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Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Summary:

Yaz was fine, after the beach.

Honestly.

If only the Doctor would stop her worried hovering, or talk to her even, maybe she could figure this out. Move past falling in love with someone she can't have. Except that was seeming less and less likely by the day, and even Yaz only had so much patience.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

            Yaz was fine, after the beach.

            Honestly.

            She was fine.

            It wasn’t like she really expected the Doctor to return her feelings, that they would exit such a conversation as anything so normal as girlfriends. It wasn’t like she really expected anything from the kind of conversation she had only just begun to formulate inside her own head, one where she had feelings not only for women in general (a new idea) but for one practically immortal alien in particular (not actually that new of an idea). She had let herself hope, in the space of a few impossible days, for some kind of culmination to what she now knew was years of longing, but it was nebulous, non-specific.

            It had still been so new, for all it had probably been simmering away from the moment the Doctor had quite literally fallen into her life, that Yaz had not even really begun to think how to talk to her about it. Dan would’ve rolled his eyes at her, but Yaz needed more of a plan. She needed to wrap her head around it.

            She just hadn’t gotten that time. The Doctor had talked to her first.

            And now it was… now they’d got past that. They both knew. There were feelings, but there would be nothing further. They would continue as they were. Yaz understood, a little, at least she thought she did. And even if she hadn’t, it wasn’t like the Doctor owed her a kind of relationship that would cause her pain. Yaz didn’t want that, of course not.

            So she was fine. They were fine.

            The problem was…

            Well. The problem.

            Yaz knew, now. That what she was feeling was… love? Possibly? She had never been in love before. How could she know that that’s what this was? How, except that even after the letdown, the Doctor smiling at her across the console made her feel like there was a sun expanding inside her chest. How, except that she thought she saw an echo of that feeling in the Doctor’s green-gold eyes whenever they crinkled at the corners because of something Yaz had said.

            Except now, that sunburst feeling had nowhere to go. Now, it was accompanied every time by a lead-pit feeling of guilt, because she couldn’t feel like this, not anymore. The Doctor had said no. She didn’t want this. Or, well, she did, but she couldn’t, which amounted to more or less the same thing in the end. This person she loved more than reason, her best friend, who she’d always care for in whatever way she could, didn’t want this from her. Being her friend wasn’t lesser; she had no reason to be disappointed, really.

            She just needed to wait this out. Wait until the heady sweep of romantic love modulated itself back into a more manageable, platonic key. Wait until the feeling of heartbreak softened itself into something Yaz knew how to carry. Time healed all wounds, after all.

            Except, it could bloody well hurry up about it.

            Because it didn’t get better. If anything, knowing the Doctor felt the same way made it worse, because was she longing just the same way Yaz was? Was she hurting too? There was no way to even ask, to truly try and gauge the Doctor’s mindset, without opening them both up to more scrutiny than they could manage, but the questions lingered all the same. If Yaz stretched her hand out another inch across the console, if she laced their fingers together, would she let her? What would it feel like? (What would it feel like to kiss her? Would her hair be as soft as it looked? What would she—no.)

            The Doctor’s confession, her wish to live in the present, had somehow left them in a strange limbo Yaz didn’t understand how to navigate. She still hadn’t told Yaz everything, and after their talk on the beach, Yaz wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Could it do any good, really? If the secrets only ended like this?

            The yearning didn’t stop, even though she badly wished it would. Not after a week. Not after two, or three, or two months. Yaz thought, in her most despairing moments, that perhaps the only way to fix herself, to move on or whatever that meant, would be to leave the TARDIS. Leave the Doctor. And that was just not possible. She was with her until the end, whenever that was, however that happened.

            So in the meantime, she waited for it to stop hurting. And she was fine.

            Of course she was fine. The Doctor wasn’t the only one who could keep things to herself. After all, Yaz was so good at repressing her emotions she’d hidden this from herself for at least two decades. She’d get through it, eventually. She’d be fine.

            She was fine.

            She started glancing down at the console instead of holding the Doctor’s gaze.

            She started shifting away from her when they were out and about, or inside the ship on their own.

            She kept her hands to herself.

            After a particularly tricky bit of piloting she’d had to handle mostly on her own while the Doctor managed a fiddly bit of jiggery pokery (technical term) as they escaped a sentient asteroid belt, the Doctor had thrown a triumphant arm around her shoulder, disheveled and grinning and so easily joyful Yaz had wanted to melt into that smile and that eager “well done, Yaz!” forever.

            Instead, she flinched away from the touch.

            The Doctor’s face shifted into a frown at once.

            “Yaz?” she asked. “You okay?”

            “’Course,” Yaz insisted with a nod. She didn’t look at her. “I’m fine.”

            “She didn’t shock you or anything, did she?” the Doctor asked, stepping a little closer to peer at Yaz with concern. “The TARDIS likes you, I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose, but if—”

            “I’m fine, Doctor,” Yaz said again.

            She looked at her then, just for a second, her gaze insistent. The Doctor stepped back, her brows flying wide in surprise, but she just nodded. She dropped it, but when Yaz looked back to the console, she could feel the Doctor’s worried eyes still fixed on her.

