Voices | Sunset Curve
Pairings: Alive!Sunset Curve x Deaf!Reader (female); a bit of Rose x Deaf!Reader (female)
Summary: Y/n, a deaf-born teenage girl, encounters an up and coming rock band at her work. Although they start off the wrong foot, she is surprised when they show interest towards her mother tongue. She agrees to teach them a little of her language, if they agree to do something for her in return.
Words: 4,4k (including song lyrics)
Warnings: none; italics are sentences written down on paper & “italics with inverted comas” are dialogues that are signed by the characters. Bold and italics are lyrics from Send One Your Love by Stevie Wonder (it came out in 1979, so technically Sunset Curve has probably heard the song). Not proof-read.
Author’s notes: I’ve written this piece for @dream-a-little-bigger-x What 90′s Dreams Are Made Of week. I don’t know, however, if I’ll keep on writing about JaTP (for now) since I had troubles writing this one. I’ll let you know anyways.
I don’t know much about American Sign Language, so you know it and you notice something that is incorrect, please let me know. The rest, I believe from my own experience with my relatives and entourage, should be accurate. Then again, I based it on what I’ve seen and encountered in France, in the deaf community I was born into(ndlr. For those you might not know, both my parents were born hearing-impaired/deaf, and thus I grew up learning French sign language, as well as into their Deaf Community.)
I added links through my work that you can go to, if you want to see how the signs are made.
Location: The Orpheum, Los Angeles, 1995
Y/n was startled when the ground began to tremble under her feet as she was putting away the remaining chairs at the centre of the room, but she quickly composed herself and shook her head, lifting her eyes up to glance at the stage ahead of her.
On it were four teenage boys around her age, and they were all lashing out onto their instruments. Y/n remembered there was an up-and-coming rock band doing their debut on the Orpheum’s stage tonight, and she guessed they were here to rehearse.
The front teenage boy was leaning into the microphone as she watched, and their eyes locked for a millisecond before he scanned around the almost empty space in front of him.
Y/n watched him cautiously, a habit she had since she was a little girl. His lips were moving quickly as he sung, what she guessed to be the lyrics, and his fingers moved effortlessly onto the neck of his deep blue electric guitar.
Then, her eyes travelled to the teenage boy on the left, with a bright red bass hanging around his shoulders. He seemed just as experienced as the front boy, as his fingers moved quickly to pluck the strings of his instrument in rhythm, all the while jumping and bouncing around the stage.
Y/n couldn’t help the smile that grew on her lips, trying to make up the melody of the song in her mind just with the sight in front of her and the vibrations on the ground.
She kept her eyes on the band, lingering on the one at the back of the stage and dressed in a light pink shirt. He had a black baseball cap covering his sandy blond hair and sweat glistened on his forehead under the spotlights above the stage. He was leaning into the microphone to harmonize with his friends, and still kept the rhythm as he played on his drums.
The fourth boy was on the right, and what she knew to be a rhythm guitar was hanging around his shoulders. He wasn’t singing, however, but he had a wide grin on his features as he looked around the almost empty space, probably imagining the sea of people that would be there in the evening.
Y/n knew they had sold out their show, Rose had told her, and their boss was putting pressure on all his employers because of it.
