Oncoming Storms - Prompt 93.3 - Trying something for the first time
It wasn't the first time her knuckles had gone completely white or stiff while she gripped the central console. Sometimes she wondered if the TARDIS had any other settings besides 'smooth sailing' and 'tumble dry'--and why it couldn't use the former more often. At the rate she was going, she'd give herself...oh, she didn't know, carpal tunnel syndrome or something, and considering her line of work, she was very lucky to have avoided all that nonsense. It certainly paid to have squishy rests for her wrists and--
Oh, why the hell was she thinking about all that for?! That chapter of her life had been closed for a while now and there she was, flying to lord knew where with a skinny alien man and she was contemplating wrist support!
"Can't you--?" she began, but she was caught off-guard as the TARDIS gave another lurch and it took everything she had to hold on. She was ignored anyway as he had begun smashing the console with a mallet and crying out something encouraging to his ship. Not one to be ignored, she slowly edged closer to him and opened her mouth to say something, but stopped as something crossed her mind. Instead, she watched him. His fingers flew over the controls now that he'd stopped hitting the console. A flick here, the pull of a lever or three there, and several buttons and dials were pushed and twisted.
Hmm, she thought to herself. She'd noticed him doing the same sequence of things before when they were being sent hurtling through the vortex. Well, whenever she wasn't on the other side of the console, eager to head out those doors, that was. Unconsciously, she'd noticed certain patterns in his piloting: some where he hit more buttons in one section if they were going somewhere in the past, how he ignored one section completely if they were going somewhere in the future, and there was this one switch that never seemed to want to go down all the way--hence the mallet. And don't think she hadn't noticed the other set of tools hanging near his chair. Some of them didn't look like tools to her, but what did she know? Hammers, mallets, screwdrivers and spanners were about the only things in her tool repertoire.
"Right, almost there, hold on!" he cried again, and reached toward her, his hand heading for a lever in front of her. "I've just got to--" But her hand shot out before he could even touch said lever and she pulled back on it. The TARDIS' churning engines slowly started to settle down into 'smooth sailing' mode and the console room levelled out.
"Let me guess. Stabilisers?" she asked lightly with a playful smirk. He only gawped back, blinking at her. She briefly wondered if her action had completely derailed his train of thought, but she could see the hints of a smile creeping up into his lips. "Followed by..." she trailed off, her fingers wiggling thoughtfully in the air as she searched for that one dial he would have turned next and--ah, there it was! She gave it a deft twist and said, "Uh, whatever that was," then glanced up at him.
He wore a rather impressed expression. "The secondary temporal stabilisers," he said automatically. Then his eyebrow shot up a split second later as if what she'd done had finally finished processing in that great big brain of his. "How did you know what they needed to be set at?"
"What, do you think I haven't watched you scurrying about this thing?"
"The TARDIS is not a 'thing', Donna."
"I mean this," she said, patting the console a couple times. "Let me help you. You can teach me! It can't be that hard to fly this ship of yours."
He was giving her one of those looks again, the kind that said, "You can't be serious. There is no way a simple human like you could ever grasp how very, very complicated and technical it is to do all this."
Before he could open his mouth to say something along those lines, however, she sidled up beside him and grinned brightly. "Oh, go on," she said encouragingly, nudging him playfully with her elbow. "What could it hurt, me learning to drive? Have you got any learner's plates that you can, oh I don't know, hang on the door handle or something?"
Muse: Donna Noble
Word count: 736