Brent, Ilad
I wonder at him, that he might still yearn so for the touch of a man whose very nature he is bound to find despicable. Yet often we do not understand each other. We see the same symbol and understand it to be opposite. From the writing on a bank note to the marks that scar my body: we each read our own stories from these self-same pages. On some level he recognizes me, enough to speak volumes with an image; and yet. And yet.
I should not have tried to explain. I should have allowed him to see me without excuse, without defense. Let that righteous anger cauterize the loss he already feels; I could see the fire in him, and I should have stoked it. But I could not do it.
I wish I did not know that they had spoken of it. I feel flanked.
The apartment still holds the scent of the dinner that was cooked recently: something involving onions and garlic and maybe cream. Mostly it just smells like it was probably a good dinner. Brent is waiting on the sofa, bad leg stretched out on the cushions, the other bent off the side. A worn, battered paperback is held open in one hand while the other elbow props up against the back of the sofa. He's wearing well-worn jeans and a pale blue button-down that is rumpled and soft with several years' wearing. Ilad's painting is all huge and overlarge, but it's angled away from the door for the time being.
The roar of the motorcycle is the usual herald of Ilad's arrival, but this time it does not come; rather, the hum of a quieter engine comes before the knock on Brent's door, since forewarned that he will have a large painting to schlep, he has made use of one of the larger vehicles in the Titan garage for the occasion. He stands at the door for a long moment, standing in his dark collared shirt of deep grey and black slacks as though composing himself, and finally does knock.
Something in Brent's countenance hesitates at the sound of the knock; the book lowers to his lap, and he watches the door for a moment. Then he dogears a page to hold his place, sets the book on the coffee table, and picks up his cane to make his way over to open the door. "Hey," he says, a little quiet, but there is a hint of warmth in his small smile as he angles to allow Ilad's entrance.
Ilad slips inside past Brent, clasping his shoulder as he enters and moves beyond him; he says, "Hey," and looks about the room with a slight lift to his dark brows, faint smile tugging more at one corner of his mouth than at the other. "How are you doing?"
"All right." Brent's smile warms a touch at the clasp to his shoulder, though there remains some hesitant distance in his expression that he fights with. "You know. Hobbling along." His expression grows a touch sheepish when he tells Ilad, "It's not going to fit through the door -- I checked earlier. I'll take it off the stretchers and roll it up after you get a look at it."
The touch of Ilad's hand carries with it the slow burn of a long fever, seeping through his fingers and through fabric; coolness breathes there instead, when he draws his hand away again. "Large," he answers, humor a dry spark in his dark eyes as he tips his head toward Brent. "Too large for doorways. Well, it is not as though I was not forewarned."
"Doorways aren't /really/ all that large," Brent mock-argues with the twitch of humor pulling at one corner of his mouth. "I barely fit through them." His gaze watches Ilad with an attention a touch closer than his usual. "There was -- a lot to fit in. I tried for too much." He hobble-walks a few steps to a spot with a better view of the too-large painting and looks to Ilad to follow. His gaze remains on the other's face, waiting the subtleties of his reaction once he looks upon the painting.
Jean-Paul was correct: it is ambitious. Perhaps too much yearned to be included, too many stories, too much feeling, but Israel is, after all, an ancient place, and that informs color and subject and mood. Browns and reds and blues and greens all mark out barest suggestions of the land but remain far from landscape; rather, it is the emotion that achieves clarity. Sunburned passion, aching control, the hint of violence. It's a little as if Brent took Ilad and transposed him as a symbol for his home.
Ilad is not the easiest man to read; the changes in his expression are subtle, ruled as much by his controlled reserve as by what emotion, what passion may burn beneath his surface. His gaze marks the shapes of the Galilee blended in their way with the kind of busy longing of the painting, and he is very still and very quiet for what seems a long time. The tip of his tongue flickers out to wet his lips before he swallows, dark eyes finally cast down and away from the painting for a heartbeat or so before he gathers himself to speak. "Ah," he exhales. "Yes. There is a lot, is there not?"
"Yes," Brent agrees simply. Something in his form relaxes, finding some relief in Ilad's reaction, however small it is. "It's a little funny," he says, turning his pale eyes to the painting. "Everything in America is just -- so /young/. There is so little to it -- comparatively."
"In ways, we are a younger country," Ilad answers, with the slight curl of humor twisting his lips, a shade of irony in tone and in the slant of his gaze as he turns it back toward the painting. "More intense, more vicious, less dignified. Yet when you walk the shores of the Galilee, when you come to know my people--" He turns out a hand, outward, in an open gesture. "We are not a young people, we children of Israel. It is true."
Even with that relief having settled on his shoulders, a quiet thrum of tension remains, not quite satisfied. Brent schools his best face of professionalism when he asks, "Do you like it?" Almost a moment later, he adds, "It's all right if you don't. You're paying for it; it's your commission."
"I was very vague with my request, because I thought to give you the freedom to paint," Ilad answers. His voice is quiet, his gaze steady on the expanse of desert color that sweeps the broad expanse of the canvas before him. "I knew you would provide me with something very great, my friend, and so you have done."
Brent keeps his smile small with an effort, reigning in the urge to grin wide and bright in some effort not to break the quiet of the moment. "I'm glad you like it," he answers in a similarly low voice. "It was--" He looks back to the painting, thoughtful. "--a very educational process."
Eyebrows arching, Ilad glances back at Brent, marking his expression with a contemplative flicker of his eyes. "Ah?" he says. "What have you learned?"
"A lot of history," Brent replies with a light ghosting of humor as his gaze slants back to his friend. "America's really pretty awful about education in certain areas." Something else ghosts there, unsure, farther in the back of his gaze.
"Oh, yes," Ilad answers, humor a darkling note in his voice as he ducks his head. "You learn nobody's history but your own, hm? Well. I was not thinking on giving out a history lesson, exactly, but--" He opens his hands, something wry in the skew of the gesture. "And so. I have never commissioned a painting before," he adds. "I will write you a check?"
