on the ship she loves just feels so right; it makes the way she’s been tying herself in knots to stay away from the Doctor seem utterly daft.

Yaz picks at a golden thread on the duvet and asks an impossible question: “What now?”

The Doctor sighs. “Haven’t a clue. My cover’s blown, so it’s not like I can go back to being your weird, benevolent stalker.”

Yaz remembers something her Nani told her back when she was thirteen and had just started getting anxiety attacks:

When everything feels impossible, Yasmin, just close your eyes, breathe, and listen to the voice inside you. You may not get the answer you want, but you’ll get an answer all the same.

So she relaxes her muscles and lets her eyes drift shut. For the first time since she woke up, she hears the unmistakable hum of the TARDIS all around her—a steady, comforting sound that lulled her to sleep for so many years.

As far back as she can remember, Yaz has never felt like she belonged anywhere. It was the source of her restlessness, the painful push that guided her itchy feet from Sheffield to the stars. Cardiff has been a sort of home, yes. But the TARDIS—steadfast, impetuous, and surprising, as full of contradictions as any human being, a place that is also a living thing—this felt like home. 

No. This feels like home. And Yaz has an inkling the feeling’s mutual.

Chapter Text

Yaz opens her eyes to find the Doctor studying her—ever curious, even in the face of abject misery.

“Doctor… Did you ever work out why we keep winding up in the same spot?”

“If I had, I’d have stopped it long ago.”

She allows herself to feel a moment of pride for working something out that the Doctor hasn’t been able to. 

“What if it’s her?”

“Her who?”

Yaz nods toward the ceiling and its swirling blue galaxies. “Her.

“Oh! Her! ” She watches the gears in the Doctor’s turning as she puzzles through the hypothesis. After a few moments, she grabs Yaz’s cheeks. “You’re brilliant, you are. I can’t believe I never thought of it.” 

She helps Yaz to her feet, then retrieves her sonic from the bedside table and orders her to stand still and hold out her arms. The Doctor runs the device along the lines of her body, face screwed up in concentration, coming to a halt when she reaches the base of her neck. She presses a few buttons on the sonic, and she gasps.

“You tricky little minx!”

“Well? Share with the class!”

“Huon particles, Yaz. The raw material of spacetime itself. Squatting inside your lymph nodes.”

“What? How?”

“Why don’t we ask her?” The Doctor raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Dear, why are there Huon particles in Yaz’s sternum?”

Yaz has no idea how far they are from the Time Rotor, but she swears she can hear a distant vwoorping.

“Thought so,” the Doctor says finally. Yaz had almost forgotten how many of these one-sided conversations she’s heard over the years.

“The TARDIS likes you, Yaz. A lot. Which tracks, since I like you a lot,” the Doctor says with a grin that’s part triumphant, part randy. “So much so that she put a bit of herself into your immune system.”

“Is that…healthy?”

“Further study needed. Point is, she’s been using the Huon energy inside you to track your location. Y’see, if there’s one thing Huon particles love to do, it’s find other Huon particles—and the Time Rotor is chock full of ’em.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Depends. What do you think I’m saying?” 

“That the TARDIS has been arranging meet-cutes for us?”

“Exactly.”

Yaz feels like her head might fly off her body. “That’s…barmy.”

“And highly irresponsible!” the Doctor shouts at the TARDIS. “I dunno. Maybe I showed her too many rom-coms?”

“So, even if I were to leave now, the TARDIS would still keep this up?”

“I mean, you can try and convince her not to, but I’ve never been able to change her mind about a single bloody thing.”

Yaz massages her temples, feeling wrung out from her very busy day of running and dying and coming back to life and finding out that the most powerful ship in the universe has been following her all over the planet for four solid years. The odds are stacked against her to an absurd degree, and she’s exhausted. She’s only human, after all.

“Quid for your thoughts?”

Yaz turns to the Doctor with the barest embers of hope igniting in her chest. “What if I stayed?”

“Here?”

“No, at Disney World. Thought I might quit Torchwood and start a career in Bo Peeping. Of course here, you numpty.”

The Doctor blinks rapidly, like a computer processor on the fritz. “You can’t, though. Can you?”

“I can do whatever I want. It’s like you said that night in Casablanca: It’s my life. I don’t owe anyone anything.”

“Nothing has changed, though.”

“I’ve changed,” Yaz says. “I’m so tired of tying myself in knots for some high-minded idea of noble self-sacrifice. I’m tired of fighting the way I feel about you. And now that we know I’m also fighting the will of an immortal timeship? That’s…too much.” She takes the Doctor’s hand. “I want to be happy. I want to be here, with you, living this life for as long as I can.”

