Work Text:
It starts as just another afternoon shower.
Steve’s in the kitchen, rinsing a mug, when the light outside goes gray. A second later the sky opens up, hard and sudden, rain drumming on the roof. He glances toward the window automatically, then stops, because it’s loud.
Not just “oh, it’s raining” loud. It’s layers.
He dries his hands on a dish towel and wanders to the front door like he’s being pulled. He cracks it open. The sound swells, rushing in around him: hiss of water on the driveway, sharp ping of drops on the metal awning, a lower constant roar where the gutters are overflowing.
He steps out onto the porch before he really decides to.
The air is cooler, mist on his face. The world is blurred edges and shining asphalt and, underneath all of that, this texture. He blinks, throat tight for no good reason, and just listens.
It’s almost too much at first. His fingers twitch toward his aid like he might turn it down, the way you’d flinch from a suddenly bright light. But he forces his hands to stay at his sides. The audiologist had said this would happen. Things would seem too bright, too sharp, until his brain caught up.
So he stands there, heartbeat loud in his chest, and lets the rain fill his head.
He can hear individual drops hitting the porch railing. The different note of water slapping puddles versus splattering leaves. Tires on the wet road out on the street, a soft shhhh that he realizes he hasn’t really heard since… God, he doesn’t even know.
It feels fake and real at the same time, like someone turned the saturation up on the whole world.
The door creaks a little behind him. Eddie doesn’t say anything. Steve can feel him before he hears him, that familiar Eddie weight leaning in the doorway.
He waits.
Thirty seconds, a minute. Long enough that Steve’s shoulders start to come down from around his ears. Long enough that the initial sensory punch turns into something he can ride.
“What’re you doing out here, big boy?” Eddie asks finally, voice low, like they’re in a church instead of on a crappy front porch.
Steve huffs out a little laugh, still looking out at the rain. “Listening,” he says, and his voice sounds weird in his own ears, clearer than it used to. “I think.”
Eddie comes to stand beside him, close but not touching. “Yeah? To what?”
Steve frowns, searching for the right words. “It’s different,” he says slowly. “Like, I know it’s rained before, obviously. I’m not, like, new.” He waves a hand helplessly. “But I don’t remember it sounding like this.”
“Like what?” Eddie has turned toward him now. Steve can feel the weight of his attention, the way he’s really asking.
Steve licks his lips, listening harder. “It’s… okay, you hear that?” He points up at the roof. “That’s like a million tiny drums. All hitting at once. And the gutter over there is this low roar, almost like the van on the highway.”
He points further out, to where the rain’s hitting the sidewalk in a sheet. “And that part’s all fizzy. Like soda. Little crackle sounds when it hits the puddles.” He laughs, embarrassed, because he sounds ridiculous, but he can’t stop. “I didn’t know it sounded like that. Or maybe I did and I just…” He shrugs, cheeks flushing. “Couldn’t hear it anymore.”
Eddie’s quiet for a beat. When he speaks again, his voice is soft in a way that always gets Steve right under the ribs.
“You’re kinda blowing my mind, man.”
Steve finally looks over. Eddie’s eyes are shiny, his hair frizzing a little in the damp, that stupid metal chain he refuses to take off catching raindrops. He looks like he’s seeing something holy.
“What?” Steve says, self-conscious. “I’m just narrating the weather.”
“Yeah, well,” Eddie bumps his shoulder gently, “it’s a good narration.”
They stand there together, the rain filling up all the spaces between words. Steve breathes in wet asphalt and earth and the faint clean smell of the storm, and under it all, the quiet whirr of his aid, doing its little invisible job.
“It’s loud,” he admits after a while, voice barely above the patter. “Like… a lot. My head kind of feels like a fishbowl.”
“You wanna go back in?” Eddie asks. “We can watch it from the window or something. Less fishbowl-y.”
Steve thinks about it. His head does feel overfull, like there’s water sloshing right up to the brim, but underneath the overwhelm there’s this thin bright thread of wonder he doesn’t want to lose.
“Nah,” he says finally. “Not yet.”
He shifts his weight and leans just barely into Eddie’s side.
“I just didn’t know I was missing this,” he admits. “I keep finding out there’s stuff I forgot how to hear, and it’s like…” He scrunches his nose, hunting for it. “Like someone keeps turning the world back on.”
Eddie makes a soft sound in his throat. His hand brushes against Steve’s, fingers nudging until they fit together, palms damp and warm.
“Then we’ll let it stay on,” Eddie says. “We’ll just stand here, and you can give me the play by play every time the universe does a new trick.”
Steve laughs, quiet and a little shaky. “You’re gonna get so sick of my metaphors, man.”
“Never,” Eddie says, scandalized. “I live for your weird little soda rain poetry, are you kidding me?”
The rain keeps pouring, drumming its thousand tiny drums. Steve closes his eyes for a second, letting the sound wrap around him, through him, soaking in deeper than the mist on his skin.
It’s loud. It’s a lot. It’s beautiful.
He squeezes Eddie’s hand once, firm.
“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Let’s listen.”