Work Text:
It came out over dinner on a Thursday.
They were eating the pasta with the sauce in the glass jar, which was Avery's sauce, the one he'd identified by brand and jar shape in the grocery list in a way that Derek had memorized because Derek memorized things, and the radio was doing its low background thing, and Avery was telling Derek about a comment thread that had spiraled into a thirty-seven-reply argument about whether the spinning robot counted as art.
"The robot is functional," Derek said.
"The robot spins in a circle," Avery said.
"That is its function."
"Spinning in a circle isn't a function, Derek, it's a-”
"I engineered it to spin in a circle," Derek said. "That was the purpose. It fulfils the purpose. That is, definitionally, a function."
"Okay but the comment thread is saying-”
"The comment thread is conflating function with utility," Derek said. "Something can function without being useful. That's a separate question."
Avery looked at him. "Is a thing that functions but isn't useful still an object or is it art?"
Derek considered this with the seriousness it deserved. He twirled pasta. He looked at the window where Hastur was doing something smug with the afternoon light.
"That's actually a reasonable question," he said.
"Thank you."
"I'll think about it." He ate the pasta. He said, incidentally, in the exact same tone: "Before all this I spoke five languages. I was thinking about it because of the French."
Avery looked at him.
Derek gestured at the radio, where something was playing that Avery had been only half-listening to, and which he now noticed was, in fact, French. A song, something folky, guitar-forward, the kind of thing that turned up on the stations that tried to be eclectic.
"I recognized it," Derek said. "Just now. I was still thinking about the robot comment thread but there was a second process running." He ate more pasta. "Five languages, though most of them are rusty. The rustiest is probably German. My Japanese is better."
Avery put down his fork.
Derek looked at him.
"Five languages," Avery said.
"Yes."
"Which five."
"English, French, German, Japanese, Indonesian." Derek considered. "And some Latin, though that's more reading than speaking. I'm not counting Latin."
"You're not counting Latin," Avery said.
"It's not a spoken language in any useful contemporary-”
"Derek," Avery said. "You speak five languages."
"Four fluently," Derek said. "German is rusty."
"Four fluently," Avery repeated. He picked his fork back up and put it back down again. "You speak four languages fluently and you are just telling me this now. We have lived together for three months."
"It hasn't come up," Derek said.
"It hasn't, how has it not-” Avery stopped. Started again. "How did you learn five languages."
Derek looked faintly puzzled, the way he looked when questions had obvious answers he hadn't expected to need to explain. "School for French and German," he said. "Japanese I started because I was interested in the grammatical structure. The syntax is quite different from European languages, the sentence-final verb placement-” he paused, noted Avery's expression, "and it was interesting. So I kept going."
"And Indonesian?" Avery said.
The question came out slightly differently than he'd intended. He'd meant it in the same register as the others, and German, and Japanese, but it landed somewhere more specific, because Indonesian was not the same category, because Indonesian was his, and the fact of Derek having it was sitting somewhere in Avery's chest with an unfamiliar weight.
Derek said: "I read an article."
"You read an article."
"About the grammatical structure," Derek said. "The agglutinative morphology. I found it interesting. And then I-” a small gesture, "kept going."
Avery sat with this.
"You read an article about Indonesian grammar," he said slowly, "and then you just. Kept learning Indonesian."
"It took about eight months to reach conversational," Derek said, in the tone of someone reporting a fact that seemed straightforward to him. "I've been reading news in Indonesian since. To maintain it." He tilted his head slightly. "I knew you were Indonesian before we met. The YouTube channel." A pause. "I wasn't thinking about it specifically when I learned. It was before any of this. But I know now that I wasn't not thinking about it."
Avery stared at him.
Derek looked at his pasta.
"That's," Avery said. "Okay. That's-” he picked up his fork again, put it down again, "that's a lot of information."
"I can speak it if you want to hear it," Derek said. "Though my accent is likely-”
"Later," Avery said. "I need, give me a moment."
