Work Text:
The Doctor is quick eyes and cracked edges and warmth, warmth, warmth. A bruise that never stops blooming.
There is no part of her that Yaz can pin down but her thundering kindness. A kindness like a force of nature, like a law of physics, like armour. It’s as integral to the universe as the Tardis, and just as impossible. It’s the kind of kindness that could ruin you.
It’s December somewhere, but it’s not December at home. It could be, technically, because Yaz doesn’t know how long she’s been gone, or exactly how old she is now, or what day of the week it should be. It doesn’t feel like winter, though. But when you live your life on the Tardis, you’re taken into it wholly and without notice. There’s no taking stock, and there’s no touching base. She might go home, but she never stays, and seasons are of no consequence. It’s like an obsession.
But the Doctor says it’s December, says it’s almost Christmas, and Yaz breathes her words. There’s no air in space, anyway.
It starts in the Tardis with Graham, lobbying to go back and see something from his childhood again. He won’t interfere, he says, but the Doctor keeps changing the subject. And then he says, “Look, Doc, I just want to see her,” and the Doctor disappears somewhere off in the Tardis. She moves into the darkness of the corridor, her pale coat a lone pinprick of light that won’t go out. Graham sighs and leans against the control centre, and they don’t talk until the Doctor returns.
She appears moments later, standing in a dark arcing doorway for one of the dozens of corridor offshoots from the main hub of the Tardis. Hands on hips, half-lit, she looks damn-near menacing. And then she steps into the light, and they can see the absurd number of tiny Christmas-themed stickers she’s newly covered her coat with.
And then she says the words, “We need to do Secret Santa,” and Graham’s trip is a lost cause.
“Secret Santa?” Yaz asks.
“Secret Spaceship Santa!” the Doctor corrects her, even louder, and shifts her fierce expression into a brilliant grin. It’s convincing. From out of seemingly nowhere, she produces a Santa hat and thrusts it towards Graham. The cute Rudolph sticker on her coat falls off and lands by her feet. “Well, pick a name, then!” she says.
“It’s not Christmas,” Graham says, startled, but the Doctor just shoves the Santa hat at him again until he plays along. He picks a name out and smiles, amused.
The Doctor gets to each of them, letting them pick a name from the hat, exclaiming, “I’ve always wanted to do this, you know! You’ve gotta have a big group of people. Or at least, more than two. You’ve gotta have friends.” There’s a slight, nervous crinkle between her eyes that Yaz is definitely not staring at. The control centre of the Tardis thrums a little louder, glowing, pouring out coppery light that catches on every little corner and makes it shine. Next to it, the Doctor is the brightest thing in the room.
Yaz watches her before she catches herself and refocuses on something else. She’s doing that quite a bit lately: watching the Doctor a little too much, a little too long, the way you might have to stop yourself staring at the sun once you make the decision to keep your eyes open. It’s not that it means anything, not certainly, or without any doubt. She could call it a crush if she wanted. Call it a crush, live with it until it dies, and never tell her mother because “I told you so” aren’t words Yaz wants to hear.
But then again, crushes don’t sit under your skin, under your feet, under your tongue. You don’t risk your life because of a crush, stake your whole life on theirs. You don’t follow someone all the way across the universe just because you fancy them.
When the Doctor gets to Yaz, a tiny cherub-faced Santa sticker tumbles from the collar of her coat, which Yaz plucks from the air and presents to her, smugly. The Doctor grins in answer.
“I actually tried this once with my friend Martha,” she tells Yaz earnestly, “but it didn’t really work. I think she knew it was me.”
Yaz reaches into the bag and swaps her Santa sticker for the last piece of paper in the hat. Out of sight, she unfurls it, to find large, sprawling lettering.
GRAHAM!
“Ooh,” Yaz declares, mysteriously, raising her eyebrows and deliberately looking at each of them.
“Where are we supposed to get presents from?” Ryan asks from beside them.
The Doctor beams up at him from where she’s leaning over the control centre, immersed in an artful deluge of light. “You’re asking the right questions, Ryan Sinclair!” They don’t talk about Graham’s trip again.
Thirty seconds later, they end up on a planet with a name Yaz will one day wish she can remember.
It’s a pretty great planet, as planets go.
Out the door, braced at the edge of an eddying rush of colour, noise and people, the Doctor brushes Yaz’s wrist with her fingers, looks at her kindly. Dazzles her.
“We are on the very outskirts of the Unspooled Galaxy,” she says, “named for its likeness to a badly knitted scarf.”
The Doctor is chuckling even when the cold hits them like a gasp.
“Yeah,” the Doctor says, smirking slightly. “it’s pretty cold here. All year. It is Christmas, though, so. I’d say it’s an appropriate call!”
