Chapter Text
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The Doctor tries, when at all possible, to see time in a linear fashion.
But crashing through the roof of a train, she figures, is enough to bang anybody’s head around.
She wakes up and tries to focus on what’s happening in the moment, but it’s hard when there are so many futures swimming around in her head. There’s an alien right in front of her, but she’s already seeing what it might and might not do, and can’t figure out which one will actually happen, until it zaps them all in the neck and neatly deposits six DNA bombs into their nervous systems.
And she sees that she’ll get them out—which of course she will, she always does with these things—but she can’t see the present linking to that future, has to feel her way around it blindly, searching for the right sequence of events to match up with that positive outcome.
And then it only gets harder when she turns around, and runs smack dab into her.
The—bloody hell, she can’t remember her own name—stops and stares. There’s a boy, or maybe not a boy, a man, standing in the aisle, next to a police officer, and that police officer happens to be her.
She takes one look, and nearly keels over from the pure illogicity of it. Dimly she registers a yellow safety vest, pretty features and a confused look, but mostly she’s trying to stop her head from spinning right out of control, because the girl—she is a girl, isn’t she?—doesn’t make sense, at all. She’s there and she’s not, all at the same time, and she doesn’t exist, has never existed, but she’s got a million timelines swimming off of her—
“Uh, excuse me, madam—” the girl tries, and she has to raise her hands to her ears in a desperate attempt to block it out because wait, this isn’t supposed to happen, she’s supposed to brush past them with an indignant ‘fat lot of good you two were!’, and the girl calls out ‘hey!’ but instead somehow this present is occurring, and—
“Hang on, why’re you calling me madam?” Distantly she realizes that in a different timeline she would have uttered those words three cars farther down, but in this present she’s still staring, actually squinting now, trying to figure out why this girl is standing in front of her, when by all logic, she shouldn’t be.
“Um…you’re a woman?” the girl wrinkles her nose in confusion, then takes a step back, because now she’s stepping up closer, right into the girl’s personal space to get a good look.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” the girl asks, and possibly by accident shines her flashlight directly into her face.
“Yasmin Khan.” She plucks the words from one of those timelines swirling around her muddled brain, and relishes the way the name sounds on her tongue. “Yaz to your friends.”
“How did you—” Yaz stares open-mouthed, and that’s precisely when warning bells go off in her head, because she's veering down a timeline that doesn't fit; None of this should be happening, she realizes, or at least in this order, and she may be out of practice but she's still a Time Lord, so with an enormous shove she pushes this one to the side, stuffs that timeline away, and drags in the one that should be happening—
“Fat lot of good you two were!” she says, and pushes past them to make her way down the train. Distantly, she notes Yaz’s indignant ‘hey!’ and feels a sharp stab of relief. She's fixed it, sort of.
And, as it always with the lesser species, they don't even notice a thing has changed. To them, she has never stopped and stared, never flickered briefly down the wrong path. It's all as it should be.
But Yasmin Khan notices. Of course she notices.
————
By the time the night is over, Grace is dead, Tim Shaw is gone, and the Doctor is back to viewing time in a linear fashion. Mostly.
She stays for the funeral, even though the headache that is Yasmin Khan stays too, because she feels she owes it to Graham and Ryan. And it's a bit easier, now that she’s more or less back in order, to sit comfortably in one linear timeline rather than spreading herself between all the ones that might. She prefers, whenever possible, to let time run its own course.
Messing about, even for someone like her, is always a dangerous proposition.
But Yaz catches her after the funeral, just as she’s about to slink off, and immediately dips them both into the kind of murky conversation she hates. It had been supposed to be all three of them there, and Yaz, perfectly innocent, would ask about her family, and the Doctor would say something vague and meaningless (it’s impossible to sum them up in simple words, anyway), but instead she ends up alone with Yasmin Khan, whose very presence makes the Doctor’s brain hurt, watching as her lips form a question she very much does not want to answer.
“Back on the train,” Yaz says, feeling out the words carefully, “You did something, didn’t you?”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” the Doctor replies, though she already knows that such a response won’t help much. “I did a lot of things on the train. One of them being falling through the roof, which, by the way, I do not recommend.”
“Oh, uh—” Yaz blinks, taken aback by her flippant answer, but drives down her path all the same. “Yeah, that must have really hurt. But I mean after that. You—you—”
She’s struggling now, and the Doctor watches her, torn, because she should have yanked them back on the right path ages ago, the nice one with the others included, but at the same time it’s fascinating to see a human try to sum up what Time Lords can barely describe.
