The door opens.

"You did, in fact, just meet me," says the resident Jarvis. "Hello."

"Well, that answers that," says Juliet. She finds a place to sit down and sits there. "I'm Bella, you can call me Juliet when that would get confusing."

"So I've heard. And I am Jarvis. Among Jarvises I'm known as New York Sunnydale; there's also Sunnydale, whom you've met, Sunnydale Apollo, whom you haven't, New York, and Malibu. But under most circumstances just 'Jarvis' will do."

"How'd you settle on that identification system?"

"It's the most obvious one, if you're a Jarvis."

"Fair enough. So, welcome to Sunshine. And being alive. I'm sorry it took so long for it to occur to anyone that Downside might have caught you."

"I believe Sherlock is more upset about that than I am."

"Is he here or off somewhere else?"

"He is upstairs."

Bella decides to head upstairs.

Jarvis has no comment on this decision.

Bella wanders from room to room, learning her way around this old/new Jarvis and looking for her boyfriend.

She heads up to look around that one.

It features many open doors, one leading to what was clearly once Tony's bedroom, and one closed one.

"Sherlock?" Bella asks the closed door.

It opens.

The room on the other side is sparsely populated with slightly shabby-looking furniture. Sherlock is sitting on a couch with a violin in his lap, motionless.

"What's having a daemon like?" she wonders softly.

"It does not easily submit to description," he says.

"I guess it wouldn't." She snuggles up. "I'm sorry she's sad. Amariah seems to think that's - really worrying."

"It's an accurate representation of what I used to be like," he says. "And apparently still am, underneath it all." He sighs. "Perhaps I shouldn't have merged my soul back in. I was getting along just fine without it."

"No," he agrees slowly, "I suppose she isn't."

Hugs!

Hugs.

"I love you," she murmurs.

"I love you too, dear Juliet."

Snuggles!

Yes. Those.

"If you're going to torch her gone," Juliet murmurs, "I'm not sure if I want to meet her at least once - or not so I don't miss her."

"I'm not sure if I'm going to torch her gone."

Juliet nods. Just a little; she's pleasantly constrained by snuggles. "But you might."

"But I might. If she is immovably determined."

"Does that seem likely?"

"Am I meant to have a guess?"

"She's yours. She's you. Maybe it's more complicated than I'm thinking, though."

"I'm beginning to suspect that the entire trouble with Steph, my inability to predict her included, is symptomatic of a problem with my original merge," he says.

"...Did I do something wrong? I think I was careful..."

"No. I asked for the impossible. Apparently I cannot have the soul without the self-hatred."

Bella squeezes him tight.

He hugs her back.

"Self-hatred is a pretty alien concept to me," she says. "Shell Bell says that hers drives her up the wall with it sometimes, especially since she folded in Shell."

"It seems to be a staple of Sherlocks."

"It should stop. Clumsiness is a staple of Bells, but it's annoying and has no benefits - so we get rid of it as soon as we can."

Hugs.

"...On a strict understanding of the word 'possible'," says Bella, "that is obviously false. You went without a soul and without the consequent self-loathing once."

"Yes, and then I merged my better half back in on the condition that the result keep his soul. With some leeway for the fact that he is more or less exactly a past version of me, if I go back on that I have essentially killed him. It's not my first choice."

"...There's that," acknowledges Bella. "Of course, your 'better half' also accepted the condition that the self-loathing was not supposed to be part of the package. If you keep that, then - pronouns are complicated, I trust you'll know what I mean - then he's essentially - emotionally crippled you in a way that was not part of the deal."

"To the part of me that does the self-loathing, that seems perfectly reasonable."

Bella presses her face into his shoulder and sighs.

"And it's not as though your average Sherlock is unable to function this way."

"Yeah, but functioning isn't a very ambitious standard."

"We accomplish ambitious things."

"That's not the same thing as personally thriving," she says. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it.

