Chapter Text
ONE MONTH PRIOR
"Yaz, you really need to get a move on!" the Doctor urged, hands pressed flat against a set of blueprints spread out atop the desk before her.
"I think I see it, Doc," Graham said from behind. He was peering through a scientific telescope angled high through the window at their backs. Ryan stood beside him, anxious eyes darting occasionally up at the sky as if he might be able to make out a single thing from where he stood.
It wasn't supposed to have happened like this.
None of it.
Purely by chance, whilst the Doctor had dropped by in Sheffield to pick up her companions, she'd intercepted an encoded frequency from an obviously alien source. Curiosity inevitably piqued, the four of them investigated. As it happened, a spacecraft was hovering unseen at the very edge of the atmosphere. The Doctor promised her friends that they would get to go see the real lost city of Atlantis, just as soon as she got past their shields and had a quick look.
The craft turned out to be an unlicensed and extremely illegal slave ship. Apparently, the slavers had elected humanity to be the next victims of the despicable trade.
There was never any question, after that, of the team's involvement. Never any question of them putting an end to it. And for a while, things were running smoothly. Whilst Graham and Ryan helped to free the captives already on board, Yaz and the Doctor had distracted the slavers with clever monologues and sneaky underhand tactics. Sneaky tactics, of course, translated roughly into them running for their lives as a diversion.
A series of unforeseen mishaps later, however, and the situation had taken a major turn. The slavers had gotten away, but they had freed all the prisoners, so the Doctor decided to rig the ship to self destruct while her friends piloted their respective escape pods back to earth.
The Doctor boarded one of her own, countdown ticking. She ejected from the main craft; hurtled back towards the fields of Sheffield. Then Ryan was in her comms.
"Yaz? Yaz, I thought you were here already? Where are you?"
The Doctor's hearts had plummeted.
“Has anyone seen Yaz?”
They'd tried and tried to get a response out of her but to no avail. And when the Doctor landed, the three of them raced back to the TARDIS only to find that it was missing, and suddenly the Doctor realised why the slavers had so easily allowed them to locate their transport beam and leave her timeship unattended. It had all been a ploy.
The Doctor had walked right into a trap and hadn't seen it until it was way, way too late. The slavers had wanted the TARDIS - fine. They were never getting into that thing anyway. But Yaz? Harming Yaz was crossing a line from which there was no return.
After an age, her voice came through, but it was groggy and infused with the static of great distance. "Doctor?" had been the first thing she'd said.
Something had happened. They'd knocked her out, left her there, knowing the Doctor had rigged the ship and apparently finding it all to be terribly amusing to leave her to a fate of the Doctor's very own design. But the Doctor knew where their ground station was; where to find the blueprints of the ship. If she could only direct Yaz to her pod, everything would be fine. She would be okay. She had to be.
So that's where they were. In a dingy office, poring over plans of the ship, desperately trying to find a way to guide Yaz to safety. Except-
"Doctor, I swear, there's no pod here!" Yaz shouted, and the Doctor felt her stress like an invisible string connecting them both, pulled taut along the endless space separating them. "I'm - I'm following your directions. I'm here. But it isn't!"
"Then you're not there! I told you, it was two lefts, a right, up the stairs and all the way at the end of the hall! Get that?" The Doctor glanced at the timer she'd set up on the desk and her blood ran cold with dread. "Yaz, you've got less than two minutes."
"It's a red door, Yaz," Ryan chimed in. "With a yellow handle. Y'can't miss it."
"Doc, she's gonna make it, isn't she?" Graham whispered.
The Doctor ignored him; kept her back to both he and Ryan. "Yaz, listen to me, there are no other exit routes for you that I can see. This is your only option. It has to be there. Find it."
"Doctor," Yaz started. The Doctor heard her choke on an uneven breath. Real fear was setting in. "Can't you just come get me?"
"Oh, Yaz, I am so sorry," said the Doctor. The ache in her hearts felt solid as rebar being driven through her chest. "I can't. Not this time. This time you've gotta save yourself. Just this once, and never again. I promise."
