Sherlock observes this reaction.

His Bella declines to say anything about it.

"Dear Juliet," he says, "if tension can be described as coiling, you look like someone's winding you onto a spool."

"Did you know that there can be ten-pointed coins?" she asks; she knows better than to expect this to distract him for long, but it might divert him briefly. "Brilliance made a bunch."

"I did not."

"We're weighing who needs how many. I'll probably get a few. A single one was enough for Amariah to make a brand new subworld in the Alethia worldsheaf that she's got root access to almost like the admin does over Downside; could be handy for sequestering demons who have objections to going offplanet or whatever."

"Interesting notion."

"And she's got harpies running the exit; they do a thing sort of like judgesight and she's got a couple other inconveniences set up so the living aren't mobbed by the dead."

"Very tidy."

"Yeah. The harpies were a problem originally, the judgesight thing they do comes with an optional 'also the target feels like utter shit about it' thing. The alethiometer wasn't very specific before the group went in, and one of them got Shell Bell."

"That sounds unpleasant."

"It sounds like it really was, yeah. And teleporting doesn't work in the old land-of-the-dead - you can get out, but not to any destination within - so Amariah and Cam and the Jokers who were along couldn't go find her when she told the link she found a harpy and then didn't say anything else."

"Has this situation been resolved?"

"Yes. She got fetched out and took a nap and then she felt better."

"What are you avoiding telling me?"

"Do you have any feelings on the subject you would like to share, love?"

"...For what value of 'would like to share'?"

"Any value that means you will do so once invited to."

Juliet draws her knees up to her chin and hugs them. "I don't think there's anything you could reasonably do with details about my feelings on the matter."

"Know them."

"You have a partly incorrect guess," says Sherlock. "If that were the only factor, she would've gone for Tony. She didn't. The main reason she didn't want to meet you is that she was wildly uncomfortable with her own existence and any amount of interacting with people was too much for her."

"I didn't think Tony asked."

"Of course he didn't. Gone for as in sought out."

"Steph was an unwanted surprise to both herself and me. Steph knew what it was like for me not to hate myself and considered herself the cause of the difference. Steph turned up under what were already unhappy circumstances, not in the short term as for Pearl but in what might have been a very long one."

Slowly, Bella nods.

"Yeah."

"Speaking of things that are likely to make you unhappy, I think my needless perfectionism about the design of that mindreading power is a sign that I'm not as keen on it as I think I am."

"...Okay."

He goes and sits down beside her and hugs her.

Hugs.

Yes. Hugs.

Tony is doing something that involves pouring molten metal into a mold! He will probably be available for conversation in a minute when he's finished.

Bella hangs out, watching, quiet.

"Hi," says Bella. "Whatcha making?"

"Arc reactor. Well, part of one."

"You going to power something in particular with it or is this mostly an exercise left to the reader out of the Being A Tony Textbook?"

He laughs. "Well, I mean, who wouldn't want a cute little cold fusion reactor to take home and feed and play with?"

"You feed it?" she giggles.

"Not literally. Well, mostly not literally."

"Mostly?" giggles Bella.

"It's not inconceivable that someday I might have an arc reactor where I have to give it new reaction material every so often."

"Fair enough." She hops into the air, crosslegged like she's sitting there. "I don't talk to you that much so I don't actually know what you heard about the thing with Steph. What did you hear about the thing with Steph?"

"Sherry got a daemon, she was suicidal, he un-got her."

"...That's all you know?"

"That's the summary. Why, was there more?"

"Just - details. I was trying to figure out how many of the details you got, though."

"...I don't know, which details do you want me to have got?" He scratches his head. "I mean, Sherry told me stuff. I just don't remember it all exactly."

"Nothing specific. Just, Steph seems relevant to him being - not too okay. And I have been thinking about that lately and it occurs to me that you might have relevant insights."

"Yeah, I bet I do," he agrees. "But I don't know what they are yet. What're you thinking?"

"Ineffectual guilty thoughts," says Bella. "I don't know what to do. I hate having things that are bad that I don't know how to fix."

"Oh boy, do I ever know that feeling," Tony says sympathetically.

"Yeah?"

"...So you know the part where the majority of his problems are basically my fault, right?"

Bella shakes her head. "I know you cloned yourself and he's what you got, I don't know many of the details about what happened after that. I mean, for most of my relationship with him you were dead and I didn't like to poke at sore topics, so I got into a habit of not inquiring too deeply into his childhood."

"Oh. Well - I was twelve," he says. "And I cloned myself. And I didn't really... have any idea what to do with him, so mostly I just left him alone with Jarvis, I didn't even give him a name or anything, it was actually kind of a hilariously ironic exaggeration of my own childhood. And now he has mega issues, which: no shit he does. I mean, I grew up, he grew up, we worked it out... but I definitely know the score when it comes to ineffectual guilty thoughts."

"Yeah. Well - yeah."

"I don't remember it - I wasn't there - my continuity of experience has a discontinuity when I died and picks up again after Golden swung through the Downside catacombs to wake me up. I'm not even sure it makes sense to be guilty. But I'm not sure it doesn't, either."

