Lingual Downtime

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Buffy/Devil May Cry
Chapter Summary: Willow wants to learn a little more about Xander's devil side, only to have him catch her at it.
Word Count: 1739
Rating: Teen

        “Hey, Will, do you want to—is that where I was practicing my handwriting?” Xander sounds completely nonplussed, and Willow immediately tries to hide the pages she’s just been staring at.
        “No!” she squeaks. She keeps forgetting he doesn’t keep normal hours anymore, so he’s equally likely to be up at two in the morning or seven in the morning.
        Xander walks closer, and she reflexively closes her eyes, until she feels a compassionate calloused hand on top of her own. “Bestest of best friends, if you wanted to learn Pashu, all you had to do was ask me.” He’s being caring and nice and he’s probably going to kill her at this rate but she doesn’t care.
        “…Sorry.” It’s weird to go through her friend’s room and take stuff. She’d taken it just before he’d gotten kidnapped, and a couple months later she still hasn’t figured out whether to return it or even how to do so. She didn’t want him to see or get weirded out. She’s surprised the Devil Arms didn’t already tell him what an utter freak she is.
        “Nah, I get it. This is the Willow that cracked an FBI database in the pursuit of knowledge.” He’s smiling fondly, and while that has nothing to do with her actions, maybe it’s better to let him keep being oblivious this once. It’s a lot less creepy, and she is trying to get over him. “Your notebook?” He makes grabby hands, and she tries not to visibly panic, opting instead to flip to a new page so he sees absolutely nothing he shouldn’t. Okay, so it’s not like when they’d been talking about the Mara and Pashran; most of her recent entries are her working through her feelings and trying to get over him, but she still doesn’t want him to see any of that.
        He raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t ask any further questions, opting instead to pull up a chair, and she can’t help but clap her hands in delight. “You’re going to teach me?” Okay, yes, better than learning from Giles, except for the fact that this will probably feed into her fantasies even more.
        “If you’re all right learning from such a poor teacher.” It hurts her to know he’s not just saying that. He actually believes it.
        “You will always be better than Mr. Beach,” she insists, and Xander shudders.
        “Point. Okay. Uhh…let’s start with the basics. The characters.” He starts drawing, and he’s gotten a lot better.
        “Don’t you mean alphabet?” she asks, confused, and he pauses, thinking.
        “I mean, some of them are letters, but not all of them. And some of them are sounds we don’t get in English, while others are…ugh, I don’t know the fancy linguistics term for this one.” He runs a hand distractedly through his hair, making her distracted, too.
        “Take your time,” she tells him supportively, because seriously, she could do this all day.
        He gets up and goes to bother the ghostchef, coming back with an omelette and a few freshly made donuts. Even two forks. “Work makes hungry Xander,” he explains.
        “Everything makes hungry Xander,” she teases, and he grins in return.
        “You’re not wrong. Okay. So, how does English work?” She blinks at him, and he shrugs. “I suck at it, but we’re gonna go for a little Socratic method here.”
        “You’ve…got the alphabet? And words?” There’s a lot more to it than that and she sounds kind of pathetic, but he nods at her encouragingly anyway.
        “That’s a start. What about punctuation? What does that tell you?” Oh, hey. And he says he’s not good at this.
        “Oh! Like, question marks say it’s a question, and exclamation marks say you’re excited. Is there Pashran punctuation? What does it look like? I hadn’t noticed at all—” He holds up a hand, forestalling the babble, but he does look proud.
        “You’ve got about half the characters that are actually letters, what would be your normal alphabet, which not all languages use by the way. Like Chinese or Japanese, a few characters are an entire syllable, plus. The rest are, uh, indicators? Things like ‘punctuation’.” He actually uses air-quotes there, then chuckles. “Your Intense Learning Face is a lot like your Resolve Face, Willow.”
        “Is it bothering you?” she asks quickly, and he shakes his head.
        “Nah, just wasn’t expecting it. Where was I?” He takes a big bite out of the donut and swallows before continuing. “Okay, Pashu—Pashran’s, hmm, the name of the people, Pashu’s the language, kind of like how Americans speak English, has three types of punctuation. The only one they use consistently is periods. There’s another character for an emphasis, another for a pause, kinda like an all-purpose comma. A lot of the time, they omit them, even when you’d have them in English.”
