if_inconvenient | (no subject)

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&cal

(no subject)

When Sherlock walks into the Biology classroom, a few minutes early as usual, he is thinking about last night. It's a bad time for it, but he is hardly going to start thinking about Biology until it is absolutely necessary.

He takes his usual seat and settles in to await Miss—to await Bella.

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Of course. She hadn't forgotten about the cameras, exactly. There had just been much more important things to think about. She makes a mental note to keep them front and center in her mind in the future.

"I'll try to restrain myself," she says, trying to imagine the kinds of faces Jessica would make if Bella did tell her. (Maybe she would just spontaneously combust.)

"Have a nice afternoon," she says, and she leaves.

Well.

That was... well.

"She certainly is a remarkable young lady," Jarvis says when the front door closes behind her.

"She is older than you are," Sherlock points out, pouring himself a cup of tea.

"Granted. I wonder if her interest will wane when she realizes you're chronologically five and a half."

"Don't you bloody start. I get enough of that from Cal."

Speaking of whom, guess who's going to stop by to visit at around suppertime?

Couldn't imagine.

Whoever this mysterious person is, they are going to find Sherlock still in the kitchen, still drinking tea. His fifth cup since Bella left.

He's thinking, all right?

"Hey."

Cal eyes Sherlock a little as he enters the kitchen. He knows that look by now.

"What's up?"

"Bella and I had a lively discussion about ethics."

Cal relaxes and smirks, going over to the fridge to help himself to a soda before he sits at the table.

"Oh yeah?"

"She handed me a copy of Tony's birth announcement and apologized for prying into my affairs. I told her the explanation was more outlandish than the facts and I wasn't inclined to provide it. She said the least outlandish possibility she could think of was cloning. The game was more or less up at that point. I am still not sure whether I regret confirming her theory."

. . . Cal blinks.

"Wow," he says.

"Also, I suspect James Mayer met Howard Stark at Milliways."

When he says it out loud like that, his chain of evidence seems so tenuous. An offhand comment about paternalism. Perhaps he is just getting paranoid.

"What?"

Cal stares.

Yeah, that's all he's got.

"It has been an eventful few days," he says dryly.

"No shit."

Cal cracks his soda open.

". . . Mr Mayer goes to Milliways?" he asks after a moment, apparently having decided that was the easiest thing to tackle.

"Yes. That much I am sure of. He claimed that the reason he looked so thoughtful had nothing to do with me, but I am not so sure I believe him."

"That's so weird," Cal mutters.

Teachers are not allowed to have social lives, or to go to places any of their students frequent. Even if, like Mr Mayer, teaching is clearly not what they really do.

There are rules.

"And if he did meet Howard Stark there, I envision a great deal of trouble."

- yeah. Yeah, he was kind of trying not to think about that.

In fact, he's tried not to think too much about the subject of the Milliways dead in general since his own father died.

"Yeah," he says quietly, staring down into his soda can.

Sherlock quietly puts his hand on Cal's shoulder.

Cal glances up with a thin smile.

"Fucking Milliways."

"Perhaps it's nothing," Sherlock murmurs. "The evidence is not very solid."

"What made you think it was?" Cal asks.