"We personally - continue," he says. "We exist. We have pleasant moments, just not as many of them as we otherwise might."

"That's sad, though," Bella murmurs. "If there was a way to half-break a Bell in such a way that she could still accomplish things and would just spend her inner life feeling like you do would you want me to do it?"

"What in any earthly variety of fuck could possibly possess me to want such a thing?"

"Maybe if I'd made an ill-informed promise," suggests Bella, but it's clear that she did not expect an affirmative answer to her question.

"It isn't really the same."

"Why not?"

"Because your entire cognition is not structured around misery," he suggests.

"Yours wasn't. For a while. Or was it always and I'm just woefully imperceptive?"

"The misery when I had no soul was the lack of Tony and Jarvis," he says. "And then I found you, and you were delightful, and I managed to dig up a Jarvis, and he also helped, and of course he came with a Tony, and then - well."

"...So you haven't actually tried having no self-loathing and all your people alive and no recent catastrophe at the same time and you're not sure how it'd work?"

"Yes. I was on my way to managing it. I might still be, if I had not latched onto the soul. But now that it's here I find I am irrationally attached to it."

"Is it doing anything that isn't unpleasant?" asks Bella.

"It gives me what you might call moral feelings, I suppose."

"Like?"

"Well, at the moment, without outside influences I would rather starve than eat a human. That was demonstrably not the case before."

"There is that. Part of me wants to point out that us outside influences exist, but maybe you'd rather not count on that."

"At the moment, if I were permanently deprived of all the people who make up those outside influences, I would rather starve than do much of anything. Also, I can't starve."

"I don't want you to starve. Or unpleasantly fail to starve. Or have to be alone. Or," she sighs, "hate yourself."

"And yet, here we are."

"I don't know what my opinion on having a soul would be without a soul."

"Because the last time you didn't have a soul and were thinking about getting one you didn't anticipate this side effect. Right." She sighs, chews her lip thoughtfully.

"Yes. The soul transition seems to have all sorts of unforeseen effects."

"If you had it to do over again what would the two of you have done?" she wonders.

"I have not the faintest fucking clue."

"Well, there goes that avenue of inquiry, I guess," she sighs.

"Indeed."

"Now I'm trying to figure out what would've happened if I'd had to come to some kind of agreement with - her."

"Under what possible circumstances?"

"Thought experiment type circumstances," says Juliet dryly. "I haven't troubled to think of any."

"The circumstances matter, I'd think."

"Yeah. It's a different situation anyway," sighs Bella. "Thank goodness."

"Happily yes. I wonder how much of my reluctance to get rid of my soul is the irrational fear that it will turn out differently the second time."

"...That's not completely irrational. It does depend on why it worked so nicely the first time, and I think we've only got speculation, there."

"Well, that's fucking lovely, then, isn't it," he sighs.

"Not to put too fine a point on it." She sighs. "I can think of, like, hack movie plots, but not actual reasonable plans."

"Hack movie plots?" he laughs.

"Yeah, like, in a hack movie plot, we'd make sure you couldn't do anything too awful if de-souling you went badly. Emergency mint containment protocol, leaving the soul stuck to your torching, making sure me or Tony could torch you at any time if we didn't like how you turned out. And then probably there would be a tragic misunderstanding and we'd all three argue vehemently before you, I don't know, kissed at least one of us to appropriately swelling music and we knew we were fools to have ever doubted you. Hack movie plot."

"Whereas," he sighs, "what actually happens is that either I convince you both I came out just fine and then am perfectly well-behaved, or convince you both I came out just fine and then kill everyone. I'd bet quite a lot on the first outcome, mind you."

"Well, the first outcome would be fine if it weren't for you being all attached to your soul. The second could maybe be forestalled if we got around to implementing mindreading."

"I'm not sure I should be as attached to my soul as I in fact am." He sighs. "I'm not sure of much right now."

Hugs.

"Mindreading wouldn't help, anyway. If I could keep anything back, I could fool you with it."

