Until The End Of Time Itself [Thasmin]

episode three: the planet cantendis IV

Dead space.

The planet seemed empty as far as the eye could see.

And it was alive, brimming with life. Life pulsing through veins under its skin, pushing through the ground and crawling across the surface, a green blue foliage with orange light shining through and towards the sky, a gradient growing darker the further you looked.

Paths formed as the figure stumbled through the leaves, stepping over vines and dragging her feet with every movement. She was quiet despite the weight that was still, unmoving, on her shoulders, as if she were carrying a sack of sand. The woman didn't let a single pained breath escape through her nose and let it all out through her eyes, crinkling around the centre, and hardening darkness from her irises, staring forward.

The small circular gap of night sky hovered ever persistent above her head, as if the two women were trapped in a fish bowl, and they were just swimming about aimlessly, reaching the end over and over again but never seeing it, looking straight through the glass at a freedom they could never reach.

Yaz was growing tired, and the warmth that seemed to fuel this planet was waning. So was her hope. The Doctor was not waking up. And yet again it was left to her, and her alone, but she tried hard not to think about it. About all that she had seen. About the cold that was flushing down her arms from the numbness in her shoulders.

The blue dot appeared in the distance, but Yaz felt it was lightyears away.
That they were lightyears away from any help, any hope, any other planet.
They were stuck, as long as the doctor remained unconscious, eyes fallen over her face, eyelashes never even flickering, not a single movement in her body.

Yaz didn't even worry for her own shivering body, but the fact that the doctor's was not, at all, but remained freezing cold to the touch, her arm dangling from her torso and occasionally grazing across Yaz's hipbone. Somehow that chilled her far more than the dawning atmosphere.

"Come on, Doctor, wake up, please." She muttered.

Far from the excitement she first felt upon the precipice of this planet, all she hoped for now was to leave and never return, but the doctor's weight pulled on her, heavier than she expected the small woman to be, and slowed her down, and exhausted her.
All the police training would never have prepared her for this. She could carry this weight, for her, for the doctor, but she didn't think she could ignore the memories of what she had seen. The secrets the doctor had been holding unfolding in that moment, before her eyes, before all those eyes.

The Doctor had panicked. Again. And though Yaz could hardly bare to admit it, something had changed in the doctor, something so significant that even in the short glimpses she saw, when the doctor let her guard down for even a few seconds, were impossible to ignore.

The sun had left them. In fact it was never there to begin with. Instead the previous glow of the planet seemed to radiate from its very core, pushing out, heating this foreign world from the inside out; once a lovely warmth now sickened her, and left her. Them.

"Doctor, please." She whimpered, tired, her voice quiet in her throat, but louder in the empty, windless air. Shadows were climbing up onto the surface, and everything was disappearing, colours of blue green and purple greying at the sign of nighttime.

The body shifted, and suddenly became so heavy in Yaz's arms that her strength gave out, and the body slipped from her grasp. Yaz's knees fell to the floor to allow the doctor's body safe landing, laying her into the deep blue sea of shrubbery, where the starlight reflected in the curves of movement in the nature of the world. Her forehead held the same starlight, where her skin was covered in sweat, cold, dripping from her hairline.