"He didn't notice the note she slid across the desk at him until she smacked his shoulder. It took him a moment longer than it should have to make out "What are you doing?" scrawled across a loose sheet of paper in perfect handwriting. He began grumbling out an answer, before stopping halfway through."

He had just been in the middle of saying she could shoot the cannon again before bed, just not at him, when her face went slack, almost scared, in a way he hadn't seen from her in the few days they'd known each other. He reached out to her, worried he'd said something horribly wrong. Maybe enough for her to actually follow through on her threats to blast him - which she hadn't done so far, but it scared him anyways. Or, as she'd persistently - insistently? - corrected him that morning, anyway.

She knocked his hand away from her arm, and maybe it was his fault for touching her like that in the first place. He wasn't sure how he'd let himself be goaded into drinking far more than planned but he was sure that he didn't love the way the room flipped upside down as he watched her run off. Her bedroom door - since when did he declare it hers? - slammed shut, slamming him out of his stupor.

He stumbled and staggered - shit he had class in the morning! What was he thinking? - to her door, and knocked loud enough to make himself flinch. Not loud enough, apparently, to make his runaway roommate open her door.

"You could at least tell me what's wrong," he grumbled, leaning against the wall. His eye caught on the smattering of grape bits that still lined the door frame from when he'd accidentally shot at her. He supposed now that he no longer lived alone he was going to have to get used to the fact that someone else could very easily walk out of their room while he was working. He'd have to stop being so easily startled. Even if it was four in the morning - at least he thinks it was - when she joined him. Was she really mad at him for that?

"Shea?" Drew called, growing a little worried by her lack of response. She clearly didn't like being cared for or worried about but he couldn't help it. She was just so… so small. And everything she said about her parents made him feel all weird and wobbly inside like he needed to make up for it somehow. He wasn't even sure if he actually— Oh, screw it. It wasn't worth the effort to try and say he didn't like her. He did. He was sure he did. What he didn't like was just how… good it felt to know she liked him too.

He knocked a third time, shaking his head and reminding himself that she was only sixteen. A child, no matter how often (or loudly) she said otherwise.

When his offer of, "I'll let you shoot me if you just tell me what's wrong," failed, he found himself doing the one thing he'd mentally sworn not to do from the moment he asked her to stay - he opened her door without permission.

A fluttery sense of relief coiled in his chest as he blinked hazily into her room, and spotted her pacing, thankfully still fully clothed, along the side of her room with her back turned to him. He took a cautious step into the room, her name slurring off his tongue yet again. Something in her body language made him want to reach out and hug her, and also turn and run the other direction and just leave her be. He reached a hand out to her instead as he stepped closer, but dropped it, his fingers curling around air before he could touch her.

"Did I do something?" he asked softly and was immediately grateful that the alcohol flowing through him had made his speech so slurred - he'd come to understand rather quickly (easy to do when she frightened and intrigued him the way she did) that being spoken to in any gentle way made her feel like she was being treated like a child. Which she didn't like. At all. Even less than she liked cantaloupes, however that stupid word was spelled.

His emotions played tug-o-war inside him, between concern and annoyance as she simply continued to pace, not bothering to turn a few inches and acknowledge him.

"Shea," he whined - he didn't mean to whine, damn it - inching further into the small bedroom. "Come on, you can even shoot me twice if you're so upset if you just tell me what's wrong!"

Not even a twitch.

What was wrong with her?

What was wrong with him?

"We can borrow another horror movie if you want," he offered, pleading more than anything. He found himself crawling up to kneel on the edge of her bed, inches away from where her pacing had come to a pause, staring outside the window at an odd angle, like she was looking for something. Or, more likely he assumed, deliberately not looking at him. "Shea, come on, I know you can hear me. This is getting childish." Even his goading wasn't getting her attention.

He watched the back of her head as she dragged her hands over her face. Maybe like she was wiping away tears? Or maybe rubbing at her eyes in annoyance? He wasn't great at other people's emotions as it was… being drunk didn't help. She didn't seem like the type to cry, but maybe that was just because he cried too much and her personality was a far cry (ha!) from his - or at least she tried to make it seem that way. She did kind of confess to having liked Elements of Robotics which had to be the geekiest show (science-wise) he had ever watched. And she even outright stated that she enjoyed Fancy-Free so maybe she wasn't as much… not a dork as she wanted to seem.

"What do I have to say to make you knock this off?" he snapped, annoyance only very-much momentarily breaking out from behind his concern.

