Chapter Text
Language
Mount Justice; July 28th, 2011, 13:42 EDT
“Thanks again for helping me practice,” Zatanna said, a faint blush coloring her cheeks as she turned to Robin, who’d just plopped down beside Conner on the couch as the two of them prepared to be Zatanna’s guinea pigs.
For the past few months, Canary had been working with the team to develop skills other than the ones they tended to use in sparring. Earlier that day, she’d wanted to assess the team’s communication abilities, which had led to other topics about language proficiency and how important it was to know more than one or two languages. After that, she’d asked after the number of languages each team member knew.
Kaldur knew Atlantean, English, and Latin; M’gann knew Martian, English, and was learning Spanish in school, but could also translate for others using her telepathy; Artemis knew English, Vietnamese, Spanish, several curse words in select languages, and was learning Arabic; Wally knew English, Spanish, and a bit of Latin; Conner was taught English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, and some Korean by Cadmus, and Robin was fluent in fifteen languages, and learning eight more, the second most in the League after Batman, who knew twenty-seven.
Zatanna, on the other hand, only knowing English and a bit of Latin, had felt out of her league and decided that she needed to practice spells for translation and language capacity. She’d roped Conner and Robin into being her guinea pigs, seeing as they knew the most languages out of their little group, and M’gann had tagged along as well because she could mentally translate and monitor the situation. The others were all sitting around the living room and loitering in the kitchen (Wally, mostly) just for the fun of it.
“No problem,” Robin grinned, pulling one leg up onto the couch to rest his chin on his knee. “So, whatd’ya need us to do?” he prompted.
Zatanna scrunched up her face in thought. “Hold on a second. . . Okay, I’ve got it,” she said, smoothing her features and flexing her fingers. “Just start talking in another language or something. I need to figure it out as I go.”
“Well, does it matter which one?” he asked.
The magician shrugged. “Probably not. But maybe a language Conner already knows?” she suggested.
“Hindi okay?” he asked, and when both she and Conner nodded, he chirped “Cool!” before diving right in the middle of a thoroughly-thought out dissertation on the exact velocity a pigeon would need to reach when flying into a window for all of its feathers to explode off of its body upon impact.
Conner and M’gann stared at Robin in horror as Zatanna flung forth her hands and exclaimed, ‘Etalsnart idnih!”
Robin was in the middle of discussing the impact of bone density, blood fluidity, and the squishiness of bird muscle on his mathematical computations when Zatanna’s spell went into play. “Stop! Stop it! I did not want to know that!” she cried, slapping a hand over Robin’s mouth. He shrugged sheepishly.
‘I guess it worked, then?’ He continued in Mandarin.
Zatanna nodded and took her hand away. “Unfortunately. Now let me try something else.” She backed up and wiped one hand on her blouse. “Conner, Robin, can you both start speaking in a language you both know? But don’t tell me what it is this time,” she added.
The kryptonian nodded, then looked to Robin to ask a question. “Just pick one,” Robin said before the clone could ask and spoil it for Zatanna.
The two of them began an awkward conversation in Mandarin about the new television show that M’gann had finally convinced Conner to watch with her. It wasn’t too long until Zatanna called out, ‘Kaeps rouy eurt egaugnal!”
Robin and Conner paused mid-conversation, each suddenly realizing that they didn’t fully understand the other. Or know quite what was coming out of their own mouths. Conner understood bits and pieces of what Robin was saying, and vice versa, but neither knew what was going on.
Conner, for his part, had suddenly begun speaking in a pidgin of English, French, and Kryptonian, the last of which he’d never had programmed into him by Cadmus, seeing as only Superman and other kryptonians had access to that knowledge.
Robin, however, had descended into an unholy fusion of Romani, Romanian, Russian, French, German, and Italian, words of different languages and dialects blending together in a weird sort of word salad consisting of the languages his parents had grown up speaking around him and had taught him.
Everybody in the room stopped as Robin and Conner’s conversation mushed together in a clamor of ill-fitting sounds, Kaldur looking up from the textbook of Atlantean magic that he was studying, Wally and Artemis pausing their conversation in the kitchen to figure out what was going on, M’gann pressing her fingers to her forehead as nine different languages all fought to be understood in her head, and Zatanna freezing as she realized something had gone wrong with her spell.
“Uh–” Zatanna began, and Robin’s eyes flew wide as he spun around to face the magician.
‘Why am I–’ he stopped, his brain fizzing as he realized he was speaking in Romanian and French. ‘Why can’t I– I can’t stop,’ Dick tried, the words coming out in a weird mash-up of Romani, German, and Russian. ‘Not speak . . . English, stupid brain– augh!” he cried out in frustration, jumping up from the couch in horror.
Conner stood as well, Kryptonian and French spewing from his mouth, parts of his sentences understood as a word or phrase of English slipped in. ‘I can’t
speaking
and. . . why am I–
I don’t even
of these
is!’
