propulsion | fade rift. inbox.

( tony isn't in his room when joselyn gets there, but it also isn't locked to keep her out so—this is only a temporary obstacle. presumably he has to come back to it at some point, and she figures she won't be the only person that's going to have kind of an unproductive day immediately following the dreams that they all shared.

there's—

they were a lot. both dreams, actually. she isn't completely sure what the logic was behind bringing her satchel with her—what she'd imagined she'd find, when probably he woke up just the same as she did—but she sets it down, and looks around. tony isn't here, and she doesn't know how long he'll be gone, so

the trunk is locked, but she already knows what's in it. she looks at his papers, next, but most of them are unreadable; she is diverted by it briefly all the same, skimming to see if he's sketched anything that she might recognize, giving up when there's just only so long you can stare aimlessly at foreign words until it's clear they're definitely not going to spontaneously become comprehensible. the wind-up light that seems to her eye vaguely dwarfish (whether that's because it is or because she just associates things of its nature with dwarves before anyone else: debatable) occupies her for probably longer than she'll admit to tony, later, but by the time he does return she's sat down at his table and is writing a letter on some of his blank pages.

she leaves out the dreams. the reason why she's just thinking of you all this morning. they hadn't really been there, she knows; too far away for the magic to have drawn them in, they must have been...constructs, spirits. but it's been a long time since she saw the children, and what a reminder of how fucking fragile everything is. )

[ The door swings open with the confidence of someone expecting an empty room.

And when he does not experience one, Tony freezes in the doorway, and then unfreezes, stepping more deliberately inside and closing the door with his back to it. He looks—

He looks well, just as she remembers. Less grey in his hair, for one, more meat on the bones, vitality in his—I don't know, teeth, whatever. He also looks a little like he just rolled out of bed, hair wilder and hair grain grown in around goatee, clothing basic and a little rumpled.

Under an arm is a leather-bound folder, of kinds, barely containing pages. ]

You touching my stuff, Smythe?

Edited 2021-02-27 03:55 (UTC)

( two things are obvious, immediately. firstly, that she has definitely been touching his stuff. she is literally still touching his stuff, there's a pen in her hand, it's a whole th—secondly, that she had briefly forgotten that was the case, and is about to object.

she looks around herself. she says, )

Well, it seemed important when I was coming over here.

( he looks fine. she looks at her satchel, calculating how crazy she'll appear if she wants to check that in more detail regardless. she's not a healer (she's not a mage), she isn't isaac, she has no special sense for if there's something underlying his appearance for her to worry about and it's very likely that if there is something wrong with him she can't tell by pressing the back of her hand to his forehead,

there is definitely nothing in her satchel that can fix it.

her lips purse. she considers, i might as well finish this since i started it, and then doesn't say that. she says, )

Have you ever dreamed someone was dead and then found their room empty? It's stressful. You touch their things.

Not lately.

[ Tony also glances at her satchel. It feels meaningful. Not sure why. He looks back at her. ]

But that sounds, uh. Sad. Traumatic, probably. Especially if you cared a lot about that person's wellbeing.

[ He steps further into the room, enough to drop down his notebook on some surface. Blindly, but they don't all go sliding off and scattering, maybe by luck, probably by muscle memory. ]

And then they walk into the room, healthy, whole, handsome. What happens at that point?

( this is how he knows it's serious: joselyn smythe passes up the opportunity to quibble over handsome, which even twenty-four hours previous she would not have. the fact that it's a fair assessment of his face and allotment of limbs has literally nothing to do with whether or not she would have argued about it,

anyway, she doesn't. she looks sort of like a spooked meerkat, actually, because that's a super good question that she hasn't prepared an answer for. she looks down at her unfinished letter, as if it is personally at fault for the fact she spent all this time writing it instead of thinking about what would happen next. )

I was going to take your vitals.

( see, now that she says it out loud, it does sound crazy. )

Okay.

[ She looks freaked out. Different freaked out to Ellis, but obviously—related. Where he'd more or less jumped all over Ellis like an over-excited labrador in an adorable YouTube compilation, Joselyn's vibes compel him to slow his roll ever so.

And switch trajectories. Tony goes and sits at the edge of the bed, undoing the buttons at his collar. His vitals. Sure, why not. ]

Well, nurse, how're you planning on taking my temperature or did we wanna wing it?

( this feels like a trap, but joselyn is unclear on exactly what she thinks the trap is even if she is fairly certain that the means of springing it are obvious. like licking a toad to hallucinate.

it was one time. )

You don't look unwell, ( she says, deploying mixed signals by setting down her (his) pen to come and stand by his knees, arms folded as she studies him like she can tell anything from doing so.

he does look better than he did in the dream, but he died in the dream, so it's a low bar to clear. )

[ Tony's hands drop him collar as he looks up at her, studying her studying him. ]

Thanks, [ he says.

And then reaches for one of her hands, and holds it. ]

Rough night, huh.

( joselyn decides that holding hands is fine. they're holding hands now, and it's acceptable. if she simply accepts it then there's no pressing need to understand what it means, or that it might mean something. it necessitates unfolding her arms, mostly because standing there with only one of them still wrapped around herself feels sort of stupid for further unexamined reasons —

she uses her free hand to take his pulse. )

I've had better.

( an unsettling window into how mages actually dream, she doesn't say, too well-practised in the art of not saying things like that. it doesn't mean she doesn't think it. )

What do you think it meant?

( she means the dream. )

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action. the morning after the night before.

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