Chapter Text
There isn't a chance to have a conversation with that Doctor, because the next thing she learns that the girl is dead - some sort of alien virus that, fortunately, didn't infect the country - and that the Doctor is gone with her, replaced (a credible rumor states) by a rather dour old man with a topknot.
Meanwhile, she is dating. Or trying to, at least.
"There's your problem," the holographic Doctor told her helpfully one night. "Square knot the wrong way around! Rookie mistake. It's easy to make, especially under stress. All you need to do -"
"Would you mind?" Yaz muttered. "Stop interrupting me. I'm in the middle of something here."
"I'm just trying to be helpful!"
"Well, you're not."
"Brexit," Chloe said. "This is cutting off my circulation. And Yaz, who are you talking to?"
The next day, after a confused morning-after breakup, Yaz bought handcuffs.
She never tried shibori again.
Even when the Doctor's not interfering, there's a distance between her and her would-be partners that Yaz can't breach.
"I don't know you," Magda tells her, nine months into their relationship. They're in Paris, on what's supposed to be an extended weekend, but when they arrive at their restaurant the first night, all Yaz can think of is the time she spent there in 1902. "I've lived with you for three months," Magda says, "and I still don't know you."
And she doesn't, of course. That's the problem.
And then, after Magda and Chloe, there is Kay.
The meet-cute, if you can call it one, is at a crime scene. Three men dead, apparently from a giant beetle (personally, Yaz suspects the creature was simply trying to find a nest, but good luck convincing anyone of that), and the police - the real police - had already been called. Yaz spends a ridiculous two hours trying to prevent the pathologist from getting to the dead bodies while waiting for her backup team to arrive.
That day - Kay, with an adorable smudge of mud on their nose, doing everything they can to get past Yaz's increasingly frantic attempts at distraction - seems to personify their relationship.
It's the night of their six month anniversary, which they've chosen to celebrate by driving out to Hadrian's wall, when Kay finally gets through.
By evening, they've arrived at the campsite. Kay makes the bed in the bell tent while Yaz finishes unpacking the bags on her motorbike and heating dinner on the camp stove.
"Thank you," Kay says, when Yaz hands them a bowl of soup. "It's getting a bit chilly out." They sit on the grass - Yaz had made sure to bring a blanket, but Kay has, as always, ignored it - and pull out a sketch pad.
There's companionable silence for awhile as they both stare at the landscape. As the darkness sets in, it's Kay, as usual, who breaks it.
"It's such a wild landscape," they say. "Imagine being a soldier and assembling that thing. Stones piled on top of each other, but they blend into the fields. It must have seemed futile."
Yaz stretches out on the green on the blanket and stares up at the stars.
"It wasn't always dull," Yaz says without thinking. "They used to glaze the surface and whitewash it. In the morning sunlight, the wall would gleam for miles. The locals had never seen anything like it."
"You were there, weren't you?" Kay asks suddenly.
Yaz turns. She can barely make out the other's face in the dark.
"I'm not blind," Kay says. "I see things. And I have a good memory. Other people say things didn't happen, but I know they did. And my pops taped the moon landing. And I know the division you work for."
And suddenly Yaz understands the Doctor's silences. Yaz has lived so many lives compared to everyone else on Earth. Speaking of her past is like opening a bottomless jar. Either she will say one word too few or ten thousand too many.
"You can tell me," Kay says. "I'm a pathologist. That scar in your leg is an arrow wound. Obsidian glass."
For a moment, Yaz stands on the precipice. Either she backs away and leaves or she jumps.
And then she opens her mouth and talks.