"I've always liked the research," Brent says with mild reassurance. "The -- getting a feel for something. I certainly didn't /need/ to keep reading as much as I did, but -- I wanted to. So." His weight shifts slightly, and his countenance turns slightly discomforted at Ilad's question. "You don't need to do that," he says quietly.
Eyeing Brent with the sidelong slant of a glance, Ilad's mouth twitches at one corner with a smile. "Are you going to tell me I am no longer paying? You may be right that it is difficult to make a living as an artist, my friend, but it is impossible to make a living as an artist if you do not charge for your work."
Brent sighs out a breath with raggedy-edged humor. "I'm going to be terrible at this, aren't I?" He rakes a quick hand through his hair. "It just -- feels so strange. Like putting a price tag on home for your best friend." But: money is money, and a living is a living. "I guess you can write me a check."
"I would not have commissioned a painting from you," Ilad answers gently, "if I did not intend to start your business off on the correct foot." He even brought his checkbook, tucked into the pocket of his dark leather jacket which I forgot that he was wearing; he pulls this out, along with a pen, and moves toward Brent's kitchen counter so that he can lean his hip up against it as he makes out the check. "Money is not always cold, you know. Transactions are a symbol, as much as anything else."
Brent traces the lean of Ilad's body with his gaze, slight and brief, while the man's eyes are dropped to his check. Then a smile shivers to life, and he acquiesces with a quiet "I guess." He sets down his cane so he can shift the painting carefully to a waiting empty spot on the floor -- where does he even have this floor space? -- and settles down on one end with a pair of needle nose pliers that he got out before Ilad's arrival. He works at the staples in the back of the painting with a diligent efficience that suggests experience.
Signing the check with a flourish of his hand, Ilad tears it out of the book and holds it toward Brent between the first two fingers of his right hand, pen closed into his opposite palm. "Ah," he says, flicking his gaze over the business of the staples. "I will leave it here." He sets it on the counter, and draws a long breath through his nose as he straightens, tucking book and pen away again.
"Sure." Brent glances up amidst his work to offer a quiet smile. "Sorry. I would have done it before you came, but I wanted you to be able to see it right." He piles staples into a little pile on the hardwood as he goes. "Hopefully I won't step on any of these later."
Ilad narrows his gaze down at the pile of staples with a faint frown tugging on his mouth. "If you injure yourself on my staples I will be very cross with you," he tells him, tone a layer of bland disguising dry humor.
"I'll do my best to avoid it," Brent promises. He looks up at Ilad with humor drawn thin over his expression before he turns his gaze back down to the process of pulling out the long, industrial staples.
Folding his hands behind his back, Ilad pads over nearer to Brent's side and sort of hovers, head tipped slightly to one side. "Is there some way I can be of use?" he asks after a pause.
"You could relax," Brent suggests without looking up. (Staples require concentration.) "Or make sure that no staples go scampering off into the wilderness of my apartment." The sense of something unsaid grows, humor taking on a covering, almost evasive quality.
"I doubt the utility of either," Ilad answers, gaze narrowing. He stays where he is, studying Brent's features in profile.
"I'm more relaxed when you're relaxed. That's a utility." Brent glances back up, very brief this time before looking back down. He shifts his position, careful of his leg, to the next side of the painting, leaving behind the pile of staples from the first side.
"Do I seem tense?" Ilad's emphasis on the personal pronoun is not pronounced, but it does exist.
Brent goes quiet a bit at that faint emphasis. "You're a little hovery," he says after a moment's breath.
Helpful, Ilad takes a step backward.
Brent huffs a quiet breath of dry-edged, voiceless laughter. "Jean-Paul told me--" He stops, both his words and his actions, unsure of how to continue. His gaze remains lowered.
Ilad's eyebrows both arch, his expression and his silence both expectant as he marks Brent's lowered gaze, the flavor and angle of his tension. However, he is of no help.
"He mentioned -- one of your coworkers," Brent says. He's resumed removing staples, but slower now, more careful -- just the same quality as his words. "I think I'd met her before, actually. If it's the same woman. From -- Bahrain."
Ilad holds himself very still for several heartbeats, saying nothing, and not quite meeting Brent's gaze; his brow furrows, his hands still clasped firmly behind him. Then he lifts his dark eyes, with the cock of an eyebrow, and says: "What of her?"
"He said that you acted--" Brent's lips thin; he reconsiders his words. "He thinks that you -- don't like her. Because of--" It is very hard for him to say. One can almost see the vaguest hints of surprise when he realizes how hard it is. "Because of where she's from." He pulls out another staple. Slowly. He doesn't lift his gaze to Ilad's.
"Interesting," Ilad says. He settles his weight in a firm plant on both feet and looks -- past Brent, gaze centered a little past his ear. "I do not think that I would put it in those terms," he says at length.
Brent's hands still. He finally lifts his gaze to Ilad's face. "What terms would you put it in?"
"Bahrain is nowhere in particular to me." Ilad's face is set, his expression composed. Beyond that, it is difficult to read anything there beyond a self-control wrought in iron and reinforced with steel. "But her people have sworn oaths to sweep mine into the sea. To soak the land of our fathers in our blood. I would put it in those terms. It is the blood that matters."
It is a harsh thing to hear. Harsh enough that Brent is quiet for a long stretch of silence in the face of it. But not forever. He breathes in a slow lungful of hair, silent and through his nose, and exhales just as quietly. "And what has /she/ sworn?"
Hands falling from their clasp behind his back to rest at his sides, Ilad is silent for a long moment in his own turn. The rise of his temper is reflected in the faint narrowing of his gaze, in the slight clamp of his jaw, in the way he holds himself utterly still. He says, "That is an easy question."
The slide of Brent's jaw tightens, and there is a low burn of passion in his gaze. Reckless and ignorant, perhaps, but there and alive. And mingled with it, in the cinch of his expression, the lowered brows, some sense of disappointment. "Then it should have an easy answer."
"So it does," Ilad answers, voice very flat.
Brent goes silent. He turns the slow burn of his gaze back to his work and starts pulling out stables with a touch more vehemence then they strictly need; his shoulders are held wired with tension.
Ilad says nothing to this silence. Slowly, one of his hands closes into a fist. He slants his gaze downward, studying his knuckles.
