Scratching
Her ears are ringing in the silence. It bounces off the walls and back at her, and Yaz shakes her head to clear it, exhaustion dragging down at the edges of her consciousness. The scratching of her biro against the paper is the only other noise in the control room, apart from the occasional bleep from the machine, but it is nothing like the Doctor’s Tardis. It has not warmed to her, does not seem to have a personality, not one that Yaz can feel like she used to be able to feel in the Doctor’s Tardis, surrounding her, enveloping her. Warming her from the inside.
This Tardis is empty and quiet. Only Yaz for company. And for Yaz, there is only the poor company of the Tardis, too. That, and her multitude of papers.
Post-it notes and sheets scatter the floor, stick to the console, taped to the wall. The paper pieces of the person she misses most, she longs to find, is doing everything she can to find, if she is out there.
Is she out there? This is the question Yaz cannot consider, cannot bring herself to even question because if she were to, if she were to take a moment to consider the fact that the Doctor might just be gone in an explosion and a demolished planet, then she will be gone, too, lost to her anxiety and her grief.
She has to keep going. She has to do this. She cannot leave her behind.
The biro continues to scratch, and scratch, as Yaz writes down the snippets she has, whatever small clues, like ashes from the fire that has burnt down the life they had with her before, before the Master, before Gallifrey, before it all burnt down, she writes all those ashes into words and sticks them to the walls as if that might mean something.
But really it is nothing, and she is no closer to finding the Doctor than she had been months ago.
She clenches her eyes shut at the thought as a wave of grief washes over her, agonising, pulling her mouth into a grimace. She turns. She does not want to look but she does. She turns and looks at that spot, the place by the entryway, where she had said goodbye all those months ago.
Live great lives.
Her breath is ragged, tears catch at the corner of her eyes, but Yaz blinks them away, shaking herself. No one can see her cry, not even herself. She has to keep going. She has to-
Her phone rings in her pocket, and Yaz scrambles for it, thinking, for one moment, that possibly it might be-
But it is only Sonya. Sonya, probably concerned about her, wondering where she is. Yaz cannot think about herself, there is only one person she is wondering the location of, hoping… longing.
It all becomes too much, and Yaz throws her phone across the console room, watching it thump against the soft material of the rolled up sleeping bag and blankets she has stowed away on the other side of the console. Maybe that was lucky, that it did not smash against the hard floor, but nothing feels important, not like her search is. Not like the Doctor is.
Yaz crouches, a sob building which scratches at her throat. She curls in on herself, hunching her arms into her body, longing for someone else’s arms around her, always longing, never having, not quite, and then it had all abruptly come to an end. This is not how it is supposed to go, she is not meant to be curled up on the floor when the Doctor is missing; she needs to be the Yaz everyone sees, the one Graham praised, the strong Yaz who never lets anything or anyone bother her… but it is hard when she feels burnt out from the inside, seeing the ashes of her former self only in the ashes of information she can find as she searches for the Doctor, and they are fleeting and crumble under her fingers, and Yaz is left with nothing.
She eyes the bedding out of the corner of her eye, considering it, longing for it as exhaustion drags down at her bones. She has no idea what time it is, but it must be late. But that is no excuse, she needs to… needs to…
Yaz digs her fingernails into the soft flesh of her thigh, waking herself up. She uncurls and stands straight, pushing her shoulders back, breathing deep. She collects her discarded paper and pen. Just this one more ash from the fire, then she can rest, then she can rest… but she will never really rest, not until she finds the Doctor.
She puts pen to paper, and the biro goes scratching on and on and on.
The Doctor scrapes another line onto the wall, discarding the small rough stone used for the job to another lonely corner of her cell, and then settles back on her haunches in the one she has currently settled herself. Another day down. She thinks. She is guessing, at this point. Time stretches on, passes her by whilst also trapping her, unable to escape its constant movement, unable to play, and it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, makes her feel nauseous.
Her greasy hair is irritating, a constant itch she cannot get rid of, and she resists the urge to run her fingers through it, knowing it will only leave them feeling unpleasant, too. Not that they are not already unpleasant; her skin is paper-dry, the air in this merciless place is artificial, too filtered, too thin, not fresh at all. It makes her feel ancient. She is ancient. That thought sits unpleasantly, too; she feels unpleasant inside and out. She feels… displaced, cut off. From the person she thought she knew, from the people she misses, from the universe just beyond dangerously sparking bars, she cannot even feel the Tardis; there are some kind of psychic dampeners in place. It is agony.
The Doctor is good at agony, sometimes it feels like an old friend, but for her, barely rising from the ashes of Gallifrey, from the ashes of everything she had thought she knew about herself, for her who loves to chatter at a hundred miles an hour, can barely stand to be alone for a single second, this agony is painful, like scratching at a chalkboard, like ringing in her ears. She focuses on the lines on the wall; they might be agony, but it is agony she can see, the passing of time, something she can control, even though she is powerless, just by looking at them. That is, if she does not think too carefully about, if she does not think about how she is the one to estimate the passing of time going by the routines of the sordid hovel, not quite knowing whether it is accurate, whether it is true; if she thinks about that, she might very well unravel.
If she thinks about anything else, she might unravel.
If she thinks about…
If she thinks…
If she…
Hooded eyes implore her not to go, being torn apart from the inside before she had even taken her final step away from them, from her. Those eyes have imprinted themselves on the back of her eyelids, every time her own close, there those eyes greet her. She tries not to sleep, she tells herself she does not need to, even though she surely must by now, even as she feels the cold seeping into her bones through her scratchy jumpsuit. But she cannot sleep. If she sleeps, she sees those eyes. She sees the eyes of dozens of children, too, sacrificed in the name of exploration, or experimentation. For the glory of-
The Doctor lurches forward, bracing herself with a hand against the wall, breathing hard. She blinks, those sad hazel eyes swimming in her vision. No, not sleeping, cannot sleep. She might lose track of time if she sleeps, and then where will she be then? Completely adrift, completely unravelled.
Her hand travels down the wall, fingertips catching at the uneven scratchings. Hundreds and hundreds of scratchings. Hundreds and hundreds of days. There will be more, there will be many more. She slumps forward, unable to stop herself.
But how many?
The scratchings go on and on and on and the Doctor unravels.
And hooded eyes laden with sorrow scorch the back of her eyelids until she is burnt down to ashes.