Luna. (floukru) wrote in the100, @ 2016-03-10 21:39:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !log/thread, alexander graham bell, dela |
WHO: Alexander Graham Bell and Dela
WHAT: AGB and Dela are working on Project: Trigedasleng Translator. See also: two total opposites are just about as cute as two people can be.
WHEN: We'll say like... Tuesday.
WHERE: Some common area.
WARNING: None!
All of this was unique for Dela, who had never before known anything but her life as part of the River Clan prior to being chased from their home by the dragon. It had taken her some time to heal to the point where her injuries weren’t as obvious. She was still recovering from some burns, but her ankle had healed properly by this point for the most part and she was more or less back to her usual ability level. Being in the mountain itself was a difficult task, though. She’d never had anything but bad memories and impressions of this place -- her father had died in the mountain, and -- given the existence of the Reapers -- he was one of the lucky ones. Even inside, she could feel nothing but death. It was oppressive, and being inside of a mountain after her life out in nature didn’t help. But it was the safest place to be, and she had to look out for her sister. So she’d stayed.
Dela stayed very tied to her roots, and she was so proud of the fact that so many in the mountain were curious in their ways. She was happy to share her culture and language with the many who asked, and it all piqued her natural curiosity as she tried to learn everything she can.
The brightest part in the situation was meeting the people she’d met. She’d made new friends and discovered so many new skills. She’d taught and she’d found a way to give back to the people through working as a healer. And, more recently, she’d found herself particularly enjoying being in the company of Alexander Graham Bell. They came from such entirely different worlds and such vastly unique upbringings, but they’d fit together like a puzzle very quickly, and she was very captivated by the new project they were undertaking together.
It’d taken hours to get to this point, and she finally sat back in the chair she’d been perched upon, reaching to brush her hair over her bared shoulder as she did so. She grinned, breathing a sigh. “I understand now,” she said, her words that sort of chopped, very careful English. “This how you work so long you forget to do anything else.”
“You see?” Aleck laughed. “It’s hard to walk away when the work’s going well, isn’t it?”
It had gotten late, though, and it was undoubtedly time to close up shop for the night. The only trouble with that was that it meant leaving Dela’s company, which he was rather loathe to do.
Aleck had settled in more quickly at Mount Weather than most did. He was a scientist by nature, not only by profession, and he had taken to this as just another opportunity to learn new things. There were nigh endless projects available, problems to solve, and even an entirely new language to learn and study. Could he trace patterns in syntax that evolved from English? How had pronunciations shifted, and why? What were the differences among the various clan dialects? And how did one say, “You are both beautiful and delightful” in Trigedasleng?
It seemed like a phrase he might need sometime soon. The more time Aleck spent with Dela, both in person and chatting on the network, the more he liked her. And of course she was undeniably lovely - and rather distractingly half-dressed, by the standards of London in 1868. (Aleck felt daringly casual himself because he had taken to leaving his quarters without a necktie.)
“Yes! Especially in the mountain where you no see the sun,” she said, still smiling. She was getting more and more confident with her English, even though she knew it wasn’t ideal. It was frustrating at times, because Dela was a very eloquent person naturally. In her own tongue, she was very highly regarded and very communicative. Because she also understood the nature of the human mind, she made for an excellent conversational partner. Having that stunted by the language barrier was hard. Even still, she didn’t feel she always entirely was able to express herself.
But she tried. And this technology that they were working on would fix so much and offer so many opportunities.
To be entirely fair to Aleck, Dela was half-dressed by most standards. The Grounders on the whole had less concern with clothing, and the Floukru followed that even further. It was hard to be in the river with great heaps of cloth hanging off of you, after all — that slowed you down. Bare-shouldered as she was, the dark tattoos across her back and around her wrists were very apparent, as were the little scars that served as kill marks for each of the lives she’d taken. (There were more than a few.) She made a unique contrast to Aleck and his scandalously missing necktie.
“You think this is a hard project? Harder than others you do, I mean?”
“I’m not sure, yet,” Aleck replied thoughtfully. “It’s a good project, and that’s the important thing. And the company’s good, which makes anything seem easier.”
The last he added with a smile. It was a deliberate attempt at flirting, which he wasn’t always very good at. He wasn’t a master of subtlety, and he’d spent a lot more time learning science and music and linguistics than he had on learning the finer points of social interaction. Not that he was bad socially - he was outgoing and friendly, and he had a genuine interest in his fellow people - but he wasn’t exactly smooth, either. He felt like he’d been doing better in print than he was in person.
Dela listened with intent, as she always did. And truthfully, it was how she listened to everyone. This was different, though — she was intrigued by Alexander for a variety of ways beyond just the things he said. He made her heart beat just a little faster, and that was something worth noting.
