Gift Of Languages

Once upon a time, a family arrived in Jump City who could not speak to anyone around them at all.

They came from a planet called Okaara, far out in the galaxy, and they had blue skin and very large eyes the color of amber. There were five of them: a grandmother, two parents, and two children about your age who looked around at Jump City's busy harbor with wide, worried expressions. They had papers that said they were supposed to be here. They had a box of their belongings. They had each other. But the harbor workers who met them spoke only English, and the Okaaran family spoke only their own language, and everyone stood in a circle looking at everyone else, helplessly.

Then Starfire arrived.

She had been flying a patrol over the waterfront and had noticed the cluster of people standing in that particular way people stand when they are lost and not sure how to say so. She landed, looked around at the situation, and held out her hand to the grandmother with a calm, warm smile.

The grandmother looked at the hand for a moment, then at Starfire's eyes, and something in those eyes — steady and bright and genuinely kind — told her it was safe. She took the hand.

Starfire was still for about eight seconds. Then she said, in fluent Okaaran: "Hello. I'm glad you made it safely. Can I help you find where you are supposed to be?"

The grandmother's eyes filled with tears.

This was the Tamaranean gift of language absorption. It worked through physical contact and genuine sincerity — not just the touch, but the real, true wish to understand. Starfire had learned this young. One honest touch with someone whose mind and heart were open, and the whole language poured in: first the grammar, which was the skeleton; then the vocabulary, which was the flesh; then, last of all and most wonderful, the way of seeing — the particular way that people who spoke this language held the world in their minds.

Every language she had ever absorbed had surprised her with its own shape.

In Khund, the warrior language, every sentence began with the subject's action — what you were doing came before who you were, as if your deeds defined you more than your name. In Interlac, the great galactic trade language, there were seven different words for "stranger" depending on how welcome that stranger was expected to become. In English — the language she had first learned from Robin in that Jump City parking lot — her favorite word was a short one.

Home.

In Tamaranean, the equivalent word meant, more precisely, "the place where you are warmed." She had thought about this often. She thought they were the same thing, just seen from slightly different directions.

She spent two hours that afternoon with the Okaaran family. She translated between them and the harbor authority, helped them find the address on their papers, and walked with them three blocks to a small apartment building where a neighbor — it turned out — spoke a little Interlac and could help them get settled. The two children walked beside her and asked her, very politely in Okaaran, whether she was a superhero.

"I am," she said.

They seemed satisfied by this.

Walking back to the bay afterward, Robin fell into step beside her. He had been watching from a distance, giving her space, and now he said: "You know, when I first met you, I thought the starbolts were the impressive part."

"And now?" she said.

He was quiet for a moment. "Now I think it's the way you actually listen. Like you mean it every time."

She thought about the years when she had had no language at all. Years aboard cold Citadel ships where no one spoke Tamaranean and she did not speak anything else. She had learned, in those years, what silence felt like from the inside — not peaceful silence, but the silence of walls, of being surrounded by words you could not reach. She had learned the exact weight of a world without connection.

That was why, for her, the gift of language was not a convenience. It was something sacred. Every word she spoke, every hand she touched with the genuine wish to understand — it was an act she did deliberately and with her whole heart.

Cyborg had once called her the best diplomat the planet had ever produced. She had laughed and said she was simply someone who had learned not to take a word of connection for granted.

Both of those things were true.

She flew home over the bay in the late afternoon light, and below her the city hummed with voices in a hundred languages — every one a door into a lit room.

Close your eyes. Think of all the words that tell the people you love that you love them.

They are all the same word, really.

Sleep well.