if_inconvenient | (no subject)

She looks around curiously.

"Yes," she says, "thank you."

Everything is clean and neat and tidy. A few living rooms are visible along the hall. A half-open door just off the foyer leads down to a presumable basement, and a staircase near the far end of the hall leads up to the second and third floors. Sherlock heads down the hall and past the stairs to the kitchen.

If Bella is paying particular attention, she might notice the cameras. They're fairly unobtrusive, but there are a lot of them.

Once she spots one of them, the rest become obvious. Bella doesn't know very much about private security, but thais seems pretty heavy for a residence. She's been in museums with fewer cameras.

Though it is entirely likely that the Stark family has more need of the heavy security, especially since Tony took over as CEO of Stark Industries.

"And here is the tea cupboard," he says, pulling open the cupboard nearest the hall door. "I'll put the kettle on. Do you want to bring up your ethical dilemma first, or shall I?"

Bella blinks, turning her attention to Sherlock.

"You can go first," she says, reasoning that if she did, it would probably derail any further conversation.

And no, the chance to put it off for a little while longer is not unwelcome.

"Well."

He shrugs slightly.

"I was speaking with someone last night and he seemed to be thinking over a puzzle. An offhand remark he made led me to believe it might have something to do with—my family. When I asked him about it directly, he said it was none of my concern, and he was either completely sincere or as good a liar as I am."

The pause before he says my family does not go unnoticed.

(She is really, really going to hate not being able to solve this one.)

Bella pauses for a moment herself, absently shifting her backpack a little on her shoulder, trying to focus on what Sherlock did say rather than speculate about what he didn't.

"Has he given you reason to think he might lie to you about that?"

He snorts, hitting the button on the electric kettle and going to another cupboard to retrieve two mugs.

"Lord yes; he's tried the like before, over other matters. But until now he has never managed to pull it off without giving himself away. If he did lie this time."

"You already think he did," Bella observes again. "And you're questioning your conclusion. You need more evidence one way or another, but you're reluctant to go after it."

She puts her backpack down next to the kitchen table, considering. She's not sure of how much her next question is her projecting her own situation, but she decides to ask it anyway.

"Is it really about the ethics, or is it that you don't want to find out that he is lying?"

"I don't like either option," Sherlock admits. "But on the whole, I would rather he were telling the truth. If he is lying, that means he knows something about my family that I do not, and is willing to lie to me about it. I don't consider that an optimal outcome."

Bella suddenly wants to know who this mystery person is. Maybe he has answers to her questions.

But it's obvious that Sherlock is deliberately shielding his identity, and wouldn't tell her if she asked.

"No," she agrees, "it's not. But if he is lying, and you can prove it, then you'll have a more accurate picture of the situation and you can decide where to go from there. You can't make an informed decision without information, no matter how much you don't like the information."

"And now we come to the difficult part. I cannot prove that he is lying, at least not without a great deal of luck. If I am right about where he got his information, the source is not readily accessible to me."

He shrugs.

"Your turn," he says, leaning back against the counter.

"It does get difficult when the information isn't readily accessible, doesn't it?" Bella can't help herself. Her tone is very dry.

She turns to hoist her backpack up off the floor and onto the table so she can extract a notebook from it.

"I just said," she begins as she does so, "that I prefer to have all the information before I make a decision."

She opens the notebook and removes a piece of paper that was tucked into it, folded in half.

"I also told you the first time we spoke that I would judge you for myself. But I didn't have all the information about you."

She pauses, frowns slightly. She's creating a narrative that isn't completely accurate. That's okay sometimes; the only person she demands she be fully honest with is herself.

But right now, it's not okay.

"And I hate mysteries. I always want to know things. Even things that aren't my business, or that people have every right to keep to themselves."

She unfolds the paper and makes herself look at him. "I wanted to know what name you were born with and why you'd gone so far to get rid of it. So I went looking. I guess it serves me right that all I found were more mysteries."

She goes over to Sherlock and holds the paper out to him, face up. It's one of the copies she made of Tony's birth announcement.

"You were pretty thorough," she says quietly, "but the Sunnydale library's basement is a lot bigger than it looks. Their newspaper collection is very extensive."

Sherlock smiles dryly, examining the page.

"Well done. I of all people am hardly in a position to condemn you for prying into my business. I might be given to object if you had made a mess of it, but you haven't."

He holds it out to her.

"There are any number of reasons why I would be unwise to give you the answer, not least of which is that I doubt you'd believe it if I did. And yet I am nearly tempted to do it anyway."

Bella looks taken aback - that was far more tranquil than the kinds of reactions she's been anticipating since she decided to confess - and then exasperated.

"If you can prove it, I will," she says. "I don't waste time questioning irrefutable evidence when it's right in front of me."

And if he can't or is unwilling to, then teasing her with it is the most suitable punishment possible for her actions.

"I can't. The only solid evidence was destroyed when we moved to Sunnydale. And the story of my life is not something that many people would be inclined to take my word for. The explanation is, if anything, more outrageously unlikely than the facts."

Bella pauses to run through her mood-zapping routine before she continues. Being annoyed is unhelpful and makes her more likely to misstep; any validity it might have is not currently relevant and can be saved to explore more thoroughly later.

When she is done, she looks (almost) perfectly calm.

"The facts," she says, "are that Maria Stark gave birth to one child seventeen years ago. Given the Starks' status as public figures and how easily information will leak out of a hospital regardless of any and all rules to the contrary, something which I've heard Charlie complain about several times because it makes his job more difficult, the act of concealing the birth of a second child would be absurdly complex. If they didn't want it or didn't want people to know about it, it would be easier to claim it died at birth, but that would also have been national news and I could find no such article.

"While it's possible for people who are not twins to look very much alike, perfectly identical cousins or strangers are a strictly fictional occurrence. You and Tony are the same age. In adolescence, even a year's difference between you would be noticeable. The least outrageous explanation I have been able to come up with for a twin who is not a twin is cloning. I doubt you could present a scenario that I could reasonably dismiss out of hand."

He smiles.

"Well, in that case, you will be pleased to hear that the least outrageous explanation is true."

. . . Bella had not been expecting that. Her eyebrows go up.

"Really," she says.

"Really. Tony cloned himself when he was twelve. I am the result. You will not find the name I was born with anywhere, because there isn't one. I decided shortly after we moved here that Sherlock Holmes suited me fine, and that was that."

. . . it fits all the facts available to Bella. In terms of simplicity, it's far more reasonable than any of the endlessly elaborate theories one might come up with. It's not unlikely that a genius of the caliber the Stark family has had to offer could invent technology lightyears ahead of what is already publicly known.

And sometimes, real life does offer up stories that sound like they belong in an indifferently written TV movie.

"But the technology doesn't exist anymore," she says, slowly, thinking about Sherlock's statement that the hard evidence had been destroyed.

"No it does not."

The kettle clicks.

That's too bad, she thinks. Technology like that, if it existed, could be tremendously useful.

She puts that aside for a moment, though. Something else to be saved for further exploration later on.

"As far as evidence goes, I suppose that doesn't matter," she admits. "I imagine identifying it would require expertise that I don't possess."

He could show her any piece of technology she wouldn't recognize and claim that it's a cloning device, and she's sure he knows that. The fact that he hasn't tried is, in a way, evidence in itself. It demonstrates a preference not to lie to corroborate his story.

"And I am hardly about to make another of me just to prove that it works, even if I could." Wryly: "One is more than enough."

Bella pauses for a moment to reflect.

"From what you've told me," she says, mostly to hear herself say it and process it, "it wouldn't necessarily be another of you. But I take your point. I certainly wouldn't ask you to."