"You can't hate someone for something their people did that they were not a part of," Brent says, voice quiet and tensely edged with unhappiness.
"I do not hate this girl," Ilad answers, his voice stiff and flat as much as his body is stiff and still.
"And you can't judge her for actions taken by others," Brent continues, stubbornly now.
"Can I not?" Ilad's voice has dropped; it becomes very soft, and his accent seems to have drawn over it in a thicker cloak. "What I cannot do, Brent, is grant my trust to this woman-child. Not after what I have seen from her people. Not after what I have experienced at their hands."
The differentiation between their positioning is suddenly and keenly felt by the man on the floor; Brent drops the pliers onto the hardwood and scrabbles for his cane to lift himself. (From the sofa? Easy. From the floor is harder.) "She's not /them/. How can you judge her for what other people have done instead of what /she/ has done?"
"I know what I can and cannot do," Ilad answers simply, coolly. The heat of him is confined to the burn and snap in his dark, dark eyes. "You have spent these hours, these days studying my country, my people. How can you stand there in judgment over me?"
"Because I'm not the one defending /racism/." The words tumble out over-quick, and it's clear from Brent's expression that they were unintended. The word sounds ugly and crass out loud, and hearing it out loud flushes his skin with anger or shame -- it is difficult to tell. "You can't honestly ask me to think that's okay."
Ilad lifts his head and looks at Brent with a hard-eyed stillness. "Okay or not," he says in a growl shaded low and dark. "It is."
"No, Ilad," Brent says with something hardening in his voice. "Racism isn't something that 'just is.' And tolerating it -- /encouraging/ it -- is what /causes/ these wars."
The set of Ilad's jaw works for a moment, and then stills. He stands there with his teeth gritted shut, his silence that of a man who does not speak because his words will be unforgivable. He says nothing.
Brent's teeth click a few times behind his lips, as if literally biting back his words. Then he turns, quite suddenly, and takes a step back to where he left off at the painting. He lowers himself down too quickly and ends up hissing in air through his clenched teeth when his leg protests. He stays in that still, tense positioning of one working through the aftermath of sudden pain even after it fades quickly.
"Do you see faces behind your eyes," Ilad asks, his voice uninflected, quiet, his expression reflecting the lingering stiffness of his very straight spine, "when you feel the pain of that gunshot wound?"
Brent has already started to relax from the quick pain, already started to reach for the pliers -- and then stops. He considers a few responses before going with the most honest: "Sometimes."
"You have seen my scars. Not all of them, perhaps, but some. There were faces behind each of those scars. Faces of Arabs." Ilad shifts his weight from foot to foot, forcibly relaxing his hand from its fist to open it in a slow spread of his fingers. "There are other wounds, wounds that have not left a mark. Lies I have ripped from people's lips in a tongue I know as well as my own. Bombs I have stopped. Bombs I have failed to stop. Bombs which blasted a great hole in my career. In my life, as I knew it. A life I dedicated to protecting my people from the machinations, from the violence of Palestine." Arab he says like any other word; Palestine, though, Palestine he speaks like poison. "Children shooting guns at me. Barely more than children, killing us from the windows of their holy places. All of these faces. My own scars. The scars of my people. Brent, do not speak to me as though I do not know that this is ugly. But these are the faces in my nightmares."
Brent is very, very quiet as Ilad speaks. His gaze is averted, settled down to the painting on the floor but not quite seeing it. Face down as it is, he couldn't see it if he tried. And then he picks up the pliers and starts working, slowly, on the remaining staples in the canvas; despite its size, there are not many left. His silence has slipped from the wired tension of anger to something weightier, more collapsed, a quiet sort of mild grief. He says nothin.
After this great flood of speech, Ilad has fallen quiet. He does not move, either, his weight planted and balanced where he stands.
Staple after staple slides out of canvas and wood, and then Brent is left with the bare wooden stretchers. He sets it aside and then gathers the canvas to roll it, slowly and carefully, with the painting on the outside. And then he has this rolled painting and he just -- sits. "I would never say you shouldn't protect your people," he finally says in a very quiet voice. "But looking at a person and seeing--" His voice breaks off, wound with too many thoughts and feelings, and he holds the rolled painting up.
Ilad finally moves, padding forward across the brief distance between them. He slides his fingers over the rolled canvas, the brush of his hand briefly touching Brent's as he angles to take the painting. "I do not know," he says after a long moment's quiet, "what you want me to say."
"Neither do I," Brent admits in a soft, unhappy voice. He reaches to grip the edge of the coffee table, hesitates; then, after a moment, he lifts a hand to Ilad in silent request.
Tucking the rolled painting beneath his left arm, Ilad clasps Brent's hand firmly in his strong right and pulls him to his feet, moving to angle in towards him with the silent offer of his shoulder in support.
There's a moment where he simply seems to leech warmth, when he's drawn close with one hand lingers in Ilad's overwarm clasp and the other settles tight against the solid muscle of his shoulder. Several thoughts cross the open book that is Brent's face, but they are too many and too close, and he moves to slide both hands away. "I feel like you've said that a lot," he says, not without a sad, tired humor. "Not knowing what I want you to say. Do I really always want something from you?" Without his cane, his weight is held uneven, but stable for the moment.
"Do you not?" Ilad's eyebrows arch, his voice quiet. His mouth twitches at one corner, a kind of darker hue to the expression behind the slow sweep of his eyelashes.
Looking as if unsure how to answer that question, Brent makes no attempt. After a marked hesitation, at least. He shifts back to angle away and reach, one hand set on the coffee table for balance, to retrieve his cane. When he straightens and settles his weight more evenly, he doesn't immediately turn back to Ilad. "No," he says, a sudden stubbornness the marks the lie in his voice. "I don't always want something from you."
"Mm," is Ilad's reply to that, a wealth of amused skepticism buried in the single hummed syllable, in the tug of the shadowed smile that pulls at his lips.
"Stop." Where Ilad seems to have found some buried humor, Brent's tension seems to reknit across his body and expression. "Can you just--" Silence hangs for a moment, interrupting. "Can you just go?" He doesn't look at Ilad.
