Touch The Sky: Doctor Who/Studio C [Book 3]

A Chronicle of Days (Prologue)

A Chronicle of Days

(Prologue)

Mallory Everton had had a very long day.

A very long day, on top of a very long week, on top of a very long month, on top of a very long year. A year, in fact, that only a handful of people remembered.

That handful of people, unfortunately, did not include the man she had married.

At 8:39pm, Greenwich Mean Time, on February 24th, 2017, she shut the front door of her newly acquired London flat, flicking on the light and trying to ignore the blank, empty room in front of her. Boxes were stacked up against the walls and the room still echoed if she spoke loud enough. It was a miracle in itself that it was all here—it had been a matter of weeks since she'd been staying with a friend in London, before going home to Utah only to turn it all around and end up living back in the UK. Being a new employee of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce—better known as UNIT—had certainly helped matters, but sometimes she could still scarcely believe it.

She had never expected a regular workday on taking the job. Aliens weren't always kind enough to invade on a 9-5 schedule, after all. Still, she hadn't quite expected her first week to be this phenomenally brutal. She'd been a little ignorant of what this job entailed, despite coaching by Mark Spencer—one of the few people who did remember the aforementioned year.

Nothing you can't handle.

She could almost hear the familiar, masculine voice in her head, and she bit back the soft sound in her throat. What she wouldn't give to hear that voice again.

The realization that she could hear it again, in a brief moment, threatened to strangle her as she made her way to the bedroom at the back of the flat, shucking her outer layers of clothing as she went. It was only about one in the afternoon in Utah right now—but even if it was the wee hours of the morning, she was well aware that Matt would pick up in an instant if she called him.

Not that the thought helped any.

After dropping off coat and sweatshirt, Mallory wandered into the kitchen, well aware that calling him would do no good when he wasn't the one she wanted. Oh, in a roundabout way he still was, but in a much more pressing and hurtful way he was most certainly not.

It had been just over a month since the beginning—and simultaneous end—of what had been dubbed the Year That Never Was. A year born of a temporal paradox, it had been one of heartache, death, and bloodshed that had ended in the most spectacular of manners, with the resounding defeat and death of the Master, the Time Lord that had orchestrated it all.

Matt had been with her nearly every step of the way as they walked the Earth, desperately trying to make their long shot plan work while the Doctor—the only other Time Lord in existence, and much saner than the Master—had been held prisoner on the Valiant, the Master's airship.

It might have all worked flawlessly... had Matt not ended up giving his life to save hers.

But with the paradox broken, the Year was undone, only a few people who had been on the Valiant remembering it. The billions that had died were back, without memory of the horrors.

Matt included.

Mallory still hadn't managed to come to terms with that yet.

He might still be Matt... but he wasn't the man she'd gone through hell with, and as far as she was concerned, he wasn't the man she'd married in the thick of that hell either.

She dropped to the solitary chair in her living room, a cup of tea in hand. Despite her churning thoughts, she unwittingly drifted off to sleep in just a few minutes, blissfully unaware of the tiny life growing inside her.