Tonight’s Flash Fiction Friday is inspired by the following prompt from the writing bot on my Discord:
[268] Whenever you speak, people hear you speaking in their native language. Most people are surprised and delighted. The cashier at McDonalds you’ve just talked to is horrified. “Nobody’s spoken that language in thousands of years.”
I didn’t quite play it straight, instead it became a small story about a girl dating a vampire. It’s pretty cute, I think. Hope you like it!
Confession
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I say, and my mouth is dry with nervousness. I’ve been practicing in my head for days but in spite of imagining this conversation dozens of times I still have no idea how Elena will react.
“Oh?” Her dark eyes are curious, glowing slightly red in the light from the candles between us on the table, her lips crimson like the rose she brought me. She’s such a romantic. It makes this harder, somehow.
“I’m… not like you,” I say. In a way it’s a lie – we are very much alike. Soulmates, maybe. At least I think so. “I… I’m not Undying.” My eyes drop at the last word. Technically I never said I was, but I let her believe it. The way her eyes, her whole face lit up when we first spoke, the way crimson streaked her face on our first nighttime walk together when she told me how it had been more than a century since she heard her native tongue spoken… I just couldn’t bare telling her that I hadn’t learned it from birth and kept it alive on my tongue through the ages as she had. It’s my own brand of weird – when I speak, people heard my language as their language. Even, as it turns out, if their language is long since dead and forgotten.
“I know,” she says and I’m so shocked I look back up. She doesn’t look angry at all, melancholy and amusement vying for dominance in her face.
“You do?”
She nodded slowly. “Don’t get me wrong, I very much assumed at first and you… you didn’t exactly say anything to dissuade me. But honestly… I’d figured it out by the third date.” She looks sheepish for a moment. “You’re just too… too mortal.”
“Is it the tan, or…?” I try to be funny, my eyes pleading with her to laugh.
“Something like that.” Her lips quirk at the corners, more sympathy than amusement. “I’ve been wanting to bring it up, but I wasn’t sure how. Especially since I don’t quite understand…”
“How I can speak it?” She nods again, and I explain it to her, explain how I can’t explain it, how it’s just always been that way, how I only realized when my friends all gaped as I spoke Italian to a waiter at a fancy pasta place on my 13th birthday. I say too many times that I don’t do it on purpose, not enough times that I should’ve told her anyway.
“I can stop if you want,” I say finally in English, dragging each word up by throat and out past my lips. Overriding my inexplicable silver tongue is exhausting, every ounce of my focus spent on forcing my vocal organs to make a different set of sounds than what my brain is telling me to make. I can’t stand it usually, but for her…
She shakes her head. “You’re making amends in the wrong direction. I’ll be happier if we only ever speak my language together.”
“So we’re still… together?” I say, hopefully.
She reaches for my hand across the table, puts her palm against mine. “We need to talk about trust, though.”
I nod. We do need to talk about trust. And maybe about feeding…