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The Doctor is being cagey.
“Now that Dan’s gone off with Di for a bit, and it’s just us, I want… I want to take you somewhere. Especially considerin’ all that just went down on the beach—”
“Multiple beaches. Took you quite a few to get it all out there.”
“Right. Which were your favourite, again—?”
“Doctor. You wanted to take me somewhere?”
“Somewhere special. Proper special.”
All that the Doctor didn’t say, of course. That would have been normal levels of cagey, Doctor-wise.
What she had said was “Lickity-split, Yaz, we’re off!” and proceeded to ignore all questions as to their destination for the next half hour while giving her half-excited, half-shifty looks over and around the console. She seemed to be a bit out of practice on flying solo too, and Yaz couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride that she’d become such an indispensable co-pilot—and also a little sad, too, knowing someday the Doctor would be doing this on her—their—own again, and probably sooner than either of them would like.
“We’re here!” the Doctor pronounces with one swift slam of the final materialisation lever.
“And where is here, exactly?” Yaz asks for what feels like the hundredth time that day.
“Aschlerdhu.”
“Gesundheit?”
“No, Aschlerdhu, Yaz!” the Doctor insists. She peers at the temporal coordinate display. “And we’re just in time. Ace.” The Doctor looks up to see Yaz still staring at her questioningly. Well, at least she’s acknowledging Yaz has questions now. “Only the largest equality festival in the Floosen Galaxy! Bit of a sordid history with equality here on Al’Adnë, but they’ve managed to turn it around in the last thousand years.”
“What happened?” Yaz asks, reaching up to catch the bundle of things the Doctor tosses at her from where she’d stashed it under the console. The bundle of multi-coloured cloth turns out to be a dark cloak brightened by a mixture of deep purple and magenta threads along with a square hat with streamers of a lighter pink and a muted orange. There is also a molded mask with holes for her eyes like that one would find at an Earth masquerade ball sitting on top, burgundy and glittering with tiny silver stars.
“Oh, tale as old as time—patriarchal society that was reformed into a matriarchal society after the Glorvvn Wars and then into almost no society at all in the War of Seven Suns and then into the society we’re visiting today!” the Doctor says, counting it off on her fingers. “They’ve been through a lot, the Al’Adnëans.”
Nodding, Yaz pulls on the cloak and pushes the hat on over the top of her braid, grimacing as the edges of the fluttering streamers brush against her cheeks where the mask doesn’t cover them.
“It always amazes me what beautiful things beings can create even when surrounded by war and strife,” the Doctor continues, shoving on her own hat. Hers is navy blue with golden dangly bits, the same colour as her mask and its shimmer of constellations. “Just goes to show, people always manage to find light in the darkest of times.” She frowns, trying to sweep the streamers out of the way of her face and scowling when they fall back into place in front of her eyes. She stuffs the hat impossibly into one of her coat pockets. Yaz happily just sets hers to the side, seeing as the Doctor hasn’t dimensionally engineered the ones on her own pockets yet.
Well. That she knows of.
“…And a big singing culture, prior to the wars. The singing’s dropped off a bit, which is good ‘cos my voice is a bit rusty, but the dancing…” The Doctor grins brightly at her. “Well? Shall we?”
“After you,” Yaz smiles back, because really, anything, anywhere, and anywhen the Doctor wants to show her, she’s more than happy to see.
“Aschlerdhu!” the Doctor proclaims, throwing open the TARDIS doors.
A burst of sound and colour seems to explode out of the entranceway. The Doctor has landed them in what appears to be the midst of a large crowd—hopefully not on top of anyone, unlike Graham’s chair—only it’s not a crowd so much as a steady flow of people streaming past the TARDIS. The colours they wear are as varied as they are bright, every hue known to man and several probably known only to shrimp moving in one rainbow flurry. Swirling, billowing cloaks spin in endless circles amongst the rhythmic stomping of feet, perfectly in time to the music that feels like it’s being blasted from every direction, bolstered by the voices of the crowd, singing and waving their limbs and other appendages all in consummate harmony.
