4/18 - Ilad
4/18/2010
Logfile from Emma.
Cooling one's heels is a phrase that makes very little sense in the context of sitting in a room, waiting for someone to show up and rummage through one's brain. Eventually, /finally/ the sound of heels in the hallway announce the approach of someone, /anyone/ to alleviate the boredom. I suppose on Ilad can say if the immaculately coifed blonde in a heels and a white business suit was worth the wait, but there must be worse people to get intimate with. And oh, darling, are they about to. Her escort opens the door and allows her to enter before closing it and taking up station just on the other side. Emma dumps an armload of briefcase, jacket, and folders on the table, and then tops the pile with gloves peeled off her hands. THen she turns to the room's other occupant and holds out her hand, telepathy swirling out already to brush feather-light fingertips across his surface thoughts. "Mr. Tal-Shachar, I presume," she greets, pronouncing his name just as he himself would. "I am Emma Frost. I believe you've been expecting me?"
Ilad is sitting waiting when she enters, at one of the seats in the meeting room, before the briefing table. He is dressed in a button-down shirt of pale, creamy jade and dark jeans: mostly casual, mostly. He sits with extremes of straightness in his spine, a military bearing accentuated -- or exacerbated -- by extremes of tension bordering on controlled panic. His knuckles press against the edges of the table, patiently awaiting the baring of his secret self before a stranger. He rises when she enters the room, stiff and straight. That the stranger is a gorgeous woman does not reduce the sense of impending nakedness that Ilad finds unsettling to his core. But he reaches to take her hand anyway, his skin heated with a suggestion of a fever. "Ms. Frost," he says. His accent is heavy in his words, the desert lingering close to each consonant. "I understand you have some investigation to do."
"So they tell me," Emma answers, her hand cool and pale in contrast to his. Blue eyes sweep over him, sharpening in predatory interest at the tell-tales of control and panic in demeanor and thoughts alike. "Are you comfortable?" she asks, pulling a bottle of juice--something red-- from her case. "The more you can relax, the less invasive this will be." Her smile is bright, and turns self-satisfied and knowing. "It could even be enjoyable, if you like." She settles herself in the chair nearest to his seat and crosses her legs.
"Ha," Ilad breathes out softly. He narrows his eyes at her, glance dark and edgy. "The less invasive the invasion?" He turns over a hand toward her, showing Emma his open palm. Deeply uncomfortable, he holds himself still and steady and does not shift in his seat. "I recognize there is necessity to this. That is enough, is it not?"
"Enough is... sufficient," she answers slowly and reaches for his hand, palm sliding against palm. "What is it you do, Mr. Tal-Shachar?" The question is a cloak and draw, masking the unleashing of her powers to slip up against his mind, the slide of will against thought like that of the contact between them. It draws his thoughts to a specific point and eases her entrance.
"I am a soldier," Ilad answers. It is the truest answer among many possible that linger behind the word. His skin is overwarm against hers, golden olive and desert hot. He has been a martial arts teacher -- a combat trainer. Of course, the pyrokinesis lurks beneath, the control of flame and immunity to its fierce tongues. He watches their hands, marking the contrast in the hues of their skin.
It is a study that is not unfamiliar to her. Her index finger bends and traces its tip in a small circle at the base of his palm while her power slides deeper like an iced knife, seeking after those other answers. Her passage is not hidden, and memories churn in her wake, cut free to drift to his conscious thoughts.
Many of his memories are ugly. He flinches a little, from some of them, as the rawest of the secrets come flashing to the fore. Torture. Thou shalt not murder, but there has been death at these hands. Some of the guilt he carries is only the guilt of living, alive and unburned, while others have died, or been gruesomely disfigured -- a face haunts his thoughts, a woman's face, hideously scorched. Secrets of identity that even he isn't sure of; skews of doubt, of God, himself and spirit; doubt of body not in what his body can do, for that he knows intimately, perfectly, with a grounded physicality that he totally controls, but of what he wants, which is much less certain. Still. There is no question that he is who he says he is.
Emma mercifully does not dwell on these ugly memories, though they tug at her interest, tantalizing snippets of a man with a bedrocked certainty and steadfastness. She is thorough, though not as specific as an X-Factor telepath might have been. She eases out, burying what she can back under his own layers. << You are a singular man, Ilad Tal-Shachar, >> she hums into his thoughts as a parting gift.
Ilad shifts against the back of his chair, finally, a quiver of his spine partway between shiver and shudder. He blinks, lashes briefly trembling dark against his skin as he swallows. "Thank you?" he guesses, his low voice a little strangled. The man is shaken. "Is-- do you-- is that all?"
"That is all the organization requires, but there is so much more I could do," she teases, innuendo laying heavy across the words and her lips. She cracks the bottle of juice and sips, then offers it across the tabletop to him. "Have a sugary supper, take some tylenol, and go to bed," she prescribes as she follows suit with a couple of small tablets she EVIDENTLY pulled out earlier. "I will inform your prospective employers that you are clean."
"I am certain you could," Ilad says, a little blandly, his mouth tugging into the twist of a bastard of smile and grimace as he looks at her. He clears his throat. "Uhm," he says. He shakes his head slightly, turning aside the bottle in a polite gesture of refusal. Perhaps he does not want to drink the unidentifiedly red. "Thank you for the offer. And for your ... ah, assistance."
She's not trying to poison him. Or get him drunk. Promise. Emma reaches to take the bottle back and returns his smile with a small, secretive one of her own. "Pleasure to meet you, Ilad," she says and rises, moving around the chair to retrieve her belongings from the other end of the desk. She uses his name because, well, because she's obnoxious. With a last, too satisfied look at him, she exits the room, leaving him to whatever fate it is he chooses.
Emma was in town...