The Time Lord's Apprentice

The Bells of Saint John

merry christmas to those of you who celebrate. welcome back to this story and a new era for our main character. as the gap between now and the days we meet the master get shorter and shorter, some serious tonal and character shifts are in order. how exactly, that's for me to know and you to find out so stop listening to me, get reading!

The English countryside flies past the window of the train snaking its way down to London. Peyton sits slumped against it, staring blankly out as the scenery slowly changes from sleepy villages dotting the green blanket to urban towns and cities.

Six months ago she watched her two best friends be ripped from time itself, she will never see them again. Time-locked. Even attempting to find them will rip a hole through reality.

She felt numb, she didn't know what to do with herself for those first few days alone in her apartment. She had avoided the dining room where one of Rory's brown sweaters and Amy's denim jacket hung over dining chairs exactly where they had been tossed before the three of them leapt into the Tardis for the last time.

A week passed before a buzz at the door interrupted her numb isolation. It was Kate Stewart. Bearing both concern for her radio silence and a letter, written from 1890, addressed to Peyton on this very day.

It was from the Doctor, explaining that he was settling down in Victorian London and not to worry about him, that Madame Vastra was keeping an eye on him. It offered little comfort to Peyton. Enclosed in the envelope beside the letter was a torn out page of a novel. The Afterword from the Melody Malone novel written by Amy Williams.

She explained what had happened to Kate, she felt for her and asked if she had told their families. She hadn't, Peyton hadn't spoken to anyone.

U.N.I.T took less than a day to produce the documents and paperwork fabricating a fatal plane crash that was supposed to take place over the Atlantic Ocean. It was efficient and clean and produced certificates of death for Amelia Jessica Williams and her husband Rory Arthur Williams.

Kate told Peyton to go home, to Leadworth where two substitute bodies were arranged for a funeral.

Arriving in the sleepy village without Amy and Rory felt wrong, she felt empty. Her parents were crying when she arrived home, they exclaimed how lucky she and the Doctor were for deciding to spend one more day in New York instead of flying with them. Peyton gave them half hearted nods in return and let herself be held in their arms.

The funeral was a haze, everyone in the town offered their condolences to their parents and to Peyton, who stared down at the twin graves, filled with strangers while she knew Amy and Rory's already decomposed bodies were in a cemetery three thousand miles away.

At the wake, Brian came up to her and told her that he knew what had happened. Peyton stared at him teary eyed while he explained that a man named Antony Peyton Williams came to visit him, explaining what had happened.

Peyton spent the next six months in Leadworth. Often sitting in the garden or reading in bed. Her parents tried to convince her to return to London, to get back to work and be busy but she couldn't.

She tried. She, and Amy and Rory's parents went down together to gather their dead children's belongings from their apartment. They kept offering for Peyton to have some of their things, clothes, knick-knacks, anything. She politely refused them all. She had a few of their things in her flat already. She didn't want anymore.

But now she returns, mostly because her parents were borderline threatening her to leave because she would do little else than sit or do chores to keep busy. They even somehow got a hold of U.N.I.T and in true parental fashion, ordered them to come up with something to busy their daughter.