Author's Note: This is my second fanfic, and my first DW one, so R&Rs would be wonderful. Thank you! Also, if anyone could inform me whether the Doctor has ever been in trouble with the Gallifreyan authorities, I'd be really happy (I've only watched half of Eleven so far...)

EDIT:/ Okay, fixed the TARIDS thing (I hope?) I broke the Sonic instead :)

"Clara?"

Clara rolled her eyes. The Doctor was (he said) over 1000 years old, and he still hadn't learnt that it was impolite to yell at people from a distance.

"Clara!"

She put her book (a first edition of 'Oliver Twist', picked up from a shop in 1838) on a clear-ish patch of the TARDIS console, and stepped back nervously. "Stay." She didn't know where she'd picked up the habit of talking to inanimate objects, but she thought she really should stop sometime. She walked over to the TARDIS door, then turned around and talked to the machine itself. "And don't steal my book again!" The TARDIS vworped.

The Doctor was outside, with a carpentry set, some wood, and some TARDIS-coloured paint. A particularly rough patch in the Vortex had ripped out a large patch off the TARDIS door, and it turned out that the Sonic was broken (neither of them knew how, but the point was it was broken and it wasn't yet fixed) so the Doctor had pulled out a carpentry set from somewhere. It looked like it had never been used before. Clara had opted out of helping him, she wasn't exactly amazing at woodwork and if she made a mistake, the TARDIS would never forgive her.

"CLARA!"

"Coming!"

She finally stepped outside. The Doctor seemed to be hanging upside down from the roof. "Doctor. What are you doing?"

" think I'm stuck."

"You're a thousand-year-old time-travelling alien and you're stuck?"

"Yup!"

"Oh God. So what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know! I thought I'd tell you, and you could come up with something for me!"

"Doctor, sometimes you are the most useless person I know," sighed Clara, stepping inside to see if she could find a stepladder. Given that it was for the Doctor, the TARDIS might let her find it in less than an hour. But then again, probably not.

One hour, thirty-seven minutes, and forty-two seconds later, the machine at last let Clara find the ladder room. It appeared that the Doctor had a whole roomful of ladders for no particular reason in a variety of designs and colours. Avoiding the most outlandish ones, she went for one that looked most like an Earth ladder. It had that circle-y writing on the side too, like the stuff the Doctor had in his control room. They appeared to be similar patterns, so Clara guessed they meant something – probably the Doctor's native language, if he wasn't from Earth. She wondered, not for the first time, where exactly he did come from…

Taking the ladder, she walked through the corridors. The TARDIS must have been bored, or perhaps tired, because it didn't try to stop her.

"You took a long time."

"Yeah, well, blame the TARDIS. It's being a cow again!"

"Don't insult my baby!" the Doctor glared at her. He seemed to be trying to hug the blue box. Whilst upside down. And given his clumsiness, that was not going to end well.

It didn't.

The Doctor lost his precarious foothold on the TARDIS roof, and tumbled down, somersaulting on the way. Luckily, he landed the right way up. Unluckily, he'd managed to break his ankle.