Dark eyes sliding away, Ilad studies a point on the far wall for a long moment. He says nothing in response. He turns, instead, and walks to the door almost wholly without sound. The next audible noise he makes is really that of the doorknob.
When he hears the doorknob, Brent suddenly turns and says, "Wait. I'm sorry. I don't mean--" He takes in an unsteady breath. "This used to be easy. And -- solid. And now it's messy and complicated and -- /hard/, and I just--" He runs out of words to say. "I do always want something from you. I just don't like the fact that I do."
Ilad stands quite still for a long moment with his hand on the doorknob. He studies his own knuckles.
"I miss you," Brent says in a very small voice that is almost ashamed of its own vulnerability. "I know that's stupid to say when you're right here, but--" He swallows and draws his gaze away to the sofa. Neutral. "I can't find the spot that's simple. And everything is just all wrapped up in you leaving and -- feelings that I have no business having and--" He hesitates. "I'm sorry."
"Brent," Ilad says, in a voice gone a little sharp with exasperation, "we were not /especially/ simple before I went to work for Titan."
"But it didn't exactly /help/." Brent's sharpness is muted, born more in helpless frustration. His weight shifts again, and he finally succumbs to the demands on his healing leg and hobbles over to the sofa to sit down. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to -- I don't know."
Ilad turns back away from the door to face Brent again, his arm curled over the rolled tube of the painting he has bought, and the shake of his head is slow. "Perhaps not," he says.
Brent takes a slow, steadying breath. "It doesn't matter," he decides. "It doesn't matter if it's simple or complicated, if it's easy or hard. It doesn't matter whatever feelings I have or don't have. You're my friend. That's what matters." He hesitates before adding in a quieter voice, "You're one of my best friends."
"You are one of my few," Ilad answers, with an odd note mingled with the dryness of his voice as he inclines his head. His thumb glides over the rolled canvas under his arm, and his gaze falls, hovering around the region of Brent's feet as he stands across the room from him. "But I am the same man today that I was a month ago. Two months ago."
"I don't think I'm the same person I was two months ago," Brent says very quietly.
"Well," Ilad says. He clears his throat, on an acknowledging note, and adds: "--...Give or take. A little, here and there."
"I don't think I've even seen your scars," Brent says, far belated, with quiet, humorless laughter that is not quite given voice. Then he catches himself. "No. I can remember the one."
Ilad marks off their places on his body, turning to brush his knuckles over his hip, and then down over his thigh where his own ancient bullet hole scores his skin beneath the dark of his slacks. And then back up, to his other side. "There are a -- few."
"I don't like scars," Brent admits. "Not on people I care about. I mean -- not because of appearances or anything, just -- thinking about someone hurting you. It--" He gestures at himself now, as if trying to describe some indescribable reaction. "I didn't ever realize how much it would really -- affect me."
"I like them," Ilad answers. His grin flashes, abruptly rakish-brief across his features, with a spark of battle-bright vitality waking in his dark eyes. "They mean somebody missed."
Brent laughs, and the sound is even unexpected to him. He swallows it quickly as if embarrassed, but his gaze is bright on that flash of grin across Ilad's expression. "I never thought if it like that."
"Walking in the valley of the shadow of death," Ilad says, smile fading but for the lingering glint in his dark gaze, "you are very much alive. I am very much alive."
"How can you have been so close to death so many times and still hold so much back?" Brent shakes his head with an expression of soft incredulity. "After the bank, I just wanted -- I wanted to /change/ things."
Ilad raises his eyebrows, high towards his hairline. "How so?"
"Some things seemed to so much more important," Brent says, edging towards vaguery with a sense that part of him regrets bringing it up. "Some things seemed -- so much less so."
Ilad pads back across the room toward him, both hands curling loosely around the painting tube as he folds into the opposite corner of the couch. He looks at Brent with eyebrows still swept high.
"Painting," Brent says by way of example. "Staying here suddenly seemed -- stupid. All these fears -- they're still there, I'm still terrified, but -- the idea that they were /keeping/ me here -- it seems so ridiculous now." He fails to add any other examples.
"Ah," Ilad breathes out. But he fails to answer the question.
"People should -- /live/." Brent breathes out the word like it is life itself all wrapped into a gift of air and voice. "People should live because you don't know when you're going to stop."
"L'chaim," Ilad answers, a little dry, but not insincere; he curls the knuckles of a finger against his temple and slants a sidelong look at Brent. "In many ways my self-control is why I am still alive, however."
"And the other ways?" Brent asks with the slightest smile that slips just softly into sadness.
Mild and bland, Ilad answers: "Luck -- and the poor aim of others."
"No, I mean--" Brent purses his lips and plans out his words. "The parts of your self-control that aren't keeping you alive."
"All one package." Ilad gestures, an idle sweep of his fingers indicating the full lean length of his body, and shakes his head. "I do not know."
Brent accepts this with a small nod, considers it with a lowered gaze that lingers just long enough to take in the length of body Ilad's gesture indicates before drawing away.
Both hands curling loosely around the painting once more, Ilad considers the rolled canvas he holds in hand for a long moment's quiet.
Brent is quiet as well. Then, with a slow movement of one hand, he reaches to brush his knuckles soft against Ilad's cheek; the touch lingers a moment, then draws away just as slowly. "I'm sorry," he says simply.
For a heartbeat, Ilad's expression registers something like guilt, or shame, or rue, or regret -- or some strange amalgam of them all. He shakes his head, and looks away.
Brent smooths one hand against one denimed thigh and the other against the sofa cushion beneath him. His fingers grip lightly. "It would probably," he says, gently now, "be better if you'd go now."
Ilad's answering murmur is not English, but it need not be; its sound is a low sigh, and its form, for all its incomprehensibility, is simple, and coupled with motion as he unfolds again from the sofa.
His pale gaze lifts and follows when Ilad stands. Brent considers a few different words before offering a simple "Thank you." The reasons for his thanks are left unsaid.
The cock of his eyebrow answer to those thanks, Ilad says: "Shalom," and takes the painting in his arms, and walks otherwise quiet to the door.
