Ilad, Kelsey
She is a scrappy fighter, it must be said, with a flair for improvisation given strength by a thorough foundation in training. But scrappy as she, without the aid of some sort of mutational cheatery, the fight is really only so long as Ilad wants it to be. Eventually Kelsey ends up pinned in some manner or another, and, though she shifts in a thorough testing of Ilad's hold, eventually her body relaxes. There is laughter on her breath, bright and exhilarated, when she says, "Yield." Her sports tank has started to cling along the neckline where exertion has brought a light sheen of sweet across her skin, and her hair mussed a little out of her pony-tail: just enough for stray curls to frizz around her hairline without actually getting in the way of her vision.
Ilad rises up off her, on the brace of his knee shifted to the mat in the course of regaining his feet. He offers her a hand up wordlessly, the glow of febrile heat undeniable in proximity as in the touch of his skin. He is dressed in grey: grey cotton workout pants, lighter grey T-shirt. There is a whisper of humor warming his dark eyes in his silence, sweat a light touch on his golden olive skin.
Kelsey clasps the hand easily and hoists herself up to bouncing feet. "Brilliant," she says with eyes crinkled with bright humor. "/Fuck/." She smooths back the frizzed curls that are clinging to the sweat along her hairline with brisk, laughing energy. "You are /really/ hot, by the way," she tells him with a wide grin before she takes a few strides to where her gym bag has been set in a corner to dig around for her water bottle.
"Thank you," Ilad intones with a particular irony shading around the paired syllables. He follows after on slower strides, paired to the bland hue of his expression, as he moves to collect his own water bottle.
It takes a moment for Kelsey to realize the more obvious meaning of what she just said, and she ends up laughing brightly when it clicks. "I mean literally," she tells him with a crooked grin as she uncaps her water bottle. "Want to come to Antarctica? I somehow agreed to go skiing there with Jean-Paul, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to freeze to death."
"Antarctica," Ilad repeats with a kind of skepticism going right to his formation of the syllables, the stark precision of their shape undermining the usual drape of his desert accent. "Antarctica?"
"{I /know/,}" Kelsey says on another laugh and slipping comfortably into Hebrew. "{We were talking about how we've been to every continent but Australia and Antarctica -- us personally, there /was/ one group that ended up in Australia -- and how we go all these places but never actually get to /be/ there. So we're talking about vacation, and he says Australia first, but then he starts wondering if there's skiing in Antarctica...}" She waves her hand: so on and so forth. "{I decided I want to go to Australia when it's warm.}" She tips her bottle up and takes a long drink.
"{So now you are going to go skiing with the penguins,}" Ilad says, following the switch of language blithely enough; his Hebrew comes readily, rapidly to his tongue, as though he's barely aware of having made the change at all. He cracks the cap on his water bottle, turning it slowly in his hand with eyebrows lifting high towards his hairline. "{Is that the coldest place upon the entire Earth?}"
"{I'm pretty sure it is,}" Kelsey sighs out between sips of water. Recapping the bottle, she continues, "{And apparently if I fall and break something, he will be abandoning me there. To the cold and the penguins.}"
"{I am not really seeing the appeal,}" Ilad says, with the twitch of a shoulder in either a partial shrug or a mock shudder. "{For you to go and freeze and to be possibly tormented by penguins.}"
"{Something about spending time with one of my best friends or something.}" Kelsey gives another sigh, clearly for dramatic effect, but it's followed up with a more contained smile and a half-shift of a shrug. "{I've always wanted to see him ski,}" she admits. "{And if we don't freeze, it ought to be fun.}"
"Ah," Ilad exhales on a low note, with the tip of his head and the barest shadow of a smile on his lips. He takes a long swallow from his bottle. "{Thus my invitation, so that you do not freeze.}"
"{I don't know if I can actually invite you,}" Kelsey says in an undertone that carries a hint of apology. "{Jean-Paul's more particular about who he spends time with than I am. /But/. That was the idea, yes. Pretty awful of me, really, inviting you along to use you for your body.}" Her grin grows a little crooked.
Both of Ilad's eyebrows go up, eyes lighting with a laugh he does not quite voice, though the faint tremor of his mirth reflects in speech. "{More particular than you are,}" he repeats. "{I see.}"
"{Well, you know him a bit. He's very -- private.}" Kelsey shrugs again and crouches in front of her bag to dig out a sports towel. "{He doesn't make friends as easily as I do.}"
"{Interesting,}" Ilad says, standing straight and still on the mat with his eyebrows remaining lifted up. His hands fold across the bottle, held before him.
Kelsey's eyebrows lift to match as she looks back at him over her shoulder. "{Is it?}" she asks, gaze gone curious.
Ilad expands, quite mildly of tone: "{I consider Jean-Paul a friend, for my part. You, I do not find that I yet know.}"
"Ahh." Kelsey straightens back up with the towel in hand and wipes it across the back of her neck. "{Well, you knew him before you got here,}" she points out. "{But I don't mean to imply that I'm friends with everyone I come across. Just that Jean-Paul and I -- function differently in that respect.}"
"{Because he is so much more particular,}" Ilad answers, with the renewal of that low tremor of humor in his voice.
"{So I'm either insulting my own taste or flattering you,}" Kelsey realizes with brightening humor.
Ilad smiles, very slightly, and lifts his water bottle to his mouth for a much longer swallow.