Yaz grins broadly, drawn inextricably into the merry chaos of it all. It seems to be a massive, bustling marketplace mid-winter, and lit by cool, earnest sunlight. A tall, blue individual with antennae passes her and nods at her with friendly, beetle-black eyes. Behind them, a squat, furry person, like a giant space hamster, pads slowly along, gazing thoughtfully at the various eccentric market stalls. The stalls themselves are organised bursts of contained chaos: all different sizes, heights and smells, selling endless amounts of things Yaz doesn’t have a hope in recognising. There’s a large, busy stall directly across from them, adorned with long red sheets; a group of aliens are excitedly chattering to the merchant and rubbing the sheets against their cheeks. Next to it, a low, narrow stall inhabited by a loud, chatty merchant with a wide, sharkish smile, inviting people to “come try our anti-balloons!”
Mainly, though, it’s freezing cold. Yaz’s wrist burns.
In amongst the miscellany of aliens, there are several beings that Yaz recognises as human, but they’re few and far between, and far-removed from the human beings Yaz might recognise from home. No, this is far from anything Yaz has ever seen before. It’s disorder, it’s mad, it’s absolutely manic—and Yaz loves it. “This is crazy,” she says.
“You like it?” the Doctor asks. There’s a constant, light snowfall that immediately catches in the Doctor’s hair, and a flicker of worry in her eyes.
“I really like it,” Yaz answers. The Doctor lights up, slips her hands into her pockets, and surveys the scene happily.
“Well,” Ryan says, his hands in his pockets, “I am going to explore. You coming with me, old man?”
“Oi!” Graham says. “Not that old,” he adds, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets, and Yaz quickly loses sight of them in the swirling lanes of alien pedestrians.
The Doctor grabs Yaz’s hand. “Let’s go!”
Yaz takes a deep breath and goes.
They stutter through a busy lane of people, never-ending, Yaz led endlessly by the Doctor’s firm grip on her hand. Aliens glance at them, push past them, knocking shoulders, and the Doctor doesn’t let go.
“You seem to know where you’re going!”
“No idea!” the Doctor answers.
It’s too easy to get swept up in her. It’s like trying to keep up with a hurricane. Never mind that the Doctor’s hand is a warm, certain weight around Yaz’s hand, never mind that the Doctor’s fingers are touching Yaz’s knuckles lightly, seeming to burn hotly even through Yaz’s gloves, even in the cold air. Never mind that the Doctor keeps looking back at her like that, smiling at her like that.
“Oh!” the Doctor exclaims, as they swing to a halt at a series of smaller, less busy stalls. She quickly picks up something bizarre and prickly to inspect. Joy swells in Yaz’s chest, watching her. The Doctor is so impossibly happy here, a shining happiness that suddenly feels like a law of the universe, like it has always been, like fact. It’s an infectious joy that reaches Yaz and warms her up, even in the cutting cold. “This is what they call a vant-arda, Yaz. It’s proper cool. Proper weird, too. My wife gave me one, once.”
Yaz pauses, arm stopped in the middle of reaching out to touch the vant-arda. “You have a wife?”
“Yes, but don’t worry; she’s not missing me. She hasn’t met me yet.”
“Oh,” Yaz says, because there’s a lot to say but not many words.
She thinks about her parents, then. They don’t miss her. And if they go back, to the right time (the wrong time), they won’t have met her yet either.
The snow seems to fall harder, then; the sun shines a little brighter.
When she looks, though, the Doctor is grinning up at her from under her hair, eyes glittering. She suddenly looks human and real and touchable again, gently and swiftly turning Yaz away from the worry, like small rips in the fabric of Yaz’s life. In a low, playfully earnest voice, she asks, “Do you want to hold the vant-arda?”
“I do want to hold the vant-arda,” Yaz answers, equally seriously.
The Doctor laughs and hands it over. Yaz laughs too, even as it pricks at her skin through her gloves.
They wander past a series of exciting stalls, but they don’t stop; the Doctor seems set on finding something in particular to show to Yaz. Yaz glances longingly back at a stall selling something that visually seems pretty incomprehensible as food, but smells gorgeous.
“Ah, here it is!”
The Doctor comes to a stop and Yaz nearly bumps into her. She buys Yaz a hot drink in a round, bowl-like cup and hands it to her, watching her intently, curiously. It’s got this bizarre, strong flavour that Yaz can’t quite place as either sweet or savoury, but burns wonderfully as it goes down, and leaves her belly feeling too full.
“Wow,” she murmurs. She takes a couple more sips, trying to identify the different flavours, and wondering to whom this drink means home, means Christmas.
When she looks up, the Doctor is leaning against one of the wooden pillars of the stall, watching Yaz with unreadable thoughts flitting over her face. There’s a small smile on her mouth, a slight sincerity in her eyes. Could be happy, could be sad. Yaz takes a deep breath and tries another sip of her drink, watching the Doctor right back.