Brent makes no attempt at a foreign tongue. He says, "Goodnight," instead. And watches Ilad go.
Complicated questions.
I should not have tried to explain. I should have allowed him to see me without excuse, without defense. Let that righteous anger cauterize the loss he already feels; I could see the fire in him, and I should have stoked it. But I could not do it.
I wish I did not know that they had spoken of it. I feel flanked.
The apartment still holds the scent of the dinner that was cooked recently: something involving onions and garlic and maybe cream. Mostly it just smells like it was probably a good dinner. Brent is waiting on the sofa, bad leg stretched out on the cushions, the other bent off the side. A worn, battered paperback is held open in one hand while the other elbow props up against the back of the sofa. He's wearing well-worn jeans and a pale blue button-down that is rumpled and soft with several years' wearing. Ilad's painting is all huge and overlarge, but it's angled away from the door for the time being.
The roar of the motorcycle is the usual herald of Ilad's arrival, but this time it does not come; rather, the hum of a quieter engine comes before the knock on Brent's door, since forewarned that he will have a large painting to schlep, he has made use of one of the larger vehicles in the Titan garage for the occasion. He stands at the door for a long moment, standing in his dark collared shirt of deep grey and black slacks as though composing himself, and finally does knock.
Something in Brent's countenance hesitates at the sound of the knock; the book lowers to his lap, and he watches the door for a moment. Then he dogears a page to hold his place, sets the book on the coffee table, and picks up his cane to make his way over to open the door. "Hey," he says, a little quiet, but there is a hint of warmth in his small smile as he angles to allow Ilad's entrance.
Ilad slips inside past Brent, clasping his shoulder as he enters and moves beyond him; he says, "Hey," and looks about the room with a slight lift to his dark brows, faint smile tugging more at one corner of his mouth than at the other. "How are you doing?"
"All right." Brent's smile warms a touch at the clasp to his shoulder, though there remains some hesitant distance in his expression that he fights with. "You know. Hobbling along." His expression grows a touch sheepish when he tells Ilad, "It's not going to fit through the door -- I checked earlier. I'll take it off the stretchers and roll it up after you get a look at it."
The touch of Ilad's hand carries with it the slow burn of a long fever, seeping through his fingers and through fabric; coolness breathes there instead, when he draws his hand away again. "Large," he answers, humor a dry spark in his dark eyes as he tips his head toward Brent. "Too large for doorways. Well, it is not as though I was not forewarned."
"Doorways aren't /really/ all that large," Brent mock-argues with the twitch of humor pulling at one corner of his mouth. "I barely fit through them." His gaze watches Ilad with an attention a touch closer than his usual. "There was -- a lot to fit in. I tried for too much." He hobble-walks a few steps to a spot with a better view of the too-large painting and looks to Ilad to follow. His gaze remains on the other's face, waiting the subtleties of his reaction once he looks upon the painting.
Jean-Paul was correct: it is ambitious. Perhaps too much yearned to be included, too many stories, too much feeling, but Israel is, after all, an ancient place, and that informs color and subject and mood. Browns and reds and blues and greens all mark out barest suggestions of the land but remain far from landscape; rather, it is the emotion that achieves clarity. Sunburned passion, aching control, the hint of violence. It's a little as if Brent took Ilad and transposed him as a symbol for his home.
Ilad is not the easiest man to read; the changes in his expression are subtle, ruled as much by his controlled reserve as by what emotion, what passion may burn beneath his surface. His gaze marks the shapes of the Galilee blended in their way with the kind of busy longing of the painting, and he is very still and very quiet for what seems a long time. The tip of his tongue flickers out to wet his lips before he swallows, dark eyes finally cast down and away from the painting for a heartbeat or so before he gathers himself to speak. "Ah," he exhales. "Yes. There is a lot, is there not?"
"Yes," Brent agrees simply. Something in his form relaxes, finding some relief in Ilad's reaction, however small it is. "It's a little funny," he says, turning his pale eyes to the painting. "Everything in America is just -- so /young/. There is so little to it -- comparatively."
"In ways, we are a younger country," Ilad answers, with the slight curl of humor twisting his lips, a shade of irony in tone and in the slant of his gaze as he turns it back toward the painting. "More intense, more vicious, less dignified. Yet when you walk the shores of the Galilee, when you come to know my people--" He turns out a hand, outward, in an open gesture. "We are not a young people, we children of Israel. It is true."
Even with that relief having settled on his shoulders, a quiet thrum of tension remains, not quite satisfied. Brent schools his best face of professionalism when he asks, "Do you like it?" Almost a moment later, he adds, "It's all right if you don't. You're paying for it; it's your commission."
"I was very vague with my request, because I thought to give you the freedom to paint," Ilad answers. His voice is quiet, his gaze steady on the expanse of desert color that sweeps the broad expanse of the canvas before him. "I knew you would provide me with something very great, my friend, and so you have done."
Brent keeps his smile small with an effort, reigning in the urge to grin wide and bright in some effort not to break the quiet of the moment. "I'm glad you like it," he answers in a similarly low voice. "It was--" He looks back to the painting, thoughtful. "--a very educational process."
Eyebrows arching, Ilad glances back at Brent, marking his expression with a contemplative flicker of his eyes. "Ah?" he says. "What have you learned?"
"A lot of history," Brent replies with a light ghosting of humor as his gaze slants back to his friend. "America's really pretty awful about education in certain areas." Something else ghosts there, unsure, farther in the back of his gaze.
"Oh, yes," Ilad answers, humor a darkling note in his voice as he ducks his head. "You learn nobody's history but your own, hm? Well. I was not thinking on giving out a history lesson, exactly, but--" He opens his hands, something wry in the skew of the gesture. "And so. I have never commissioned a painting before," he adds. "I will write you a check?"
"I've always liked the research," Brent says with mild reassurance. "The -- getting a feel for something. I certainly didn't /need/ to keep reading as much as I did, but -- I wanted to. So." His weight shifts slightly, and his countenance turns slightly discomforted at Ilad's question. "You don't need to do that," he says quietly.
