Work Text:
Miles has been forced to acknowledge, after much analysis, that Klavier Gavin does seem to be at least fluent in German. That doesn’t necessarily make him a native speaker, of course—that accent of his is ridiculously exaggerated to the point that Miles can’t even tie it to a region, while that loathsome brother of his doesn’t have one at all.
As the universe has seen fit to put him here, knives in his ears as he listens to the man spout a mishmash of heavy handed compliments and poorly concealed double entendres to an increasingly enraged, red faced Franziska, his mind focuses on the grammar as a psychological coping mechanism. The sentences themselves might be worse than the love poetry Wright sent to him in the fourth grade (and then again in adulthood with no improvement whatsoever), but Gavin constructs them correctly. He pronounces the umlauts and each phlegmy ‘sch’. He picks the accurate pluralizations and never even misses an article, nominatives and accusatives and datives all rolling easily off his tongue in an interchangeable, proper, succession of der das die dem den.
Miles is this close to concluding that he may actually be from Germany when he tacks a mistake onto the end of a sentence.
“Fräulein?” Franziska echoes, her eye twitching. Gavin keeps smiling at her guilelessly, unaware of the danger.
“You foolish demeaning fool! How dare you?!” The whip collides with a crack and a cry of pain, and Miles experiences the most satisfaction he’s felt since before the Gramarye trial.
“I am not your ‘little’ anything, fool, much less your woman!” She brings the whip down one last time for good measure before stalking off, head held high with righteous indignation.
Klavier’s pained shouts are in English.