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For as long as there had been a Yasmin Khan, there had been nightmares.
She was sure there had been nightmares before her – and was surer that there would be nightmares after her – but not in the way that she experienced them. Where her sister had grown up dreaming of men chasing her down the street, Yaz had dreamed of red; pulsing and angry as it swallowed her, consumed her, filled her up until red was all that was left. When her mum had detailed images of a bog monster from a movie they'd watched the night before breaking into their flat, Yaz had quietly remembered the sound of war drums piercing her; the force of them shaking her dream self so harshly that she had awoken dizzy and disorientated. While the children at school dreamed of kidnappings and chainsaw massacres and vampires, Yaz dreamed of black holes and endless pits and creatures without faces.
And while everyone else broke free of their bad dreams filled with adrenaline, ready to run into the arms of whoever was there to comfort them, Yasmin Khan laid paralysed. It usually lasted for no longer than an hour, but during that hour her body had no feeling, no thought, no will. For that hour it was like she was merely a pair of eyes, glaring intently at her cracked, white ceiling. Like she was an orb floating gently against her pillow.
Like her body was somewhere else.
Everyone had nightmares, but Yaz's left her friendless. The bad ones made her silent, but the unbearable ones left her with a short temper and a quick tongue, making her unbearable to be around. She was unapproachable, as a girl who had been paired up with her in Primary school had complained to their teacher. She was enigmatic, as her Secondary school form tutor had described in her report card one year. An outcast.
And the friendlessness lead to emptiness, and the emptiness lead to That Day. The decision to stay that she'd made then hadn't given her friends or made her feel full, but it had given her purpose. And it was that purpose – that drive to become a police officer – that had kept her going, pushing, persevering.
Waiting.
And then came the Doctor. The Doctor, who filled her mind with new worlds and creatures and concepts, leaving no space for bad thoughts. The Doctor, who always made her feel special, even if they were in a situation where there was nothing Yaz could do to help. The Doctor, who lived life at a mile a minute, meaning that when sleep came it was bone dead and heavy from exhaustion.
Dreamless. And, for the first time in her life, without nightmares.
For a while, at least.
Because then there had been Barton and the Master – but most importantly the Kasavin. She didn't know how, and she didn't know why, but ever since she had been sent to that other world her nightmares had returned. No, returned felt wrong. Shifted. Because now it was the same nightmare, one that she had never had before, repeating again and again every single night like a broken record.
And as her dreams had effected her then, these new ones effected her now.
Yaz thought she would be more upset when Ryan and Graham decided to end their time on the TARDIS. She'd always known they'd leave before her, had felt it deep within her bones since the fateful day they'd all agreed to go. The two of them had said it themselves then; they needed the Doctor for temporary reasons, needed to use the exploration and adventure that she brought to distil their grief until it was something they could live with. And while that happened, Yaz had also known that her love for it all – the stars, the universe, the Doctor – wasn't going to fade any time soon. Even when she'd known the Doctor had been lying to her.
But knowing was different to experiencing. So as she watched both Ryan and Graham fall (despite months of reluctance from Ryan) comfortably into their roles as grandparent and grandson, she watched herself lock into place as their fam. She'd watched herself love them.
So, yes, she'd expected to feel sad. Maybe even a sense of loss for good measure.
All she felt now was blinding rage.
“You what?”
Ryan took a step back, surprise clearly dawning on his face. They were in Graham's house, the place looking better than any house that had been through an attempted Dalek invasion just days before should, and the Doctor was supposed to be joining them there in an hour. Because today was the day they were supposed to be going back, to the travelling and the excitement and the Doctor.
Apparently not.
“I don't understand,” she continued, although she did. She had always understood, but for some reason that understanding had vanished now.
“Yaz,” Graham started, but Ryan put a hand on his arm and gently shook his head; telling him silently that he wanted to be the one to explain.
“You know that we love the Doctor,” he said, “and you know that we appreciate everything she's done for us. But after everything that just happened – with the Daleks, Jack, the Jadoon and...” They both looked to Graham's arm, freshly put in a cast and signed by them all. Even in her anger Yaz could admit that what had happened to him had been a close call. “It put our lives into perspective,” Ryan concluded. “It put Earth into perspective. If we hadn't been here to protect it-”
“The Doctor is always here to protect it!”