The Doctor’s expression is halfway between terrified and impressed. “Yaz…”

“What about you, Doctor? What would make you happy?”

Something behind the other woman’s eyes goes dark. “It’s very dangerous when I let myself be happy.”

Yaz shakes her head in disbelief. “Do you realize how deeply fucked up that is?”

“I’m not like other people, Yaz. I can’t afford to take risks. You know that.”

“Sorry if this messes up the epic, tragic story you’ve been tellin’ yourself for three thousand years, but: You are like other people. You may have a lot more power and a much longer lifespan, but you’re still a person. And that means you deserve a chance at happiness.”

Yaz thinks of what Jack told her about Rose, and about the nights when she would find him sitting alone at the base with a bottle of something brown, staring at a well-worn photo of a beautiful man with the kindest eyes. And she thinks of Gwen and Rhys, and the home they’ve found in each other. 

“Look, I know it’s a huge risk, and I know it could—and almost certainly will—have consequences. But that’s just being alive, isn’t it?”

The Doctor jumps to her feet, clearly grasping for an argument—any argument—why they both ought to go back to being miserable. “It’s completely unscientific!” she blusters. 

Yaz can tell from her expression that she’s close to wearing her down. So she cheats a little to speed up the process: She pulls the Doctor back to the bed, leans in close, and nibbles her earlobe. It’s the work of a moment, but Yaz can feel exactly what it does to the other woman.

“Reckon there isn’t anything scientific about that,” she whispers.

“Well, actually, it’s quite a predictable hormonal response to the stimulation of an erogenous zone,” the Doctor says, voice low and shaky.

“Doctor. You’re stalling.”

Yaz watches the Doctor have a silent, heated argument with herself. When she turns back, she looks more vulnerable than she’s ever been before. “I’m scared, Yaz.”

“Me too. Let’s be scared together?”

They undress each other slow and easy, for once allowing themselves the luxury of time. Every kiss, every caress, is both a question and an answer: 

Can we have this? 

Yes, we can have this.

It’s decadent beyond words to have the Doctor beneath her, above her, inside her, after all these years of longing. And it’s even more luxurious to be inside the Doctor’s bedroom, a place, she’ll learn, that no one else has been permitted to enter in a hundred, hundred years.

Yaz thinks back to that day on the beach in China when the Doctor warned her exactly how dangerous this would be, and the ages and continents, the agonies and ecstasies, the joys and sorrows, they’ve experienced since then, both separately and together.

Maybe if she hadn’t died and the Doctor hadn’t risked everything to save her, they’d never have gotten here. Maybe Yaz would’ve been too afraid to confess her feelings, and maybe the Doctor would’ve asked her to leave, and maybe she would have. And maybe she’d have regretted that decision for the rest of her days.

There’s bravery, she thinks, in being a little selfish—or even very selfish. If you haven’t got yourself, you haven’t got anything; and if you don’t let yourself have what you want most in the world, then what’s the point of even having a self?

“Yaz,” the Doctor breaths against the shell of her ear.

“Hmm?”

“You’re existentially spiraling again.”

“Existential? Yes. Spiraling? No.”

“Shall we put our clothes back on and go read Sartre, then? I think there’s a copy of Being and Nothingness in the 463rd library, filed under ‘Massive Bummers.’”

She starts to climb out of bed, but Yaz pulls her back down. “Don’t you dare.”

“Yaz?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Are we doing something dangerously stupid?”

“Probably.”

“Shall we keep doing it anyway?”

“Definitely.”

The Doctor’s eyes are starting to drift shut. Yaz can’t imagine how long she’s been awake, not to mention the toll it must’ve taken on her to watch her die again. 

“Hey. Get some rest. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

There’s profound uncertainty in the Doctor’s expression when she asks, “Promise?”

There’ll be a lot to explain to Jack and Gwen and her family, and her flat in Cardiff to clear out, and probably a few Disney World employees in Woody and Buzz costumes to rescue from the Sontarans. Not to mention the massive weight of responsibility to grapple with, knowing the high stakes of the decision they’re making. 

But with the Doctor looking at her like that, it’s easy for Yaz to give her a peck on the lips and say, “Promise.”

Chapter Text

The Doctor keeps her promise not to cock up the timeline, no matter how dire the situations they find themselves in.

Yaz doesn’t, though. So much for being the responsible one.

