Chapter Text
It became a common enough conversation in the TARDIS during Yaz’s first few years traveling with the Doctor, back when she had (foolishly, she now realizes) hoped to learn more about this bubbly, enigmatic alien who had spirited her away from Sheffield and on to, well, everywhere.
Generally, it went something like this:
“So what’s your real name, then?”
“The Doctor.”
“Right, but I mean your proper name.”
“…The Doctor.”
“But that’s an honorific, not a name. Like, I’m Police Constable Yasmin Khan, but I don’t go round calling myself ‘the Constable.’ ”
“Ooh, maybe you should! Rather dashing, that.”
“Please just tell me your name, Doctor.”
“You just said it!”
“Why are you like this?!”
“I’m getting a bit concerned you might be concussed, Yaz. Did one of those sentient dodgeballs bonk you in the head yesterday when we were escaping from the Moon Where It’s Always Gym Class?”
Then the Doctor would fuss over her, shining a light in her eyes, holding the sonic up to one temple and then the other, probing her head for bumps. Even back then, Yaz knew it was pure theater—a feeble attempt to divert her attention away from the subject the Doctor was so blatantly avoiding. But she went along with it, because she couldn’t help but follow wherever the Doctor led, whether it was to a different conversation topic or the heat death of the universe.
Now, Yaz thinks she’s starting to understand why the Doctor doesn’t tell anyone her real name. Speaking a secret thing out loud gives it form, gives it power. It’s like summoning a ghost into the room; it’s going to make itself known, whether it’s rattling the china or standing over your bed in the middle of the night.
Yaz knows because it’s what Dan did to her last week at that blasted storage facility, somewhere around their seventh (or eighth?) time getting incinerated by Daleks.
Have you ever told her?
Yaz had been doing a bang-up job these past few years of shunting her increasingly complicated feelings for the Doctor into a shadowy corner of her mind, occasionally letting them crawl out to bathe in the watery blue light of a threadbare hologram. But when she finally found the Doctor again after so long away, and her friend dropped everything to wrap Yaz in a hug that made every muscle in her body go slack with joy, the blinding glow of the other woman’s presence chased all those shadows away.
And maybe Yaz had averted her eyes from that light, and maybe the Doctor hadn’t noticed that something had changed; but Dan did. And she knows from four years tromping all over the globe with him that once that bloody Scouse susses something out, he never keeps it to himself—whether or not there’s anything to be done about it. Yaz can’t decide whether it’s his most annoying trait or his best one.
Is it that obvious?
Dan called it into being, this way that she feels about the Doctor, and Yaz didn’t deny it. And now it won’t leave her alone.
She can sense it sitting across from her at the breakfast table, or bending over her as she spins up the photon accelerator coils on the console; she can feel its weight resting beside her in bed at night, or whatever counts as night when you’re drifting through the Time Vortex.
It’s got a shape now; but Yaz knows enough not to give it a name, too.
At this moment, it’s a palpable presence at her side as she sits on the steps of the grating, pretending to read a book while the Doctor yanks sundry TARDIS innards out from beneath the console like a dodgy surgeon. Yaz is finding it difficult to take her eyes off the other woman as she works—not out of interest in the mechanics of the ship, but in the mechanic herself: bracers hanging loose at her sides, henley sleeves rolled up to reveal lightly muscled forearms, messy hair barely held back by the welding goggles perched atop her head, face streaked with engine grease.
And as Yaz watches, the thing that is the way she feels about the Doctor begins to solidify like raspberry Jelly.
“Whatcha reading?”
She lets out an extremely uncool noise when she looks up to see the Doctor kneeling in front of her, eyes sparkling.
“Erm…”
Shit. What am I reading? Shit. Yaz had pulled the volume from a shelf in the 783rd library—the one that’s mostly Earth books—this morning out of a vague sense of interest, but now she can’t remember what it was she was interested in. Not with the Doctor’s face this close to hers, a bead of perspiration dripping from her hairline to her forehead to her cheek before tracing along the delicate line of her jaw.