Ryan scoffed, “You and I both know that's not true. Didn't you listen to a word Jack said about Torchwood? About how the Doctor can't always be here to save us? About how, sometimes, Earth needs someone that's already here to step up and do what she can't?”
“What, and you think that's you?” Yaz bit back, the anger swelling in size at the thought of the Doctor not being capable enough – not being good enough. “We're nothing without her. Were you not listening when she told us that? Our team structures mountainous, remember?”
“Exactly!” Ryan roared. Graham looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. “She's lied to us the entire time we've known her. Getting her to tell us the basic things that you tell your friends was like pulling teeth. And I can't do that anymore, Yaz, as much as I love her. I can't spend the rest of my life running after someone that doesn't care about me the same way I care about them.”
They all went silent. It felt as if they were in a bubble, and that one word would blow them all up and apart.
Yaz, being Yaz, broke it anyway. “You're wrong. She loves us, no matter how small we are next to her. And this, you two leaving, is going to break her heart.” And that was it – why all of her common sense had been replaced with white, hot fury. Sometimes Yaz felt as if she'd loved the Doctor her whole life, even before then, and that kind of love was blinding. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done something without thinking about how it would effect the Doctor first.
“We know,” Graham said carefully, treading on verbal egg shells. “And we wish that wasn't the case. But sometimes in life you need to break people's hearts in order to do what's best for yourself.”
Yaz could only shake her head. Suddenly and inexplicably, she imagined what might happen if she took Graham's clock off the wall and bashed it around both their heads. If they would bleed from one hit or two. If the Doctor would be proud of her for defending her name.
“Fine,” she said instead, blinking rapidly as the previous thought washed over her and hid somewhere in the back of her mind. “You two stay here and be selfish cowards. I guess we know now who meant it when we said we were family.”
That was the end of it, although Ryan's eyes stayed firmly on Yaz for the rest of the time she was there. Even while the Doctor listened as Graham clumsily explained that they were staying, when the Doctor pulled that face she did whenever she was hiding how she truly felt, he was looking at her; eyes squinted and mouth in a firm line, as if he were trying to solve a hard question on a test. Yaz ignored him, opting to instead put an arm around the Doctor's shoulder and lead her into the TARDIS.
She felt Ryan's questioning eyes on her even then, but she couldn't think of why.
The dream started like this: Yaz, standing alone in a tunnel. The walls of it were a slick grey, as if they had only recently been painted over. There was no light source yet Yaz could still see a good metre ahead of her.
Yaz and the Doctor's adventures as a singular unit started quite smoothly, all things considered. They answered a distress call from a dwarf planet that was being used as a theme park for an alien species that Yaz thought kind of looked like walking and talking salmon. The distress call had been because the theme park's workers – the original inhabitants of the planet, as they would later find out – had started an uprising. Luckily, Yaz had been able to move some of the children they had been holding hostage out of the main park with the rocket rides, using the bombs strapped under them as fuel power, while the Doctor negotiated a new treaty between the two species. The Doctor had given her a funny look when Yaz told her about it, but neither of them mentioned it beyond that.
Next, dream Yaz moved to inspect the walls. It was then that she saw that the slick wasn't paint but goo – moving and bubbling along the walls. When she reached out to touch it, it tried to touch her back.
The next trip had been a harder one, figuratively and metaphorically. The TARDIS had accidentally landed them on a planet made almost entirely of lava, who's resident's were giant rock-like people. To defeat them, Yaz had taken a leap of faith and jumped into the volcano at the centre of their capital city; discovering that inside was where they'd kept the planet's water supply. Somehow she'd gotten it to go off, causing the planet to erupt into a fit of explosions where the lava and water met. The Doctor had had more than a glance to say about that one, but again Yaz's actions went mostly uncommented on.
Dream Yaz jumped back, making sure to keep herself in the centre of the tunnel as the walls continued to close in on her. It was this, the twisting and shifting of the walls, that allowed her to see it .