            That, it seemed, was her mistake. The Doctor had caught on, and she was worried now. And when she was worried, she hovered. She didn’t really say much about it; she didn’t try and ask prying questions. But she lingered, a little too close in Yaz’ personal space (which didn’t help). She watched her for too long with wide, concerned eyes, chewing absently on her lower lip (which really didn’t help). All the worried hovering, shockingly, did not make Yaz feel any better. As the days of this dragged on, it made her feel much worse. Like she was being scrutinized; like she’d done something wrong, in falling for the Doctor, and had to be monitored now in case of any further misbehavior.

            Fortunately, her old tricks of getting the Doctor out of her mardy moods seemed to be at least slightly effective at distracting her from her own. Unfortunately, the question-asking method of distraction still only seemed to go so far.

            “Can you reach the temporal ignition bypass?” the Doctor asked; she was knee-deep in ship maintenance and had actually agreed for a change when Yaz had asked if she wanted help.

            “The what?” Yaz shot back.

            “That lever… there,” the Doctor explained, using her chin to point at a switch far into the center of the console. She wouldn’t be able to reach it herself from where she was, busy as her hands were with the different strands of wires she has threaded between her fingers.

            Yaz reached forward to touch what she thought was the right thing and flipped it when the Doctor nodded. A little smile tugged at the corner of her lips, almost like she was proud of Yaz. Which was a nice feeling Yaz instantly stuffed into a box and chucked as far back into her thoughts as it would go.

            “I swear you make half this stuff up just to mess with me,” she said with a laugh.

            “Oi!” the Doctor protested. “It’s not made up! The old girl and I have had lifetimes to work out a system, that’s all.”

            “You say that, and you still couldn’t manage to get us home in fewer than ten tries that first trip,” Yaz teased back.

            “Well,” the Doctor replied, her ears going pink, “that was a new interface and everything. She does like to keep me on my toes. Besides. I got to spend time with my fam, didn’t I?”

            She offered up an all-too-earnest smile at that, one Yaz couldn’t help but return. If the TARDIS had behaved herself and deposited them home after that first planet… well, the entire trajectory of Yaz’ life would be vastly different, wouldn’t it? Even in the midst of all the heartbreak she felt then and knew would compound further soon, she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.

            “Yeah,” she said with a nod. The Doctor swallowed, her eyes a little too bright, and Yaz cleared her throat. It was time for a deflection. “You said you stole her, right? How’d you manage that?”

            It was, apparently, the wrong deflection. The light in the Doctor’s eyes dimmed and her shoulders tensed up as her gaze dropped away from Yaz’.

            “It’s a long story,” she said.

            “We’re in a time machine,” Yaz pointed out. “Take as long as you like.”

            The Doctor’s fingers tightened over the console.

            “Maybe some other time,” she said, her voice too low, her eyes flicking up to meet hers and then down again like perhaps that would substitute for an apology.

            It didn’t.

            Yaz gritted her teeth and stepped back from the console.

            “Right,” she said. “In that case, I guess I’ll go to bed if we’re finished here.”

            “You all right, Yaz?” the Doctor asked, and in an instant, that worried look was back, like she knew she’d shut down too quickly, pushed Yaz too far.

            “Yes,” she insisted.

            “Yaz—”

            “Good night, Doctor,” Yaz replied over her shoulder.

            She hoped very much that the Doctor couldn’t hear her slam her bedroom door. She felt stupid about it, the moment it crashed into place. She wasn’t a teenager; she was far from the first person to have to deal with a broken heart. She needed to get a fucking grip, preferably yesterday.

            The problem—well, part of the problem, a piece of the many-layered and very stupid problem—was that even if she did want to talk about her feelings, that wouldn’t make them go away. And even if she battled over that particular hurdle, she had no one to talk about them with. She couldn’t trust Dan not to put his foot in it and meddle again, as well-intentioned as he’d been the first time. Besides, he spent less and less time on the TARDIS and more and more with Diane these days. Yaz was happy for him, and not even a little bit jealous. Ryan would never let her live it down; she suspected he and Graham had known all along and just assumed she’d known too. Graham, for his part, would probably be very nice and listen very attentively and say something far sweeter than she deserved and less instructional than she needed. And she sure as hell couldn’t call her sister for something like this, because that she truly would never recover from.

            The only person she had to really talk to was the person she needed to talk about, and that wouldn’t be fair on either of them. Her feelings weren’t the Doctor’s fault; she couldn’t make them her problem.

            It was possible that Yaz needed more friends.

            And so it continued, day after day. Time seemed elastic on board the TARDIS; one “day” could be a four-hour adventure or thirty-six, and one pause to rest on board the ship could last days if the Doctor found enough maintenance to keep her busy, or just five minutes from one planet to the next. All the while, the Doctor hovered, and Yaz retreated, more and more snappish when her attempts to bring them both back to somewhere approaching normal—when her questions into what the Doctor had told her she wanted—increasingly found dead ends.

            She tried to keep them busy rather than spending too much time resting. It was hard to sleep lately, she’d found—no matter how tired she was, inevitably trying to sleep would leave her alone with all sorts of thoughts she didn’t want to be having. For a while, the Doctor was thrilled by this, but eventually, she noticed. She always noticed, in the end, and her expression took on that polite-cat smile and too-knowing gaze.

