bantha_fodder | [fic] the rhythm of these words [the pretender]

The Rhythm of These Words
The Pretender, Miss P, Jarod, Angelo, G.

I wrote this for Pieces last week. I'd just got out of Chinese class, so was indulging my languages kink.

**

Jarod is eight when he learns Chinese. "Why do I have to learn this, Sydney?" he asks. "Everyone I know speaks English."

"Being bilingual is a useful trait, Jarod," Sydney replies, ever patient. "When you're older, you might be glad to have the skill."

Thirty years later, Jarod tracks a serial killer through the Los Angeles and into the tiny shops of ChinaTown; he reads the clues on the ground and the characters on the signs, and he knows where he is going.

Sydney was right.

**

When Jarod is thirteen, he teaches Miss Parker German out of a book. "I don't even know why Daddy wants me to learn this," she says, throwing the book down. "I'll never be as good as you."

"Of course you will," he replies; "And you'll be glad of it when you're older."

Miss Parker laughs. "You sound like Sydney," she says. "Don't you ever want to talk like you're my age?"

"I don't know that I am," he says, and she ends the lesson there.

Though her German is rusty, and under practised, when her father sends her to university in Frankfurt she knows enough to lean on the bar, legs long and bare beneath her skirt, and have attractive German men buy her drinks.

Her German gets better.

**

Angelo picks the emotions as he reads them, anger and fear and lust. The words he learns are the ones he picks out of the air; amor, he hears, colère and pa and words he couldn't read, couldn't understand if he heard them, but knows because he feels their truths on the daughter's face.

The language he speaks is understood by everyone and no-one, and sometimes he hates the words that he has lost.

**

Miss Parker learns Japanese on the streets of Tokyo. She hangs out with the wrong people, sure, but she's from the Centre and so she's hardly one to talk. She learns the things they don't say, too; learns to pour tea and bow to strangers on the street, and one cold, blustery day she learns the proper way to fold herself into a kimono and, later, Tommy Tanaka slowly, carefully unwraps the heavy folds of fabric from her body, and they fuck, whispering Japanese endearments as the bright winter sun shines through the window.

She speaks Japanese when she returns to the States; translates her emails in her head and counts her dollars in yen.

She worked hard for her knowledge, she knows; she will not see her father take one more thing away from her.

**

Jarod teaches himself Ukranian from a book. He learns Malay from tapes, and Tamil from the elderly Indian man he helped six months after his escape. He runs and he learns and he watches, and he knows better than to stop, so he doesn't.

"Stop," he says, when she answers the phone. "Bud' laska, zupynka," and he knows she doesn't even blink because he can see her where she stands on the balcony of his recently vacated hotel room.

"Ne mohty," she replies, and he hangs up.

Across the way, she looks down; sees him, and shouts. He waves, blows her a kiss. Pretends like he planned it.

When she turns away, he frowns. He didn't know she spoke Ukranian, and he wonders what else he's missed.

END