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Charley had quickly learned that the Doctor's TARDIS ship was full of wonderful things that she could only dream about. Beyond the mystery of how so much managed to fit inside such a little space (she'd interrogated him about that before and gotten no satisfactory answer at all), there were seemingly endless rooms, the purpose of which she couldn't guess; corridors that she swore would slowly twist until she was walking on the ceiling and looking up, or maybe down, at the floor; and mysterious, morose music that drifted, maudlin, from deep within the magniloquent Doctor's ship.
Very early in their travels together, he had offered to show her his favourite star, which blazed silver and lilac and heliotrope. “It's beautiful, Charley, just beautiful! You really have to see it, and then you'll understand what I mean!” he'd said as he rounded the console. “It's my absolute favourite! Not my favourite, I mean, but it's someone's favourite and that makes it mine too!”
He said things like that a lot, like he was making a point to love everything about life simply because it was wonderful to be alive. He was always so sweet.
She'd watched in a tizzy as he danced around the controls, soothing the ship and shouting out assorted facts. It burned at 5000 degrees in some measurement she couldn't even begin to spell out, and it was the largest star that still took tea with sugar. Apparently.
“What planet are we landing on?” Charley had asked, breathless.
But he'd smiled at her and winked. “Planet? Who needs a planet to land on when you're in the finest time machine Gallifrey or any of the seven systems can offer? We're landing in space.”
Of the oddities in the TARDIS, Charley thought that the lack of a roof in the console room was one of the less strange things. The dark wood walls simply climbed up, up, up like in a grand cathedral until they faded away and baby blue or brilliant green painted the sky over their heads. It was, she thought, either the best simulacrum of the sky any artist had ever made, the most complex technology on the whole ship, or simply the beautiful and natural sky itself. There was no glass, or she would have thought that she could see the glint instead, Charley believed that she really was looking up at a vast and impossible oculus.
With that in mind, the prospect of landing in space was less appealing to Charley than it seemed to be to the Doctor. As he continued his optimistic waltz, Charley’d piped up, “But, Doctor, if the ceiling is open, won’t we just float away? Will we be able to breathe?” And then she felt rather proud of herself for picking up that much of what he’d said about the adverse effects of space from one of his winding lectures on the beauty (and danger) of the universe.
He stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh.” He looked up. “Oh.” Then he looked at Charley. “Ah!” He ran to her, kissed her on the cheek like she was brilliant, and then hurried into the depths of the TARDIS. If she was blushing, it was only because she was proud to have thought of something that the Doctor hadn’t.
A couple minutes passed before the Doctor came back. Charley had just been considering whether or not it would be worth settling down with a good book and waiting when he came in, nearly crashing into the wall as he did. In the Doctor’s arms was a huge and tangled mass of rope, which was unceremoniously dumped on the floor. He doubled over, hands on his knees, and caught his breath, before quickly righting himself and flashing Charley a bright smile.
“Solution!” he shouted. Charley grinned back. “Now, if you don’t mind, Miss Pollard, could you help me find the end of this so that I can tie it to the console?”
Before long, they’d gotten the heavy cord looped around the base of the console twice and tied with a knot that the Doctor claimed he had learned from Midas himself. Then he’d carefully looped it around Charlotte’s ankle and tied it there as well.
“It’s not too tight, is it?” the Doctor asked as he tugged on the rope to check that he’d tied it properly.
She’d shook her head. “I’d rather get pins and needles than be lost in space.” Charley tested the rope herself. It held remarkably well.
Finally, the Doctor had taken his own place by the console, rope wrapped around his waist where he could wiggle out if he needed to, and he rested his hand on the large bronze lever. “You’re absolutely sure? Positive, Charley? I can’t promise that we’ll be one hundred percent safe, and I know that I said it was beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll risk you if you aren’t sure. Alright, then. Hold your breath.”
So she’d sucked in as much air as she could until her pink cheeks were puffed out, and the Doctor had thrown the lever. The lights in the console made a wooshing sound that was becoming dreamily familiar to her and the ship shook as it shot through time and space.
Charley braced herself to feel her hair stand on end and then to feel herself drifting up above the central console. She imagined what it would be like to be weightless as a bird. It would probably be freeing.
Traveling with the Doctor was exhilarating like that. Every new place they visited would have offended her poor Mama twice or thrice over and her sisters would have dropped dead if they saw the company that Charlotte was keeping now, but there was so much freedom. She didn’t regret any of it.
Then, Charley had realized that the TARDIS had fallen silent and she didn’t feel any different than before. She cracked one eye open and saw that she hadn’t moved. Above her, she saw stars. In front of her, she saw the Doctor making a face at Charley. He was not going red in the face from lack of oxygen. In fact, he seemed to be trying to hold back laughter.
Charley let out the breath she’d been holding. “You’re insufferable!” she exclaimed.
“What if I could simply breathe in space?” he asked playfully. “You shouldn’t assume it’s safe just because I’m breathing. You could have suffocated.”
“Wouldn’t that have been terrible?” Even though her words were positively dripping with sarcasm, she wasn’t really mad at him. Well, she might be a little cross, but she had to admit that it was probably going to be funny when he explained why she wasn’t flying off into space like he said that she would.
The Doctor’d bounced between his feet like an excitable rabbit. “Yes, Charley, yes it would. Fortunately, even though I can breathe in space, the TARDIS still has its internal atmosphere, pressure, and everything else required to breathe intact.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Yes, I can see that. Why?”
“Because of the ceiling,” he said. He flicked a switch on the console, one of the many, many switches that she couldn’t keep track of, and they both watched as the celestial pointillism of distant stars and galaxies melted into an ordinary wooden ceiling. “It’s been there the whole time, simply invisible. I thought that I had told you, but I suppose I must have forgotten that in the rush of emotions when you came aboard, and then we’ve been taking care of Ramsey and… Well, Charley, You seemed so worried and I had a somewhat cruel idea.” He laughed and raked his hands through his hair. “Please --- You aren’t mad at me, are you? I didn’t mean it to be rude. You’re brilliant. You really are.”
She may have been somewhat of an idiot compared to him (not that she would admit that out loud), but the Doctor, so far in their travels, had never once sought to talk down to her or make her feel in any way inadequate. She knew that she was hundreds, even thousands, of years behind him in terms of science and technology, but he explained it to her when he could, and, to Charley’s credit, she was catching on quickly. She knew that the joke hadn’t been that she was a backwards idiot from an epoch before electric kettles and mind probes. In fact, she realized, quite happily, that she hadn’t thought that for a second.
Charley pouted, mostly for the show of it, and shook her foot at the Doctor. “Care to untie me, then?”
“Of course,” he’d said, but in the end he’d had to find a remarkably scary looking sword to cut her free. Then, he’d taken her to the door and opened it. He’d explained that there was an air bubble around the ship, that there was internal gravity keeping them in place, and that he’d never put her in danger just for a pretty star.
They had sat together and watched the Doctor’s favourite-star-but-not-really-but-someone’s favourite as it burned at 5000 degrees sxariiins. (It really was a stunning thing to watch.) Charley admitted to him that, childishly, she had always imagined that the sun would be friendly, and the Doctor assured her that most of them were.
“Can you really breathe in space?”
He laughed. “No, I suppose I can’t. Not yet. You have to have a growth mindset about these things. That’s a wonderful idea when they come up with it, a growth mindset.”
“I’ll learn to do it first,” she said.
It was nice. It was good. There was so much more to learn and to explore.
That was how things went when you traveled with the Doctor, if you were very, very lucky. And she swore that she would never leave as long as she had the choice. It was absolutely wonderful.