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It should have been awkward, really.
Two women, perched on a bed, facing one another. It should have been a deeply uncomfortable experience.
Yaz was wearing her pants and absolutely nothing else. The Doctor was in her bra and the loose, thick shorts she always wore when she couldn’t tuck.
She was bad at opening up about things, and she was particularly bad about opening up about this, but the calming motions of Yaz’s soft hand on her knee - and the context making it a rather unavoidable conversation - had given her the push she needed to finally say the things that she probably should’ve eighteen months ago.
It had all been going so well - they’d finally managed to swallow their respective baggage and just get on with it, having kicked Dan out, only for things to go wrong just at the last minute.
Over six months of gentle escalation and make-out sessions that were beginning to leave them both rather breathless and hot under the collar, they’d managed to find five minutes (and a TARDIS bedroom) that they had to themselves. And then the Doctor had to go and ruin it for the both of them.
She knew it would be different, but she hadn’t expected to go over all claustrophobic (about her own skin, however that could be rationalised to a point where it made sense) and leap off of her girlfriend muttering apologies and constantly readjusting her shorts. She’d done this recently - in the last 500 years, at least - so why was she suddenly so… Incapable? It wasn’t even that the equipment had changed.
But that seemed to be the problem within itself. Instead of being just another part of her, like her fingers or her head, that was something that felt wrong. It wasn’t a natural extension of her, or that wasn’t what it felt like; it felt as she would imagine it would if someone taped a cucumber to the top of her head and told her that it was now a part of her skull. She kept thinking she could shrug it off, then got really bad emotions when she couldn’t.
Sometimes, it was like stress. Others, annoyance. Sometimes it felt as if she couldn’t breathe and if even a hand brushed against it she’d feel physically sick then miserable for two days.
And it was spreading, too. Whenever she looked at her hands, or her jaw, or her nose, or her hips, or her shoulders, or her feet, or her eyebrows, or her-
“Doctor?” Yaz’s voice cut across the gap between them and the Doctor glanced up, then folded her hands - which she hadn’t realised she was staring at - into her lap and regretted it. She moved them onto her calves instead. “Do you want to talk about what just happened?”
The Doctor wanted to pull each of her hairs out one by one when she heard the hint of emotion in Yaz’s voice. She looked nervous, as if it was her fault, and slightly like she had been rejected. It wasn’t like she could be blamed for feeling all that. It made sense for her to feel all that. That was why the Doctor hated that she did.
“Sorry,” the Doctor said. It was the first and only thing she could think of. “I’m so sorry, Yaz, I don’t… I don’t know what that was…”
Yaz moved her thumb gently across the Doctor’s knee. “If you don’t want to have sex with me-”
“No, Yaz, I do -”
“-that’s fine.” She tried valiantly to keep the tinges of sadness from her voice, but the Doctor knew they were there because she could feel a tiny piece of each of her hearts break off and cut the insides of her arteries.
The Doctor just gazed at her girlfriend across the ever growing expanse of mattress between them. Yaz was smiling, and it made the Doctor ache more. It made her love her more. Even in the midst of everything she was feeling, she was still prioritising the Doctor’s needs and comfort.
“Yaz… I do, believe me. Please, don’t think this is anything to do with you.”
She relaxed visibly, the kindness of her smile breaking through to her eyes once the fog covering them lifted. “What is it then?” she asked gently.
The Doctor picked up Yaz’s hand in her own and played with her fingers for a little while as the words coalesced from the whirlpool behind her eyes. She saw it, then, and held up both of their hands to look at, one next to the other.
“See it?” the Doctor asked, quietly.
Yaz frowned and shook her head.
The Doctor sighed. “See how your fingers are rounder? How the knuckles don’t protrude as much? And how the bottom knuckle of your thumb is small and round? Now look at mine.”
Yaz’s eyes flicked between the two hands in front of her, but her face showed no sign of recognition of what the Doctor was talking about. “They’re pretty similar, Doctor.”
It’s like being an artist. You have an idea of what you want your art to look like, and it sits in your head.
You
know what it is
supposed
to look like. You have the concept in your head, in all its glory, and you attempt to broadcast it to the world. But, when you make it, it’s not perfect. You can’t get the shadows to fall right - and you mucked up the proportions - and that bit there just won’t look like what you want it to. You see a mess. You see all the bits that went wrong - all the parts of it that you couldn’t reproduce from the template in your head. When someone else looks at it, though, they can’t see what it’s
meant
to be. You may have produced something really good, but you have perfection to compare it to: they don’t. They never had that other image in their head in the first place, so they can’t pick out the places where it doesn’t match up.
“I
can see the difference.” She sighed again, scratched her face, then flexed her fingers. “And it kills me. Yaz, this body is a
man’s.”
“Implying it belongs to a man, which it doesn’t.”
“I know - I know - that I’m not a man. I feel it.” She jammed a too-square finger in the space between her hearts. “I know. But the world doesn’t, and my body certainly doesn’t, and I wish I could touch you like how a woman could-”
Yaz took the Doctor’s hand and laid it over her cheek. “You’re doing it right now.”
