Steve is pretty good at dealing with pain. Burns, scrapes, bites, bruises, he will just grit his teeth and get through it. It's almost like the more it hurts, the less he has to think about everything. But when he starts losing his hearing, there's no pain, nothing to shield him from his thoughts.
He's terrified. He already feels isolated, singled out in their small group, and of course he's concerned about not being able to respond, to live his life as he knew it, but what eventually breaks him is the smallest thing, the most insignificant, mundane thing.
He and Robin are sorting books in the Family Video and they have this unspoken ritual - whenever there is a theme song in the movie they're watching, Robin will hum it for the rest of the day, with exaggerated movements, directing the orchestra and everything. And Steve watches her one day and realizes - he will lose this. He will never hear Robin's voice again, her slightly husky and over the top renditions of whatever unlucky movie happens to play. He can't help it, his breathing becomes heavy and shaky and before he knows it, Robin is embracing him and he's trying to explain how scared he is, how he feels like his life is basically over, how he'll miss her silliness and they won't be able to talk on the phone when she leaves for college, he can't ever hear her hum anymore...
After an emotional evening and a pizza night with their favorite sitcom - with subtitles! - on, they go to work again, but Robin excuses herself for a bit, runs into the nearby store. When she comes back, she has a large sketchbook in her hand and a black marker. She starts scribbling along to the very faded melody that Steve is registering from the TV and when she hands her final work to him, he laughs and maybe cries a little. Maybe more than little.
What Robin drew for him looks like a mountain range. She created an axis for time and an axis for the "MUSICAL DRRRRAMA", indicating how intense the music is in each moment. And all of the intensity is annotated, not a single soud described, but rather how Steve and Robin still see their world, in all its silliness. "This part is mega sharp, reminds me of wanting to stab Tommy Hagan with a knitting needle", it says next to one peak. "Remember that really soggy and stale cookie we ate at your place because we were hungry? That's what it feels like" and "it's sooooo looooong and boooooring it's like Mrs. Click's class" and "the violin here is crispy. SPICY. Like the Chinese food we had last Thursday, it kind of never wants to stop burning".
It's then that Steve knows that he will be okay. There won't be phone calls, but there will be letters, so many letters with silly descriptions and drawings, nagging to practice his ASL and visits to check if he really did his homework. Robin will be better than him at it, of course she will, but even when they'll both be able to sign fluently, she will still hand him a new melody scribble now and then.
On Steve's first birthday without sound, she gives him a huge binder labelled "For my only schmuck: Steve's album". In it are tens of scribbles, all of the melodies they hummed together in the Family Video with fresh descriptions and inside jokes. And when she stands in front of all their friends, hands raised up like a conductor and under her guidance, the whole group signs "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, STEVE", he realizes that sounds might have been overrated, because there were no words to describe this kind of love.