"There's only a minute le-"
"Not helping, Ryan," the Doctor cut him off sternly. "Yaz. You should be right on top of it now from what you told me."
"I should be, yeah. But I'm not. Your map's outdated," came Yaz's quiet response, and it sounded so much like giving up that the Doctor felt sick to her stomach with it. "It's over, isn't it? Really over, this time."
"It's not over until I tell you it's over!" she said, shaking with rage and something else she refused to name.
"Doc." Graham attempted to rest his hand on her shoulder.
"No." She shrugged him off. "Yaz. You are not allowed to fail this time. You're not. Get in the pod and come home."
"I'm sorry I let you down, guys," Yaz said. It sounded as if she were trying to be strong; to hold back the flood. "But I want you to know that I don't regret any of it. Not a single second."
"Yaz, stop," Ryan cut in. A tear tracked down his cheek. "Don't you dare."
"Ryan, Graham - you are my family. I don't have long enough left to tell you how much you meant to me but I hope you already know."
The Doctor's legs felt like they were about to give beneath her. "Yaz-" she choked out. "You're wasting time."
"And Doctor," Yaz pressed on. Her name on Yaz's lips sounded like the saddest smile. "Oh, Doctor. You probably already know exactly what I'm about to say. You've probably seen it in the way I look at you. But I have to... Wait. Something's-"
Static.
The timer went off.
The Doctor's entire body went slack.
"Yaz?" Graham shouted. "Yaz? You still with us? Doc, what's happening? Now's not the time to go mute!"
Ryan bolted for the door. Graham was right behind him, but the Doctor - she moved slow. She moved as if her ankles were tethered to lead balloons; as if her bones were built from concrete. The volume on the world depleted and when she eventually pushed open the door out onto the field behind the building, she couldn't even react to what she saw.
Fire in the sky.
Meteors of metal and carbon hurtled towards the earth in the aftermath of the ship's explosion, painting the horizon with streaks of orange and red and yellow. And black. There was smoke everywhere.
The blaze turned the frozen tears in the Doctor's eyes molten. When she blinked, she cried lava.
Yaz.
Her Yaz.
Turned to ash; falling like snow.
PRESENT DAY
It was snowing.
The streets of Sheffield howled their bitter song like wolves in the wind.
It was quiet at this time of year; students gone home for the holidays and the sub zero temperatures keeping most off the streets. A train, half empty and Manchester-bound, left the station with a deafening roar over the tracks.
A lone figure trudged through the snow. Duffel bag slung across their shoulders, they kept their head ducked and their shoulders braced against the cold. Time had passed, yet still their feet found the familiar path as if by instinct. Instincts which, until very recently, were believed to have been lost forever.
Oh, but now.
Now, home was a real, solid place. Home was a train station, the grey campus buildings in town, the night club at the end of the street outside of which a few drunkards staggered and swayed. Now, there was not just a name to cling to but also a feeling of having belonged somewhere, somewhen. Mirrors were beginning to mean something again. Speaking of mirrors -
Dark eyes hitched on an old flyer attached to a lamppost, one corner flapping in the wind. It was half succumbed to water damage and the picture had faded and blotched, but the likeness was indisputable.
MISSING, it read, in bold red letters.
Somebody was missing that girl.
She beamed with brilliant white teeth. That smile - so fucking alien. What was she laughing at? Who could even say? A disembodied hand lay on her shoulder, the face cropped out. Where in the world was that other face? Did they have a name and a home, too?
Flyer torn to shreds in gloved hands, the traveller pressed on. With every step, their footing felt surer and the cold less bitter. Lights glowed from the high rises, warm and orange, and guided the way like stars. How could any of this ever have been lost to them? How could it have been so easily cast away?
Uneasy fingers tried the handle and it gave without resistance. Only one glance over a snow-capped shoulder. Something, right there, missing from the sidewalk. Something important. Another time.