A moment passes, and the Doctor swallows, blinks and turns round briefly, murmurs something quickly to a passing stranger. When she turns back round, she seems to have amassed a whole new lot of stickers. Thoughtfully, the Doctor takes one and fixes it to the tip of Yaz’s nose. Yaz smirks at her with playful derision, and the Doctor grins. “It’s a present,” she informs Yaz smartly.
“Very cool,” Yaz answers, and the Doctor’s smile is brilliant. It’s too brilliant. Too perfect, the kind of smile that Yaz will remember years from now because there’s no way to forget a smile like that. Devastatingly happy, devastatingly bright. Thunderous, and not quite real.
It’s too much, sometimes. All of it.
Yaz always forgets that the Doctor isn’t human.
“How old are you?” she asks, on an impulse, and the Doctor’s smile flickers and fades in an instant.
It’s a look of hurt. More than that, it’s a look of desperation. Yaz has seen that look on the face of angry teenagers she’s handed tickets to, or had to get to interview them at the station to get down their information. They get that look when she asks them a question they don’t want to answer, that they can’t answer, that would incriminate them.
It occurs to Yaz that the Doctor doesn’t want to talk about the fact that she’s not human, not like her friends. It occurs to Yaz that the Doctor doesn’t even want Yaz to think about it.
And without warning, music rises around them like a tide coming in, harmonious music that sounds like it could come straight from an orchestra, but when Yaz looks, it’s just a small group of aliens singing from all the way down the street, making these throaty, vibrant sounds so loud they seem to fill the whole city. “Woah,” Yaz says, looking from the Doctor to the choir and back again.
“Oh, wow,” the Doctor says, and that sad look she’d had just a second ago has vanished. In an awed, respectfully quiet voice, she explains, “It’s a solstice anthem. Kind of like a Christmas carol, except everyone knows it, and it goes right into your brain, and—”
“Right into your brain?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Yaz splutters a laugh into her drink, taking another sip. “That’s insane,” she says, and the words get washed away in a cresting harmony. She has to watch the Doctor’s lips to catch each of her words.
“That’s the universe,” she says. “There’s so many things I want you to see.”
“What’s your real name, Doctor?” Yaz asks.
“The Doctor,” she answers, quick as a flash.
“What’s your real name?” Yaz repeats.
The Doctor stops, then. She takes a deep breath like she’s trying to breathe past a knot in her lungs. Another question the Doctor doesn’t want to answer. Something else incriminating, something else that’s dangerous territory. But her eyes are crackling like thunder, and it just makes Yaz want to ask her all the more.
“What’s your name, Doctor?” Yaz asks again.
She’s pressing on a bruise, pushing too far. She knows it; she can see it in the Doctor’s face.
“Why don’t you tell us about your friends? Who’s your wife?”
The cup in her hand feels like an anchor Yaz needs to cling onto, just to feel like she’s standing still. People pass around them, between them, and the snow falls, and the music only gets louder.
“I have new friends,” the Doctor answers firmly. “You.”
“I’m asking about your old friends. Your family.”
The Doctor has secrets. And she can see the moment the Doctor resolves to never share her secrets with Yaz. She sees it as the Doctor steps towards her, the way she lowers her eyes.
And then the Doctor kisses her.
Yaz grips her arm automatically, fingers twisting in the fabric of her jacket. The Doctor’s mouth is hot, lips barely apart; it’s meant to a short kiss, sweet, chaste, and Yaz has no idea what it’s supposed to mean. But something sparks in Yaz’s gut like the lighting of a match, and she opens her mouth and grips the Doctor harder, her new anchor, and kisses her back even harder.
The Doctor’s teeth click against hers, but her mouth opens, lets Yaz in, wet and warm and gasping. The heat of it curls through Yaz and lights her on fire. It’s like kissing a solar flare.
They pull apart slowly, and the Doctor looks surprised, with high flushed colour in her cheeks that has nothing to do with the cold.
For a split second, the Doctor’s mouth works, but she doesn’t speak. “I’m old,” she finally tells Yaz, with dazed eyes. “I’m just. I’m old.”
The dots don’t connect for a moment, leaving Yaz flickering between thoughts, uncertain about how to move, what to say, when she’s still got the shock of it coursing hotly through her veins. She glances away and, all around them, people are moving away, looking at them strangely. No doubt something as human as kissing is considered totally alien and weird on a planet like this. And Yaz is still clutching the fabric of the Doctor’s sleeve, and the Doctor is still looking at her like an apology.