He sighed every last breath of air out of his lungs - How many molecules of carbon dioxide left a persons' body every time they breathed out? Did it depend on how slowly they breathed or their lung capacity? What about breathing out through their mouth or their nose, did that change it?- and let himself slump down. He was pouting and he knew it, and he knew he should care because he was twenty-one years old and just a few years from being a doctor and doctors shouldn't pout, but he didn't care even a little bit.

"Is this… Is this because of the whole kidnapping thing?" Nothing. "Are you that worried about having to go home?" He sighed again, his fingers twitching. He wanted to reach out to her, to comfort her the way he'd always preferred to be comforted, with hugs and cocoa moo and… "Do you want hot cocoa m– um… Hot cocoa? I won't make you talk if you don't want to, you know."

Shea's own shoulders slumped and she slowly turned toward him, the heels of her hands (what a weird term… he didn't want hands to have heels) pressing into her eyes. He sat up a little straighter, a bit more proud of finally getting her attention that he maybe should have been.

She dropped her hands, opening her eyes. And then she took in a sharp breath of air through her nose - how much oxygen did she just breathe in? - her eyes going wide, as if she were somehow surprised to see him. In the exact same instant, her hands shot out, smacking into his shoulders and sending him sprawling off the opposite side of the bed.

He yelped as he fell, which certainly wasn't as masculine a sound as he would have preferred to make. He scrambled to his feet and fixed his glasses, glaring her way, despite being very glad she was at least acknowledging him again.

"What was that for?" he demanded. Not that she seemed to take any of his demands seriously. And not that he wanted to be super demanding.

A different sort of concern, the kind that made his stomach get all flippy and made his fingers twitch, replaced the confused concern that had had full control over him the moment before. She bit her lip, staring at his with her eyes still wide in a way he supposed would be funny if it didn't make him so nervous. His eyes flicked across her - not in a creepy way! - as she stood frozen before him, her mouth working a bit like she wanted to say something and couldn't. She looked alright, the only thing worthy of note was her hand dangling at her side, clutching something little in a closed up fist, hiding whatever it was from him.

"What is that?" he asked, immediately distracted. Her eyebrows only furrowed together. She looked cute when she– sixteen! She's sixteen! He pointed at her fist and she glanced down, before taking a hurried step away leaving her with her back pressed up against the wall.

She looked… scared. What had he done to scare her? Had he said something he shouldn't have? Was it because he'd said he liked her? But she said it first! And it wasn't like he'd meant it in any way that she hadn't seemed to mean it… He just… liked her company, he supposed.

"Shea?" he asked, finding his hands floating up in a sort of surrender/innocent gesture of their own accord. She bit her lip again, then sighed, the first sound she'd made since first running away from him on the couch. With a small step that almost entirely closed the distance between them, she held up her hand. She seemed reluctant, but she slowly uncurled her fingers from around what she was holding, letting him see.

It took him a moment to place what he was seeing since he'd only seen something like it a few times in his life - mostly at Christmas when his extended family came to visit. His… second cousin? had them too. Although he suspected, given the understanding that she was at least fairly wealthy, hers had been paid for unlike Georgie's. Georgie had been randomly selected for a trial of a new design - he hadn't minded being a test subject one bit… though he'd also only been two. Still, they'd worked and the few times he and Georgie - George by now, Drew supposed since he must be fifteen or so - had met, Drew had never seen him without them. Of course, that meant he'd also never seen them off, either, which made him forgive himself for not recognizing them right away.

He tapped the two tiny devices with drunken curiosity. Had she been wearing them since they met? Why did she take them…

"Are they broken?" he blurted, and then immediately started to blush. Obviously she couldn't hear him… And, thankfully, that meant she may not have heard anything else he'd said to her. Especially thankfully to his comment that he knew she could hear him. No, she couldn't. No wonder she pushed him off the bed! She hadn't actually known he was there! It probably shouldn't have felt so good to know he could startle her, especially when she looked so upset. Traces of guilt mingled with guilt-worthy giddiness.

Shea pointed at her ear with her free hand, obviously telling him she couldn't hear. I might be able to fix these, he thought, without actually opening his mouth to try and speak and make himself look even more ridiculous. At least he was drunk. That always made for a good excuse.

Gesturing in a way he could only hope conveyed his desire to take a look, he held his hand out. Shea's jaw worked - She could still talk, couldn't she? - without sound again, and she slowly, almost looking scared again, dropped the external transmitters for cochlear implants into his palm.

Part of him wondered in a sort of absent-minded way if she had styled her hair to cover her ears the way it did to hide them. He didn't understand why if she had. They were cool! And then her comment about not wanting to trust anything he called cool rammed into that thought like a freight train and he decided he wasn't going to say that to her if he could fix them.

