After several long minutes where Donna ate something that resembled pasta, wandered aimlessly around the ship in search for the loo, and stared in horror at her reflection, she finally emerged onto the bridge in an outsized shirt, dark trousers, and her trainers.
And came face to face with the last member of the Captain's crew.
"Holy god!"
She jumped back.
The forth member of the crew was easily seven feet tall, a strange, paisley colour, and covered in scales. He had a massive, raptor-like muzzle, and yellow, baseball-sized eyes that eyed her beadily with an uncanny intelligence.
It had a tablet of some sort underneath a sinuously-muscled arm and sniffed at her disdainfully.
"Oh, you brought me a snack." His lizardy upper lip lifted in a sneer. "Urgh. She's old and tough. How am I supposed to eat this?"
The threat to eat her sailed right over her head as Donna straightened.
"Old?" She demanded. "Old? Watch it, before I turn you into four dozen pairs of shoes, you great scaly lump!"
In hindsight, picking a fight with a giant lizard was probably not one of her best ideas, but whatever.
The captain's calm voice cut through the burgeoning bickering like a knife.
"Enough."
Instant quiet. Donna stared. In her experience, only the Doctor could command respect that absolutely.
"This is Roger." The captain said. "Roger, this is Donna."
Yeah, this is surreal.
"'Roger'?" Donna asked sceptically. "What sort of name is that for a lizard?"
"What sort of name is Donna for a human?" The massive lizard shot back.
"A perfectly reasonable one, thank you very much."
"That's enough." The captain stood from his seat at the helm. He had changed from the warden's getup into a fitted shirt, heavy pants and big boots. His hands were still gloved and a gun belt wrapped around his hips. He looked quite yummy in an outlaw kind of way.
He sized her up with those shrewd green eyes, fists on his hips and feet shoulder-width apart. He looked like he was about to head off to a gun fight at the OK Corral. In space.
Roger just rode roughshod over both of them, ignoring the knife-edge in the atmosphere.
"Are we picking up strays now?" He demanded. "We've planned the hell out of this operation, and we don't need to be taking in Little Red here."
"She stays." The captain cut over him, expression neutral.
"This could throw the whole model off." The lizard argued back. "Everyone here needs to play their part to perfection. It's a new variable that needs to be taken into account, and what if it can't even pull it's own weight? Once we're out, we can't afford to keep stopping because you pasty warm-blooded sausages decide to shoot strands of DNA at each other."
"Whoa!" Donna held her hands up. "First up, there's going to be no DNA shooting in my vicinity whatsoever, I can assure you!" The captain may have been handsome, and had stopped her brain kersploding, but he was still kind of an ass. She'd already done the bad boy thing, and had no immediate desire to repeat the experience. "And the 'it' has a name."
The lizard sneered.
The captain watched this exchange, his expression neutral. Donna stared hard at him. He was such a contrast to the Doctor, who walked around with his emotions on his sleeve. She couldn't see anything at all.
"Are you done?" He asked calmly.
Roger simmered into silence.
"The girl stays. She has a Time Lord in her head."
Silence reigned in the bridge for a long moment, and Donna drew herself up. "My name is Donna Noble. Not 'it' or 'girl'."
No one seemed to pay her any attention. There was a patter behind her, and Donna turned to see the little boy enter. His eyes were narrowed, but he was bristling with a manic energy that she recognised from her time with the Doctor.
His eyes were fixed on her.
"Fascinating." He said, with the air of a scientist watching a lab rat repeatedly electrocuting itself looking for the food button. He circled her slowly with his hands folded neatly behind his back, like a diminutive Bond villain. Donna's eyes followed him, her sneer feeling like it was permanently etching itself on her face.
The boy ignored her obvious hostility. "Fascinating." He said again. "And an Earther. What about the Metacrisis Effect?"
Donna frowned. The few memories she had accessed told her that primitive sentient-brained creatures like her were doomed the moment they were slaved together with a Time Lord mind, but both the boy and the captain knew about the Metacrisis Effect, and the captain in particular knew a trick to counter the effects somewhat.
There must have been a way to beat the Metacrisis.
She opened her mouth to reply, but the captain cut in over her.
"Under control for now." He glared at her. "But more she picks at the compartmentalisation, the worse the Effect will become."
Donna glared back. "I can speak for myself."
His brows rose. "As you have proven repeatedly."
"You really are a jerk, you know that?"
"Now you and Roger have met." He cut over her again, and Donna was seconds away from socking him in the jaw. He'd been nice, almost friendly, when he'd recognised the Metacrisis and helped her to stem the flow of new information, but now he was just as cold as before. "Roger is our tech man."
Donna just looked at the lizard sceptically. He glowered back at her.
"And this is our medic." He indicated the boy. "Doctor Zaphod."
