So this part is shorter, but it just sort of worked out that way. I'll update as soon as I can. Hope everyone is enjoying this story!
John Watson was born six weeks premature. His entire life he would hear the story about how the doctor told his parents that his situation was very delicate, and if they gave him too much oxygen, he could go blind, but if they gave him too little, he may become brain damaged.
John Watson's parents were both Deaf. They came from a long line of Deaf relatives, it was a genetic condition, one they assumed they would pass on to their children. John Watson's parents didn't want a deafblind child, so they went with less oxygen.
Luckily for John, he was a fighter, and he survived. When he was four weeks old, the doctor told his parents they could take him home. They also told them that their son, John Hamish Watson, could hear.
John didn't remember the looks his parents gave each other when they got that news. There had only been two hearing children born to any members of the family they knew of, and those hearing children were born to distant cousins. John's parents had been Deaf children, of Deaf children, of Deaf children.
He was too young to see his father put his arm around his wife and sign to her, 'It's okay. He's our son and it's going to be okay. Maybe they made a mistake.'
It wasn't that his parents disliked the hearing, or that they wouldn't love their son. On the contrary, John's parents loved their boy very much. They were, however, terrified. Terrified that they would never relate. Terrified that their son would never fit in, because CODA kids didn't often fit in. CODA kids didn't belong in either world, really, and Mr and Mrs Watson didn't want that for their son.
Harriet, John's sister, older by nearly six years, was hard of hearing, but not deaf. She spoke, she was the spokesperson for the family when they had to go out to places where people didn't sign, where they didn't understand what it was like to be Deaf.
Harriet immediately hated her little brother when she learned he could hear, not because he could hear, but because it meant he was different, and Harriet, oh she wanted to be different. She didn't want to be the spokesperson of the family. She didn't want to tell her parents yes, when they asked her if she would help John learn to speak.
John's parents didn't quite know what to do with him, and in the end, they didn't really do much at all. John was a fussy baby, but they never really noticed. He was fed on a schedule, and when he woke in the middle of the night wet and hungry, no one responded to his screams.
John learned to self-soothe at a very early age. His parents watched him for signs of brain damage that the doctor warned them of, but John was a healthy boy, and smart. By the time he was a toddler, he seemed to prefer not to speak at all, and most people didn't realize the boy could hear.
It was only when his parents had to make the choice for him to go to a hearing school, that John realised how different the world was around him. People moved their mouths and made sounds, and those sounds were words. And people didn't express enough on their faces and John was just so confused all the time. He didn't understand intonation when someone was asking a question, he didn't understand most of the sounds that all of the letters made. He could spell, but he didn't hear sounds in his head, he saw hand shapes.
When he spoke, he spoke like a Deaf person. Slurred, missed letters, impatient. He didn't like it. The words choked him, got caught in his throat, made him so angry. His speech therapist nearly gave up on him until one day, he came in and he just sort of... had it.
The therapist would take credit, but John was tired of getting punched and kicked and laughed at by the other boys. He hadn't really understood the words, but he understood the fists, and the finger pointing, and the laughter. John locked himself in the library, took a book he had been able to read since he was three, and began saying the words over and over and over, until his throat was raw, his tongue was sore, and until he sounded just like the angry woman was trying to make him sound.
He didn't tell his parents when he came home for the holidays, and they didn't ask. Harriet, however, knew. She knew that he'd figured it out. He knew he had figured out that he was special, that he was different than the rest of the family. Some people in the outside world would think of him as better, more whole, complete, even.
It didn't matter that John didn't see himself that way, or that his parents saw him as far more broken than she was. What mattered was that John was probably going to take a wife and bring home grandbabies for their parents to fawn over, and Harriet would be alone, ugly, and angry.
John was eight when that happened, Harriet was fourteen, and she was drunk. She'd stolen some of the Christmas party wine and helped herself in her bedroom before she confronted John.
'What's up?' John asked as she walked in.
She was swaying on the spot, and she slammed his door behind her. She reached up and turned her hearing aids up and she smiled, drunkenly, meanly. "Special boy," she slurred, her eyes nearly crossed. "Look at the special boy. Let's hear it, Johnny. Let's hear your voice."