He looked them over, wishing he was more familiar with the fairly obscure technology - it would make it much easier to fix. But he could fix anything! That's what his mother had boasted during the heatwave the summer before his first year of college when a whole bunch of his neighbors flocked to him to fix fans and air conditioning units and once noteworthy...ily… a refrigerator.

He'd made fifty dollars in a week and was even given an old beaten up bicycle which he'd promptly traded to his older cousin Eddie for his Mighty Martian action figure collection. Eddie had laughed later about how he was planning on giving them to Drew anyway, too grown-up for 'toys' as he claimed to be, but Drew didn't think the trade had been half bad for him. What was he going to do with an un-rideable bicycle, with bent handlebars and rusty chains, that was way too big for him anyway? Just like Eddie would have given the action figures right over to him, he would have been perfectly content to pass the bike over without question.

Of course, the downside was that Eddie fixed the bike and managed to sell it for another fifty bucks. Drew had spent an entire day calculating how much the action figure collection was worth to make himself feel better about losing out on the extra cash. (It was worth almost two thousand dollars, all because Eddie had always been good at goading people into trades, even if he didn't care about what he was trading for. Not that it really mattered since Drew was never going to be willing to sell any of it anyway.)

With a shake of his head, Drew forced himself to refocus on the devices in his hand. They'd gotten wet, at some point, he realized as he gave one a quick shake and droplets of water splooshed out onto his fingers. He almost opened his mouth to ask what happened, before remembering and turning on his heel (which belonged on feet, not hands) and starting the walk to his own bedroom.

She trailed after him by no more than a step or two, following him in a way that was even more stray-puppy like than the night they had met. He shot her a small smile, hoping he could convey his confidence that he could fix them up for her. She only shrunk in on herself, hands stuffed in her pockets and looked away from him. His smile dropped and he turned away himself to step into his room.

There was no real reason for him to not let her in, but he was tempted to shoo her out anyway as she followed him. A glimpse of her face made him decide not to. Her gaze was fixated on his hands, on her external transmitters, and she was wringing her own hands and biting at her lip and if she was as scared as she looked he couldn't just make her go away. She didn't even look like she fully realized that she was standing in his room, and she made no move to come in any further than to hover over him when he took a seat at his desk, so he decided it was fine. It really didn't matter.

As he started looking the transmitters over, calculating the best way to begin repairs on them he was reminded of the joke his father used to make when he was little. He used to say there were two people inside of Drew's tiny body. There was the one who couldn't pay attention to anything at all, not even a little bit - the one who had a million and two questions to ask unrelated to what was actually happening. And then there was the one that focused too much. The one that couldn't be distracted by anything at all until whatever he was working on was done. Once, when he was maybe three he'd decided to build a spaceship out of blocks and cardboard boxes, and when his mother came to pull him away and make him eat his dinner with the family he had pitched a fit, screaming and crying and kicking and when he'd finally been allowed to go back, he knocked the whole thing down, so upset that he couldn't make himself remember exactly where the next piece had been about to go.

The second person took over almost instantly, and his focus wasn't taken away from his new little project even when Shea helped herself to sit on the corner of his desk or when she started rummaging through his notebooks. Well, he noticed it and smacked her hand away, but he only noticed it in the back of his mind. He didn't notice the note she slid across the desk at him until she smacked his shoulder.

It took him a moment longer than it should have to make out "What are you doing?" scrawled across a loose sheet of paper in perfect handwriting. He began grumbling out an answer, before stopping halfway through. Stupid.

He snatched the pencil from her hand and wrote "FIXING" in all capitals (it was easier that way) below her question, relieved when she didn't smack him to get his attention again. Mostly because of the focus, but also because it hurt. He suspected she might not realize how strong she actually was. Or he was weaker than he suspected, which would be embarrassing.

Once he found a way to crack them open where they would reseal without needing so much as a drop of glue, drying off the transmitters took precedence… Which he did by unprofessionally dabbing at the insides with the fabric of his shirt. Whatever. If she complained he could still point out that he was drunk. Which, actually, was a little concerning, because he might be more likely to mess things up that way, but he was too drunk to even care about that.

One part of the internal mechanism had completely fried, which was a shame. He needed some small piece of metal to replace it, he determined. Without any tools to cut metal on hand, he couldn't… His body caught up to his brain before he had even caught up to his brain, and he found himself turning to snatch the pencil from Shea's grasp again. It took a little bit more effort than he'd hoped but he eventually managed to snap the little piece of aluminum away from the eraser end of the pencil. It took even more effort, and some even further-from-professional biting, to gnaw off a piece that was the right size to replace the part that had been severely damaged.

