Adam, Ilad
It is getting late. Ilad is sitting quietly at the chair in the living room, slowly nursing tea from inside a thermos. He is starting to look a little run down and tired, but it is not yet time for him to chase somebody else out here to take a turn at the screens; he drinks the tea, his cuffs unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and one button down, and his tie nowhere to be seen.
How does Adam change clothes? Probably painfully. He's managed to change into pajamas, however, knit pants and a faded t-shirt from some corporate softball team. His arm is curled against his body in the plain sling offered by the hospital. He scuffs in all besocked, hair a little mussed from an attempt to sleep. He stops scuffing a little ways from Ilad, watching him quietly for a moment. "I suppose you don't need help looking at a screen," he says.
What, no nightcap? Ilad takes a longer swallow from the tea and then settles back in the chair, turning his gaze away from the feeds to cock an eyebrow at Adam. "Perhaps not," he says mildly, turning his hand outward in an open gesture and then curling his fingers inward. He adds, "Trouble sleeping?"
No nightcap. Perhaps he is assuming that their hosts won't come barging. Adam's smile is stiff and slight, not reaching his eyes. "It is not particularly uncommon," he says, forming the words a bit carefully.
"I suppose not," Ilad murmurs without chasing the caution of Adam's words. The night is dark and quiet as reflected on the screens. It is just like guard duty. He draws his thumb along the line of the thermos, and settles his head back, slowly melting some of the habitual straightness of his carriage into something of a more relaxed seat in the chair. "Does your injury trouble you?"
"It is certainly an unfamiliar sensation," Adam says, voice quiet with a dry sort of attempt at humor. "They sent me home with painkillers." He takes a few steps closer to the sofa and sets his good hand along the back.
"I am very familiar with these," Ilad confides. He glances down the length of himself in the chair, eyebrows quirking together, and then looks back to the feeds again, quieting a moment.
"I've seen." Adam then goes particularly, awkwardly quiet. "I'm just going to put the kettle on for some tea," he says after a brief silence and turns the short distance to the kitchen.
Ilad blinks, and turns his glance after Adam, but only briefly; he has feeds to watch.
It seems that Adam is going to stay in the kitchen for the entire time it takes to make a cup of tea, from heating the kettle to steeping the tea. But eventually he does come back, looking more composed, and seats himself silently on the sofa.
Ilad gives him a look as he returns. It is a look that it probably requires a strong fluency in eyebrow to properly interpret.
Adam is better at eyebrow than Harrison, though he is sleepy and drugged. But he probably isn't being completely honest in his understanding when he asks, "Did you want some?"
"No, thank you." Ilad picks up his thermos, left to wedge between thigh and the side of the chair, and tips it in Adam's direction demonstratively. The he rolls it between his hands, glancing back at the feeds again with a low sigh exhaled past his nose. "There are times," he remarks with a companionable kind of humor, "where I feel as though my role in life has been reduced to that of the world's most overpaid security guard."
Adam sips his tea, careful of the heat, as Ilad speaks. His smile is very slight in reply, but it comes a bit easier and more genuine. "I do not envy the lot," he says, "back at Home." Because presumably he doesn't get out of feed-watching duty here.
"No," Ilad says. He rests his fingers together, the thermos bound in the loose cage of his hands. His mouth twitches up at one corner. "No, I would not imagine so."
"I don't do well without work to keep my mind occupied," Adam says. His fingers curl around the warmed ceramic of his mug. "I find it stresses me."
"Oh," Ilad says, lifting his gaze to a brief contemplation of the ceiling. "I find my mind occupies itself."
"Mm." For a moment Adam is silent. Then he says, "I prefer the work."
"I am usually writing something," Ilad says with that quiet air of late night confidence; he lifts his thermos for another sip without looking up from the quiet screen. "The long quiet is good for that. Letting words ... steep. So to speak."
"I didn't know," Adam replies, which is perhaps an obvious answer, but it is coupled with the hint of drowsy curiosity in the lift of his brows. "What sorts of things do you write?"
Ilad's mouth skews in a kind of grimace, and his fingers trail an idle path through the air before they fall once more against his lap. "Just stories. Little nothings."
"Oh." Adam's gaze lingers on the line of that grimace and the invisible trail of Ilad's fingers before it draws away. After sipping his tea, he says, "I play piano. Some cello."
"Ah?" Ilad's gaze lifts, flicking back toward Adam with an echo of quiet curiosity in it. "I like music."
"It is difficult to go through a family like mine without a slew of extracurriculars," Adam says, tone shading dry once more. The humor fades into something more thoughtful. "It's -- something of a stress relief." His expression tightens with sudden realization. "I suppose I won't have access to it for a while."
Ilad cants his head, inclining towards Adam with a kind of quiet sympathy. "Recovery time," he says. "I hate it. I took a shot-- well." His fingers flicker again. Never mind where he took the shot. "This summer, and then again -- I grew rusty at all my pursuits. Save the pen, I suppose. The hazards of living overmuch in one's body. You climb the walls."
