The break of dawn always comes like a breath of fresh air. Cool at first, like the dampness of the dew that rests on blades of grass; but the warmth of the rising sun quickly permeates what sat dormant overnight, bringing it to life. The golden glow of the sun that peeks over the horizon blazes light years away, but it somehow comes from within.
That’s what it feels like. The same cycle. It happens over and over again, yet the awe never eludes them. Every time that fire burns within them, it’s a new beginning, a new opportunity.
After regenerating, the Doctor finds themselves being given a second chance with the last person they left behind.
As it happens, the building they’re on top of is directly adjoined to another, much taller building. The side facing them is windowless and was, once upon a time, probably grey. Not anymore.
The wall has been transformed into a chaotic mural; an ill-fitting jigsaw of amateur illustrations. Yaz struggles to focus on any one aspect.”
—
I’m not a visual artist by any means, but my love will clothe your bones by @freefallvertigo lives in my head rent free and I had to try and recreate at least some of Jonah’s mural.
(previously attempted Jonah’s painting they do in that chapter as well — which can be found here)
For the dialogue prompts: 16. "You were calling out, in your sleep. You said my name." Also Thasmin, of course!! :) :) (I got yours, I am Thinking...)
Thanks for the prompt! Ah, sleep issues and thasmin, two great tastes that taste great together! Anyway, here we go! (I even stuck to just about 1,000 words, I'm so excited!)
----
The first time the Doctor called out, Yaz thought she’d dreamed it. The second time, she shot out of bed and raced to the console room, convinced the Doctor had hurt herself tinkering and needed help.
But the console room was empty. The TARDIS buzzed at her, like she’d provided the wrong answer to an important question.
“Yaz! I can’t reach you!” The Doctor’s voice bounced off the crystal pillars. She wasn’t here, so why was it so loud?
Yaz laid a hand on the controls. “Are you doing this?”
No answer.
The TARDIS’ level of consciousness was still one question mark in a life overflowing with them. Maybe the ship was trying to tell her the Doctor was in danger. Maybe this was some side effect of the Doctor’s connection to it.
Whatever the reason, the Doctor was in trouble and Yaz needed to get to her.
Through the corridors she ran, poking her head into every room she passed. Movie theater: empty. Library: silent. The waters in the three pools were flat and still. Yaz checked bedrooms and basketball courts and a lab with a staggering number of beakers bubbling over open flames.
No Doctor.
Deeper into the TARDIS, the corridors aged. Somewhere between one step and the next, the walls melted from familiar hexagonal plates into ancient brick. Candles perched in wall sconces lit the way with flickering orange light.
“No! Please! Yaz!” The Doctor’s voice was a broken echo coming from the gaping, hungry maw ahead.
Yaz crept forward with one hand on the damp, cold wall. The void swallowed her.
And spit her into a forest.
She stumbled over a tree root, slid on a pile of wet leaves, and caught herself against a trunk.
“Infinite space wrapped in a tiny package,” the Doctor had described the TARDIS as, once upon a time. As she gazed into the shadowed canopy, Yaz realized she’d never really believed it. Wet bark beneath her fingernails solidified the reality of those words.
Something rustled in the underbrush. A choked gasp—the Doctor! Yaz parted a tangled clump of bushes and dove between them. On the other side, a massive tree had fallen and been caught by its neighbor’s lowest branches. It hovered a few feet off the ground, black and hollowed out with age, overgrown with creeping vines and moss.
Underneath it, close to where the weathered trunk met the ground, the Doctor lay curled up on her side. Unhurt, as far as Yaz could tell. Asleep.
The Doctor gasped again and Yaz rushed to her side. Soft moss tore away under Yaz’s knees and she sank into the cold mud. The Doctor was tucked against a wet log, cheek resting on a smooth stone, peppered with wet leaves. Her muddied coat was wrapped tight around her. If it weren’t for the crease between her eyebrows, Yaz would say she looked impossibly comfortable.
But then the Doctor thrashed, that crease deepening, her mouth opening soundlessly. Yaz leaned forward, heart pumping. What was wrong? She touched the Doctor’s wrist, grit squelching beneath her fingers.
The Doctor stilled, her face smoothing out, the lines of her body relaxing. Yaz froze.
This was certainly the weirdest place Yaz had found the Doctor napping, but she did look peaceful. When was the last time she’d even slept? Maybe it would be best to leave her.
Yaz sat back on her heels and released the Doctor’s wrist.
The frown returned and the Doctor kicked out, heel biting into the log behind her. Yaz touched her again and she settled.
Oh, for the love of—the mud was cold, and the thought of being in contact with it any more than she had to made Yaz wrinkle her nose in disgust. But the Doctor needed the sleep, and this was where she had decided to get it, for some reason. So, taking a deep breath to steel herself, Yaz slid into the crevasse.
A shudder worked its way up her back at the cold, wet ground, the smell of leaves and rotting wood. She squeezed in closer, working one arm underneath the Doctor and the other over her waist. Yaz tucked her nose into the Doctor’s neck and the overwhelming scents of nature receded. The universe consisted of just her and the Doctor, huddled together in the little burrow.
