Tuesday mornings at the mortuary were never Harry's favorite. They were, more often than not, overcast, and while Harry liked to ponder the coincidence of the entire situation, it didn't change the fact that the world beyond the walls of the mortuary mirrored the infinite bleakness of the one therein contained. He learned to appreciate the breeze and the wet thickness of the air outdoors, but he never quite got used to the feeling of anticipation, thinking, hoping it was going to rain, although it seldom ever did.

It wasn't even the mortuary itself that depressed Harry. Growing up surrounded by sterile white walls and the corrosive scent of embalming fluid desensitized him as a child to the concept of death. He discovered that death was just a thing that happened to people, for whatever reason, and, well, it just happened. While friends lost grandparents and wept for days, Harry remained unfazed through the deaths of all four of his own. Even the death of his own mother at age 10 only warranted a temporary period of mourning.

Perhaps Harry was broken. Perhaps he didn't feel things the way they needed to be felt. But Harry would disagree. He thought very insightfully, quiet, like he always had been, observing, pondering, questioning the stabilities and take-for-granteds of life. As an adolescent, people had always insisted that his lack of speaking was a serious byproduct of the pain in his life, but his father understood. Harry wasn't silent out of fear; he was silent out of indifference. Simple, straight-forward indifference.

The indifference was shaken when a truck on a back country road outside of London overcompensated for swerving off of the road a bit by speeding into the next lane, hitting Harry and his father head-on. Harry always refused to recall the details that followed, even to himself, out of fear of experiencing again what lays beyond the walls of indifference that he'd spent a lifetime crafting for himself. The walls were cracked and chipping, the reality of his situation pounding relentlessly upon them, like a battering ram, and Harry was trying so hard to patch the crevices and make the intrusion stop.

The only time Harry could recall himself ever crying was when they told him his father, the only person he had left in the world, had passed away. It started out as a lump bobbing at the top of his throat, threatening escape until Harry couldn't swallow it down anymore. It spread to his eyes, causing them to sting with tears and blurr his vision until they spilled out from his eyelids and slid down his cheeks, streaking his porcelin skin. Then it shot down his spine like he'd been harpooned by his own mind and soon he was shaking, limbs and body wrecked with sobs, his voice cracking and hitching upon every broken noise that escaped his throat. He was sure every sound he'd made was primal and ugly, but he was not aware of it in the slightest.

Harry had never imagined how silent the world could be until the crashing of metal folding upon metal, glass shattering, screams and cries of pain all at once bombarded his eardrums, and then, all at once, it had stopped. His head felt split completely in half by the noise. Pain beyond any measure had overcome him until he fell into a slumber and the paramedics arrived to cut him out of the car. But the silence had not stopped there. When Harry awoke with tubes in his arms, force-feeding him morphine and fluids, he expected to hear the rhythmic beep of an EKG monitor at his side, or perhaps the buzz of the hospital beyond his door, but he heard nothing. Pure nothingness. Not even the ringing in your ears you get late at night when you lay awake in a sleeping house with nothing but that incessant ringing.

From that day forward, Harry Styles was deaf. They had given him every type of hearing aid possible, but nothing had recalled even so much as the ringing.

Notes

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