"Yes," Adam agrees in a murmur, "I suppose." He settles back against the sofa in an uncharacteristic slouch and sets his mug on one leg.
"Depending on what the doctors say," Ilad says, running his knuckles along the curve of his jaw, "you might speak to our mutual friend as to -- hm. Shortening the wait."
"Mm." Adam looks down to his mug, one thumb drawing along the rim, with an edged discomfort creeping into his posture.
Ilad eyes him unspeakingly for that silence, eyebrows twitching up.
After a rather telling hesitation, Adam says, "I don't think he'd care for me to ask."
"Oh, well, I suppose you will just have to be laid up physically for several months so as to avoid causing him momentary discomfort," Ilad answers, his voice gone particularly bland.
"Well." This silence is colored more particularly with the shadings of a man backed into a corner without an adequate answer he's wishing to share. Adam...sips his tea.
"Foolishness, Morpheus," Ilad reproves, although his tone is actually quite gentle for all the harshness of the message.
"Well," Adam says again. "Perhaps I will reconsider given a few weeks." His tone, however, remains unconvinced.
"It is your own foolishness to hold," Ilad says. "I feel no need to waste my breath on it." He shifts in the seat, leaning slightly forward to set aside his thermos on the floor, and then stretches, lacing his fingers together as he extends his arms. Soft noise escaping his mouth as he settles back in the chair again, he lets his head fall back against it, and studies the feeds. "I have faced terrorists before," he remarks, as though apropos of nothing much. "A whole war's worth of them."
The muscle of Adam's jaw twitches with a brief tightening, then settles once more. For a few moments he doesn't reply, and the crease of his brow is indicative of the awkwardness of not knowing the proper response. "I'm sorry," he says eventually.
Ilad's eyebrows twitch up again, and he glances back at Adam. He looks to the feeds once more, a long moment spent silent before he says: "But terrorists who opposed me for my blood, my faith and my people. Not terrorists who could call me a brother."
There is a moment of something like paranoia in which Adam starts to say, "I would never--" Then he stops, falling into the thoughtful quiet of comprehension. "I do not think," he says, "that they would want to claim me."
"No," Ilad says in a low, soft voice. "I think that they would want to claim you most of all."
Head tipped down and brow lowered, Adam's gazes askance at Ilad with his mouth thinning to a tight line.
Ilad looks back at Adam with a steady darkness to his gaze, a tautening edge waking in his jaw. "Fear is their greatest weapon," he says. "Fear of mutants. Of their power. Of our power."
"Better to leave me where I am, then," Adam says, voice edged with a bitter sardonicism, "than try to convert me. I'm obviously more use to them here."
"Are you?" Ilad asks quietly. Rather than stay nailed to his perch, he draws out of the chair in a slow shift of his limbs, rising to stand and then pacing on quiet steps towards Adam's couch.
Adam's gaze tracks the rise of Ilad's body without lifting his chin. Then he pulls it away sharply, fingers tightening around his mug, and says nothing.
Ilad does not ask the question again. He comes to rest standing beside Adam's couch, tall and straight and watching him.
"It is impolite to loom," Adam points out in a low voice.
"It is impolite to ignore a question," Ilad parries mildly.
"I don't know what you expect me to say," Adam says.
"I don't know either," Ilad says, an odd lightness in his voice. "Frequently I ask questions without knowing the answers."
Adam's gaze lifts as his lips twist in an acknowledging frown to Ilad's point. He sips his tea and says, "Most people don't pursue this line of conversation with me. I've started to learn to avoid it."
"Speak to me anyway," Ilad says. He steps to the side, and claims the other corner of Adam's couch. His gaze skips up, brief in its contemplation of the still largely dormant late night feeds, and then draws his eyes back to his injured companion.
"I've found these sorts of conversations end with me compared to rapists," Adam says with the slightest hint of a snap to his voice. After a moment, he adds in a more even voice, "I have nothing to say that you would enjoy hearing."
"Ah," Ilad says. Something about his aspect cools. He reaches across the space between them, touches his fingertip to Adam's nose, and then brings it back to his own. "Do not speak to someone else who is not here. Speak to me."
Adam, frankly, starts a little at the touch to his nose, like -- what? He blinks at Ilad a moment, then, jaw tensing, he says, "Well, it's wrong, isn't it." He forces himself to amend, "It feels wrong." He exhales slowly. "I've always felt wrong."
Ilad watches him silence for a beat, and looks away, his gaze seeking and finding the stillness beyond on the feeds, the same ordinary sights he has seen for these past long hours. He does not say anything for ticking seconds. Then he says, "What is right, then? Where may rightness be found, if you are wrong?"
Adam, perhaps inappropriately, laughs. It is a bitter note. "That's just it, isn't it?" he says. "Nothing to be done for it. But fear is not just the weapon they use. It's the weapon used against them."