They took a trip into English history next (during Henry VII's time as king, or “the most underrated part of Tudor history” as the Doctor had called it). Autons had replaced Lambert Simnel with one of their own – a pretender inside a pretender – and the two of them had somehow found themselves recruited as soldiers at the battle of Stoke. It had been Yaz delivering the killing blow to the Earl of Lincoln, another Auton replica, that had saved the day; the young Auton boy posing as Simnel having turned good and surrendering after a heartfelt speech from the Doctor. The Doctor didn't question Yaz's newfound ability to sword fight – at least not out loud, anyway.
It was a small object sitting at the end of the tunnel. Well, small was just an educated guess – she had no way telling just how far away it was – but regardless of appearance Yaz knew as soon as she saw it that it was what she was in the tunnel for. Somehow, getting to it would be what saved her.
Next was an attempted Sontaran invasion of 1970's America. Yaz still refuses to admit what deal she'd made to end that one.
So she ran. It was all she could think to do, the only option she had. Even as the walls chased her, rolling like waves to get to her, she kept on running
Communist Russia, 1922. Yaz had stopped a group of rouge time travellers from killing Stalin before he could rule Russia and creating a paradox by convincing the Doctor to place a perception filter on their weapons, replacing them with their own vortex manipulators that only had enough energy for one trip.
and running
It was only by the time the two of them had decided to take another trip to modern Earth that Yaz realised that the Doctor was now looking at her differently.
and running. As she ran, the walls started to scream. Whether it was for her or at her, dream Yaz didn't know, but what she did know was this: they were screaming her name.
But the name they were screaming was not Yasmin Khan.
When Yaz entered the TARDIS after spending the day spent with her family, she was immediately struck by the state of the Doctor.
Whizzing around the console, hair in disarray with her sleeves rolled up and her goggles placed on wonky, she pulled large cables around with her; putting them together and tearing them apart. There were times when Yaz wondered why the Doctor didn't call herself the Scientist or the Inventor, now being one of them, because she certainly looked more like one of those than a medical professional. Yaz also wondered what she'd call herself, if she was a Time Lord. Surely not the Copper.
She watched the Doctor run around frantically for a few more seconds before calling out, “Doctor?”
The Doctor stopped so fast she nearly fell over, tripping over her own feet as she span around to face her friend. “Yaz,” she said, in a tone that Yaz couldn't decide was shock or excitement. “You're just in time; I was just finishing!”
“Finishing what?” Yaz asked as the Doctor haphazardly threw her goggles over her shoulder.
“You'll see,” the Doctor replied, looking like a maniac as she beckoned Yaz over to the far side of the console.
Yaz moved carefully, making sure not to step or trip on any of the cables laying like snakes on the floor. When she stood beside the Doctor she put her hands on Yaz's shoulders, pulling her slightly in front of her before placing her chin in the space between her hand and Yaz's neck so that they both could look over the specific part of the console. Yaz tried to ignore the effect the rare physical intimacy was having on her.
“So, I was thinking,” the Doctor started, her breath dangerously close to Yaz's skin, “that this time you could choose where we go.”
Yaz frowned. “I thought I chose Communist Russia.”
“Well, yes,” the Doctor said with a tsk. “But I thinking more along the lines of choosing which planet we go to.”
That only made Yaz's frown deepen. “How am I supposed to do that?”
The Doctor moved towards the console, where the headset that allowed a telepathic link with the TARDIS rested in it's usual holding place.
“Uh, no way.” Yaz moved back on instinct, but merely (stupidly) increased the pressure between her back and the Doctor's chest. “Didn't that really hurt when Graham used it?”
“That's what I was fixing! I only allow the best of services for my Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor explained, moving around her to pick the headset up. “That and allowing it to pick up more on abstract thoughts than concrete locations. All you'll have to do is think about your dream planet and it'll take us to the closest thing that reality has to offer!”
Yaz looked between the Doctor, grinning wildly with anticipation, and the headset in her hands. It was a no brainer – anything that made the Doctor this excited made Yaz excited too. The Doctor's grin widened when Yaz nodded. Wary not to get parts of the headset caught in Yaz's hair, she moved slowly as she put it on her.
“Right then, Yaz,” she said when it was finally securely on. “Lets see what your mind has to offer.”