"Harriet," John said, a word he had practiced over and over, afraid he would never really get it right. How could he be sure, really, that his parents really intended for her name to sound that way. Her sign name was the sign for jam, the sign name she'd had since she was a baby, one their mum couldn't bring herself to let go of, or change. The word Harriet and the word Jam just wasn't enough of the same to make John happy.
"There it is," she said and stumbled forward. She raised her hands to sign, and then laughed and dropped them. "Don't need it now, do you? Your hands."
'Why are you angry?' John signed. Harriet reached forward and slapped him, hard, and it shocked him into instant silence. John backed up but Harriet came forward and slapped him again and again. He felt his skin sting and start to swell. The skin near his lip broke and he tasted blood. She kept hitting him until he fell and covered his face, yelling, "Please stop! Please!"
"They can't hear you, idiot," she spat at him and backed up. "If you tell them I did this, I will kill you."
John believed her. When his mother demanded to know what happened, John lied and said he'd fallen outside on the ice. The look on his mother's face told him she didn't believe him, but she didn't question him any further. John had never lied to her. Ever.
John went off to school the moment the holiday was over, a bit bruised, but hurting more on the inside than on the out. No one asked him about his marks, no one really cared. John was the weird kid, the one who preferred to talk with his hands and his expressions than his voice. He was the kid who still hadn't quite gotten the intonation of a question right.
He didn't want to come home for the Easter hols. He wrote his parents and begged to stay, but they insisted. They had family from all over Britain coming in, he needed to show up, and please be careful, John, no more bruises. Just watch your step, his mother wrote to him.
John was petrified. He spent most of the holidays in his room, hiding from his sister, hoping she would just leave him alone. Easter Sunday she pushed open his door and gave him a wicked look. She was drunk, but not impossibly so... yet.
She tossed him a wink. "Embarrassed to be seen with us now that you've figured out you're hearing?"
'I'm just tired,' he signed back to her.
Harriet rolled her eyes. "Stop signing, you twat. You don't deserve to. You don't belong here and you know it. They all talk about you when you're not in the room, and you'll never know because if you can't see it, you can't hear it. They all talk about how sad your life is because you shouldn't be here." Harriet reached up and tugged one of her hearing aids out of her ear. "At least I can do this, and I can fit in. Go away, Johnny, no one wants you."
John swallowed thickly. He wanted to, at the moment, he wanted to go far away from her, and from them. He wanted to, because she was probably right. He'd seen the looks his aunts and uncles and distant cousins gave him when he was in the room. They'd sign their hellos, and my aren't you growing so fast, and you look just like your dad, but in their eyes was pity.
He hadn't realised that he didn't belong, but when Harriet told him so, it made sense. He didn't bother to look at her again and eventually she left, slamming the door behind him. She spent the rest of the holiday trying to torture him with loud noises. Putting the telly on full blast when he was sleeping, switching all the radios on at full volume. She even produced an air horn which she used on him while he was in the shower, causing him to startle so badly he slipped and bashed his face on the side of the tub.
His parents had noticed that one, and chastised their daughter, but not too hard. She was just playing pranks, John insisted and though his mother looked concerned, she let it drop. She allowed John to stay at school, though, until summer.
When John was ready for University, he was absolutely ready. He loved his parents, they were great, but they had done little to nothing to prepare him for the actual world. He was angry, angry with his sister for being such rubbish. He was angry at his parents for not noticing enough, not spending enough time telling him that no matter what their lives were like, it simply was okay for him to hear.
His anger drove him to the Army, and while his mother cried, Harriet got drunk, beat him up, and then whispered that she hoped he would get shot before he had the chance to come home again. He wondered what Harriet would do if that actually happened, but honestly he did want to make it through without any major casualties.
When John joined the Army, he decided to train as a doctor. It made the most sense, and he was very good. The country was at peace then, and he trained for years, mainly at St Bart's, and he made some real, actual friends, had a girlfriend, quickly realised what he wanted was a boyfriend, and then had a few of those.
John was never really happy, but he was the most at peace he'd ever been. He wasn't normal, he didn't quite fit in, but he wasn't apart from the world anymore, either. Harriet wrote him the few times she landed herself in rehab. She was sorry, she was trying, she'd met a woman named Clara, and Clara was great. Clara was hearing, and their parents loved her, and they were getting married. She was sorry for all the times she made John feel like he didn't belong in their world.
