#it's thasmin if you squint really they're just Close

[tardis-sapphics]

46 cause why not.

i didn’t forget!! i’m just shit at consistency. anyway, here’s my attempt -- tw for body horror

It is difficult to find the things you cannot see.

Good things come along in life in a myriad of ways—sometimes with a fanfare, a parade, and sometimes without acknowledgement. They have been loud, and they have been quiet, and stubborn. So stubborn. They entered Yaz’s life on the back of a beautiful stranger. They have ruffled through Yaz’s hair like the winds of space, cool on the fingertips with a whispered promise of worth, and deserving, and relief.

But they do not come alone. In the spirit of balance, of course, the sinister creeps in without a trace.

It starts—somewhere. She doesn’t know. She can’t possibly know; neither of them can. But it starts somewhere, stalking her through distant lands and keeping a close eye on her.

They travel. Always. New sights—so many new sights, her brain is filling up with them—with new temperatures, new peoples, new curiosities. The mountains of Poboba, where they swim upright through swarms of glowing insects. Underground caverns populated by mammoth butterflies, fluttering high above them and casting frantic shadows in the green firelight. Glass cities and beach huts clustered in their millions. A whole planet dedicated to sculpting.

It follows her.

The problem is that she can’t keep her energy up.

They stay in for a couple of a days, instead of a couple of hours. The Doctor spends time reading on the Second French Revolution in the 2500s, whilst Yaz struggles through sleep on the sofa beside her. When she is tired of being tired—and the Doctor, though she’ll never admit it, is tired of being in the same spot—Yaz pushes herself upright and asks to see Eartha Kitt in concert.

She lasts an hour. It’s not Eartha—at a sudden burst of brass, she jumps awake in her chair. It’s hard to fight an invisible force. Not for the first time, she sees the Doctor glancing at her, frowning—and then smiling placidly when she is caught.

‘Maybe it’ll go away,’ Yaz shrugs when the Doctor insists on sonicing her. It picks up something unusual, but it can’t say what. Too many variables, too many possibilities. It almost short circuits.

‘It better,’ the Doctor grumbles, the frown producing a deep line in her brow.

‘Doctor,’ she says, struggling to keep a yawn out of her voice. She places a hand on the Doctor’s arm, and it makes her look at Yaz. Still frowning. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Yaz aims for reassuring. ‘I just know it.’

‘But what if you’re not?’ the Doctor counters. There’s more to her worry; there’s centuries’ worth of concern that Yaz cannot comfort by herself. Always, it shines in her eyes—the guilt of living too long.

She should be so hard, Yaz thinks, like stone. And, yes, some nights she is stone, unreachable, stuck in the wallows of memories.

But here, on this night and on most others, she is soft and living. And worrying so deeply, Yaz cannot perceive the bottom of this well. If the Doctor were to fall in, she would be screaming for miles.

Yaz tries to push that thought out of her mind. She has no energy for misery.

‘Then we’ll deal with it,’ she says simply. ‘We always will.’ The Doctor’s expression tightens, and Yaz corrects her mistake. ‘We always can.’

No absolutes. No certainty. Just the certainty of themselves, existing now, together.

They are preferring 1950s New York to the south, though the laws here are still restrictive. If they go anywhere, they prefer public places; Yaz particularly enjoys the parks, where she can sit and regain her breath.

But the New York air is brittle. Winter is always what it says it is here; unlike in Sheffield, where icy winds give way to disappointing drizzle. Yaz shivers in the cool of the night. ‘Let’s go back.’ Her teeth are chattering.

When they return to the hotel, she finds herself shivering still. She hides under the duvet to keep herself warm, but she hardly feels it. Putting on the Doctor’s coat does nothing either.

She can’t feel much at all. The world lurches around her and her arms shudders as she reaches to put a hand on her forehead. Sweat. Lots of sweat.

‘Doctor,’ she manages to spit through clattering teeth. She looks toward the bathroom, where the Doctor has popped in to further investigate the ‘suspicious’ showerhead. ‘Doctor.’

The Doctor reappears in a flash, and her face falls further at the sight of Yaz bundled under the covers.

A pale hand on Yaz’s head, a finger on her pulse point. ‘You’re burning up, Yaz,’ the Doctor murmurs. Her voice is not quite frantic, but it is certainly on its way.

Yaz rolls her eyes. ‘Think I’d guessed that by now, thanks,’ she huffs, and she can hardly think about how similar to the Doctor she sounded then. Blinking down at her lap, she slides her hands back just so and laces her fingers with those just checking her pulse. ‘D’you know what this is?’

Now the Doctor settles on the bed, one hand still entwined whilst the other reaches for the sonic on the beside table. ‘No idea yet. Could be your bog-standard human fever, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s something more…’ She purses her lips.

‘More…?’ Yaz enquires.

‘More rude,’ the Doctor finishes, her face scrunched in concentration. She scans Yaz with her sonic again. ‘In any case, the planets we were last on were quite remote. Unique, and with plenty of unique illnesses. That’s always the risk with these adventures—but they’re really very beautiful—’

‘So I’ll have to let it take its course?’ Yaz interrupts. A yawn overthrows all her functions, until another bout of tremors cuts it short.

‘Unfortunately. But I’ll be here the whole time, I promise.’

Yaz refuses to leave the bed. She is not quite sure how the Doctor does it, but she manages to secure their residency for over the week—and it is a necessary foresight, as Yaz deteriorates rapidly. Both are helpless in the face of it.

