That Which We Find In Others (original work)
(subtitle: Spot The Fandom References)
Jim burst into the house and dropped his backpack beside the couch, yelling, “Aunt Susan! I’m home!”
His eight-year-old cousin, Darcy, poked her head around the corner. “She’s hanging out laundry.” The head popped out of sight, only to reappear a second later. “We’re having fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner.”
Jim sighed. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes meant that Frank, Aunt Susan’s second husband, was going to be home for dinner. Frank didn’t approve of Jim and didn’t care who knew it. Which - was fine by Jim, since he didn’t approve of Frank right back. “I met someone interesting today,” he said to Darcy. Her head had disappeared, but he knew from experience that she would be sitting on the stairs, where she could hear everything going on from out of sight. It was a tactic he’d used plenty himself. “His name is Marc."
A leg and half Darcy's face appeared around the corner. "Like the nice man at the post office?"
"I think he spells it with a 'c' on the end instead of a 'k', but yeah."
"Why's he interesting? I thought you said all your classmates were boring and idiots and they should all go jump in Mount Doom."
Jim winced and checked that his aunt was still outside. "Darce, you shouldn't always believe everything you hear, and you definitely shouldn't repeat it. Even if most of them are imbeciles," he muttered under his breath.
"So why?" She had migrated to the bottom step now.
"He has a little brother."
"Lots of people have little brothers." Disdainfully. “He doesn’t sound very interesting to me.”
“If you come here a sec I’ll show you why he’s interesting.”
She came to stand by the couch, clutching Flopsy, her ragged stuffed bunny, with one hand. Jim placed one hand flat on his chest, then moved one hand, first two fingers extended, to rest on the other, before he curled his fingers in a series of swift motions. “Know what I just said?”
“You didn’t say anything. I’m not stupid, Jim.”
“Smarty-pants. I just said ‘my name is Jim’. Except I said it in the language Marc knows.”
“Why’s he talk like that?”
“He doesn’t all the time, but his little brother can’t hear, so they use sign language - that’s what it’s called, what I was just doing.”
Her head tilted. “I guess that’s pretty cool, I mean, it’s like a secret language that only -”
“Jim?” Aunt Susan came around the corner; a tired look covered a face still lovely despite the wear of years.
“Hi, Aunt Susan.” He stood and moved to kiss her cheek. “Need any help with dinner?”
“Actually, if you could mash the potatoes while I finish up the chicken? Darcy, would you please set the table? Frank should be home soon and I’d like to have everything on the table by the time he gets here.”
Jim gritted his teeth at the mention of Frank, but respect for his aunt kept him from saying more than, “Sure.”
He ate his dinner as fast as he could, cleared his dishes, and headed for his room, mumbling something about homework.
Without an undue amount of o’er-weening pride (so sue him; he read a lot) Jim knew he was pretty popular at school. With his mom in the Force, he’d had a lot of experience fitting in - find just the right amount of cheekiness each teacher tolerated and which ones could be charmed in/out of things and the most average of average grades he could get. Nobody likes a sanctimonious bookworm, so he kept his love of books as quiet as he could and stayed just popular enough that no one actively hated him and kept his head down enough that the jocks didn’t get jealous and he got through all right. His aunt would sigh whenever she caught sight of his report card and say, “Jimmy, I know you can do better than this - you’re staying here for a while now, so don’t you think you might try and bring your grades up, a bit?”
He had smiled. Getting noticed almost always ended in blood, sweat, and tears (or at least the first two). It was safest to fly just under the radar, so he smiled and waved at people as he passed, but his first real smile of the day came as he walked out of his last class and saw Marc getting his books out a couple lockers down. “Hey!”
The other boy glanced up and smiled back. “Hi, Jim. Man, can you believe Mr. Logan’s assignment? I can barely draw stick figures, much less an apple that looks like a real apple.”
Jim leaned against his locker, backpack slung over one shoulder. “You’re telling me. It’s all right for Steve and Peter and artistic guys like that, but if he expects more than a cartoon from me he’s gonna be disappointed.”