So the Doctor can sweat. That’s interesting.
Y’know. Empirically.
Not waiting for an answer, the other woman extricates the book from Yaz’s hands, holding her page with one finger to inspect the cover. “ ‘Pervye Stupeni: Zapiski Inzhenera,’ ” she reads. When Yaz looks confused, the Doctor amends, “Ah, of course, TARDIS translation matrix. For you, I expect it’s called ‘The First Steps: An Engineer’s Notes.’ My bad, as the kids say. Do the kids say that? At some point in Earth’s history, I’m almost definitely certain the kids said that. Anyway, cosmonauts! Brilliant.”
Oh, right. The Soviet space program. Yaz had wandered the stacks that morning with no destination in mind, browsing idly, running her fingers along the spines like her mum had always scolded her for doing at Waterstones when she and Sonya were little.
The Doctor once told Yaz that even she doesn’t know how many libraries the TARDIS contains (“I swear, they breed like Toluan salt-beetles in springtime,” she’d said). Some are as elegant and fastidious as the Bodleian, while others don’t even have shelves, much less a card catalog. Once, she and Ryan stumbled across a zero-gravity library where he nearly got his teeth knocked out by a rogue first edition of “Infinite Jest.”
The books in the 783rd library, however, are at least loosely organized by topic. This morning, Yaz came across a section devoted to the history of human space exploration; and, hey, she’s a human exploring space. Her eyes skimmed across the titles: “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” “Handprints on Hubble,” “Failure Is Not an Option,” “Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space,” and one tantalizingly called “Mystery on Mars: What Really Happened at Bowie Base One?”
Then, a book literally dropped into Yaz’s hands—the one the Doctor is flipping through now with characteristic interest. But when she hits a particular page section, her expression goes from curious to grave.
“All right, Doctor?”
“Yeah, I’m…fine,” the Doctor says, transparently not fine as her eyes trace down the page, brow furrowing.
Yaz nudges the book away from the Doctor’s face with the tip of her finger, forcing the other woman to meet her eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
It’s a request she’s made countless times, in countless ways, and it’s nearly always greeted by avoidance, dismissal, or your bog-standard “No time! Run! ” So she’s surprised when, this time, the Doctor actually answers.
“This author, Aleksei Ivanov.” She points to the name on the front cover. “It’s a pseudonym he had to publish under so the KGB wouldn’t arrest him for revealing state secrets. His real name was Oleg Ivanovsky. Soviet rocket scientist— the Soviet rocket scientist, in fact. Absolute genius. He was the chief designer of Sputnik 1, the first satellite humans ever launched into orbit, and Vostok 1, the spacecraft that carried the first human into orbit.”
“Yuri Gagarin,” Yaz supplies. It’s an easy one, but she still expects the Doctor to toss out a bright Five points to Yaz!
But her expression doesn’t waver. “But Ivanovsky also designed Sputnik 2, which is…a less cheery story.”
Yaz knows this one too; not because she learnt it in school, but because she was the kind of child who sat alone on the swingset at recess, reading books about dogs because her parents wouldn’t let her have one. “Laika,” she murmurs.
The Doctor nods. “Of all the sad stories in the whole history of your planet, Yaz, the big ones and the small ones, Laika’s is one of the saddest.” She flexes her fingers in the air, as if searching for something to fix.
“I remember reading about it when I were a kid. Made me so angry,” Yaz says.
“Humans are capable of such beautiful, generous, creative acts, but you can also be so, so brutal and callous. Not you you, of course,” she clarifies with a small smile. “I mean the ones who aren’t remotely Yaz-like.”
“Of course,” Yaz mutters, trying not to blush. The Doctor says nice things about you all the time! She’s your best mate! she shouts at herself internally. Why is it suddenly a whole big thing?
The Doctor rises and begins to pace. “Imagine finding a lovely little dog on the street with lovely floppy ears and a lovely waggy tail who greets everyone around her with nothing but trust and…and…love! Imagine finding this dog, taking her to a top-secret government lab, and submitting her to a series of sadistic experiments, all because she’s too sweet and naive to know these people are hurting her!”
