"I'd give you good odds, I'm not sure I'm as sure as you are."

"The amount of mental privacy I would need from such an arrangement is more than sufficient to conceal an underlying desire to destroy the world. I am in a better position to know that than you are."

"I believe that you could keep me from being sure that you weren't fine. I'm not sure you could convince me that you were definitely fine."

Bella laughs. "Even now that we've had this conversation?"

"Now that we've had this conversation it may become completely impossible to convince you that I am definitely fine," he snorts, "but if it doesn't, my point stands."

"You don't think there's any space between it being completely impossible to convince me that you're definitely fine, and it being absolutely guaranteed that you can convince me that you are?"

"I don't think there's any space between being able to convince you that I'm fine when I'm not and being able to convince you that I'm fine when I am."

"I guess that makes some more sense." She sighs, she squeezes his hand. "I want you to be fine. I really, really want it, and I guess if you can live with being like this then I don't need to lose metaphorical sleep over it but I'm going to keep thinking." She lets out a soft, sad chuckle. "Maybe one day we'll run into another one of you who eventually figured it out."

"It would! I mean, a surprising number of problems have been solved with alt-finding, up to and including death. I wouldn't put it past the multiverse to eventually hand you a solution."

He laughs.

"I have very little idea what that'd look like," she muses. "I wonder if you'd have been it, if you had a while without your soul and with all your people."

"I bet I would."

"It was less obvious. I didn't give it much thought."

"I am having a complete failure of imagination about failing to notice self-loathing."

"I don't go around consciously observing what a terrible waste of a soul I am. I just... quietly neglect to value myself. The merge did fix most of the higher-level symptoms."

"Is there," Bella sighs, "any point to arguing with you when you utter worrisome phrases like 'terrible waste of a soul'?"

"File it under 'backhanded non-hyperbole'," he says. "It describes my emotional reality, not my actual beliefs."

"And as far as I know none of us have managed to teach anybody else how to make those things match when they want, like we can, so it could easily be a waste of effort to try."

"I actually have practiced a kind of self-modification, but it was demonstrably unable to get me out of this fucking fix."

"How does yours work? Besides 'evidently not well enough'."

"Worked," he says. "Past tense. I can't imagine doing it again."

"Speaking of turning oneself into Sherlock Holmes, does Strat have this problem?"