The shaking is joined by a fluctuating body temperature. The Doctor tells her that technically, she is experiencing both hypo- and hyperthermia; this ‘fun fact’ is made ‘fun’ only by Yaz surviving both of them. She manages a couple of hours of fitful sleep, but her waking hours are hell on earth, with added perspiration.

And then the shadows start creeping.

She can feel them in amongst the delirium of her fever. They are black in the flog: clear and defined when everything is unfocused. She cant anchor herself to this bed, this room, but she knows where the shadows are at all times.

The Doctor joins her on the bed; Yaz is eighty percent sure about that. But Yaz’s words are crashing into each other as soon as she tries to speak, like cyclists falling over the starting gate. An eagerness, and a purpose—but a shoddy execution. She struggles against her own incompetence, eyes fixed on a shadow crawling closer, as she tries to warn the Doctor of the impending danger.

She tries and tries until it’s the only word tumbling out of her mouth, garbled and destroyed—but necessary, necessary, please, not the Doctor, anyone but the Doctor—

Two hands encapsulate Yaz’s face and the Doctor takes up all her sight—blurred and unsolid. Yaz blinks, maybe.

The Doctor is speaking to her. But then half of her face is cloaked by shadow and her smile starts melting—melting, dusty pink dripping down onto peach skin—then onto blue—and the stripes—she can’t remember the colour of the stripes before they were sullied by the Doctor’s wax-melted mouth—hardly breathing, Yaz watches in horror as the Doctor’s nose succumbs to the same fate, then her left eye, the eyeball sliding down the rest of her face, red coating what was the white of an eye, hazel-green that held a universe—her Doctor, Doctor, melting—

Yaz screams, wrenching her eyes shut, heart pounding, writhing against the secure clamps around her head, crushing her wafer-thin—

Then something lands on her, in her brain, and she sleeps.

The sheets smell of sweat. Gross. Yaz turns onto her other side, but the stink persists. When she breathes out, her mouth tastes dry and wrong, unclean, and she resolves to take a shower. She must be strong enough by now.

Everything comes back to her with the subtlety of a brick wall, and she bolts upright, wide eyed.

From the edge of the bed, fingers fidgeting, the Doctor stares back at her. Face fully intact.

‘Oh, Yaz,’ she breathes, more a sigh than a verbalisation, and immediately strong arms are enveloping her.

Yaz relaxes into the hug, her own arms reaching up to grip onto the Doctor’s shoulders, tightening as the thudding of her heart quickens. She’s still covered in multiple days of sweat but she couldn’t care less. The Doctor is fine, she’s here, she’s alive, she is fine.

Unexpectedly, the relief pours out of her in a sob—then another, then another. When she breaks away from the hug to save herself from drenching the Doctor’s coat, thumbs brush across her cheeks to clear them of salty tears.

She stares at the Doctor’s—fully-structured—face, kind, old eyes wide in their delight. They are blurry again, but this time it’s just the tears, some pooling in the Doctor’s eyes too.

‘You made it,’ the Doctor grins. Her palms are soft on Yaz’s cheeks, her fingertips calloused. ‘Was all a bit touch and go for a while.’

‘Your face isn’t melty,’ Yaz blurts.

The Doctor starts. ‘Oh! Right. No wonder you screamed in my face,’ she responds a moment later, absorbing the information. ‘I was about to be a bit offended, to be honest with you.’

It’s said lightly, but her voice is too tight to deliver it correctly. Yaz collects the Doctor’s hands to hold in her own, playing with fingers on her lap.

‘What was that, Doctor?’ she asks. ‘Never had a fever like that.’ She never wants to again.

The Doctor clears her throat. ‘I’m fairly sure that’s shadow fever,’ she explains. ‘There’s a bunch of similar viruses that produce those symptoms, which tend to be grouped into one term—nearly all of those viruses come from the galaxy we’ve just travelled from. Rare, but not impossible to get. No wonder my sonic had a hard time identifying it—you probably had multiple strands jostling for your attention.’

Yaz sighs, the movement causing a strand of hair to fall in front of her face. ‘Fantastic.’

The Doctor brushes it away for her. ‘That’s why I had to send you to sleep,’ she admits, her face gall and guilty. ‘Old Time Lord trick—I really am sorry about that.’

Yaz nods the apology away. The sleep has helped enormously—now what matters to her is that shower.

Except, when she looks for the bathroom door, she can’t find it.

‘But I need to warn you,’ the Doctor continues.

‘Yeah?’ Yaz mumbles. Her voice feels like static. She tries to cough it away. Still no door. Weird.

‘You got through the worst bit, and you’re definitely gonna live, Yaz, I promise.’ The hands recede from her own. Yaz looks at them, familiar brown skin and all ten digits—but they feel odd, like they are not her own. ‘But you’re gonna feel the effects for a while. You need to stay in bed for a couple more days. Your body’s not strong enough to move—and neither’s your mind.’

Now the static is growing. Fuzzy. All’s fuzzy.

‘That was round one, Yaz. Might help if you sleep off rounds two and three, I think.’

Why did the Doctor stop holding her hands? Was it because they feel fuzzy?

‘Just tell me if you need my help, yeah?’

Yaz follows the sound of the voice, up the waxwork, until she looks squarely at the Doctor again.

The Doctor, perched on the edge of the bed again, her mouth dripping down around her chin, her hands trying to hold her eyes in place.

Yaz screams.