I recently found you through all of your silverv posts (which are amazing by the way!) and I was wondering, how does Aidan handle not being able to hear Johnny in her head after they seperate and get him his own body (because yes it's canon, we don't accept any other endings here). I imagine it would be hard for her as she got used to not having to use her hearing aids to hear him.
Ahhhhhh!!!!! Thank you so much for enjoying my posts and also thank you so much for asking about my V, I often worry a lot I bring Aidan up too much in response to things because I have absolute brainrot for my oc babies. So, thank you so much for giving me excuse.
But in regards to that; Aidan hates it and she hates that she hates it. For so much of her life, silence was her comfort. Despite all losing her hearing put her through when it comes to her Nomad “family”, it gifted her this way to shut the world out when it becomes too much. It gave her a wall she could always put up when she was tired of the world and the people in it. She didn’t have hearing aids for years following the loss of her hearing and the first time she was given them and put them in; she cried and ripped them out, because the world was too fucking loud. Even as she’s gotten use to them, she maintains them on low volume. The world has always had a mute button and volume control, which she likes. Her deafness isolated and othered her among her clan, but she learned to use it to grant herself peace as well. She prefers more often than not to be without them, nothing better after a long day of bullshit, to put the world on mute and to be left to her own silent little world.
Then Johnny comes in and he gets through that, barges his way into her peace and destroys the silence of her little world. The one person she can’t mute and he’s also someone who never shuts up. And in the early stages, even past his initial...first impression, he is at times entirely too much. And it feels as if something has been taken from her (and tbf a lot has been taken from her) her peace, her tranquility, her little quiet world where she could just breathe and be is gone because this stupid yelling old man had to set up shop in her brain.
But time goes on, communication gets better, relationship gets better, Johnny starts to grow, she starts to grow and he’s no longer an intruder in her little world but apart of it. It’s now their little word where only they exist, they only hear one another, only communicate with one another, just them, a world no one else can really intrude on. And that becomes her new sense of peace and comfort, Johnny does (Though she’d never word it that way, cause it sounds needy and dependent and lovey dovey, but he’s become her comfort and peace)
And then everything changes, as it so often does, and woohoo everything’s fixed, but now Johnny’s voice is something she can’t hear no matter what anymore. And she hates it so much, because now she’s forced to hear everything else always if she also wants to hear Johnny and she always wants to hear Johnny. Now that she wants to hear him, no matter what, she can’t. It hardly seems fair. And she hates how needy and desperate and clingy it sounds, but god the world doesn’t feel right when she can’t hear him. The first time he talks to her afterwards and she has hearing aids out, she realizes she can’t hear him, she nearly wants to cry. She always wore her “weakness” like armor, used it to protect herself after others used it to hurt her, used the barrier it provided to stay safe; but she doesn’t want that between her and Johnny, she doesn’t need it with Johnny.
For a long long while, she’ll be wearing her hearing aids more than she ever did before. Because she doesn’t wanna miss out on hearing him, doesn’t want to ever be without his voice. Once upon a time she yoinked them out as soon as she got home, but now she’s falling asleep with them in, because she wants to listen to him as she drifts off. But, hearing aids aren’t comfortable to wear 24/7, they can itch and irritate after so long and rub the skin raw. And she’ll try to pretend like that isn’t happening, because she knows she’ll be nagged about taking them out for a while. But, Johnny lived in her head, he knows what’s happening, catches her rubbing and itching at her ears more, starts to see them getting redder. And he’s telling her gently, you need to take them out and she’ll pout even though she knows he’s right. So, she starts to limit her time using them as much as she hates being without his voice...being without any part of him really.
If she’s truly frustrated and desperate and upset, she may even entertain the idea of getting cochlear implants, something she was always sternly against. And Johnny does his best not to get mad when he learns that because he knows it’ll be her choice at the end of the day, but if she only is thinking of it because of him, that’s not right and a huge thing to do because spoiler alert, you’ll be taking away your volume control and mute button. And Johnny knows what happens when she gets overwhelmed and overstimulated by noise, he doesn’t want her putting herself through that daily just to hear him.
And like with anything it takes time to adjust and grow used to it. Growing pains of both her and Johnny completing forgetting she can’t hear him without them. So, he’ll talk about something extensively or call her name or start to kind of sing a new tune that just popped in his head and be like “why is she ignoring me? did I do something wrong? did i forget something? did I fuck up?” and then see her hearing aids on the bed side table and be like “oh thank fuck, i thought I was in trouble.” Or because she sometimes even spoke out loud to him as an engram, she’ll start a conversation or ask him something, not hear the answer and be like “oh...right...”
And eventually can accept, well maybe without her hearing aids she can’t hear him but she can hold him, feel him, lay her head on his chest and feel the rise and fall of his breaths, if he hums while she’s like that she can feel the reverberation and vibration of it in her chest, when she lays on him she can feel it when he talks even if she can’t hear it (sometimes she wonders if he just makes up nonsense to say or what he may say in those moments since he knows she wont hear, he never explains and she’s still deciding if she wants to hide a recorder somewhere in the apartment to find out later) She slowly becomes comforted and okay with the fact that while she doesn’t have him the way she did before, she does have him and that alone is more than enough.
I also like the idea that there’s bleed over between Johnny and V following separation, things that stuck from the other person. Because, you can’t fuse, be separated and it be a clean perfect divide. You can’t blend red and blue then be surprised when you get purple. They leave traces of one another behind. And with my V, I like the idea that Johnny ends up with some sign language knowledge. Not fluent afterwards but she’ll catch him absent mindedly throwing an asl sign in with his usual hand gestures, which he didn’t even know he knew. And from there, he takes to actually learning it fully because while lip reading tech is way better in 2077, its still not always perfect and he knows her well enough to know how much she just appreciates people making that effort for her. He’s never quite perfect at it, because he has a habit of talking with his hands already and using a lot of hand gestures, so sometimes he’s trying to sign but instinctively does his own little hand motion. Hand talking is a habit he can’t really break and, quite frankly, Aidan doesn’t expect nor want him too. She still understands it fine, because after being brain roomates she understands him in most situations, and affectionately calls it Johnny Sign Language.
Eventually, its just normal life and she’s not even afraid to use it to joke around and be a shit head, or avoid his nagging at times, because how could she not.
Aidan: Wait, is this about Arasaka, again?
Aidan: *pulls out hearing aids while maintaining direct eye contact*
Though even so far into it, there will be real bad days, just days where her brain is not kind to her, where she’s struggling with the weight of all she’s endured, when she just needs all of him; needs to hear and feel him, needs to feel like he’s all hers again, like they’re in their own world and nothing else matters, a bubble where only he exists to her, so she’ll insist on wearing her hearing aids to bed, laying on his chest, volume on low so she can only really hear him, and having him talk to her about anything and everything, and once she’s fallen asleep he has to gently take them out and lay them on the bed side table for her.
Also also, I didn’t get as into it, because this is already long as fucccck because i could talk about my ocs for actual years, but I also think Johnny struggles with feeling less special when suddenly she needs hearing aids to hear him. Because he kind of being the possessive man he is liked that there were times when he was all she could hear and that meant all the focus was on him. And now he’s just another person she can shut out if she chooses to do so.
oKAY SHUTTING UP NOW AND THANKS SO MUCH FOR LETTING ME SCREAM FOR THREE YEARS