Derek gave him a moment. He ate pasta. He waited with the patience of someone very accustomed to Avery needing a moment when confronted with things Derek had said.
"Okay," Avery said. "Say something in French."
Derek looked at the radio. He said, without inflection, without fanfare, in French that sounded like he'd grown up somewhere near Lyon: "La sauce est meilleure dans le bocal en verre. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Peut-être que le bocal en verre est simplement plus honnête."
Avery understood none of it.
"What did you say," he said.
"The sauce is better in the glass jar," Derek said. "I don't know why. Maybe the glass jar is just more honest."
A pause.
"You said that," Avery said, "in French."
"Yes."
"About the pasta sauce."
"It's true," Derek said. "The glass jar sauce is noticeably better. I've been meaning to mention it."
Avery put his face in his hands.
The thing was, once Avery knew, he couldn't unknow it.
This was a pattern he'd identified in himself over the course of knowing Derek, the way new information about Derek didn't simply add to a picture but restructured it entirely, sent him back to re-examine things he'd already looked at and find them different under the new light. The cipher had done it. The tiny robot had done it. The first-aid kit prepped in advance of the soldering burns had done it.
Five languages was doing it.
He started noticing where it appeared. Derek reading something on his phone and his lips moving slightly, which Avery now understood was him processing a language that ran differently in his head. Derek pausing at a sign on the way to the shops, the one on the Korean restaurant they walked past, and reading it the way you read something you can nearly get. Derek hearing the French radio station and having a second process running.
Avery watched all of this and experienced it like a person watching a magic trick who has just learned the mechanism and finds the trick is somehow better, not worse, for the knowing.
He started the game that afternoon.
It was not a game, technically. It was more of a compulsion. He was in the kitchen getting water and he pointed at the tap and said, without planning to, "What's that in Japanese?"
Derek, from the living room: "Jaguchi."
"Fridge?"
"Reizōko."
Avery looked at the fridge. "Reizōko," he said, quietly, to himself.
"The accent's off," Derek said, still in the living room. "The middle syllable is shorter. Reizōko."
"Reizōko."
"Better."
Avery pointed at the window. "Window in French."
"Fenêtre."
"German."
"Fenster."
"They're similar."
"They share an etymological root," Derek said. "Both from the Latin fenestra. If you know one you can often guess the other." A pause. "Indonesian is different. Jendela."
"Jendela," Avery said.
Something about hearing his own language come through the wall in Derek's voice was a different kind of thing. He stood at the kitchen window and looked at it and tried to locate the specific nature of the thing, file it somewhere.
He couldn't quite.
The progression through the afternoon went, approximately, as follows:
What's that in German (the chair, Stuhl; the book on the table, Buch; the plant, because Avery wanted to hear Derek say Hastur's name in German, which was the same but different, something about the vowels, die Pflanze, or if you want the specific variety, Hastur is a Sukkulente, which I enjoy saying).
How do you say that in Japanese (the sunset coming through the window, yūyake, which Derek said like he was reading it, not translating, like he was already in the other language and just reporting back, wait, say it again, yūyake).
And in French (and Avery just wanted to hear the French, had wanted to hear it since dinner, the specific sound of Derek's voice in another grammar, another set of mouth shapes, which was a thought Avery was filing firmly under things I am not examining directly).
Derek answered all of these without looking up from whatever he was doing. He was at the workbench for part of it, and then on the couch reading, and then making tea, and through all of it Avery orbited him asking for words like he was collecting them, like he was learning the shape of something.
Avery's face was warm for approximately four hours.
He was going to attribute this to the tea.
The tea was not the cause of this.
Around nine in the evening, Derek looked up from his book and said, with the careful observation of someone who had been noting data points and had reached a conclusion: "You're flustered."
"I am not-”
"You've been warm around the ears since dinner," Derek said.
"It's-”
"The tea is the same temperature as usual," Derek said. "I made it."
Avery closed his mouth.
"You are flustered," Derek said, "about the languages."
"I'm not flustered," Avery said, with dignity, "I am simply, processing new information."