            Whenever that happened, Yaz just tried to beat her out the door. It didn’t always work.

            She found the Doctor in the console room that morning after another night spent tossing and turning. She could feel the beginnings of a headache ghosting at her temples, but she cracked her neck and ignored it as best she could.

            “Morning,” she told the Doctor, setting a cup of tea for her on a clear space in the console.

            It had become a routine of theirs, during the months after Ryan and Graham had left but before the Flux. Probably the only thing they had that counted as a proper routine on this ship where time made no sense and didn’t matter much anyway. The Doctor would do… whatever it was she did other than sleep most of the night, and Yaz would come back in the mornings with tea for them both, the Doctor’s loaded with a frankly disturbing amount of sugar and milk. It had taken a while for Yaz to build up to the right amount, but the smile she’d gotten once she had figured it out made it all worth it.  

            That morning, like she often did, Yaz retreated to the steps with her own mug. The Doctor glanced up from the console at the cup of tea and at Yaz, and her face lit up like fireworks. Yaz bit down the pang that bubbled up in her chest at that—how could she not have fallen for someone who got so much joy from something as simple as a cup of tea?—and took a sip.

            “Thanks, Yaz!” the Doctor said.

She downed half the mug in two long swallows—Yaz knew inevitably the rest of it would get cold and forgotten in the space of the next few minutes—and turned back to Yaz And then she sniffed, and she frowned, cocking her head to the side to look at her.

“You’ve got coffee,” the Doctor said.

Damn it. Of course she’d noticed.

“I have got coffee,” Yaz replied evenly.

“You hate coffee.”

“I do not hate coffee.”

“You do, you said once that you didn’t like coffee because it just made you jittery and you were still tired after it and you only ever had it as a last resort and usually regretted it—”

“Doctor, I think I said that maybe once, years ago—” Yaz said, attempting to interrupt.

“But I do remember it,” the Doctor interrupted back. “I remember everything. Are you okay? Did the TARDIS give you the wrong thing? Y’know you can get her to fix it—”

“I’m fine, and no, the TARDIS didn’t give this to me. I don’t ask her to make tea for me, I can do that myself.”

“But you didn’t make tea, you made coffee,” the Doctor said again, brow furrowed in genuine concern and confusion and it was so annoying and so infuriatingly cute that Yaz wanted to scream into her bloody cup of coffee.

“Yes, I made coffee. I fancied a coffee, all right?” She took an exaggerated sip, made an over-the-top noise of approval. “See? I don’t hate coffee.”

The thing was, usually the Doctor was right: coffee did tend to just make her more shaky and more anxious and no less tired. But she had come to appreciate it a bit more in her years stuck in the past when caffeine options had often been slim—which she was not going to bring up right now because she did not have the energy to deal with the Doctor’s guilt spiral over that again—and she really had slept like shit. If she had thought it would lead to an interrogation, though, she would’ve just gone for the double-tea-bag method instead.

“But why did you have it instead of tea?” the Doctor pressed. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“But—”

“Doctor, I’m fine, all right? I’m just a little tired today. Figured the extra caffeine couldn’t hurt, wherever we ended up.” She smiled, and did her best to change the subject. “Which is where, exactly?”

“Did you not sleep well?” the Doctor asked, barreling straight past the usual easy diversion of a new adventure. “Is it too hot in your room? Or—did it get cold? I didn’t think rerouting the power to the fifth greenhouse would have affected the power in your room but maybe—”

“I’m fine! Stop blaming the TARDIS for things, all right?” Yaz snapped. “I’m fine, I just didn’t sleep well, I made coffee. This is not an end-of-the-world event, Doctor!”

“But I—” the Doctor started, then shifted closer to her around the console, started again. “I’m worried about you, Yaz.”

Why?”

The Doctor just looked down at her, so close and yet so far. The light in the console room always painted everything in warm shades of amber; it made the Doctor, usually so full of frenetic energy, seem softer, somehow. Like she was something Yaz could really reach out and touch.

For a moment, Yaz let herself get pulled in. Let herself hold her breath, just in case this, finally, was it. A way in to some kind of honesty, rather than the exhausting dance of half-truths. Let herself drown in the intense focus of the Doctor’s honey-gold gaze.

But the seconds ticked by. The Doctor didn’t say anything. She was waiting for Yaz to speak, to give her a way in, rather than expressing anything herself. Again. And instead, Yaz took a breath, and looked away.

“Whatever,” she huffed. She took another sip of coffee. “Well, don’t be, all right?”

“Yaz—”

“Doctor, I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” the Doctor said, so quietly Yaz almost missed it.

But she heard it. And it made her want to hurl her stupid coffee cup at the Doctor’s head.

“Great, don’t believe me, then,” she snapped. “Where are we, anyway? What are we doing today?”

This time, she didn’t wait for the Doctor to answer. She just swallowed the rest of her coffee, grimacing at the too-hot gulp, and got up to look at the console herself.

