Title: In Learning, Teach; In Teaching, Learn

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Rating: K+

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.

Summary: Four times Ichabod was caught off guard by modern technology, and one time he took Abbie back to the basics. 2000 words.

Spoilers: Sleepy Hollow, mid-Season 1 (written pre-finale)

Notes: For Hllangel in Yuletide 2013. Ichabod vs Modern Life? Count me in.

1)

Automatic Doors

Abbie had been expecting trouble the first time she took Ichabod to the local Buy Plus. The way he'd stared at the cartload of groceries she'd brought up to the cabin had really made her wonder how he'd react to a warehouse-sized building devoted to nothing else. And not just because of the sheer quantity of food inside: the vast variety of what was available. She knew he was aware that things were different now, but she was pretty sure he hadn't fully realized yet what speed of travel, refrigeration, and mass production meant for what went onto people's tables.

She really hadn't expected the trip to grind to a halt before they even got in the doors, though. Or more accurately: through them. She watched Ichabod back carefully out of the range of the automatic sensors, then step forward again, staring in fascination as the door swished closed and then opened in front of him.

Huh. Abbie hadn't really thought about it before, but the little stores he'd visited near the motel, the library, the station, and even the drive through joint where she'd introduced him to fast food all had doors that at least pushed open, if they didn't have knobs. "You okay there, Crane?" she asked. "We're going to hold up traffic if we stand here much longer."

"These ... these 'automatic caution doors'," he replied, gesturing at the label on the glass, "how do they detect my presence? Is there someone ... watching, on one of those 'cameras' of yours, anticipating my movements?" Somehow, he managed to make the quotation marks in that sentence perfectly audible without actually saying 'quote, unquote' or making the sarcastic hand gesture.

"Think of it more like ... say, a trip wire," she replied. He understood those, right? Woodscrafty stuff, from his spy days? "But an invisible one, like a beam of light. You cross it, it opens."

"And closes behind us," he said, still staring at the door with raised eyebrows. "...Similar to a trap."

She stifled a chuckle. "You could see it that way. Make it easy to get in, and then keep us there spending money as long as possible."

"More covert manipulations in the name of modern convenience," he concluded, frowning.

"Philosophize later, all right? Let's get this over with."

"Very well," he replied, giving the door one last suspicious look as he stepped over the threshold.

2)

Junk Mail

Surprisingly, Ichabod had actually taken pretty well to email ... at least, once Abbie bookmarked the login page for him and talked him through a quick tutorial on left click, right click, and navigation so he wouldn't get lost on the 'nenenet' again. He was still a little traumatized from accidentally tripping over that sex chat site.

He was in awe of the speed of the communication, mostly, comparing it to how long it used to take letters to travel and admiring the platform it provided for rapid distribution of information. What had taken Paul Revere several hours, or he and his friend Abraham days with the Declaration of Resolves, would now take mere seconds.

He didn't even seem to mind, much, the informal way most people responded; it was enough for him that he upheld proper standards, and that they conveyed the requested information.

Junk mail, though. Lord, she was never going to hear the end of the junk mail.

"Leftenant!" Ichabod addressed her in a scandalized tone the first time he received one. "This ... this missive directs me to ... to ... I cannot be deciphering the metaphor correctly!"

She glanced over his shoulder at the subject line: Bang Her Hard and Make Her Moan! "It's junk mail. I told you about those. They're trying to tempt you to, ah, spend money."

"But ... why are they sending it to me?" he objected, cheeks reddening with embarrassment. "Was it because of the 'chat room' I inadvertently accessed?"

"Not unless you entered your email address on that page?" She raised her eyebrows teasingly at him, then shook her head. "Don't worry about it. I even get them sometimes."

Ichabod gave her a startled glance. She could almost see his brain ticking over, wondering if her expressed gender might be yet another alarming and unexpected cultural difference, and grinned. "Equal opportunity junk mail, Crane; they don't care who or even what you are. They just want your money. And the more emails they send, the more chances someone'll buy."

"I will never understand this century," he replied in a long-suffering tone, then deleted the email with a vehement click of the mouse.

She smiled at his scornful profile, then turned back to her paperwork.

"...Miss Mills! This missive purports to offer the loan of $2500 overnight!"

At least he sounded as shocked by that as he did the sex emails.

3)

Smart Phone Cameras

For the same reason he liked email, Ichabod had gotten on board with the telecommunications revolution pretty quickly. He might not understand how it worked beyond the broad basics of transmitting sound waves, but people had been 'talking' at a distance through all sorts of cruder signals for practically all of recorded history, so it wasn't a totally foreign concept even if he was older than Morse Code. And his eidetic memory came in handy for memorizing phone numbers.

He might still leave 'aural missives' complete with greetings and a sincerely Ichabod Crane every time he hit voicemail, but he was totally hip to the dial-and-connect features of a telephone.

The rest of it, though: Abbie handed him over Jenny to explain what 'apps' were, anticipating headaches. But he came into the old Armory the next day as glued to the pocket-sized, two-and-a-half by four-and-a-half inch device as any modern twenty-year-old, swiping his thumbs with abandon and squinting at the screen.

"Hey, Crane. Playing Angry Birds?" she asked, bemused.

