The hum of the TARDIS console was now like background noise to Clara. The sound of her heartbeat was as familiar to her at this point in time, and yet, she still had this feeling that the TARDIS was toying with her. Ever since she travelled to the famed Rings of Akhaten, she was certain that the TARDIS had a grudge against her, that the sensations she felt when aboard the ship weren't just her paranoia but actual, tangible hatred. She had no idea why the TARDIS hated her, of course, she was just an ordinary woman, but the ship's attitude towards her still softly hacked away at the back of her mind.
"You alright?" the Doctor's sympathetic tones echoed around the console room, carrying the heartfelt message with them.
Clara turned to him and smiled, "Ah nothing," she looked up at the spherical revolving discs above the time rotor, "just wondering why this old rust bucket doesn't like me."
"Rust bucket?!" the Doctor shouted in lowered tones at Clara, "I'll have you know this TARDIS is in pristine condition. And I'm sure she likes you really, you just need to get to know her. Like... like an estranged nan!"
A puzzled look shot back at the Doctor from the other side of the console, "an estranged nan?"
"Sure, we all have estranged nans. Y'know, the ones that make you leave your own planet... no... just me?" the Doctor's face feel with the sudden realisation that only he had had this problem. He went back to the console controls and started fiddling. "Anyway, she was only part of the problem. I mean it was sterile really, I wanted to see the universe, have fun, and she was here, from the very beginning, the TARDIS."
"You talk about her as though you love her," motioned Clara in an apparent sarcastic but secretly admirable fashion.
"I do," said the Doctor, "In my own way, of course." The Doctor stroked over an array of buttons on the TARDIS console and panned his head around the console room, he thought for a second that a tear was going to roll down his cheek, but he supposed that his body thought better of it. "Right then, Clara Oswald" he lively interjected into his own stream of thoughts as he often did, "you haven't been to America yet."
"Doctor, when I said I wanted to come with you I was kind of expecting huge Alien planets, the mysterious past and the undetermined future, not... America."
"Oh come on Clara, the land of the free!" the Doctor saluted to Clara, in much the same way an enthusiastic young child would. "One, maybe two hours, we don't have to stay there for long. What do you say? Ice cream's on me."
"You are ridiculous, you know that. Hold old did you say you were, over a thousand? And yet you still act like a child."
"You say that as if it were a bad thing, Clara, as a lovely man in a scarf once said, there's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." And with that the Doctor hurled one of the TARDIS levers towards him and, whilst laughing with Clara like two children in a playground, he piloted the TARDIS for modern day America.