Yaz isn’t much of a dancer. Sure, she and the Doctor had managed a two-step in the Galerie des Glaces under the judgmental eyes of Marie Antoinette, but that had been the Doctor tripping over her own limbs and Yaz trying to remember to breathe despite their closeness.
But this…this is something out of a Bollywood movie. Madness and revelry so in sync with each other that it appears almost choreographed. Almost immediately when she and the Doctor step out of the TARDIS, they are swept away by the crowd and the relentless beat of the music—hands reaching toward them outstretched, laughter and the jingle of bangles and bells, welcoming smiles underneath masks of silk and feathers and small glittering stones. And, miraculously, it doesn’t matter if her steps are slightly mis-timed, the Doctor’s are off wildly and she is swinging her hat like a lasso besides, nearly hitting the parade-goers to their left and back. Now that she is among them, one of them, the energy that thrums through the crowd is intoxicating, all-consuming… Joyful and proud and triumphant and a hundred other things besides.
Yaz doesn’t know how many miles they march-stomp-dance through the streets, nor how long her chest cavity reverberates with the drums. All she knows is by the time she signals to the Doctor and they drop off out of the throng down a quieter side alley, her feet hurt in her boots and her head throbs slightly with the constant barrage of flashing colours, lights, and pounding music.
“Excellent call, Yaz,” the Doctor says, her voice a bit hoarse. “Were gettin’ a bit overstimulated myself.” She spots something over Yaz’s shoulder. “Ooh! Wanna go up, get a view from above?”
Yaz nods her agreement, and follows the Doctor up the ladder she’d spotted dangling off one of the buildings. Four storeys up, the ladder lets off onto the building’s roof, and she and the Doctor walk to the opposite edge to look down. From this height, the parade stretches out before them, winding through the streets like a giant glittering snake, swaying and undulating with the music.
“They know how to throw quite the celebration, the Al’Adnëans,” the Doctor says.
“A massive parade and dance party in the streets,” Yaz agrees with a laugh. She looks over at the Doctor, whose face is lit up in multi-coloured flashes from the revels below, and decides to say it. “It reminds me of something. Something from home.”
The Doctor looks sideways back at her. “That were kind of the idea,” she admits, soft as she can over the noise.
“Except it’s different, though, isn’t it? With the masks and all.”
“Masks can be fun!” the Doctor argues. “And they’re representative—like I said before, used to be big problems on this planet: racism and sexism and ulutryiarianism and probably all the other -isms you can think of, really. But now they’ve gotten past all that, figured out how to do things more fairly—now it doesn’t matter what’s under the mask, everyone is equal.”
“A little on the nose for you, isn’t it?” Yaz points out. “All the masks.”
“Well, you know noses, very unreliable—or maybe just mine from this go-round; the raggedy man could sniff out a hair gel from a nine decametre radius.”
“You’re doing it again,” Yaz tells her. She turns her whole body to face her this time, making eye contact even if the Doctor’s eyes don’t quite meet hers. “Doctor, you’re amazing. You should go to a planet where you get celebrated for being you, not just that you could be anyone.”
“Nah, too many planets out there already that celebrate the Doctor,” she replies, scrunching her nose.
“No, I mean…” Yaz pauses. “You called it…’regeneration,’ right?”
“Oh, don’t wanna talk about that now,” the Doctor says. “Shouldn’t have even mentioned it again, really—or were that just in me head? Bit of a downer regardless, talking about your impending demise, and this is a party, innit?”
Twitching nose, shifty eyes, utter inability to sit still—she’s a bit embarrassed, and definitely uncomfortable, but Yaz plows onward anyways.
“No, I mean—before, when you were explaining regeneration, you said that there were other Doctors before you. Er, other people who were the Doctor. And even if they became you and you will become someone else…this you, now, is still distinct, right?”
“Erm…I guess so?” The Doctor scratches at her left elbow, looking up at the sky.
“Then that’s what you should be celebrating. You. You-you, not the Doctor. Not the facade you hide behind—don’t give me that look, I’ve seen you do it,” Yaz tells her. “This place is great and all, and what they’re celebrating is really wonderful and I’m glad it works for them, but…you spend a lot of time celebrating the wonderful bits of other people—”
“Other people are wonderful! Graham and Ryan and you, Yaz, definitely you—”
“—and you get a lot of praise for what you do as the Doctor, obviously, but there’s another part of you that loves custard creams and rainbows and knitting sweaters for cacti and loves the universe, in general. Maybe that’s all of the Doctors, I don’t know, seeing as I haven’t met any of them, but…you love being in this universe, playing in it, so, so much, and I think that’s you,” Yaz says. “That joy.”