“You have to let me go.” The Doctor’s voice is ragged as she struggles against the regeneration energy enveloping her body. 

“Fuck that,” Yaz grits out, furiously mashing buttons on the TARDIS console. 

“That’s really…quite…unsafe.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yes…you…do!” the Doctor grunts as she drags her body forward, looking as if every inch is costing her. Yaz barely catches her before she falls, then lowers her gently to the floor.

“I can’t lose you!” 

“You won’t. I’ll still…be here. Just…different.” Wreathed in scintillating gold, the Doctor never looked more beautiful. So beautiful it hurts.

“I don’t want you to be different.”

“You’re telling me…Yasmin Khan…can’t handle…a little change?”

She turns to address the Time Rotor, desperation shaking every word. “Don’t just sit there! Help me! You’re the one who dragged me back into this! So fucking do something! ”

For the first time in Yaz’s memory, the TARDIS is utterly silent.

“There are some things even…she…can’t do,” the Doctor chokes out. Her voice is growing weaker by the second.

But Yaz doesn’t want to hear it. Her mind is already made up. 

“If she won’t, I will.”

The Doctor’s eyes go wide with horror. “Yaz. No. Please. ”

Ignoring the logical part of her brain that’s screaming at her to stop, Yaz gets to her feet and walks back to the console. 

“Yaz!”

The blood is pounding in her ears, every muscle in her body taut with bloody-minded determination. Her vision narrows until all she can see is what’s directly in front of her: the nav computer, into which she punches in the temporal coordinates that will take her back to eighteen minutes ago, just before the Master aimed a laser blast at the Doctor’s chest. Then the emergency break, which she releases with a forceful yank; she can tell the TARDIS is fighting her. It’s only when she curls her fingers around the dematerialization lever that she hears a voice shouting in the back of her brain. It takes her a long moment to realize it’s her own.

Do you know what could’ve happened if it went wrong? ​​Do you really think I could go on, knowing what it cost?

Yaz thinks of the sort of person she’s always tried to be, of all she’s sacrificed to save the lives of others, time and again. She loves the Doctor beyond the telling, it’s true. But she loves the universe more.

The whole of the TARDIS seems to exhale when she releases the lever and reapplies the emergency brake. And then her numb legs are carrying her back to the Doctor, who’s still, thank every star in this galaxy, holding on. Yaz lowers herself to her knees and grasps the other woman’s hand. 

“Knew…you’d…do the right thing…in the…end.” The Doctor’s voice is less than a whisper, but the adoring smile she gives Yaz is strong as ever.

“I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I never should have come back. I never should have…”

The Doctor shakes her head. “All our days, Yaz…I wouldn’t…trade them…for anything.”

“Me neither,” Yaz says, finally letting herself cry.

“Now…kiss me, you stubborn arse, before I…bloody…explode.”

The regeneration halo is blinding as Yaz kneels like a penitent before the Doctor, letting the celestial light envelop her.

The feeling when their lips meet is overwhelming, as if she’s French-kissing a supernova. It burns like nothing she’s ever felt. She knows she needs to stop before her human body is ripped apart (or worse), but it’s so hard to pull herself away—and not just because she isn’t ready to say goodbye. It’s as if gravity is holding her there, pulling her into the Doctor’s orbit like the Earth to the Sun. 

Then, all at once, whatever had Yaz in its grip lets go, and she falls hard on her back against the grating. But the burning doesn’t stop. If anything, it’s worse—and it’s radiating from every part of her. She’s not the Earth, not anymore; she’s a second sun. 

“Doctor,” she chokes out. “What’s…happening…to me?”

The Doctor’s golden eyes are staring out of her golden face with a mixture of wonder and terror. “Holy shit,” she murmurs.

Yaz has heard the other woman describe the process of regeneration before: all the cells in your body rewritten, half-body, half bomb, dying and being born all at once.

“Doctor, I think I’m…I’m…”

“That’s impossible,” the Doctor says.

“You have to stop…calling things…that are actively happening…impossible!”

“I will if they’re…impossible!”

It hurts like hell, but Yaz can’t stop herself from laughing.

“We really need…to get…better at…goodbyes,” the Doctor says breathlessly.

It’s happening. Yaz can’t say for sure what, but it’s absolutely bloody happening. And in the last few seconds before it does, she chokes out, “Actually, I don’t think we have to say goodbye after all.”

And the rest? Well, that isn’t Yaz’s story to tell. At least, not this Yaz.