"{If I were you, I'd go for the latter,}" Kelsey suggests. The towel slides, mopping up sweet, across her face and chest. "{I'd rather prefer to think people are flattering me.}"
"{How do you go to Antarctica?}" Ilad asks with a gathering puzzlement in his expression as he glances back at her. "{Is there lodging? It must be too cold for a camping expedition.}"
"{By plane,}" Kelsey deadpans. She settles the towel around her neck and stretches her arms up over her head. "{Hell if I know. There must be, mustn't there? I'm sure there are other people crazy enough to want to do shit like this.}"
Ilad gives Kelsey a skeptical glance, perhaps for her level of vacation preparedness at this stage of life. "{Are you sure you are actually going to Antarctica and not just making a lot of jokes about penguins?}"
"{I am -- seventy-five percent sure we are actually going to Antarctica,}" Kelsey says soberly. "{I don't think he jokes about skiing much. Not really a topic for him to joke about.}"
Ilad cocks an eyebrow at her. "Well," he says, a placeholder word that works far better in English than in Hebrew.
"{And I know that he actually does want to go on a real vacation,}" Kelsey continues. "{And he asked me to pick between Australia and Antarctica. So -- yes, I'm pretty sure we're going. Sometime.}"
"{Then I hope you do not freeze,}" Ilad tells her blandly.
"{Me, too.}" Kelsey cants her head at him. "{So does you running a million degrees mean you're better or worse at dealing with the cold?}"
"{I grew up in a desert,}" Ilad answers with a warming humor in his voice, the turn of his hand outward a vague accompanying gesture. How it relates to his body's generation of heat, he does not really know. "{I do not do well with cold.}"
"{I think I'd enjoy living somewhere where it's in the low twenties all the time,}" Kelsey says with a hint of wist to her voice. Ahh, for an eternally temperate climate. "{So you probably wouldn't come to Antarctica anyways.}"
"{On the contrary,}" Ilad says, with a slight inclination of his head. "{In good conscience I would not allow my brothers and sisters in arms to freeze to death.}"
Kelsey laughs in a bit of surprised delight at his response. "{Even if it means we'd all be cuddling up to you to leech body heat?}"
Ilad's response comes to that comes at a slight delay. Slight. "{I had not really considered that point,}" he says.
"{Did you think you would keep us from freezing by your warm personality?}" Kelsey teases lightly.
Ilad slaps his hand at his thigh where a pocket would be if he were not in workout pants, and then opens it out toward her. "{I usually have a lighter on me,}" he answers, dry to her lightness.
"{I'd hope we'd be smart enough to bring fire fuel ourselves.}"
"{I don't need fuel,}" Ilad answers, with the lift of both eyebrows, "{and I can get considerably more heat than a wood fire.}"
"Touche." Not in Hebrew. NOT EVEN IN ENGLISH. Growing curious once more, Kelsey asks, "{How hot can you go?}"
"{At least hot enough to melt steel,}" Ilad answers, with the brief flash of a smile across his expression. "{Beyond that, hotter, but I haven't yet determined how to measure. I keep meaning to speak with Sikorski about finding some adequate measure of temperature.}"
Kelsey offers a low, appreciative whistle as to that particular limit. "{Impressive. There's always ways to measure. When i had his position, I ended up asking Dr. Grey at Xavier's for suggestions for equipment to help Lance train. With years of experience with mutation training, they've put together some handy devices for it.}"
"{At worst, he will have to order an industrial--}" Ilad pauses. "An industrial pyrometer," he says in English, his mother tongue failing him in this regard. You don't often need to say 'industrial pyrometer' in Hebrew.
"{At the worst,}" Kelsey agrees. There is some humor that twitches in her lips as he switches languages. "{It's useful intel to have, though.}"
"{That is what Jean-Paul says,}" Ilad answers, screwing the cap back onto his water bottle with a slow turn of his fingers.
"{Well, we are both very intelligent people,}" Kelsey says with wide-eyed sobriety. "{Sometimes we say the same thing.}"
Ilad arches his eyebrows at her, finishing the reattachment of the bottle cap.
"{Also, I got used to the mutation-training-mindset,}" Kelsey concludes with a flash of a grin.
"Ah," Ilad says, with a tip of his head in her direction. "{I have not really spoken with your successor.}"
There's a moment's pause, thoughtful, before Kelsey says, "{He's sharp as anything. I mean, I like Tom a lot, but disregarding that -- he's very sharp. And he's -- the telepathy makes him able to help with training in a very particular way.}"
Ordinarily difficult to read, the twist of Ilad's expression at that last is not hard to interpret. He goes, "Mm."
Kelsey recognizes that twist, and it's not hard to make a certain assumption about Ilad's attitude. She is quiet for a moment, considering it, and then says, "{But obviously that would be up to whoever he was helping to train.}"
"{I don't imagine it would be of much help with a determination of flame temperature,}" Ilad intones with a certain irony; he lifts his free hand to stroke his knuckles over the line and curve of his jaw, shake of his head slight.
"{No,}" Kelsey agrees. "{I was generalizing, really.}"
Ilad tosses his water bottle from one hand to the other and inclines his head to her. He says "Well," again, but this time, he picks up from it with, "I should really shower before my next shift."
"Aye, of course," Kelsey says, slipping with him back into English with all the Scots-warmed accenting it implies. "Thanks for the session," she adds with a smile before reaching down to grab her gym bag and water bottle.
"You fought well," Ilad tells her with the shadow of a smile to answer on his lips before he turns to lope out toward the locker rooms and onward.
"Thank you," Kelsey replies, accepting the compliment with some sense of respect for its source. She spends a few moments stuffing things into her bag and adjusting it before following in the same direction, but he is likely already in the shower by the time she gets there anyways.
If she hurries she might catch a glimpse of naked back before he disappears into the shower room.
Hot.
It's true.