Adam, Ilad
Having a whole wing of a hospital for quarantine is inevitably -- strange. Likely privacy is not guaranteed whenever one would like, but at least there are showers. Adam has likely taken several since arriving. He has finished eating a meal provided by the hospital, though 'finished' in this case means having eaten around the inevitable centerpiece of meat. He pulls restlessly out of his seat, looking tense and still, somehow, a bit tired, and goes to throw away the evidence in the trash near the open door. He stalls, however, near the doorway, gaze sliding down the hallway with some distracted interest for the whole -- medicalness of it. There are probably nurses around. And agents. (Having a quarantine wing is like having a hospital playground, right?) The tray sits in his hand, forgotten for the moment.
Ilad is already restlessly familiar with the Bluefields hospital, and now walks its halls directly against the advice of his nurses, who have tried to instruct him -- even sometimes in English -- to stay off his damn leg. Instead, he lopes down this hall or that in motion, using the prop of his stick to mitigate the foolishness of his restive behavior. He pauses at sight of Adam, an eyebrow twitched up for his forgotten tray, and leans into the brace of his stick against the floor.
"Ilad," Adam says, actually sounding mildly surprised in his distraction. As if, oh my, he didn't expect to see him here. In their quarantine wing. He remembers himself after a moment, and what he was doing, and tilts the tray to scrape off the uneaten meat. (Are you supposed to just leave it on your tray for them to come back and pick up? Maybe. Idk.) "I'm surprised you're still--" He doesn't finish the sentence, but his gaze drops to Ilad's leg in clear indicator of the unspoken topic.
Ilad glances down at himself, and his lips purse with a dry kind of suppressed humor in his dark eyes as he looks back at Adam. Weight braced against the prop of his stick, he inclines his head. "Alden will lend me his aid," he says, "but I will not accept it before he is fully recovered. He looked half-dead."
"I barely expected to see you injured for an hour's time once he saw it," Adam says with some wisp of humor, but there is something tense to his smile at mention of Alden's state. He seems to turn over several possible responses in his mind before simply saying, "Yes." After a beat, with a strained courtesy somewhat out of place in their surroundings, he asks, "Would you like to sit down?"
Ilad looks Adam with a thoughtful, measuring glance. He is unusually unsubtle in his contemplation, curiosity plain in an expression ordinarily masked neutral and difficult to read. He tips his head. "My thanks," he says, intonation reflecting none of the irony that might be read in the twitch of his mouth at the corners. He limps over to the nearest chair to fold himself into it, sitting straight and still with his stick propped against the table at a diagonal lean.
Adam nods, perhaps something grateful in his fleeting smile at the lack of irony in Ilad's voice. Continuing the game of propriety, he settles himself a bit stiffly in a second chair. His pack sits in a corner, but his two books -- political commentary from one world, history from another -- sit on a table near the bed. "It was -- a relief," he says, voice quiet, "that you were all here."
Ilad exhales a low breath past his lips, and the shake of his head is slight. "I only regret that I missed the, ah, battle at the gate, so to speak," he says. "I might have been of some use, even--" He gestures, vaguely, at his thigh where the bullet gored into him to lodge in his muscle.
"Well." Adam pulls his gaze away to search for the window, some tense sort of regret seeping into his expression. "We are -- mostly whole. The worst we brought back with us."
"Indeed," Ilad says, watching him a little narrowly with his hands folded in a loose clasp in his lap. "I understand it was not an easy field mission."
For a moment, Adam doesn't reply. Then he says, "It was very...long." He glances back to Ilad, forcing a rueful smile.
"I was not clear on just ... how long," Ilad admits, following Adam's pause with one of his own. He lifts a hand, turns its fingers in a gesture. "The logic of the place eludes me."
"A month?" Adam guesses. He shakes his head soon after. "Maybe not that long." He looks down at one of his hands as a fingernail scratches along the arm of his chair. He is quiet quite a while before he asks, "Did you ever hunt?"
"Hunt?" Ilad repeats the word as though he finds it unfamiliar. He blinks in surprise, canting his head but slightly as he looks across at Adam. "Ah -- no. I have not."
"My father--" Already Adam finds something in his words to twist his smile into something wry and grim. "--used to take us hunting. My brothers and me. I wasn't the best of us -- I actually think John was, strange as it sounds." He taps his fingers lightly against the arm of the chair, gaze locked onto his own hand in lieu of looking at Ilad. "I offered at one point -- across the portal. We were trying to -- help where we could. They didn't want to give me a gun, so one of the younger men -- Kyle -- took me fishing." He exhales a voiceless sort of laugh. "Fishing with spears. Underwater. He laughed at my hesitation and said that I'd love it." And the humor, even the dark dryness, fades away. "I killed a fish and thought of Michael Hold's head exploding."