“Oh.”
And you love me, too, she thinks, even if she can’t say it out loud. Even if that truth is exactly what makes it so she can’t.
“That person,” Yaz says instead, “that person should get seen and—and—loved in all of this too.” Her cheeks have darkened now, she knows, but she continues anyway. “And for me…” She stops, swallows. “Doctor, as lovely as this was… Maybe I’m finally ready to celebrate being me, too.”
The Doctor is looking at her again, now, gazing at her with those timeless eyes that have seen galaxies, millennia, wars fought and battles lost, but also with a tenderness to her expression causes something warm to settle in Yaz’s chest.
“I were mad at Dan for a bit there, for sayin’ to you what he said—and for sayin’ it to me, to be honest—but I think it was what I needed. What we needed.”
“A good kick in the trousers,” the Doctor says.
Yaz’s mouth quirks upward. “Or in the culottes.” She takes a deep breath. “After Izzy Flint and everything that happened in secondary school, I shoved that part of me down as deep as it would go, ’til I didn’t admit it was there anymore even to myself. And then after Dan, and our talk on the beach…even if it wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for, it was still out there, and the world didn’t end, like it always felt like it would. I’ve seen worlds end with you, and it’s never about something stupid as—as—the way that I love. Because it’s not a bad thing.”
“Love is never a bad thing,” the Doctor whispers. She swallows, and looks away. “Your love could never be a bad thing, Yasmin Khan.” Her lips are a tight line as she gazes out over the sea of partygoers and masks, and this time Yaz lets her have her silence, her wordless inner war of what she wants versus what she can have. She knows the outcome of that battle anyway. It’s enough to know she is wanted—or, well, she is making it work. For both of them.
When she Doctor moves again, it’s a quick spring to her feet and a small smile that lets Yaz know the space was appreciated. “So you have a request, then?” she asks, holding out her hand.
“Doctor,” Yaz says, letting her pull her to her feet, “take us to Earth. Present day.” She smiles. “Take us to Pride.”
The TARDIS lurches wildly to the left, throwing Yaz against the side of the console with an oomph that knocks the breath out of her lungs. Her forehead nearly smacks into the gravitational deflector, and she grabs onto the bar around the edge of the console even as she pulls the helvic regulator lever before the Doctor can even ask her to. The TARDIS shudders but doesn’t stop its careening path through the vortex, nearly sending her flying, this time with a sudden drop.
“She always bucks lately when we try to take her to Earth, my Earth,” Yaz shouts across the console. “Have you noticed that, Doctor?”
“What? Oh, er, yes, I have!” the Doctor—who had been indeed sent flying in this last round, and had taken to it with her usual aplomb and flailing limbs—shouts back, hanging from one of the glowing columns curving up toward the ceiling for dear life as the TARDIS jolts and pitches again, this time far to the right. Just as it re-orients again, the Doctor drops, a look of intense concentration on her face as she lands and slams her hands over two buttons and a swirly-thing that Yaz thinks you’re supposed to twist during manual in-atmosphere flight, for altitude or summat. “Ha! Got ya.” The TARDIS straightens abruptly, letting out a soft whine. Yaz waits a few seconds to be sure, then gingerly peels her clamped hands off of the edge of the console.
“She likes you!” the Doctor chirps by way of explanation. “’S why you can pilot her as well as you do! Well, that and your skill, of course. Never discount the skill of Yasmin Khan.”
“And…?” Yaz prompts, still nonplussed. Though that may be the concussion; her head might have connected with the grav plating after all.
“And she thinks we might be returning you home, poor old girl. And if we were—which we’re not—” the Doctor says pointedly to the central pillar. “—you’d be gone.”
“…Oh.”
The Doctor must sense the sadness coming on because she breaks the moment with a jaunty wink. “Told you she liked you! Now—we’re here.”