It was warm enough inside the complex that the parka's hood was removed to reveal long hair, dark as those eyes. It was down. Wavy. It didn't sit right that way; wanted to be something else. Something difficult to place. Like so much else.
Boots thudded softly up the stairs one at a time. Steady. Slow. Take it easy. That head still hurt something awful at times.
Moving like a ghost along a dimly lit hallway that never before seemed to stretch so long (presumably), the lone traveller felt longtime weariness yield to something dully familiar but long since shelved.
Hope.
It was all here, exactly as was imagined. No, not imagined. Remembered. Those memories were real and this was the proof and on the other side of that door-
A clenched fist hovered millimetres from the wood.
Two lungs filled. Held. Deflated.
When the knocks came, they echoed, and the brooding darkness only amplified them tenfold. Felt like they were still echoing when, seconds or maybe minutes later, light pooled out onto the carpet through the gap beneath the door. A single set of feet shuffled resignedly across creaking floorboards. The traveller did not breathe. Did not move a muscle.
Every excruciating moment of the past four weeks had been guiding them precisely to this moment and if it turned out not to be what they believed it to be - if it was all a lie - then they had nothing and this was all for nought and they might as well just put a stop to the hurt.
But then the door opened.
And of course it was never going to be anybody else, was it? Because this was their home, and standing there with awful bags under her eyes and a dressing robe pulled tight around her, was their mother.
"Mum?" The word was hardly a whisper, as if in speaking her name too harshly they might blow her away. Again. Please, prayed the traveller. Don't blow away.
She gasped, this woman, who looked so frail compared to the oft revisited image of the strong and gorgeous and maternal figure they'd been latching onto like a lifeline. But it was her. Undeniably her.
"Yaz?" croaked she.
To hear her name - a name she hadn't ever been truly certain belonged to her in the first place - fall without hesitation from the lips of her mother. Well. That was it. That was what this had all been for. Except. Except where was the relief behind those tears? Why did she look so frightened; so fucking haunted?
"But - but you're dead," she stammered. "I don't underst - you're dead. I buried your body three weeks ago."
THREE WEEKS PRIOR
Graham and Ryan wore the same suits to Yaz's funeral that they had to Grace's.
It wasn't until the procession was over and they were making their way to the wake at Yaz's flat (no, not her flat. Not anymore), that Ryan remembered the loose button on his shirt cuff. He didn't want to show up and shake hands with her parents when the button on his cuff was loose. He couldn't be so brazenly disrespectful.
"It is important, Grandad," Ryan stressed, fidgeting with his cuff. They were standing outside the complex. "It's Yaz's family. I can't let them think-"
"They won't be thinking about the buttons on your shirt, son. Believe me." Graham gave Ryan's shoulder a squeeze. "That's the furthest thing from their minds today. C'mere."
When Graham pulled Ryan in for a hug, he reluctantly stopped himself from fiddling with his sleeve to reciprocate. He'd told himself he wouldn't cry today. He'd keep it together for her family, for her memory, for himself. He would. But that fucking button. His entire body shook with the strain it kept to cling onto the last of his resolve.
"I can't believe she's really gone," Ryan choked into the padding of Graham's jacket. "And where the hell is-"
Then came that sound.
Once, the sound had meant so much to Ryan. It had meant hope, safety, adventure, family. Now, as the TARDIS phased into view at the corner of the sidewalk, wheezing and gasping all the while, all it served as was a bitter reminder of the gaping loss they had all endured.
They pulled apart as the Doctor stepped out into the cold streets of Sheffield. Sober eyes fixed on Graham and Ryan, she buried her hands in her pockets and allowed them to approach.
"Where have you been?" Ryan demanded. "The funeral started over-"
"I couldn't face that," the Doctor said quietly. "Couldn't very well look her family in the eye knowing the part I'd played in Yaz's death."
"We missed you," Graham offered. "Didn't think we'd even see you again after..."
