Sometimes Ankh speaks in snatches of alien tongues. The sound of them sets Eiji on edge. He listens to the muttered phrases and short exclamations and does his best to catalogue each fragment, at least until Ankh morphs unthinkingly back into modern Japanese and the moment is lost.
Eiji has traveled more countries than he has any care to count. He has forgotten more words in more languages than he could ever expect anyone to remember. But sometimes Ankh growls something under his breath, and sometimes Eiji recognizes just enough of the words to make the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Sometimes the syntax resonates in familiar structures in his mind. The ring of the syllables in his ears makes a kind of distant sense, but he can never shake the foreign feeling that surrounds even familiar words.
He continues to listen.
Ankh speaks modern Japanese with ease. Eiji tries to remember if there was ever a time in which it had been difficult to understand him. Their first meeting is still a blur of color and sound, and he can't remember if the words Ankh spoke then flowed the way they did now. Eiji has a vague impression of distant, antiquated formality. But it hadn't been difficult to comprehend then, not really, not even in the chaos surrounding them.
The languages Ankh doesn't know he speaks are old, Eiji realizes the more he listens. Not ancient, not quite, but he can feel the archaic lilt to them. Forms of words that no longer exist. Idioms and phrases fallen out of use centuries ago. Bursts of sound that might have once held meaning, but are now little more than verbal artifacts of a time long gone.
He remembers that Ankh is eight hundred years old.
He remembers that 'artifact' describes Ankh just as well as it does the languages he speaks.
Ankh swears sharply at a retreating Yummy and Eiji matches what he hears with what he knows. It's easy when he can connect words and phrases with their modern counterparts. Easy to navigate his way with careful steps through conjugation and declination when he has a baseline of comparison. Then Ankh scolds him for not paying attention, and his transition back into Japanese is seamless, but Eiji is still thinking in middle Arabic and doesn't make the change quite fast enough to keep up. He replies in modern Arabic and Ankh pauses, his eyes narrowing.
Eiji blinks at him. Switches back into Japanese. Asks him what's wrong. Ankh cuffs his ear and tells him to stop goofing off. Now they'll have to work even harder to find their missing prey.
Eiji ducks his head in apology, but he doesn't miss the way Ankh studies him for the next few minutes. Calculating. Suspicious.
Chiyoko is teaching Hina a Spanish carol, and Eiji is searching out harmonies, and on his way through to the kitchen, Ankh stops short to listen.
It is an old song, but even its earliest recordings in written history are well after Ankh's time. Eiji had been certain he wouldn't recognize it. But from the way his eyes stare into nothing, from the way he hovers mid-step for just a moment too long, Eiji knows.
Chiyoko calls out to Ankh. He scowls at her and breezes into the kitchen, and then retreats upstairs with his ice cream. Hina sighs, but they continue to sing as they decorate the restaurant. And as Eiji ascends the stairs after closing time, he can hear the murmured words, undertones of melody muffled through the door that is always closed, will likely always be closed between them.
"Ríu ríu chíu, la guarda ribera
Dios guardó el lobo de nuestra cordera."
Ankh never speaks of his life before. Eiji doesn't expect him to. The past isn't a topic of comfort for either one of them. But Eiji finds himself wondering anyway.
He stares up at his ceiling some nights and listens to the distant murmuring from the other side of the room. There are plenty of puzzle pieces, and though he knows he hasn't found them all yet, he does his best to fit together what he has. Ankh knows at least as many languages as Eiji does—he hasn't used one yet that Eiji doesn't recognize. What cause would he have had to learn them? Language-learning for Eiji has always come out of necessity. He can't see it being any different for Ankh. After all, Ankh has never really struck him as the scholarly type.
Eiji spends long hours wondering what the world must have been like in the days Ankh walked it. Wondering what it was he had seen and heard and felt. Wondering what horror it was he had suffered that could kill the wanderlust in him.
Eiji decides it must be Izumi Shingo's fault. Having access to a brain saturated in the modern language must have made it easy for Ankh to absorb. Eiji is not so lucky. Especially now that Ankh is beginning to guard his words more jealously.