“Yaz—”

“Hmm, Andromeda galaxy, year 4242,” Yaz said, ignoring the Doctor wheeling around the console after her, a tense, worried shadow. “Interesting. Don’t think we’ve been there before.”

“Yaz…” the Doctor said again, closer to her now. Close enough to reach out and touch.

Yaz moved away, stepping out of reach again and to a different display. She just needed to tap one button before the information she wanted sprang up, hovering like a flickering hologram between them. She suspected the TARDIS put it there on purpose, trying to get Yaz to look at the Doctor. She ignored the ship, too, in favor of the information.

“Looks like we’re on a ship of some kind. A cruiser—a constellation cruiser. Does that mean it’s a ship full of stargazers? Do other cultures have different constellations than we do?”

“I know what you’re doing, Yaz,” the Doctor said. Her voice was low, just shy of angry herself.

Well, good, actually. The Doctor could have a taste of her own medicine for a change.

“Experiences of a lifetime, right?” she said, and she looked the Doctor directly in the eye as she said it.

It hurt, didn’t it, to be shut out like this on purpose.

The Doctor flinched, blinking at Yaz in surprise, but Yaz pasted on a smile and tossed the Doctor her coat from where it hung over one of the crystal pillars.

“You coming?” she said, already marching towards the door.

The Doctor hesitated just a moment, just long enough for Yaz to wonder if she had gone too far. She didn’t want to hurt the Doctor at all, she just wanted her to stop prying. But by the time she’d reached the doors, the sound of the other woman’s footsteps sounded behind her. Yaz was annoyed enough that she didn’t want that sound to feel like relief, but it did anyway.

They stepped out of the TARDIS and into a sleek spaceship. As usual, they had landed somewhere nondescript and out of the way, the space-age equivalent of a broom cupboard, but it only took a few short turns before the sleek tube-shaped silver corridors widened and revealed an atrium-like space. Enormous windows curved up and over their heads, leaving an unbroken view of the stars and swirling nebulas around them. It was beautiful. Yaz stared out into the vastness of space for a long moment and simply took in the view, letting the tension coiling through her unwind a few degrees at the sight of it.

At the sight of the Doctor, awestruck and delighted as starlight dotted across her cheeks. Even amidst everything else, Yaz knew, down to her bones, that she would never trade a second of this for anything else. How could she? Not when she knew that she could ask and the Doctor would tell her the names of every single star swirling overhead. Not when it was just the two of them facing off against the universe, adventures in store, people and worlds to save.

Just the two of them…

Yaz looked down from the windows and around the room, which was large, and cold, and completely empty aside from them. The TARDIS had said this was a cruiser; wouldn’t that mean there should be other people on board doing the same stargazing she and the Doctor were?

“I have to say, Yaz, this was a good spot to pick,” the Doctor said, smiling up at the stars.

Yaz opened her mouth to agree, to hopefully, finally sneak past the awkwardness and unpleasantness of that morning and back to their usual rapport, when she heard it. A soft click, and a whine, almost too high-pitched to register.

She whipped her head around just in time to see a light winking from the corridor they’d just walked down. And she threw herself forward at the Doctor before she could blink.

“Get down!”

They landed in a heap on the cold, hard tiled floor, polished to a shine to reflect the stars above and very unpleasant to land on; the blaster burst sailed over their heads and burnt an ugly slash into the nearest support strut for the ceiling.

Pain burst sharply through Yaz’ chin and knee and elbow from the landing, but the rest of her had fallen on something soft. Onto the Doctor. She grimaced, picking her head up from the floor, and froze when she saw Yaz hovering over her. Yaz held her breath, the rise and fall of the Doctor’s torso against her own entirely too much, completely overwhelming even before it was paired with the Doctor’s eyes going wide with shock and looking, suddenly and too obviously, at her lips.

But then the whine started up over their shoulders again, and Yaz looked up to see what had shot at them emerging from the corridor. It was a robot, a strange, almost velociraptor-shaped creature that appeared more like a silvery gun turret with legs than anything else. It swung its red-eyed head towards them and lined up another shot.

“Yaz—” the Doctor started, but Yaz was already scrabbling up off her, offering her hand.

“Run!”

The trouble was at least easy to diagnose, at least; the robot wasn’t alone, and it and its friends herded Yaz and the Doctor down a few curving silvery corridors until they found the rest of the ship’s human passengers and crew hiding in the barricaded cafeteria. The robots, it seemed, were supposed to provide ship maintenance, but somebody in corporate had screwed up and gotten combat bots instead. Retrofitting them had worked for a while until an old command got triggered by accident, and now the bots were out to kill everyone on the ship instead of mopping or tuning up the environment systems.

The plan, too, was simple enough. The ship’s captain had already sent out an SOS, but this far into their cruise’s route, it would take another hour or more for backup to reach them, by which time the robots absolutely could breach the barricaded cafeteria doors. So the Doctor and Yaz made their way to a narrow secondary bridge control, where the Doctor could use the sonic to trick the robots into looking the other way while the crew and guests ran for the evacuation pods. Once that was done, she’d seal the ship, return to the TARDIS with Yaz, and let corporate deal with their robotic mess. Everybody would win, except corporate, which was hardly a problem.