A violent image sprung to the forefront of Ryan's mind. The Doctor, stony-eyed and still as a corpse, standing over the bodies of the thieves who'd stolen the TARDIS and stranded Yaz on board a doomed ship. Merciless was not typically a word Ryan, or anybody, would have associated with the Doctor. Then, he'd never seen her like that. He'd never seen anything like the way she'd hunted them like dogs and revelled in their pleas for life while they burned. The curl of her lip - it was as if she'd enjoyed it. She'd exuded so much hatred that Ryan swore he could taste it like blood in his mouth.
Even though it had terrified them, they'd decided to let it go. Because this was Yaz, and they were all grieving and heartbroken and not entirely themselves. They were all angry. So when the Doctor let them burn, Graham and Ryan didn't dare get in her way. As if they could have done a thing to stop her.
"Are you coming inside, then?" Graham asked, nodding towards the building behind them. "I know it's a tough one, but I'm sure they'd love to see you there."
"Funeral's aren't really my thing."
"Yaz would want you there," objected Ryan.
"Yaz is dead." This, the Doctor said so sharply that neither Graham nor Ryan could help but flinch.
Graham exchanged a glance with Ryan and cleared his throat. "Doc, look, I know you blame yourself for what happened but it really wasn't your fault. Yaz was supposed to have gotten out - we all thought she had. She'd hate to think you're becoming someone you're not because of her."
The Doctor tried an appreciative smile but it was so painfully empty and devoid of its usual colour that it might as well have been a sob.
"Why are you here then?" Ryan chimed in. "If not for the wake?"
"I'm here to give you this," said the Doctor. She reached into her coat pocket and withdrew an envelope. "Read it later. When you're not - when you're alone."
"What's it say?" Ryan said, accepting the letter.
"Does it explain how you came up with a body for them to bury?" Graham asked. "Doc, we saw that explosion. There was nothing left. Just rubble. No way there was a body left to drag out of the wreckage after that."
"Yeah, but her mum identified her. In a morgue," Ryan pressed. "Said the cause of death was a bad fall?"
When they'd heard the news that Yaz's body had turned up a week after she'd died in that explosion, Ryan and Graham had tried ceaselessly to contact the Doctor for some kind of explanation. Radio silence is all they were granted in return. She’d gone off the grid without a word, leaving Ryan and Graham in the lurch alone.
"The how doesn't really matter, does it? What matters is that Yaz's family doesn't spend the rest of their lives waiting for a girl who's never-" The Doctor clenched her jaw. Ryan saw her fists flex in her pockets. "Who's never coming home."
"Doctor, you have to come inside. Stay for a bit," Ryan pleaded. "It's Yaz, we're on about. Not some stranger. She means something."
The Doctor frowned at Ryan. "If what I did to those creatures doesn't prove how much she meant-"
"You didn't do that for her," Graham refuted softly. "You did that for you. She'd have hated to see you like that; to see you going against everything you believe in and everything you've ever preached to us. Doc, we saw you spill blood and smile while you did it. It was..."
"It was me," the Doctor finished, curt and detached. When her eyes cut between Ryan and Graham, in them was that same barren brutality she'd exhibited for Yaz's killers. "It was the side of me I never showed you before because I didn't want you to be frightened of me then."
"And now?"
"And now you're attending the funeral of your closest friend." The Doctor lowered her eyes, shaking her head imperceptibly. "Maybe you should be frightened."
"You're leaving," Ryan said. "Aren't you?"
The Doctor lifted her head only to gaze past them at Yaz's flat. "In a sense, I s'pose I am. It's all in the letter I gave you." Then she looked at them, really looked at them, as if she were committing their faces to memory. Maybe she was. "Well. See ya then."
"What, that's it? That's all you're gonna say?"
The Doctor shrugged. "What else is there?"
"Doc-"
But she was gone - vanished back inside the TARDIS with a lacklustre sweep of her coat. And moments later, that old blue box groaned its possibly final goodbye without further ceremony, leaving Graham and Ryan to stare solemnly at the spot where it once had been.
