As shocking as finding out about the doctor being deaf was – and it had been, Stone had completely forgotten about it being a possibility and had just embraced the normalcy of the lab crew using sign language Just Because, so finding out about the hearing aids had left him reeling for the rest of that night – the life at the lab returned back to normal eventually. Eventually, because as ashamed as Stone was to admit it even in the privacy of his own head, he had absolutely treated the doctor differently for a good week or two at first.
He had found himself speaking louder and clearer a couple of times, until he caught himself doing it and adjusted back to his normal volumes, mentally berating his own idiocy. If the doctor had noticed, he had gracefully let it slide – which meant the doctor probably hadn't noticed, because he wasn't known for being graceful nor letting things slide. Not that he was known for not noticing things either. It was a mystery that Stone was happy to leave as such, if it meant he avoided getting yelled at for defaulting to ableist bullshit.
He had also found himself unconsciously making more noise when he was approaching the doctor out of the field of his vision. He actually hadn't caught himself developing the habit until the doctor complimented him for it, of all things.
"Stone, I've noticed that you've been more conscious about your abhorrent habit of sneaking up on me", Robotnik had said, accepting the coffee and cookies Stone had delivered to him. "I like this development, keep up the good work."
Stone had been equally shocked about finding out he had been doing such a thing as he had been about the compliment. His new noisier way of walking up to his boss had promptly gone from an effortless, unconscious thing to a deliberate, ironically harder thing to remember to do. But getting a compliment from Robotnik was a great motivator, so Stone happily put in the extra effort.
Another, much nastier habit he had found himself battling against had been a newfound need to protect the doctor from everything. Not his usual "I'm the doctor's closest bodyguard, this is my job", no. But the kind where he had assumed the doctor needed help with something he had never indicated needing help with, and the kind where he had either steered people in the doctor's line of sight or subtly made the doctor look in their direction in a misguided attempt to make sure he wasn't surprised by their presence. It had taken the doctor giving him weird looks for Stone to catch on that he was behaving differently, and he had embarrassedly corrected his act post-haste.
Thankfully, the initial awkward – and completely unnecessary, might he add – adjusting period had worked itself out quickly and Stone had avoided making a complete ass out of himself, at the very least. If the doctor had connected any dots with all the little things, he had kept quiet about it, which Stone was grateful for. All in all, the non-issue of the doctor's deafness went back into dormancy.
Until, months later, it abruptly resurfaced.
ooooo
Two days ago, they – or rather, Robotnik, but since Stone was the one handling his correspondence, it might as well be "them". This had nothing to do with Stone very much wanting to be "them" or "we" with the handsome and incredible doctor Robotnik, no sir – had received an email about a piece of presumably alien technology that had fallen into the hands of the government. Doctor Robotnik was to be in charge of analyzing, dismantling, reverse engineering, or whatever else he felt was a necessary course of action to figure out what it was. Needless to say, the doctor was excited and ready to disregard any and all previously established deadlines for this new project.
When it arrived, Stone had dutifully made sure everything else from meetings to physical tools had been neatly pushed aside to make the time and space for the thing.
"Look at it, Stone!" Robotnik said once the box had been opened and the packing peanuts covering the object had been cleared, a wide smile under his moustache. "I've never seen this kind of metal before! And that's without even getting into what is hidden underneath it!"
"Very exciting, doctor", Stone agreed, despite not really seeing anything of much interest yet. He wasn't familiar enough with metals to see any difference between whatever this was made of and, say, a car's bonnet, but he could agree that the concept of alien metals and technology was exciting. Seeing the doctor so pumped up was a treat in and of itself as well, and Stone was very happy to be witness to it any day.
"Now, help me unpack this baby the rest of the way and we'll get to work uncovering its secrets!"
We. Stone's smile widened.
The box was peeled back, more packing peanuts were disposed of – and still more kept being found clinging to Stone's suit jacket and the doctor's slacks and in every nook and cranny of the lab; a pact to nuke the packing peanut industry was established in short order – and finally the… thing was sat on a work desk in the assembly lab.
It looked like a large metallic cluster of grapes, each sphere the size of a volleyball and connected to a thick rod at the center with a bendy metal tube. There were fourteen "grapes", and the metal was the colour of steel but with a reddish hue where light reflected off it. At the end of the "stem" was a port of some kind.
Robotnik was talking a mile a minute into his wrist device's recording app while examining the port. Something about needing to create a power adapter with matching parts to plug it into, once he figured out the suitable voltage that will be enough to power it but not to fry it.
"But first! I will need to take apart one of the spheres and figure out what this machine's primary function is", Robotnik narrated, now examining a metal tube linking one of the grapes into the stem. "It wouldn't be wise to power this on only to find out that it evaporates everything in its immediate vicinity upon unauthorized activation. Stone, toolkit."
Stone opened the toolkit and held it out for the doctor to select his weapon of choice. Then he basically sat back and relaxed while watching the doctor work, occasionally handing him tools or accepting some back, holding out a hand to accept a bunch of screws and then putting them in a bag. Eventually the grape lay on the table in two halves, exposing the complicated alien gears, circuits and motherboards. A badnik scanned it and took a few close photos while the doctor consulted his wrist device.
