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Quality Time
There is something intrinsically bonding about being shot at with someone.
It really has a way of bringing two people together.
Yaz would do all of the psychoanalysis on that, except no, she wouldn’t. Really, she thought that it was pretty obvious; there’s a sort of thrill that comes from managing once again to
not die,
even if the low before that high is so low that not even Shaggy could limbo underneath it.
Call it trauma bonding, call it baptism of fire, call it a date - it all just depends on your outlook, really.
Yaz thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the Doctor, even if it always did seem to be a collage of near misses and singed jackets.
Part of the allure of the Doctor was all of that, anyway. Yaz thrived on the danger - on the way that she had to be at the top of her game at all times. She had been plagued for far too much of her life with a constant stream of unnecessary and self-deprecating thoughts; she carried around with her an inner monologue that seemed to hate her, and wanted to make her as miserable as possible. It was nice to be put in a situation where she had no choice but to make it shut the hell up. It meant that she got a brief second of respite.
The Doctor was her escape from all of it. Yes, she got chased by aliens, and, yes, she got shot at a lot, and, yes, there were a good few people in the universe that would have her guts for garters if they ever saw her again, but that was all a part of the fun.
The best part of it all was that the Doctor was equally as unhinged in this respect. She also thrived on the danger: she loved it. She liked feeling like she was doing something worthwhile, and she liked feeling as if she was right at the edge of what she was capable of.
It was a good bonding exercise, at the end of the day.
People say that, for a relationship to work, you have to take an active interest in the other person’s interests. For Yaz and the Doctor, that was quite difficult at times, because a lot of the Doctor’s hobbies were strange and somewhat inaccessible.
Now, Yaz didn’t want to be mistaken - she was incredibly flattered (and baffled) that she had been taken to go bowling with Virginia Woolfe and she never would have otherwise pegged Marcus Aurelius as a good bass player, but these were things that she had to really get to grips with. The Doctor was a traveller and a hobbyist, so it was her life: and it made Yaz’s hobbies look trivial at best.
There’s always going to be an element of wondering if you will ever be good enough for the Doctor, no matter who, when, or where you are. There will always be a voice in the back of your head that tells you what you’re doing will never compare to the miracles the Doctor could show you, or the miracle of her existence at all.
Yaz had been nervous, at first. A jog ‘round Sheffield followed by a game of Cluedo seemed to pale remarkably in comparison to the whole of time and space, as riddled as it was with celebrities.
But, as always, the Doctor had found a way of putting her at ease. Yaz felt like, sometimes, she didn’t have to necessarily verbalise all of her thoughts, because she was pretty sure that the Doctor could read at least half of them.
What she always forgot was that all of this was just as alien to the Doctor as everything else was to her. As impressive as it was to go bowling with Virginia Woolfe, to Virginia Woolfe, that was just bowling. As incredible as it was for Yaz to have a go at the Ice Warrior’s version of pool with exploding cues in the year 5892, to the other people in the pub, she was just another patron who had come in for a pint (even if Yaz didn’t actually drink).
What felt incredible to her felt mundane to others - so, by extension, what felt mundane to her felt incredible to others. And you could probably give the Doctor a carrot and cookie cutters and she’d be entertained for at least three hours.
“It’ll probably be boring to you,” Yaz said as she dumped the box for the board game down on the table. They sat in one of many TARDIS rooms with two low sofas facing each other across a coffee table.
“Bored? Me? Never. I love board games.” She flipped the lid open and took out the rule book. She flicked through it, not spending more than a second on each page, and then nodded. She ran through each of the rules, asking for Yaz to fill in the bits she missed or explain it if she was wrong.
Yaz went digging in the box and pulled out some of the cards. “I thought you said you hadn’t played this before?”
The Doctor sat back on her sofa a little. “I haven’t. But I just read the rules, didn’t I?”
“Speed reader.” Nothing could surprise her anymore.
“I was the slowest in my class at the Academy. The Master always used to rib me about it.”
Okay, scratch that.
“Shall we start?” the Doctor asked, with her trademark cheeriness, before Yaz had the chance to ask further questions.
Of course, the Doctor won. She won and she kept winning, until Yaz was desperately trying to beat her competitive side into a box with her own lead pipe. It wasn’t about winning (it’s always about winning) - it was about getting the chance to share her hobbies with her girlfriend (it was about winning).