It was an unusually neat plan, aside from one thing: the secondary control room was tiny, with only one chair and a thick metal grate serving as a door, and now Yaz was trapped inside it with the Doctor, with nothing to do but wait.

The headache she had tried to chase away that morning with coffee and sheer force of will was dragging in earnest at her temples now. She sat on the floor, one leg stretched out, one curled up to her chest, and leaned her head back against the wall of flickering indicator lights as the Doctor rigged up what she needed with the sonic. Behind her head, a screen blipped with little dots across a map of the ship. The sonic’s fake passengers glowed yellow, leading the little red robot dots on a wild goose chase through the halls and far away from the stream of green passengers on their way towards a safe exit.

The Doctor balanced on the chair, looking more like a bird or a perching gargoyle than a person with the way she hunched over the control panel, fiddling with various switches and dials until she was satisfied.

“There we go,” the Doctor said at last, swiveling in the chair with a squeak. “A bit anticlimactic like this, I suppose, but nobody gets hurt.”

“Right,” Yaz agreed with a nod. “How long, do you think?”

The Doctor glanced back at the screen, scronching her nose in thought.

“Mmmm… maybe twenty minutes?”

“Hmmm,” Yaz replied, closing her eyes with a sigh.

Twenty minutes to sit here and be cross with herself about picking a spot with killer robots. Twenty minutes for the Doctor to get increasingly fidgety in close quarters. Twenty agonizing minutes for that gaze to fall more and more heavily on her, for the air in the room to constrict with the tension between them.

Yaz tried to fight it out in silence. Tried to swallow back her irritation—at herself, at the damn robots, at the whole situation—and keep it trapped behind her teeth. But she could feel the Doctor staring at her. She was definitely fidgeting; the rustling of her coat was one thing, but the squeaking of the chair was like a lightning bolt to her growing headache.

“Doctor,” she finally said, not opening her eyes, her tone as level as she could make it. “Please stop staring at me.”

“You’ve got your eyes closed, Yaz.”

“I do,” Yaz replied. “I still would like you to stop staring at me.”

“I’m not,” the Doctor insisted. “People can’t really feel it when someone’s looking at them. There’s no scientific evidence—”

Yaz tilted her head on the wall, opened her eyes, and found the Doctor staring at her exactly where she knew she would be. She didn’t say a word, just pointedly raised one eyebrow at her. The Doctor shut up, her cheeks turning pink, and she looked back down at the console.

“Thank you,” Yaz said, and closed her eyes again.

“Yaz…” the Doctor began. There was a pause, and more fidgeting sounds, another squeak as the chair moved. “You know you can talk to me. Right?”

“I know,” Yaz said, clinging on to what was left of her patience and biting back a groan. “The same goes for you, for the record.”  

“That’s… different,” the Doctor muttered.

“Oh, I assure you, it really isn’t.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

At that, Yaz snapped her eyes open again. The Doctor suddenly looked very small and very vulnerable, perched on her chair, staring down at Yaz with wide, worried eyes. And in spite of all her irritation, in spite of her frustration that maybe she wanted to be the one getting some reassurance for a change, she still couldn’t help softening a little at the look on the Doctor’s face. Because this was just another piece in the ever-growing pile of evidence that this was killing her, too. And if Yaz could help ease that hurt, she wanted to. Every time.

“No, Doctor, you didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

The Doctor nodded, something tightening in her expression.

“Then… whatever’s going on, Yaz, you don’t have to take it out on me.”

Yaz spluttered in shocked disbelief. She had been a little grouchy lately, to be sure, but she had months and months and months of the Doctor’s poor treatment of her as a benchmark and she was nowhere near those levels.

“Take it out on—”

“I know you must’ve been… disappointed, after we… after the beach, but—”

“No, you don’t know,” Yaz snapped. “You don’t know anything, because you didn’t let me say anything then. You just told me how it was going to be.”

“I didn’t—you could’ve disagreed!”

“What, when my other options were badger you into something you didn’t want, or leave?” The Doctor flinched back from the word like Yaz had struck her. “Of course I agreed! Doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt, Doctor!”

“Yaz—”

“And believe me, I am doing absolutely everything I can to not take that out on you, because, turns out, I am allowed to be sad about this, and if you could just let me have that instead of… of lurking over my shoulder all the time, then maybe we could just keep living in the bloody present like you asked!”

“But I…” the Doctor stammered, and then swallowed. “I don’t want you to be sad, Yaz.”

“I’m not a fan of it either!” Yaz snapped. “Except that’s what happens when you fall in love with your best friend and she turns you down not because she doesn’t feel the same but because she’s maybe possibly dying. That is a lot of sad stuff!”

The Doctor opened her mouth and then closed it again, all the fight deflating out of her posture.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“You don’t have to be sorry about that,” Yaz told her. “What you do owe me an apology for is promising to tell me everything and then shutting down on me every time I ask a question. Because that’s what’s the hardest thing to deal with, Doctor. You said you wanted to explain, you said you wanted to live in the present, and you’re not. So what do you actually want, because everything else hurts too much to figure it out.”

