Game of Thrones: Fanfic: Secret language

[m_findlow]

Title: Secret language
Fandom: Game of Thrones
Characters: Grey Worm, Missandei
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 567 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for paceisthetrick's prompt "Any, any, tongue tied" at fic_promptly
Summary: Learning a new language is hardest when you can't get the words out.

Grey Worm has never known what it was to have someone he could talk with. In truth, he’d never had much use for talking, being Unsullied, but then Queen Daenerys had come along and everything had changed. He was no longer just a lowly solider in her army, but considered a skilled warrior in and of himself, and a commander for the rest of the Unsullied. Unsullied had never had a commander from within their own ranks, but Daenerys had changed all of that, allowing him to select other Unsullied to command smaller platoons of men. She had even given him the option of a name, though he did not want his old name back. That had been long ago when he’d been a boy, and not a man. The Masters had bestowed that name upon him, so that would be the name he would wear with pride.

What had thrown him most was the ability to speak for himself. He’d never been allowed to have thoughts of his own. They weren’t needed when his only duty was to follow his Masters into battle and to fight for them, die for them, and to suffer whatever injuries they chose to inflict upon him.

He spoke Valyrian because that was the language of Essos, but the people where his Queen intended for him to serve would not understand the tongue. That was why she’d had Missandei coming to visit him at night, to teach him the tongue of the Westerosi. They very quickly ran out of things that he could say that related to warfare, so Missandei had tried to teach him more conversational phrases and terms. Most of this she sourced from trying to ask him personal questions about his life. She was most forthcoming about her own childhood, even though like him she’d been taken into slavery from a very young age. She still managed to make it seem like the Summer Isles had been a magical place and that the Masters had been kind to her, even if that wasn’t the case.

What made him trip over his words was the way she looked at him. He imagined that was how women looked at other men – not Unsullied men – with that warmth and an interest that went beyond the intellectual. Imagining Missandei being interested in him was pointless. He was only half a man, though he desperately wondered what it might be like to have a woman like her touch him. Just speaking with her in those darkened rooms at night, lit only by a sparse few flames, felt so intimate. Talking about who he was, who he had been, and what sort of things interested him, felt like they were doing something they shouldn’t. He didn’t realise he had so many secrets until Missandei has started extracting them from him, one by one, as he stuttered over the strange syllables and sounds of the Common Tongue. They didn’t sound nearly so otherworldly when Missandei spoke them. Everything she said sounded like music and poetry, even though he knew very little of either. He knew he would never be worthy of any woman, let alone one as wonderful as her, but it didn’t stop him from being nervous and scared when they were together. Somehow, sharing his innermost thoughts and memories was more intimate and terrifying than anything she might do to him with her body.