Cold
“Doctor!”
Yaz is near-panting as she throws herself into the Tardis- the Doctor’s Tardis, not her own mausoleum of a ship. The comforting warm glow of the lights greets her, the machine humming to life in Yaz’s presence, but Yaz looks past this familiar presence to look for another. Hunched over the console, perhaps? Or is she doing repairs down below? Or perhaps she is hiding within the Tardis’ infinite depths?
Only…
It feels wrong, Yaz can just tell that there is someone missing.
“She’s not here, is she?” She asks, and around her the Tardis thrums in apology, mournful, and Yaz’s breath rattles out of her. She places a hand to one of the pillars, feeling its warmth beneath her fingers, reacting to her, comforting her, and she takes a moment to soak in its familiarity, to transfer that warmth to herself. There is still hope.
Find the Tardis, find the Doctor. That is what Jack had said.
He follows Yaz in soon after, and one look at her hung head, his mouth settles into a thin line and he strides towards the console. The Tardis protests his poking and prodding at first, and Jack gets irritated, but eventually, the ship accepts his help.
Yaz keeps a hold of the pillar as the ship responds to Jack’s questioning in bleeps and low bonging sounds, simply allowing herself to feel the Tardis under her hand. She was not sure she ever would again, being left only with the cool, cold interiors of a Tardis that is distant from her, became the canvas for her sorrow, repurposed and misused; in the end, Jack had used it to lead them to this Tardis, the Tardis, but to Yaz it will always be a cold place of goodbyes. This Tardis, however, is like coming home again, and the warmth it instils in her nurtures the small hope which begins to grow in her chest, despite the rotting of grief and hopelessness within her, despite how much else there is against them, that possibly… her search might almost be over.
The Tardis lurches into movement, and Yaz holds on tight to the pillar, silently begging the machine under her hold: Bring her back, bring her back to us, bring her back to me. Yaz could swear in that moment that the machine replies back to her, but there is a ringing in her ears that she cannot quite hear it past.
A thump, and Yaz staggers, almost falling, but she regains her footing before she can. That is what is needed right now: cannot fall, must keep going, must find her. Earth needs her. The Universe needs her. Yaz needs her.
“Alright! Where are we?” Jack asks the machine, staring down at the console. His face darkens, and finally Yaz lets go of the pillar, heading over with dread in her gut. Into the darkness.
“What is it?” She asks, voice hoarse. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere I hoped I would never be.” Jack answers ominously.
“Where?”
One of the most secure prisons in the universe, apparently, and Yaz stomach turns at the word. Prison. In all her work, in all her investigations, she had not even thought to consider the Doctor might be in prison. Ironic for a police officer. She might find it funny, but right now the irony is sickening, her overlooking this potential sickening, the truth at last sickening. Why prison?
“We need to be quick.” Jack tells her, and Yaz nods, knowing they do, that there are people, a planet, counting on them, but it takes her a moment to force her legs to move. They feel leaden with the weight that has fallen on her shoulders, replacing the weight of months’ worth of searching.
She moves off from the comfort of the Tardis, patting the console once, reassuringly, for herself or for the Tardis, she is not sure. But the machine hums under her palm and it feels like a boost, an encouragement. You can do this, it seems to say, you can bring her home.
Yaz is struck by the oppressiveness of the place from the moment she steps out of the Tardis. The air is thin and unpleasant, she already feels grimy, the walls steely, cold. It is so, so cold, and damp. It is dark, whatever scant light there is artificial, thrumming with static. Electric, dangerous. Yaz feels cut off from everything, even from reality. Prison, indeed. Sickness curls up in her stomach and she takes a few deep breaths, but she cannot seem to get enough oxygen as her heart pounds in her chest.
They take things as slow as they dare, knowing what rests on this mission. They have a timeship, they should not need to worry about time, for goodness sake, but the constant state of tension they have been in the past few days makes it hard to break the habit, especially as even more tension is added by the mission itself. But they move carefully, not wanting to be spotted. Guards pass them by, the Judoon, the same as had been in Gloucester. Yaz had not liked them then and she certainly does not now, keeping the Doctor in a place like this.