“You’re cheating!” Yaz declared after the Doctor won the third game in the row. She wasn’t really upset, and she let her light tone show that.
“How?” the Doctor quipped right back.
“You’re using your space brains.”
“My space brains?”
“Yeah.”
They stared each other down across the table until the Doctor couldn’t hold her laughter back anymore. Once the Doctor went, Yaz couldn’t hold onto her composure anymore, either.
“Shall we play another game? One where I don’t use my space brains?”
“No, because then it’ll just be even more embarrassing when you win.”
They spent the rest of the evening curled up together, watching Brian Cox documentaries. Every so often, the Doctor would chime in and speak over the telly, and Yaz would try her best to follow, but she very quickly ended up falling asleep with her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder and a million stars dancing behind her eyes.
Infodumping
Time Lords, apparently, had something called a respiratory bypass system. Yaz thought that it would be exactly the kind of thing that would come in extremely useful - the kind of thing that you could very easily use, quite a bit, to get you out of a sticky situation or two. In fact, that was probably why the Doctor was so damn good at doing just that.
There had been more than a few occasions in which they had been running somewhere - sprinting this way and that, probably making a mad dash to get away from whatever it was behind them that wanted to kill them this week - and, no matter how far they went, the Doctor always seemed to be okay. Yaz would often find herself bent double, heaving, gasping, trying desperately to catch her breath before she was caught herself, and look up from her knees to see the Doctor completely fine with her sonic in her hand. Part of Yaz wanted to be insulted, as one of them actually spent time working out, and it wasn’t the Doctor, but the much larger parts of her brain (the one that thought it was impressive and the one that thought it was hot) were much bigger and much better at making themselves be known.
They’d gone snorkelling once, too, and it had come in handy then in the way that it meant the Doctor entirely bypassed the need for a snorkel at all. She seemed perfectly happy just floating about as dead weight in the water, pootling about and not breathing for twenty to thirty minutes at a time.
Once, the Doctor and Yaz had been making out in the TARDIS, and the Doctor forgot that Yaz didn’t have a respiratory bypass system, and Yaz forgot to breathe. It was lucky that the Doctor had Yaz pinned so firmly to the wall, otherwise she would have hit the deck when she passed out.
The Doctor didn’t stop apologising for a month.
Moving forward, the Doctor promised never to use her respiratory bypass system like that again, and to take the time to periodically remind Yaz to breathe.
An increasingly common use for the respiratory bypass system, however, was infodumping. Yaz didn’t realise at first, because, as far as she knew, the Doctor was just like that, but, after a while, she realised that her girlfriend pinning her down and gesticulating wildly as she explained something Yaz would never understand was actually quite an affectionate gesture.
She would unlay at least a gigabyte of information onto pretty much any individual that stood still for long enough, but, with Yaz, her hands seemed to move even wilder and she would rock up onto the balls of her feet and back down again as she talked. She was always stupidly animated, and always ridiculously bright, and she would go off on tangents this way and that before swinging back around to her original point with some comment about knowing the context.
And she used her respiratory bypass system in a way that was somewhat unsettling, because it allowed her to speak entirely uninterrupted and without breathing for, sometimes, upwards of fifteen minutes. How she even had lungs big enough to manage it was something Yaz didn’t understand - because, even if she didn’t need to bring more air in for the biological respiration bit, she surely still needed it for the actual production of speech. Right?
Who knows.
Yaz always listened to everything that the Doctor was saying, even if the vast majority of it went entirely over her head. She thought that that was what the Doctor needed; less of an active participant in the conversation and more someone to look at her with interest and nod in all the right places. The Doctor had a love for information in all of its forms, and about all sorts of things. Yaz was sure that she’d had the plot of Cars 2 explained to her at warp speed at least once.
The discussions always followed a similar layout. It would begin with Yaz asking a question that she thought would have a relatively straightforward answer. Then, the Doctor would straighten her back out and stare briefly at the ceiling, as if planning everything that she was about to say. She’d hunch over again and go,
“Okay. So.”
Yaz had the length of time that the Doctor used to suck in one huge breath to prepare.
