#i esp like alex's little speech in the last point there

[justlightlysedated]

another one of those aus where alex has been an alien the whole time:

"Okay," Michael says as soon as Alex parks the truck in front of the pharmacy. "You'll need to get several bottles of nail polish remover along with the bandages for my hand, okay?"

Alex blinks at him, "Why nail polish remover?"

"Acetone. It'll help with the pain," Michael says, and then hisses in pain, hunching over in his seat.

Alex doesn't understand, but that seems to be the theme of the night. He'll just have to trust that Michael knows what he's talking about.

“Okay,” Alex says nodding his head and getting out of the truck. He looks back at Michael through the window, and he’s leaning down with his head pressed to the dashboard, breathing heavily.

Alex nods his head to himself and walks fast into the pharmacy.

Alex gets gauze and splints and a sling and bottles of hydrogen peroxide along with several bottles of acetone. His head is still killing him, so he also gets a bottle of store brand pain relievers.

He pays for everything in cash, thankful that the cashier is around his age and looks to be really high and not really paying attention to the things Alex is buying.

Alex walks quickly out of the pharmacy and into the truck. Michael is still leaning against the dashboard. 

He only moves when Alex slides the bags towards the center of the bench seat before he gets in and closes the door behind himself.

He turns to Michael and watches in complete shock as Michael uncaps a bottle of acetone and downs the whole thing before Alex can tell him not to.

“Guerin!” Alex says and takes the mostly empty bottle from his mouth. 

Michael blinks rapidly, gasping, and licking his lips as he looks at Alex.

Alex waits a beat, and Michael exhales roughly. “We’re aliens,” he says, and Alex just stares at him. “Acetone works kind of like morphine.”

Alex just keeps staring at him. Michael licks his lips again. “It will help with that headache you probably still have.”

Alex looks at the bottle he has in his hand, there is barely a mouthful left. If Michael is wrong about this, then that little bit shouldn't be enough to kill him.

"You paint your nails," Michael says, and he reaches for another bottle. "Haven't you ever thought that nail polish remover smells good enough to drink?"

Alex has, if he's being honest, but everyone has thoughts like that about things they shouldn't be putting into their mouths.

Michael just uncaps the other bottle and Alex stares as he downs the whole thing, and then leans forward again gasping, but it sounds less like pain and more like pleasure.

Alex looks back at the bottle in his hand, and he feels a sharp spike at the back of his head.

He's seen his hands glowing red, and he's sure that you only make up things about a traumatic event after the fact, when you're trying to understand what's happening to you logically.

Michael hasn't keeled over dead yet, so he inhales deeply, and drinks the rest of the acetone in the bottle.

Alex expects it to be nasty and make him gag or throw up from the times he's accidentally put his fingers in his mouth after taking his polish off. But it's almost tasteless, bitter and just a little bit fruity.

It goes down cool, and Alex can feel it right in the back of his throat and in his nose.

The pain in his head dulls to nothingness, and Alex looks at Michael with wide eyes.

Michael is holding a new bottle of acetone in his hand, looking at Alex. 

"Aliens?" Alex asks feeling like maybe this is all a dream he's having.

Michael opens his mouth to answer, and then he bends forward, gasping in pain again, holding a hand up to his head. 

Alex reaches for him startled and then gasps, as he feels a pressure in his head and a sharp high pitched ringing, and then a quick flash of someone with blonde hair on the ground.

Isobel, the name flashes through his head, and then he's back in the car, and Michael is gasping as he leans his head on the dashboard again. 

"Isobel, trouble," he says, and Alex just nods his head, turning in the seat to start the truck back up.

He knows exactly where he needs to go. He's not sure how he knows, but he thinks it has more to do with Michael than Isobel.

"The Mines," Michael gasps, reaching towards Alex as though he intends to drive himself. "We have-"

"I know," Alex says, cutting him off as he puts the truck in drive. "I'm going to get us there, but you need to splint your fingers before they start to heal wrong."

"Max can heal them," Michael says, and Alex darts a look at him out of the corner of his eye as he pulls out of the parking lot and into the main road, pushing the truck past the speed limit immediately.

"Well," Alex says, fingers tightening against the steering wheel. "That's all well and good, but what if he can't?"

Michael expels a breath, "It wouldn't be the first time he healed a broken bone of mine."

Alex's fingers go even tighter on the wheel.

"Guerin," Alex says, and his voice sounds brittle, like it might break at any second, and the last thing he needs right now is to break. "Just, please at least wrap gauze tight enough so that it's immobilized."

Michael doesn't say anything, but Alex hears it when he starts looking through the plastic bags for the rest of the things that Alex bought.

He sighs in relief and pushes down harder on the gas, hearing the truck protesting lightly, but Michael doesn’t say anything to stop him. He just hisses and gasps in pain, and Alex keeps his eyes on the road so that he doesn’t get distracted. He feels a slight tingling in his own left hand, and he tightens his fingers around the steering wheel.