“The Tardis is saying she’s near here.” Jack whispers to her as they edge around a corner, the small device in his hand glowing and emitting a soft beeping noise which is getting more and more persistent, provided for them by the Tardis, as eager as them to see her thief returned.
“Jack!” Yaz whispers harshly, her heart thundering in her chest as her stomach lurches as a figure comes into sight, being escorted by two Judoon guards, head bowed, hands clasped together loosely in front of their body. They are clothed in a scratchy-looing maroon jumpsuit, with strange writing down one side, and their hair… it looks dishevelled, greasy, unkempt. Obviously, prisoners are not kept in a great condition, even worse, in a barely ethical condition. Maybe there is no place for ethics here, in one of the securest prisons in the universe. Yaz shudders, swallowing bile.
That is her.
She is there, only dozens of feet away from Yaz, after all this time.
The Doctor.
She looks…
“Is that her?” Jack asks her, voice grim, cutting across her horrid realisation. Yaz nods, taking a steadying breath, and Jack grimaces too.
“Yeah. That’s her.”
It is like she can hardly believe her own words. She suddenly feels dizzy, and Yaz holds onto the wall they are pressed to, keeping herself upright whilst she waits for it to pass. It is the shock, she knows, months of waiting to see her face again and yet not knowing exactly how, or where, and suddenly she has been presented with this. In her dreams the Doctor reunites with her looking like she had at her best, all rainbows and a cheery smile, and in her nightmares she does not, she never comes back, is dead. But this, this is like a purgatory state of misery.
Yaz digs her fingers in harder against the wall. The metal beneath her grip is cold and grimy. The wall is smooth but thrumming with the artificiality of this place. It is foe to Yaz, cold and hard and her fingers slip against it as she tries to process the place she is in, the Doctor is in, but she is here to break her out of it, it will not hold her for much longer.
She watches at the Judoon push the Doctor into a cell, presumably, shouting at her aggressively. There is no response. And then the cell door is closing with a heavy clinking of metal and the guards are moving back along the corridor, and Yaz and Jack are alone. They share a look, and then they are off, creeping towards the cell as quietly and as quickly as possible.
“Can you get it open?” She whispers to Jack, glancing back and forth up and down the corridor checking to see if anyone is coming. But it is quiet, eerily so, just the artificial thrumming and the static from the lights. Jack bends down to look at the small panel by the side of the door, fiddling with it.
“Oh, just watch me.” He says, but he sounds less than sure.
It takes him an age to get it open, he tries many different things. Yaz only pays half attention, ears pricking for any sound from down the corridor, eyes alert for anything hint of movement. Finally, Jack pulls something from one of his coat pockets with exclamation, muttering something about some alien in a bar giving him a certain tool which is the same model as this model of security system, and the moment he uses it on the device, the door stutters and staggers open, loose on its hinges, exposing the cell beyond. Yaz feels like she, too, is being exposed, vulnerable, all her emotions flayed and out in the open, as she takes in the sight in front of her.
Months of expectation have already been served the starter by the sight of the Doctor, but this, the main course, confronted with her face to face like this… it is bitter on the tongue, bitter with shock and with terror. Yaz is frozen, taking in the sight in front of her.
She begins with the walls, the steely, cold walls, oppressive forces, but scarred with row upon row of tallies. They cover almost every surface, white scarring onyx in jagged, untidy lines. It is obvious what they are representative of, the passing of time, but what time that is, Yaz is unsure, but she can see just from their volume and the haphazard way they fill the room in depressing decoration that it has been far too long. Yaz thinks of the walls that have confined her, decorated with her own frustrations and desperations as she had tried to hold on to the last thing she had, unfriendly and unfamiliar… she shivers at the similarity that is displayed here. This is not right; these walls speak desperation.