Marc laughed. “I hear you. Hey, I’ve got to go pick up Edmund - you wanna come with? We can hang out at my house afterwards and work on homework or whatever. My mom makes these awesome cookies.”
Jim hesitated, thought about going back to his aunt’s house and keeping his mouth shut while Frank criticized Aunt Susan’s cooking and Jim’s lack of ‘dicipline’ and the trouble he caused and Darcy’s ‘juvenile’ habit of carrying Flopsy with her, and said, “I’d love to come. Let me just text my aunt and let her know.”
When they pulled up in front of Tarsus Elementary School, Jim asked, “You want me to wait out here?”
“You can come in if you want - I’m picking him up from his classroom. His interpreter waits with him until I can come.”
“Interpreter?” Jim slid out of the car and shoved his hands into his pockets, hunching a little against the cold drizzle.
“Yeah.” Marc locked the doors and motioned him towards a side door. “We’re lucky, actually. Lots of kids are either put in a special ed classroom or given papers to do in the corner because the teachers don’t know how to teach a deaf student. But Ed’s in a regular classroom with the other kids; he just has an interpreter with him, both to interpret and to help him interact with his teachers and classmates.”
“Huh. That’s actually kinda cool. So, anything I should know about before I meet - Edmund, right?”
“Right, but - oh, snap, I forgot, he wants to go by Ed now; don’t tell him I told you.”
“Uh.” Jim held up his hands. “You forget, I only know how to introduce myself, say ‘nice to meet you’, and I know about half the alphabet.”
“Well, just in case.” Marc grinned. “Anyway, just remember, when you’re talking to him or he’s talking to you, don’t look at the interpreter. That’s really rude. You always look at the person who’s talking, even if they’re using their hands.”
“Got it,” Jim nodded. “Anything else?”
“Ed hasn’t been lip-reading very long, but he still needs the practice. Just speak clearly, but you don’t need to exaggerate lip movements or anything.”
The ten-year-old’s smile when he saw his older brother was brilliantly wide, and Marc barely put out his hands in time to catch him as the younger boy barreled into him, arms flying tight around his waist. The interpreter stood up and picked up her bag, smiling to Marc. “You might want to make sure the English homework gets done,” her hands moved as she spoke, and Jim watched in fascination as they danced through the air, even though Ed was ignoring her in favor of packing up his own school things, “he was having particular difficulty with sentence structure.”
Marc nodded, his hands moving as well as he said to Jim, “In ASL, the sentence structure is time, then topic, then comment, so it’s hard for deaf kids to understand English grammar.”
“Well, I get that,” Jim chuckled, “English grammar’s hard enough for me and I’ve been speaking it all my life.”
The interpreter tapped Ed on the shoulder, signed something with a smile, and then waved goodbye to Marc and Jim.
“Ed,” Marc touched him on the shoulder, speaking and signing at the same time, “this is my friend Jim. He’s going to come over and hang out for a while, and we can teach him some signs, okay?”
The younger boy looked from his brother to Jim, who smiled as winningly as he could, and then back to his brother, signing something that looked like a question.
“I don’t know if he’s staying for dinner. Should I ask?” Marc glanced at Jim, a smile quirking up the corner of his mouth.
Ed nodded emphatically, and Marc turned to Jim and asked solemnly, “Jim, would you like to stay for dinner?”
“…are you sure your parents won’t mind?”
“Nah; mom loves having guests for dinner.”
“Well, in that case, sure.” Jim paused. “How do you sign ‘thanks for inviting me?’”
Smiling, Marc moved one open hand from his chin outward, swept the same open hand in towards his waist, and then pointed to himself. Jim repeated the signs somewhat awkwardly, and was rewarded with a quick-silver smile.
Struck by a sudden impulse, Jim inclined in a deep, old fashioned bow towards Edmund, signing at the same time, “Nice to meet you.” The answering smile was even brighter, and Marc said dryly, signing with a wry look at his brother as he attempted to replicate the bow, “You know, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Jim laughed. “You know, you just might be right.”