What If?

"You're nice, underneath it all." I said quietly, watching the end credits roll up the screen. The cat jumped on me and I froze in fear of provoking it. It sat in my lap knowing full well the paranoia it caused, the furry little...

"I'm not. I'm protective, there is a marked difference between the two." Sherlock sighed. We led across the couch in 221B, sharing his sulking space as we stared at each other sleepily from opposite ends of the couch. He closed his eyes for a moment, but I knew he wouldn't sleep until I did.

"Well, I think that's nice." I muttered, as the cat skipped from my lap to Sherlock's and sat there quite peacefully, almost purring and staring at me with it's large blue eyes as if trying to prove a point. "You remind me of him, sometimes. You want to protect people, so you push them away a little bit when they get too close. Pretend you don't care as much as you do to save them."

His eyes opened, and he stared at me, frowning in thought for a moment. "That's very observant, Pond."

"That was nearly a compliment, Sherlock." I smiled, and then sighed gently. The similarities made them different. Sherlock was set in his ways, he would always be there at 221B through hell or high water. He had his moments of madness, his bad habit of keeping human body parts in the fridge, and would often sulk for days. But compared to Him, he was reliable, steady, travelling in one line all the time with no jumping back and forth. Compared to That Man, he was more human in all of his morals. Sherlock cared about his friends, The Other didn't.

Sherlock patted the ginger cat on the head, and it made no move to try and claw at him as it did with every one else. I felt a little rejected that my feline companion preferred another's company to mine, but then again, the horrible little animal and Sherlock were weird little versions of each other. Moody, independent, and sulky with all but the very few. People put up with them rather than trying to befriend them.

"You remind yourself of him, don't you?" he murmured, "How lonely you are. Instead of travelling through time and space alone you travel through life. Never making close friends for fear of hurting them, that you'll have to leave them if he ever returns. But some how you find yourself always mildly entangled with strangers that you grow to like. It's because you're not completely like him, Amy Pond. Underneath the tough act, you're a very nice person. You simply don't want any one knowing because to you, that says weakness."

I felt an ache in my chest, not a sad one. A hollow one. That scared me a little. The empty space that used to be filled with thoughts of the fabulous Raggedy Man who promised to take me on adventures but then ran away. There was nothing there. I'd tried filling it, when He had started to filter out. But disposable happiness never lasted long and it never, ever filled the void.

"Since when were you my psychiatrist?"

"Did you bite the last one or just pull his hair? I can't recall." he said quickly, smirking.

I raised my eyebrows at him, and that thread was cut before I had an excuse to slap him. Well, he had some amusement out of this anyway. He'd been bored lately, not many cases had interested him and it was rare to see him like this when he was suffering with out any work to do. Let's challenge him a little, I thought.

"How are there still things you don't know about me?" I whispered, staring at him. "With every one else, it's a quick five minutes and you know their life story. You've known me for two years and you haven't even scratched the surface." He seemed to take up the challenge, sitting forward and crossing his legs, staring at my face with a look of concentration. The cat yelped and jumped off the couch, retreating to the kitchen.

"You're from another dimension, that's an intensely hard thing to comprehend." he muttered, his arms folded across his chest. "And well, sometimes I like to take my time."

"No, that's weird, that's not like you." I answered, pausing for a moment. "You're like a pattern. You change for nothing and no one. You never, ever take your time."

"I changed for you." he said bluntly. I looked up at him, his eyes blue in this light, cold and distant yet somehow endearing. "I've not tried to rapidly store information, I definitely don't push you away as much as I have John and Molly in the past. I've even struck you as nice. I don't really know what I'm doing around you at all, it's quite frankly very, very strange. You're a simple little human and I sit and stare at you sometimes and try to work it all out, but it never adds up."

I didn't know what to make of Sherlock's point of view at all. I never knew if I was being treated as a friend or lab experiment, if he even bothered because I was some pathetic little puzzle that kept him from being bored. But then my stupid faith in humanity swept all of that away, and I trusted the good I saw in him much more than my own conscience. It was a habit that I wasn't too fond of.

"I'm a girl from a little town in an alternate reality. That's it. Nothing special, nothing complicated. You'll fry your own brain trying to over complicate things. I'm just normal, boring Amy Pond, and that's it." I said, sitting in his parallel now, legs crossed and arms folded. He frowned for a moment, and I rolled my eyes.

"You're not, don't think that. You aren't boring, Amy Pond. If you were boring we wouldn't be having this conversation. You wouldn't be worth my time, put simply. It's taken me two hundred and eight thousand, one hundred and fifty minutes, thirty six seconds to even find out the basic concepts that make up your life. If you weren't worth the time I'd have known a long while ago." He said matter-of-factly, his eyebrows raised slightly as a small gentle smile appeared.

"You almost make that sound like a bad thing. Am I taking up the memory in your brain?" I said quietly, a small laugh there on the end as I couldn't meet his gaze any more. I looked down at my hands, staring at them, pale and small. My hair fell down over my face as I listened to him.

"That's my point, I've not cared. I've not needed any of that information for anything useful at all. To my subconscious you seem to matter much more than the solar system and the chicken and the egg riddle. That's why my brain did it. My brain liked it because my subconscious liked it. Because subconsciously, Amy Pond, crazy ginger from the small town of Leadworth who disliked apples as a child and prefers lilies to most flowers and is quite clearly totally in love with the idea of space time travel, I liked you very very much." he muttered, staring at me as if I was the most confusing thing he'd ever encountered.