He still lets out the occasional quick bark of foreign sound, but now he swallows each one just as quickly. Eiji pretends not to notice the flint-sharp glances Ankh shoots him after every exclamation. He gives no indication how much he understands, and it almost amuses him how antsy Ankh gets because of it.
Was he so used to being able to keep secrets hidden behind alien syllables? When had he built that as a defense mechanism? Why?
Ankh slips once and lets out an impressive string of insults in middle-low German when he knocks a sack of flour to the kitchen floor. It's an accident, but Ankh is supposed to be graceful and deadly, not clumsy and covered in flour, and his indignation at the universe rings clear and sharp in his voice.
Eiji snorts with laughter at one particularly clever (caustic) remark. He regrets it immediately when Ankh's eyes flash up to meet his. They are wide and startled, as though he has suddenly found himself cornered, prey in the eyes of a predator.
Eiji realizes with a start that he is the predator. And Ankh is not accustomed to being prey.
Ankh kicks the bag of flour and storms out of the kitchen. Chiyoko calls after him, but he ignores her, leaving a swirl of white powder and a lingering sense of isolation in his wake.
Ankh guards his words even more fiercely for weeks after that.
It feels as though the door has been closed in Eiji's face once more. He understands, or at least, he thinks he does—but it's hard to tell, because, as he is beginning to discover, Ankh does not want to be understood. He is not here to be understood. He is here to achieve his goals and destroy everything in his path. He does not expect to be listened to. He does not expect to be comprehended. He only expects to fight and be fought. Kill or be killed. Grasp his desires or fade away.
The silence does not last beyond his waking hours. At night Ankh murmurs in hazy, indistinct swirls of unintelligible dreamspeak. Eiji makes no effort to interpret them. But despite his best efforts to ignore them, he still catches individual sentences on occasion, syllables that burst into clarity before drifting back into the fog.
Sometimes those words make Eiji sit up and stare into the darkness. Make him rest his back against the headboard and curl his knees into his chest. Make him put his face in his hands and breathe slowly, fighting back dizzying waves of déjà vu.
Eiji never asks for the whole story. Ankh would never tell him if he did.
Ankh seems to enjoy the sound of consonants. He clicks each one off as sharply as he can, relishing the force of diction he can put behind each word. There is a fierce sort of pleasure in each snap and crackle of sound. The more he listens, the more Eiji comes to realize that the power in Ankh's voice comes not from volume, but from the concise closure on each consonant, the clarity of every word, the insistence that each hard, sharp sound be heard as exactly what it is meant to be.
Eiji's consonants are softer. He tends to linger on his vowel sounds, making them round and gentle. The ease of his voice comes from only a light rest on each consonant sound before flowing into the next vowel. The calm haze of his tone seems to bother Ankh, more and more as time progresses, and Eiji will not understand why until the world begins to blur around him and the sharpness of sound disappears into fog. Then he will understand the love of cracking shell-hard consonants against the back of his teeth and the roof of his mouth. But for now his voice flows like a river, and Ankh regards it with suspicion and distaste.
Ankh yells something in the middle of a fight and Eiji reacts before he can register what he's being told. He follows the advice without thinking, ducking and spinning around to find the weak point on the Yummy's back.
It isn't until after the battle has ended that he gives Ankh a questioning look. He is met with another of those calculating stares, as though Ankh is weighing possibilities and potentials—a look that almost always means trouble.
Eiji hesitates, then asks him something in Kiswahili. Ankh replies in something that sounds just close enough to be distinguishable. Eiji smiles at him, and Ankh scowls and turns away, but not even his dour avoidance can dampen Eiji's mood.
Eiji thinks mostly in Japanese these days. He remembers a time where his thoughts flashed by in strange blends of every language he has ever learned, picking out words that hold a more specific meaning in one language than in another. Now he is out of practice. An entire year spent in one place has brought his native tongue back to the forefront again, though he can still feel the others flitting through his mind sometimes, alighting gently and twisting his tongue into syllables his friends don't quite recognize when he needs a word his home language cannot quite comprehend.