And then she was off. Yaz would have to try and follow the stream of information that was about to whack her square across the face, sometimes aided with diagrams and often with hand gestures close to expressive dance, and hope that, by the end, she could find the answer to her question within it.
And she wouldn’t breathe. Not once. She would find a way to have a stream of sentences that meandered and dodged the point until she finally got to the end of everything and said a small, “If that makes sense.”
Yaz would lie and say that it did, but ask a follow up question about something she could remember being said. She’d be lying if she said that she didn’t just pick out something that she knew and could remember and ask for a little more detail on it, just so she got to see how adorable the Doctor was when she explained it.
And she was learning. The Doctor had a frankly frightening amount of knowledge locked away in her thick skull, and an insatiable desire to share it. Yaz wanted to know everything she could - about the Doctor, and about the universe she lived in, and the circumstances of everything around her. It was fascinating - and the Doctor had the ability to get so excited about even the most mundane of things that Yaz could almost be convinced that the tidal forces that formed the cliffs on Pyrovillia was actually interesting.
The conversation always ended the same way, too - with the Doctor finally tiring herself out and quieting down with a soft smile. Yaz would poke her in the side and call her Bighead. Their faces would be mirror images of the same shit-eating grin. They’d share an always-too-fleeting kiss - and have the TARDIS inevitably fling them back off into space again.
Gifts
Yaz had a collection of rocks in a shoebox under her bed.
She had had friends when she was a kid who did the same thing. She never got it herself - she liked rocks - everyone does - but she would find cool ones and show her mum before dropping them back onto the ground and moving on with her life. She didn’t have the same urge to collect and maintain the rocks as some of her friends did.
They weren’t her rocks, see - it was never her that picked them up. They were all presents from the Doctor.
On pretty much every planet that they went to where something didn’t go horribly wrong, the Doctor would, eventually, make a huge, excited cry and bend down enthusiastically to pick up something from the ground. She’d then slip it into her pocket and carry it with her for a little while, only to go digging around in her coat to present it to Yaz with a beaming smile when they got back into the TARDIS.
The first time it had happened, Yaz had found herself staring, somewhat baffled, at the small pebble that she held in her hand. When she looked back up at the Doctor, she had felt her confused frown dissolve right off her face - her girlfriend looked so chuffed with herself that she had to smile back and kiss her thank you.
It’s the thought that counts.
When she got back to her room, there was a shoebox on the bed, which she moved so she could lay down and clutch the gift to her chest.
Yaz thought, as her rock collection grew, that there might be a common theme across them, but she couldn’t find it; some of them were bright green, like sea glass or emeralds; some were tiny, barely the size of her thumb, and some were the size of her palm; one hummed when you dragged your fingers over it; one had veins of gold set into jet black; some were volcanic; some were geodes. She couldn’t find any underpinning similarities apart from them all being cool.
She was such a nerd. They were rocks. They were cool rocks, given to her by her nerd girlfriend, but they were rocks.
This went on for months. Eventually, the shoebox was more than full, and Yaz had to ask the TARDIS for an upgraded rock storage space. They all told stories, see - that was one of the reasons she was moved to keep them. One of them had been pocketed on the cliffs of Dover as they watched the sunset. One had gotten stuck in Yaz’s boot mid running away from an enraged Zygon who was, honestly, a really solid bloke, but didn’t favour trespassers. One the Doctor had picked up and said looked just like Yaz’s eyes.
There were memories, embedded in the granite. Love sewn into the strata.
Yaz thought that there wouldn’t be any harm in grabbing a rock or two for the Doctor, either. But she wanted it to be a surprise.
They were taking a hiking trip on the sloping mountains of Janice III, an odd planet that was distinctly earth-like but noticeably colour inverted. Yaz had asked why that was, but the Doctor’s rambling about perfect reflection of light waves was something that Yaz couldn’t quite catch. All she knew was that it was quite jarring to look up and see a bright yellow sky dotted with stark black clouds.
The universe always finds ways of surprising you like that.
The Doctor, as per usual, had a frightening reserve of energy that she had the miraculous ability to tap into whenever she pleased. If anything, it made her quite annoying to hike with, because it made the whole ordeal vaguely reminiscent of taking the dog for a run and having to put up with it looking bored all the time as it jogged, perfectly unaffected, next to you, looking up at you periodically as if it was bored and wished you would try slightly harder.