Artemis flew from the kitchen, Wally speeding next to Robin as his friend turned to try and talk to him. ‘Wally– please tell me– gah, you don’t know what I’m saying, do you?’
“Robin, slow down, I can’t– I don’t know what you’re saying, dude!” Dick’s shoulders slumped.
Zatanna’s hands flew to her mouth before falling back down, and Kaldur had led M’gann to a nearby seat as her headache worsened. “I’m so sorry– I don’t know what went wrong, I just–”
Kaldur laid a hand on the magician’s shoulder. “We will figure it out, but we must remain calm,” he intoned, and Zatanna nodded, mentally running through what went wrong with her spell while Kaldur returned to M’gann and led her through a meditation exercise. Wally and Artemis looked on in concern.
“Why can’t they speak English?” Wally asked.
Artemis half-turned to him. “Conner can speak bits of it, I heard him. But I don’t know what–”
“If. . . I concen–trate,” Conner began, closing his eyes intently for a few seconds, “I can focus. . . on only speaking English. But . . . it’s difficult. Like . . . my brain is crowded, and ‘parts of–’ parts of,” he repeated, “me are . . . fighting to speak . . . something else?” he tried.
‘Conner, do you think it’s Kryptonian?’ Dick asked, all of his words still mixed up in different languages, but Conner only looked at him in confusion. And he realized that, if Conner could speak in only one language if he concentrated, then he might be able to, as well.
Conner, in the meantime, had also figured out that he had understood parts of Robin’s speech, and he turned to the younger boy, forcing himself to concentrate on his exact words. ‘Can . . . you . . . speak only . . . French?’ he managed, his brow furrowing in intense thought.
Dick lit up, and nodded his head sharply. ‘Yes! Thank God!’ he exclaimed, the singular language coming easily to him after he’d realized he had the choice. ‘I don’t know what went wrong with Zee’s spell, and– why were you speaking so slowly? Cadmus taught you French, right?’ Conner blinked and waited for his brain to finish translating what Robin was saying, but it was a slow process, as the only knowledge he had of the language was what Zatanna’s spell had recently endowed him with. ‘Right?’ Robin repeated more hesitantly.
Conner shook his head. ‘Not . . . French. That part . . . is Zatanna,’ he admitted. ‘I think that’s what. . . is making it so hard . . . to understand and only speak . . . one language.’
Dick nodded. ‘English, French, and Kryptonian?” he guessed, and Conner sucked in a sharp breath of hope at the last word.
‘Kryptonian?’ he repeated. ‘But I don’t know–’ Conner paused as he realized that he hadn’t known French, either, before Zatanna’s spell. Which meant . . . it was possible. But he hadn’t ever really dared to hope that he could– Conner focused on English and turned back to Wally and Artemis, catching Zatanna’s attention as he began to speak. “I’m speaking Kryptonian, too,” he said.
“What? I didn’t know you knew it,” Wally said.
Conner crossed his arms. “I don’t. But I am half-Kryptonian,” he added.
Light dawned on Zatanna’s face. “Oh! I said, ‘speak your true language,’” she realized, “because I just assumed that it would be English.”
‘Damn,’ Dick cursed quietly in Russian, catching Artemis’s attention. Her eyes widened as she realized that the language was a clue to Robin’s ethnicity, and, having quite the repertoire of foreign curse words herself, she easily recognized the Russian.
“I know how to fix it, now,” Zatanna promised, before flaying her fingers wide at Conner and Robin and exclaiming, ‘Keaps lamron!’
Robin felt something settle in his throat, and when Zatanna turned to look at him in anticipation, he said aloud, “All good now?”
Wally pumped a fist in the air as he lunged at Robin to pull him into a one-sided hug. “Oh yeah! All better now, Rob,” he grinned, and Zatanna heaved a sigh of relief of her own.
M’gann had calmed her brain down, by that point, and she and Kaldur returned to the group, the martian intertwining her hands with the kryptonian. “What’s wrong, Conner?” she asked.
Conner looked at her. “It was. . . nice, I guess. Speaking Kryptonian. I didn’t know that was something I wanted to know,” he admitted. “It feels like I’m missing something, now.”
Dick looked over at the clone in understanding. He knew what it was like to not feel entirely himself, to feel like a fraud when he spoke English so often instead of his mother’s and father’s tongues. Bruce had learned a bit of Romani with Dick’s permission, but. . . he thought that he wanted to share that part of him with Jason, and maybe Tim. “A piece of your identity,” he added, and met Conner’s eyes. “I get it. You should ask Un– Superman to teach you,” he suggested. “It would be a good way to get to know him.”
A dark cloud passed over Conner’s face before he remembered that, recently, Clark had seemed more open to spending time with him. Their relationship still wasn’t great, but. . . there was something to hope for.
“Okay,” Conner agreed.