PRESENT DAY
The more time Yaz spent with her family, the less of a total stranger she felt to herself. Slowly, it became easier to sort through the two decades' worth of memories constantly bombarding her; easier to peer through the haze of confusion and disorientation.
Yet explaining how she'd risen from the dead had been an unwelcome chore. How had there been a body if Yaz had never died? She was certain the others would be able to explain, but for now she settled on a feeble excuse improvised on the spot - something about how her top secret involvement with a special branch of the force had required her to fake her own demise.
"But I identified your body," her mother had said, trembling.
"It's mad what they can do with prosthetics these days."
Obviously they had been livid, and relieved, and so extremely confused. But above all, her family had been so unbelievably happy to see her that they let the lie slide and simply welcomed her back to life. She'd given herself all night and most of the next day with them, but she desperately needed to see the others. It was killing her to know that they still thought she was dead.
Which is how she found herself at Graham's that evening. After proving herself not to be a dream or a trick, they'd hugged her for so long and so tightly that it felt as if they were slotting all her errant pieces back together with their embrace. God, how she'd needed that.
She almost hadn't wanted to let go, but she had. Once they'd untangled, and wiped the tears from their faces, Graham put the kettle on and they settled down at his kitchen table.
"I still can't believe it's actually you," Ryan was saying, staring at Yaz as if she were a living miracle. "How did you escape? Where've you been?"
The kettle came to boil and Yaz winced when it screamed, bringing two fingers to her temple. The pain came and went. "Its, uh, it's all a bit muddled to be honest. I remember looking for the escape pod and - and finding something else. It was like this glowing blue tile in the wall. I touched it and then... nothing. Darkness. For a while."
"What was it?" Graham asked, setting three mugs down on the table and taking a seat.
"Must have been some kind of teleportation device. When I woke up I was on Earth again," Yaz recalled. "Only, I was nowhere near Sheffield and I didn't have a clue who I was. Not even a name."
"Blimey," Graham muttered.
"Where'd you end up then, if not Sheffield?"
"I came to in a hospital in Prague, of all places. They called me Jane Doe for weeks."
For the first two weeks, her mind had been an inky, bottomless well of pure black shadow. Absolutely void. And this void fought back whenever she tried to venture down it; sent waves of total agony coursing like electrical currents through her mind and body. The doctors were stumped.
One day, however, a sliver of light made its way through a crack in the darkness. One single image, as confusing as it was comforting: a blue box.
"Once the first memory came back to me, the others started to follow. It was a dead slow process though, and some of my memories made, like, no sense. I thought I was losing my mind when I started remembering aliens and foreign planets and time travel. That's what the doctors thought, too. That I was mad."
Yaz had believed them, too, at times. Everything would get so fuzzy and all her memories would meld together in some horrific amalgamation of nightmarish visions and she'd be unable to tell truth from fiction or dream from reality. And oftentimes it hurt, trying to separate it all, as if she were painstakingly pulling apart the stitches that bound it all together. That was a symptom that had yet to subside in its entirety.
"But I knew," she went on. "You guys, my family, the Doctor. I knew it had to be real."
The way she'd missed them; there was no way that was fabricated. No way that was a construct or a product of some unnameable illness. Now, there was only one person left to reunite with. Her heart ached to think of her. The first time she'd remembered the Doctor, it had been her voice in her head, waking her from a restless dream.
You've got to save yourself... come home.
"Where is the Doctor, anyway? She probably still thinks I'm dead." Yaz would have to fix that. Now. "Can I use your phone? Can I call her? God, she must be so..."
Ryan and Graham looked severely uncomfortable at the mention of the Doctor's name. A look passed over them that Yaz couldn't identify. Abruptly, Yaz felt what could only be described as an intense wrongness coil like a deadly snake around her heart, constricting almost to the point of a bloody eruption.
"What is it?" she asked, an edge to her voice. "Is she okay?"
"Well," Graham sat up straighter. "She's alive."
"If you can even call it that," Ryan mumbled.
