To make it clear: I'm not a huge fan of Calypso and Leo together, but I tried to make this story really good anyways because so many of you readers are. I did do my very best to find a cute concept, based off of the fact that if an anglophone learned so much as basic greetings or vows in French for me, I would explode with happiness. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters portrayed below.
Lost in Translation
"Next," Reyna said slamming an imposing looking stamp on a folder before shoving it aside.
Reyna and Frank were going down the no-bullshit road for their praetorhood. Instead of submitting slips of paper with problems with them, they had Open Principia Sunday when all the legionnaires could just line up at the principia with their problems and argue them out in front of the praetors. This had the added bonus of discouraging or weaselling out the soldiers who didn't actually have a problem that important since Sunday was also the day of freedom and visiting Berkeley.
"Hey Calypso," Frank said. He looked bored out of his mind, slumped over the table.
"Hi," she said shyly, easing the door shut behind her.
"Is there anyone behind you?" Reyna asked.
She shook her head. She'd made sure and given her turn up to anybody behind her.
"I actually only need to talk to Reyna," Calypso said.
"Oh thank Mars," Frank said shooting to his feet. "I mean- gosh, are you sure?"
Reyna shot him a look but Calypso smiled.
"Yes, thank you," she said.
Frank nodded at Reyna and said something about meeting up later before slipping out.
"Good praetor," Reyna said, "but short attention span."
Calypso smiled nervously.
"What's going on?" Reyna asked, leaning forwards.
Since she'd learned that Reyna had spent some time with Circe, Calypso had been much less threatened by the other girl's imposing façade, and Reyna had been much harder-pressed to keep it up. She'd never actually met Circe, but Calypso had heard about him from a shipwrecked hero named Odysseus- and if there was something that she could sympathise with, it was being stuck on magical islands where time ran differently for years and years. In fact, you could say that Reyna was one of the first friends that Calypso had made on earth.
"I need to ask you a favour," she said.
"Shoot," Reyna said.
"Okay, so the other day I started looking for a word," Calypso said. "You know, like, sometimes you just forget a word?"
"Sure," Reyna said, her face dull.
"But I said it in Greek and Leo translated for me. And then, you know, maybe we talked about Greek poetry and stuff and it was cute…"
"Sure," Reyna said, still unimpressed.
"And I thought that it was really nice how he could speak Greek to me," Calypso said, "when I haven't heard it in so long and I was starting to miss my language. And he's done so much for me, to show me what the world's like now and everything... So I was wondering if maybe I should start picking up some Spanish… and whether you could help me…"
"Teach you Spanish," Reyna repeated.
"Please?" Calypso asked.
She sighed and pushed piles of papers and folders around the table.
"I don't know how much I can do," Reyna said. "How much time I'll have…"
"Please? Whatever you can do is really, really plenty," Calypso pleaded.
Reyna sighed. "Okay. Next Sunday after the meetings, I can pull something off."
Calypso beamed.
Lesson 1
"Okay," Reyna said. "I'm going to start with the words that are easy to remember."
"How do you know they're easy?"
"Because Jason knows them from hearing me talk to my sister or swear," Reyna said, "and five year olds across America have memorised them from Dora the Explorer. No, you don't need to know what that is."
Good. She had a feeling that if she asked Leo he'd guess what she was doing, and she wanted to surprise him.
"Let's start simple," Reyna said. "To say hello, you say 'hola'."
"Hola," Calypso started.
"Good," Reyna said. "You're caught up to the five-year olds."
"We really have to catch you up on this whole culture thing," Leo said as he shook the big, square electronic. "If this thing decides to work…"
"And play a movie?"
"Right, this is the thing that plays movies," Leo grinned. "Anyways, Forrest Gump is a must if you're even going to spend ten seconds with Piper. She's a nut for it. Then I'll show you who her dad is in another movie…"
He shook the electronic (Calypso always got their names confused) again and Calypso's stomach made a little spin. She got so excited whenever Leo tried to share movies and books and words and comic books with her, it was a step up from the welcome and care that people usually gave her at the camps.
She couldn't wait to show him that she cared too.
Lesson 3
"What's that?" Reyna asked pointing to the floor.
"El piso," she said.
"Right. And that?"
"El sofa," Calypso said pointing at the couch.
"El mesa," Calypso said to say 'the table'.
"La mesa," Reyna corrected.
"What? Table is lamesa?"
"No, the pronoun for mesa is la not el."
"I don't understand," Calypso said.
"I should probably have mentioned this before. It's not like English or Greek," Reyna said. "Some words are feminine, some words are male."
Calypso's eyes popped.
Lesson 5
"So to say 'I am happy', you would say 'yo soy feliz'," Calypso said, her elbows resting on stray highlighters and lined sheets of paper.
"Actually, no," Reyna said. "Okay, so since 'soy' only applies to the first person singular, you can cut the 'yo'. It's useless."
"Alright," Calypso said.
"Also you don't use 'soy'."
"But that's the verb for 'to be'," Calypso said.
"Well, actually, there are two different verbs for 'to be'," Reyna said.
Her face fell.
