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After that, there are two conversations Bella wants to have very possibly more than she has ever wanted a conversation in her life.

One of them is going to have to wait until Charlie gets home, and that will be hours yet. (It's also the one she wants to have the most, but there is very little she can or would do about that, so she is putting it very firmly aside for now. Just because she knows about vampires now doesn't mean Charlie is in any more danger than he has been every other night he's worked. There is no logical reason to try to drag him home now. She can and will wait.)

(She's always known his job was dangerous.)

Prior to Milliways showing up, Bella had just arrived home after dropping Sherlock off; giving him a ride from school when he wants one has become routine.

She jumps right back into her truck and very carefully does not speed on her way to the Stark residence.

The other conversation she wants, she can have right now.

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The door unlocks at her approach.

Bella parks where she usually pulls up. It's not a parking spot that is especially convenient for anyone else, but the only other person at all likely to visit is Cal and he parks in the garage.

And she doesn't care very much about anyone else's convenience at the moment.

She shoves her keys into her pocket and gets out of the truck.

Edited 2016-10-25 20:36 (UTC)

Sherlock opens the front door and steps out.

"Back so soon?"

Bella trips a little as she hits the ground, catching herself on the truck door.

"Vampires."

. . . she was planning on being a little more eloquent than that, but.

It does get her point across.

She shuts the truck door, a little harder than it deserves, and heads for the building's door.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. No. Mostly. I didn't run into any or - no, that's not true either."

She stops, exasperated.

This conversation is not going to go well if she can't make any sense.

She takes a breath.

"I'm fine, I'm annoyed with myself, the vampire I met was you at Milliways." She shakes her head. "A different you," she clarifies. "He didn't know me."

"...are you sure you're all right?" he asks, in a somewhat different tone. The thought of himself as a vampire is—deeply horrifying.

The change in his tone catches her attention, breaking through her annoyance in a way that her mood-zapping routine failed to do during the drive over no matter how many times she went through it.

"I'm really fine," she assures him. "He didn't try to hurt me. I don't think he even wanted to."

"Why don't we discuss this inside, then."

"Let's."

She follows him inside; as she does so, she looks him over a little, noting the healthy, not even slightly corpse-like skintone, the fact that he's breathing, and -

Oh.

That scar.

Yes.

(The other Sherlock didn't actually have one of those.)

"So. What did he say?"

It's ridiculous, how easily she can forget about it. It's not exactly easy to miss.

But then, it's also never been one of the things she's found especially interesting about him. At least not until now.

There are a lot of possible answers to his question, but Bella chooses the one most immediately relevant to the subject at hand.

"He said, 'It was Obadiah Stane who sent the vampire gang.' He thought you'd want to know."

Which, now that she's not right in the middle of that conversation, she realizes - of course he would. Of course.

She'd want to know how her double had been turned, too.

"...Did he let slip any implications about his response?"

She pauses, which she knows is in itself an answer. She'd purposely glossed over that at the time, planning to address it later, to avoid those implications.

"His world's Stane is dead, too. Not pleasantly."

Another pause as she remembers, and says slowly, trying to get the phrasing verbatim,

"He said you probably wouldn't believe it, but that you wouldn't be disappointed in his conduct."

"...that's... an interesting message for him to have decided to pass along," says Sherlock. "I'm not entirely sure what to think of it."

"I think it was important to him."

She glances down, taking a breath, then looks back up.

(How would she feel, being told about Charlie or Renee dying in some other reality? How much would it really matter, in the moment, that they weren't her Charlie and Renee?)

"His Tony didn't make it."

"Oh."

Bella has never been a person who finds any measure of happiness or relief in someone else being dead.

Now, very suddenly, she is one, because she doesn't know what she would do right now if Obadiah Stane were alive to pose a potential threat in this world.

(The look on Sherlock's face - it's enough to make her wish, even knowing that he values having all the available information at least as much as she does, that she hadn't told him.)

But without that to think about, there is one very clear course of action.

"Would you like a hug?" she offers quietly after a moment.

"Yes," he says.

"Thank you."

The answer is no surprise, really, but Bella -

She doesn't know a lot of huggers, and she does know that not many people like being touched without permission.

Which she now has, so she steps forward to hug him without any further hesitation.

"You're welcome."

He relaxes noticeably, taking comfort in the contact.

"—I think I do believe him," he says after a moment. "He didn't give you any reason to fear for your safety?"

Bella doesn't really know how long a hug in this situation should last, but she suspects the answer to that is as long as Sherlock needs it to.

(And. It's not exactly as though hugging him is some awful chore.)

"No," she says. "I probably should have been nervous at least, but I wasn't. At least not about anything he might do," she adds.

She can hardly deny, after all, that she did experience considerable anxiety during that conversation. It's just that none of it was his fault.

"The thought of what I might be like as a vampire has crossed my mind before. I'd always thought the possibilities ranged from bad to apocalyptically bad. By telling me I would not be disappointed in his conduct, he's telling me it turned out much better than I feared. And implying that apart from torturing Obadiah to death he either hasn't killed anyone else, or doesn't intend to continue now that I know he exists."

It's nice, being taken through someone else's thought process unprompted. Even under the circumstances, she can't help but think that.

She responds with the appropriate appreciation, considering what he's told her before she answers.

(Aside from glossing over the alternate Obadiah Stane's fate yet again, and not because of the distraction factor this time, either.

She is perfectly okay with being a bit squeamish over the idea of someone being tortured to death.)

"That," she says, "sounds like there's a lot I ought to know about vampires."

And like maybe she should have been very nervous.

"In a literal metaphysical sense, they have no souls. When a person turns into a vampire, they are normally observed to lose things like impulse control and ethical restraint and the capacity to feel guilt or regret. Often they also gain destructive impulses to match. But they retain the memories, and to varying extents the personality and intellect, of the human whose reanimated body they inhabit. Some consider themselves to have continuity with their mortal selves; others don't. It seems pretty clear the one you met was of the former kind."