It wasn’t so bad, as the Doctor’s body molded itself more closely to Yaz’s. Warmth pooled between them. A thick bed of leaves softened the ground. The swaying of the trees overhead and the scratching of creatures in the brush formed a pleasant white noise. Yaz’s eyelids drooped.
Time flattened and draped itself over them.
Eventually, the Doctor stirred. “Yaz? What are you doing here?”
“You were calling out, in your sleep. You said my name. I had a hell of a time finding you. What are you doing here?”
The Doctor tilted her head. “Sleeping.”
Yaz rolled her eyes. “I got that. But why here? There are beds on the TARDIS. A lot of beds.”
“Well, yes.” The Doctor laid her hand over Yaz’s and intertwined their fingers. “Those were all too loud.”
“Loud.”
“Yes.”
That made no sense, but maybe the Doctor could hear things Yaz couldn’t, especially aboard a telepathic spaceship. “Are you okay? What were you dreaming about?”
The Doctor shifted, turning onto her back and staring at the tree trunk overhead. “Same thing I dream every time I sleep, lately.” She squeezed Yaz’s hand. “Someone or something took you from me.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave you.”
“You won’t have any say in it, when you do.” The Doctor turned back to Yaz, reached over, and pulled her closer. “Can we just… stay here for a while?” She kissed Yaz, a plea for more time.
Though she was wet, and filthy, and a stick was poking her in the hip, Yaz nodded. “Yeah.” She wrapped herself around the Doctor tighter. Held onto now as hard as she could. “We can stay as long as you like.”
thasmin - 2,345 words - rating: G - beach scene and boundaries - read on ao3!
What you said, Doctor, about living in the present while we still have it,” Yaz starts. “Last time we were on a beach. Well—we’re time travellers, everything is the present to us."
The TARDIS brings Yaz and the Doctor to ye olde seaside Scarborough Fair, and Yaz takes another chance on a beach to tell the Doctor just how much she means to her.
written for the @thasminsecretsanta run by the ever brilliant lina, as a gift for @thirteensfavoritetoy! thank you for such a thoughtful prompt, i had wonderful fun with it. have the happiest of holidays and merry christmas!!
read the whole fic below the cut!
“Scarborough fair!” the Doctor announces, whirling her way across the control room. It’s just her and Yaz in the TARDIS, Dan having popped home for a sleep in his own bed, and Yaz is glad the Doctor has taken this as a chance for the two of them to adventure together. They could’ve gone straight to the next morning and picked Dan right back up again, but he shut the doors behind him and the Doctor turned to her and asked, “fancy a trip just us?”
And how can Yaz ever resist a question like that? How can anyone?
So, Scarborough fair. “But not like the Simon and Garfunkel song, though that is very good. No, I’m talking about the actual fair itself that the song was based on—held in Scarborough every August and September from 1253 until over a century later. Merchants, entertainment, good food, good people.” The Doctor glances up from where she’s fiddling busily with the controls. For a second, there’s the slightest hint of bashfulness in her as she looks up through her eyelashes. “That sound alright?”
Yaz beams, the Doctor leaving her a little helpless as she always does. “Sounds perfect.”
The Doctor looks at Yaz and Yaz looks at the Doctor and even as the TARDIS engine thrums into life and jolts them across space and time, the connection between them remains unbroken.
**
“I don’t think it’s August,” Yaz says, blisteringly cold wind whipping about her face as she stands a few tender steps outside of the TARDIS. “And I can’t see a fair.”
The Doctor pouts as she rambles to a stop beside her, hands on her hips in dismay. “Well, at least it’s still Scarborough,” she salvages.
“How can you tell?”
“Slight tinge of rosemary and thyme alongside the sea salt in the air.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Am not! Seems we’re just a few months out of where we wanted to be. It’s 1303 like I’d hoped, fiftieth anniversary of the fair. It’s just we’re a few months late.” The Doctor squints, taking in the view around them which is lit with dazzling winter sun.
The sky is a crystal blue, pure and clear, boundlessly spanning the horizons and unbroken by clouds. They’ve arrived midway up a sloping cliff, the land around them climbing upwards and lush with coastal bracken. On one side, the hill rises to meet a large stone wall, behind which must stand a busting castle judging by the great tower above them and the chatter being carried down to them on the sea breeze. On the other, the grass drops and rolls down to a large sandy beach. Waves beat frostily upon the shore. Huddled behind the sandbanks, the town of Scarborough stands, all twisty streets and wood framed houses latched up to beat the winter cold.
“You know, I don’t think the TARDIS ever lands exactly where you tell it to,” Yaz laughs, pulling her jacket closer around her.
“Ah, more fun that way,” the Doctor grins. She pats the weathered side of the blue box with a fond hand. “She takes us where we need to go. Maybe Scarborough only needs us in December.”
The TARDIS gave us a beach, Yaz thinks. Maybe she knows. Maybe she’s telling us to try again.
She nods, tries to let her next words sound nonchalant.“Or maybe we need Scarborough.”
