The Doctor-Tyler Family

Lessons with Mum

"So now, just pull this here," Rose said nervously, guiding her son's hands on the levers. "Now those three buttons - red one first, blue, and..." Jamie pressed the buttons in quick succession as the TARDIS rocked around them. It shook a little, and then landed with a thump that would have thrown them to the floor if Rose hadn't been hanging on to the console, with her son pressed between it and her.

If all had gone well, they had moved two feet to the right and no more than twenty minutes from when they left. It was the safest sequence she knew of to let her nine year old practice without his dad, but she was still nervous. It was one of othe few sequences she knew by heart on the TARDIS controls. She usually pressed buttons and held levers when he told her to, but she could fly on her own if need be. She just wasn't certain she could teach Jamie to fly it without the Doctor.

But today, her husband wasn't home. There hadn't been much to do at Torchwood, so Rose had left very early. She'd cleaned the kitchen, gotten her hair trimmed, and had a nice relaxing hour in front if the telly before she had to pick up Jamie. He was usually picked up along with Tony and spent an hour or two at his grandparents' doing homework, but Torchwood's irregular schedules left plenty of afternoons for him to spend with his Mum and Dad. Today, his single minded determination to fly the TARDIS had driven Rose to nervously consent, but the first half hour had been only pretend - Jamie acted out the lever pulling and button pressing, happily explaining what everything did to his Mum, only occasionally being corrected - before finally growing bored and asking to do something REAL.

Well, Rose was able to correct Jamie on the properties of each button in the TARDIS. And she was capable of flying it through simple sequences, and suspected she could achieve greater distances and precision in an emergency. But she would never, ever be comfortable flying without the Doctor, and she imagined it would be a long time before she was comfortable with her son flying it at all. But he HAD been taking sporadic TARDIS lessons for the past year, and she DID know the boring little dematerialization sequence by heart, so she had agreed.

Now, her son looked gravely up at her. "Did I do it?" he asked.

She smiled at him, hiding her nervous fear that they might not be where she intended. "Why don't you go check?" she suggested instead. He ducked under her arm and raced out, pulling both doors open wide.

"Aw, we didn't go anywhere," he complained, looking from side to side in the living room.

"Jamie?" Rose heard the Doctor call frantically from somewhere else in the flat before he rushed into the living room. He looked at the TARDIS and his son standing in the doorway. "Well, where did you go?" he asked.

"Nowhere," Jamie pouted.

"We weren't supposed to go anywhere," Rose pointed out, joining him outside the TARDIS. "I told you, we were just moving a few feet left and a bit into the future. Go check the clock in the kitchen." Jamie did as he was asked, and Rose turned to her husband. "How long have you been home?" she asked.

"Oh, about an hour," the Doctor said. His expression changed in that quick way he had, one moment very nonchalant and the next stern, almost cross. "You over shot a bit, didn't you?"

"Yeah, a bit," Rose said, acting like it was just a little mistake. Jamie reentered the room and announced, "It's seven thirty! Mum, we were gone four hours!"

The Doctor looked at Rose again. "How long did you hold down the blue button?"

"I thought you aren't supposed to hold it down. It's the red one, then that one, then the green one, one after the other."

"Right," the Doctor said. "But what about the lever, the one sort of swirly one over to the left? And the knobs, the ones down by the edge, did you turn them all three-quarters counterclockwise?"

"Yes," Rose said.

"Hmm..." the Doctor looked puzzled. "Did you whack the console a couple of times with the mallet, just for luck?"

"I did!" Jamie piped up. "I don't think we skipped anything, Dad."

The Doctor furrowed his eyebrows, and stepped past Rose into the TARDIS. He spent a few minutes fiddling with some knobs, and looking at some screens that seemed to have recorded the previous movements. Suddenly his face went pink. "I, erm, may have given you the wrong directions." he said sheepishly, with his back still to them. Turning to face them, he asked, "Are you aware that you crashed into Pluto?"

Rose's jaw dropped, and then she laughed. "So it's all your fault, then!" Jamie laughed at that.

"Well, there's no need to rub it in," the Doctor said, pretending to be hurt. "Now, then..." - he looked from his wife's face to his son's, building the suspense - "shall we go somewhere?"

"We should," Jamie said seriously. Rose was already closing the doors. The Doctor started suggesting places, with Rose throwing out ideas. Together, the Doctor-Tyler family started working at the console of their TARDIS... running around it, yelling, whacking, pushing buttons and pulling levers, trying to work informative details towards Jamie through the stream of 'technical terms" (pull this rope-thingy, now turn the timey-wimey adjustor... I call this one the wibbly-wobbler control, I'm not sure what the real name is.... Well, you know I failed jiggery-pokery!) and falling over each other, while the Doctor had two hands and a foot on the controls and Jamie tried to mimic him, and Rose snuck a few pictures on her phone, and finally all falling down as the engines made their loud, exciting and yet comfortingly familiar noise, and finally racing out, hand in hand in a chain led by Jamie, into their next adventure.

It wasn't how a TARDIS was meant to be flown, but a TARDIS wasn't meant to be a family home, either. It was an extension of their house, and often more their home than their everyday flat, and this was just what the Doctor ordered.