Oh, why am I writing this? Because Eileen Leahy is amazing. Simply amazing, and she is awesome. Don't tell me otherwise. I will fight you on this.
Yes, I have a couple of other fanfics that I haven't completed yet. Don't worry. "Mr and Mrs Johnson" (both versions) are still being written, but I'm going under a whole bunch of fangirl rage. Thank you, AoS writers for killing off Grant Ward. I don't appreciate it very much. Thank you (insert heavy sarcasm here) for killing off half of my ship!
Back to this fanfic. This is going to be the beginning of Eileen Leahy. Because she needs a beginning. Seriously. She needs one.
I haven't quite figure out whether or not I'm going to throw in some Sam x Eileen, but I'm most definitely considering. If I do throw it, just know that it isn't going to happen until it is... Well, I don't know. But we are going to start at when Eileen Leahy is very, very young. Six years old. That sort of thing.
Okay. I'll stop rambling on. Here we go.
Eileen Leahy lives in a world without sound.
The silence is all she knows, but in her dreams, she can distantly remember something from the days with sound. An unknown supernatural creature took away her parents and her hearing when she was just a young baby of about five, six months old. She can't remember their deaths nor her parents' killer.
It's not a mercy. It's not a gift from above.
She wants to know—to remember, to never forget—who has killed them. But she can't. She can't recall a single thing. She was too young. Lillian O'Grady—the hunter who accidentally found Eileen crying in her crib—says that it's probably for the best, but she doesn't think so. Because she doesn't know, Lillian is grasping at straws to pinpoint which supernatural creature killed Eileen's parents. And who knows? Maybe, that thing is going to kill more people.
And leave survivors like Eileen.
Lillian O'Grady is the first person who has ever cared for Eileen—or at least, that is what she knows thanks to her memories. Not her biological mother. Not her biological father. Lillian. The woman with red hair, a smoker's voice, and a cigarette in her fingers whenever she's downright nervous.
Eileen's adoptive mother confirms Eileen's hearing disability shorty after she found her. Eileen can't follow noise, and she can't seem to sense much of the world by sound. The doctors confirms it for sure when Eileen is five years old, but they all know she's deaf with no residual hearing. Lillian drags Eileen from doctor to doctor, always trying to discover all the information about Eileen's disability.
Eileen herself can clearly remember how the doctor—hearing specialist, to be much more specific—would put headphones on and then press some buttons out of the corner of Eileen's eyes. Eileen can always tell when the specialist push the buttons, but she can't quite figure out what should trigger her fingers.
"Some sound," signs Lillian, speaking too.
Eileen holds onto the button, but she never pushes it.
The hearing specialist, shaking her head, moves her mouth, but Eileen doesn't know what she's saying. Too young to understand so many words, she can make out a few sentences here and there and she wishes—so wishes—that the doctor would use sign language. It's as if she is being purposely left out of the conversation. The odd man out of the trio. The strange one. The outsider.
Later, when Lillian brings Eileen back to the cozy yellow-white house with flaky paint flecks falling from the walls in San Francisco, Lillian tells the full story. The doctor diagnose her condition as "complete hearing loss." There's no chance to get it back.
No cure. No solution.
Eileen isn't quite sure what to make of that. A world lacking of sound is what she knows, and regaining the ability to hear might push her off her orbit.
She sits on the edge of her bed, facing against the wall. She picks up a picture book and begins to read, her mouth moving along and mimicking the way her speech therapist talks. She isn't quite sure if she is indeed enunciating the words, but she can tell that something is coming out. Audible words? She doesn't know.
The hair on the back of her neck rises, and she immediately stiffens.
Lillian gently places a hand on her shoulder and signs, Are you going to bed, Eileen?
Practicing her voice, Eileen whispers, "Yes." Then after watching Lillian close the door behind her, she climbs in, checks her gun, and then falls asleep.
Time passes by, and she gets her first hearing aid at six. That is at the same time Lillian has taught her how to slay ghosts with a salt gun and to handle a match properly. She is always left purposely out on these "cases," but her adoptive mother makes sure she knows what to do in case of emergency. Since the beginning of her life, Eileen has slept with a gun under her pillow, knife and book about vampires on her night stand, a lighter in her emergency bag of clothes, and a jar of salt underneath her bed. She knows how to make an emergency EMT out of worthless trash, and she can load a gun without looking.
But she can't hear. It's a disadvantage.
When she is six years old, Lillian takes her to see another hearing specialist. A male doctor, this time. She goes through the entire process again, and they put headphones over her ear, give her a button to push, and then turn to Lillian to talk about something. She can't quite read his lips correctly thanks to the flickering overhead light that needs to be fixed. She is sure that the doctor isn't talking about some kind of gardening moss.
She sighs a little. She hates whenever she misreads lips.
When they get back home, Eileen has two pairs of hearing aids. She puts one set on and turns them on high. Nothing. But she can feel something, a sort of mild vibration coming from the aids.
She stomps her foot on the wood floors.
The vibrations are stronger, alerting her in that direction. Downwards.
For the first time since visiting that doctor, she smiles.
Sitting on the twin bed in the middle of her room on the second floor, she gaze out of the window and stare at the neighbor's house. Picket fences, thriving green lawn, and shiny cars.
Normalcy. She isn't sure what she would do to have a day with sound and without supernatural elements. It would be… strange. Like a fish out of water. But she wouldn't be an outsider anymore if she has her hearing back.
Her nerves suddenly pick up a sort of vibration. In her right ear. Left, less so. She turns her head towards where the vibration is the strongest, and at the open doorway, Lillian stares at her with palpable but also pleasant surprise. With her hands shaking, she signs and asks, "How do you feel?"
From the way her hearing aid pulses, it's picking up Lillian's words.
She signs back, My ear can feel the aids.
Lillian smiles slightly and raises her hands again. "That's good. You should go to bed, Eileen. It is almost nine o'clock."
Eileen nods. She takes her hearing aids out, turns off the light, and stares at the ceiling. Without the telltale tremors in her ears, she can't tell if there is any sound in her room.
But she has not forgotten about sound. In her dreams, she can hear screaming.
She doesn't know who is screaming. She has a feeling that it is her parents, and maybe it is a sweet gift that she doesn't remember everything.
So what do you all think? Please review and give me a piece of your mind. I need to know whether or not I'm accurate on the hearing aid and deafness angle. I have been researching as much as I can and pulling intel from my deaf cousin, but I can only say so much.