Nonchalance is hard with the Doctor, though. Truthfully, Yaz has never cared so much before, about anything. Anyone. But if her earnestness slips through, the Doctor doesn’t show that she notices it.
“You look a bit chilly, d’ya want my coat?” the Doctor blathers, “if I’d have known it was gonna be so cold I would’ve brought me scarf out, found you a hat or something.”
Yaz goes to protest but the Doctor is already shrugging her coat off, bundling the soft fabric into Yaz’s hands with a certain determination. The cloth is warm with the Doctor’s body heat, the material made all the more welcome against Yaz’s cold palms.
“But you’ll get cold,” Yaz attempts.
“Well you’re cold already, and I’m an alien, I’m built weird. Temperature works differently for me.”
Yaz isn’t sure about the accuracy of that statement, but she can tell by the insistence in the Doctor’s voice that she isn’t about to take no for an answer.
“Alright, alright,” she says, giving in. She slips her arms through the slightly-too-big coat, laughing as the hood falls over her head in the movements of putting it on.
A gentle hand pulls the hood back from Yaz’s eyes and the world blossoms back into colour. “There you are,” the Doctor chuckles. She looks Yaz up and down, just once, an approving smile growing on her face. “Nice,” she murmurs. For the slightest second, Yaz catches that hint of bashfulness again. Can’t quite work out if her newfound warmth is coming from the coat or the way the Doctor is looking at her. But then the Doctor is back to her usual brashness and is taking her hand and tugging her along the cliff.
**
They could’ve gone up to Scarborough Castle, seen it brimming with Plantagenet life in the festive season. They could’ve headed for the town, found a pub or some grub and walked among the common folk living their wonderfully ordinary lives. That’s Yaz’s favourite part of visiting the past—seeing the everyday. The Doctor can get them in anywhere, they can always meet a monarch or find the seedling moments of a legacy. But stumbling across someone incredible who will undoubtedly, eventually, be forgotten, that is special. 21st century Yaz can remember 14th century friends and travel to the year 3000, and her memories coming with her too means there is a little piece of the 14th century common folk out among the future stars.
But today they do neither of those things, although Yaz can tell the Doctor desperately wants to. The Doctor asked Yaz where she wanted to go and with all the history between them, with the TARDIS bringing them here, Yaz had to say the beach. Yaz thinks the Doctor knew all this and let her choose anyway, and adores her even more for it.
They’re walking the length of the shore. This beach isn’t shingle like last time but sand, vast expanses of it washed glassy with water and worn smooth with the winter wind. There are, as there always have been and will be on beaches, some wild youngins dashing about in the shallows, shrieking as the white horses break on them with freezing fervour. Apart from that, the beach is quiet. The Doctor is quiet too.
Yaz looks over to her, seeing the soft curves of the Doctor’s shoulder blades usually hidden by her coat. Her collar bone pokes out of her t-shirt, her hair flapping idly by it in the wind, starting to go wavy in the salt air. Yaz can do best friends. She’s almost perfected it. The air between them is clear and they both know where they stand, bouncing out to sea with the stone the Doctor wished on and sent skimming. Always waiting for the final splash. And still, and still, Yaz is left remembering the words the Doctor said all those years ago: like hope, love abides.
“What you said, Doctor, about living in the present while we still have it,” Yaz starts. “Last time we were on a beach.”
The Doctor stiffens almost imperceptibly; if it were anyone else Yaz could’ve put it down to a gust of wind or the growing chill. But this is the Doctor, Yaz’s one constant in all of time and space, and she’s learned by now how to translate the single alien language the TARDIS can’t. The Doctor’s smallest movements have a tendency to betray her.
Yaz braves on. “Well—we’re time travellers, everything is the present to us.”
The Doctor looks at her. “You think?”
“Why not?”
“I’ve just never thought of it like that before,” the Doctor says, slowly, like Yaz’s words are still seeping into her brain and she needs the time to make sense of them.
“How do you see it, then?”
The Doctor looks at Yaz as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Like everything is ending all of the time.”
Yaz’s breath leaves her. All the adventure, all the discovery, every sunrise they’ve watched together, and the Doctor sees every moment like it’s their last. No wonder she thinks their time together is always running out. No wonder she wished this could go on forever.
Yaz fixes a smile back on her face. Over the years, she’s found the Doctor is a lot more receptive to advice when it’s given with an innocent grin. She’s not sure why that is, if the Doctor doesn’t realise it’s advice if she gives it that way, or even if Yaz’s smiles make the Doctor feel as helpless as the Doctor’s smiles make Yaz. But it works. “Maybe that’s why the TARDIS always takes you somewhere unexpected. She’s trying to tell you you’re wrong. Every time you step out of those blue doors, something new begins.”
“Yasmin Khan, the great philosopher,” the Doctor grins. “You’re wise beyond your years, you are.”
“That’s why we get on, we meet in the middle,” Yaz chuckles.
“Are you calling me immature?”
“No, I’m fondly teasing you about your childlike wonder at the world.”
The Doctor narrows her eyes pointedly at Yaz, the smile dancing on her lips the giveaway to her faux suspicion. “I’ll let you get away with that,” she says eventually, earning a laugh.
