Hush

TWO

As it turned out, Ruby's rescue party wasn't the usual emergency services rescue that most explosions warranted. Ruby's rescuers were a government organisation called SHIELD and the man with the eyepatch was the director of said organisation mysteriously named Fury.

It had taken a while for her to accumulate such information for when she had woken up in an infirmary, she had attributed the room feeling as though it had been floating to her headache. The ringing in her ears hadn't ceased but now she could hear minutely better through her right ear, the one she had been able to cover in the onslaught before Spiderman had offered her help. She remembered his face vividly but found enough incentive to keep his identity secret.

The doctors had spoken to her to start with, one forgetting she had gauze taped over her left ear and the second inspecting them and testing her before realising she truly couldn't hear them well enough.

She had read her chart; multiple broken ribs, a ruptured lung, burst left eardrum and a torn ovary. And, scrubbled underneath in pen was impaired hearing.

For a while she was bedridden in the infirmary on a flying ship referred to, by the people she asked, as a helicarrier. It made sense as to how she always felt slightly aloof when she was shipped around in a wheelchair for the first time.

"Turbulence," the doctor told her loudly near her right ear when the helicarrier shuddered on one walk about the infirmary floor, "it rarely affects us." Most of the time, when it was quieter around them, she could just make out the voices of those who spoke loudly near her right ear. To begin with, the sensation was horrible. She hated the tickle of their breath on her neck and the air hitting her sensitive ears but it was worth it to hear the words and not just their vibrations.

The night before this particular stroll she had requested a music player and headphones. She figured that she could still listen to her favourite songs if they were loud enough. And, maybe, if she switched to electric guitar from acoustic she could learn to create her own music again. She could hear in her right ear the words of the music but it was not the same, there wasn't a spark in her brain she once felt at the bass rattling her mind in the best way. This time, as the music blasted at full volume, it was nearly silent in her right ear and the way the bass rattled her brain took her back to lying in the rubble and white noise coming through the speakers. Her scream forced the infirmary into an evacuation and lockdown. The few patients on the level were removed in two minutes, quick enough to preserve their hearing while muffled agents and doctors returned to calm Ruby.

The windows of the helicarrier rattled under her scream and it seemed to be much stronger than the last time. Her disposition changed after the headphones were tossed across the room, she began to cry and doubled over clutching her abdomen.

Her injuries didn't hurt as much as they had due to the morphine filtering through her body but the ghost of the pain she had felt when the first rescue team had dropped the concrete back on her spread across her abdomen. She hugged herself, her body screaming at the movement as she sobbed, brought to silence by the pain.

The doctors were forced to sedate her and the next day she found herself in the hallways experiencing turbulence.

She was turned down a hallway where they usually turned around but, this time they continued on. Narrowing her eyes, she glanced up at the doctor, conscious that they weren't wearing mufflers and her voice was a pain to anyone that heard her. To begin with, she thought they hated the sound of her voice... that she was so unbearable and they were simply being kind out of pity. That perhaps they knew she knew Spiderman's identity and they were keeping her to keep her silence. She soon discovered that the reason was because, by some cursed turn of fate, her hearing had been stolen and her voice had been heightened to such a decibel that it was nearly unbearable to the human ear. It was her own voice that had deafened her own ears.