fix tonight

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the doctor's thoughts are in italic, unless the italics are within dialogue.


She wakes up to flickering orange.

The lights are difficult to register. Masked half by shadow and half by her own fever, light and reality become disformed. Stretch it out and see how long the crystals will run; all ice cold and discomfort. Fingers of formation held together, physics' discipline its first and last point of call.

But not for her. Reality bends. Her mind's eye is rolling around on a broken-down ride, spinning teacups in perpetual motion, speeding up and slowing down with every new orbit.

No wonder, then, she crosses the lines of time.

In front of her, wispy figures pirouette around, people she was never meant to see.

Are they here, all of them? It's her thought, but not all her voice. Susan? Ace? Rose? Bill? Come to help?

Fabrics and skin blend in with one another. The rollercoaster won't stop. They won't stop. Some of them take in the sight of the cave; the brave shadows, the rock formation, rusty red set alight. Some of them explore, feel the walls only to touch nothing. Some of them speak. Wordlessness in reality become whispers in the back of her mind, the back of her throat.

Her hearts are pounding. Make them real, Doctor, make them real again. Expel this bitter pain.

Why won't they come to her? She carries them with her. Isn't that enough? After all she's done?

One of her own hands has been placed beneath her, her body on its side and her legs directed away from her. Recovery position. Right. It's hard to think, hard to do anything much, with all these hearts' ghosts ignoring her. Logic is so difficult to disentangle from the rest of her. Her conscience is the same as her hearts; her hearts the same as her conscience. Everything inextricable. She is everything because of everything else.

How very human of us both, she hears the Doctor think.

She can't see her. Can't find her.

But she has to speak, she has to sit up. Even when reality bends, Yaz recognises the need for it. Head burning, hearts boiling, she wills there to be strength in her muscles, to be air in her lungs. All survival depends on the very defiance of her situation. If reality is bending, then she will bend it back.

Is she back in the cave again? With the red dust and heightened blood. Everything depending on the dark of the light. Reaching back, exhausted outstretch, her hands come suddenly up to a cave wall. She taps it. Solid. Solid. Red. Good. She will lean back and let her spine cry out in relief. She lands with a quiet thud, spends the next ten seconds goading her legs into moving, to rest in front of her. Through the tear build-up on her eye's horizons, she confirms a mission accomplished.

Still, the memories dance a cruel pirouette.

Brigadier. Clara. She may murmur it. Her hearts are everywhere. She sees them all.

Yaz smiles for her. She smiles, and cries. Loneliness, the slowest poison.


Consciousness is difficult when a mind implodes in slow-motion. Consciousness is different, too. Waking and sleeping are pointless, arbitrary concepts she can't see any point in. The images are still the same. Light free of physics' discipline, crystals beckoning memory, and pasts manifest. Taunt her with the words; she doesn't care.

Manifest memory has a different feel to it; a different look. The wispiness is perceivable, a shimmering, but eyes are only one way into a person. Yaz looks at them and she sees the Doctor's own grief, a cry that hurts soundlessly. It takes up her head, fans the flames, and all she can do is burn in it.

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