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“Another field trip?” Tony asks warily. Stephen met him in the Sanctum’s foyer instead of waiting for him in the kitchen or the sitting room, as he usually did. He looks anticipatory.
“I promise you will enjoy this one,” Stephen says. “There will be no displaced souls at all.” Tony hesitates, and Stephen’s face falls a little. “If you don’t want to go, I’ll understand completely.”
He says he’ll understand, but his emotional landscape is a mess of regret and self-recrimination. It’s not that Tony doesn’t trust Stephen—it’s these new abilities he’s unsure of—but Stephen is clearly taking it that way.
Tony swallows his anxiety. “No, it’s fine. Where are we going?”
The answer is: a comedy club.
Tony lets Stephen pay the cover and usher them to a small, two person table. It’s in the back, but no one gives them a second glance, so the wizard must be masking their identities somehow. “I didn’t take you for the stand up comedy type,” Tony says, bemused. Stephen is almost vibrating, he’s so eager.
“We’re not here for the comedy,” he says. “At least, not directly. You said once that Soul has you feeling my emotions?” Tony nods. Stephen goes on, “When I signal you, I’d like you to extend a small fraction of that ability to the rest of the club. Only the surface!” Stephen says quickly when Tony frowns. “Just enough to pick up through soul the emotions you could easily read off their faces.”
Tony wants to argue—if he’s not getting anything he can't see for himself, why bother?—but he suspects that Stephen will take it as another sign of distrust if he does. “All right,” he says instead, though he can’t keep the skepticism out of it.
They’re about ten minutes into the set and the crowd has warmed up and is laughing enthusiastically when Stephen taps the back of Tony’s hand and nods.
It takes Tony a minute to figure out how to use Soul’s power to connect to a specific group of people on a specific level, but when the connection finally flares to life his jaw drops.
The mood of the club is effervescent.
It doesn’t feel like sensing a single person’s emotions, or even like sensing a dozen people’s emotions. Everyone in the club is on the same wavelength, they’re all experiencing the same emotion in the same moment, and it forms a gestalt that grows beyond any individual’s amusement. It buoys Tony. It’s like having a really good buzz and knowing there’s no hangover coming, and it inspires a kind of wonder that people can do this, that this feeling of connection and happiness is as much a part of humanity as any of the darkness.
Tony finds himself laughing, and he reaches out and takes Stephen’s hand and doesn’t think twice about asking Soul to help him share this feeling, because Stephen deserves to feel it, too. Stephen’s delight at Tony’s reaction threads through the entire experience, and somehow that makes it better.