He startled a little as he looked up at her, then gave a wry smile as he tilted the phone so the camera eye faced her. "While I am certain that the infuriated avians are, indeed, as beneficial for perfecting one's hand-eye coordination as Miss Jenny insists, such a game still seems an inefficient use of my time."

Ichabod carefully tapped at the screen as he spoke; he probably thought he was being sly. Abbie arched her eyebrows at him. "Did you just take a picture of me?"

"Merely testing the function," he replied, unapologetic, and tilted the phone again to poke at the image. "Most remarkable."

"Me? Or the picture?" she snorted.

"I have the highest regard for you, Miss Mills, as you well know," he replied, chidingly. "Yet this device ... Did you know it is capable of holding thousands of images, forever as true to life as the day they were captured?"

"Yeah. Unfortunately. Never do anything embarrassing around someone carrying a phone these days; remind me not to show you Facebook sometime."

"You treat it so lightly," Ichabod shook his head. "But what I would not do for even one image of Katrina."

Well. If he put it that way. "Finally, a modern convenience you like," Abbie replied, and carefully didn't notice him pointing and tapping for the rest of the day.

4)

Rubber Bands

For a nobleman's son from the 18th century who'd expressed disbelief the day they met that modern women wore trousers, Ichabod Crane was a very handsy guy. He touched everything - sometimes even her, when things got weird or distressing enough that he forgot he was married to a ghost for five minutes. Not that Abbie was occasionally frustrated about that, or anything.

It was like having a little kid around, actually. She'd read somewhere that the sense of touch helped children ground abstract ideas in concrete experiences, and apparently nothing conveyed "it has a light side and a dark side and holds the universe together" better than playing with the sticky tape at her desk at the station. Magic: the gift that kept on ruining both their lives in the name of saving the world.

But even the joys of pressure-sensitive adhesive paled next to one particular office supply.

"Is this rubber?" she heard Ichabod ask incredulously, distracting her from her paperwork.

Abbie looked up to see him testing the tensile strength of a rubber band with his fingers. She winced preemptively, wondering whether or not to warn him - just as one of his fingertips slipped and snapped it back. "Yep. Like tires, and those boots - you know, Wellingtons."

"Is that supposed to mean something to me?" he frowned, shaking his stung finger.

"Like the Duke of Wellington?" she replied. She was sure that particular guy was British, and even somewhere back in Ichabod's ballpark.

"I'm afraid I don't recognize the name."

Not close enough, apparently. "Nevermind. But yeah, we call those rubber bands. Careful, they're trickier than they look."

"I had noticed," he replied dryly, stretching it again, more carefully this time.

Abbie watched him at it ... then glanced back at the ponytail he insisted was a 'queue'. "Speaking of rubber bands, what do you use to tie your hair back, anyway?"

"Leather ties, of course," he replied, blinking at her. "Do you mean to say ... you use these?"

"A variation of them, anyway. Here, let me show you." She snagged the band out of his hand before he could snap himself with it again, then gathered her hair back in a quick twist. "See?"

He didn't seem to know whether to stare more at her exposed throat or the dish of rubber bands still on the desk. But she did notice that several went missing that day.

...and 5)

The Unsheathed Blade

"Now that I have demonstrated my expertise with your modern guns, I believe it's time you learned to wield a more appropriate weapon against our supernatural foes," Ichabod said, drawing one of his recently purchased swords from its scabbard and offering it hilt-first to Miss Mills.

Abbie balked at the sight, backing up with palms outward. "Unh-uh, I don't think so," she said. "I have a perfectly good gun right here. And even the Horseman uses an Uzi these days."

Ichabod shrugged off the latest incomprehensible reference, assuming it signified the rapidly firing projectile weapon Death had somehow acquired a fondness for, and did not move. "And yet when he kills, he does so with an axe. These are supernatural foes we face, Lieutenant, and they are not easily felled - or even injured - by weapons of the modern era."

Abbie frowned, then grudgingly lifted a hand and took the hilt; she hefted the sword once, then adopted a stance evidently copied from his own, awkward though it was on a woman - on any warrior - of her limited height.

"I don't know," she said, dubiously. "Cutting your buddy's head off didn't seem to stop him."

"The Horseman is, I believe, a special case," he winced. "A sharp edge more than sufficed against the infestation at the Fredricks house; and it has the advantage of being entirely as lethal against mortal enemies, whereas the reverse is not true."

"But only at close range."

"Indeed," he replied. "I am not suggesting you attack an ordinary foe with such a weapon. But against less mortal adversaries..."

"All right, all right already. Give me the damn lesson," she sighed, her tone now one of resignation.

"Very well," Ichabod nodded. Then he moved to assist her; her stance was still faulty.

"Uh, Crane, what are you doing?" Abbie asked, shivering as he set one hand at the small of her back and the other at her elbow.

Belatedly, he realized the intimacy of the position. What, indeed.

"Correcting your stance," he covered swiftly. "I think you'll find your balance improved, thus."

"You think so?" she replied, looking up at him through her lashes.

You are a married man, he reminded himself. Strange, how that assertion seemed to lessen in power each day Katrina remained beyond his reach.

He unsheathed the second sword and stepped back, shaking off the thought. "Let us begin..."

-x-