They’ve made it all the way down to the sea now. It’s a good job Yaz wore her Docs, as every few waves a gust brings the water right in over their feet. The Doctor’s coat flaps unfamiliarly around Yaz’s calves and she wraps it around herself a little tighter. Its scent brings her as much comfort as her childhood bedroom.
Beside her, the Doctor seems unbothered by the cold. Maybe she wasn’t lying when she said temperature works differently for her. The wind is running breezy fingers through her wavy hair; through the strands, the Doctor catches Yaz staring and Yaz glances back down to the sand. When the Doctor shifts her feet, sea water pools in the prints her boots leaves behind, just briefly, before the sand shifts in the current’s flow and it’s like she was never stood there.
“I waited for you,” Yaz says, staring at the ephemeral shifting of the tide. “For three years.”
The Doctor clears her throat a little awkwardly. “You never gave up hope?”
“Course I did. Three years is a long time, especially without you,” Yaz states bluntly. It’s not a confession, it’s a fact. “I missed you.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, she’s going about it wrong. “I’m not saying it to make you feel guilty, I’m just saying. I lived in the present then, having lost you, and being with you again… Maybe some things are worth it. Stars, maybe some things aren’t worth it and we should do them anyway,” she tries, slightly breathlessly.
The Doctor does what she does best and looks out to sea, the unfathomable emotions of an immortal alien locked behind her brow. Her body language, Yaz has learned to translate, but her thoughts she never can quite get a grip on.
Even when it’s quiet between them, it’s rarely silent. The rhythms of the wave on the shore, the humming of the TARDIS engines, the triple beating of their hearts. The three years that Yaz spent without the Doctor, those were silent. But they were full of longing.
“Even when the hope was gone, I never stopped loving you,” she says, and that is a confession. Or the closest thing you can get to one when the woman you’re confessing to already knows it all. But she’s not asking for anything, just saying it because it needs to be said.
“Yaz…” The Doctor turns to her and looks back away, swallows, words still in her throat. “I never was any good at saying the important things. Just know—” the Doctor finally turns to face her properly, their bodies parallel to the shore. She’s found a smile, the kind which Yaz can hear deep in her voice and sounds like contentment. “Being with you makes me love being me. I’ve been so many people, but I’m the luckiest of all of them. I’m so glad it was me who met you.”
Yaz feels her cheeks dimple. “Me too. I wouldn't have it any other way.”
“Even if—”
“Even if.” Yaz finishes it for her. “I’ll take what you can give me. And maybe steal a little more,” she says with a smile. She presses a kiss, soft and chaste, to the Doctor’s warm cheek; feels the downy hairs of her skin and the wrinkles of her crow’s feet against her lips. It’s a quick and flighty thing, an innocent toe over the line the Doctor drew in the sand on that beach in 1807.
“Thieves take,” the Doctor murmurs. “That felt more like a gift.”
“A present,” Yaz says. Then, a little more shyly, “I’m giving you my present.”
The Doctor’s eyes are wide and brown and almost doubting as she stares at Yaz.
Trust in me, Yaz wants to say, but can’t quite get the words out.
In the end, it seems she doesn’t need to. The doubt in the Doctor’s eyes thaws, resolving itself into something sweeter, more steadfast. Her hand finds Yaz’s under the too-long sleeves of her own coat. The Time Lord’s skin is warm and soft as her fingers slip between Yaz’s own, the double heat of their palms glowing amid the cold of the beach the TARDIS brought them to. Scarborough Fair and 1303 can wait; they’re time travellers. The Doctor smiles at Yaz, and Yaz smiles at the Doctor, and even as the waves of the beach break frostily on, the connection between them is remade anew.
I wasn’t planning to write a multi-chapter smut. I really wasn’t. But these two just have a lot of feelings, and I just have a lot of feelings, so here we are.
Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5
Her body is on fire, her hearts slamming noisily inside her chest, and the only thing that can calm the storm is Yasmin Khan’s voice.
Yaz, telling her that she’s safe, that they’re both safe, that they’re here together. That they found each other again.
And the Doctor knows that – of course she knows that, of course she knows that her body, her mind, are no longer being split across multiple timelines, different lives, lives that were taken from her and lives she’s never known – she knows that she’s whole again. Or, that she’s supposed to be whole again, that she’s in the right timestream, in her own body, that the torture is done, that the agony of fragmentation across space and time has stopped.
That she’s here, now, naked and lying between Yaz’s legs. Yaz, who is also naked. Yaz, who is trembling and wanting and wet and… and scarred, on her thigh, and the Doctor sees only red.
Because it’s her fault, that Yaz was hurt badly enough to need to be sewn back together, that she was trapped and all but alone in a century even more hostile to her than the one she was born in. That she had to talk Dan through stitching her up, that she had to be that brave, that she had to be that much more like the Doctor.
