#not even a beginner speaker of asl I'm but yeah

[the-ace-with-spades]

From the just hold my hand scenes that (probably) won't be written

Ice can't talk, he hasn't been able to for a while, not long after the diagnosis even, but since his last surgery, he knows he will never be able to again.

He and Mav learned sign language as soon as this became a possibility — they attended lessons together, sometimes online, and they practiced with each other, until they became fluent enough to communicate daily using sign. It became faster than Ice writing whatever he wanted to say and so it became primarily how they talk if it's just the two of them — by the time Bradley enters their life again and brings in a whole new husband and four (and counting) kids into it, they use sign language every day casually.

Bradley and Jake's middle daughter, Ronnie — Ice is her favorite, has been since the day they've met. Mostly due to his calm and soothing demeanor and just the aura of safety he has to him, but also because she's a quiet kid who doesn't talk much — she has a bit of a speech development problem that isn't too worrying at her age but has to have an eye kept on it — and often gets buried under the hyperactivity of her older sisters who talk a mile a minute or under her baby brother who craves attention and often gets it because he's cute as a button when he's clingy. But Ice always took the time to pay attention to her even if she was quiet or if she was not doing anything, even if it was just sitting next to her or holding her or basically looking at her expecting her to show him what she was doing or what she liked. People outside of her basic family (her parents and her memaw) rarely get her as much as he does.

So she's maybe a little clingy about Ice.

And you know, when it kind of settles that Mav and Ice are going to be in their life, Bradley promised himself he'd at least try to learn sign. He's terrible at it, he's always been not that good at languages and despite having the finger flexibility that a lot of learners struggle with, he just doesn't have the muscle memory that lets him have a smooth learning.

When Ronnie sees him practicing at home and asks why he looks like grandpa Mav when he talks to grandpa Ice and he explains that it's how Ice speaks (which Ronnie never thought about because she's a kid and she thought grandpa Mav could just understand Ice so well without speaking out loud because he loves him so much, the same way her parents did with her), she gets obsessed.

Next time Bradley takes the kids for some playtime with their grandpas (while Jake and Bradley have some me-time together...), Ronnie gets all shy when Bradley says the well-known phrase of, "Go say hi to your grandpa," and she signs to Ice.

It's just a little clumsy "Hello, grandpa," the simple wave of a hand looks a bit too much like a salute and maybe she adds a third tiny arch as the sign for grandpa finishes but Ice gets it and it gets everyone — especially Ice — a little teary-eyed as well.

[Also, sign language often has the same kind of insider linguistic slang families have when using spoken languages (you know, your sister once calls the terrace door windwoor when she's five and your whole family still calls it that even though she has kids of her own and a corpo job now... this but with hand signs) and I love the idea of Ice encouraging her to make those mistakes and then having them become only their inside vocabulary that no one else gets]