By the time Jude finished his speech, he was breathing hard. All eyes in the room were on him, and with the absence of shouting, it was suddenly eerily quiet.
He swallowed nervously and added, “I’m Jude, by the way. Nice to meet you.”
Finally, Ezra broke the silence.
“What the actual fuck, man?” He squinted at Jude likehewas the alien here—a sentiment the other three people in the room seemed to share.
“What?” Jude asked, looking from one face to another, trying to figure out why everyone seemed so stunned. Had he really gone that hard?
“Jude,” Al said softly after a beat, “do you not realize?”
“Realizewhat?”
“You’re not speaking English,” Al said, and Jude blinked at him.
“What?” he asked, except now, as he paid attention, he realized that Al was right. “What” was what he’d intended to say, but what came out was a sound he didn’t know he was capable of making. Alarmed, he turned to Ezra and asked, “Do you understand me?”
“Thatwas in English,” said Al, not speaking in English.
“It was?”
“Yes, but that was not,” Al replied, still not speaking English at all.
Jude was starting to get a headache.
“No fair,” Ezra said. “I wanna be able to speak the weird alien language. Cool trick, Jude. How’d you do that?”
“I have no idea,” Jude said, looking helplessly at Al. He was pretty good at just going with the flow, but he had to admit that being able to pull an entire language out of his ass without noticing was pretty weird. Although, maybe not as weird as pulling eggs out of his—
“It’s true, then,” Al’s mother said, shaking her head, lips slightly parted in shock. She turned to Al’s father and asked, “Is there any other explanation?”
“None that I know of.” Al’s father shook his head as well and placed his lower set of hands on his hips. “Unless humans are especially proficient at languages.”
“I promise you they are not,” Al swiftly assured him. “I’ve never heard Jude speak Darvrokian before in all the time I’ve known him.”
“That’s… incredible.”
“Okay, can everyone stop being cryptic and explain what the hell is going on?” Jude asked, effortlessly speaking to Al’s parents in a language he didn’t know he knew.
“It’s our bond,” Al said, glancing at Jude and then looking down at his feet, as though embarrassed or ashamed. “It’s not a fully formed bond, but remember how I told you that extreme emotions might make you able to feel what I’m feeling? Well, I think that my fight with my parents was extreme enough that I accidentally transferred an entire language to you through the bond.”
Jude’s eye twitched.
“Cool, that’s normal,” he said.
“I know this isn’t about me,” Ezra said, piping up from the doorway, “but I just want to say that I’m feeling a little left out.”
“Apologies, Human Ezra,” Al’s father said, this time in thickly accented English. “We mean not to exclude you.”
“It’s polite to end a sentence with ‘dude’ if it’s a human you don’t know well,” Al informed his father, showing off his English skills. Jude wasreallystarting to get a headache.
“Okay, so I can learn languages through this pseudo-bond Al and I have,” he said, choosing not to correct Al’s creative use of English. “So what? Why’s that such a big deal? Frankly, I think the egg thing is a bit more shocking.”
“Al?” Al’s parents asked in unison, wearing identical frowns.
“My human name,” Al said a little smugly. He was clearly proud to be so deeply integrated into Earth culture, and despite the actual insanity of the situation at hand, his pride made Jude smile.
“It is a big deal,” Al’s father said, slipping back into his native tongue—Jude was beginning to be able to tell the difference, “because it means that Ξ.A.kr’ξ??’p, or ‘Al’ as you know him, was telling the truth about the two of you being True Mates. A partial bond like the one you share would not be possible if it weren’t true.”
