"...There's that," acknowledges Bella. "Of course, your 'better half' also accepted the condition that the self-loathing was not supposed to be part of the package. If you keep that, then - pronouns are complicated, I trust you'll know what I mean - then he's essentially - emotionally crippled you in a way that was not part of the deal."

"To the part of me that does the self-loathing, that seems perfectly reasonable."

Bella presses her face into his shoulder and sighs.

"And it's not as though your average Sherlock is unable to function this way."

"Yeah, but functioning isn't a very ambitious standard."

"We accomplish ambitious things."

"That's not the same thing as personally thriving," she says. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it.

"We personally - continue," he says. "We exist. We have pleasant moments, just not as many of them as we otherwise might."

"That's sad, though," Bella murmurs. "If there was a way to half-break a Bell in such a way that she could still accomplish things and would just spend her inner life feeling like you do would you want me to do it?"

"What in any earthly variety of fuck could possibly possess me to want such a thing?"

"Maybe if I'd made an ill-informed promise," suggests Bella, but it's clear that she did not expect an affirmative answer to her question.

"It isn't really the same."

"Why not?"

"Because your entire cognition is not structured around misery," he suggests.

"Yours wasn't. For a while. Or was it always and I'm just woefully imperceptive?"

"The misery when I had no soul was the lack of Tony and Jarvis," he says. "And then I found you, and you were delightful, and I managed to dig up a Jarvis, and he also helped, and of course he came with a Tony, and then - well."

"...So you haven't actually tried having no self-loathing and all your people alive and no recent catastrophe at the same time and you're not sure how it'd work?"

"Yes. I was on my way to managing it. I might still be, if I had not latched onto the soul. But now that it's here I find I am irrationally attached to it."

"Is it doing anything that isn't unpleasant?" asks Bella.

"It gives me what you might call moral feelings, I suppose."

"Like?"

"Well, at the moment, without outside influences I would rather starve than eat a human. That was demonstrably not the case before."

"There is that. Part of me wants to point out that us outside influences exist, but maybe you'd rather not count on that."

"At the moment, if I were permanently deprived of all the people who make up those outside influences, I would rather starve than do much of anything. Also, I can't starve."

"I don't want you to starve. Or unpleasantly fail to starve. Or have to be alone. Or," she sighs, "hate yourself."