Ankh's mind seems to be a constant war of language. Modern Japanese almost always wins out in the end, but he often seems to struggle as much as Eiji ever has with expressing complex or abstract ideas in only one tongue. He speaks of his desires and his intent in simple, direct language. Eiji had been certain that this was only a reflection of his direct and brutal personality, but part of him wonders now if there has ever been a poet in Ankh, and if that poet has been lost for good behind eight hundred years of betrayal and deceit.
Ankh still talks in his sleep, but the words are changing. Eiji still tries not to listen for them, but still he catches odd fragments that should make no sense out of context. Even so they make him smile, for the troubled sorrow has faded from his voice. There are no more snatches of rage or grief. Anger, yes, because Ankh always has something to be angry about, but nothing like the potent, wounded fury that had made him twist and snarl in his dreams.
Now there are muttered curses and familiar names, snatches of commands and insults, and sometimes even very soft laughter. Eiji smiles against his pillow and closes his eyes. He can worry about what this will mean for the two of them, for Hina, for Shingo, later. For now, he thinks, he can allow himself to be glad.
It isn't until Eiji says something idly to him in German that Ankh freezes.
It is a line Eiji does not realize he has crossed until it is too late. Ankh turns away from him, and Eiji wonders for half a panicked second if he has said something particularly offensive without realizing it—but Ankh would have either laughed or sneered at him if that were the case. Neither of those things have happened now. But there is a flash in his eyes that Eiji recognizes, though it takes him a moment to work out where he has seen it before.
The German language is Ankh's mother tongue. Eiji remembers this from what Kougami has told him, though he hadn't known the last time the two of them had a confrontation like this one. Now Eiji watches the ice come sheeting down over Ankh's expression, feels the door that had begun to open up between them slam shut once more, and reminds himself that Ankh holds no love or loyalty at all for the place he had once called home.
Eiji knows a little more of the story now than he did the first time. He knows some of the things that have happened. He knows better than to think he will receive any confirmation of these things from Ankh. But he suspects he knows very well why it is that Ankh reacts so coldly to any reminders of the place he was born—and the place he had died.
When Ankh abandons them, Eiji realizes exactly how hard it is to fill the silence.
It's easier when he lurks about the Cous Coussier. Hina and Chiyoko, Gotou and Date and occasionally even Satonaka, hoards of strangers he will likely never see again after their quick stop to this quaint little restaurant—their voices hum in the very walls, etched into the grain of the wood. The wash of language keeps the numbness at bay. With so much to listen to, so many different accents and individual turns of phrase, he can lose himself in examining the differences in texture and tone of the voices around him. The sheer amount of input very nearly makes up for the way it all begins to lose focus.
When Eiji leaves them, there is nothing left to hold back the static. It creeps into the back of his skull, buzzes in his ears, and the sounds of the world dull down to a murmur. Even when Hina comes to the edge of the river to visit him, even when Chiyoko brings him boxes of food he'll never ask for but will gladly accept, even when he returns to fight with Gotou and Date and Satonaka, their presence can no longer fill the growing void within him. Their voices come to him as though from a great distance, as though through water, hazy and dim.
This is not what he had wanted. But if this is what is required of him, if this is what he must do in order to fight, he will bear the silence, just as he has borne every desire before it.
The first and final time they fly together, there is no need for spoken word. The space between them is nonexistent. Their minds are nestled together somewhere, suspended in darkness shot through with bolts of red and gold, and the necessity of moderation between intent, speech, hearing, interpretation, and meaning blinks out of existence. There is only the truth, pure and simple, a truth that something as clumsy as language can only ever brush the surface of.
There are regrets. Of course there are. They are only human, after all.
One day they will need the words again, but this day there are only two that matter. Two words that Eiji will repeat over and over to himself every language he knows. A mantra spoken in every language they once shared.
Someday.
Somehow.