One Direction | Preferences

You're Deaf

You’re Deaf

A/N: These preferences can be really quite beautiful if you write them well (which I didn’t) but I hope it’s okay anyway.

Niall: Niall learns sign language. Just for you, and only for you, and it both breaks your heart and sticks it back together. He’s so proud of himself, beaming as he spells out the first ‘hi’, and he improves until he no longer needs the clumsy letter signing, able to hold a conversation with you at normal speed, until it just becomes second nature for him, using it with other people by mistake. And so it goes on until it’s the middle of the night and he raises his hand, making one new sign for the first time, his pinkie, forefinger and thumb pointing up, his middle fingers curled down, ‘I love you.’

Harry: And so Harry tends to draw on you, whether it’s in pen or sharpie or his just fingers tracing things out, so you have little reminders as you go about your day, the words ‘I love you’ on the inside of your wrist, ‘you’re beautiful’ across one side of your ribcage, ‘you’re my favourite person in the whole world’ on your foot. And maybe it should be a burden, permanent marker embedded in your skin, but to you it makes you feel lighter, Harry’s scrawled writing lifting you up instead of dragging you down. 

Liam: You and Liam have a book. It’s normal enough, one you could find in Officeworks if you took the time, but it has a much greater meaning than that, the pages full of writing and notes and messages, sometimes whole conversations, sometimes just little reminders. There’s a mix of everything and it’s your favourite thing to flick through, it’s basically your whole relationship on paper, there forever, from the first ‘I love you’ written in Liam’s steady handwriting, to damaged pages and harsh words scrawled in an argument, and on the last page, written in big letters ‘will you marry me?’, the excited ‘yes!’ beneath it.

Louis: You like to feel him speak against your fingers. Even if you can’t hear the words, you can feel his mouth forming them against your hyper sensitive fingertips, his lips brushing them as he tells you about his day. You manage to follow along, lip reading like you’ve been taught to, but there are certain times when you need him to write it out for you. And he always jumps straight to it, riffling through his things to find the notebook he keeps for all his notes to you. But your preferred way of conversation will always be touch, feeling his breath on your palm as he slowly pronounces the words, smiling at you the whole time. 

Zayn: Zayn gets frustrated sometimes when you or someone else has done something to annoy him and you just stare up at him blankly, even apologetically, waiting for him to either write it down or sign it. He huffs and sighs and waves his hands around before grabbing for a piece of paper, beginning the agonisingly slow process of writing out everything he wants to say. For his birthday though, you present him with a small whiteboard, complete with a duster and marker, kissing his mouth while he lies in bed and handing it to him, letting him write his first words on your new form of talking, ‘I don’t know how to live without you.