Archive of Our Own ^beta

It started with the occasional ringing in her left ear. Nothing more than a small bout of tinnitus; everybody gets it from time to time. Even though it slowly started to increase in time with each increment, it still didn’t seem as much of a worry. As it started to become more apparent, Vanya took to staying away from loud situations, straying from crowds, even starting to avoid conversations due to hearing troubles.

The doctors tried everything, from wax dissolving drops to examinations, yet nothing was ever achieved, there was seemingly no root cause to her hearing decline. As it progressed, the rest of the world became muffled, with noises becoming trapped in an invisible cotton net forced into her ears. The decline was much quicker from here on, with only a month between the muffled voices and songs to near complete deafness. She struggled to play her violin, unknowingly hitting more sour notes in her practice until she was called out in front of her orchestra, forced to get better or lose first chair, but she couldn’t get better.

Her siblings noticed her start to recluse, hiding away from group conversations and meetings as she understood less and less. She attempted lip reading, but the movements were too fast for her to piece together, leaving her left to the side and alone. They tried to help, using email messages instead of phone calls, talking slower and writing words out for her. As helpful as they were trying to be, it just made her feel more of an outcast, separating her further as her condition got worse.

It had been just under a month from the muffled hearing before there was nothing. At first, she assumed it was a quiet day, that there was nothing going on in the bustling world around her. As the day progressed, she noticed the way book pages became silent, the way her doors suddenly stopped creaking. It wasn’t until she dropped a glass, watching its shattered remains silently scatter across the tiled floor, that she realised what was occurring. The last remnants of her sense had gone, fallen away into a final silence.  

Her entire power was based on converting sound to energy, if she couldn’t hear, how was she meant to act? It was as if she was as a child again, stripped of every uniqueness and thrown to the side, doomed to a life of normality against a background of superiority. As days went buy it became increasingly harder for her to come to terms with her new reality. No longer could Vanya find solace in the rain beating down her windows, the sound of the wind through the trees on a breezy afternoon, the sounds of her siblings laughing at some obscure joke in the living room. Every small reason to give her happiness had been stripped away, leading her to live in a disoriented state far from her comfort zone.

It wasn’t until she was alone on the train platform, stuck in her own head that she realised a new side of her abilities. Alone and lost in a mindset of self-pity, she missed her train to take her across the country to get away from home for a while. As realisation set in and the train started to depart, she felt everything around her despite its devolution of sound. The platform vibrated as the seats began to move, Vanya’s grip on the wooden benches only getting tighter as she resisted the urge to scream in desperation and anger. The vibrations only got stronger, rippling throughout her dead as if she was standing next to an amplifier, every want to get away drowned out by the ever-increasing vibrations.

 She lost sight of time before the waves came to a stop. She hadn’t even realised she had scrunched her eyes shut so tight, her hands cramping with the intensity of her grip on the bench – the only thing left standing on the platform. Benches had been thrown to the opposite ends of the platform, people scattered confused and afraid over the tarmac as endless downpours of scattered paper began to fall around them. Has she done this? The vibrations were linked to sound after all, so what if she could control them instead of the idea of sound. Ever since developing her power, she only focused on the perception of what noise was; as something you could only hear and channel through one sense. It was so much more than that. It was waves, waves that could be controlled through all senses if she focused hard enough. This was the beginning of a new kind of destruction.