in between moments

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell has not found Milliways by herself since the occasion on which she first met Sherlock.

Today, after eight months, she does.

She makes sure that Sherlock and Tony are both awake, finds that they are but do not want to join her in the bar today unless she finds something interesting, checks her coin supply and finds it sufficient, and steps through.

Comments

[she_sells_seashells]

A mushroom cloud is billowing in the way that mushroom clouds are known to do.

[sicaria]

Sherlock stands very, very still for a very, very short amount of time.

Then she sends her power looking for Coin and brainphones Tony.

[I need a hundred thousand triangles of pain. Right now. I'll explain later if I can.]

[ferratus]

[What—] he starts, but he knows that tone of voice, and he trusts her.

So he turns on the agony beam to the requested amount.

[she_sells_seashells]

Coin is sitting in her office, looking perfectly innocuous.

[sicaria]

Sherlock cannot deal with her right now.

Sherlock can barely deal with the coin she is trying to make.

It turns out that the pentagon that modified her perception of pain was not... quite... sufficient.

But she can't take the time to readjust. She summons the concentration to make coins out of what she's feeling, and as soon as she summons the concentration to stop, she tells Tony [enough] and spends a declawed star to declaw one of her new eight-pointed coins.

Her wish is extremely specific. She wants Bell back. Not a version incompletely reconstructed from her own knowledge or any other secondary information, but the same person who was destroyed in a nuclear explosion a minute ago. She wants Bell back, right here, unharmed and unchanged and with complete memories of her life up to the point where she was murdered.

[she_sells_seashells]

[-er,] Bell finishes her sentence, then blinks. "...Sherlock?"

[sicaria]

"Coin just assassinated you," Sherlock says flatly.

And she expands her perspective on both Coin and her own house, so as to spot any more threats before they arrive.

[she_sells_seashells]

"...Assassinated me? But I'm here. How did I get here?"

There's nothing incoming on the house.

(Coin doesn't, actually, know where Bell's magic comes from, or she would never have done something so incomplete and foolish.)

Coin is receiving a report that the bomb has gone off and as near as anyone in Thirteen can determine it got its target. "Thank you," she tells the report-deliverer, "that will be all."

[sicaria]

She lifts the end of her coin-chain, on which there are still three extra evils, tangling their points with one another.

She has her suspending-contemplation-of-something-unpleasant face on.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I -" Bell looks at the evils, and then throws herself forward and hugs Sherlock hard. "Fuck. Thank you."

[sicaria]

"It turns out that a pentagon for masochism is not sufficient," she says, hugging back a little stiffly. "Which reminds me."

She spends a hex.

"That should be better. Now. What do we do about Coin?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"It's not? Oh my - Sherlock, you didn't even stop to boost that before...?"

[sicaria]

"It would have wasted time."

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell hugs her tighter. "I wasn't getting deader."

[sicaria]

"You were continuing to be dead."

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell doesn't understand. So she looks.

[sicaria]

Bell continuing to be dead was more unpleasant than the amount of pain required to make her stop. And Sherlock could not be quite certain that there wasn't a time limit involved, that any second spent tuning her masochism and experimenting with Tony to find a more pleasant delivery method might not be the particular second that carried her out of reach forever.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I love you," mumbles Bell into Sherlock's shoulder. "I love you so much."

[sicaria]

"I love you too," she whispers, closing her eyes against sudden tears.

[she_sells_seashells]

Dealing with Coin is urgent, but not urgent on a scale of minutes. They can stand here hugging each other and crying for a little while longer.

[sicaria]

Yes. Yes, they can do that.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I'm almost surprised you didn't kill her on the spot," Bell murmurs.

[sicaria]

"That would also have wasted time."

[she_sells_seashells]

"And we wouldn't be able to figure out who else was in on her plan to nuke a perfectly nice section of the ruins of Europe so easily, either," says Bell.

[sicaria]

"True," says Sherlock. "What shall we do about her?"