"As do most swords have two edges," Ilad says, with a turn of his hand. He blinks once, a slow blink of his eyelids, and exhales. "I do not believe that you are wrong, {Adam}." If he says the name with its Hebraic pronunciation, is that /like/ not breaking cover? "But I do not believe that you are right, either. Nor I, either. But for all the pain it causes you, for all the bitter ache you seem to carry ... I could almost envy you your certainty."
"I used to have more of it," Adam says quietly, lips pursing as if the admittance leaves a bitter taste on his tongue.
Ilad rises again from his seat on the couch, glancing down at Adam with arched eyebrows. His mouth quirks to one side. "Well," he says. "My sympathies." He steps past Adam on the way back to his own seat, fingers falling to trail across his ininjured shoulder as he moves.
Adam tenses just slightly at the brush, and the way he says, "I'm sure," is perhaps not entirely convinced.
Ilad makes a low noise in his throat, glancing back at Adam as he moves toward the chair he abandoned. He shakes his head, and sits down again. "Doubt and I are old ... bosom companions," he says. "I have always walked in the grey shadow between wrong and right. As a soldier. As a questioner. As a Jew. As a man." He tips his head, and says, "I think that the ugliest truth must be cleaner than the cleanest half-truth ever made." And then he looks away again, falling quiet with his admission spent.
There is something respectful of this silence as it allows the weight of Ilad's admission to linger in the air. Eventually, Adam says, "It has been a long time that I have felt very sure of who I am. Enough that sometimes I might envy doubt."
Ilad watches the screens for a long moment's quiet, still and silent in his seat. He does not look back at Adam, but he does smile in a faint ghost of almost-humor, almost-rue. He says, "You would prefer the quicksand to the stone, would you?"
"There is a certain appeal in ambiguity," Adam replies, catching on that ghostly, rueful thread. "If I cannot be right, I could at least be unsure."
"From where I stand," Ilad says, closing his eyes in a slow shuttering of dark lashes against olive-gold skin, "it carries very little appeal."
Adam watches Ilad a long time in silence. Then, after setting his mug down on an end table, he smooths his hand down the fabric of his pajama pants. "Well," he says. The rest of his words are held carefully behind his teeth.
Ilad blinks his eyes open with a quiet startle, as though finding himself on the edge of a doze in the quiet and the gloom. He blinks again, and looks across at Adam with a slight lift of his eyebrows, the flicker and shift of his gaze across the older man's features like on some level he expects to be able to read what Adam is not saying in his face.
The fact that there are words withheld is clear, at least, if not quite the form or nature of those words. Adam draws his hand across his face in a slow rub, briefly obscuring his tired features. Eventually he says, "Are you all right until the end of your shift?"
"Is that an offer to relieve me?" Ilad asks, retrieving his thermos to hold it in the close press of his hands.
"If you need it," Adam says.
"It ... might be wise." Ilad rubs at his eyes with the forefinger and thumb of his off hand, a faint grimace registering across his expression.
"I doubt I will be able to sleep for some time," Adam murmurs. "You might as well go to bed."
Ilad hesitates for a beat, and then rises again, a little slower and stiffer about the motion this time. He ducks his head to Adam with a tip of the thermos in his direction. He says, "Thank you, then."
Adam shakes his head in silent dismissal of Ilad's thanks and stands in preparation to take his place. "I think--" He pauses a moment, considering the other man. "I think you are a more generous person than I."
Ilad pauses, lifting his gaze to meet Adam's with a quiet surprise in his dark eyes. He asks, "Do you think so?"
Almost confused by Ilad's surprise, Adam says, "Yes." He watches the man a long, curious moment.
Ilad moistens his lips with a flick of his tongue as his gaze falls. "A rabbi might tell you," he says, "that to embrace chesed--" The Hebrew word is soft, delicately spoken. "--is an act of repentance, and without repentance, there is no atonement."
Adam draws his tongue along the back of his teeth for a brief moment before saying, "I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with the word."
Ilad looks briefly exasperated by the limitations of the English language, and thinks about it for a moment. "Compassion?" he tries eventually. "Kindness? Mercy?" His fingers trail through the air in a quick, cutting gesture, slicing through idle frustration, and he says, "Those."
"Oh." Adam considers this with a silent thoughtfulness, and there is some awkward compliment laced among dark words when he says, "You must feel you have much to atone for."
Ilad smiles. The expression is a little sharp, for all that the inclination of his head seems to take the words as they are meant. He says, with a voice full of weighted breath, "Oh, yes." Then he turns, gaze falling as he begins to walk on slow steps towards his bedroom.
Adam watches Ilad turn, and the other man is almost gone before he thinks to say, "Goodnight." He stands next to Ilad's abandoned chair, not yet sitting.
"Good night," Ilad murmurs over his shoulder, and disappears into the ridiculously adorable bedroom beyond his door.
Late night.