“You know what I mean,” she mumbled miserably. “It was just, then, when I was kissing you, I became so aware of… It and- It’s not meant to be there anymore. It’s… Wrong .”
Yaz ran her thumb over the back of the Doctor’s hand where it was still pressed to her face. The Doctor couldn’t meet her eye. Even how she was sat made her far too aware of the divergences in what was and what should be. She shifted her weight, pressed her eyes closed. She pulled her hand back, drew her knees up to her chest, and hung her head between them. She felt a shiver rake all the way across her; it was a cold that seemed to emanate from her very bones. It felt like it forced itself out from somewhere deep inside of her. It took every inch of strength she had managed to glean to resist the urge to unzip her skin down the spine.
She could regenerate. She could end this misery and take a new body - one that was hers. What was stopping her from doing that? What was-
Soft fingers wound their way into the hair at the nape of her neck.
Oh, yeah. Yaz. That was why she’d stayed. Yaz loved this version of her.
It probably all would have been easier if this even made any sense. Time Lords were genderless beings, for all intensive purposes. Unlike humans, who appeared to have both a predetermined sex (although not as binary as they pretended it was) and some sort of psychological gender identity to boot (which was even less binary), Gallifreyans had done away with the whole affair upon discovering regeneration. What was the point in having such things when you changed it all the time?
So why had her brain decided to turn on her this time? What had gone wrong inside of her that she now felt like this?
She tried to push herself towards the feeling of Yaz’s fingers on her neck, knowing that where she was headed was nowhere good. She wouldn’t gain anything by convincing herself that how she felt was a flaw. She knew that. Of course she did. So why was she so fucking deteremined to make herself believe it?
Misery has gravity, and it’ll drag you in. Once it has you, it’ll keep eating mass from you, until all you can think about - all you can convince yourself you deserve - is what you’re already feeling.
Yaz had been nothing but kind. As ever. If anything, it was Yasmin Khan who didn’t deserve all this. She deserved to be with someone who was actually capable of opening up, both physically and emotionally. She deserved someone who could love her in a human way - and all the Doctor could give her was the universe.
She picked up her head and put it on her knees, meeting Yaz’s eyes shakily. “Do you think it’ll ever go away?” her voice sounded small, even to her.
Yaz brushed a thread of hair out of the Doctor’s face and tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” she said, softly. “But I think you’ll get better at dealing with it.” She pressed a gentle kiss to the Doctor’s forehead.
“I think I’m really miserable, Yaz.”
Yaz almost laughed at her - her face broke into an adoring smile that curled downwards at the edges. The Doctor knew it, and she knew that Yaz knew it, but she still thought it was worth saying. As a way of admitting to herself - and showing Yaz that she was, really trying to be better. She’d kept Yaz shut out for far too long.
“But there aren’t really the right words to describe it all.” She pulled a blanket from behind her and offered it to Yaz, who was still noticeably bare. “Are you cold?”
Yaz took one corner in each of her hands, the blanket draped around her back, then opened her arms. The Doctor rolled around and laid down so that her shoulders rested in Yaz’s lap and the back of her head pressed against her sternum. Yaz closed her arms around the both of them and kissed the Doctor’s head again.
“You wouldn’t have to find them, even if there were. I don’t need to know everything.”
“But I want you to understand,” the Doctor mumbled. “It's important to me.”
Yaz ran gentle fingers over the Doctor's arm. She didn't feel hot, which she probably should've.
Time Lords ran a few degrees cooler than humans did, which meant that Yaz’s touch was normally slightly scalding - but, as it stood, they were the same temperature.
It made the Doctor realise the vulnerability of the position that Yaz was in. Even as they sat, despite the blanket, and despite the Doctor's back being to her, Yaz was exposed: she was wearing, truly, the bare minimum, and had absolutely nothing to hide behind. The Doctor played with the hem of her shorts and tried to figure out how to phrase the next sentence.
“Sorry,” she ended up saying. It was the best opening she could think of. “It's like… You've given me so much of yourself, and shown so much trust in doing that, and I'm basically still fully dressed, and- I'm sorry, Yaz. It's like I've taken advantage of you.”
The Doctor felt a cheek come into contact with the top of her head. “Don't be silly, Doctor.” Her voice was quiet and kind. It filled the tiny space they'd carved for themselves.
The Doctor frowned.
“I know it's not the same, but I was never particularly confident in myself physically before I joined the force. Most of my randy teenage encounters were done with a shirt on. Showing skin means different things for different people, and you can't hold yourself to a cis standard. Your timeline, your expression, what you're comfortable with, will all be different. We can take it at whatever pace you wanna go at. I honestly don't care how much of you is on show as long as you're comfortable. There's no point in doing any of this if it's not fun, and it won't be fun if you're dysphoric as hell the whole time. I'd rather a happy Doctor with her shorts on than a miserable Doctor who feels like she owes me nudity. Which she doesn't.”