Once again, the Doctor stared at her, too many emotions flickering across her face to untangle. Once again, she waited for Yaz to say something, or swallowed down a half dozen things to say she deemed insufficient. Once again, Yaz rolled her eyes and looked away.

She checked the map over the Doctor’s head; the last of the little green crew dots were filtering into their escape pods. Mission accomplished; time to leave.

“Let’s go,” Yaz said.

She shoved herself upward and off the wall, reaching around the Doctor’s shoulder—forced close enough by the small space for her hair to brush against Yaz’ sleeve, damn it—to grab the sonic before yanking up the grate door and marching out into the hall, her feet pounding too hard against the floor.

The Doctor stayed behind in stunned silence for about ten seconds before scrabbling after her.

“You can’t just walk away in the middle of a conversation!” she shouted as she raced to catch up.

Yaz just laughed.

“Oh really?” she said. “Well, for starters, two people need to talk for it to count as a conversation, and I didn’t hear you offering up much there. And also, I don’t want to have this conversation. I have been trying not to have this conversation for weeks.”

“Yaz…”

“I don’t think you get to tell me no and then stare forlornly at me for weeks about it, I don’t think that’s fair. If you wanted normal you have to be normal.”

“Yaz—”

“I don’t want you to hurt either but if we could just, I don’t know, be, then maybe all of this crap would hurt less and I could—”

“Yaz!”

The Doctor reached forward and grabbed Yaz’ hand, pulling her to a stop. It felt like the whole ship tilted on its axis then, righting itself around the Doctor’s cool palm against her own. It felt like the touch knocked all the air out of Yaz’ lungs. She looked between their joined hands and then up at the Doctor’s face. Except she wasn’t looking at Yaz, she was looking at something over Yaz’ head.

For a moment, Yaz was confused, until she heard that high-pitched whine again. And then she sighed.

“They’re behind me, aren’t they?” she said.

“Yes,” the Doctor said, and she yanked hard on her hand again and pulled her around a corner just in time for two blasts to singe past where they had been standing.

They waited for a moment, Yaz trying to calm her racing heartbeat, wondering stupidly if the Doctor was too, before they both peered very cautiously around the corner. There were about ten of the robots down the hallway, lurching towards them like they were trying to sniff them out.

“Doctor,” Yaz said, “these robots. They’re not… sentient at all, are they?”

“No, I don’t think so,” the Doctor said. She stuck one hand and the sonic out into the hall for a scan, yanking it back and away from another blast. Then she shook her head as she stared down at the readout. “Nope. Just code and wires and very angry programming.”

“Brilliant,” Yaz said.

“What—”

But Yaz threw out one arm to press the Doctor back against the wall until, a few moments later, the lead robot stuck its head around the corner towards them. Yaz didn’t give it time to line up a shot. Instead, she ducked forward so she could punch upwards as hard as she could at the underside of its head.

There was a satisfying crunch as the metal, thinner than it looked at the joint of the neck, bent a little from the punch. Apparently corporate had also cheaped out on quality casings for the combat bots it shouldn’t have bought. It staggered back, the gun atop its head spinning and firing backwards into another one of the robots behind it, blasting a smoking hole straight through it.

Yaz grinned, flexing her hand at her side. That had definitely stung, and she hoped she’d just split the skin across her knuckles rather than broken something. Right now though, she hardly cared. Right now, there were another eight robots to get through.

“Come on,” she said, glancing for a second over her shoulder at the Doctor, who looked somewhere between terrified and awed. “The TARDIS is that way!”

The robot Yaz had punched was still wobbling back and forth in confusion, blocking the hall. Yaz let out a yell and kicked it as hard as she could, sending it flying backwards into the pack of robots. The Doctor stepped up beside her then, aiming her sonic towards them and shorting out the nearest gun with a fizzle and a pop. The fear in her eyes was gone, replaced by a kind of feral glee Yaz couldn’t help but match.

Oh yeah. She really needed this right now.

She needed this singing adrenaline, the clear and destructive objective, the rush of adventure. She needed the motion, the distraction, the excitement of danger. The next ten minutes, while they got out of this jam, that was a present she could live in easily and not have to think too hard about.

Another robot lurched forward, and Yaz punched its head upward before grabbing it and smashing it into the wall, crumpling its casing while the Doctor’s sonic disabled the rest of its functions. As satisfying as punching the things was, it also hurt, and she didn’t think her hands would make it all the way through the line of robots ahead of them. So instead, Yaz stepped forward to the smoking hunk on the floor that the first robot had shot. One of its arms had been partially torn off by the blast, and Yaz planted her foot on the body to help her wrench the piece off, just in time to swing it right into the face of another robot in a shower of sparks and deflected laser blast.

“Aim for their knees, Yaz!” the Doctor said, waving the sonic high and shorting out another gun.

Yaz didn’t ignore her, exactly, it was just that she also had eyes, and she could see that every robot still standing in that hallway was training its attention on the sonic screwdriver in the Doctor’s hand. So the ones she could just knock over while the Doctor sonicked them, she did. The ones about to shoot holes straight through her friend, she smashed through the head or the neck, whatever she could reach, with every ounce of force she could muster. Just because the Doctor was needlessly careless with her own life didn’t mean Yaz had to let her get away with it.