“Here, here, or 17th-century-France-is-close-enough-to-home-Dan-so-let’s-get-bon-bons, here?” Yaz asks, leaning forward to peer into the astral spectrometer. Right galaxy, at least, and yup, those are her normal set of constellations.
“Semantics,” the Doctor sniffs, but squints at the spectrometer anyway before checking the temporal coordinates. “June 2021. Skipped a few months ahead of where we’re normally at to get to June, of course, but we can always go back if you want to—”
“No going back,” Yaz reminds her. “Not til we see this through.” She smiles. “Besides, you promised the TARDIS.”
“Right-o!” The Doctor springs toward the door, then pauses, turning back to Yaz. “Wardrobe? This feels like a wardrobe-y kind of trip.”
“Definitely wardrobe,” Yaz agrees, and feels her heart do a momentary flutter in her chest in anticipation. How many years has she avoided Sheffield Pride, always making sure she made other plans for that day? How many times had she asked for it off months in advance so PC Officer Khan couldn’t be scheduled to work it?
Three rights, a left, and a shimmy down a narrow set of stairs later, she and the Doctor arrive in the TARDIS wardrobe—a maze of hanging racks for clothes from all centuries, all planets, along with a couple curtained changing rooms and a few benches that are especially helpful when the Doctor’s struggling to get her wellies off, hopping on one foot with her tongue sticking out. Yaz can see their pirate outfits hanging two racks to her right near the ceremonial robes from their visit to Constarna-2, but on the racks nearest the entrance the TARDIS has helpfully supplied what looks to be a veritable explosion of colour for this particular stop.
The Doctor bounces over to it. “Well, Yaz? What should I wear, d’ya think? My first time at Earth Pride!”
“You’re already kind of dressed for it,” Yaz says, pointing at the ever-present rainbow on the Doctor’s shirt.
She grins. “Excellent fashion sense, me. Rainbows are good for all occasions, but especially Pride. ’S why you can never find me without one!”
“Where were your rainbows during that whole mess with Barton and MI6?” Yaz teases.
“Yaz!” the Doctor exclaims, aghast. “Did you not see my cufflinks?” Her forehead wrinkles. “And me boxers, but I weren’t goin’ round showin’ off those… But I deffo showed the cufflinks to Ryan and to Graham and… I knew I should have added the pocket square. Y’couldn’t have missed that! Always add a rainbow pocket square, Yaz, it dresses everything up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Yaz laughs.
In the end, the Doctor keeps her usual shirt and coat but changes out the laces on her boots for rainbow versions and convinces Yaz to let her do the same for hers. For her part, she goes pretty standard as well—her favourite brown leather jacket over a shirt of dusky orange-pink. She affixes her hair in a style she hasn’t worn in a while, but when the Doctor sees the twin space buns she knows she too is reminded of lighter, simpler times. Not that Yaz would trade those times for these, either—a time before she knew who the Master was, or had witnessed the possible devastated future of Earth, before years of hardship as a woman mired in 1901.
“Oooh, face paint!” the Doctor exclaims just as Yaz is clipping the second bun into place. “Love me some face paint. Will you do me some face paint, Yaz?”
“Yes,” Yaz says, mostly because she’ll do anything for the Doctor but also because if she doesn’t the Doctor will be going to Pride in full rainbow-face. She takes the paint set from the Doctor and sets it on one of the benches before taking out her phone and Googling a quick reference photo of all of the common flags and handing it to the Doctor. “Tell me what you want, yeah?”
“So many options,” the Doctor says delightedly. Her brow furrows as she peers at them all, scrolling and reading the description under each one with the same level of concentration she gives other very important things like tinkering with TARDIS innards and getting the precisely right ratio of beans to toast. “And the meanings, all ascribed to colour combinations! Have I ever told you about the planet Chromia before? Their entire language is colour. And they can see more of ‘em than you lot do, or than I do, for that matter. But it makes for the worst of mix-ups…one speck of fuchsia looks a little mauve and all of a sudden I’m breaking into the palace instead of looking for the loo.” The Doctor sighs. “Unfortunately the TARDIS doesn’t translate hex values as well as auditory phonemes, same reason we don’t much visit the scent-based cultures.”