Yaz’s eyes fix on the Doctor’s bright, blown pupils, her faint frown, her parted, wet lips. But Yaz feels brave now, strong. She doesn’t have answers, but she feels the thrill and adrenaline of someone who just flew into a sun and survived. The thrill and adrenaline of someone standing on an alien planet, buying Christmas presents even though it can’t be Christmas, burning hot in the furious cold, in the aftermath of an impossible kiss with an impossible woman.
A big smile plays at her mouth and she can’t help it, she lets herself grin, and the Doctor lets out a smile too. They share a laugh, light and twinkling, and Yaz can’t tell which one of them it was that started laughing, but there they are, shaking in the aftermath of it, their fingers entwined in the space between them.
When Yaz kisses her again, chaste this time, kind, the Doctor leans into it, breathless, but her smile is muted when they pull apart.
“Merry Christmas, Yaz,” she says, as though that kiss was the one that ached.
It doesn’t occur then, to Yaz, that the second kiss was an ending.
“Merry Christmas,” Yaz answers.
Yaz finds her hand between them, palms pressed together, but there’s something she can feel in the Doctor’s hand. She glances down, and the Doctor says, “Oh, uh—” and unfurls a tiny scrap of paper.
You can’t have Secret Spaceship Santa without YAZ! it reads.
Yaz laughs, nearly glows. “What are you gonna get me?”
“Did you like the vant-arda?” the Doctor asks, warm, but she steps back.
“It was prickly.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Yaz just grins, and the Doctor sighs melodramatically, taking on her radiance like a barricade. “Well, I can’t tell you anyway,” she continues. “It’s Secret Spaceship Santa for a reason, you know,” and she adds a silly wink, over-the-top, nervous. Her cheeks are still hot with colour.
“Alright?” comes a call from within the crowd, and there’s Graham wandering over, and Ryan following behind him. Ryan seems to be cackling his head off. “Did you see what just happened?” Graham asks, some outrage in his voice.
“No,” the Doctor says, another step away from Yaz and guarding herself with a smile. Her hands are busy in front of her, fiddling with her new sheet of stickers so much they scatter down, slowly, to her feet.
“What?” Yaz asks.
Ryan’s amusement shakes through him as he says, “Graham just tried to buy something with a twenty-pound note.”
“Graham!” the Doctor exclaims, somehow fresh and bright now, a horribly clean slate, and Graham blurts out a laugh, hands sheepishly in his pockets. “Right,” the Doctor announces. “Our shopping trip is not yet over. Let’s find somewhere new! Have any of you ever been to the Nineteen Moons of Umbriel?”
They start to potter off back through the crowd, Ryan chatting eagerly with the Doctor and Graham, and Yaz tails back a little, until she stops, just watching them.
The snow falters as it falls around her, stutters and slows. She waits a few steps behind the others, her heart a solid weight in her throat. Her veins crackle in quiet flame, uncertain and not ready to continue. She misses home. She misses her Mum and Dad, and her friends, and her work.
But the Doctor is warm, warm, warm, blindingly so, and Yaz doesn’t think she can ever go home again.
Days later, weeks later, it’s Christmas again. It might be the same Christmas period, but they’ve been to 30th century Earth since then, mid-summer, and hopped across a series of tiny but inhabited asteroids where the seasons fluctuate rapidly between acid fog and alkaline floods, where winter is out of the question. It’s on a trip to an impossibly huge, black moon that orbits too close to its planet, and too close to its sun, that the Doctor suggests they have Christmas dinner.
They have it in the Tardis, because Graham and Ryan don’t want to go home, and Yaz doesn’t know how to talk to a family she hasn’t seen in months, but who last saw her that same morning.
It’s a glittering, bubbling meal, a gently busy jumble of food and crackers and crowns. Ryan leans back in his chair and talks about Grace, and Graham sits with his elbows on his knees and just listens, a small smile on his face. The Doctor recites nonsensical stories about the places she’s been, the inherent madness of the universe. She frames herself like a lost traveller, a fool, as though she’s not just as much of a force of nature as the crests and crashes of space. She’s beacon, anchor and sea.
Under the table, Yaz slips her hand into the Doctor’s, and grips on for dear life. The Doctor looks at her with alarm, but seems to settle when she realises that that’s all Yaz wants, to just hold her.
The Doctor threads their fingers together, leans her shoulder against Yaz’s, and glances up at her briefly, for an inscrutable instant, before looking away.
Against Yaz’s shoulder, the Doctor laughs and shares and acts like a real person. It’s not convincing anymore. She’s as ruinous and devouring as a sun.
Yaz follows her, anyway.
“Doctor,” Yaz pushes, quiet, and the Doctor looks at her again.
“Merry Christmas,” she tells Yaz softly, a quiet promise between their mouths.
Aching, Yaz nods, and looks towards the light of the Tardis. “You too.”