Speaking. The Doctor is doing that, too, as she sits down on a hard, flat surface. There is a small raggedy blanket by her side, and Yaz blanches to realise that must be a bed, and no, this is terrible. They had seen things this bad on their travels, but there the Doctor had been, with the three of them by her side, saving the day, but now they are here but maybe they are late and the Doctor, she appears to have not been able to help herself because…
The Doctor sits hunched with her elbows on her knees, ratty hair in her face as her eyes track the tallies on the wall in front of her, talking quickly, as she had always done, and that voice… it is so familiar and so comforting but the tone is ragged and the words… she is counting, numbers, calculations, and it seems she has not noticed the opening of her cell door, so focussed on her task as her eyes move unblinkingly, tracing the marks on the wall. Finding meaning in the desperation; desperation feeding off desperation, and endless circle.
Yaz wants to run forwards but she also wants to turn back and run. Her grief, it needs somewhere to go, it needs relief, the reward after all these months of being able to say ‘she is alive and I have found her’, but there is no relief to be found here and it builds up in Yaz, ready to explode like a volcano, and she almost feels dizzy again. But Jack is at her back and she is pushing forward into the space, pushing towards the Doctor, her feet urging her on as if her own body is saying ‘you can do this’. She approaches whatever remains of the woman she had idolised, had admired, the woman she-
Her despair is almost tangible, sends cold dread down her spine which seems to spread from the frigid walls, the artificial air, infecting her lungs, seeping into her bloodstream; Yaz feels poisoned, suffocating. It could be very easy for her in that moment to freeze in place and be overcome by a hypothermia of emotion, seeing the most amazing person she has ever met being brought so low, unable to help herself. But in that moment, Yaz finds that inner warmth spread from the Tardis, in her chest, blossoming like a flower. Its petals are delicate, freshly grown, and far too unstable for such a hellish place as this, but it is enough for her to step forward further towards the Doctor in hope as well as despair. She breaths in the cold frigid air, a deep steadying breath.
“My god.” Jack murmurs behind her, taking it all in. Yaz ignores him, set with single-minded determination on the Doctor now. She is still scared, but she has finally reached the moment she has been anticipating for months, and Yaz will rise to it.
“Doctor?” She asks, coming to a stop by the other woman, crouching down. Her legs feel numb.
The Doctor continues to reel off numbers, unhearing, eyes flittering agitatedly still. Her fingers twitch a little where her hands hang limply, and when the Doctor does not respond to Yaz calling her a second time, Yaz carefully takes one of those hands in her own.
It is more than just a touch of skin on skin, it is connection, a coming together after so long and it takes Yaz’s breath away. To feel the Doctor beneath her, a physical presence, freezing cold but so alive. Yaz tightens her hold. “Doctor?”
The Doctor startles, and she near-falls from the bed, stumbling to the corner, ripping her hand from Yaz’s. Yaz pushes back herself in shock, rising to her full height, her heart hammering in her chest. She is unseated from her confidence for a moment, shock taking over.
The Doctor is wide-eyed and open mouthed and staring at Yaz in compete shock. She blinks, frowning, as if she cannot believe the other woman is there. Yaz gathers herself and takes a step forward, but the Doctor stumbles back further, and then her eyes lock on Jack just behind Yaz and they widen even more, and she shakes her head, uncomprehending.
“No…” She mutters, words cutting through cold air with the severity of a butter knife, barely making a dent. She clenches her eyes shut, turns her head away from them, her hands curling into fists. “No…”
“Doctor…” Yaz ventures again, her breath pluming in clouds as she speaks, lungs filling with icicles.
“That’s not possible, that’s not possible.”
“Doctor-” Jack tries to intervene but he, too, seems frozen by this moment, this hostile place. Tallies marked on the walls, a horrid truth in front of their eyes.
The Doctor stumbles again, her back hitting one of the steely walls. Her hands splay against it, fingers digging in. it looks as if it is the only thing holding her up as she tries to come to terms with reality, with the breaking ice of this horrid place. She looks into Yaz’s eyes, and Yaz looks back, and both of them are frozen as they struggle to come to terms with the realisation of each other. Emotions sit as if tangible beings in the air between them, as multitudinous as the tally marks, and Yaz breathes in and out in the frigid air and realises that the search might be over, but the small flower of hopes she holds close to her chest needs to survive frosty surroundings first.
