And I've been putting out fire with gasoline...
Des leaves work around the time he finishes his conversation with Martha, looking like the sort of person who has just received news that the Apocalypse is going to occur within two weeks... Honestly, it's not that far from the truth. He'll concern himself with Jack Fucking Harkness and all his relevant identities later, however. He has a Doctor to
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Or, more accurately, circled the house until she found an open window on the second floor and ducked in, and then followed the sounds of Des until she could land on his shoulder. Public transit is nice, but it's slow, and even dipping into her stipend to pay a cab leaves her dealing with traffic. This is a more direct approach, and when it comes to the House of the Disaster-Prone, she has a feeling that urgency trumps decency.
Once she has a good grip on Des's shoulder, she tilts her head at him and tries to get her syrinx working the way she wants it to.
"Trrrrrrenchkut."
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He throws up a hand, his voice mildly hoarse. "I don't know. A few weeks? A month? It's been awhile. I thought he would have changed back by now."
Des is not having a good day. Then again, who is at this point?
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Dmitri stares at him.
"He what‽"
One can hear the interrobang at the end of that sentence. One can here the laws of modern English punctuation revolutionizing themselves around that sentence, and Dmitri rounds on him fully, pointing the Doctor-ferret at his face like an accusation.
"And you waited until now to call someone - Desmond Descant, do you know what happens to shifters who stay in animal form too long?"
...given how much concern he wasn't showing...
Dmitri closes her eyes for a moment, counting primes down from 100 in something difficult. Why, why, why is the universe falling apart today?
"Des," she says through gritted teeth once she's reached 17, "shapeshifters who don't shift out of animal forms for prolonged periods of time begin to lose their higher reasoning functions and degress to the point where they effectively are the animals they've shifted into. This isn't the Doctor's lousy set of coping mechanisms so much as it is cognitive suicide."
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He stares at the ferret being shoved in his face and just looks horrified for a few moments.
"And you don't fucking care, do you?" He growls, which seems really odd to do to a ferret, but there's something of the Doctor in there. Some part of the Doctor chose this. "That's what you want? Just hide away from the world and stop existin', and do you even think, for a second, about what that's going to do to people like me, like Martha, like...."
He grits his teeth like he's trying to keep tears from coming and then jerks his head towards the upstairs and shouts, "DONNA!"
He stalks off towards the kitchen. He can't deal with this right now. He just can't.
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We don't ask about these things. Like why Donna's still in her jimjams. Probably best if everyone doesn't know. She hits the bottom of the stairs, takes one look at Dmitri holding the ferret and Des nowhere in sight, and sighs.
"Right, what'd he do?"
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"Someone the Doctor knows and quite possibly still feels responsible for in his fucked-up and at least recently continuing career of taking responsibility for everything except that which he has any control over is about to go on trial for war crimes, and if that's not enough, if he's like every other shifter modern science has ever studied, his mind is be deteriorating the longer he stays a ferret until one day the ferret will be all there is," she says, and takes her fingers away from his ears for long enough to raise her hand to forestall any retort. "I ran into him a couple weeks ago and he was still there enough to communicate in morse code, but I've got no idea how a Time Lord brain might or might not be equipped to handle this."
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Donna takes the ferret upstairs into her room and closes the door. There are a few minutes of silence, wherein Donna is presumably trying to convince the Doctor that shifting bipedal again is the best plan.
Probably about three or four minutes into this, she can be heard to bellow, "DON'T YOU BLOODY TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME, SUNSHINE!"
Then more silence.
Finally, approximately eight minutes after taking him upstairs (sorry, Dmi, it's a tough job convincing the Doctor to do something he doesn't want to do), Donna steps out of her room with a robe (that matches her pyjamas) over one arm, and a cowed ferret cuddled to her chest.
Yes, resting on her bosom. We won't mention that when he's not a ferret anymore, it would just make him blush.
"All right, he's ready," she tells Dmitri calmly.
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Among the things she's worked out? Someone really needs to find a way to install a Supernatural Wikipedia on the journal network.
...also, she has a feeling that she knows why Des needed a shapeshifter rather than her specifically or anyone who could convince the Doctor to shift back. Granted, the last time she had any indication that the Doctor cribbed other people's Rift abilities was when he was borrowing April's to put her down inside her own head, and that makes her sixteen new kinds of twitchy, but at least she knows what needs doing ( ... )
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But then Donna will just fish him out and yell at him some more and there's no getting away from any of it, is there? He sighs, and nudges Dmitri's hand for a second with his nose. Sorry about all of this.He shifts back slowly, and it's difficult to tell if that's due to reluctance or simply the fact that he's unfamiliar with the process. The ferret didn't much care about the robe except as something to hide under, but as more and more of the Doctor comes back, he very much appreciates that it's there ( ... )
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"Thank you for telling us," she tells Dmitri with a strained smile. "Make sure the door latches, ta." It's not a brushoff, just... knowing that Dmitri wants to get out of here, and needing to deal with the Doctor. She straightens the collar on the robe he's wearing. "Come on, sunshine," she says gently, and steers him into the kitchen, which Des has (thankfully) vacated at some point in the past ten minutes. "Let's get you some cocoa. It's always good for when you've had a hard day."
That's putting it mildly.
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Someone is going to get a very concerned raven, unfortunately sans giant machine. Someone is going to get a very concerned raven soon.
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After a moment, he drops heavily into a chair and makes a sound that might be a laugh, all shattered and sharp-edged and tearing at his throat. "War crimes. He'd like to be charged with war crimes now."
He supposes disappearing into the TARDIS and never coming out isn't an option.
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Yes, the Doctor was the focus of much of what happened. But there's enough people out there that whatever they want to do with him, they can do without the Doctor's testimony.
It might be a good precedent to set, sure, but that doesn't mean Donna has to be happy about it.
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The smile fades quickly. "Well, if anyone ought to..." He pauses a second, staring absently at his hands. He might be reminding himself what it's like to have fingers - he might just be looking for anything to look at but Donna, and risk her turning around and meeting his eyes. "Everything that happened was because..."
Because of him. Because once upon a time, in some universe, a little place called Boeshane got caught up in the Time War and he's the only one left to answer for it.
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"Right. Were you the one who flipped somethin' in his mind and made him go mad? No? All right, were you the one to lock those bits of his mind away? Still no? Did you go to his home and say, 'oh, guess this doesn't need to exist anymore,' and unmake it? Of course not. Did you, in fact, have anything to do with the events that led to him becoming John Thane? No. You didn't." She's been moving closer through this whole thing, and is now standing right in front of him, looking stern. "And don't you start on how you're the only one left. From what I understand, he's from a different universe as you, yeah? Which means that even if his version of the Doctor was involved, that's nothin' to do with you, so just stop with all your guilt trips and ( ... )
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