The moment that was done, his mind snapped into a haze. He wasn't sure - as always - if he even blinked the whole time he was completely zeroed in on fixing the devices. All he knew was that by the time he was done and looked up again, his eyes were burning, the sun was threatening to rise outside his bedroom window, he wasn't sure if he needed to use the bathroom worse than he needed some water, and Shea looked absolutely adorable.

She had dozed off at some point, still sitting on his desk with her head leaned up against the wall and her arms pulled across her chest. He didn't mean to stare at her, and he didn't stare for too long, but he couldn't help it any more than he could help smiling at her as he did. She didn't move much in her sleep aside from an occasional twitch of her fingers. She didn't even snore, which was sort of frustrating. Logistically - logically? - he knew she wasn't perfect. She still seemed perfect and that frustrated and scared and intrigued him. She didn't even snore, for goodness sake!

Shaking her awake, he decided as he began to squirm uncomfortably, would be something he did after he used the bathroom, and sprinted out of his room.

She'd woken up after he left, he discovered with a startled scream when he stepped out of the bathroom a minute later to find her standing tensely outside, one hand raised as if to knock. Her shoulders slumped a bit, relaxing when she saw him. At least she didn't hear him scream.

It was an impulsive movement brought on by his overeagerness to see if he'd managed to fix her transmitters, and therefore give her back her hearing, but he grabbed her hand and started to drag her back to his room. He couldn't help but notice her slide her hand out of his grasp and cross her arms back over herself again, not cruelly or harshly, but she still did it. Commenting wasn't worth it. What would he have even said?

He had to usher her back into his room as if she was only finally realizing that it was, in fact, his bedroom. He tried to not present the transmitters to her with too much of a flourish, considering he still didn't know if he got them working again. From the way she rolled her eyes and smirked up at him, he must not have done a good job of not being pridefully dramatic.

Shea stared down at the devices, as he watched her hopefully. She took them from his outstretched hands, and instead of putting them back on then and there the way he had hoped, she grabbed them and ran off. He watched the bathroom door swing shut, and a moment later she'd clicked the lock shut, leaving him to anxiously pace the hallway as he waited for her. For a moment he debated making breakfast, but his stomach churned at the mere idea of food and he decided that that could wait until a more reasonable time.

The very second he heard the bathroom door creaking open, he whirled around to face her, nerves wiping any trace of a smile clean off his face. That was, at least, until she shot him a small smile, her face a few shades greener than before. He couldn't help breaking out into a grin, stopping his pacing a few steps away.

"Are they working now?" he asked, glad to not feel stupid for talking again.

"Yeah," she replied almost sheepishly with a quick, snappish nod. "Um… thanks. For– for fixing them. Can we…"

"What?"

"Just pretend you never saw them?" she finished so quickly and so quietly he could barely make out her words.

"Why?" he asked, mere curiosity earning him a glare.

"Just… Don't," she grumbled– growled, really.

"Shea?"

"Look," she snapped at him, and he took a step away from her sudden wrath without really meaning to, "I'm enough of a freak already without this, okay? Nobody is meant to see them. Ever."

"How long have you had them?"

"Drew…" Her voice sounded like a warning, a very tired warning, but a warning.

That didn't mean he had any self-control. "Well?"

Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, and if he wasn't so fond of rolling his eyes himself he'd tell her they'd get stuck there. "What did you put in your pocket earlier?"

He felt his brow furrowing as he tried to figure out what she meant. Eventually, the only thing he could do was shrug.

"When you knocked down the photo of you and your mom," she elaborated. "You put something in your pocket. What was it?"

He quickly shook his head as an understanding of what she wanted to know washed over him. "Nothing," he told her, which he realized a moment too late was exactly what he'd said when she caught him the first time.

"Fine, but if you're not going to tell me then you're not allowed to even remember this happened, got it?"

"What do you expect me to do?" he asked, "Suddenly develop amnesia?"

Her hands flared up at her sides, and though she was quick to hide them behind her back he still felt suddenly wary, casually reminded that she could seriously hurt, maybe even kill him if she wanted. Somehow he suspected that she still never would.

"No," she groused. "I just… Nobody is supposed to know, alright?"

"I won't tell anyone," he promised, hating how meekly his voice came out.

Shea crossed her arms and slouched past him to throw herself down on the couch. "You're not meant to know either."

"Well, I'm glad I do," he stated. And he was glad. If he didn't know then she'd still be deaf and he'd still be terrified he had done or said something wrong and upset her. He was more glad that he'd been able to help, but that was beside the point. "Shea? I'm sorry, I don't…" With a sigh he sat down on the opposite end of the couch, neither one making a move to look at the other. He slumped forward with his elbows on his knees, while she continued to glare in the direction of the kitchen, turned bodily away from him.