They smashed and sonicked their way through the robots in sync with each other, a very strange dance of ducking and swinging, circling forward and back. They really did make a great team.

That thought made Yaz hit the next robot in line even harder.

“There’s just two more on this level,” the Doctor said. “Go, Yaz. Get to the TARDIS.”

This time, Yaz did ignore her on purpose, because when the Doctor turned away with the sonic, another robot crept up behind her, aiming straight for the back of her head. Yaz leapt forward with another fierce cry, swinging the robot arm in her hands so hard that the robot’s head snapped clean off and went flying down the corridor.

The Doctor turned, surprised, just in time for that last robot to slump down to the floor with an echoing thunk. The hallway was suddenly very quiet, the only sound left their heavy breathing.

“You’re welcome,” Yaz said flatly.

The Doctor just nodded, staring at her with wide eyes again. She looked like she was tempted to lean forward, to step closer. She looked, and once again stared too long at, Yaz’ lips.

Yaz turned and stomped off towards the TARDIS.

There were no other robots to be found between them and their ship, but Yaz kept hold of the robot arm until she had reached the doors, only then chucking it down the hallway. Once she did, though, it felt like she’d dropped her hold on the adrenaline keeping everything else at bay. Pain shot up her hand, radiating down her fingers and up through her wrist in sharp, stabbing jolts. Her headache returned with a vengeance. But she pushed her way through the TARDIS doors and marched straight up to the console, pulling up some scans of the cruiser immediately.

“The escape pods all deployed and they’re waiting safely for rescue,” Yaz said as soon as the Doctor entered the TARDIS and shut the doors behind her. “No other life signs on the cruiser, and the company’ll be here to get them and sort the robots in about half an hour.”

“Brilliant,” the Doctor replied softly. She had her arms folded across her chest, stepping closer to her by the console like she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to. “Nice work, Yaz.”

Yaz just nodded.

“Should we tow the escape pods to the ship, do you think?” she asked suddenly, reaching out to fiddle absently with some of the dials on the console. She didn’t really change anything; she wasn’t sure what, exactly, those particular dials did.

“They’ll be all right,” the Doctor said.

“Or—should we warn the company how awful those robots are? Couldn’t hurt, sending an SOS—”

“The cruiser’s crew can do that.”

“Sure,” Yaz said, turning again, reaching for something else. “But we could—”

“Yaz, stop,” the Doctor said suddenly. “You’re bleeding.”

She reached out and very gently took Yaz’ hand in hers. And Yaz crumpled. Her shoulders curled inwards; she couldn’t look up at the Doctor, not now, not with all the fight gone out of her. Not when she might do something even worse than shouting: cry.

“Oh, Yaz,” the Doctor said, her voice so soft and so full of kindness that Yaz let out a little noise that was somewhere between a whimper and a sob.

The Doctor examined her split knuckles carefully, skimming her thumb across the bloodied skin of her fingers. And then, she raised Yaz’ hand to her lips and kissed the back of it, the gesture so gentle and so lingering that Yaz finally looked up, air solidifying in her chest. When the Doctor pulled away, just slightly, her breath tickled at the skin of Yaz’ hand, brushing against the jagged edges of the wound, and then it wasn’t just breath. There was golden light, soft as dust motes in a shaft of sunlight, swirling up from the Doctor’s lungs and into Yaz’ skin.

When the Doctor raised her head, the wound was gone. Yaz gasped; the Doctor ran her thumb across her fingers again, this time over unblemished, unbloodied skin. But she did not let go.

“What was that?” Yaz asked. “That was—that day we met, when you fell asleep on Grace’s couch—you looked like that.”

“Regeneration energy,” the Doctor answered quietly. “It’s—remember, when we met I said I’d just been a white-haired Scotsman?”

“Yeah,” Yaz said, a little smile tugging at the corner of her mouth at the memory of the train. “I didn’t really understand it then.”

“I didn’t really explain,” the Doctor replied with a shrug. “It’s—well, it’s a long story…”

She paused for a moment, and Yaz expected her to leave it at that, again, and this time she was too tired to argue about it. But the Doctor held tight to her hand, and she continued.

“Time Lords, we don’t die so much as change. We regenerate, every single cell in our bodies turning over for a new one. Same software, different case, essentially, although all those memories and feelings and experiences rerouted through different neurons tend to get translated differently.”

The smile she offered at that was incredibly sad, and Yaz suspected she was trying to offer multiple explanations at the same time. But her head still hurt too much to work it out, not when there was one very important thing getting in the way.

“But—if you gave that to me—Doctor, what does that mean for you?” she asked, alarmed.

“It’s fine,” the Doctor said. “Turns out I’ve got… rather more of that hanging around than I was led to believe.”

“But—it was just a cut, it would’ve healed fine on its own. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“’Course it was. You were hurt, and I could fix it. I wanted to.” The Doctor’s smile widened a little at that. “Speaking of, you’ve still got that headache, haven’t you?”

