[ video ]

[hostage]

[Goodbye to the Jesse who was a clean and successful art student, hello again to the Jesse who looks like he spent the last three nights sleeping under a bridge.]

Been thinking about this the past couple days, trying to figure out how I really feel about it, but you know what? I still feel the same as I did before:

It was shitty.

It was shitty for you guys to change us back without asking if that's what we wanted. A lot of us were better off the way we were last week. The next time something like that happens, maybe ask how we fucking feel about it.

[He just had to get that off his chest.]

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video;

[helpline]

The other Doctor pointed this out to you but there's still that possibility it was all or nothing. [ The Doctor's calm as he talks, giving a little shrug. ] Course, you can't really tell until you ask whoever fixed that displacement to begin with.

[hostage]

Yeah. Hooray for everybody who got exactly what they wanted. Especially the people who don't have to live with it.

[helpline]

You're what, eighteen? [ once again, the Doctor is horrible at judging ages. ] I'm sure people've pointed out that life's not fair to you by now.

[hostage]

Fuck off.

[A life of prolonged slavery and torture is a little more than just unfair.]

[helpline]

You're not the one that should be telling me this. [ he just responds, with a frown, entirely unaware of Jesse's everything. ] From what I see, you're angry about someone fixing an accident. Did it screw you over? Entirely. Could it have been fixed, everyone changing back except for you? We don't know. How dangerous was the accident to the timeline, to our memories, or to the fabric of reality? Again, don't know. You've got every right to be angry, you should hold on to that anger, use it, channel it, anger's good. But anger without knowing the full picture is dangerous.

[hostage]

[He's gonna channel that anger into murdering everyone up in this bitch if people don't stop telling him to essentially get over it.]

Considering nobody asked us what we wanted, it looks like they "fixed" it without knowing the full picture, either. But it's cool 'cause everybody got their old friends back just the way they like 'em.

[helpline]

"Fixing" it sent that version of me to his death, [ the Doctor simply responds, still glaring all the while. ] If there was a way to change it while saving those versions of our selves then trust me, I'd be the first in line. But sometimes the only option is a horrible one.

[hostage]

It wasn't the only option. There was still the option to leave us the hell alone.

[helpline]

Except that might not have been an option! Stop being so pig-headedly stupid and actually listen to what I'm saying. Something like that, some sort of mass swap like that, it's always got repercussions and those are usually really bad.

[hostage]

You don't even know if that's true. Different versions of people show up here all the time from alternate universes. Nothing happened last week that the Porter doesn't do all the time on its own.

[helpline]

But what happened last week wasn't caused by the Porter. It was caused by some idiot who probably didn't know what they were doing. The Porter, for all it's ineptness, at least manages to pull us all in here in a way that hasn't damaged the fabric of time. [ somehow. the Doctor still doesn't know how the Porter works, a fact which pisses him off to no end. ]

[hostage]

How do you know it didn't work the same way? For a lot of us, this was fixing a problem, not making one.

[helpline]

The fact that it happened in the first place was the problem.

[hostage]

You got nothing to back that up except that things were different from how people wanted 'em to be.

[helpline]

I've got two thousand years of experience in fixing things that people messed up to back that up.

[hostage]

This ain't wherever you came from.

[helpline]

No, but the wonderful thing about time is that it's consistent across all universes. Metaphysical force and all that.

[hostage]

Right, yeah. 'cause you been to every single one and you definitely know how magic affects time in all of 'em. There's no way stuff could possibly work in a way you never thought of before.

[helpline]

Precisely. [ unstoppable force meets immoveable object ] I haven't been to every universe but I've been to enough to make an educated guess.

[hostage]

Awesome! We're all super impressed!

[helpline]

You should be.

[hostage]

[Aaaaand disconnecting.]

[helpline]

[ the fact that the conversation went this long in the first place tells wonders for Jesse's patience....... ]