| Once upon a time, probably in Seattle, a baby was born. And really, that's all Adam knows. He doesn't know what day it was, of what month. He doesn't know who was there, whether there was a lot of fanfare, if he was passed around to cousins and grandparents over the following hours and days. Was his father there? Did they decide to find out his gender beforehand or was it a surprise? What were their names?
What happened that made them decide to give him up? For all intents and purposes - and indeed according to his birth certificate - Adam Shapiro was born on October 8th, 1991. But the only life he's ever known began on June 2nd 1992, the day his adoption was finalized. It's not the only reason he doesn't celebrate his birthday, but it's one of them. Maria and Isaac Shapiro were good parents. Never anything but. Their biological son Jonah was born deaf, and since neither of them shared his disability they adopted a deaf infant to be his little brother so that he didn't grow up isolated in a world of hearing people. They never told him that, but that was what Adam always understood, ever since he was old enough to know what 'adopted' meant. He didn't hold it against them. Still doesn't. It makes sense, and he knows he's more grateful to them than either of them will ever know, for the love they've always shown him and for just being there at all - he wasn't in the system long enough to remember it, but adoptees have a way of banding together, and he's been told a few horror stories. It still stings when your mother lovingly recounts the story of having deliberately chosen you to be part of the family, and refuses to talk about the part where your first one deliberately decided not to have you as part of theirs. Aside from that, Adam's upbringing was essentially uneventful. The Shapiro family moved to New Orleans with Isaac's job not long after the adoption. He and Jonah went to a school for the hearing impaired until joining a mainstream high school with the aid of interpreters. Adam had friends, hobbies, a life. He was a conscientious student with a talent for seeing through bias and embellishment into the truth of a matter. At first he thought he wanted to be a journalist, to cut through that veneer and bring reality back to the world. But over time he realized how much of modern journalism basically amounted to marketing - and besides, it seemed like such a shallow thing, like treating the symptoms of something instead of the underlying condition. It wasn't that people were any more stupid or delusional now than they'd ever been. It was that all the history people were taught was tainted with anything from unconscious bias to outright lies. That was what pulled him into history as an area of study. What brought him to focus on medieval military technology was - well, have you ever seen how cool a trebuchet is? As it happened, it was incredibly lucky for Adam that he'd always thrown himself so enthusiastically into his studies. Without the high grades he consistently achieved, he'd never have gotten the scholarship that ensured he was able to attend the prestigious (and prodigiously expensive) Tulane University. And without that, he would never have met - and later become TA for - Dr Roger Hayes. Until he met Roger, only Adam's immediate family knew anything about what he could do. How he could hear people without hearing them, able to discern meaning without the distraction of the words that cloaked it. How he spoke without talking, not even his hands, a sort of foreign presence in the other person's mind that was usually subtle but had the capability to become overpoweringly loud for short periods of time. There was no doubt in Adam's mind that people had experienced it before, but they always shrugged it off as their imagination, something impossible. Roger, however, knew it for what it was. Confronted him about it and explained about himself, his friends, his community. Basically invited him in. It helps that the rent is already lower than the shitty apartment he's been living out of for the past couple of semesters. And who knows, maybe having a roommate won't be so bad. |
| If Adam wasn't already vaguely interesting to most people purely on the merit of being deaf, he might have the problem of initially coming off almost... boring. He's a very chill kind of guy who likes to get along with things and prefers that everyone else do the same. He'll explain in great detail, in very fast ASL about jousting and how the design of armor changed to reflect the change in weapons used against it between the 6th and 13th centuries, but he's not the kind of guy to steer the conversation his own way - you have to kind of trip over it first, or else be deliberately looking for those hot buttons that make his eyes bright and his hands blur. Adam tends to be the guy who does things for others without being asked and without ever bringing it up for later recognition; if you ever think man, it's cool someone did that, I wonder who it was about something small and convenient, it was probably him. He can be avoidant when drama crops up, preferring to withdraw and keep to his own business, which can make it look like he's hedging his bets and trying to 'play both sides' when the fact is he's not going near either of them. He's the kind of guy who only really smiles when he's got something to smile about, but at the same time isn't picky about what that something is. This apparent contradiction in terms is equal parts stubborn and yielding, sensitive and unruffled, animated and steady. |
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