#expel all the hope from my brain and focus on just. ok. being sad and getting over jt

[munamania]

should i unfollow/block her. i think probably

[aethelar]

Hi! I love your fics, particularly the ones about Newt/Artemis or 'what if Newt had a stutter' or those sorts of things, and I was wondering, could you do one for what if Newt was deaf?

Massive thank you to @natural--blues​ and @pluto-pepsi​ for advice for this piece; any signs mentioned are BSL and taken from this video dictionary 

Newt knows drums. Not by their sound and not with his ears; he knows them with his fingers, vibrating against his fingertips, or with his feet, by the shockwaves they send rippling through the ground. When they’re loud it feels like they’re in his chest, punching through his ribs until his heart pounds with their relentless beat, beat, beat.

These are the drums he feels: the hippogriffs’ hooves as they gallop across the field with the wind at their backs; the booming erumpets stamping their feet in a mating dance that demands a response; the war-time shells landing in muddy - bloody - fields and leaving craters in their wake.

He doesn’t hear them whistle as they come. The shells. He feels them when they explode, but he doesn’t hear them whistle. He doesn’t hear the warning shouts, the panic, the wailing alarm and the frantic scramble of soldiers retreating to shelter.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t hear.

When he was young, the biggest thing he didn’t hear was himself. He screamed, because children scream, and he felt it in his vocal chords and rattling through his lungs. When he was happy he yelled, when he was sad he cried, when he was startled he shrieked; and he knew in theory that sounds could be loud and loud could be bad but he didn’t know that he could be loud too.

He learnt, in the end. Loud was when you intruded on other people in a way that they couldn’t ignore. Loud was when people stopped to stare, when they turned to each other and tutted, when his mother fretted anxiously and signed for him to stop with jerky, embarrassed movements. It was ok to make noise, he was allowed to make noise, but it had to be quiet noise. It wasn’t ok to be loud. Newt didn’t know how to tell the difference so he choose to keep silent instead.

My poor egg, his mother said, twisting the first movement into an N in the nickname sign she gave him. Life is too hard.

That’s a lie. Life isn’t too hard. Some of Newt’s creatures fly, but he can’t, so he fetches a broom and wobbles precariously up to meet them. Some of Newt’s creatures see in the dark, but he can’t, so he sticks markers to the walls and feels his way towards them with his hands. Some of Newt’s creatures hear, but he can’t, so he rests careful fingers against their sides and feels the way their ribs vibrate when they sing. Life isn’t too hard. It’s beautiful, whether you can hear it or not.

But when he was young his parents believed his life would be hard. They kept him close. They learnt sign language, teaching themselves and Theseus as they taught him, and the bedtime stories they told him were as much for them to practice as for him to watch. He can’t hear, they’d say when people tried to talk to him, which was true enough. And, he doesn’t understand, which was far less true than they thought it was. They talked to people for him and sometimes they translated and waited for his answer, but sometimes it was quicker to answer on his behalf.

Newt was born wide-eyed and loud with curious, reaching fingers and he didn’t know that he was deaf. Deafness was something he learnt, like he learnt to be silent, like he learnt that life was hard, like he learnt that his parents did the talking and Newt did the standing to one side to watch. They didn’t mean to teach him that. They didn’t mean to teach him a lot of things, but they worried and they hovered and he learnt them all the same.

Hogwarts is… It’s a lot. It’s different. It’s noise in the way that noise is something you can’t ignore, a cacophony of lights and spells and paintings moving on the walls, of too many people to focus on and too many of them behind him where he can’t see. Newt turns his head every time something flickers in his peripheral vision because he has to, because what if it’s someone talking to him and they think he’s ignoring them; he struggles in the common room where the light is low and the flickering firelight isn’t bright enough to see mouths by; four people talk at once and they cover their mouths and turn their heads and he can’t follow their lips and when they look at him expectantly he doesn’t know what any of them said. 

He feeds his dinner to the owls and dangles his feet out the owlery window and thinks, sourly, that if the other kids were deaf like him they’d be more considerate about how carefully they spoke to people. They’re rude, he decides. Rude and pushy and too close and too many; Newt doesn’t like them and he doesn’t see why he should have to. People have always been his least favourite kind of creature and sharing a dorm with four of them doesn’t change that. 

(He’s deaf, his parents say, it’s hard for him to be around other children, you have to understand.)

(Newt not liking people has very little to do with being deaf and very much to do with growing up with only his parents and his brother and his hippogriffs for company, but deafness is an easier thing to blame.)

It’s a bad start, and it only gets worse. Newt is made to sit at the front of the classrooms and he hates it. The only difference it makes is to single him out - he’s no deafer at the back of the room than the front, there’s no point to it. Are they expecting him to lip read the lectures? It doesn’t work like that. Some of the professors try to speak slowly for him, some of them speak with unnaturally exaggerated mouth-shapes and repeat themselves; Newt ignores them all and focuses instead on copying things down from the subtitle-charm running on the chalkboards. Sometimes it skips words. Sometimes it lags. Sometimes it picks up homonyms or someone gossiping at the back of the room. Sometimes it takes up too much space on the chalkboard and the teachers get annoyed and turn it off so they have space to draw a diagram; they explain it while they draw and stab the chalk at the important symbols with stern faced emphasis to their words and Newt has no idea what they say. Some teachers give him meticulous hand-written notes, which is thoughtful; some teachers think his brain doesn’t work because his ears don’t, which is not.