"The processing looks like flustered."
"The processing looks like-” Avery stopped. Looked at Derek, who was watching him with the look that meant he had identified something and was deciding how much of the identification to share. "Yes," Avery said. "Fine. Maybe a little."
"Because of the languages."
"Because of the-” Avery gestured, broadly, at Derek, "everything. All of it. You learned five languages. You learned Indonesian because of an article. You've been reading Indonesian news to maintain it. You said the glass jar is more honest in French over pasta. Everything is-” he stopped, "you are a lot, Derek. As a person. You are a significant amount of person."
Derek looked at him. The expression shifted in the way it did, into the warm, careful, receiving thing.
"That's the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me," he said, "while also sounding mildly like a complaint."
"It's not a complaint," Avery said. "It's an observation. There is a lot of you to be aware of at any given time and I am always aware of all of it."
A pause.
"The languages specifically," Derek said.
"The languages specifically are-” Avery looked at the ceiling, "yes. Fine. The languages are a lot."
"The Indonesian," Derek said, quieter.
Avery looked at him.
Derek was watching him with the full attention, the specific kind, the kind that knew something. The lamp on the end table was doing something warm to the room and the evening outside was dark and the plants were in their various states of growing, and Derek had Indonesian in his mouth because he'd read an article once and then just kept going.
"The Indonesian," Avery said.
"Do you want me to say something?" Derek said. "In Indonesian. If it's strange you can say, and I won't-”
"No," Avery said. "Yes. I mean-” he breathed, "say something."
Derek thought for a moment. Not long. He was not, Avery knew, the kind of person who needed long to find words; the pause was about choosing them, not finding them.
He said: "Sudah lama aku tidak merasa seperti ini."
Avery went still.
The words landed differently than English landed. They always had, in Indonesian, this was a thing Avery had known abstractly and hadn't thought about consciously in a long time, the way your first language fit differently in your chest, the way things said in it arrived at a different address. He'd grown up moving between languages, English online, Indonesian at home, the two of them running parallel in his head until they'd become nearly interchangeable, and somewhere in the parallel running he'd stopped noticing the difference in where they landed.
Derek's Indonesian landed somewhere English didn't reach.
"What does that mean," Avery said, quietly.
"I haven't felt like this in a long time," Derek said.
The room was quiet.
Avery looked at him. At Derek on the couch with his book closed in his lap and his careful eyes doing the full-attention thing, and the plant named after a defeated god on the windowsill, and the small spinning robot on the kitchen table still spinning perfectly every time something came within range.
"Like what?" Avery said.
Derek considered. "Like things are worth keeping," he said. "Like I want to know what comes next. Like the world is, interesting again, in the specific way it was before it was-” a small pause, "before." He looked at Avery. "I meant all of that. In Indonesian. It was all in the sentence."
Avery put down the mug he'd been holding.
"How," he said, "is it all in one sentence."
"Indonesian is efficient," Derek said. "It says what it means."
Avery thought about that.
He thought about the word sudah, which meant already, which meant the feeling wasn't new but was being named. He thought about seperti ini, like this, which was demonstrative, which pointed at the moment of the saying. He thought about all of it arriving at once in a sentence shorter than the English and landing, as Derek had clearly intended, precisely where English wouldn't.
"Say it again," he said.
Derek said it again.
Avery sat with it. Let it settle.
"My pronunciation," Derek said, after a moment. "Is it-”
"It's good," Avery said. "Your accent is, it sounds like someone who learned from reading. Which makes sense. But the words are right."
"The intonation?"
"Is good. Better than most non-native speakers I've heard." Avery paused. "Did you study the intonation specifically?"
"I found audio resources," Derek said. "I wanted it to sound like it was supposed to sound. Not like I was approximating it." He tilted his head slightly. "It's your language. I wanted to do it correctly."
Avery looked at the ceiling again.
He was going to need a moment.
