there is room here to expand

[cross_and_bow]

When Juliet leaves the party, she goes to meet the new Jarvis.

She knocks, to be polite.

Comments

[cross_and_bow]

"...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."

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

Bella presses her face into his shoulder and sighs.

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

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

[eversomuchfun]

"We accomplish ambitious things."

[cross_and_bow]

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

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

"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?"

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

"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.

[eversomuchfun]

"It isn't really the same."

[cross_and_bow]

"Why not?"

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

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

[eversomuchfun]

"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."

[cross_and_bow]

"...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?"

[eversomuchfun]

"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."

[cross_and_bow]

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

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

"Like?"

[eversomuchfun]

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

[cross_and_bow]

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

[eversomuchfun]

"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."

[cross_and_bow]

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