i might brave the fire til the feeling hits

something real

She wakes up in her own bed on the TARDIS. It's not a slow start, not filled with light streaming in through a window and bleary eyes blinking to adjust.

She springs up and sits, palms either side of her, mouth open like a scream. And she gasps the name, 'Doctor,' over and over again, until the room comes into focus. Blue, blue. Her pulse is erratic, a two-beat thumping in her chest. She registers, somewhere in her head, that they are only two beats, and relief floods her being.

'Yaz,' she hears to her right, and she turns her head to see Ryan, having been leaning on the doorframe, jump up into standing straight. His hands drift upwards on instinct, ready to help. His eyelids are low with exhaustion, but they widen at the sight of Yaz finally awake.

'Doctor,' Yaz pleads again, the only thing she knows right now. The only one she has known for a while. She needs her.

Ryan nods. 'I'll—I'll get her,' he promises, and dashes into a corridor. She can see his leg kick out as he trips, but there's no loud thud to signal his body hitting the floor. He has it under control.

'Doctor,' she whispers again, her gaze drifting from the TARDIS corridor to the rest of her room. Blue, blue. She knows it now.

Soft cotton bunched into her fingertips, blue, blue. Little glitters embedded into the threads. A wooden wardrobe on the wall adjacent to her bed, opposite a white desk, and a chair with her police uniform draped over it. Facing her, white shelves cover the opposite wall, shaped around the ceiling's slant. Some shelves have been gifted books, stacked neatly and sorted by alphabet. All of them to read and explore. Other shelves are adorned with sleek photo frames, ones Yaz had printed of her family, of her work friends. Most are new pictures, taken as a foursome on new planets; sunglasses and anoraks and huge, smiling faces. In each of them, Yaz is next to the Doctor.

The memories she has of these are overwritten by a buzzing sort of feeling, very quiet in the back of her head. Blinking, she searches for it, but nothing comes up. Just a notion of something else being there, a new perspective she can no longer see. But she has the feeling of it. The feeling of a feeling.

A memory of a memory.

Two spots on her temples ache like she's drilled into them. She lets the blue fall into her lap, and she rubs at them, but little can be done. She thinks it'll stick around for a while, this headache. But it's preferable to the burning, the imploding of a brain too small to comprehend, even, the size of Time Lord's.

The size of a Time Lord's grief. It was too much, far too much. It burned her from the inside out. Searing despair and blackened regret. Over and over and over. Even two hearts were too few to hold it all.

Yaz wonders how the Doctor does not break, constantly.

Films lie, and heroes do not look at death to feel nothing. Two hearts older than a religion have cracked and broken ad nausea, and they are preparing to do so as long as the Doctor is alive. Yaz remembers knowing that for the first time; how it felt to know the Doctor grieves for people she doesn't yet know. How bottomless her hearts seem to be, only to be rewarded with the same suffering in different presentations.

Yaz breaks for her. A sob threatens to break out. Loneliness, the slowest poison.

In the height of emotion, her pulse calls to attention a throbbing, a nasty pinch – she directs her head to focus on her right arm and she sees, once more, a wound. It's wrapped up, white gauze bright above her darker brown skin, and it makes her smile. She knows her own wounds. She knows her own body. The relief, relief. She's okay.

She's okay, and not without consequences.

There's a commotion to her right, and she turns her head again to see the Doctor come rushing in. Her heart flies.