        It’s time she asks a question to make sure he realizes she’s paying attention, and she only remembers last minute she doesn’t have to raise her hand like in class. “What about question marks?”
        “That’s my Willow, already moving on to the advanced stuff.” She can’t help but beam with pride. “Those are nwa. Nwa means both ‘sentence type’ and refers to the characters that indicate the sentence type. They’re put right at the beginning of the sentence, I guess kinda like Spanish, so you know when you start what kind of sentence you’re getting into. The one you’ll see most often is sbi, a normal sentence. Status quo, basically.” He draws a character, and she tries to memorize it. “There’s also sur, which says it’s a command. Kjo are exclamations, and tse are questions.”
        “I don’t see those on all of these,” she realizes, going back through his papers, and when she glances up he’s practically beaming.
        “Notice that I said ‘sentence type’,” he explains.
        “There’s no period either! These aren’t sentences.” That makes so much sense!
        “Yup. So, for example, if I was writing a shopping list, I wouldn’t have nwa or periods unless I was being a total weirdo. Oh, and there’s also a character that indicates names, acting kinda like an Egyptian cartouche, but we’ll get there.” He moves on, probably to the thing about his handwriting, given how he looks sheepish. “Now, I probably mentioned this already, but if you’re going to have fancy cursive, your lines have to be perfectly straight, and you have to use squares. I try to do that and get impatient because it’s taken so long and then my handwriting falls apart. It’s important, because it’s pretty easy to miss a dot on the paper. I’m not sure why the perfectly straight thing is a thing, but it is. Spacing is also a thing, and that actually makes sense.”
        He draws a few more characters, then points at them. “It’s kind of obvious, but can you tell me what the difference between these two are?”
        “…One is a vertical line and the other is a horizontal line?” She chafes a little, but then, she does have to master the basics to get anywhere.
        “Right. You’re looking at a consonant, v specifically, and a vowel, o specifically. Consonants are always vertical, and vowels are always horizontal.” She’d suspected that, subconsciously, just from the way the words looked, but never actually put that together directly.
        “Now, for the most part, you don’t have to worry about spacing too much, because words are usually consonant-vowel-consonant, or something like that. Most of the common double-consonant sounds are their own character. But if you get sloppy, it can be hard to tell the difference when consonants do fall together, usually from compound words like Pashran—pash meaning shadow and ran being a group of shadows, like ‘the shadows of the trees’. And, like German, Pashran like to make long, complicated compound words.” At least she’ll probably be better at that than him, since his English handwriting he’s been doing for years is also…not exactly the prettiest. She’s not sure whether to feel happy that there’s something he’ll be good at, or guilty about it because it definitely makes him feel bad. “Even then, vowels are going to remain distinct, unless they’re in one of those syllable-characters—which resemble the vowels. All of the vowels are made up of up to three lines and up to three squares. They’re easy to tell apart. It’s the consonants and indicators and syllables that get tricky. They have the same up-to-three lines, forming the core of the character, but the up-to-three squares can be on either side of the lines.”
        That sounds more complicated than it looks. “So…if you don’t space it correctly, you could end up mistaking a group of two characters for a different group of two characters.”
        “Yes, exactly.” Xander always gets shifty on his seat in enthusiasm. It’s kind of fun to watch. “If there are two sets of squares next to each other, you know what belongs to what, but if one of the characters has an open side… Let’s take the English word bat. Now, if you just spell it the way you would in English, with the characters for b, a, and t, no problem. But there’s also a character for ‘at’.”
        “Does it mean something different if you spell it differently?” Willow asks, and that throws him for a loop for a second.
        “Yeah,” he answers eventually, in the tone of ‘I thought that was really obvious and now I’m realizing it isn’t and having a minor panic attack’.
        “What are the characters for b and at?” she asks, to forestall that, and he sends her a grateful smile.
        He draws them with some specific space between them, labeling them. “You can see at isn’t open on either side, while b is open on the right. So you can see you’d have to be careful if you don’t want them confused for s and tsh.” For reference, he draws the other two.
        “Okay. I got it. So now, the alphabet?” He starts, labeling each as he goes, and she tears out a page and copies them.
        “Your handwriting’s pretty even in Pashu.” It’s half a compliment, half complaining, but she can’t help but blush even when it’s not exactly about her appearance. She’s beginning to realize the crush isn’t going to go anywhere, but if she can at least make herself realize it’s not going to go anywhere she’ll be a lot happier.