It took five minutes of waiting, of hoping for her to break the silence and say something, for him to finally give in. "It was another picture," he said, the words slip-sliding their way out of him, too quickly for him to decide to take back.

At least she looked at him, even if it was with a calculated blank look on her face and a monotone, "What?"

"What I put in my pocket earlier. It was another picture."

"Oh," she said.

"Does that make us even?"

"Not really. What's it a picture of?"

Too late now… He reached into his pocket, glad to find he hadn't accidentally folded or crumbled the wallet-sized photo in his working haze. She shifted closer to him at the same time he shifted closer to her, landing them with mere inches of space between them. He didn't mind, and since she didn't move away he wagered a guess to say she didn't either.

Even looking at the picture made him feel like someone had reached into his chest and ripped his heart right out. He hadn't shown it to anyone since he was nine. It was nice, in a not-at-all nice way to show it to Shea. He held it low between them, and slowly flipped it over, willing himself to just let her see it.

"Oh look, a fledgling dork," Shea said, somewhere between laughing and sounding entirely unenthused.

"I'll have you know I was a full-fledged dork already, thank you very much," he retorted, delighting in the smile she gave him and the brief peal of laughter that bubbled out of her.

"That your dad?" she asked, her voice going soft as she pointed at the photo. Good thing she didn't touch it - he may well have burst into tears… he had kept it so well preserved.

Drew nodded and, deciding that thus far they had traded a secret for a secret, he told her, "It's… It's the last photo of just the two of us that we ever took."

"How old were you here?" she asked, gently goading him.

"Eight. This was just a few weeks before I turned nine." He couldn't even remember why the picture had been taken, there hadn't been a special occasion. Just him, in a Mighty Martian t-shirt that fell down to his knees (one he still had tucked away in the very back of his closet for the absolute safest of keeping) and his father, in jeans and a striped polo shirt, working together to build a model rocket.

"What… happened to him?" Shea murmured.

Drew screwed his eyes shut, managing a shrug before letting out a shuddering breath. His words came out choked as he told her, "I don't… really know. He just never came home one night after work just a few months after this was taken. He'd called to say goodnight to me as always since he didn't get home from work until after I was asleep. But that night he said if I waited up for him we could watch a movie together since it was a Friday and I was a high school student. So I did. I stayed up all night but he never walked through the door." He blinked back tears, hating that twelve years later he still wanted to cry. "The police spent half a year searching for him. My mother and I had to bury an empty casket."

He cautiously, nervously, terrified beyond reason...edly, risked glancing at her expression. He'd never told anyone before, about what had happened, too worried about how they'd react. In high school, rumors had been aplenty about Teddy Lipsky, the deadbeat who abandoned his wife and son, or about Teddy Lipsky, the poor soul who had been murdered so brutally they couldn't even find the tiniest chopped up pieces of him. The first rumor would be hissed in his ear, "Even your dad doesn't want you," between classes, the second more cruelly recounted to him by Jack Bendtner - who had been a senior when Drew got to high school, and who Drew could only assume was still a senior - as he shoved him into lockers or dumped him into trashcans.

Shea didn't suggest either of those things had happened. She simply nodded and whispered a quiet apology. "That sucks," she added, shrugging slightly. "Sucks to not know what happened, I bet. Or… does that help?"
"I don't know," he told her. "I'm not sure I want to know. I hope… whatever happened to him… It wasn't too painful."

He watched her bite her lip again before she gestured vaguely then dropped her hands in her lap. "I got hit by the comet first. So, I guess when the explosion happened I was the closest to the– the center or something, I don't know. All I know is by the time we stopped being dead I couldn't hear anything, and then like a week later I had these things surgically implanted in my head and… Wow, magic, I could hear again… Well, after the third try."

"I'm sorry too," he told her, only because it felt like the right thing to say. "If it makes you feel any better, I think they're cool. You're like an android!" Which was exactly what he'd told himself not to say to her…

Despite her amused sounding scoff she glared at him. "Not helpful."

"Well, I'd want to be an android."

"That's because you're a dork, dork."

He could only smile as he leaned to rest his head against the back of the couch.

"You know what?" Shea said a few minutes later, looking more asleep than awake. "Being nine fucking sucked."

He snorted in surprise at her curse but nodded anyway. "Fuck being nine," he agreed. Her laughter really ought not have been as nice a sound as it was. And fuck going to class, he thought to himself as early morning sunlight reflected around the room.