Yaz was at a loss. "What does that mean? What happened to her?" She'd waited so long so see her again and now - what? What weren't they saying?
Graham heaved a sigh. Rising from his chair, he rummaged around in one of the draws until he found an unsealed envelope. He considered the envelope, considered Yaz, then acquiesced. "Here," he said, handing it to Yaz with a face full of regret. "You'd better read this."
Hey fam,
The Doctor here. Possibly for the last time.
I want to begin by trying to convey how truly, truly sorry I am about what happened to Yaz. Except I can't begin to do that until I admit that it didn't just "happen" to her. I did it. I killed her. We can all deny it until we're blue in the face, but I blew up the ship whilst she was on board and as a result, she died. That's murder. Her blood will forever stain my hands and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.
But it's a long, long life for a Time Lord. I'm not certain I'd be able to bear it. Not this. Not right now.
So, I'm making a call. A selfish one. It probably won't make much sense to you and if you ever have to witness it, I apologise profusely - but I have to do this if I mean to survive.
Shortly after I deliver this letter to you, I'll be taking a break from my humanity. It's a neat little trick us Time Lords resort to when the trauma of our seemingly endless existence becomes unbearable. This is such a time for me.
I won't go into too much detail but the short explanation is that I'll be forgoing all of my emotions from here on out. I won't be able to feel my guilt, my grief, my immense loneliness. But I also won't be able to experience joy or empathy or love. For these reasons, it is in everybody's best interest to steer well clear of me. Make no mistake, after today I will be the Doctor no more, so under no circumstances should you allow me back into your lives or your homes.
There's no telling what I might do.
You might believe yourselves to be capable of bringing me back to myself. You're the only family I have left, so I suppose if anybody stands a chance, it's you two. Just don't hope too hard. Some things you simply don't come back from no matter what anybody says or does. Some losses are too great to bear.
I hope one day I'm strong enough to find my own way back to myself and back to you. If not, then this is goodbye. Forever.
Once again, I am tremendously sorry to have caused you this pain; to have taken somebody so absolutely decent and kind and brilliant from your lives (though I don't ever expect your forgiveness in return).
All my best eternally,
The Doctor
Yaz stared at the letter for a long time.
Without question, that was the Doctor's manic handwriting, but she couldn't make herself hear those words coming out of her mouth. It just didn't make any sense. She turned the page over as if she might find a P.S.
Blank.
"I don't understand," Yaz confessed numbly. She was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"She abandoned us, Yaz," Ryan said, bitterness laced throughout every syllable. "Didn't even go to your funeral. After she made such a big deal about my dad and everything. She's a hypocrite. She doesn't care about us and she doesn't care about you."
Graham placed a hand on Ryan's arm and shot him a look. Ryan leaned back, anger giving way to concern for Yaz.
"Sorry, Yaz," he muttered.
"But - but -" Yaz didn't even know what to say; to think or to feel. This whole time, all she'd been able to focus on was reuniting with the Doctor, only to find out that she didn't technically exist anymore. How was she expected to process that? "Have you seen her since?"
"Once," Graham confirmed grimly. "We called her a couple of days after your funeral, when we got around to reading her letter."
"And she came?" Yaz asked, a defiant spark of hope alighting against the friction of despair.
"Wish she hadn't," Ryan said under his breath.
"We asked her back and tried to reason with her, talk to her, but... Yaz, it was like we were talking to a complete stranger. She couldn't care less about any of us. Cracking jokes about what happened, all that. Couldn't believe my eyes, to be frank with you. Was like she were possessed by somin’.”
"Everything in the letter's true," Ryan said. "The Doctor's gone, Yaz. She ain't coming back."
Yaz refused to believe any of what she was hearing. Total bloody slander. This was the Doctor they were talking about. Selfless, compassionate, strong, dependable. She wouldn't run away. She wouldn't leave them behind when they needed her most. It wasn't in her nature.
"Give me your phone," Yaz demanded.
"Yaz-"
"I said give me your phone." She held her hand out, palm up. "I'm calling her. Right now."