John burned the letters that Harriet had sent him. Time had gone by, many, many years, but the pain wasn't any less. John wanted distance from her, from that world. Once, when John was doing rounds at the hospital, before he was shipped off to Afghanistan, there was a deaf man in one of the rooms waiting for test results.
A pretty nurse ran up to John with a grin. "Rumour has it you speak sign language," she said and then explained the situation.
John stared at her, and he wasn't sure what made him say it, but he looked her straight in the eye and said, "I don't know sign language, you have your facts wrong."
She was flustered, but she apologised and rushed off to find someone who did know the language. For the first time John felt free of that world, the world of the Deaf where he didn't belong, and while he didn't belong in the world of the hearing, not really, he belonged in his own world, and in his own world, he had control.
He didn't, however, had much control when he was shipped off to the middle east and subsequently shot. The bullet went through his thigh, and a second through his shoulder. The one in his thigh shattered his femur, dusted part of it.
He was in the hospital for six weeks in Afghanistan before he was well enough to be shipped back to London. He received a second surgery when he got home, and attempt to screw what remained of his femur to a titanium rod in hopes that he wouldn't lose the leg.
Six months he spent at a rehabilitation centre, his leg immobilised, transported from place to place by wheelchair. John was angry, but he never complained aloud. He never told anyone how much it hurt, how he could feel the rod inside of his leg, how he just wanted it to stop. Take the damn leg, he'd think some days when it was just too much to bear.
He narrowly avoided a Percocet addiction. Instead he focused on slowly working his leg until he was able to actually get better.
"You're going to limp," the doctor told him after his final x-ray. It had been two years since the bullet tore his life apart, "probably for the rest of your life. You lost about an inch and a half of your height on that leg, and likely you're not going to get it back."
"What about that damn rod?" John asked, wiggling his foot, imagining he could still feel the titanium fused to his bone. The x-rays showed that John's femur had regrown around the titanium rod, and it had gotten to the point where John could walk on his leg, with the aid of a cane, but no more wheelchair.
"That's yours now, for life," the doctor said. "We'd have to re-shatter the leg to take it out, and in the end you'd probably lose it, and all your hard work would have been for nothing."
John wasn't sure why it bothered him so badly that he was going to be part metal for the rest of his life. He sighed, but accepted what the doctor said, and used his new cane to walk out of the rehab center.
He spent another year in a half-way house for Army veterans who were recovering from disabilities. Most of them were amputees. One of them was a blind guy, who was disgustingly optimistic in John's opinion.
He was learning to read Braille and use a cane. He had a guide dog on hold, as soon as he could master a few other skills that would allow him to live on his own again. One drunken night the two of them ended up having sex in John's bed, and John mused what the sex might have been like had he been born Deaf, as his parents intended.
John moved out the next day, and didn't say goodbye to the blind man. He knew it probably hurt, but it would have hurt more if John opened his mouth and told the man he was using him because he wanted to know what it was like to fuck a blind bloke. It was only a half truth, but John was still angry and it was the cruel half that would have come out.
It was by chance John had run into an old Army friend in the park a few weeks later. He was staying in a dirty old room at a hostel, while he tried to figure out what he could afford in London, which wasn't much at all. Harriet was drinking again, going by Harry now, and she'd left Clara. She tried to insist John move in with her, as a way to make up for all the years of torment, but John couldn't bring himself to accept it.
He accepted the gift of her old mobile, however, because John had no real money to speak of, but he was determined to make it. When he saw the fat version of his old friend, he tried to ignore him, but the man persisted.
They got coffee together, John ordering his scalding hot, and he rather enjoyed the way it burned his tongue as he took large gulps. "Who would want me as a flatmate?" John answered the question that had been asked.
The man's face split into a grin. "That's the second time I've heard that today."
John felt uncomfortable, petrified, but curious all the same. He knew his friend, he knew that look, and he knew something was about to change for him. He didn't think he'd be meeting a tall, lanky, gorgeous man, who was looking for a flatmate, and absolutely stone deaf.