It’s her fault, that Yaz is talking about it so casually, now. That she’s trying to comfort the Doctor, like she knows that the Doctor is contemplating using the TARDIS to track down the man who’d hurt Yaz and… and…
But she’s here, now. The Doctor. And Yaz. They’re here, they’re both here, like Yaz is saying. They’re here. Not stuck in time, not her body ripped apart across three different time streams, searching for her, failing. Failing to find her until too long after things like this happened to her. How many other scars does Yaz have, because of the Doctor?
But they’re here. They’re both here. They found each other, they did.
The Doctor breathes out a laugh when Yaz calls her big head. Her heart starts to calm. The small moment of levity is an ocean lapping at the shore of her rage, her fear, her helplessness to take the pain away from Yaz, soothing the flames enough to keep her anchored to the present, to this bed in this room the TARDIS grew just for them.
An entirely different set of flames ignites again when Yaz, on the edge of her soft laugh, brushes her fingers across the Doctor’s breast, her nipple. She can feel Yaz’s breath hitch as clearly as she can hear it, and it matches the hitch in her own.
Yaz’s pupils are dilating, and the Doctor can feel Yaz’s pulse through the fingertips tracing her nipple. If she continues that, touching her like that, with that look in her eyes – looking at the Doctor like she’s someone to adore instead of something to fear – the Doctor really doesn’t know what she’ll do.
Because she knows what she wants to do. She knows how much she wants. With Yaz.
“Wait,” she says, stilling Yaz’s fingers by touching her wrist. More of her pulse. She fights the need to shiver. “I wasn’t done with you.” She hears the husk in her own voice, and watches the sound work its way into Yaz’s body.
She needs so much more of Yaz’s body.
Her lips find Yaz’s scar again, cataloguing every nuance of her old but too-new injury. The Doctor can taste the relative freshness of the gnarled tissue when she licks and kisses Yaz’s scar, can even tell exactly where Yaz was in the world when it happened, exactly what kind of improvised medical equipment she’d instructed Dan to use. Exactly how much his hands had shaken while he’d stitched her up. Exactly how brave she’d had to be.
“My Yaz. My brave Yaz.”
She’s not sure she’s said it out loud until Yaz breathes her name like a question.
She shouldn’t say it. She shouldn’t be doing any of this. But Yamin Khan is already naked underneath her, and haven’t they both suffered enough, away from each other?
“I want to give you everything,” she murmurs against Yaz’s skin.
Because she might.
And just for tonight, she is.
“Hm?” Yaz asks. Well, she squeaks more than she asks, and the Doctor can feel Yaz getting wetter the more time the Doctor spends between her legs, even just focusing on her thighs, even just at the suggestion of her voice.
The Doctor’s never really thought of her voice as something that can do pleasant things to people. She can call off armies and blaze into a war she knows she’ll win – if anyone can call what she does winning – with her voice, but this? This, Yasmin Khan, trembling, vibrating with need for her, her hips barely restraining themselves from thrusting up, desperately needing pressure, because of her, because the Doctor murmured her hearts into Yaz’s skin?
Yasmin Khan, an absolute miracle of a woman, letting the Doctor hear her voice crack, her carefully constructed control break, because of her?
The Doctor doesn’t know what she is, not anymore. Not even “Time Lord” suits her, now, not that it ever had. She doesn’t know what she is, who she is, but she does know this – Yaz is lying beneath her and her voice is breaking. For her. For her.
She chuckles softly into Yaz’s skin, because it’s such a pretty sound – Yaz’s cracked voice and her half-question and her vibrating body begging for the Doctor to give her more – and because she’s savoring the opportunity to say it again. To hear her respond, to watch her respond, to what the Doctor murmured without thinking but now, very much, needs to tell her again.
“I said,” she begins, pressing a kiss to Yaz’s thigh one last time – for now. She forces herself not to think about that – about time – about the chaos and the destruction and the everything that wanting to give this woman everything comes along with. She forces herself to stay anchored, to stay here.
The Doctor drags her eyes up to lock onto Yaz’s. Her pupils are dilating wildly and the Doctor sees her gulp, hears her gulp, and it’s all she can do to not… well. She will. She will.
Because this is what Yaz has asked for, so many times, now. And the Doctor is nothing if not abysmally weak when Yaz asks anything of her. She keeps her voice soft because she knows exactly how hard her eyes are. Full of one last warning. One last confirmation that Yaz knows what she’s asking for – for the Doctor to let go.
“I want to give you everything. Can I do that, Yaz?”
She hears it in her own voice that she’s shaking again. That her jaw is tighter on one side, like it gets sometimes when she looks at Yaz.
When she watches Yaz pilot the TARDIS with a zeal for living inside her that reminds the Doctor why she travels, and she needs to restrain herself from just latching onto Yaz and pulling her close and giving her all of her own oxygen and never, ever letting go.
When she watches someone threaten Yaz’s life – a situation the Doctor puts her in far too often, which she will never forgive herself for but can’t seem to stop doing, because Yaz wants more, more time with her, and dammit, so does the Doctor – and she needs to restrain herself from obliterating the person’s very existence.
