The Doctor-Tyler Family

Growing a TARDIS & Other Things

Two years after Bad Wolf Bay...

Rose pushed the door open into the yellow nursery room where the Doctor was hard at work on.. something. Although the room was technically a place for the TARDIS coral to grow into a living, time-sentient creature capable of carrying them through the time stream, it had also become the Doctor's workshop. Mostly it was because he had to build a complicated set of circuits and containers to put the living coral inside, but he frequently brought home random space debris from Torchwood and analyzed it in there too. Often times, Rose was his partner studying their homework, but the Time Lord science required to build a TARDIS mostly went over her head, and she was reduced to handing him tools and cleaning up. No matter what though, it was their favorite thing to do together, and probably the most frequently used room in the house.

Today, the Doctor was hunched over a table, holding his sonic screwdriver in one hand over a sheet of metal. His suit jacket was cast to the side across the table, and he was wearing a maroon T shirt. He reached to the side while still looking down, grabbing for a bolt and a screw.

The screwdriver wasn't quite as good as his original, but it worked well. He'd made it as soon as he started working at Torchwood, basically as soon as his identification and backstory had been falsified, out of a sonic pen he'd found deep in the pocket of his blue suit jacket. Try as he might, it wouldn't do wood, but he had added a useful little laser setting that could solder metal together - inspired, he said, by an old enemy and older friend called the Master.

Rose took a minute to look at the coral growing in the aquarium. It was a large aquarium, filled with several liters of water and the slightly luminous golden TARDIS coral, directly opposite the window where it would get plenty of sunlight. This, then, was what she had looked at when she became the Bad Wolf. Hazy memories played in her mind like old video tapes, missing great chunks of film. The Time Stream was barely flowing into this coral, so it was perfectly safe to look at, but the Doctor said that in a few years it would come into it's full power, and they would need the TARDIS shell to be ready by then.

Rose wandered from the aquarium to where the Doctor was working. She looked over his shoulder at the shiny metal, and sat down on the stool beside him. She reached across the table, stretching for a piece of metal that had fallen out of the atmosphere recently, and picked up a nearby magnifying glass to examine it.

She was looking at the metal, but she wasn't thinking about it. She knew she couldn't get anymore information out of it anyway, not with just a magnifier; they'd used microscopes in the lab already. She was thinking about the Doctor.

She was always thinking about him, but their lives had been comfortable and together enough that she'd never really done this kind of thinking. But a new-ish girl at work had asked her today, "Is Doctor Smith your boyfriend?" It had sounded like a middle-school way of putting it to Rose, but it still made her pause. They were a couple. They kissed, they had date night, they shared a bed - but they didn't call themselves anything. They didn't say date night, or "This is my girlfriend, Rose." If he brought her flowers or she made him dinner, it was sweet and loving but not exceptional - it was just them. Really, she thought, it's like we're married. But that was what worried her. Everything was perfect, or as close as it could be while the TARDIS was still growing. But the Doctor had always been slow about acting on his feelings, about committing to anything, and besides that, maybe he had some different, Gallifreyan custom that he assumed was the same on Earth. She should ask him. She would ask him. But not just now, because now he was saying, "Rose, could you pass me those yellow wires?" while his face was still concentrated on his work, and he was so cute and focused, and she passed him his wires and thought, Maybe it's better this way.

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One week earlier...

The Doctor had bought the ring. He'd brought another ring Rose had, that he'd seen her wear and knew fit her well, and picked the perfect diamond in the same size. The band was thin and gold, with one large, sparkling diamond in the center and two smaller stones on either side. It was given to him in a black case with a gray cloth interior, and he tucked it in his inside breast pocket and worried about when he should give it to her.

He'd never done a proper Earth proposal before, ring and all. He'd been married, yes, a long time ago, but it was very different. He'd forgotten much of it, but knew that the parts he remembered were only the best; he'd let time claim the bad memories, and could only vaguely recall having divorced her sometime before Susan was born.

Unbidden, some of Donna's emotions surfaced in his mind. He was going to propose, he was going to get married! A giddy grin spread across his face as he walked back to his and Rose's flat. Yes, he imagined screaming, and then corrected himself. Rose would be the one screaming yes, hopefully. Unless she beat him to the proposal. Or didn't want to marry him.

It was this kind of uncertainty that delayed him. Fortunately for him, Rose also kept her silence. Actually, she may even have forgotten her own uncertainty - she'd decided that, as much as her mum would like to see her have a proper wedding and kids and all, she was good as she was.

She was also lying to herself, trying not to rock the boat, and probably wouldn't breath until he asked her to marry him.

And so they continued their lives with new unspoken weights, and neither of them noticed the other's tension, too preoccupied with their own.