It isn't judgment that crosses and comes to rest upon Ryoko's face, but a sober sort of confusion, an itchy-scratchy sort of solemnity about which she is as uncertain as the scene that played before them. The air feels heavy, tense, but in a discernibly different way than when the darkness came to call. She cuts through it in turning her eyes to Axel, muddling through the intensity of the previous scene, his sigh, his averted gaze, and the flood of questions that stutter and skip in their attempt to rush to the front of her mind. Who? Where? What? How? Why? Why?

And then there's that part of her that's tempted to laugh, to try to brush it off, give him a shove and sweep this under the rug, and -- and make him smile, laugh, anything. Anything that isn't that soft sag and turned gaze that seems to permeate him in the moment. She doesn't quite know what to do with it because she hasn't seen him like this before and it's different than what she knows, what she's seen. Wrong. It seems wrong to her and she can't quite find her words. She's been looking for a moment now and becoming increasingly frustrated by her inability to just spit them out, so she does what anyone would do in this situation.

Ryoko reaches to turn his face back toward her, sticks her thumbs into his mouth at the corners, and tugs out and upward. Don't mind her adjusting the width and height of this smile. She squints as she puzzles it out, tugging here and there. Maybe there...?