It wasn't until late afternoon that the tedious banging stopped and Rose was finally able to hear herself think. She looked up from where she sat sulking and spotted him talking to an exposed area of the console unit with a mallet in one hand and his sonic screwdriver in the other. She still wasn't entirely sure what he was doing. When she's asked earlier he was very vague at first and when he's finally explained his irritating behaviour in more detail, she hadn't been listening properly.
Rose was busy at the particular moment he had decided to create a racket that echoed to where she was packing for a visit home, but her curiosity nagged her to investigate the source of the noise and she had ended up jogging into the console room with her hands over her ears. "What's going on?!" She asked loudly over the dull thunks of the mallet connecting with a metal panel on the inside of the console.
He looked up at her, considered her for a second and then turned back to the console. "Rose, if I even began to explain to you what I was doing with my highly complex and ancient time machine, would you understand?"
"Probably not" Rose replied and she knew his response was simply because he felt too busy to talk.
"There you go. Mush," he added quickly and tried to shop her away clumsily with the mallet, but he stopped again and looked up at her with confusion in his eyes, "Why are you wearing a coat? It's hot enough in here to keep the Velcia warm and all of them are cold blooded" he stated with a strangle look on his face. Rose shifted slightly under his gaze. Sometimes she got the feeling that he could read minds.
She put her hands on top of the console and started fiddling with one of the switches in a futile attempt to avoid his glare. "I agreed to meet Mickey for a drink tonight. You know?" she added at the sight of his baffled expression, "A catch up."
"That idiot?"
"Yes" Rose replied fiercely.
"You can do better than Rickey, you know?" and he shot her a look that much resembled pity.
"It's Mickey, and I don't think so," Rose growled through gritted teeth, "Anyway, I need you to drop me off on Brixton Road at 7 pm."
"No can do. Well, not tonight at any rate."
Rose's face dropped. He was just about to start hitting the metal panel again when she finally managed to reply after being sure she wouldn't yell at him.
"Why? You can't stop me from seeing him" she added because she knew he had a jealous streak and it would wind him up to her her say that.
He looked up at her again and cocked an eyebrow. He'd evidently seen through her attempt to induce another jealous response. "I'm not trying to prevent you from seeing him. We can't land until I've fixed this," he pointed to the console to ememphasise his point, "Sorry Rose. You look very nice though."
Rose blushed. He didn't often give her compliments like that and she suspected it was just an easy attempt to cheer her up but she was happy with his effort nonetheless.
"Blimey. The last time I saw someone with cheeks as red as yours, he was called Snuggles and lived in a zoo on Truuge."
Rose grinned at him and leaned against the console as he returned to hitting the exposed metal panel again until it popped open with such eagerness that Rose had a sneaky feeling that it wanted to be fixed as much as she did.
After texting Mickey and apologising for her lack of reliability, Rose crouched down to get a good look at he wiring that the as hidden behind the panel and tried to engage him in conversation again. "It looks like the wiring from the inside of a plug to me."
This time he grinned at her, not believing that the innards of his highly complex and ancient time machine could be compared to something so simple. "I'm trying to fix the Directional Unit, not that it worked properly in the first place," he looked over to her and tapped her on the shoulder after finding her staring at her phone again, "Do you remember when I was going to take you to Naples in 1860 but we ended up in Cardiff in 1869? This is responsible for that."
Rose watched as he ripped out a handful of the wiring and threw it behind him. The tangled mess landed on the floor as silently as it had flown through the air. Moving some more wires out of the way, he finally reached what he was apparently looking for.
The Directional Unit looked a lot like a galaxy contained in an egg timer. Rose could see various specks of light sparkling in much the same way that frost did du? ring sunny, winter mornings. Something obviously wasn't right though. He picked it up, gave the top a quick tap with his sonic screwdriver aJX placed it on top of the console.
"Why are you fixing it now? Surely you could have fixed it before you met me?" Rose pressed, watching him trying to locate another object she knew would no doubt help him with his quest.
"For as long as I've had the TARDIS it's never completely worked. I've lived with it. It wasn't that big of a problem, but now it has completely stopped working which is why I can't take you home right now. I can't guarantee we'll land on Earth, let alone Brixton Road. I've been trying to fix it as quickly as possible but you've been distracting me so the likelihood of me fixing it tonight has dropped dramatically."
Rose huffed and stood up again before snatching her phone out of her pocket and began furiously punching the keys so hard that she wasn't surprised when one of the buttons broke under her thumb.
"I'm sorry," he sighed as he got to his feet and tried to console her with a one-armed hug, "Better luck next time." He grimaced before turning to the egg timer like box and picking up his sonic screwdriver.
Rose could still see him from where she sat and hour later if she looked up. Turning back to her phone, her thoughts lingered on the one subject she had tried to avoid thinking about since she met him; the future. Rose was starting despise being unreliable. It was bad enough when she couldn't make it home for her mother, although she was sure Jackie wasn't as bothered as she had made out she had been when Rose couldn't make it to Howard's birthday party last December, but she was starting to become unreliable for Mickey now as well. That was the biggest issue Rose faced when traveling with the Doctor.
He was always reliable when Rose needed help or when he stopped at her house to pick her up to go on another adventure, but reliability for human things such as birthday parties and dating didn't exist in his world. She doubted they ever would.
Please leave a review so I know my stories are being read. This one-shot was created for the sole purpose of me getting to know FF. The quality of my writing will improve with my UNIT series.