"I'm pretty sure I know what Sherry would say."

"Yeah. I know too. But that doesn't leave me confident that he's right."

"I'm not seeing where you're gonna get a better expert."

"Maybe. Anyway, now he's - not okay. And either I'm seeing a lot of it because on some level he's connecting me with her even if he wouldn't endorse that intellectually, or he's just - generally traumatized, but then you have special-properties-as-relate-to-Sherlock and he's not traumatized at you as far as I know, that's why you're the one who's doing minting here, and meanwhile the other Bells with Sherlocks don't have this going on, and I keep kicking myself for being jealous because that is in no way healthy, helpful, or an appropriate focus for anybody's emotions about the topic, but I am."

"...Do you want a hug?"

"Might as well."

Tony takes off his work gloves, drops his safety goggles on top of them, and hugs her.

"Yeah, I really don't know what to do about the jealousy thing," he says. "Us Tonies get a little of that, but it's about cool shit the other usses have invented and we fix it by inventing more cool shit."

Bella's floating crosslegged in midair again. "Shell Bell and Pearl have daemons now," she says.

"...Should I be figuring something out from that?"

"And," Bella continues, "Pearl's daemon reportedly preened Shell Bell's hair. Which was presumably adorable because everything about Shell-Bell-and-Pearl is adorable, and is also - I don't know. I don't know what the factors are but there is a big chunk of me saying that because I'm Shell Bell's alt and because my boyfriend is her girlfriend's alt I should be able to have any thing she has, and I can't. Steph didn't even want to say hi - and apparently she didn't say hi to you either, so that's probably not a matter of the specific thing - but today Sherlock decided he doesn't want to figure out a mindreading protocol after all, too, and it's not like it was ever tried so I can't claim to miss it, but."

"Well, I mean - you're alts but you're not the literal same people," says Tony. "The impression I get from that crowd is that Pearl is so close to Shell Bell because she was kind of - forced to be. I mean, not in the obvious bad way that that sentence implies, but their world used to be pretty immensely fucked up and when things are immensely fucked up sometimes it makes you kind of - grab onto people a little harder than you otherwise might've."

"There was actually also an obvious bad way part. Shell Bell started out straight," remarks Juliet, looking at the ceiling.

"Yeah, that too. But it's not ongoing or anything."

"Yeah. What do you mean about the fuckuppedness of the world making Pearl and Shell Bell grab on harder? I don't think I get it."

"Okay, I'll put it another way," he says. "Sherries get really intense about stuff. Pearl gets extra intense about stuff because there's always been that life-or-death thing for her, more than there's been for the rest of us because we didn't grow up with teenage gladiators on live TV every year. Like, talk about reminders of mortality, damn."

"I'd think being a vampire would be a pretty significant reminder of mortality. I guess it's different in kind."

"Yeah. Pearl grew up knowing there was pretty much no chance everybody her age she knew when she was twelve would still be alive when she was twenty. Our Sherry grew up pretty much thinking everyone he cared about was invincible, because everyone he cared about was me and Jarvis, and then... we both died. Which messed him up pretty bad, but kind of in the opposite direction, you know?"

"I don't know. I can speculate about how Shell Bell coped with growing up in Panem; I have much worse extrapolation powers for other templates. What do you mean, the opposite direction?"

"Like, it's hard for him to get close to people because part of him thinks they're gonna come home one day and get assassinated in front of him," says Tony. "...Maybe that's one of those things that's only obvious to me."

"I got assassinated in front of him," muses Juliet.

"Yeah, see? So even though he knows you're immortal and everything, and even though me and Jarvis both came back from the dead - there's still that little voice in the back of his head going 'see, I was right, everyone you ever love is going to die a horrible death and there's nothing you can do about it'."

"I'm still not clear on why this would be backwards relative to Pearl. Shell Bell died too - not in front of Pearl, but mid-conversation."

"Yeah, but... they're different people, who grew up differently, so a similar thing happening affects them in different ways," he says. "I think that's kind of the point I'm trying to make here. Also, didn't she resurrect her in like two minutes? Which is part of the same pattern I'm talking about with her - the Hunger Games are a thing you can win. And she did. Her and her Tony. To Pearl, holding on tight to the stuff you care about is a strategy that actually works."

"That makes sense," murmurs Bella. "...Have you talked to Sherlock, our one, about any of this stuff?"

"...Not really."

"Should you? If someone were generating insights like this about me I would want them, but I'm not sure about him."

"He might've figured it all out already. Or not. I dunno."

"Maybe worth replicating this conversation for him - I assume that's okay with you?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Thanks," says Bella, and she smiles and hugs Tony again and then flies up the stairs, hunting for her boyfriend.

"Yes he is. I assume you talked about me, then, since his other major topics of expertise are engineering and nuclear physics."

"We did briefly talk about the pet arc reactor he is building, but yes, you were the primary topic, I can reproduce the conversation if you want."

"Go ahead."

Brainphone-dump. Whee.

"As usual, Tony understands me better than I do myself."

Nuzzles. "I'm not sure if any of this is practically useful, of course, but it's worth knowing."

"Yes."

Snuggles.