Until The End Of Time Itself [Thasmin]

interlude

The TARDIS.

It was a winding place, and Yaz always seemed to struggle at finding her way around, no matter how many times the doctor walked her through it, both metaphorically and literally. Now it was that much harder, since it felt like the woman wasn't even there anymore.
Absent from any meals they usually shared, and absent from the ship's main controls, the only time Yaz saw her now was when they crossed paths, as the doctor came out for the night and Yaz headed off for bed.
She could see that the doctor tried her best to smile at her, to look joyful, had excused her absence with being busy, with something, though the doctor never hung around long enough for her to ask what it was she was doing before she burrowed herself under wires and tubing and a comforting electronic buzz.

Yaz waited it out, one more night. It had been four days since their trip to the haunting planet, and Yaz, knowing the doctor's schedule, would wait until the time was right so she would pass her on the way to her room, each time looking at her with longing eyes, hoping to reach out and hold her, but backing out every time, the moment gone before she had even worked up the courage to think about it. The doctor wouldn't have wanted it, anyway. She didn't seem to be a big lover of physical affection, despite her deceiving looks, but Yaz felt like she needed it, and if she needed it, then she couldn't imagine just how much the doctor did, right now.

When she failed to hear those quick footsteps trail through the hallway at he allotted time, she waited, picking at her left-over evening cereal, watching the milk drip from the spoon she held up, with her head resting on her curled back hand.

It was unlike the doctor to be late, for anything. Though she was spontaneous, she was unusually punctual when it came to certain personal routines, and Yaz had observed long enough t know them all.
So when the doctor still hadn't arrived at the console ten minutes later, she knew that something was wrong, that something had changed, and dropped her spoon, ignoring the milk splashed on the table.

The hallway was darkened, like it usually was, like the entire TARDIS had a habit of displaying as of late, somehow seeming to replicate the emotions the doctor carried within her at any given moment (however if that were true, she was sure it would be more dark far more often than it was.)
Yaz frowned, holding her hand up to the TARDIS walls and dragging it lighting across, as she continued to walk forward, hoping she would be lead the correct way if she closed her eyes and let the ship do the thinking and directing for her. She thought of the doctor, as she often did, and began to walk, and as she did, she could feel the light and could see it spreading through the skin on her eyelids, reaching her eyes. Then she looked out, and saw that she had been directed towards a dead end hall way, with one singular door at the end.

"This is where she is?" Yaz asked around her, and the lights in the ship brightened momentarily and by a small amount before darkening again. Yaz believed this to mean either an unenthused, rather sad way of saying yes, she's in here, but be gentle with her, or her way of saying maybe she's in here, i don't know. I can't keep track of her either. She assumed it to be the first.

She tried not to make a sound as she made her way down the hallway, the brighter light beginning to fall upon her face from the crack in the closed door overhead. It was warm and golden, and so much like what she had missed dearly. Holding a hand up to the door, the wood smooth against her fingers, she thought of the past few days, and then her mind once again jumped to the distant past, when the doctor first left her, and that time, for far longer than she had now, for what they both assumed would be forever.
Yaz couldn't help but think about that moment more and more with the more distance that was put between the two of them, the more silence and loud and painful darkness that she sat in, waiting for her return. It took her back to the years she spent without the doctor, long sentences of life she could barely remember, if it weren't punctuated with pain and remembrance.