The boy nodded and smiled pleasantly, hands still neatly clasped behind his back. Donna's brow furrowed.
"Zaphod? Like the bloke from Hitchhiker's Guide? By Douglas Adams?"
For a moment, the boy, the doctor, looked unamused. His expression twisted. "Irritating little man he was."
Donna frowned. "You what?"
"Nothing, my dear. Merely having a little reminisce." He smiled.
Donna sank down on her haunches, so she was eye level with the kid.
"How come you look like a little kid but sound like you're an extra in a period piece?" She regarded him with the same fascination that he had with her earlier.
Zaphod raised an eyebrow. "Appearances can be deceptive. If you truly are a Time Lord's companion, you should know more than anyone."
Donna frowned. "D'you mind using a word other than 'companion'? It makes me sound like a hooker."
The captain smirked. Zaphod's brow furrowed.
"Confidant?"
"Better."
"So who is he?" Roger asked.
"What?"
He rolled his eyes. Apparently it was a universal gesture for you gotta be kidding me.
"Your Time Lord!"
It was then that Donna realised that she really didn't know who these people were, and what they planned to do. She had picked up pieces of a plan, but no one had seemed inclined to fill in the blanks.
Even though he seemed to take the knocks in stride and roll with the punches, the captain didn't strike her as a man who really flew by the seat of his pants without backup of some description. Donna's plain old Earth common sense told her that he had a plan for her in the long run.
A plan that was probably not that good for her.
Yippee.
"The Time Lords are dead." Donna said steadily, staring at the captain. He gave that little unfriendly smirk again, spinning his chair at the helm around and sinking into it, eyes on her.
"Is that so?" He asked idly, like he didn't really care one way or another about the answer.
"That's so." If he was spoiling for a fight, she'd happily bring it to him. "And since I know diddly-squat about this crew or you, I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to not tell you anything."
The little doctor looked like he was considering backing slowly from the bridge. In contrast, Roger looked like he wished he had a bag of chips, a beer, and a comfortable seat. Donna idly wondered where Lily was.
"You want to know about me, fine." His voice was silky and deadly, and he lent forward on his seat, forearms flat against his knees. Donna felt herself go rigid, knowing that this was the make or break moment. She was aware of Zaphod shepherding Roger from the bridge. It would have been amusing if it wasn't so serious.
"As you may have guessed, I have seen the Metacrisis Effect at work on lesser evolved beings before."
Donna almost snorted at the 'lesser evolved beings' part. If not for the space pirate meets Renaissance fair thing he had going on, he would have been just another pretty, obnoxious man. Well, she was pretty sure that's what he was. She was reasonably confident from when she had kneed him in the goolies that everything was where it was supposed to be, if perhaps not exactly in working order.
He never broke his staring contest with her.
"I have seen regeneration energy used to save lives en mass, and I have seen the fallout."
It came out before she was conscious of saying it.
"How?"
His deadly smile turned into a sneer.
"Because it wasn't just Time Lords that fought in the War."
Donna sank down into the navigator's chair, watching him, silenced.
"The War drew out all factions, including those who were to use the death and destruction for their own gains. I was one of the heads of the Elysium star system resistance. We were fighting a battle on both sides. The Daleks on one and the Nightmare Child on the other." His voice was flat. It was something that Donna had seen in the Doctor during the fight with the Racnoss. Part of him was still fighting the Last Great Time War.
"What happened?"
He gave a little shrug.
"We lost." The man said it so casually that Donna's internal alarms went off. Suddenly his presence in the Doctor's memories, and the horrible guilt and sadness that the Time Lord associated with him made a wrenching sense.
"The captain goes down with his ship."
He shot her a smile. It was a nice smile when not weighed down with cynicism and bitterness.
"You don't have to tell us which Time Lord, but be aware that the Time War is not a distant memory to the people that inhabit this arm of the universe. You must be careful who you reveal the Metacrisis to, and even without that, the Time Lords still have many enemies."
You don't have to tell me that. Donna's brows drew together. "How long has it been for you?"
His brows rose at her unintended innuendo, and he smiled, another genuine smile.
"I didn't mean it like that, you clot." It seemed that whatever galaxy you ended up in, men related everything back to sex. "I meant, how long since the Time War ended for you?" The Doctor had spoken like the Time War was so far in the past Donna couldn't even imagine it, but she knew for a fact that humans of the future had fought the war against the Daleks.
The captain wrinkled his nose slightly. He had freckles. That's cute. Snap out of it, girl. He's a tool. "Ah, yes. The relative confusion surrounding life with a time traveller."
She gave a what-can-you-do shrug.
"Relative to this universe, it has been three years."
It was a good thing that she was already sitting down, otherwise her legs would have given out from beneath her, mind reeling.
Three years.
It's only been three years since the end of the Time War.