He took the moment. He was aware of Derek giving him the moment with the same patience he gave everything, sitting on the couch with his closed book and his waiting, and Avery breathed through the warm thing, the complicated thing, the thing that had been building incrementally since dinner and had reached its maximum point in the words sudah lama aku tidak merasa seperti ini arriving in his chest at the address English didn't know.
"Say something in Japanese," he said, when he could.
Derek looked at him.
"I want to hear all of them," Avery said. "The rest of the five. I want, say something in each of them."
"About what."
"Anything. The same thing if you want. Translate it."
Derek thought. He looked at Hastur, who was sitting on the windowsill being Hastur. He said, in French, something that curved at the end like a question that wasn't really a question. He said it again in German, shorter, more angular. He said it in Japanese and it was unhurried and fell at the end the way Japanese did, sentence-final, everything arriving at once. He said it in Indonesian last, just a few words, quiet, and Avery heard his own language again at the address that English didn't reach.
"What was it?" Avery said.
"The same thing each time," Derek said. "More or less. Each language loses something from the others."
"What was it in English."
Derek looked at him. The lamp light. The full attention. "Something like-” he chose carefully, "I didn't know there was still this much left."
A silence.
"Left of what," Avery said, though he thought he knew.
"Things worth, being here for," Derek said. "Things I want to be present for. Things that are going to happen and that I am going to be in the room for when they do." He looked at Avery with the directness he saved for things that mattered. "The King took a great deal. For a while, it took the sense that there was anything remaining worth, seeing." He was quiet for a moment. "There is. That's the part that's come back most clearly. There is a great deal left."
Avery thought about eleven days and a world that shouldn't exist and the hospital room and the first text and room 214 and three months of breakfast eggs and burnt toast and tiny robots and eleven seconds on a skateboard and the sunflower plant on the windowsill and the seedling that had been late and arrived anyway.
"Yeah," he said. "There is."
Derek looked at him. "Banyak sekali," he said, softly.
So much. So very much.
Avery looked back.
The evening was quiet around them in the specific way of evenings that were full of things that didn't need to be said because they had already been said in every language available and possibly some others besides.
Later, in the comments on a video that wasn't about languages at all, a Skywars tutorial, Derek explaining bridging mechanics with the patience of a man who had decoded an interdimensional cipher and found this comparably manageable, someone would write: "wait does D3rLord3 speak multiple languages, someone in the comments said he does French??" and the top reply, from AveryTheMayo's account, would be: "five. he speaks five languages. he mentioned it over pasta. i put my fork down."
Below that, from D3rLord3Returns: "I was not aware this was notable information."
Below that, from AveryTheMayo: "Derek."
Below that, from D3rLord3Returns: "The languages are functional. They serve communicative purposes."
Below that, from AveryTheMayo: "DEREK."
Below that, 84,000 likes and a reply chain that went for several hundred comments, the top of which said: "the way he says 'the languages are functional' like he didn't learn Indonesian because he read one article one time and then just KEPT GOING", and another that said: "he learned a whole language to maintain it. he's been reading news in it. 'it serves communicative purposes.' I am not okay."
Derek would read all of these. He would say, to Avery, across the kitchen table: "The languages do serve communicative purposes."
Avery would say: "I know."
"That's not remarkable."
"Derek."
"Communicating in multiple languages is simply-”
"Derek," Avery said, "you said something to me in Indonesian last night and I didn't sleep for an hour."
A pause.
Derek looked at his coffee.
"Hm," he said.
"That is the correct response," Avery said.
Derek picked up his coffee. He looked at Avery across the table with the expression that meant he was filing something, keeping it somewhere careful. "I'll remember that," he said.
"You'd better," Avery said.
Derek looked at him for a moment longer than the sentence required.
Then, quietly, in Indonesian: "Kamu juga penting bagiku."
You matter to me too.
Avery's ears went red.
"You did that on purpose," he said.
"The languages serve communicative purposes," Derek said, and drank his coffee, and Avery put his face in his hands and the sunflower reached toward the window and Hastur sat in his pot being unbearably smug about everything, and outside the city did its morning thing, and neither of them was in any hurry at all.