#this is somewhere between a drabble and a meta and a scene analysis… whatever. hands you this mess

[dandelionjack]

the ninth doctor trusted rose enough to believe she would stay with him after his face changed. and twelve took some convincing but towards the end of deep breath accepted that clara would stay by his side no matter how old he looked. but thirteen was so used to losing people. her previous self had loved clara and lost her, he had looked after bill and failed to save her, he had tried to redeem missy and (to his knowledge) lost that cause too. no wonder she wouldn’t trust yaz to stay for her fourteenth face. no wonder she believed she ‘had to do this next part alone’. she had grown quietly distant with the new knowledge that she was no longer even an ordinary gallifreyan, not something of this universe, but outside of it, alien even to the aliens. isolated and inaccessible, standing on an invisible pedestal her ancestors placed her on — a pedestal that more resembled a cage. glass walls on all sides like the forced regeneration chamber. thin glass wall between her and yaz now, transparent but too solid to break through. harder than azbantium when there’s no solid footing to stand on.

of course yaz would run when she saw her new self. of course she would leave. companions would never stay now, they would never fully understand. when thirteen said that she would need to do ‘this next part’ alone, by ‘next part’ she meant ‘the rest of her (potentially eternal) life’. it’s the classic gambit: push the one you love away before they get the chance to reject you. because they always will, now. either that or they die in horrible circumstances. better to flee like you’ve always done.

this is why the bigeneration was a narrative necessity, why the giggle was the perfect vision of a positive finale. the original version of the doctor gets to settle down with people that he won’t lose. people that he won’t turn away from. people whose hearts he won’t inevitably break. he’s sitting there in the back yard and he’s not going anywhere…

…yet somewhere out there in sheffield lives a police officer named yazmin khan. she’s not all sunshine and rainbows — all cops are bastards, after all. sometimes she takes her nameless rage out on a shoplifting suspect. sometimes she hands a parking ticket to a kid that didn’t deserve it. and sometimes she does genuine good for the community, sometimes she goes to the club and dances with strangers, sometimes she sits on the sofa and watches a documentary about space exploration and laughs at the painful inaccuracies. and many miles south, the doctor spends time with his family, but he’ll never get the courage to visit her. because she’d want to run away with him again. and he could never give her that, not anymore. anything but running.

yazmin khan loved the universe in the eyes of her doctor. oh, that doctor in the garden? the stay-at-home-doctor? he’s brilliant, but he would never be enough for her. his presence would never replace the cosmic vistas and myriads of stars thirteen gave her. and she’s never coming back