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It was quick, like a flash, like a blink, squeezed impossibly into the moment between Tecteun’s watch slipping out from between the Doctor’s fingers, and the distant clink of it landing deep within the ship.
A vision – one that faded like a dream the more that she tried to grasp at it. Less of a vision, no, more like a feeling, a sense, a warmth.
His face had been absolutely gorgeous. Her face. Their face. Yes – another self, an afterimage pressing gently at the edges of her memory. Unknown selves, unknowable selves, were held impossibly in stasis between one moment and the next – but not him, not the Doctor. The Doctor – that Doctor – made her body feel light, lighter than she’d ever known it. Holding him – oh, she’d held him – was holding herself, was holding the selves she’d been and the selves she’d never remember – and knitting herself back together, whole and complete if only for the briefest moment. Things were heavy here – the Flux and Time and all the things she’d never said weighing down on her body just as soon as she returned to it. But for a second there – for a moment she’d been him, she’d been new, and even standing now in her own TARDIS, her cheeks hurt just a little from how she’d been smiling.
He’d loved her. He’d loved her, and it’d knocked the wind out of her, her body coming back down to the ground. She could never say things like that. And yet he could – and who knows if they could, the ones in the watch, heading down and down into the unknown. That’s why you got me, he seemed to say, anew. And the thought was good – of everything that she’d collected in this life, everything that had weighed her down, giving life to someone different, to someone honest and light and happy. A life for a life. Still, she wanted that life. She wanted him. She wanted to be him. Why him, and not her?
I want to tell you everything, she’d told Yaz, only moments ago. But then he was there, his arms around her, his love so certain – you never do.
She thought of her, of those eyes, hurt and searching and grappling, always, for that certainty, that clarity, that love that she could never give her. That love that he gave so freely. And it made her sick, it made her angry, it made her want to scream and cry and reach down into the console to grab the watch – to fill out her deficient self with whoever it was she might have been, to find whatever was missing in among the clamour and hurt of all those selves –
Then the watch landed, softly, against the very bottom of the ship’s labyrinthine underbelly.
She knows, the Doctor – the new Doctor – had said.
The Doctor – alone, safe, for the first time in a long time, in her TARDIS, let out a breath she thought she might have been holding ever since the Master had taken her to Gallifrey. And then she cried, unabashedly, like she never had before in this body.
‘Yaz?’ she said after she’d cleaned herself up, a whisper into the intercom in her room.
‘Doctor?’
‘You wanna watch a film or something?’