Yaz shakes her head as she watches the Doctor whip herself up into a frenzy of compassion. “I can’t. It’s absolutely horrible.”
“Of course you can’t. Because you’re good, Yaz. You’re the top! You’re a Waldorf salad!”
“I’m…wut?”
The Doctor makes a dismissive gesture. “Cole Porter song. Neither here nor there. Point is, these people, who had the temerity to call themselves scientists, did what they did because Khrushchev handed them a ticking clock, and they wanted to show up the bloody Americans. So they took Laika, who was so easygoing, so docile, and they implanted electrodes under her skin and sealed her inside a space capsule—which, mind you, they left sitting outside on the launchpad in a Russian winter for three days before they shot her into orbit. Before they sent her off to die. For them. ”
Yaz gets to her feet and lays a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Doctor…”
The other woman turns away and leans into the console. “The official story was that she survived in orbit for a full week before she died. A lie, of course. It was Ivanovsky who told the world what really happened, when he published that book. A week. Please. ”
The Doctor lets out a long breath before continuing. “Laika lived for, at most, seven hours. It was a miracle she even survived the launch. The engineers figured out a few days beforehand that the thermal system on Sputnik wasn’t up to scratch, but they just shrugged their shoulders and went forward with the mission anyway. Playing with a living thing like that.”
Yaz leans against the console a few feet from the Doctor. “I get the sense this isn’t entirely about the dog.”
“D’you wanna know how exactly she died, Yaz? In agony. Cooked to death by solar radiation from the outside and heat from the engines inside. All because of a basic thermodynamic miscalculation. Morons.” She takes a shaky breath. “Laika died on November 3, 1957, but the satellite stayed in orbit for another five months, circling the Earth 2,570 times. Sputnik 2 was a symbol of progress for the humans who put it up there. But for that little dog? It was her coffin.”
When the Doctor finally turns to look at her, Yaz is flabbergasted. There are tears in her eyes. Proper tears. She can’t remember the last time she saw her friend cry, if ever.
“The first living creature ever to slip the surly bonds of Earth,” the Doctor continues wetly, “and she had no idea what was happening to her. No say in her own fate. And she died confused, in pain, terrified. They betrayed her, Yaz. She trusted them, and they betrayed her.”
When it seems like the Doctor is finished, Yaz follows her first instinct and pulls her into a tight hug. And after a long, awkward moment, the other woman reciprocates. Without her coat on, the Doctor feels so small and fragile in her arms. I’d do anything for you, Yaz thinks, inhaling the scent of engine oil and…marzipan? Does Time Lord sweat smell like marzipan?
“I’m sorry,” Yaz says when they pull apart.
“What for?” The Doctor does a poor job of hiding that she’s wiping the tears from her face.
For thinking about how your sweat smells like marzipan when you’re in the middle of a profound emotional crisis. “That you’re hurting. Because of some random book I brought in here that fell into my hands.”
“Hang on. It fell into your hands?”
“Yeah. Bit weird, but…”
“Of course.” The Doctor throws her hands into the air and raises her voice. “You think you’re soooo clever, don’t you?”
It takes Yaz a moment to realize that she isn’t speaking to her, but to the TARDIS.
“Something analogous to the situation? Force a moment of catharsis? Well it didn’t work. See?” She twirls in a circle, arms spread wide. “Not. Bothered.”
The Time Rotor vwoorps in a way that Yaz somehow knows is both admonishing and concerned.
“That’s a bit rich, comin’ from you,” the Doctor shoots back, staring daggers at the Time Rotor.
Yaz is beginning to feel as if she’s walked into the middle of a domestic argument that she has no business hearing. “I’m just gonna…” She walks slowly backward.
The Doctor spares her a parting glance, something like regret showing through her anger for a moment. Then she gives a small, resigned nod.
Yaz heads down the hall, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. Right before she vanishes from earshot, she hears the Doctor shout at her ship, “See? Now you’ve made things weird!”