"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?"

"Strat has slightly less of this problem, but Downside brought it out in full."

"Downside fucks with people. I have a vague horrified curiosity about how well Shell could ever have recovered if she hadn't folded back in to her liveling counterpart."

"Downside does fuck with people. Well, it did. Hopefully it now does it less."

"We're working on it - luckily we only lost a couple of days there - but yeah."

"I love you," murmurs Bella. "I wish you could love you too."

"I used to love me," he sighs. "But I do love you. And Tony. And the various incarnations of Jarvis."

"If we don't figure out a nice well-rounded fix soon I guess I'll talk to Shell Bell, but I suspect the answer to how Shell Bell deals with it is just "she occasionally despairs, and also she didn't ever get used to hers being any other way'," sighs Bella.

"Does it really provoke despair?"

"I don't mean, like, sitting alone in a dark room waiting for the universe to end, kind of despair, I just mean determining that there is a bad thing in the world and nothing to be done about it presents itself and it's time to stop beating one's head against the wall and permit the bad thing to continue to be until further notice, damn it all. Arrogant busybody Bell type despair."

He snorts. "Ah, that's more like it."

"Yeah, I don't think I'm in any danger of getting turned into Shell or Sarion just by virtue of you not liking yourself. It'll just - make me sad when I think about it."

He hugs her.

"Guilt, mostly. But he's used to it. I started out that way, after all."

"Yeah, like - the obvious etiology is the mindset around being a clone, except then there's Pearl and Strat."

"Pearl has a different reason. Strat has less reason and, perhaps relatedly, less of the problem."

"It doesn't have to be right now, it doesn't have to be at all if you don't want to. But if you're willing - or her, I'm not clear on to what extent she has preferences when she's tucked away - then I'd like to."

"It's hard to tell what her preferences are without bringing her out and asking. Which she prefers I not do."

"I can skip it if that would be pleasanter for - plural you."

"I'm really not sure," he sighs.

Hugs.

Hugs.

"...Do you want me to go away so you can talk to her in private?"

"That would probably be best."

Bella kisses his temple. "Okay. I love you. I love you so much," she murmurs, and she goes out the door to see if there is any more of this Jarvis to explore that she's missed. Or maybe a Tony to talk to.

There is no Tony, but there is plenty of Jarvis. A library stretching up through all four floors, for example.

Ooh, nice library. "What're the highlights?" Bella asks as she takes flight to scan shelves.

"Perhaps you would enjoy browsing Maria Stark's romance novels," he suggests. "Top floor."

Bella snickers. She has a look, but none of them grab her. "More of a stuffy old literature person. Some sci-fi and fantasy."

"You will find plenty of those up here, for that matter," he says. "Nonfiction mainly on the bottom. Decorative works mainly on the second."

"Decorative works?"

"Books that the family owns to show them off rather than to read them."

"Ah." She peers through the fiction. "We might rez Tony's parents at some point. I don't know what the standing opinion on timing that is; I think I'll let Tony decide."

"Tony may decide that they'll keep awhile."

"They will keep indefinitely, presuming we retain access to Jane."

"Indeed."

Bella picks out a book and flies into a chair and curls up in it to read. She doesn't go at top speed; with spare processing power she composes various demon related plans.

Time passes.

[She does not want to meet you,] says Sherlock. [She expects it would be unpleasant for all of us.]

A pause, and then, [You can come back now.]

"Gone. There didn't seem to be any point in waiting."

He hugs her back.

"Is it better now?"

"I don't know."

Bella squeezes him and sighs.

Sherlock also sighs.

"I wish, I wish, I wish I knew how to help," Bella murmurs.

"So do I."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"If this were me I would be finding someplace quiet to process everything by myself so I'd have something coherent to present to everyone else. But that's Bells." Pause. "Right?"

"...I think I might want to lock myself in here and play needlessly melancholy violin for a few hours," he admits.

Needlessly melancholy violin it is.