“See anything that fits?” Yaz prompts, sensing they’re about to get a bit off-track.
“Mmh…pansexual? Is that okay?” the Doctor asks.
“Of course,” Yaz smiles at her.
“And one of the wonky gender ones?” she continues. “My gender is very wonky, by Earth standards, I think. Perfectly normal for a Time Lord though.”
“Sure. Non-binary or genderfluid? Yaz says, leaning in to look. “Or do you consider yourself trans?”
“Let’s go ‘fluid,’” the Doctor replies. “Since it’s always flip-floppin’ about. Though I were stuck as a man for quite a long bit there…”
Taking the phone from the Doctor, Yaz examines the picture, then selects the colours she’ll need out of the tub. She forces the Doctor to sit down—not an easy task, and requiring several threats involving eating the last custard cream—and to sit still, which fails entirely. When she’s finished, the Doctor has a stripe of hot pink, yellow, and light blue on one side, and a more muted pink, white, purple, black, and blue streaked across the other cheek. The lines are about as straight as Yaz is, but, well, at least that seems appropriate for Pride, and the Doctor doesn’t seem to care either, staring at herself in the mirror with a grin and turning her face from side to side.
“My turn?” Yaz asks, and is gratified by the way the Doctor springs into action. She is all eagerness and bounce and squirrel-like agility until she has Yaz’s selected colours actually in-hand, at which point all the fidgeting seems to stop at once, tongue poking out the side of her mouth as she scrunches her nose in concentration.
The proximity… Yaz was not prepared for the sudden proximity of the Doctor’s face to hers as she makes the first careful swipe of colour across her left cheek. She’s so close, possibly the closest she’s ever been, and Yaz tries not to think about the way she can feel her breath ghosting across her lips, or every single gold fleck in her hazel eyes. The feather-light strokes of the brush against Yaz’s cheek tickle, but she forces herself to remain still, shutting her eyes as if that will make the closeness any easier to bear.
“This all right?” the Doctor asks moments or hours later, her voice a bit husky. There is a shuffle of feet against the floor as she steps back before Yaz opens her eyes again. Not meeting her gaze, Yaz turns to look in the mirror and can’t help the way her lips turn upward at the edges as she stares at her own reflection, the warm lesbian flag colours now painted across one cheek. Lesbian. The word still bounces around her skull longer than it should, her skin tingling like it’s brushed against sandpaper with the unfamiliarity of the label, but that feeling of unwelcome strangeness has been fading a little bit every day since New Year’s now. Lesbian. After everything that happened in secondary school, she used to stare at herself in the mirror wondering what was wrong with her, why everyone could sense it but she couldn’t. Now, witnessing the symbol splashed across her face for the whole world to see, excitement sparks deep in her belly for the first time.
“It’s perfect,” Yaz tells her, spinning back around with a smile. “Thank you.”
“Brilliant! Ready to get a shift on, then?”
Yaz nods, and the two of them head back up the stairs, right, and three lefts and stop before the TARDIS doors. The Doctor throws them open with a flourish, revealing a parade already in full swing outside—thumping music and flags of every variety of colour waving everywhere, body glitter and rainbows and thunderous courage, a thousand people streaming by and claiming their place and personhood with every step.
Yaz teeters on the doorstep, looking out at a community she had run from for so long. It feels different from Al’Adnë, fun as their celebration had been… More familiar. More like coming home.
Next to her, the Doctor lets out a gasp. “Yaz, some of them are wearing flags as capes. No Doctor has ever had a cape before, I don’t think—can I be the first Doctor with a cape?”
“Of course you can,” Yaz says, smiling up at her. She gazes back out at the happy, boisterous crowd again, then back at the Doctor. “Can we… Will you hold my hand?”
The Doctor looks at her for a moment, then nods. “‘Course.” The Doctor’s hand closes around her own, warm and secure, and Yaz laces their fingers together.
“I’m proud to be with you, Yaz. In whatever ways we are and in every way we are,” the Doctor tells her. “You make me so proud.”
“You too, Doctor.” She faces the parade again, and gives the Doctor’s hand a squeeze. “Now, let’s go find you that cape.”