Chapter Text
Yaz pulls her hat down over her ears and looks around the warehouse again. Nothing’s changed since the last time she checked, which isn’t surprising seeing as it was less than a minute ago. It’s a bare-bones building, dark steel walls and steel pillars and minimal windows. There are lines of metal shelves stacked with boxes and shipping crates in a pile at the other end of the room. She’d peered into some boxes when they came in but all they had were nondescript electronics. Moonlight was filtering in through the plastic skylights in the roof, painting everything in soft white light. It's still dark enough that everything around them looks greyscale. The Doctor is scanning behind some boxes with her sonic, lighting the area orange. She never finished explaining what she was looking for - but she did give a detailed history of the pH chart that was more entertaining than expected.
“We should just call someone.”
“Who you gonna call?”, questions Ryan from his spot nearby attempting a casual lean on a pillar. He's only failing a bit. He doesn’t seem as cold as Yaz, but it's clear he's just as cautious about standing around in a warehouse at night looking for mysterious figures. He's been intermittently stealing glances at the door while looking down at his phone, the screen illuminating his face.
The Doctor pops out from behind some dusty machinery with her hand in the air like she’s answering a question, waving it back and forth. “Ooh! Ghostbusters! I know that one!”
Yaz feels her face split into a smile and promptly becomes distracted when the Doctor smiles back. She has a really great smile. Getting distracted is just common sense. She’s currently wearing what appear to be night-vision goggles, and Yaz notes that they’re a recent addition. She definitely wasn’t wearing them when they left the TARDIS and they couldn’t have fit in her pockets. Probably. If she could ‘dimensionally engineer’ bigger pockets Yaz would really have to ask her about it.
Ryan clears his throat, and she realises they’ve been smiling at each other a little longer than necessary. The Doctor blinks, then looks down to her beeping sonic screwdriver and bounces off to investigate, her coat swishing behind her. Yaz’s cheeks flush with a not unwelcome warmth as she watches her go and she turns to look at him with her eyebrows raised. She’s trying to play breezy and unaffected but it falls flat as she starts to shiver a little.
“What?”
He respectfully ignores her blush, or maybe he can’t see it in the dark.
“I’m saying, who would we even call about this?”
Earlier, Ryan and Yaz had gotten dropped in their own time period to loiter while the Doctor ran repairs on the TARDIS. They’d spent some time playing high stakes laser tag on an ice planet and during the game a snowstorm had blown into the console room. No-one owned up to leaving the door unlocked, but everyone pitched in to clean up as much as they could. The Doctor flew them back to Earth, then shooed them off so she could pull apart the intricate wiring and dry it off. When they returned after hot chocolates and a phone call to Graham (resting after twisting his knee diving away from an accidental friendly-fire laser beam) the Doctor was eager to set off somewhere new. Until a screen started flashing, then she was eager to run around this industrial district in the dark to look for something 'skittery'.
“It’s probably just kids messing around. It would be pretty easy to scare them home.”
“You can’t call the police on them just for hanging about. And if they’re trespassing, so are we.”
The Doctor, still staring at her sonic, clambers down from the crate she was standing on at the other side of the room. She’s pushed her goggles up onto her head along with her hair, but a couple strands have fallen around her face. Yaz feels the urge to push them back around her ears, even from across the room. She blinks a few times and looks away, but the feeling doesn't really wane.
“It’s definitely not human. Too acidic”, the Doctor remarks, mostly to herself, while walking across the room to the duo. She looks up at them, beaming the way she does whenever she gets to call them a team name. “Alright gang! Let’s go!”
“Let’s go do what?”, says Ryan, less eager.
“From my readings of the area, and those eggs over by the crates, there’s an alien somewhere around here. Big. Too big to belong here. Traces of some kind of personal teleportation device, so it’s probably only the one. So, let’s go find it!” Her smile doesn’t falter, and she might be staring at Yaz again. It’s cute, but not as cute as it would be if Yaz’s feet were warmer.
Wait.
“Eggs?”
“Yep!”
She drops her sonic into her (dimensionally engineered?) pocket, then grabs both of their hands, pulling them off towards the door they’d entered from, the sound of her boots echoing in the high ceilings. Yaz blushes again. This really shouldn’t be happening. There’s an egg-laying acid alien running around. But all she can focus on is how soft the Doctor’s hands are, how warm she is, the calluses forming on her fingertips from tinkering brushing against her knuckles. She’d seen a guitar sitting in a corner of the TARDIS’ library one night, and wonders if the Doctor plays. Ryan has already let go, following a little behind, but Yaz tightens her grip. It’s the best way to warm up her hands.