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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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"...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."

. . . no wonder Sherlock had greeted the idea of himself as a vampire with such alarm. A being like that with a mind like his . . .

It's useless to be retroactively anxious for the safety of herself a half an hour ago, but she is anyway.

"I guess I got pretty lucky, then."

Nothing happened; nothing was going to happen; she is fine.

Fine and overwhelmingly glad that her own double managed to stay out of that whole mess.

"Yes. He clearly put a lot of effort into communicating to me that he is not in fact my worst nightmare incarnate, but he... did not take any of the thousands of cheap shortcuts that would have been available to him in that enterprise. If he'd been lying, I think he would have cheated more. So he is, somehow, a slightly-but-not-disastrously more amoral version of me."

And then, because after all he's still Sherlock,

"Or he's playing a very long game indeed, which I wouldn't entirely put past him. I'd have to know more to get closer to ruling that out."

Bella sighs.

"Try not to get turned into a vampire, okay?"

She thinks again of the physical differences. A vampire Sherlock would be much less pleasant to hug.

. . . that is not relevant right now.

And really not something she should be thinking about while they're still actually hugging. For one thing, she hasn't taken the time yet to sort out how she might or might not feel about Sherlock or about Tony's insistence that Sherlock likes her and she doesn't want to have anything even close to resembling that conversation before she's had an afternoon with her notebooks about it.

So, to stave that thought process off before he can become evident on her face (and hoping it's not already too late):

"Did this world's Obadiah Stane really die from an illness?"

Absently: "No, he got sucked into Hell."

Bella drops her arms so she can step back and stare at him.

"What?"

He blinks. He looks at her. He refocuses.

"—Sorry, I've been very thoroughly distracted by the concept of a vampire version of me on the loose in some other world - ah, Sunnydale is built on the mouth of Hell. Its physical locus is currently in the basement of Sunnydale High. Don't go down there. It's debatable how literal the Hell in question actually is, but it's verifiably at least an unpleasant place full of hostile supernatural beings."

"The - ?"

She has nothing to say, beyond that, so she closes her mouth. There's little point in trying to talk when she hasn't thought of anything to say.

When she does, after a very long moment, it's,

"So it's more than just vampires and - that entity, then?"

She is going to have a very long talk with Charlie tonight.

(It occurs to her that her first instinct, upon receiving this new piece of information, was not to verify it for herself. Apparently she can add "avoid getting sucked into Hell" to the very short list of things that are more important than confirming startling new knowledge.)

"Much more. The catchall term for anything that's sapient but not human is 'demons', and there are thousands of species from hundreds of more or less mutually accessible dimensions. Some of them are perfectly benign; some of them eat people."

There is so much to know. She has to wonder, though, how much help the library is likely to be on this subject, considering -

"Don't people know?" she asks. "They must know. Especially - Sunnydale must have a much higher concentration than the rest of the country, that's why the death rate is so high. Don't people notice?"

Then she makes a face, because yes, she does in fact remember that she herself was talking about anemia not so long ago. And worrying about the iron content of Charlie's food.

She has already established for herself that she is an idiot, thank you, that's not important right this second.

"People are remarkably good at fooling themselves."

That puts you well ahead of the crowd, the other Sherlock had said, and she knew he was right, has known for a long time that most people prefer to delude themselves to varying degrees, but.

But.

"Don't they want to live?"

"I'm not the one to ask," he says wryly.

There is a lot to unpack in that comment.

Bella adds it to the ever-growing list of things to think about later, when she's sat down with her notebooks. Between talking to Charlie and the journal entry she'll need to write, she may not get much sleep tonight.

That's fine; she wouldn't have, anyway.

Charlie.

She's not thinking much about what she says right now, so the question slips out.

"Do you think Charlie knows?"

He must know.

Everyone thinks the Sunnydale Police Department is a big joke.

But Charlie must know. He doesn't come home until after sunset most nights and he's still alive. He must know.

(All children want to think that their parents are better at everything than most people. Bella knows hers aren't. They're just people, too. That never worried her much, until right now.)

"Hard to say," he says. "With that sunset curfew of his, he's at least paying more attention than most people. I don't know him well enough to say more."