And for some reason – the Doctor’s entire being shaking and her jaw ever so subtly clenched and her eyes on absolute fire – Yaz looks down her own body to hold the Doctor’s gaze with her own, and her voice trembles oh, so slightly, so prettily, her eyes swimming with promise and possibility and magnificent nebulae of hope.
“I’d like that.”
The Doctor’s lips turn up into a grin, and even as far gone as she is, she registers the deep rasp in her own voice.
“Good.”
She holds Yaz’s eyes with her own, tracing her tongue from Yaz’s scar – from where they’ve been, together and apart all at the same time – up her inner thigh, up and up, to where they’re going, now, utterly together.
The Doctor has never needed like she needs when Yaz whines, when she twists her hands in the sheets, their sheets. When the Doctor can feel what her tongue is doing to Yaz, can feel every moisturizer Yaz has ever used consistently, can taste the heady vibrations in Yaz’s pulse as she shakes underneath the Doctor, underneath her. The Doctor needs more.
They’ll always need more of each other.
Tonight. Tonight.
She lets her raw need for more of Yaz move her body, shifting so that her legs are straddling Yaz’s, somewhere below her knees, letting Yaz feel exactly how much she needs her. There’s not enough friction, never enough friction, because Yaz’s leg is immediately soaked where the Doctor’s straddling her, and oh, the sounds Yaz makes are the prettiest she’s ever heard, the desperation that crosses her face as she arches up into the Doctor, like she wants to give her more.
Like Yasmin Khan feels how the Doctor is dripping for her – the Doctor, for whom this kind of thing is simply not on her agenda of galivanting across the universe, but she thinks now she might need this forever, with Yaz, with her brown eyes on fire beneath her – and Yaz wants to give to her.
But the scent of Yaz’s need, the heat of it, is so close to the Doctor’s lips. She keeps Yaz’s gaze locked into her own before glancing down, just quickly, to part the hair between Yaz’s legs with her fingers.
The Doctor is used to having control. So much control. Over the people around her, yes, but also, certainly, of the sounds that come out of her mouth. The words she uses to explain, to distract, to give herself time to think.
The screams she holds in, the swagger she lets out instead.
But when she sees Yaz open and exposed and dripping beneath her, the Doctor’s moan escapes her throat, her lips, utterly of its own accord.
She’s seen entire galaxies burst to life and she’s seen sentient stars and she’s seen purple oceans that feed entire solar systems.
But she has never seen anything as beautiful as Yasmin Khan beneath her like this. Waiting. Eager. Needy. For her, for the Doctor.
Hers.
Hers.
“Yasmin Khan,” she breathes, fighting to pull words out of the swirling awe in the mind. “You’re beautiful.”
She licks her lips, because she needs to give her more, needs to taste all of her, needs to catalogue everything about the miracle of a woman lying beneath her.
When she meets Yaz’s eyes, her questions must be burning through her eyes.
Yaz whispers her answer once. “Please.”
Anything. The Doctor would do anything, for her.
For her Yaz.
Without pausing, Yaz repeats herself. “Please, Doctor.”
It’s the addition of her name – the thing she calls herself, that she’s come to doubt time and time again, but that Yaz says with such certainty, whimpering the Doctor’s name like it’s a prayer when the Doctor is the one who is on her knees praying… it’s the sound of her name on Yaz’s lips that snaps through the last of her restraint.
The last of her reason.
She kisses Yaz’s clit, gorgeous and swollen and perfect, just once, just soft, before she can’t help herself, before she loses herself in want.
Her tongue drifts lower, right to where Yaz is dripping the most, and divinity floods her tongue. Because she tastes divine, and the Doctor needs to show her, needs to claim her, because she’s hers, hers, hers.
She drags her tongue up Yaz’s clit, and Yaz screams.
The Doctor has never heard Yaz scream because of anything that’s been done to her body. Only when it was someone else’s. But this is not a scream like she’s heard ripped from Yaz’s lips when the Doctor’s been shot or when Ryan’s been tossed off the back of a giant beetle and looked like he was heading for the acid lake.
No, this scream is ecstasy. This scream is Yaz tangling her fingers into the Doctor’s hair, fighting for purchase and arching her hips up and begging for more of the Doctor’s tongue on the most sensitive part of her body. This scream is every ounce of ecstasy the Doctor is feeling, rushing up from her tongue, sinking into Yaz’s body, tearing through every one of Yaz’s nerve endings, and coming out through Yaz’s lips.
This scream is the Doctor’s moans vibrating against Yaz’s clit, cascading between both of their bodies and spilling out of Yaz’s mouth, a cry to the universe that they should have done this sooner, they would do this forever and more .
Yaz tastes like winter and summer on dozens of different planets, magnified and amplified and still somehow everything that is earth, everything that is home.
The Doctor can taste all her ecstasy, all her fears. Every planet Yaz has ever walked, every eon of time Yaz has ever graced, the residual artron energy in Yaz’s body flooding through her and into the Doctor's mouth. She can taste everything Yaz has ever breathed in, everything she’s ever taken into her body, made a part of her. The Doctor can taste everything that is, and ever has been, Yaz.
