if_inconvenient | (no subject)

Entry tags:

&cal

(no subject)

Sherlock does not want to be at school today. For once in his life he is something less than indifferent to the occasional stare and snicker, the looks of familiar contempt from those who have been around long enough to get used to him. His mood has been fluctuating wildly between rage and despair since yesterday morning. He knows his self-control is good enough to keep him from reacting to any taunts with violence, but nothing will stop him from wanting to. Which is unsettling in itself.

He has a duty, though, one that cannot be ignored. And if he is going to show up at school again, he may as well do the job properly. He is on time for every class before lunch, polite if not friendly when circumstances call for conversation, crisply dressed—in trousers, thank you; he does not think he could bear the reactions to another skirt. The only signs that anything is wrong are the dark circles under his eyes and the tension that stands in sharp contrast to his usual indolence.

At noon on the dot he is in the cafeteria waiting for Bella Swan.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She sighs.

"I'm sure you appreciate that you've given me a great deal to think about in the last couple of days."

Very softly: "I do, yes."

"It wasn't difficult to conclude that I had no way of proving that you are not a clone," she continues, "and what little evidence I have makes far more sense if you are than if you're not.

"I don't think confirming the existence of a ghost-like entity, or at least confirming that it doesn't not exist, is going to be quite so simple."

"Hence my reluctance," he murmurs.

"Yes," she allows. She would be similarly reluctant in the same position.

"Well, I certainly won't tell that part to Charlie."

"As I said."

He's rubbing his arm again, and he still hasn't opened his eyes.

She'll find a way to warn Charlie to be careful without giving him the details. Forewarned is still forearmed.

She watches Sherlock's hand work on his arm for a moment as she thinks. Of her current available options, accepting Sherlock's warning as genuine for the time being and proceeding accordingly seems best; finding out just how this entity operates is important if it's real, and won't do any actual harm if it isn't.

"Is it just the dead that it looks like?" asks finally.

"Yes. I have personally seen it disguise itself as Obadiah Stane and Howard Stark. The image is flawless, the voice likewise, but either it cannot accurately mimic the behaviour of its subjects or it does not care to. And it makes no sound when it moves, only when it speaks."

He opens his eyes at last, only to look out the window. His hand stills for a moment and then resumes its restless traversal of his forearm.

Bella remembers her earlier reflection on the difficulties of Charlie's job.

"I can see why a police officer would be a useful target for a threat," she observes. "Especially here."

"Oh Lord," he murmurs. "The major advantage I had over it is that I do not know any dead people over whom I am particularly disturbed."

"And you already knew about it," she says. "Because of Tony."

She can give Charlie half that advantage, maybe. He's already leery of her spending time with Sherlock; he's sympathetic to what he believes to be Sherlock's plight, but concerned that he may be unstable or otherwise undesirable company for Bella. Not only can she not tell him the full story about this entity (if she decides she believes it), she also can't tell him who it came from. He'll know she's omitting information and will be unlikely to take what she does tell him seriously, and probably be annoyed into the bargain. Which isn't to say that a warning won't be useful if the entity does make a move, as an actual encounter would give Bella's words more weight, but it doesn't seem to have done very much for Sherlock.

"I had previously assumed that it could not trouble me."

He wraps his arms tighter around himself, hunching a little in his seat.

Very, very quietly: "It watched me sleeping."

A shudder passes through Bella. Sherlock's demeanor makes even more sense now; she can imagine how intensely unpleasant it must be to wake to find that someone with malicious intent has been watching you at your most vulnerable.

She can't imagine being especially pleased with the idea regardless of the person's intent, for that matter.

"That is certainly troubling," she agrees.

Sherlock nods.

Something in this exchange, either telling her about it or seeing her agree, seems to relax him a little.

"Is there any way to block it?" she asks. "To keep it out?"

"That I have discovered, no."

He kind of didn't sleep last night.

She had expected as much. He would already have included the information if he had it. Still, she sighs.

"Will you be all right?"

"With any luck," he says, which sounds flippant and really isn't.

She looks at him thoughtfully.

"That's a particular problem for you," she says. "And it knew."

When it didn't have convenient triggers in the form of dead people as it did for Tony, it modified its approach.

- it occurs to Bella that this, unlike the clone issue, is something she could independently verify with Tony. It isn't something that requires education and an immense IQ to comprehend, and seeing one's dead parents is the kind of thing a person is less likely to be able to lie convincingly about.

"I didn't even bloody know how bad it was until yesterday," he tells the window. "I've slept alone all my life except once or twice—" he is not getting into his complex relationship with Tony right now "—when I was younger. I knew I found the thought of doing otherwise extremely distasteful, but my reaction when this creature turned up was rather more than that."

Bella's first response is to apply logic: if Sherlock is asleep and thus cannot hear or see his surroundings, and the entity's only weapon is appearance and words, then it cannot have any effect on him while he sleeps and so there is nothing to fear.

The problem with that, however, is that if logic worked to dispel phobic reactions, then phobias wouldn't exist.

She thinks, then tries a different approach.

"It taught you something new about yourself," she says. "It's best to know about that weakness before it's exploited by something that can do you physical harm."

"Very true," he admits. "Not as comforting as I'd like, but true."

Some people might offer a hug. Hugs are nice; Bella is not averse. But she doesn't know what Sherlock thinks of them, and she does know what he thinks of logic, so instead she continues,

"And now that you know about it, you can work on it. That's the comforting part," she adds. "I find it very comforting to know that I do not have to submit helplessly to things about myself that I don't like. I haven't always been successful in eradicating them, but I can at least modify or temper them. And you have far more experience than I do in personality modification." Which, she thinks, is putting it mildly.

"Also true," he says with the first smile he has had all day.

Bella smiles back, pleased with her success.