Eyeing Brent with the sidelong slant of a glance, Ilad's mouth twitches at one corner with a smile. "Are you going to tell me I am no longer paying? You may be right that it is difficult to make a living as an artist, my friend, but it is impossible to make a living as an artist if you do not charge for your work."
Brent sighs out a breath with raggedy-edged humor. "I'm going to be terrible at this, aren't I?" He rakes a quick hand through his hair. "It just -- feels so strange. Like putting a price tag on home for your best friend." But: money is money, and a living is a living. "I guess you can write me a check."
"I would not have commissioned a painting from you," Ilad answers gently, "if I did not intend to start your business off on the correct foot." He even brought his checkbook, tucked into the pocket of his dark leather jacket which I forgot that he was wearing; he pulls this out, along with a pen, and moves toward Brent's kitchen counter so that he can lean his hip up against it as he makes out the check. "Money is not always cold, you know. Transactions are a symbol, as much as anything else."
Brent traces the lean of Ilad's body with his gaze, slight and brief, while the man's eyes are dropped to his check. Then a smile shivers to life, and he acquiesces with a quiet "I guess." He sets down his cane so he can shift the painting carefully to a waiting empty spot on the floor -- where does he even have this floor space? -- and settles down on one end with a pair of needle nose pliers that he got out before Ilad's arrival. He works at the staples in the back of the painting with a diligent efficience that suggests experience.
Signing the check with a flourish of his hand, Ilad tears it out of the book and holds it toward Brent between the first two fingers of his right hand, pen closed into his opposite palm. "Ah," he says, flicking his gaze over the business of the staples. "I will leave it here." He sets it on the counter, and draws a long breath through his nose as he straightens, tucking book and pen away again.
"Sure." Brent glances up amidst his work to offer a quiet smile. "Sorry. I would have done it before you came, but I wanted you to be able to see it right." He piles staples into a little pile on the hardwood as he goes. "Hopefully I won't step on any of these later."
Ilad narrows his gaze down at the pile of staples with a faint frown tugging on his mouth. "If you injure yourself on my staples I will be very cross with you," he tells him, tone a layer of bland disguising dry humor.
"I'll do my best to avoid it," Brent promises. He looks up at Ilad with humor drawn thin over his expression before he turns his gaze back down to the process of pulling out the long, industrial staples.
Folding his hands behind his back, Ilad pads over nearer to Brent's side and sort of hovers, head tipped slightly to one side. "Is there some way I can be of use?" he asks after a pause.
"You could relax," Brent suggests without looking up. (Staples require concentration.) "Or make sure that no staples go scampering off into the wilderness of my apartment." The sense of something unsaid grows, humor taking on a covering, almost evasive quality.
"I doubt the utility of either," Ilad answers, gaze narrowing. He stays where he is, studying Brent's features in profile.
"I'm more relaxed when you're relaxed. That's a utility." Brent glances back up, very brief this time before looking back down. He shifts his position, careful of his leg, to the next side of the painting, leaving behind the pile of staples from the first side.
"Do I seem tense?" Ilad's emphasis on the personal pronoun is not pronounced, but it does exist.
Brent goes quiet a bit at that faint emphasis. "You're a little hovery," he says after a moment's breath.
Helpful, Ilad takes a step backward.
Brent huffs a quiet breath of dry-edged, voiceless laughter. "Jean-Paul told me--" He stops, both his words and his actions, unsure of how to continue. His gaze remains lowered.
Ilad's eyebrows both arch, his expression and his silence both expectant as he marks Brent's lowered gaze, the flavor and angle of his tension. However, he is of no help.
"He mentioned -- one of your coworkers," Brent says. He's resumed removing staples, but slower now, more careful -- just the same quality as his words. "I think I'd met her before, actually. If it's the same woman. From -- Bahrain."
Ilad holds himself very still for several heartbeats, saying nothing, and not quite meeting Brent's gaze; his brow furrows, his hands still clasped firmly behind him. Then he lifts his dark eyes, with the cock of an eyebrow, and says: "What of her?"
"He said that you acted--" Brent's lips thin; he reconsiders his words. "He thinks that you -- don't like her. Because of--" It is very hard for him to say. One can almost see the vaguest hints of surprise when he realizes how hard it is. "Because of where she's from." He pulls out another staple. Slowly. He doesn't lift his gaze to Ilad's.
"Interesting," Ilad says. He settles his weight in a firm plant on both feet and looks -- past Brent, gaze centered a little past his ear. "I do not think that I would put it in those terms," he says at length.
Brent's hands still. He finally lifts his gaze to Ilad's face. "What terms would you put it in?"
"Bahrain is nowhere in particular to me." Ilad's face is set, his expression composed. Beyond that, it is difficult to read anything there beyond a self-control wrought in iron and reinforced with steel. "But her people have sworn oaths to sweep mine into the sea. To soak the land of our fathers in our blood. I would put it in those terms. It is the blood that matters."
It is a harsh thing to hear. Harsh enough that Brent is quiet for a long stretch of silence in the face of it. But not forever. He breathes in a slow lungful of hair, silent and through his nose, and exhales just as quietly. "And what has /she/ sworn?"
Hands falling from their clasp behind his back to rest at his sides, Ilad is silent for a long moment in his own turn. The rise of his temper is reflected in the faint narrowing of his gaze, in the slight clamp of his jaw, in the way he holds himself utterly still. He says, "That is an easy question."
The slide of Brent's jaw tightens, and there is a low burn of passion in his gaze. Reckless and ignorant, perhaps, but there and alive. And mingled with it, in the cinch of his expression, the lowered brows, some sense of disappointment. "Then it should have an easy answer."
"So it does," Ilad answers, voice very flat.
Brent goes silent. He turns the slow burn of his gaze back to his work and starts pulling out stables with a touch more vehemence then they strictly need; his shoulders are held wired with tension.
Ilad says nothing to this silence. Slowly, one of his hands closes into a fist. He slants his gaze downward, studying his knuckles.
"You can't hate someone for something their people did that they were not a part of," Brent says, voice quiet and tensely edged with unhappiness.