Yaz closed her eyes. As the Doctor counted down, she thought about what her dream planet entailed. A planet with no discrimination, perhaps. Or maybe even a planet with no crime.
It was neither of those that she thought of.
She didn't know what happened, really. One second she was waiting for the Doctor to tell her when to start thinking, then the next she was feeling the telltale thrums of the TARDIS landing.
Yaz's brain didn't have enough time to catch up with what was happening as the Doctor raced towards her, taking the headset off with considerably less care than she'd placed it on. “Come on,” she said, taking Yaz's hand. “Lets see what we've ended up with.”
The results were disappointing, to say the least.
They were on a dull, grey planet. She would've mistaken it for moon if it weren't for the way the sky shone a sparkling purple.
“Oh,” the Doctor exclaimed, her face forming a half-scrunched, half-frowning mixture.
“Is it another Orphan planet?” Yaz asked, taking a step outside the TARDIS to look around.
“Could be, unless there was no life here to begin with.” The Doctor took a similar step outside, holding her hands on her hips. “Maybe travelling through abstract thought wasn't the best idea.”
Yaz felt a pang deep in her chest. There was nothing worse, she had discovered after many months of travelling, than disappointing the Doctor. She was about to suggest trying again when her feet began to feel mysteriously warm.
They looked down at the same time. The grey ground, which had once been a dry, concrete-like floor, was now a wet sludge; opening up and absorbing them into it.
It was in that moment that the Doctor started panicking.
It was in that moment that Yaz knew exactly where she was.
“OK.” The Doctor hastily pulled out her screwdriver, scanning the ground. “OK, this is fine. Don't panic.”
But she wasn't panicking. Not even in the slightest. Instead she watched calmly as the sludge continued to suck more and more of her body into the ground.
There was a second where she was completely submerged, unable to breathe. But just as quickly as they were submerged were they spat out again, both of them landing with a loud thud against a hard, cold floor.
It was the tunnel; she knew it before they'd hit the floor, before the ground had even covered past her knees. It just who was there with them that she wasn't expecting to see.
“Well, well, well,” a familiar voice said as Yaz helped the Doctor stand. “Who would've expected this.”
It was the Master – dressed in his usual purple suit, sitting on the kind of wooden chair you'd see in someone's garden and clenching onto something tightly in his left hand. He'd clearly been waiting a while.
“How?” the Doctor practically growled, moving protectively in front of Yaz. “When the death particle was activated, there was no way you could've-”
“Oh, but there was,” he purred, leaning forward in his seat. “Not for my beloved CyberMasters, but luckily for me I'd been given a little cheat code beforehand. Hadn't I, Yaz?”
Her heart stopped in her chest. It must've done, because she suddenly wasn't able to breathe.
It was then that the Master revealed what was in his hands: a single dice. Yaz recognised it immediately as one from Barton's casino party.
It. The object. What she needed to be saved.
“I must admit, I was confused when I first met you Yaz,” he said, twisting the dice around in between his fingers. “I'm never usually so drawn to humans. To anyone, really. But when you placed this dice in my pocket it all started to make sense.”
But - “I didn't do that.”
The Master chuckled, a deep and menacing sound. “I knew that's what you'd say.”
“Listen,” the Doctor interjected, “I don't know what game you're playing, but Yaz doesn't need to have any part in it. It's me you want, it's me you've gotten. Let her go, then maybe you and me can finally get to the point.”
The Master merely laughed again. “For once, Doctor – just once – this has nothing to do with you. And this is a game that your Yaz has been playing a lot longer than you or I.” Suddenly, he stood. “Catch.”
The dice fell through the air.
The Doctor moved to catch it, but Yaz was faster; reaching a hand over the Doctor's shoulder. It burned pleasantly against her skin as Yaz stared at the shape of it in her palm, moving away from the Doctor.
She knew what she needed to do.
“I don't understand,” the Doctor said.
“Old friend, it would appear that you aren't the only one with missing memories.”
Yaz crushed the dice in her palm; releasing a flurry of light and energy that moved to Yaz as instinctively as magnets.
For as long as there had been a Yasmin Khan, there had been something else alongside her. Something hiding in plain sight.
The Master opened her eyes.