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

Something So Precious

Something So Precious

(Original Interlude)

"Hey."

Matt glanced up sharply, gaze meeting that of Tori Pence.

He refused to call the blonde woman Mallory's replacement—not that he'd heard any of the rest of the cast refer to her that way, but he couldn't help but feel a bit like it. He wondered sometimes if she thought of herself that way. "What's up?" he asked automatically.

"Not much," she answered, pushing her glasses up her nose. "You?"

Matt shrugged.

"How's Mal doing?" Tori asked after a long moment.

"Haven't heard from her."

"Really?" She dropped into a seat across from him. "I mean, Whitney said the same, but I was assuming Mallory would've talked to you."

"Why would you think that?" he asked, taking a low, slow breath in an attempt to avoid getting his hackles up. Tori only raised a brow, as if to say, Are you kidding me?

It all flashed through his head—every kiss and near miss he had Mallory had shared on stage, long before the Doctor came crashing into their lives. Every moment they pined but were too cowardly to move forward. It added up to an unfortunately sizable portion of his life.

"Tori, we're actors," Matt said flatly. "Did you really think...?"

"How stupid do you think the public is?" she shot back. "We didn't think it, we knew it. You two were obvious about it."

"We weren't that obvious," he shot back. Not to each other, at least, he added, thinking to himself that they'd literally gotten married before either of them had come close to realizing the depths of their feelings for each other. The fact that they'd gotten married almost a hundred and four years in the past and not exactly voluntarily was beside the point.

Tori only shook her head. "Look, I'm kind of an outsider here. There's years of history you and the rest of the cast has that I'm not privy to, and that's okay. But I'm well aware something's going on here, and even I can tell you're not yourself."

There's more going on here than you know, he thought dryly.

Silence dragged out. "Well, tell her I said hi if you hear from her," Tori finally said, getting back to her feet.

"Yeah."

He had the feeling he was likely never going to get the chance to pass Tori's message along.

~~~

She had expected the fatigue.

Anyone would have been tired coming out of that Year, out of twelve months of constantly being pushed to her mental and physical limits without respite. Anyone would've needed time to recover that she hadn't really given herself.

Mallory hadn't expected the all-consuming exhaustion, the constant fuzzy head and the ability to pass out at the drop of a hat without regard for location or surroundings.

Her first instinct, as February crept past into a bright but chilly March, was that there was something else wrong. She'd lived on a diet that had barely replaced the calories she'd used day in and day out, and lost weight she hadn't really had to lose. With the luxuries of the modern world at her disposal again, she might look better, but she wouldn't be surprised if she had a myriad of deficiencies or some system that had decided to quit playing ball.