please consider: deaf ianto. he's born without hearing, and grows up learning sign language. he doesn't understand, when he first attends school, why the kids make fun of him just because his teachers speak with hands as well as words. when he speaks, in half-formed words he's never heard, his voice is soft and quiet and shaky. he doesn't have trouble concentrating in exams cause everything is silent all the time anyway. age eighteen, all hands and feet and gangly adolescence, trying to (1/5)
find a place in the world, he decides to study information science, because libraries and archives are silent, holy places where it doesnāt matter that he speaks with flicks of fingers. he graduates with a supernova of expectation ahead of him. he joins torchwood, twenty-one years old, painfully young to lose so much. lisa hallett is just the girl in the coffee room who promises time and time again sheāll learn sign but never does. the other survivors of canary wharf speak of the screaming, and ianto remembers only silence as ash danced in the air like a living thing. twenty-three years old, with scarred skin and eyes too old for his face, he moves back to cardiff because the memories live in london like a ghost that follows in his footsteps everywhere he goes. when he learns of the existence of torchwood three, he leaves well alone for a while, because that world was built for people who are not broken in the way ianto is broken. after a while, though, he cannot leave it alone anymore. he greets jack harkness for the first time in a voice he cannot hear and reads the denial from his lips. refusal is an old friend to ianto, and he tries again, and again, and suddenly heās falling back into a world heād almost forgotten. instead of running comms, mainframe transcribes for him when the team are out in the field. in the quiet in-between, he walks in the cells and the archives, the same quiet, holy spaces that had brought him here, to serve under a man who looks at ianto like he makes the world stop spinning. jack promises to learn sign. ianto braces himself for another lisa, but the very next day, as ianto passes jack in the corridor, he signs āgood morningā and jack signs it back. over the following months, tosh and owen and gwen learn it too, and soon the flicker of fingers forming phrases is commonplace around the hub, and ianto finally understands the meaning of family. with them around, the world isnāt silent for him anymore.
Hi I donāt know long ask etiquette but I hope this is okay because this is by far one of the best asks Iāve ever received and your writing is beautiful and Iām trying real hard to not get emotional about it or deaf Ianto or any of this in general. Thank you so much for sending this wonderful headcanon/amazing short fic. I hope youāll send me more because I really do love this a whole lot and wow I love my boy