Yaz couldn’t speak, still too overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Doctor’s gesture over so small an injury. Instead, she just gave a very small nod. The Doctor smiled again, pulled Yaz closer by their joined hands, and pressed another kiss to her forehead. Yaz closed her eyes, letting herself lean in, letting herself feel the soft warmth of that golden light filter through her. The pain bled out of her temples, out of her neck and shoulders as the tension she’d been carrying all day eased. She’d never felt as safe as she did right in that moment.

She’d never felt as loved.

She didn’t realize she was crying until the Doctor finally pulled away. She reached up to cradle her cheek in her hand, swiping away a tear track with the pad of her thumb, until Yaz blinked open her eyes to find her view blurry with tears.

“What else hurts, Yaz?” the Doctor said, so kind and so tender and, for once, so very patient.

And the sight of her like that broke Yaz’ heart all over again. What else hurt? What didn’t hurt? Which truth would sharing make better?

I love you and I can’t ever have you, not really.

You’re still keeping things from me, like you can’t trust me. Like you won’t ever trust me.

“You’re acting like this is already over,” Yaz finally said, her voice cracking through her tears. “But I’m here, Doctor. I’m right here.”  

The Doctor’s eyes went wide, and Yaz thought, perhaps, she saw a hint of tears there, too. But she didn’t get a chance to see, really, before the Doctor pulled her in to a hug, practically crushing her to her chest. Yaz hardly minded, wrapping her arms tight around the Doctor’s waist, tucking her nose against her neck, and wishing she didn’t ever have to let go.

“I’m sorry, Yaz,” she murmured against her hair. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Yaz whispered back. “Just let me in.”

The Doctor held her for a long, long time. Yaz lost track of the minutes, and she didn’t care. She could have stayed there forever, warm and safe in her embrace, the soft thrum of double heartbeats beneath her ear.

“I thought I was being clever, for a change,” the Doctor said finally. “I thought I was… sparing you, somehow. Sparing us both. Think I just made it worse.”

“Might’ve done,” Yaz replied, her laugh bubbly and crackled with tears.

“Yasmin Khan, you’re… astonishing,” the Doctor continued. “You deserve so much better than me. So much more than I can give you.”

Yaz raised her head at that, shifting so she could look the Doctor in the eye.

“I think I get a say in that too, Doctor,” she said.

The Doctor nodded at that, swallowing hard. Her eyes are too bright with unshed tears.

“What a right pair of idiots we make, eh?” she said.

When she laughed, Yaz couldn’t help but join her. It felt, somehow, like they were on the edge of something, like they had been while staring out at the ocean floor, like they had been on that rocky beach. And now that they were here again, Yaz understood that reluctance to step forward and out into the unknown. She knew what she wanted, but couldn’t make that choice for the Doctor.

“There’s still so much I want to tell you,” the Doctor said at last. “But first, I…” She paused, cupping Yaz’ cheek again, her eyes darting all over her face. “Yaz, can I…”

She trailed off, again, but this time, Yaz knew what she was trying to say. This time, she could meet her halfway.

“I’d like that.”

When the Doctor kissed her, it was so soft, so blissfully tender, it almost didn’t feel real. Yaz melted into it, into her, like her whole life had been leading up to this moment. Like the only place she had ever needed to be was right here.

Yaz broke the kiss eventually, regretfully, opening her eyes to find the Doctor smiling at her, for all there was a little bit of a worried scrunch to her nose. But Yaz just smiled back.

“Am I dreaming?” she finally whispered.

“If you are,” the Doctor replied with a soft huff of a laugh, “then so am I.”

At that, Yaz beamed.

“God, what a day,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe I ought to shout at you and punch robots more often.”

“That was—” the Doctor spluttered. “It was very reckless, Yaz, you shouldn’t—”

Yaz leaned in and interrupted her protests with another kiss. She had, it seemed, finally found a way to quiet the Doctor’s nervous rambling.

“Let’s… should we… library?” she suggested, fiddling with the edge of the Doctor’s coat once she’d pulled away again. “And we can talk?”

The Doctor nodded, but that nervous look was back in her eyes.

“Yaz, I’m not… I’ve never been good at this. Any of this. This face especially. I want to, I do, I just… I’m not sure I know how.”

Yaz nodded too. She was tempted to respond with a quip, break the tension, brush aside the worry for now. But instead, she just held the Doctor’s hand.

“I’m no good at it either,” she confessed. “Want to try with me anyway?”

This time, it was the Doctor’s turn to beam, bright as starlight, brilliant as the regeneration energy she’d so selflessly shared. She didn’t need to say much now, before Yaz tugged her along by the hand to the library, where they could talk while wrapped safely in blankets and in each other. All she needed to say was an echo of what Yaz had said to her.

“I’d like that, too.”

Notes:

Hello hello!! Excited to sneak this one in just at the end of Pride month!! :)

I've been working on quite the monster of an AU, which should be ready to start sharing... sooooon... but in the meantime, if you're reading this in June of 2024 when I posted it, and you have not yet preordered a copy of the Thasmin fanzine More of the Universe, please go check out thasminfanzine on twitter, tumblr, or instagram!! I have a story in the zine and helped put it together, and believe me when I say it is a GORGEOUS book filled with truly amazing art and stories you won't want to miss. All proceeds go to charity!! :)

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and hope you all have a great week!