“You’re incredible, Yasmin Khan,” was all the Doctor could mumble back.
“Just trying to keep pace with my girlfriend.”
There was a practised routine to it. She knew where she could touch, how to hold out her arms so that they didn’t brush against her, what angles she could hold her neck at, and exactly when and where to close her eyes. Her strict routine of avoidance of her body was a carefully practised affair; one that she had gotten far too good at.
She sat in the shower, her knees drawn up to her chin, her eyes staring blankly at the wall ahead of her. It occurred that she should remember that view, as she should remember that moment. She would not.
It was the hundredth time that she had felt this way, and it was the hundredth time that she had stared at the same wall having the same thoughts. She knew this, but she couldn’t remember a single prior. Even after she turned the water off, she stayed curled up in the base of the tub and stared at her legs.
Why were they shaped like that? She had burnt herself out of emotion, now, as she often did. There was nothing left to feel - which left her with the hollowness that always followed it. Now that she was all out, her tanks emptied, the best that she could do was stare at her body with a blankness and lack of recognition.
In the same way that her brain deleted these moments from her memory, it would often hit a point where processing that her body was hers became too much - and it reverted. Now, instead of the misery and the claustrophobia and the barely restrained desires to take off her skin, all she had was a dumb unrecognition. The legs she saw weren’t hers. She felt no connection to them, intellectually or emotionally, and would not be surprised if they moved by someone else’s whim. She shivered, naked and wet and in the bottom of the bath, but didn’t want to move. Towelling herself down was her least favourite activity.
When she finally got out, she wrapped the towel around her chest and perched on the edge of the tub. Now she had something to keep the heat in, she could sit and wait to air dry. Her clothes were folded on the floor, brought in so she could get dressed quickly. She stared at them blankly.
Every thought in her head was too loud; they pierced the quiet and broke through the stillness the burn out had draped over her bones.
It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been an hour, but, eventually, the Doctor found it within herself to stand again. Her limbs were slow, as if the lethargy that had wormed its way through her brain had infected the rest of her muscles and cursed them with an acrid slowness. She could barely lift her arms to slip her t-shirt on. She layered loose shorts over loose shorts, tucked her feet away in woolly socks, and tried to convince herself that it was how her jumper was falling that made her abdomen look so square, and not that it was actually just her.
She plodded miserably back to the bedroom she had left, where Yaz was half asleep on the bed. She knew she would feel worse by morning if she didn’t shower - sticky, greasy and covered in so much hair -, even if it did also make it temporarily so, so much worse.
Yaz blinked hazy eyes open when the Doctor shut the door behind her. She smiled weakly, and Yaz returned it. She rolled onto one side and stuck her arm up, still with the corner of the blanket in it. The Doctor fell into her arms. She faced her girlfriend, face buried in her chest, arms tucked in and folded up between them. She couldn’t lay on her side with her legs pressed together - that reminded her far too much of things she couldn’t bear to think about - so rested one knee on top of Yaz’s.
Yaz fell asleep quickly. The Doctor was still warring with the misery that was chewing its way through her stomach and the thoughts that she knew were irrational but wouldn’t go away.
Eventually, the meditative repetition of Yaz’s breathing lulled her into a doze, and her brain - mercifully - switched completely off for a few hours.
That perfect image you keep in your head. The you that never was - that might never be. The perfect idea that you try and reach, every second of every day, and have to live with as it taunts you, forever just slightly out of your grasp - it becomes your friend. And you grow to hate it more than anything else.
There was a woman who sat in the space between the Doctor’s ribs. She was the Doctor, too, but she was so much more. She was a woman in body, as well as mind. She was everything the Doctor craved being. She had what the Doctor never could.
The changes to her body, the Doctor could brush over. When she was having an okay day - when she could keep herself together and cope - she didn’t mind that she was shorter and had a completely smooth neck. But, even on the good days, there was something she always resented that perfect version of her for.
She was content. She was content with herself, and her body, and in being with Yaz in the ways that all parties involved so desperately wanted to get stuck into. Nothing held her back.
Lots of the misery that the Doctor carried with her in her hearts was old news. A lot of it was deep scarring that would never heal - and that was something she would carry with her whatever body she was in.
But that version of her? The one who could look in the mirror and see someone looking back that she could recognise as herself? She had so much less to carry with her. She had such freedom.
She didn’t have bags under her eyes, because existence wasn’t exhausting. She didn’t have back pain from hunching over or multiple incidents of heat stroke from wearing far too many layers all of the time. She didn’t have an awful, crushing malevolence sat in the back of her head, and she didn’t have a habit of convincing herself that she wasn’t real.
The Doctor loved her. She wanted to be her, desperately, for every second that she was awake.
And she held a bitter resentment for someone who had everything she never could.
She would be lying to say it was rational, and she was fully aware of that. But emotion isn’t rational; that’s the point.
It’s just there. Untreatable. Unabatable. Unrelenting.
It’s just… There. And it never leaves you, even if you do get better at dealing with it.