Tears sting at the Doctor’s eyes, looking up Yaz’s body, from the arch of her stomach and the peaks of her nipples to the tilt of her chin and the way she’s panting and whining and moving with every breath the Doctor takes.
“Doctor, yes, please, Doctor, please, Doctor. My Doctor, please.”
More tears flood the Doctor’s eyes as moans into Yaz’s clit, needing her closer, closer, reaching up and down and slipping her hands underneath her, grabbing at her hips, her ass, pulling her closer because she needs more, she needs to give her more, she needs Yasmin Khan to never stop whining for her like this.
Because she is her Doctor. Yaz’s Doctor.
And suddenly, the name feels like her own again. Suddenly, the name once again feels like her sworn promise to the multiverse, to this woman who’s making her want to live out the entire rest of her lives between her legs, to protect her and to honor her and to cherish her and to worship her and to lo – yes, yes, damnit, yes, to love her.
The Doctor pulls back, just slightly, staying close enough so they both can breathe, so they both will survive the momentary pause from complete fusion.
“Yaz,” she husks, her lips, her tongue, her throat full of everything that is her.
“Doctor.” Yaz’s fingers loosen their grip on the Doctor’s hair, one of them disentangling completely to stroke her face. Her nose wrinkles adorably when her finger brushes her own wetness on the sides of the Doctor’s mouth.
“Sorry,” she whispers, but she’s smiling. “Is it alright?”
“Oh, Yaz.” The Doctor keeps eye contact as she turns her face to kiss the inside of Yaz’s wrist, her palm. She feels Yaz’s breath catch even before she hears it; tastes every watch, every bracelet, that’s ever touched Yaz’s skin; and she revels in the pulse threading under her lips.
“It’s perfect,” the Doctor rasps. “You are perfect, Yasmin Khan. I only stopped because I wanted to – I needed to –” How to explain that she needed her to know that she lov – that she loves her?
“Yasmin Khan, you need to know that I – ”
Yaz licks her lips, her eyes clearing from their haze somewhat as she stares down at the Doctor, continuing to stroke her face, her eyebrows, her nose, her cheeks. The Doctor can hear her heart racing somehow even faster than it was before.
The Doctor bites her lip. Her eyes sting and she doesn’t remember the last time she let herself cry as much as she has these last… minutes? Hours? Centuries? She doesn’t know how long they’ve been in this room, and she’s finding that she doesn’t care.
“Yaz, I – ”
She fails again.
Love isn’t something the Doctor says. It’s something she does. But she wants to tell Yaz, especially now, especially –
“I know, Doctor,” Yaz whispers, the smile on her face stopping the Doctor’s hearts. Because she does. Know. The miracle that is Yasmin Khan will never, it seems, stop amazing her. “I know you. And I do, too.”
She catches the Doctor’s chin with her fingers to make sure she’s looking at her, nose wrinkling slightly again at her own wetness there. She smiles, so the Doctor smiles. Yaz’s smile is like nothing else in the multiverse. Soft and warm and hard and sure, all at the same time.
“I do, too,” Yaz repeats, like she needs the Doctor to memorize the promise. But she needn’t worry – the Doctor has been memorizing everything.
“Do you want to keep showing me, Doctor?”
The Doctor is certain that her smile goes from tender to wicked as she hastens to comply, to tell her, to show her, because if it is going to be anyone, it would be, it is, Yaz, Yaz, Yaz.
They both moan – and Yaz whimpers and whines and screams – as the Doctor sets about showing her with diligence, with dedication, with everything she associates with Yaz. With everything Yaz deserves.
She licks her from different angles, cataloguing Yaz’s reactions to different amounts of pressure and speeds, different parts of her body. The Doctor can’t tell if she’s moaning or growling as everything Yaz coats the Doctor's tongue, her pleasure dripping into her mouth and onto her lips.
Yaz’s whimpers, whispering the Doctor’s name as she arches her hips up and pulls the Doctor impossibly closer with her fingers in her hair.
All of the Doctor’s senses, always flitting about and taking in everything that is surrounding her, absorbing every single bit of information the air has to offer… everything about her, every drop of her focus, collapses instead into the woman beneath her.
The way Yaz is sighing her name is quickly becoming the Doctor’s only tethers to this universe, to this timestream, to this reality.
She traces her tongue everywhere she can touch, everywhere that makes Yaz writhe under her. Her hands trace up Yaz’s waist, fingers reaching to circle her nipples, pinching softly, drawing a breathless whine from Yaz that might just be the prettiest thing the Doctor has ever heard.
The sound calls a growl from the Doctor’s mouth, and she brings one of her hands back down Yaz’s body. Back down between her legs.
Yaz nearly sobs when the Doctor pulls back, just enough to look up at her. The Doctor waits, breathing ragged, until Yaz steadies enough to look down at her instead of tilting her head, facing the simulated stars and galaxies streaking overhead.
She traces Yaz’s inner thigh with her fingers, watching carefully while Yaz shivers underneath her.
“Yasmin Khan,” she says, her voice huskier than she thinks it normally is. But then again, nothing right now is as it normally is. “May I?”
