and the words have fallen

"Do you ever wish you knew Spanish?" Augustus asks unceremoniously one evening. "Like, enough to speak it?"

The Changeling tilts its head and doesn't answer straight away. Augustus isn't bothered by the delay, she just keeps on sorting her Bakugan cards, and doesn't try looking up to stare back at it while she waits.

"Sometimes, I suppose," Changeling says finally. It turns its head away to continue speaking, and Augustus can see its hands flexing uncertainly in its lap as it weighs its words. "I believe my mother had... Expected me to learn. But she was told it would be expecting too much. So she was told to cease speaking the language around me altogether. I learned more ASL than I ever did Spanish. M-,"

It cuts the noise off in its throat. Augustus does not speak up yet. Sometimes, she messes up the tones when she speaks, and she ends a sentence accidentally sounding like she's still in the middle of saying something, so people will wait even though there is nothing to wait for. The Changeling is not like this, Augustus has learned, and it gets annoyed to be spoken over. Generally, it's easier to wait unnecessarily than the opposite, especially when Augustus is a little embarrassed bringing up the topic at all.

"I do not know if it is true, that it would have confused me. But, yes," it concludes. "Occasionally I do wish I had been given the choice."

It doesn't ask outright for her answer, but Augustus opens her mouth anyway — they always do quid pro quo. "My mom used Spanish a lot, when she was around," she says, shuffling the cards to keep her hands busy. "Not, like, whole sentences, but she would use a bunch of Spanish words still even when she spoke English mostly. I remember some of it, but, I think she'd stopped speaking full Spanish even before I was born. I think about this sometimes," she admits.

"Because my great-grandma did not speak any English at all, you know?" she explains. Augustus does not always remember things right, but she remembers that house very well. The scratchy texture of the carpet on her knees, and the smell of stuff always being cooked in the kitchen, and the way her great-grandma would chatter at her, and how sometimes someone else would interrupt and say in English what she had said, but even then she hadn't really seemed to expect Augustus to speak back, and Augustus remembers feeling relieved by this. She also remembers there were Our Lady statuettes everywhere — sometimes being in Changeling's room makes her nostalgic for it. Augustus thinks maybe they could have liked each other, her great-grandma and the Changeling, and then realizes she's being distracted.

"Anyway," she continues, trying to reign herself in. She has a point, she thinks, but she feels strangely shy about getting to it. She does not usually talk about this a lot. she does not think her dad would understand it, really. "My grandparents always spoke both fluent. But my mom didn't speak it much at all; I think I remember someone telling the story that my grandparents made her stop speaking it when she was a little kid, even though she was fluent in both, so she would not keep an accent. So she would blend in more."

It had worked for her mom, but not so much for Augustus. Not that Augustus has a Spanish accent like her grandparents had. An Autism one, maybe, though. Everyone had tried really hard to teach her to "overcome" it too, but even though Augustus can speak clearer than she could when she was a kid, it isn't anywhere close to being gone. Her speech therapists would all be disappointed, probably, to know that her current voice is just as good as it gets. Secretly in her head, though, Augustus thinks she's pleased by this. She likes her voice — errant W's and strange pacing and poor intonation and all. 

"But I think she wished she spoke it more. I wish I spoke it more." She realizes that she has been picking at the frayed edge of a Gate Card, peeling the layers apart, and hastens to stop before she pulls it apart entirely. "I think I missed my window, though."

Augustus digs Altair out of her pocket and rolls it onto the card so that it pops open, so that she can play with all of its hinged pieces instead of ruining the card. "Like, people say I should learn it on my own," this is something of a lie, sort of. Augustus has never spoken to anyone about this before, but she suspects that if she did talk about it, that is what people would tell her. "But I do not learn things well. And my mom is not around anymore to speak Spanish to anyway. So it feels fake. I have lived with my dad longer than I ever did my mom. It's," she hesitates again, tilting her head away from the Changeling so she does not have to see it react to what she says. "I am darker than you, but I always feel like it doesn't-, like I don't count. It doesn't feel right. Like it might have. If she hadn't left. If they had not made her stop speaking Spanish." 

Augustus clicks the Bakugan back into its ball shape. "Sorry," she says reflexively, flushing a little. "That's dumb."

"It is not," Changeling counters promptly. When she glances up, Augustus finds it is staring at her shoulder very intently. "It is not stupid."

Its jaw is so tense, Augustus thinks, and then feels something very fond grow warm in her chest when she realizes that it's because it is trying to look for words to be reassuring to her. It is better at being matter of fact than comforting, but it is trying, and Augustus wants to smile and bite it and run away and do none of that at all at the same time. She squashes down the feeling until it is strange and fluttery in her stomach and not anywhere else in her body anymore.

"You count," Changeling settles on saying. "Even if you were paler than me, you would still be Mexican. That is how it works." It hesitates again, and then, "My mom would speak Spanish with you, if you asked her to teach you."

Never in one billion years will Augustus have the confidence to broach this topic with Mrs. Mendez, Augustus thinks, laughing a little in her head about it. But she can tell that the Changeling means it, and that is more than nice enough on its own.

The biting feeling comes back so strong that Augustus' teeth ache with it.

"Thanks, Changeling," she says, and the words are clipped more than they should be, and her tongue catches awkwardly on the consonants, and the tone is more nasal than people say it should be.

Secretly in her head, Augustus thinks at least that is something nice, too.