It also meant, however, that Yaz had the opportunity to sneakily collect rocks. When the Doctor had bounded twenty paces ahead and stood, hands-on-hips on a large boulder, looking out at the view sprawling beneath her of yellow rivers and pink trees, Yaz could take the opportunity to nick any cool looking rocks she could find and slip them into her pocket. Occasionally, the Doctor would scan something with her sonic and/or stick it in her mouth. Every time this happened, Yaz would freeze, poised to run, and analyse the Doctor’s reaction. If she stiffened or frowned, then she knew it was showtime: but, each time, she just grinned and ran off a little further ahead. She took such glee in new things.
By the end of the hike, Yaz had over ten rocks shoved into her pockets, and used the excuse of sitting down on the trig point - some things being literally universal you would expect, other things not so much - to sort through them. The Doctor paced the length of the ridge, excitable and sonicking everything that she could get her arm out to, giving Yaz the perfect chance to pick her best rock.
She had loved the purple veins in one of them since she first set eyes on it, so threw it up and caught it before slipping it into her jacket pocket and chucking the outvoted rejects onto the cairn.
She knew that her girlfriend would love it - and she did.
When they got back to the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately began pulling levers and switches and talking about how interesting the biology of that planet had been. Yaz sat and listened, entirely not following but happy to be being included, until the Doctor found a rare moment of stillness and faced her square on.
“I got you something,” Yaz said. The Doctor tilted her head to the side, questioning. Yaz fought a smile as she pulled the rock from her pocket, then took the Doctor’s hand in her own and turned it over so her palm was facing straight up. She dropped the rock into it.
The Doctor’s face melted instantly. She went uncharacteristically quiet, staring with open adoration at the small rock in the palm of her hand, before curling her fingers around it and launching herself at Yaz.
She thudded into her girlfriend with such force that she actually staggered back a few paces; her arms raised of their own accord to hold the Doctor’s back. She melted into her without even having to think about it.
“Thank you, Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor said.
“Least I could do,” Yaz replied. The Doctor gave her one final squeeze that would have cracked a lesser woman’s ribs before jogging back over to the console, rock still firmly grasped in one hand.
Months later, Yaz found herself stood in a corridor. The Doctor’s hands dived into her pockets and began pulling all the random paraphernalia she carried with her out of them. Yaz’s hands cupped in front of her automatically and she soon found a collection of parts falling into her fingers. A yo-yo. A bag of Hula-Hoops in packaging from the 1970s. A rock with purple veins through it. Seven different credit cards.
Yaz pushed the rock over with her thumb to get a better look at it. When she looked up at the Doctor, she was smiling sheepishly at her, though her hands still delved around methodically in her pockets. Eventually, she found what she was looking for - a set of drumsticks, for whatever reason, which she jammed between her arm and her side - and began to scoop all of her crap back into her pockets. She left the rock until last, sharing a brief look with Yaz as it finally found its way back into her pocket.
Parallel Play
The Doctor was something of a cat.
The more Yaz thought about the analogy, the more she liked it. Always up at an ungodly hour, zooming about the place and making a mess. In no way domesticated, but also no longer feral: something that exists in the limbo between untamed and unattached and entirely dependent. Ridiculously affectionate and fiercely loyal to the few people that she had decided were worthy of her time, attention and favour. A fan of curling up on the sofa and getting scratches behind the ear.
But she also had that wonderfully feline habit of following you around only to ignore you. Her sister had had a cat that did the exact same thing - it would sit on the other side of the sofa to her whilst she doomscrolled, then get up and follow her to the kitchen when she went to make tea. Yaz would often watch it, trying to figure out what it was up to. Why would it curl up and sleep, not even facing her sister and two foot away, only to get up when she did and ignore her from its perch on the kitchen counter?
It was only in accidentally catching some of that Jackson Galaxy show over her mum’s shoulder (it was a slow Saturday) that it was explained to her.
As it turns out, a cat sleeping with its back to you is a huge sign of trust - that it feels safe to have you out of its eyeline is actually a great compliment.
And the reason that they got up and followed you - even if they weren’t particularly fussed on doing the same thing you were at that moment - was that it was their way of saying, hey, I wanna spend time with you, but I don’t want to get in your way.
The Doctor did very much the same thing.