Ilad is quiet for a long moment after Adam finishes speaking. He lifts a hand, scratching light fingers along his jaw to drag through his neat scruff, which is once more well-groomed. "It grows less, with time," he says. "But it will not ever leave you." Studying him with a dark slant of dark eyes, Ilad sits there, and then leans slightly forward, reaching across to claim Adam's hand in a loose clasp of fever-warm fingers. "Have you spoken with someone, Adam?" Adam's name comes a strangely to his tongue, its syllables claimed by their ancient Hebraic roots rather than their modern English ones.
"I was ordered into psychiatric treatment some time ago," Adam says with particular blandness, "as everyone knows." His hand does not tense in Ilad's grip, but his fingers are somewhat stiff, as if he's bleeding off tension elsewhere in his body with something of an effort. He does not look at the clasp, however. "When we returned, after our weapons were freed -- they were on fire for a time, the metal overheated. Others chanced the burns, and I was -- relieved."
"That is an evasion," Ilad remarks with nothing of judgment in his voice; he speaks as though making an idle identification, as a man familiar with evasions in all their shapes and forms. A conoisseur of them, perhaps. "You will only take from psychiatric treatment what you put into it. You only speak to your therapist on what you choose to speak to your therapist." Where Adam does not balk at the touch of Ilad's hand, it remains, for the moment; what physical reassurance he may offer with simple contact is given. He says, "To die for your country is easy. It is simple. With death, there is an end. To kill for your country is not so simple. To do worse things, it is less simple yet."
Adam's jaw tenses at Ilad's identification, and he says nothing of it. All of a sudden, his fingers twist and cling to Ilad's. "I don't want to talk about it," he says, quiet and just the smallest bit helpless, in spite of the current conversation. "I don't want to think about it. I want it -- gone."
"My friend," Ilad says, his voice very low as he focuses intently on Adam's features, "run from this and it will pursue you forever."
Adam swallows. He does not nod, but his chin jerks just an inch that at least provides some acknowledgment that he heard the other man. The silence stretches. His fingers tighten in some strange sense of anticipation until he finally says, very quiet, "I'm sorry, Ilad."
Ilad's eyebrows twitch up. Gaze flicking down to the join of their hands, he looks back at Adam again with a querent gaze. "For what?"
Reluctance to explain is clear and thick in his expression. Adam keeps his gaze averted from Ilad's focused gaze. "It's my fault," he says. "You and--" He hesitates even longer before saying, "You and Charles."
Ilad looks absolutely blank, and sits very, very still.
"I told him not to throw away a friendship. I told him to -- restrain himself." Adam soldiers on, stubborn with some sense of responsibility weighing down his shoulders. "I don't know that I -- truly expected him to listen."
The only motion Ilad makes for a very long moment is to withdraw his hand from Adam's and let it curl into a tight fist, pressed against his thigh.
This seems -- expected. Adam swallows again and draws back his own hand to curl against his leg. Not a fist, but something looser. Holding onto warmth. "I am sorry," he says again. "I saw -- the threat of my own mistakes. I thought he was simply -- depressed and miserable and -- acting out as he does, but he--" He lifts a hand -- the one not still lingering in the ghost of heat -- to pinch at the corners of his eyes. "He hurt himself, I think, forcing himself to refuse."
Ilad's silence might continue for a century. When he breaks it, his voice is dead level. "He spoke to you."
Finally, Adam looks to Ilad. He seems to recognize something in the other man, for his expression sets with a certain grimness. "I was not -- eager to hear of it." Then, as if recognizing some lack of generosity in himself, his voice gentles just a touch to say, "He had no one else to tell."
Ilad is silent for a long moment after these words, his expression a mask but the look in his eyes, past his struggling neutrality, very dark. He reaches out and takes his stick.
"Ilad--" Adam struggles for something to say, something to stall the reach of Ilad for escape. But he shuts his mouth and thinks of nothing that's enough.
White-knuckled in his grasp of the stiff, Ilad levers himself standing and looks down and across at Adam. He waits for a moment in perfect silence, motionless.
"He had no one else to tell," Adam says again, low and nearly pleading. "Would you leave him entirely without counsel?"
Ilad's expression shifts in a ripple of what resembles intense disgust. He looks at Adam, and then begins to limp away, stick thunking fiercely against the floor.
Adam stiffens and nearly shrinks at that expression. When Ilad begins to limp away, he turns his gaze to the floor in the opposite direction and then lowers his face to the cradle of his hand.
Strangely enough NEITHER DID ILAD.