The flirting was not lost on her, and she blushed, ducking her chin just a little and tucking hair behind her ear. As can be expected, this type of behavior was not something that the fierce Grounder warrior very often demonstrated. She laughed. “You say so many nice things,” she said. “I think you trying to get some sneaky thing if I did not know you were just very sweet.”
She was very pretty in that little moment of shyness, Aleck thought. It was a little bit of a relief, too - if she was blushing, then he didn’t have to feel so silly about the goofy smile on his face.
“I’m not trying to get anything, I promise,” he said. “I’m not even very good at being sneaky. I leave that kind of thing to Jacob and Miss Frye. But…” He paused, and he didn’t blush, but he did avert his eyes a little. “I’m not this sweet with everyone I meet, though. Just so you know.”
She grinned back at him when she saw his expression, the two of them making quite a pair where they sat with such goofy looks and flirty body language. Dela was so out of her element in this, but Alexander made her feel so comfortable doing so.
Dela laughed. “I do not think you are so sneaky, no. Not to be offensive,” she said. When he continued, her head tilted a little, her mind working just a little longer as she worked to figure out what he was trying to say. When it hit, she grinned brighter still, even with the blush that crept back into her cheeks. “Oh, good. Otherwise, I go through with feeding you to river snake,” she said.
“Please, let’s not do that!” Aleck said, laughing as well. “How about we make a deal, you and I? I’ll restrict my fumbling attempts at flirtation to you until you tell me you’re bored of it, and you don’t let me get eaten by water-dwelling monsters. Does that seem fair?”
He didn’t appear nearly so nervous as he felt. In Aleck’s world, that was more or less an offer of courtship, though such things didn’t usually involve the threat of death by river snake in Victorian London. There were plenty of reasons to be nervous about that. She might just laugh at him, for one. Then there was the fact that he was from another dimension, and that they knew so little of each other’s languages and cultures. But then, that was sort of the point of a courtship, wasn’t it? To get to know each other and determine if you’d suit? They just had a little more to get to know than most.
Dela still smiled as he spoke, curiosity tilting her head a bit as she waited to hear the terms of his deal. Her grin grew just a little as he spoke and she translated, and she nodded even before she responded aloud. “Very fair. Both very dangerous for you, after all,” she teased. “Though I am not so much a water-dwelling monster. More a water-dwelling warrior.”
As with so many other things, the Floukru version of courtship varied drastically from Victorian London. In fact, it largely didn’t exist. In a warrior culture such as hers, there weren’t balls or galas to attend. There were no sweet teatimes or other such dates. That wasn’t to say that couples didn't love one another — they absolutely did, in most occasions. But their time together was spent hunting or fishing or fighting. Everything was more tangible and practical and less slow-moving and emotional. There was a lot more physicality. So this idea of being so sweetly flirted with was utterly captivating to Dela, who was so out of her element. But it made her feel warm, and she liked the way that felt. “You not so fumbling.”
“And you are a water-dwelling delight, Miss Dela,” Aleck replied. “Dangerous, perhaps, but I think I can count on you not to strike me dead unless I do something to deserve it, which I’ll try my best not to do.”
Aleck was brought up to be a gentleman, and didn’t see any reason to be anything else with a lady he thought so highly of, even if she wasn’t a conventional sort of lady. Not that he would object if she wanted to be more physical, but he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to push it. That would be disrespectful, where he came from, and while he knew that the prevailing customs around romance were different here, it seemed best to err on the side of caution.
“Dangerous makes for good compliment for my people. I like that you think so, even if I would not hurt you,” she said. You are much too lovely to hurt, she offered in her native tongue, grinning at him to see if he might pick out any of the words from their long hours of work on the dictionary.
She pulled a bare knee up from the floor, her arms moving around it lazily as she made herself more comfortable in her chair. “You tell me more about what you work on here. What besides this is in your smart mind?”
He got a little of the Trigedasleng phrase, enough to make him smile. He probably would have done that anyway, though, from watching her shift around in the chair. She had that same easy grace that his Assassin friends did, but much prettier than Jacob and significantly less clothed than Evie. It was a bit distracting. Charming, but distracting.
“Well, I’ve been playing with the iron horse with Mr. Stark,” Aleck said. “And a few more pairs of rolling boots like Jacob’s, but those go very easily now. Mostly I’ve been looking into communication projects - things we could use to communicate over long distances should the network become unusable for some reason.”
Dela tried to add more and more of her native tongue back into their conversations, now that they’d started spending time together. Just as she was working perfect her English, she knew that he wanted to learn Trigedasleng. Also, she liked watching the face he made while working through what she’d said. It was very dashing. He was so unlike the Grounder men she knew, and she adored that.