Yaz was a fan of Front Room 4 - not to be confused with Living Room 4 or Sitting Room 4.
(“I’m tellin’ ya, Yaz, they’re different names because they’re different things! Even a small difference is a difference.”).
Many of the TARDIS rooms were great fun, but Yaz didn’t find that they suited her needs and tastes all that well. The boating lakes were brilliant - but not for curling up with a cuppa. All of the Living Rooms were very TV centric, which, to be brutally honest, Yaz couldn’t always face after an adventure - she would much rather sit in silence because that wasn’t something she got a lot of whenever she left the TARDIS. All the Sitting Rooms just felt like SCS shops, because the Doctor took sitting and a disconcertingly extensive collection of purple sofas far too seriously. Front Rooms 1-3 all had a distinct (and bad) design choice, with one made to look like it was taken straight from the animated Little Mermaid film and, no matter how cool it did admittedly look, Yaz could never get comfortable in the 18th Century Gothic one.
It wasn’t until Yaz remembered Sonia’s old cat that she understood why the Doctor insisted on sitting in the same room as her.
They had so many rooms on the TARDIS. Yaz’s reasons for her choice of room were clear to her - obviously - but the Doctor’s somewhat baffled her. The Doctor presumably approved of all of the decor choices, as they were in, for all intensive purposes, her house, but she still decided to ignore the pantheon of somewhat neglected and unused rooms to sit six feet away from Yaz and crochet.
The Doctor was very good at crochet. Just the other day, Yaz had watched her knock out a quilt in thirty five minutes using four balls of wool and sheer force of will. It would have been impressive, had it not been terrifying first. It was also kind of adorable, though, because she would always stick her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated so hard on getting it right.
But why come into the only room in use out of hundreds of thousands just to ignore the person in there and make a blanket?
Because the Doctor was like a cat.
The Doctor wanted to spend time with Yaz, but she didn’t want to make herself an annoyance in the process. She didn’t want to infringe on Yaz’s space, activities, or quiet, even if she wanted to feel her company - so she set up shop a respectable distance away and did her own thing. Every so often, Yaz would ask her what she was up to, just to show interest, and be thoroughly rewarded with a silent display of the last few hours’ work and a wide grin. Once, she had had a freshly crocheted toy seal thrown over to her with Sealing the deal - will you be my girlfriend? sewn into the stomach. Yaz had thought it was so incredibly stupid that she’d said yes.
For someone like the Doctor, the message was the best she could send.
It was surprisingly intimate, for the both of them. They had just been through the wars together - sometimes literally - and found that they could still recuperate with one another.
A lot of the time, Yaz found being around people to be somewhat draining. She found that, on top of all of the action and the emotion and the physical pain and the aches deep in her muscles, her brain would cry out just as loudly for a rest. Her social battery needed a regular MOT, and she’d always found receding somewhere to be on her own to be the best thing for it.
Some people actively took it out of her. Some took it out slower. Some didn’t take it out at all.
And the Doctor could put it back in. She could recharge in the Doctor’s company, just as the Doctor could recharge in hers.
That was what made it so special, Yaz decided, as she nibbled on a custard cream and watched her girlfriend blow her fring out of her eyes as her hands crocheted at light speed.
They were admitting to and rejoicing in just how safe and comfortable they had become with one another, all whilst not saying a single thing at all.
Physical Touch
Yaz hadn’t entirely expected a lot of this to even happen. For one thing, both her and the Doctor were very socially awkward, and, for two, the Doctor had never given over the vibe of someone who was particularly interested.
But they had found themselves in that situation and everything had happened really rather quickly.
And now they found themselves buried in the aftermath and one another. The Doctor was half on top of Yaz, her head on her chest and her hair brushing against her jaw, and Yaz was making the most of having the Doctor so close to her.
She found peace within it. The Doctor was two thirds of the way to being asleep; she wasn't moving at all, her eyes closed, but her breathing hadn't quite evened out into the scarcity it did in sleep.
They stayed like that for a long time - the Doctor curled around Yaz, dozing, and Yaz letting her fingers ghost across her shoulders and the back of her neck.
“Yaz,” she murmured, eventually.
Yaz's breath hitched. She'd heard the Doctor say her name in tones she'd never heard before in the last however many hours, but this one was new again. Soft. Reverent.