"Based on what I'm seeing here so far, I don't believe this to be a weapon unless the other spheres are different on the inside", Robotnik said while typing something. "My hypothesis is a computer of some kind, or perhaps a data bank. The information within could be of great scientific value if I can access it and decode it. Of course I can't rule out this being a weapon designed to destroy our computer systems or infrastructure via an alien virus, so I'm going to have to choose carefully which computer to hook this into when the time comes, and obviously it can never be used to access the internet again as a safety measure. We can scratch that previous thought about power adapters; I'll need to create a modified USB adapter instead to hook this up to a computer."
The doctor dug back into the insides of the grape while going on and on about alien file types, potential sound and photo files, indecipherable text files and inventing fonts and wanting to consult his linguistics acquaintance in France and Higgings in the cyphers department…
And suddenly he dropped his tool, clapped his hands over his ears and howled in pain while jerking his head from side to side.
Stone jumped to his feet, heart hammering in his chest, and grabbed a hold of the doctor's shoulders, trying to stop his motions and form eye contact. "Doctor! What's wrong? What's happening?"
Robotnik stopped jerking around, ripped off a glove, and reached into his ear with his thumb and index finger. He pulled out a tiny cylindrical hearing aid with the practically invisible removal handle attached to it, and thrust it and the glove against Stone's chest. Stone let go of the doctor and fumbled to accept the objects. As soon as he had them, the doctor reached into his other ear and removed the hearing aid from there too, giving that to Stone as well. Then he leaned his head back against the headrest of his office chair and caught his breath, eyes closed.
The hearing aids felt warm in Stone's hand and his heart felt too big to his chest at the thought that he had been trusted to hold them.
Once Robotnik was composed again he opened his eyes and gave an irritable sigh. His hands, one gloved and one gloveless, flew through signs. 'That machine somehow caused painfully loud interference in my hearing aids. They might even be broken now, I'll have to check later.'
That explained the need to get them out as fast as possible. However, Stone didn't hear any interference from them, even when he cautiously lifted them closer to his ear. He handed the doctor back his control glove to free one hand for signing. 'I don't hear it.'
The doctor frowned at the hearing aids thoughtfully, then at the alien machine. 'Interesting. Hold onto them, I'm obviously not putting them back in now. Tell me if this machine makes any sounds at any point.'
Stone gave a thumbs up and pocketed the hearing aids with utmost care, placing them in his inner breast pocket right by his heart, where they obviously belonged.
'Narrate out loud for the record when I sign to you', Robotnik added after a moment.
Stone did as asked, although he needed to ask the doctor to slow down a couple of times, because the doctor was doing the thing where his signing sped up to compensate for the lack of speech to go with it. Or at least that was how Stone interpreted the phenomenon, because it only happened when Robotnik wasn't vocalizing while signing and it wasn't specifically a test for him.
Stone was proud of the fact that he didn't need to ask the doctor to fingerspell anything that wasn't already a necessity due to the lack of existing signs in the first place – he was officially fluent now. In the privacy of his own head, Stone thought of this as him now sharing the doctor's secret language without barriers.
After a long time of tinkering, narrating for the record, and opening up a second grape to check if the insides were the same – they were – the doctor stretched his arms above his head and rolled his chair back. 'I need coffee and a computer. You get the former.'
'Yes, doctor.'
ooooo
Stone brought the doctor his coffee and also a proper lunch to the computer lab, where a desktop computer was being thoroughly cleansed of anything important and kitted with whatever programs he deemed necessary for the project.
Stone put the food tray down on an empty storage cart and wheeled that over, hid one item behind his back for now, and tapped Robotnik's shoulder to get his attention. 'Mandatory food break, doctor. Decoding alien technology is smoother with full energy reserves.'
Robotnik spun his chair around to face the makeshift dining table. He looked unimpressed. 'You're making a revolutionary discovery wait, just to feed me wallpaper glue masquerading as mashed potatoes, barely okay meatballs, disgusting snot gravy, and tasteless steamed vegetables?'
Stone chuckled. When he had seen today's cafeteria lunch, he had figured the doctor wouldn't be happy about it. He brought out the last item and set it on the edge of the tray, next to the latte. 'Of course not, you're also getting a double chocolate muffin to make up for all that.'
He had personally baked a batch a couple of weeks ago and frozen a few for emergencies, such as today's lunch. As expected, Robotnik looked much more interested in the prospect of eating with the right motivation. 'Bribery accepted, bootlicker. Get me a new pair of hearing aids from the top left drawer over there, I want background music when I get back to work.'
A hand was waved in the general direction of the doctor's main work desk, and from the indicated drawer Stone found half a dozen little boxes with spare hearing aids in them. He dug the broken pair from his breast pocket and placed them on the table nearby for the doctor to look at later, then took a box from the drawer to bring to the doctor.
His hand hesitated on closing the drawer.
This was the second time something had happened while Stone had been present. A precautionary measure wouldn't hurt, right?
He took another box and slipped it into his breast pocket, then closed the drawer and returned to the doctor's side.
ooooo
They never did find out what information the files in the alien grape data bank – the doctor was never wrong – contained. It was only a couple of months later that the translating and decoding project was put on hold when they got a call from the government about an even more pressing situation, also possibly involving aliens.
Stone had never thought he'd have a reason to visit Green Hills, Montana, but he prepared the Mobile Lab for the doctor and carpooled with the bodyguard crew in one of the agency's cars and off they were.
Turned out his stay there would be much longer and lonelier than he had expected.