Leo was humming a song as he worked and Calypso only picked up a few words.
"Todo aquel que piense que la vida es desigual,
tiene que saber que no es asi,
que la vida es una hermosura, hay que vivirla.
Todo aquel que piense que esta solo y que esta mal,
tiene que saber que no es asi, que la-"
He noticed watching her and grinned lopsidedly.
"Hey you," he said. "Hadn't noticed you walk in."
Calypso was busy picking out words she recognised. Saber was to know in some form… vida was life… hermosura was sister or beauty, she couldn't remember…
He kissed her on the forehead.
"What were you singing?"
"This old Celia Cruz song," Leo said. "She was a singer. I don't really like her, but my grandpa used to blast her music in his shop so my mom always sung her stuff when she worked. I picked up on it, I guess."
"It didn't sound too bad," Calypso said.
"Yeah, you need a better standard for music," Leo grinned.
Lesson 7
"It's really not that hard," Reyna said. "Words that end in 'a' are usually feminine. Words that end in 'o' are usually masculine. Whenever a word ends with an accented vowel it's masculine, and so are months and days of the week and…"
"But why?" Calypso said. "Why do they even need to have genders? A table's a table with no sense of identity or consciousness or- or-"
"I don't know," Reyna said. "I just speak Spanish, doesn't mean I understand it!"
"My head hurts," Calypso said as she laid her head on Leo's chest during the campfire. Well, more precisely, during the time at which they were supposed to be at the camp fire but had actually escaped to sit on the Argo II and stargaze instead.
"How come?" Leo asked.
Because I'm studying too many new words too long and living in a constant language shock of English, Greek, Latin and Spanish, she wanted to say.
"I don't know."
Leo kissed her hairline.
"All better?"
"Oh yeah," she said. "Definitely all better."
Lesson 9
Words were starting to fuse into one and the same to Calypso.
"Garlic," Reyna quizzed her.
She drew a blank.
"Ceja?" She tried.
"Ajo," Reyna corrected. "Chicken?"
She had no idea.
"Pollo. How about fish?"
"Pez?"
"Pez is fish when it's alive. Like, if you're talking about the animal like my pet fish. When you're talking about food, fish is pescado," Reyna said.
Calypso held her head in her hands.
Lesson 11
"Where are you off to with that?" Leo said nodding towards the scalding cup of coffee she was holding.
"Oh, umm," she scrambled for a lie, "Coffee date with Reyna."
"Nice," Leo said. "Have fun."
"Thanks," she said. It's not like the coffee is the only thing keeping me awake.
Lesson 13
Reyna was being a clear and attentive teacher as per usual, and Calypso was struggling as she usually did. It didn't help that there were three legionnaires serving penance for being out of bed past curfew mulling around the principia and moving boxes of old archives to the basement. Their constant coming and goings were distracting Calypso, and it was even worst when one of them spoke up.
"What are you saying?" One of the legionnaires, a kid named Juan, said.
"I'm teaching her colours," Reyna said coldly. "Do your work."
"What the Hades kind of colour is velde?"
"Green!" Calypso piped up.
"She's right," Reyna said. "It's green."
"Green is verde," Juan replied.
"You say it velde," Reyna replied.
"No," Juan said. "Verde."
"You say it velde, Juan," Reyna said. "I talk to Ana Julia all the time and that's how she says it too."
This arguing went to and fro for a few minutes before Reyna stopped, suddenly come to a huge realisation.
"Where are you from, Juan?" Reyna asked.
"Ecatepec," he said. "Mexico."
"That's why," Reyna said. She turned to Calypso. "I'm Puerto Rican. Caribbean Spanish tends to switch R to L in front of T or D. It's just differences in the dialect."
"What?" Calypso despaired. "Why would anybody do that?"
So she was sitting alone in the Big House at Camp Half-Blood, where Chiron had offered her a room until she either felt comfortable living on Olympus or found a place of her own. Scrawled notes and pages of word translations and a chart on verbs that Reyna had drawn for her were spread on the table. Calypso wasn't sure which part was making her cry, but the frustration was definitely getting to her. Couldn't she learn this? Was she really that displaced and disassociated from the mortal world?
"Hey you," Leo said from behind. He put her hand on his shoulder. "What… what's wrong? What's all this?" He said picking up one of the papers about food-related words.
"I was trying to learn Spanish," Calypso said, eyes shut. "But I think I'm a lost cause."
"A lost cause?" Leo frowned.
"Reyna tried to teach me but I never understood any of it and it's such a weird language and it's hard to learn languages and I'm not good at them like at all," Calypso said. "And there are five different words for fish and two verbs for to be and two 'L's sound like a y but they didn't write it as a y to start with… I really couldn't handle it and I didn't want to tell you to make it a surprise but then it was because I didn't want to disappoint..."
"Hey, hey," Leo said. "Calm down. I'm not disappointed, this is… actually, really, really sweet… like… wow… But it's a whole lot of work for nothing. The only important word in Spanish for you is te quiero, anyways."
"How come?" Calypso asked.
"Because that's I love you," he said simply.
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