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[propulsion]

"You have reached the life model decoy of Tony Stark."

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[propulsion]

Tony's attention bounces around Holden, then, the tops of his shoulders, his wrists, the flat plane of his chest, like suddenly he will see something he's missed this whole time. Like he doesn't know how possible it is to conceal the telltale lyrium.

"You're gonna have to break that down for me," he says. "Being of a primitive, earthbound peoples. What kind of medication are we talking, how is it accessed, can I peep it."

He is rolling up out of his sit, collecting the book as he goes, closing it.

[acreage]

The weather's been warming up enough lately that it's easy to snag a sleeve of his shirt and pull it upwards. Near where his arm slopes into his shoulder is a small, distinctly metallic circle. It sits over a raised bit of skin, triangular, something clearly just below the surface. And, of course, it's all lyrium-blue glow.

He says, "I caught a lot of radiation a few years ago. Oncocidals do a good job of managing the long-term damage. But I think we're probably a few centuries out from Thedas developing anti-cancers."

Do they even know about...DNA? Cells? He shrugs. Then,

"Unfortunately, I never did develop any superpowers."

He's funny! Right, Iron Man? This is definitely the moment to crack a joke.

[propulsion]

Tony rolls forwards in his sit to squint at that little raised patch of hardware under wetware, the little—port, lets call it. The familiar illumination of ethereal blue. His attention doesn't pivot to Jim when he explains how it came to get under there, manages to put together through context and etymology what the heck an oncocidal is meant to be, and refrains from prodding it.

Just kidding, but he does raise his hand, wiggle his fingers in warning, and then prods it. Just a little. It's very scientific of him.

"That you know about," he quips, immediate and ahead of the rush of feeling some kind of way, swiftly on the rise. "What about anything else, since you've been here? Symptoms, signs? Now that you've had six months to fuck around and find out."

[acreage]

There's a slight raise to his eyebrows, but he mostly bears all and any poking with some amount of grace. Or, maybe, just the acknowledgement that he did in fact wait six months to fuck around and find out what the shape of this conversation would be.

There's the feeling of metal, or plastic, or something hard just beneath the surface of the skin — not unexpected, probably, from appearances.

"Nothing that I've noticed." And then he points out, "If there were symptoms, I wouldn't have come to you first."

A healer would make more sense, after all. There's the implication that he might not have said anything, to Tony, in that situation; and if he's noticed that, he doesn't try to deny it.