Ilad, Jean-Paul
Rainfall during the night has soaked into the earth, leaving it squelched and muddy underfoot. What is visible of the sky through the stretching fronds and vines and branches of the forest canopy is a pale gray. The heat of the day is already strong, although not yet as oppressive as it might be later. Emerging from his tent this morning has taken Ilad some effort, a kind of careful dragging with then the plant of his stick firmly in the squelchy ground to drag himself to his feet. Limping uneasily, only mostly dressed without the completeness of holster and body armor, he looks remarkably alert, but also remarkably strained as he begins to move away from the tents proper and into the trees. His ordinary quiet step is quite thwarted by his hobbled progress and the squelching thunk of his stick.
Well, since Ilad is squelching off for necessaries, Jean-Paul will just wait. Up early as ever, he looks a little scruffy around the jawline, but otherwise clean-ish. He is dressed in a plain white tee and heavy cotton pants with far too many pockets. He lacks body armor and gun. He is becoming complacent. This Thursday morning he sits not so far from camp in full view of the portal building. He looks across the burnt grass and contemplates the building's angles. When Ilad returns, he glances up to give him a brief nod.
Leaning on his stick heavily as he pauses at the return to camp, Ilad looks a little pale beneath the ordinary warmth of his skin tone -- a pallor that makes olive-gold looking more greenish. He clears his throat, and limps a bit closer to Jean-Paul's perch to find a place to sit and extend his leg at a prop. "Good morning," he says, a little dry; his voice is a bit frogged this morning, too, even after the clear of his throat. His pants are loose dark cotton beneath a grey T-shirt. Both are starting to look awfully familiar.
"How's the leg?" Jean-Paul asks all small-talky.
Ilad growls. Sitting down, he extends it, and stakes his stick into the earth beside him with near-violent force.
"Yeah." With light fingers, Jean-Paul brushes his own shoulder and then drops his hand to his side. "Remy got shot in the leg once, little tropical island. Ended up getting a pretty bad infection. I'm sure you're taking better care of it."
"I have been shot in the leg before," Ilad says. He glances down at himself. With a rueful ghost at his mouth's corners, he exhales a low sigh past his lips, and looks up at Jean-Paul again beneath a slight lift of his eyebrows. "Actually I suppose it would be easier to find parts of my body where I have /not/ been shot, at this point."
"But have you been shot in the leg before in the /jungle/?" Jean-Paul asks with a light touch of wry humor. His gaze falls to Ilad's shoulders and arms, seeking bullet scars.
"That, no," Ilad says, tipping two fingers in Jean-Paul's direction. "But at least there was the hospital, hm?" Ilad's shoulders obscured beneath the fabric, his arms are actually wholly free of bullets. Ilad looks to Jean-Paul and then glances across his arm. "The bullets do seem to concentrate /lower/," he says.
Jean-Paul drops a hand to fan his fingers across his hip and thigh. It is dangerously close to quite highly valued territory. "Took a hit from a shotgun once," he says. "Avoided them since."
Glance falling to the press of Jean-Paul's hand, Ilad's dark eyes lift quickly. "Frightening," he says. "Shotgun spray." He sucks a breath in through his teeth. "All mine have been lonely bullets. Well--" He shifts, stirring in the seat to lean forward with his weight largely braced on his good leg, and his hand touches against the cheek of his ass that is scarred beneath the fabric. Eyebrows twitching, he says, "This was a ricochet. Humiliating."
"It was -- we had a healer," Jean-Paul says rather than try to describe. "Not like Alden. Both times I've been shot, actually, there were healers on hand. Lucky me." He glances up, then over at Ilad. His lip twitches.
"Only the one time, for me," Ilad says, as he settles back down with a faint grimace to answer the twitch of Jean-Paul's mouth. He lifts his shirt on one side, briefly baring the scar he earned back when we had a Bobby and Bobby was Kaci and now all those people are vague. "That one. From the bank."
"Ah, of course. I remember that," says Jean-Paul with a low murmur as he glances toward Ilad's side. He keeps his hands in. No touchy. His gaze lifts with the arch of his eyebrows. "You know, for a while, I thought I was quite cursed. Then you come in, and since then, I've barely been injured at all."