And they are trapped between cold metal walls.
Her limbs are tired, laden down with a cold which seeps in deep, between her joints, in her blood, pumped by two hearts which stubbornly go on beating. The small hope they hold between them is growing ever more fragile by the moment, and as the Doctor is escorted back to her cell by Judoon guards she can feel the petals falling from it one by one as it shrivels.
It has been small but persistent for so long now, but finally, it seems it has been defeated. It is too cold here for hope, sometimes.
Her last ditch attempt, years in the making, gone to pot. Blown. She should have known better than to believe she had allies in this place; she is infamous here, and her misery is many of the other inmates’ pleasure. Was it ever really going to work? Or had she deluded herself?
She barely notices as she is shoved every now and then down steely corridor back to her cell. Should this place feel like home by now? Is she being stubborn in not seeing it that way? Probably not, it is unpleasant, authoritarian, it is never meant to feel like home; she is, apparently, not deserving of one.
She can feel herself slipping away, falling to the ground in pieces. There is one thing she can hold onto as she feels herself spiral, and she itches to return to her cell, suddenly impatient for it, for the stability, however artificial, however self-contrived it may be, that it provides.
The Judoon berate her as they shove her back into her cell, and once upon a time she might have berated them back, but she finds she does not care, focused with single-mindedness on her walls, laid out like years before her, and she slumps herself down on the edge of her ‘bed.’ She slumps forward, elbows on knees, exhausted, and tries to hold onto that last strand of sanity, even as her fingers go numb from the cold.
Time, time is what she has, she can control it like this, just using these tallies. She can control it- pretend she has control.
She counts the tallies, begins to do little calculations with them, pretend she can play with time again. She zones out, her eyes are unblinking as they stare at the tallies, finding a strange sense of calmness in them. There is a ringing in her ears as she disconnects from the reality of her cell, from her reality.
And then.
A touch.
Unexpectedly warm.
The Doctor startles, her mantra broken, and scrambles from the bed. She looks up, spots a face, so familiar but yet so old- not old as in aged but old as in it has been years and years since she has seen that face. Her mouth gapes, her hearts hammering away as her lungs freeze up, paralysed in confusion and shock. There is another face behind that first, and it has been even longer since she has seen that one, she is sure, but is she really seeing them? Are they really here? No, no, they cannot be, because she has been trying to break out of here for years and they couldn’t have just…
She takes another step backward as the first face steps forward. “No… no…”
“Doctor?” She says, and the Doctor feels sick, suddenly, to hear her name (it has been so long since she heard her name!) from that voice. Is this it? Has the last petal fallen? Has her brain brought in something to console her as she finally goes around the twist? The warmth in her chest is distinguishing as the terror of it hits her. She wants to laugh. After all her lives and what is finally making her lose it is the one thing she has been longing to see for so long. Yaz. But Yaz cannot be here.
“That’s not possible, that’s not possible.”
She backs into one of her cell walls, familiar, almost comforting in its grounding reality, despite how harsh the reality is. She stares at Yaz, she stares, and stares and stares and her fingers dig into cold metal and she puts more space between them- between her and the proof of her last hope fading. She is really too far gone now, isn’t she? Finding comfort in the cold walls that contain her. It is perverse. Yaz’s presence here is perverse, it is wrong, it sullies her brilliant beaming light. It is not even Yaz at all. It is the Doctor’s failure which stands in front of her.
And it is frozen, too, as the Doctor struggles to comes to terms with what has happened to her, and suddenly she finds herself in a confrontation, in the middle of her solitary cell. But she is so tired, and all she wants to do is give in, sink to the floor and tell them all they have won: the Judoon, the inmates in here with her, the Master, all those years ago on Gallifrey, the Timelords, tell them they have finally defeated her because here she is- Yaz- the blossoming hope of humanity, of the universe, but she is not really here, she has been twisted and turned into a symbol of the Doctor’s failure by the cold steely walls that oppress her, by the tallies she has created that were never going to be enough. The Doctor wants to scream, she wants to cry, she wants to slump to the floor and never move again.
But instead she is frozen against cold metal wall.