"I do not hate this girl," Ilad answers, his voice stiff and flat as much as his body is stiff and still.
"And you can't judge her for actions taken by others," Brent continues, stubbornly now.
"Can I not?" Ilad's voice has dropped; it becomes very soft, and his accent seems to have drawn over it in a thicker cloak. "What I cannot do, Brent, is grant my trust to this woman-child. Not after what I have seen from her people. Not after what I have experienced at their hands."
The differentiation between their positioning is suddenly and keenly felt by the man on the floor; Brent drops the pliers onto the hardwood and scrabbles for his cane to lift himself. (From the sofa? Easy. From the floor is harder.) "She's not /them/. How can you judge her for what other people have done instead of what /she/ has done?"
"I know what I can and cannot do," Ilad answers simply, coolly. The heat of him is confined to the burn and snap in his dark, dark eyes. "You have spent these hours, these days studying my country, my people. How can you stand there in judgment over me?"
"Because I'm not the one defending /racism/." The words tumble out over-quick, and it's clear from Brent's expression that they were unintended. The word sounds ugly and crass out loud, and hearing it out loud flushes his skin with anger or shame -- it is difficult to tell. "You can't honestly ask me to think that's okay."
Ilad lifts his head and looks at Brent with a hard-eyed stillness. "Okay or not," he says in a growl shaded low and dark. "It is."
"No, Ilad," Brent says with something hardening in his voice. "Racism isn't something that 'just is.' And tolerating it -- /encouraging/ it -- is what /causes/ these wars."
The set of Ilad's jaw works for a moment, and then stills. He stands there with his teeth gritted shut, his silence that of a man who does not speak because his words will be unforgivable. He says nothing.
Brent's teeth click a few times behind his lips, as if literally biting back his words. Then he turns, quite suddenly, and takes a step back to where he left off at the painting. He lowers himself down too quickly and ends up hissing in air through his clenched teeth when his leg protests. He stays in that still, tense positioning of one working through the aftermath of sudden pain even after it fades quickly.
"Do you see faces behind your eyes," Ilad asks, his voice uninflected, quiet, his expression reflecting the lingering stiffness of his very straight spine, "when you feel the pain of that gunshot wound?"
Brent has already started to relax from the quick pain, already started to reach for the pliers -- and then stops. He considers a few responses before going with the most honest: "Sometimes."
"You have seen my scars. Not all of them, perhaps, but some. There were faces behind each of those scars. Faces of Arabs." Ilad shifts his weight from foot to foot, forcibly relaxing his hand from its fist to open it in a slow spread of his fingers. "There are other wounds, wounds that have not left a mark. Lies I have ripped from people's lips in a tongue I know as well as my own. Bombs I have stopped. Bombs I have failed to stop. Bombs which blasted a great hole in my career. In my life, as I knew it. A life I dedicated to protecting my people from the machinations, from the violence of Palestine." Arab he says like any other word; Palestine, though, Palestine he speaks like poison. "Children shooting guns at me. Barely more than children, killing us from the windows of their holy places. All of these faces. My own scars. The scars of my people. Brent, do not speak to me as though I do not know that this is ugly. But these are the faces in my nightmares."
Brent is very, very quiet as Ilad speaks. His gaze is averted, settled down to the painting on the floor but not quite seeing it. Face down as it is, he couldn't see it if he tried. And then he picks up the pliers and starts working, slowly, on the remaining staples in the canvas; despite its size, there are not many left. His silence has slipped from the wired tension of anger to something weightier, more collapsed, a quiet sort of mild grief. He says nothin.
After this great flood of speech, Ilad has fallen quiet. He does not move, either, his weight planted and balanced where he stands.
Staple after staple slides out of canvas and wood, and then Brent is left with the bare wooden stretchers. He sets it aside and then gathers the canvas to roll it, slowly and carefully, with the painting on the outside. And then he has this rolled painting and he just -- sits. "I would never say you shouldn't protect your people," he finally says in a very quiet voice. "But looking at a person and seeing--" His voice breaks off, wound with too many thoughts and feelings, and he holds the rolled painting up.
Ilad finally moves, padding forward across the brief distance between them. He slides his fingers over the rolled canvas, the brush of his hand briefly touching Brent's as he angles to take the painting. "I do not know," he says after a long moment's quiet, "what you want me to say."
"Neither do I," Brent admits in a soft, unhappy voice. He reaches to grip the edge of the coffee table, hesitates; then, after a moment, he lifts a hand to Ilad in silent request.
Tucking the rolled painting beneath his left arm, Ilad clasps Brent's hand firmly in his strong right and pulls him to his feet, moving to angle in towards him with the silent offer of his shoulder in support.
There's a moment where he simply seems to leech warmth, when he's drawn close with one hand lingers in Ilad's overwarm clasp and the other settles tight against the solid muscle of his shoulder. Several thoughts cross the open book that is Brent's face, but they are too many and too close, and he moves to slide both hands away. "I feel like you've said that a lot," he says, not without a sad, tired humor. "Not knowing what I want you to say. Do I really always want something from you?" Without his cane, his weight is held uneven, but stable for the moment.
"Do you not?" Ilad's eyebrows arch, his voice quiet. His mouth twitches at one corner, a kind of darker hue to the expression behind the slow sweep of his eyelashes.
Looking as if unsure how to answer that question, Brent makes no attempt. After a marked hesitation, at least. He shifts back to angle away and reach, one hand set on the coffee table for balance, to retrieve his cane. When he straightens and settles his weight more evenly, he doesn't immediately turn back to Ilad. "No," he says, a sudden stubbornness the marks the lie in his voice. "I don't always want something from you."
"Mm," is Ilad's reply to that, a wealth of amused skepticism buried in the single hummed syllable, in the tug of the shadowed smile that pulls at his lips.
"Stop." Where Ilad seems to have found some buried humor, Brent's tension seems to reknit across his body and expression. "Can you just--" Silence hangs for a moment, interrupting. "Can you just go?" He doesn't look at Ilad.
Dark eyes sliding away, Ilad studies a point on the far wall for a long moment. He says nothing in response. He turns, instead, and walks to the door almost wholly without sound. The next audible noise he makes is really that of the doorknob.
