OS 141.1 Sun
There were no stars in the sky.
Sarah wasn't sure when this started to bother her, but it did.
People said that they were a myth, but she'd never been able to shake the feeling that there was something wrong with the world. Time was moving too fast and it made her feel at times, like she was on a fun fair ride.
She wondered sometimes if she were the only one who noticed the anomalies. Not just the stars, the distances and the way the world didn't make sense. A few years into her journalism career, she couldn't cope and returned to uni to read physics. It didn't help. The course was like an echo, teaching her rules that were no longer relevant to the world as it was, and yet none of her fellow students seemed to notice.
Sarah got through by faking normalcy, as she had since she was a teenager, waking up with an overwhelming sense of grief over the loss of a best friend she'd never had. Meanwhile, she abused the university's science equipment, taking reading after reading, delving into the legends and lore of the stars and collecting everything she could find about the Pandorica and about the one star that was left, the sun.
By the time they'd decided she was a crackpot, she'd got enough data to form a hypothesis and to estimate how much time they had left. Twenty years if they were lucky. And every day the world felt a little smaller and time sped by a little quicker.
No one would hire her now. Nor could she get published. It didn't matter. She took a job in Leadworth, teaching primary school. It gave her ample time for her extra-curricular investigations. She bided her time, following her instincts and keeping her eyes on the sky. And she told stories about the stars and alien planets and the madman with a box whom she had once travelled with in another life.
This was the most real place in an unreal world and sooner or later the right child would come through here; the one who could unlock the Pandorica and set in motion the Doctor's plan, whatever it was. As long as there was a light in the sky and a memory of the world as it had been, there was hope that they could rewrite history again.
Because Sarah knew there were no stars in the sky. Not even the sun.
Sarah Jane Smith
410 words