"I'm pretty sure I know what Sherry would say."

"Yeah. I know too. But that doesn't leave me confident that he's right."

"I'm not seeing where you're gonna get a better expert."

"Maybe. Anyway, now he's - not okay. And either I'm seeing a lot of it because on some level he's connecting me with her even if he wouldn't endorse that intellectually, or he's just - generally traumatized, but then you have special-properties-as-relate-to-Sherlock and he's not traumatized at you as far as I know, that's why you're the one who's doing minting here, and meanwhile the other Bells with Sherlocks don't have this going on, and I keep kicking myself for being jealous because that is in no way healthy, helpful, or an appropriate focus for anybody's emotions about the topic, but I am."

"...Do you want a hug?"

"Might as well."

Tony takes off his work gloves, drops his safety goggles on top of them, and hugs her.

"Yeah, I really don't know what to do about the jealousy thing," he says. "Us Tonies get a little of that, but it's about cool shit the other usses have invented and we fix it by inventing more cool shit."

Bella's floating crosslegged in midair again. "Shell Bell and Pearl have daemons now," she says.

"...Should I be figuring something out from that?"

"And," Bella continues, "Pearl's daemon reportedly preened Shell Bell's hair. Which was presumably adorable because everything about Shell-Bell-and-Pearl is adorable, and is also - I don't know. I don't know what the factors are but there is a big chunk of me saying that because I'm Shell Bell's alt and because my boyfriend is her girlfriend's alt I should be able to have any thing she has, and I can't. Steph didn't even want to say hi - and apparently she didn't say hi to you either, so that's probably not a matter of the specific thing - but today Sherlock decided he doesn't want to figure out a mindreading protocol after all, too, and it's not like it was ever tried so I can't claim to miss it, but."

"Well, I mean - you're alts but you're not the literal same people," says Tony. "The impression I get from that crowd is that Pearl is so close to Shell Bell because she was kind of - forced to be. I mean, not in the obvious bad way that that sentence implies, but their world used to be pretty immensely fucked up and when things are immensely fucked up sometimes it makes you kind of - grab onto people a little harder than you otherwise might've."

"There was actually also an obvious bad way part. Shell Bell started out straight," remarks Juliet, looking at the ceiling.

"Yeah, that too. But it's not ongoing or anything."

"Yeah. What do you mean about the fuckuppedness of the world making Pearl and Shell Bell grab on harder? I don't think I get it."

"Okay, I'll put it another way," he says. "Sherries get really intense about stuff. Pearl gets extra intense about stuff because there's always been that life-or-death thing for her, more than there's been for the rest of us because we didn't grow up with teenage gladiators on live TV every year. Like, talk about reminders of mortality, damn."

"I'd think being a vampire would be a pretty significant reminder of mortality. I guess it's different in kind."

"Yeah. Pearl grew up knowing there was pretty much no chance everybody her age she knew when she was twelve would still be alive when she was twenty. Our Sherry grew up pretty much thinking everyone he cared about was invincible, because everyone he cared about was me and Jarvis, and then... we both died. Which messed him up pretty bad, but kind of in the opposite direction, you know?"

"I don't know. I can speculate about how Shell Bell coped with growing up in Panem; I have much worse extrapolation powers for other templates. What do you mean, the opposite direction?"

"Like, it's hard for him to get close to people because part of him thinks they're gonna come home one day and get assassinated in front of him," says Tony. "...Maybe that's one of those things that's only obvious to me."

"I got assassinated in front of him," muses Juliet.

"Yeah, see? So even though he knows you're immortal and everything, and even though me and Jarvis both came back from the dead - there's still that little voice in the back of his head going 'see, I was right, everyone you ever love is going to die a horrible death and there's nothing you can do about it'."

"I'm still not clear on why this would be backwards relative to Pearl. Shell Bell died too - not in front of Pearl, but mid-conversation."

"Yeah, but... they're different people, who grew up differently, so a similar thing happening affects them in different ways," he says. "I think that's kind of the point I'm trying to make here. Also, didn't she resurrect her in like two minutes? Which is part of the same pattern I'm talking about with her - the Hunger Games are a thing you can win. And she did. Her and her Tony. To Pearl, holding on tight to the stuff you care about is a strategy that actually works."