When he hears the doorknob, Brent suddenly turns and says, "Wait. I'm sorry. I don't mean--" He takes in an unsteady breath. "This used to be easy. And -- solid. And now it's messy and complicated and -- /hard/, and I just--" He runs out of words to say. "I do always want something from you. I just don't like the fact that I do."
Ilad stands quite still for a long moment with his hand on the doorknob. He studies his own knuckles.
"I miss you," Brent says in a very small voice that is almost ashamed of its own vulnerability. "I know that's stupid to say when you're right here, but--" He swallows and draws his gaze away to the sofa. Neutral. "I can't find the spot that's simple. And everything is just all wrapped up in you leaving and -- feelings that I have no business having and--" He hesitates. "I'm sorry."
"Brent," Ilad says, in a voice gone a little sharp with exasperation, "we were not /especially/ simple before I went to work for Titan."
"But it didn't exactly /help/." Brent's sharpness is muted, born more in helpless frustration. His weight shifts again, and he finally succumbs to the demands on his healing leg and hobbles over to the sofa to sit down. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to -- I don't know."
Ilad turns back away from the door to face Brent again, his arm curled over the rolled tube of the painting he has bought, and the shake of his head is slow. "Perhaps not," he says.
Brent takes a slow, steadying breath. "It doesn't matter," he decides. "It doesn't matter if it's simple or complicated, if it's easy or hard. It doesn't matter whatever feelings I have or don't have. You're my friend. That's what matters." He hesitates before adding in a quieter voice, "You're one of my best friends."
"You are one of my few," Ilad answers, with an odd note mingled with the dryness of his voice as he inclines his head. His thumb glides over the rolled canvas under his arm, and his gaze falls, hovering around the region of Brent's feet as he stands across the room from him. "But I am the same man today that I was a month ago. Two months ago."
"I don't think I'm the same person I was two months ago," Brent says very quietly.
"Well," Ilad says. He clears his throat, on an acknowledging note, and adds: "--...Give or take. A little, here and there."
"I don't think I've even seen your scars," Brent says, far belated, with quiet, humorless laughter that is not quite given voice. Then he catches himself. "No. I can remember the one."
Ilad marks off their places on his body, turning to brush his knuckles over his hip, and then down over his thigh where his own ancient bullet hole scores his skin beneath the dark of his slacks. And then back up, to his other side. "There are a -- few."
"I don't like scars," Brent admits. "Not on people I care about. I mean -- not because of appearances or anything, just -- thinking about someone hurting you. It--" He gestures at himself now, as if trying to describe some indescribable reaction. "I didn't ever realize how much it would really -- affect me."
"I like them," Ilad answers. His grin flashes, abruptly rakish-brief across his features, with a spark of battle-bright vitality waking in his dark eyes. "They mean somebody missed."
Brent laughs, and the sound is even unexpected to him. He swallows it quickly as if embarrassed, but his gaze is bright on that flash of grin across Ilad's expression. "I never thought if it like that."
"Walking in the valley of the shadow of death," Ilad says, smile fading but for the lingering glint in his dark gaze, "you are very much alive. I am very much alive."
"How can you have been so close to death so many times and still hold so much back?" Brent shakes his head with an expression of soft incredulity. "After the bank, I just wanted -- I wanted to /change/ things."
Ilad raises his eyebrows, high towards his hairline. "How so?"
"Some things seemed to so much more important," Brent says, edging towards vaguery with a sense that part of him regrets bringing it up. "Some things seemed -- so much less so."
Ilad pads back across the room toward him, both hands curling loosely around the painting tube as he folds into the opposite corner of the couch. He looks at Brent with eyebrows still swept high.
"Painting," Brent says by way of example. "Staying here suddenly seemed -- stupid. All these fears -- they're still there, I'm still terrified, but -- the idea that they were /keeping/ me here -- it seems so ridiculous now." He fails to add any other examples.
"Ah," Ilad breathes out. But he fails to answer the question.
"People should -- /live/." Brent breathes out the word like it is life itself all wrapped into a gift of air and voice. "People should live because you don't know when you're going to stop."
"L'chaim," Ilad answers, a little dry, but not insincere; he curls the knuckles of a finger against his temple and slants a sidelong look at Brent. "In many ways my self-control is why I am still alive, however."
"And the other ways?" Brent asks with the slightest smile that slips just softly into sadness.
Mild and bland, Ilad answers: "Luck -- and the poor aim of others."
"No, I mean--" Brent purses his lips and plans out his words. "The parts of your self-control that aren't keeping you alive."
"All one package." Ilad gestures, an idle sweep of his fingers indicating the full lean length of his body, and shakes his head. "I do not know."
Brent accepts this with a small nod, considers it with a lowered gaze that lingers just long enough to take in the length of body Ilad's gesture indicates before drawing away.
Both hands curling loosely around the painting once more, Ilad considers the rolled canvas he holds in hand for a long moment's quiet.
Brent is quiet as well. Then, with a slow movement of one hand, he reaches to brush his knuckles soft against Ilad's cheek; the touch lingers a moment, then draws away just as slowly. "I'm sorry," he says simply.
For a heartbeat, Ilad's expression registers something like guilt, or shame, or rue, or regret -- or some strange amalgam of them all. He shakes his head, and looks away.
Brent smooths one hand against one denimed thigh and the other against the sofa cushion beneath him. His fingers grip lightly. "It would probably," he says, gently now, "be better if you'd go now."
Ilad's answering murmur is not English, but it need not be; its sound is a low sigh, and its form, for all its incomprehensibility, is simple, and coupled with motion as he unfolds again from the sofa.
His pale gaze lifts and follows when Ilad stands. Brent considers a few different words before offering a simple "Thank you." The reasons for his thanks are left unsaid.
The cock of his eyebrow answer to those thanks, Ilad says: "Shalom," and takes the painting in his arms, and walks otherwise quiet to the door.
Brent makes no attempt at a foreign tongue. He says, "Goodnight," instead. And watches Ilad go.
Complicated questions.