“May you what?” Yaz breathes. It’s the Doctor’s turn to shiver, because she hasn’t even begun to give Yaz what she deserves – and she already sounds utterly wrecked.
It makes the Doctor shake with barely contained need, with the heady sensation that she has made Yaz this breathless. That her tongue between Yaz’s legs has reduced one of the most brilliant people she’s ever known to murmuring questions that sound like she’s on the edge of reason itself.
It brings the Doctor close to her own kind of edge. The kind where she needs to fill Yaz completely, to make sure Yaz can no longer tell the edges of her own body because the entire multiverse is wide open to her pleasure.
The Doctor can tell dimly that she’s growling at the sound of Yaz’s voice, at the taste of her still all over the Doctor’s tongue. At the nearest of her fingers to the center of Yaz’s pleasure. At the knowledge of what she wants to ask.
She can tell dimly that her throat is raw from the growl that’s ripped from it at Yaz’s pleasure.
She can’t tell – until Yaz chuckles softly – that she’s gone too long without answering Yaz’s question. That she’s gotten so lost in what she needs to give her that she’s forgotten to answer her.
Time is so odd, sometimes.
The richness of Yaz’s chuckle makes the Doctor tremble with even more restraint.
“Use your words, Doctor,” Yaz chides, her voice thick and low and miraculous.
The sweet cockiness in Yaz’s prompt runs like her finger up and down the Doctor’s spine, and there’s that growl forming all on its own in the back of her throat again.
“Inside you,” the Doctor husks. “Do you want me inside you, Yaz?”
Yaz’s answer comes with no hesitation, no doubt. It makes the Doctor see more stars looking down at the woman naked underneath her than she would if she looked up.
“Yes, Doctor. I want you inside me, please.”
The Doctor pauses, watching Yaz tremble. Watching their bodies pressed together, Yaz’s legs open for her tongue, and now for her fingers.
Words she never speaks flood toward her lips again.
When Yaz licks her lips and strokes the Doctor’s cheek, reaching to hold her free hand, the Doctor links their fingers together. Yaz squeezes her hand, and the Doctor squeezes back – but not nearly as strong as she can. She wants to take Yaz, but she will not hurt her. And the Doctor knows exactly how strong her body is.
“Alright, big head?” Yaz asks. “You’re trembling.”
“I want to give you everything, Yaz,” is, once more, the only response the Doctor knows how to say out loud.
The Doctor shifts, shimmies, grinning as Yaz giggles while the Doctor crawls her way up Yaz’s body. She wipes her mouth, her chin, on her shoulder, first one side, then the other. Yaz’s soft giggle fills the Doctor’s hearts, and she shivers when Yaz uses her free hand to traipse her fingertips up and down the Doctor’s side.
Their breathing syncs – the Doctor can hear the moment it happens – while their eyes stay locked.
Yaz licks her lips. The Doctor does the same.
With her free hand, the Doctor strokes Yaz’s cheek and holds her palm there. She looks down, the galaxies behind her head reflecting in Yaz’s eyes.
She leans down, kissing Yaz’s temples. She relishes her pulse under her lips, the scent of that shampoo the Doctor helped her haggle for a few solar systems away. She kisses her eyelids, one at a time, offering a silent thanks for the way Yaz sees the universe – because the way Yaz sees the universe has saved it, saved her, time and time again.
She presses her lips to Yaz’s nose and is rewarded with another giggle. She breathes out one of her own.
But when she pulls back and they lock eyes, the thickness of her question – of Yaz’s answer – charges back up between them.
“Please,” Yaz whispers, tucking the Doctor’s hair behind her ear. “I need you inside me.”
“Yaz.” The Doctor doesn’t groan her name on purpose. It’s pulled from her lips by her need rising to meet Yaz’s, just as Yaz’s hips rise to seek the Doctor’s.
The Doctor murmurs Yaz’s name over and over into her lips, shifting so she once again is pillowing Yaz’s head with one hand, braced on her forearm as she kisses her full and deep and rich.
Yaz shivers underneath her as they both pause to watch the Doctor’s hand tracing down Yaz’s collarbone, her arm. Back up her arm, over to her chest. She takes her time on Yaz’s breasts, shifting so she can take her nipple briefly into her mouth, relishing Yaz’s moans, her pleas.
“Doctor, don’t tease,” she whimpers.
So she doesn’t.
She brings her mouth back to Yaz’s, kissing her steady, resting their foreheads together as she pulls back just slightly, just so they can both focus on the sensation of the Doctor’s fingers, once again traveling down Yaz’s body. Down her stomach, across her hips, traipsing down and then back up her inner thigh.
The Doctor memorizes Yaz’s shivers, her gasps, when her fingers touch where her mouth had been just minutes – hours, centuries? – before.
And oh, the heat of her, the sensation of everything that is Yaz coating her fingers.
She needs more.
She needs to give Yaz more.
“Sure?”
“Sure,” Yaz whispers. “My Doctor.”
“My Yaz,” the Doctor returns as the universe falls away and reforms all at once, everything balancing on the tip of the Doctor’s finger as she slips effortlessly inside her.
