Work Text:
Everything.
Absolutely everything.
Everything on the planet, in the universe, in the multiverse, has a story to tell and he is the one to hear it. They go on a short tour of a colonial house because it seemed like a neutralish thing to do with his teammates, and the guide makes an offhand comment about what stories there’d be if walls could talk. Doug barks out a laugh because the walls probably have a lot of things to say about sex. Not that he can actually read that, but it’s safe to assume.
“Really? You speak the language of the walls?” Amara falls into step beside him.
“Eh, sorta.” Amara glares at him. “It’s part of culture. Part of the language of a life. Several lives probably. It’s difficult to explain.”
“Doug, you literally translated the language of the universe.”
He wobbles his hand. “Well, yeah. But that was straight up translation. With a frighteningly sentient being. Who WANTED me to understand. And it was exhausting. And I’m pretty sure that if I ever tried to speak that language, I’d unravel and possibly mess it up and accidentally like, erase myself from existence.”
Amara falls a step behind him when they climb the stairs. “Don’t you dare die on us again.”
“Oh, but what is life but long years interrupted by a series of deaths and highly inconvenient rituals to be not dead before death parts you again?”
Amara frowns at him. “I can’t tell if you’re joking. Like, especially with you and with Dani and with Illyana, that’s horrendously accurate.”
“Isn’t it?!” Doug grins at her. He looks around. “Oh, we seem to have lost the group.”
“It’s fine, I think. So like, actually tell me about how your power works? Like, er well, like how’d you read the recipe of those muffins!” Amara’s smiling and continues walking down the hallway.
Doug snorts. “Oh, I was bluffing about that. I got the recipe because I faked the body language of working there and nobody told me to leave. So, I read their cookbook.”
“That sounds vaguely illegal.”
“So is running around in yellow not-spandex but here we are.”
“That’s, fair I suppose. So, what counts as a language?”
“Everyth-”
“IT DOES NOT YOU JUST ADMITTED YOU COULDN’T READ A RECIPE FROM THE FOOD ITSELF.”
“Let me finish! Everything is part of a language. That sounds, more right. Like words and body language and intonation and intent and motivations. Culture and history and architecture and all of that is the language of humans. Plus I don’t actually control it most of the time? It’s always on, always telling me there’s more. I can hear you talk to the Earth with your mutation and hear it talk back. If I wanted to, I could talk like that too. But there’s two outcomes. A) the earth ignores me. B) the earth listens and talks back and that's a bad idea.”
Amara nods. “Yeah, that sounds like an accident waiting to happen.”