Alex opens his mouth to see if he can get Michael to give him more clarification on the whole, alien thing, but Michael cuts him off.

“After we figure out what’s going on with Isobel,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything that I know.”

Alex can’t help but look at him to see that he’s carefully wrapping his hand in the gauze, gaze intent on his hand, brow furrowed.

Alex swallows hard and looks back at the road.

They drive in silence for a few long minutes the only sounds coming from Michael downing another bottle of acetone after he finishes with his head, until Michael tells him to turn, and he startles a little but starts driving the truck off the trail until they spot a car in the darkness. 

Alex blinks at it a few times as he twists the key in the ignition but leaves the lights on. “Isn’t that Rosa’s car?” he asks in a low voice. 

Michael doesn’t answer as he stumbles out of the truck, and leaving the door open as he runs towards something only he can see.

Alex turns the lights off and follows after him, and stops short when he sees two bodies lying on the ground one with long blonde hair, the same person that had made him think Isobel earlier. But that wasn’t Isobel, it was Kate Long and the person beside her was Jasmine Frederick.

They were both unmoving, not breathing, and Alex stares for a long second before he hears Michael’s voice, “Isobel!”

He hears running, and then a grunt and a pained hiss that sounds familiar, and he runs towards where he saw Michael go, and finds him getting up from the floor. 

“What happened?” Alex asks as he helps him to his feet. 

Michael shakes him off without a word and runs to the entrance of a cave.

Alex follows after him, and runs straight into him where he’s frozen right at the opening of a cavern. Alex looks over his shoulder to see that Isobel is holding on to Rosa, whispering something in her ear, and he sees the way that her hand starts glowing red, and he doesn’t think about it, he just reacts.

He pushes past Michael and 

--Rosa and Isobel are unconscious, Michael asks what did you do? Max walks in and reacts, Michael stands between Alex and Max and starts to explain what he saw.

--They talk about the dead girls outside, Alex tells them that he's seen Isobel leave the school to hang out with Rosa plenty of times and he knows that she used to deal with the two dead girls and that they got mad because Rosa wouldn't get them drugs and Rosa had thought they were friends. "People think that just because I'm wearing headphones I'm not paying attention, but I am."

--Michael says they need help, adult help, Max says that they can't, if Isobel killed them, they can't just turn her in, Michael opens his mouth to say something and Alex cuts them off, saying they can't tell anyone or trust anyone in this town. "If the cops come here, they're going to see two white girls dead, the sweet Evans kids, the Master Sergeant's son, and a homeless teenager who doesn't have anyone to fight for him, and they're going to make it out like he was the one that did it, and is that what you want, for Michael to take the blame?"

[jockrightsnow]

omg I would love to hear you talk more about your tags on that last post—how you research syntax/speech patterns for non-native English speakers’ dialogue. this is something I struggle with a lot in writing fic (esp writing Russian players!) and I’d love some advice on how to get better at it.

god this got long! i just care about this! i will put under a cut for the 99% who will be like u little pedantic bitch.

so my answer is probably not AS helpful for Russian players because i have not written at any length with Russian characters and their language is SO different, so i find it is trickier! but the process is likely the same. i am not an expert at this by any means (only know/have taught spanish <--> english), but i do think it gives you more believable voices and also tends to help you understand the perspective. some people are better at english than others! some are less good! some have been in english classes for a while, some haven’t! there’s variation! you don’t have to do this to write well, but i think about it.

some things i think about:

1. sentence structure/syntax--more than vocabulary, sentence structure is the thing that gives most english language learners trouble and tends to give them away. in order to figure out common mistakes along these lines, it is helpful to look up how sentences are typically structured in someone’s native language. very often, people learning english will rely on those structures. this is actually why swedish is very easy to learn for english speakers--the sentence structure is most often subj, verb, object. but there are tricks: in complex declarative sentences, the verb will always be second, even if there is an adverb or object in the first position instead of the subject, in sentences with subordinate clauses, the independent clause inverts verb and subject. stuff like that does tend to give a sentence a different feel, and it absolutely very commonly almost-always sticks with someone. it’s foundational to how people construct their thoughts, it can be hard to change.

2. pronunciation--i don’t love to see heavy dialect written phonetically and i think many people don’t, but there are ways to consider it and certain ways to write it well. certain languages have different stresses or tone ranges or pitches, which can give off a certain Vibe if you’re used to english, which is on the more expressive end of the scale in tone and pitch (obviously i don’t think that’s better, but it is different and it does affect how people hear a speaker’s voice). certain sounds straight-up do not exist in other languages, certain letters are always pronounced a different way. it leads to predictable mispronunciation. for this, resources like this are very interesting.