“That were alright, yeah?”
Yaz took one of the Doctor's hands on her stomach in her own. “More than alright. My body's not been this relaxed in donkeys.” She wanted to say more. About how her heart had never been so full or her head so quiet. She didn't find the words, nor the courage to say them.
“I think I just turned each and every one of my brains off,” the Doctor chuckled. “And it's different with these bits. Blimey.”
Yaz couldn't stop herself from laughing.
The Doctor's face cracked open into a smile. Yaz could tell that her brains weren't firing on all cylinders yet, but she couldn't find it within herself to mind because the centres that filtered out the Doctor's thoughts weren't back up and running.
Yaz didn't realise that the Doctor even had those filters, because she was always saying something and she was always putting her foot in it. Yaz was frankly baffled that what came out of the Doctor's mouth wasn't everything; she wondered just how busy it got in her girlfriend’s head.
“I like making you laugh,” she mumbled. “It's me favourite sound in the universe, probably. Including Coldplay's third album.”
The Doctor seemed to have a thousand versions of herself. Every so often, it was as if an old regeneration would stick their head above the parapet, and the Doctor would become a version of herself she hadn't been for hundreds - or thousands - of years. Even within this version of herself, there were layers - the different people that sat underneath her skin were just scratching the surface of the different people that even the blonde woman could be. She was terrifying, and she was stupid, and she was a child, and she was ancient - and there was still so much of her that Yaz knew she was yet to meet.
This version of her was different. She was someone that Yaz had never seen before, for the obvious reason that she'd never laid with her while she struggled to reboot her brain through the post-orgasm haze. She was so much more open. So much more prone to actually saying what she was thinking.
The Doctor had more heart - and hearts - than anyone else Yaz had ever met, but they couldn't be any further from her sleeve. She used snappishness as a defence mechanism; wore anger like a cloak to hide everything else that she felt. But here and now? When the soft hum of the TARDIS lights was the only sound to backdrop their breathing and the Doctor's brainless words? Her hearts may as well be on display. Every other part of her was.
It was surprisingly easy to home in on everything the Doctor relayed in that second, mostly because it was all there was. Yaz was draped in her - so entirely surrounded by the Doctor that there wasn’t anything else. She could feel all of it - from the gentle twitching of fingers on her stomach to the weight of the Doctor through her ribs and the gentle pressures of legs against her own. Every nerve in her body had been burning, exposed and raw, a very few moments ago, and she could still feel the sensitivity that wracked her. She could still feel the ghost of breath across her skin.
The Doctor was warmer, too. Usually, she felt cool to the touch - a few degrees out of Yaz - but, in that moment, she was the same temperature. Yaz wasn’t sure if it was thermodynamics or all the exercise they’d just done, but she didn’t care.
With so much of the Doctor’s skin on show, the scent of her filled the room, too. Yaz breathed it in and felt a relaxation hit her deep within her bones. Tea and engine oil. Custard creams. The outdoors. Home.
The Doctor stretched out her legs, pointing her toes to the bottom of the bed.
Yaz ran a hand over her head, leaving her fingers to rest in the gap between the Doctor’s ear and jaw. She kissed the top of her head.
“I think my brains’re back,” the Doctor said. Had her accent gotten thicker?
Yaz felt the intent in the way that her fingers were drifting up her stomach to her chest and suppressed a shiver. It was a notion she could get behind. “Are they?” she said, somewhat weakly. Being enveloped by the Doctor was one thing, but being teased by her was entirely another. Her plan to be cool about this had gone out the window however many hours ago when the Doctor started to kiss down her neck, but she had managed to grip onto some grace and decorum. She was getting more and more ready to cast it aside the further north the Doctor’s fingers wandered, though, and it went entirely out of the window the moment they left her skin and she let out a pathetic whimper. The Doctor replied with a sly grin, propping herself over Yaz with an elbow either side of her head. Their noses were nearly touching, Yaz’s hands mapping gently the curves of the Doctor’s waist, as they took one final moment to breathe.
“Wanna go again?” the Doctor asked quietly.
The Doctor’s knee had found its way between her thighs, swathes of their skin were pressed together, and Yaz had hands buried in the hair at the sides of her head. Was her answer in any way a surprise?
“Absolutely.”