“You—you did something,” she delivers at last through gritted teeth. Her eyes narrow in frustration. “I don’t know what it was, I don’t know even how to describe it, but you looked at me, and you told me my name, and then a second later—or, not a second later, it was at the same time—you said something different, and it all happened differently, but I don’t know how.”
She takes in a deep breath on the last word and lets it out in a huff, and the Doctor only too late realizes she’s standing there with her mouth hanging open in awe, because, once again, Yasmin Khan is not making sense. Or rather, she’s putting words to concepts she shouldn’t be able to see, let alone describe, and the longer the Doctor stares, trying to make sense of things, the farther she seems to spin away from it.
“You shouldn’t have seen that,” she says honestly, and steps forward, moving in a tad too close. “You shouldn’t be able to describe what you just described, let alone realize that something happened. How did you do that? How did you know?”
“I—” Yaz is leaning back, drawing uncomfortably away from the Doctor’s scrutinizing gaze and too-close proximity. “I-I don’t know. Why can’t I be allowed to see it? What did you do?”
The Doctor studies her, and doesn’t answer. She’s not sure this is a conversation she wants to have, partly because it’s swimming towards a shrouded future, and she’s never liked shrouded futures, and partially because staring at Yasmin Khan is giving her a splitting headache. She can’t decide if she’s talking to a person, or a shadow.
“Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor murmurs. “What are you?”
Yaz opens her mouth, maybe to answer, maybe to return the question, but the words never make it out, because before she can the Doctor steps back, and starts to close off the timeline.
It’s too risky, she decides. Something about Yasmin Khan jars violently with the whole time-space continuum, and while normally the Doctor loves a mystery, she currently has a missing ship and an urgent need for a change of clothes. Higher priorities.
She wouldn’t usually pull such a massive shift so soon after the one on the train, but she’s sort of desperate to escape this conversation, so she reaches out and starts groping through realms of possibilities. She finds the one they should have been heading down, had the Doctor not let herself get sidetracked, and this time, she doesn’t shove it in. Instead she folds it carefully to the moment, letting it flow around them like water over rocks, sweeping away the debris of a conversation that never happened.
“What did you mean in your speech, you thought you’d run out of time?” she asks Graham, keeping an eye out for Yaz, who’s glancing around at the others as if she’s only just noticed their presence. She can tell by her expression that she’s spun it much smoother this time; she blinks, once, then settles in listening, just as she had been the entire conversation.
————
She tries to get her TARDIS back, and ends up yanking them all into empty space. Two spaceships which never should have been there scoop them up, and by the time Yaz wakes and stumbles to the front of the craft, the Doctor has seen enough to know they’re crashing.
She’s not entirely sure she can pull them out of this one, either. The pilot finally agrees to jettison the back end, but by then they’re careening uncontrollably, the Doctor is trying to steer and take care of Yaz at the same time—it’s her first time out in space and they’re crashing, bless—and as soon as she sees the descent pattern, she can tell they’re not going to make it.
She lies to the pilot and straps herself in, even though she knows it’s pointless, and rifles through possibilities. There are plenty, but nearly all of them involve a fiery death, and the ones that don’t whip by too fast for her to catch.
That’s the problem with crashing, she thinks through gritted teeth, as she jerks back the controls. It all takes seconds, and sometimes, even with all of time at her fingertips, seconds just aren’t enough.
She slides them into an optimistic timeline that gets them through the atmosphere, but as they hurtle to the planet, the surface looming large before them, she can’t find another one that works. They all end in death, every one, and the ones that don’t are too far away to grab without upsetting the temporal present. She switches controls, and flicks a switch that doesn’t matter, and tries to look like she’s doing something because it’s too late to even tell the others that it’s too late. The beige of the planet fills their viewpane, she pulls back on the controls, hears the others screaming, and wishes she hadn’t told Yaz she would save them.
Then, just as they’re about to smash into the planet, she feels something wrench in the space-time continuum. The entire present shifts sideways, screeching like rusty hinges into a possibility that is too damn far, and then jolts roughly into place. The brakes respond suddenly, and she yanks them into position, the entire ship heaving backwards with it. Sand blows over the viewpane, blinding them, but she doesn’t care because a moment later the ship tips forward and settles, right into an impossible present.
They’re alive. They shouldn’t be.
And the Doctor hadn’t changed a thing.
She glances behind her, sees a hand gripping the edge of her seat, and follows it up to Yaz’s face, pale and wild-eyed with fear, her breath coming in short, quivering gasps. She clearly thought they were about to die. The Doctor’s reassurance hadn’t done a thing.
But apparently Yaz had.
The Doctor stares at her, and despite the pleasant, buzzing relief of survival humming through her veins, she can’t help but feel a surge of fear.