3. actual cultural language differences! this is in part about what turns of phrase are common, what’s the cultural (or often, can be regional) “cat who got the cream”-type idioms, what is colloquial that you don’t realize is colloquial, etc, but it can also be about how you talk about concepts on a larger scale. 

the recent sidney crosby engaged fiasco is a good example of this--in russian, “girlfriend/boyfriend” has a very casual connotation, so for longer-term relationships, a russian person might say “fiancee” instead. there are certain languages where you talk about love using different words if a relationship is more casual. these are fun, i think, because i do think that kind of thing can be meaningful. 

there was some book or study i read about how maybe the way we learn language impacts how we think. i think parts of it were debunked (eg not having a word for something like ‘crush’ doesn’t mean you don’t feel it, that’s silly), but parts of it are certainly true, right? like, if you have a different way of talking about spatial awareness or time, your ability to translate those concepts will be affected because your thoughts are often structured along those lines. 

4. vocabulary--less important than you’d think, but still interesting to think about what words someone would have learned. i expect hockey players to know virtually every hockey-related word in english, and even in the KHL, there is some coaching done in english because plenty of non-russian players play there and never learn the language (it is very hard). pretty much everywhere, you’re going to know the english words for many hockey-related terms. but you might not know other complex words, because you might not ever have a reason to or a context where you would’ve learned it or been corrected on it.

i often have to examine or cross-examine spanish speakers, and you actually don’t want to correct every single thing they say--you only want to correct things which might lead to a misunderstanding, because you don’t want to seem pedantic to a judge or condescending to a witness. 

this is also true in a lot of social settings. so i do see some things which tend to go uncorrected because they don’t lead to any wrongness. for example, videoS plural in Swedish is video klipp. it’s the same, it’s really the same. but i notice sometimes that plural S is dropped by Swedish speakers or a word like “klipp” that’s so similar in meaning and context to the english word will come it. there’s one video where petey says ‘eller’ instead of ‘or’--it’s close, it’s a word that doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t correct it, it’s normal, you get the point. there are plenty of words that are so similar they might just have a different inflection, or which are entirely the same in different languages. these will not get corrected in daily conversation for the most part.

but there are also false cognates which you DO need to correct (eg in spanish embarazada = pregnant, i do need to correct it every single time because it has a huge impact on proceedings if someone’s pregnant) and being aware of those is also helpful! 

there are also some crutch words which differ from person to person (this is also true for native english speakers). when people use those and in what way can be important. there are certain things a specific person gets wrong only when nervous or not thinking or whatever (i personally find the “person realizes they’ve been speaking in a different language while having sex because it was so good” trope. exhausting, to say the least. but it is true that in higher-stress moments, someone might not have the capacity or desire to do internal translation, or might feel frustrated by it.)

i really do think all of this is Very interesting, and mostly my advice on doing it for languages you don’t know is:

1) be thoughtful about stuff, be believable. contrary to what it seems like from this whole dissertation, not every sentence needs to have errors in it, especially for people who are Growing/Learning/Actually Very Good at english. don’t be condescending about it. being at an intermediate stage in english learning might make someone choose a simpler sentence that’s still correct. it might lead to an actual relevant misunderstanding or tonal shift. it might not. it might enhance someone’s understanding of a situation! it’s not all about just fucking shit up--it’s a hard thing to learn another language. you gotta respect people who are doing it!

2) hear people talk, preferably the people in question if available but doesn’t have to be (for characters i care about less, i will often wholesale map a sentence and then copy the structure exactly. i did this for pasta because i didn’t care about actually figuring out so much about him emotionally--i just listened to his ep of sp*ttin ch*clets as i wrote and copied several sentence structures exactly with my own Content and then, as you may be able to tell, gave up on that venture to movie-montage the rest because i am Lazy.) 

it’s interesting to hear someone talk both in their native language and in english--you get a feel for the tone and pitch differences, and also i love to see native language interviews because i tend to think they’re more reflective of someone’s actual thought processes when they’re not trying to come up with words or modifying their sentences to be simpler. petey’s swedish interviews, for ex, are far more reflective and eloquent and funny. but again, he is getting better very quickly, in part because swedish and english are more similar than they appear. progress is often slower for russians, because there’s a lot more ground between the two languages and a whole diff alphabet and also strong cultural affinity to where a good number of russians living in america almost exclusively hang out with other russians living in america. (see ex alex ovechkin, nikita zadorov--both have very russian-heavy social circles if Instant Gram is to be believed)

3) actually look up stuff like “common english mistakes for [x group]”--there are plenty of good language learning resources which will show you the mistakes people tend to make, the pronunciation errors, things like that. these are invaluable.

4) google translate stuff if you’re going to have a touching language-teaching moment. once read something where someone was contemplating how to say something, which they wouldn’t have done in reality, because how you say it was Exactly the same in the person’s native language. i also think it’s fun to read google-translated articles and see which things jump out at me as Weirdly translated, because those are often things which are going to be different! but that’s not gospel, it’s something you can look into. sometimes google translate is just bad.