"But Tony can listen to you, I promise."

"...Okay."

Tony is sitting by himself in his room in the original Jarvis.

"...So apparently you signed up to listen to me process my feelings aloud, but I don't think Jarvis did, and I'm going to wind up saying a lot of things I don't endorse so I'd rather limit the audience."

"Apparently you found her in your room and freaked out and teleported her to Canada?" says Tony.

"Yeah. And I guess she brainphoned Sherlock for help, and - to the extent that there were sides he was not on mine - and I'm talking to you instead of him now because I guess he identifies with her or something? But like - I feel like I've faceplanted into an expectation that I treat my mental opacity like it is the problem here, like, we'd all be a happy Soph-including family if only I'd had the courtesy to be brainwashable? And instead I am the only person I know who has not been brainwashed, and the problem Sherlock chose to address first after concluding that I wasn't crazy was that I wasn't being nice enough. Like - is it just me or is that a complete failure of perspective-taking - what would he do if he woke up one morning and discovered that - I don't know, that his cloning retroactively yielded an extra that everyone remembered but him? Soph was alternately defensive and quiet, I have no actual personal beef with her, but - Sherlock."

"Aww, man. It's not your mental opacity that's the problem!" he says. "Do you want me to explain Sherry? I can, I'm good at that."

"Yeah, explain me some Sherlock."

"If Sherry woke up one morning and there was an extra clone in the family that everybody remembered but him, he'd get right into figuring out what the hell was going on, but he'd treat the extra guy like family unless he found out he was some kind of camouflaged assassin or something. He empathizes way, way too strongly with the whole 'brand new extra person' situation to do anything else."

"...Okay. I don't know how to do that, though, I'm not Sherlock, I can't derive a reasonable picture of her personality from ten minutes of talking to her and her tacky taste in jewelry, she's not even an alt of Lexi. Soph had the idea that I should act like she's some other Bell's sister, which was a good idea. Which I can do because I met Lexi and didn't find her deeply bewildering. If Lexi were stranded here, I'd know how to react to that - I mean, it'd involve a lot of trying to get her home to Aurora, but I don't imagine anyone would complain about how I treated her in the meantime. But - that isn't what happened. Everyone else changed too. I don't know how much splicing her in has affected your memories or the Jarvises' or Sherlock's - let alone my parents, god, Aurora's on record speculating that she has the worst relationship with her parents of any Bell specifically because she wasn't an only child and it made her neurotic. Do my parents now remember raising a neurotic standoffish child who was never confident that she was loved enough? And I mean, Aurora is noticeably different from the rest of us, she has an exactly standard backstory right up to 'move to Forks, find magic and a significant other' but she still acts - off-center. Not in a bad way but in a different way. I don't expect this to add up to much with people I don't interact with socially on a regular basis, but my parents - And Sherlock! Now he remembers meeting and being interested in and teaching and engaging in Slaying with and - all that - a Bell with a sister. The fact that the Bell he remembers now never existed and I do instead doesn't mean it's really me he remembers. Having a sister a year younger than me would've affected me. I don't know who all the brainwashed people remember. I'm not her. For a distressingly large fraction of all practical purposes, he met me earlier today, in Canada, shouting at his friend."

"...Well, first of all, he's off designing a wish right now to get his original memories back without fucking up the new ones," says Tony. "I might do the same thing if he doesn't think it'll mess with my head too badly."

"That helps. He didn't tell me that."

"Yeah, I figured."

"I'm pretty sure I can't do an equivalent. I don't think I can pull a - variant on Shell Bell's merge with my self-who-never-was. Even if I decided I absolutely, without reservation, wanted to, I think I almost certainly resist mental editing."

Tony shrugs.

"And of course it wouldn't make sense for Soph - she can't well remember not existing - so she knows someone I am not and could not be even if I wanted to."

"I think Sherry said something about - alternate pastwatching?" he says. "So you could find all that stuff out."

"Yeah. Now I have homework. And - it's a lot of homework, it's seventeen years of homework, I can watch most of it at greater than the original speed and I can skip over parts where we're just sleeping in our twee little bunk beds and so on, but if I'm at all thorough it's years of homework. And - I asked, I grabbed, responsibility for the whole world. I don't resent having to deal with Glory, or talk to demons, or eventually interface with human governments. I don't resent the obligations that I volunteered for when I helped myself to ludicrous amounts of power. But I resent the - personal imposition. If someone does something and then I have to go kill them or undo it or find their creation a nice quiet subdimension to peacefully live out its days, that's fine, that's part of the job, I signed up for that, I clock in and clock out at highly irregular hours but I can clock out of that. If I even start with Soph I don't get to live with her being my 'sister' some limited number of hours every day, or only when there's a crisis, or only when I feel like it, and I didn't sign up for that and I am not used to it from earliest toddlerhood and that's my life and I want to decide what goes in it without demands like that. Like, at least if Renée and Charlie improbably had a baby right now, I would get used to the baby from a starting point where its primary needs involved its physical safety and we'd work out our more complicated interactions over a longer period of time, from scratch, bit by bit. Soph already has some set of expectations for how having a sister works for her, and what if I hate it, what if I do all my homework and whatever she remembers only works if I'm a year old when I first encounter her and she's little and cute at the time?"

"Then you both have to deal with that," he says. "There's not always a perfect answer. You just... have to do the best you can with what you've got."

"Maybe. It's very tempting to just give up. Not bother. Wish Soph the best of luck, act extremely awkward around Charlie and Renée, get on with my life. Move officially out of Twee Bunkbed Room and be out of her way, Sherlock can pass her coins under the table if he wants, he's the one who makes them. Screw the homework, I have a world to patch and a Mercury palace to design, you know? Except I'm pretty sure if I did that I wouldn't have a boyfriend any more and that is not helping me evaluate the possibility on its own merits or dismerits."

"...Well... I haven't actually talked to Sherry about that, and I'm not saying it wouldn't throw him because it really would, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't just dump you over it."