She listened curiously as he spoke, nodding along with what he said. She was fascinated by all of his projects and the way his mind worked. It was a lovely thing, truly, and something she had no ability to fully comprehend. “How your mind comes up with these?” she asked, grinning, gesturing to her own head. “How you have so many thoughts and can work through them so well?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Aleck replied, giving her a smile and a shrug. “I’ve always had a head full of thoughts. I don’t know any other way to be. I just try to get as many of the thoughts turned into action as possible, because they’re not doing anyone any good just bouncing around in my brain. Like the way you understand people and how to talk to them; it just comes naturally.”
Aleck sort of knew that he was a genius, but not exactly. Like a lot of other great scientists of history, he thought of himself as standing on the shoulders of the innovators and inventors and scholars who came before him. He knew he was quicker than most, but hwasn’t impressed with himself, in a general sense. After all, Signor Auditore had known Leonardo Da Vinci; there was someone impressive. Aleck just had a few impressive projects, as far as he was concerned.
She responded in Trigedasleng with a phrase that she then translated with a grin: “Better to have head full of thoughts than head full of rocks.” She nodded as he spoke, but shrugged a shoulder. “Very different, though. Similar in a way, maybe, but also not. You speak to technology, but it have so many different parts. And then you build and make new. I do not do those things,” she said. “I make tools, but they are for purposes. I need to fish, so I make a spear. I need to hunt, so I make a bow. You make tools because of creativity. You find holes and fill them.” She smiled. “It’s so impressing.”
Aleck made note of the Trigedasleng phrase. It seemed a useful one, and he had a good enough memory and a good enough ear to keep hold of it until it was needed. Then she called him impressing, and he really did blush.
“Oh, no! I mean...yes, I do that, the finding holes and filling them, but that’s not...is it really?” He looked up at her with a hopeful smile. “I’d been trying to impress you a bit. Just not so much that you’d think I was too shiny to touch.”
When he blushed, Dela’s smile grew again -- really, to be honest, his influence was primarily that of discovering the spectrum of smiles she was capable of giving. Somehow, it’d come to be that she was always wearing one of some sort around him. For someone out of her element in the mountain and who had grown up in such a hostile environment, that was telling.
“It really is!” she countered, nodding. When he admitted to trying to impress her, she blushed again. (Again.) “You succeed,” she said, and then reached and pressed her fingertips to his arm. “And not too shiny to touch, see?”
It was a tiny little touch, but it sent a shiver up Aleck’s spine just the same. Flirtation was exciting business, and at least as much fun as science. Dela had said he made her blush once, and now it seemed he’d succeeded again, and it was a very nice look on her. She looked nice all the time, but the blush and the smile were just marvelous. He had been hoping she would like him, and it seemed she did, and...now what did he do? At home he knew the rules, but it didn’t take much cultural insight to see that they were very different here. Could he just go on saying what he was thinking? It seemed to be working out all right so far.
“You’re very impressive yourself, you know,” he said, and though it seemed excessively bold, Aleck turned his arm over to catch Dela’s hand with his. “I’ve never met anyone who manages dangerous and clever and charming and beautiful all at once even half so well.”
Dela’s touch initially had just been a way of proving her point in a teasing way, but the contact really was lovely, and she was blushing harder still at the fact that she’d reached for him the way she had. And that, again, wasn’t really typical — the physical nature of her people meant a lot of contact just like this. This was different, though.
She tilted her head a little at his words. “You only see parts, though. Wait til it is warm and we fish and hunt,” she said, grinning. She diverted her eyes to their joined hands, both startled by the gesture and very much enjoying it. “Oh,” she breathed, surprised by his words as well. “You say the nicest things, Alexander.” She said, bringing her other hand to her own flushed cheek to cool it.
Aleck’s smile was turning into a grin. It was staying a grin. His face was probably going to freeze like that. Fishing and hunting, eh? That sounded like a grand time, if he was to be doing it with Dela. He liked the idea of doing just about anything with Dela.
“You seem to make them pop up in my head,” he said, and found that he didn’t have to work too hard for the courage to press forward. “May, ah...may I see you again tomorrow? I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission but yours for that, do I?”
“Yes?” She responded, pleased at the thought. She liked knowing that she could have an impact like that on someone so clean and unique. Dela had no real concept of herself in comparison to others, aside from knowing that she as a Grounder was different. There was no sense of feeling out of place, which was something her fellow Floukru did feel at times. She knew that there were those in the mountain who didn’t want them there, but she personally felt no sense of inferiority in any way. Even still, she noted the differences between them, and it surprised her that she could catch the attention of someone like him in such a way.
“Oh no,” she said, then quickly added, “There is no one else, I mean. Yes you can see me. I take care of myself, see? And I like to see you again.” She smiled. “You come to sunrise again with me?”
“Where I come from, I would have to ask your family’s permission to court you,” Aleck explained. “I’m still learning the local customs, obviously, so I...I thought I ought to ask. But since you’re entirely in charge of yourself, minding your own affairs and all, I...yes.” He chuckled at himself, because he realized he was getting tangled up in his own little speech. “Yes, I would love to come to sunrise with you again.”