"It has always struck me as -- a little funny that the scar is much the same," Ilad says, glancing down at himself again and then tugging the grey cotton back into place over his skin. Smile very slight as he meets Jean-Paul's gaze, he looks away again to subject the portal building to a long and thorough sort of look. He says, "Drawing your fire, am I?"
"Apparently." Following Ilad's gaze, Jean-Paul's expression fades to a quieter reserve. "Alden's never healed you, then, for all your injuries."
Ilad shakes his head. His jaw tightens; the customary neutrality of his ordinary masks seems notably absent, and in its place, he looks strained. "No," he says. "Though," he adds, "I have heard it an experience best missed, barring necessity."
Jean-Paul's glance blinks back, marks the strain, and then -- leaves it. Really, it is the least he can do, ignoring it. "Yes," he says.
Fingertips drawing in a drag across his jaw -- the neat grooming of his scruff has taken a little bit of a hit, over the past couple of days -- Ilad shifts, and straightens a little where he sits. His hand falls loosely across his injured leg. "Though I suspect that I have suffered pain enough to bear it gladly," he says. "When they return."
Jean-Paul laughs, once, under his breath. It shades a little dark and a little bitter. He leans forward, a trifle stiff in the angle of his body, and clasps his hands as he looks forward. "When they return."
Ilad turns his gaze aside, subjecting Jean-Paul's features to a quiet study. He reaches to press Jean-Paul's near forearm in the close of his fingers, his skin as fever-warmed as ever (how does anyone tell when his wounds are infected?). He says, "Yes."
The tension of his expression so carefully removed from any kind of grief, Jean-Paul looks over at the touch. He smiles, faint and crooked. "All right," he says. His hand presses once in a fold over Ilad's fingers, but it is brief. /Chaste/. His hand slides away. "But you might want to rethink that gladly."
Thumb sliding across Jean-Paul's skin as he draws his own hand back after the brief and /chaste/ contact, Ilad glances away with the work of his throat in a swallow. He says, "I -- perhaps you are right." Hand curling into a fist, he rests it against his injured leg, and stares with a narrow-eyed intent at the portal building.
Thumb-slides aren't chaste, Ilad. Quietly, Jean-Paul repeats, "When."
Maybe not the chastest of chaste. It's not like he groped you. The flick of Ilad's tongue moistens his lips as he swallows again, and a breath escapes him in a long gust expelled through his nose. "It is so strange," he says, "to think that if I had a thousand years I could not walk to where -- they are."
"It's a little impossible, isn't it? No matter how far you walk, no matter how high I fly, they aren't -- here." Jean-Paul shifts and drops his hand to the seat that he rests on. "They could be this close, you know. On the other side of -- I don't even know."
"I cannot understand it," Ilad says. He lifts a hand, reaching before him as though to touch something that is not there, and closes it into a fist, grasping nothing as he lets it fall.
"Me either." Loosely lacing his fingers, Jean-Paul bows his head. "Jamie thinks we should go after them, once Ji's device is repaired."
Teeth set against his lower lip, Ilad studies the building for a long moment's silence in the wake of these words, and then looks back to Jean-Paul. "Walk into worlds beyond ken," he says. He murmurs a few words beneath his breath, the muttered Hebrew cadence of a prayer as his gaze falls again.
A silence stretches after Ilad's quiet Hebre, and then Jean-Paul says, "Pretty much," like he understood it at all.
"The waiting feels almost like an illness," Ilad says, tension seeping from the set of his shoulders down the straight draw of his spine.
"It is an illness," Jean-Paul says, quiet and strained. "It's a fever and an ache." He pushes to his feet, surging restless. "And we're as helpless to cure it."
Ilad's "Yes" is low and quiet as he watches Jean-Paul rise. He stays behind, sitting tense and still.
"At least I can pretend to be productive." Sympathetic in his glance over his shoulder, gaze lingering on Ilad's leg, Jean-Paul inclines his head.
Ilad's smile flicks across his mouth, brief and dark and edgy. He tips his head in acknowledgment. "At least it is not my hands," he says, holding them up.
"At least." Jean-Paul lifts his hand in a low gesture. "I'm going to go pretend."
"Good luck to you," Ilad answers, letting his own fall. He turns his gaze back toward the portal building, then. For a while, at least, he will sit here and brood.
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