As for the students - perhaps if Newt hadn’t already decided that he preferred creatures to people it wouldn’t have been so bad, perhaps if Newt smiled at the hopeful ones that tried to gesture and write notes to talk to him, perhaps if he refined their crude signs into an actual language and taught them how to talk - but he doesn’t. He doesn’t like people, remember. Some of the students laugh at him for being friendless and nerdy and covered in feathers and, yes, sometimes, for being deaf, but when the teachers give them detention the deafness is the only thing they ever cite. Special treatment, someone sneers in astronomy class; none of the other nerds have teachers protecting them like that. It gets caught in Newt’s subtitle charm and written on the chalkboard; they get detention and Newt sinks further in his seat and pretends he doesn’t exist. So do most people, in the end. It’s easier for all involved. Newt retreats to the lake and talks to the mermaids until his hands cramp in the cold and reminds himself that people form only a fraction of intelligent life on the planet, and it’s not a fraction he has to get on with.

My poor angel, his mother says, fingers fluttering in sad, drooping wings. Life is just too hard.

It’s not. It’s not. Life isn’t too hard and Newt isn’t an angel, he’s a boy and he’s annoyed and his brain works just fine even if his ears don’t. If life is hard, it’s because people treat him as deaf first and Newt if they remember. If life is hard, it’s because the teachers make so many unnecessary allowances for him that he doesn’t know anymore when he’s done right and when he needs to improve. If life is hard, it’s because everyone has decided it’s hard, and when Newt is sixteen he’s expelled for keeping dangerous creatures on school property but everyone shakes their head and says he’s deaf like that’s the real reason, that’s the only reason, because of how it apparently makes his life so bloody hard.

He’s angry when he goes to war, thoughts tripping with silent spells and his words muffled around the handle of his wand. He’s angry and reckless and wild, wide-eyed and speechless with bitter, swearing fingers, the dropout, the deaf boy whose life they said was ruined because it didn’t have sound.

(the different boy whose life they said was ruined because no one could imagine a life without sound)

Theseus finds him in the med tent and Newt is angry there, too, but it’s a different kind of anger, unsure and afraid.

He hadn’t heard the shell whistle as it came. He hadn’t heard the warning shouts, the alarm, the other soldiers retreating back to shelter.

He’d felt the explosion when it landed. The sound punched through his ribs and the shrapnel tore through his side; the pain sent him to what was left of his knees and throbbed in his chest. Like a drum. Beat beat beat in time with his heart, loud and impossible to ignore.

Newt, Theseus says, knuckles shaking as he rubs them together. He pulls him into a hug, careful of the potion-soaked bandages, and Newt can feel Theseus’ hands still signing against his back. Newt, Newt, Newt.

I’m sorry, Newt says where Theseus can’t see. They were right. I couldn’t hear. I wasn’t good enough. I’m sorry.

The healers don’t speak sign. They have a translation charm active. It reads his words out in a bland, feminine monotone, and Newt knew they cast it but he doesn’t know they left it running. He keeps signing, clamping his elbows against Theseus’ side to stop him turning to look, awkwardly forming shapes with only his forearms free to move, and he says all the things he doesn’t want Theseus to know and the translation charm reads them out loud for everyone to hear. Everyone except Newt.

It’s too hard, he signs, defeated, and in his white-cotton sheets with the bones in his hip slowly knitting back together, he even believes it. He’s deaf. He can’t do it. Life is too hard.

It’s not, Theseus signs back, and he grabs Newt’s chin when he glares and turns away. Being deaf isn’t going to stop you, he signs with stubborn fingers and a determined scowl, and if it doesn’t work then try another way. 

Sign language is so much more than fingers. Theseus’ hands say try another way and his eyes say Because I know you and I know you can and the way he messes up Newt’s hair and smiles says You’re deaf not stupid, you idiot.

Theseus stays with him while he heals. He stays, and he worries, and he even hovers, but he doesn’t talk for him. He doesn’t pretend Newt’s not there. He doesn’t act like Newt won’t be able to manage without him. Not to the healers who ask him how is brother is doing, not to the officers who look at Theseus when they discuss Newt returning to the front. Theseus translates, when Newt wants him to, but he only translates; he doesn’t talk for Newt and he doesn’t answer on Newt’s behalf. He never has, not in the park where the other children played and Newt’s too-loud laughter said all it needed to, not in the shops where Newt pointed and mimed and even wrote out the things he needed and the vast majority of shop workers tried their best to understand, not in Hogwarts where Newt’s brain worked just fine and he learnt his way through textbooks and class notes and finger-spelled the charms that sign language didn’t cover until he’d fixed them in his mind and mastered them.

Newt can’t hear. Theseus can. When his bones have reknitted and his muscles regrown Newt transfers to a different regiment, and then Newt can ride dragons. Theseus can’t. They both survive the war.

Newt never really learns to like people. He’ll always prefer his creatures, prefers talking to them slowly and wonderingly with gentle movements that are careful not to cause alarm. They talk back, in the tilt of their heads and the flutter of their wings resettling over their shoulders, in the twitch of their tails and the way their ears lie flat against their skulls. Sound is one way to communicate but Newt is more than his lack of hearing and there are so many more ways to talk than speaking.

When she is eight months old Addie the nundu sits back on her haunches and lifts her right paw in a clumsy wave. She brings it to her chin with her claws in and pushes it forwards with her claws out and Newt is so startled he laughs.

Hello beautiful, he repeats back to her. It’s the same greeting he’s given her every morning since he rescued her and he does it again, grinning and holding back tears and however hard life is or isn’t it’s all worth it just for this.

She butts her head against him and her purr reverberates through his chest; he feels it in his ribs and his lungs and the steady beat, beat, beat of his heart.