Closed: Eye eye baby baby eye eye

[evantuality]

CHARACTERS: Evan, Laedo, and Sieglinde
DATE: A day after Laedo's return to Oska
WARNINGS: Possible discussion of disfigurement
SUMMARY: Evan's been promised a replacement eye and he's gonna collect


The most upsetting part was that Evan was growing used to his situation. The patch went on every morning and stayed on till he had to bathe or sleep again, and he no longer really felt it. The mess of scar tissue that ruined one side of the eyelid underneath was well healed over, and although it was still pink it was no longer tender. There were times, solid hours at a time when his missing eye wasn't a consistent backbuzz in his mental processes. More than anything else, that was disturbing.

Generally Evan was the sort to politely step back and wait rather than impose upon a person, particularly for a favour as serious as the one he was leveraging from Laedo, but the dragon wasn't back a day before Evan had pinged him about it.

They'd set the time for the next day. Of course, that had lit the young man up in a tizzy of nerves, which he had spent the day trying his best to ignore with limited success. When the appointed hour came, Evan was waiting in his room, the spot that Laedo and he had agreed upon as a place with some privacy where Evan felt safe. He had slept badly, but just then he barely felt it, abuzz as he was with nerves. He'd tidied his room, laid away some provisions that would keep until tomorrow, and brought in a small pile of books from the library, expecting to have to den up for a couple of days.

There was one last thing to do, and Evan was feeling a little like he was regretting the offer he'd made to have Sieglinde come along and watch. What if it hurt? What if he embarrassed himself in some form? He'd have to hold it together particularly, for even if his twelve-year-old audience was particularly mature for her age, she was still twelve.

Still, he'd made the offer and he'd make good on it. He pulled up the network from his wrist bauble, keyed in Sieglinde's username.

"Hey," he started off, a little quick with nerves. "If you still have an interest in observing how Laedo's healing magic works, um, he's due to show up at my room in about ten minutes. I'm on the top floor, three doors in from the back staircase."

Comments

[evantuality]

Evan actually lets slip a whimper as the procedure carries on, unable to quite hold in all of his distress, and he does not for several moments realize Laedo is done. It still feels strange, wrong, bizarre to have something in that socket again, almost as wrong as it had felt at first for the socket to be empty, and so the end of the procedure isn't quite the sense of relief that he had hoped it would be. Had he ever noticed before that he could feel his eyeball all the way back into his skull? Had he ever been able to before?!

He gasps when Laedo asks the question, because it's only then that he does realize that he's seeing -- he's seeing something from the missing eye, some warmth of light through his closed eyelit. His optic world had been flashes of light and the static of intense distress to the point that when the vision in his new eye had begun to blink in and out he had taken it as a doubling of vision more than new input: his brain, unaccustomed to the doubled vision, had been tricked. But now he carefully, oh so carefully blinks.

And then he hisses as the light from the room, even so dimmed as it is compared to daylight, stabs into his skull like an ice pick. Still, with that stab had been vision, had been a watery and blurry impression of the room around him.

"Oh, god," he says, voice high with stress and with excitement. "That -- I mean, I could see!" Not, strictly, useful information. He gasps, bringing his hands to his face, touching his cheek and around his eye socket, not quite able to bring himself to touch the newly filled eyelid again. "Oh, god, it hurt, was it supposed to hurt? Is that bad?"

[asscan]

"It was never going to be comfortable, if that is what you're questioning," Laedo replies, loosening up for a moment or two in his amusement at Evan's spouting. He glances from the man to Sieglinde for a moment, then back to his patient. "I need to make some adjustments. Can you see out of it still? Is it dark, or bright? How are colours coming through?"

[grunehexe]

If you had asked Sieglinde if she'd ever anticipated being able to witness something as interesting as this, she wouldn't have said yes.

She probably should have been better at comforting Evan, and she did manage a good pat or shushing hum of comfort, but... it would be wrong to say she wasn't primarily focused on what Laedo was doing.

Reconnecting nerves... if she could do that, then theoretically she could possibly repair the dead nerves in her bound feet, if she ever chose to-

Sieglinde forced herself to stop right there. To instead hold up her hand in front of Evan's face and begin helpfully holding up fingers to provide a sample of something to see.

"And your perception of motion?"

[evantuality]

"It's -- ahh." Having the both of them there, hovering over him, was deeply off-putting and Evan took one glance and then closed his eyes again. Only, however, long enough to shake his head like a dog ejecting water, and rub at the aching muscles at his temples and forehead. "It's really, really light-sensitive."

Admitting that lets him gather himself enough to try again: he opens his good eye, and then very slowly cracks the bad one. He hisses again at the light, but presses on. The pupil's dilated, only slowly constricting, and the eye begins to water for the brightness. "Ahh, um, I can see motion fine. And... and colour, though it seems blown-out, I guess."

Putting that together felt like a valiant effort to the shaky redhead.

[asscan]

"Hm," was his only response, at least from the askan. Laedo placed one hand at the back of Evan's head again, then, other hand coming up over the human's new eye, he spread his fingers out to place delicate fingertips at brow and temple, thumb over the center of his forehead. He gave another little sweep of a gesture, barely enough to bring his fingers over the eye properly, then a twist, as though cracking a safe. All that, and Evan might feel something twisting faintly, dimming the vibrant fizz charging between eye and brain. If he needs it again, Laedo will make another minor adjustment, but ultimately he says, "it will take a few days to adjust. Try what you've been given for forty-eight hours, and unless you are given to splitting headaches or a sudden loss of vision, we will convene again."

He then looks over to Sieglinde, finally finding it in him to grin, if tiredly. "I apologize if I wasn't outlining that as I worked. It has been a while since I last performed such a complicated operation. Do you want to adjourn to the library for more paper? I can talk out what I did, in time."

[grunehexe]

What did a new eye feel like? It wasn't something Sieglinde could easily imagine, having never lost a limb. She had always tried her hardest not to think of what it would be like to regain such things, because it tended to just remind one of what was lost.

But it must be a strange one. Curious, Sieglinde kept watching Evan's reactions closely until Laedo addressed her directly.

"If Evan will be alright alone than I would appreciate the chance, yes-"

After all, her rather detailed note-taking was at the moment cut off midway, and they hadn't even gotten to the good part yet. Notes were something of a formality for her, considering her capacity for memory, but it helped cement them better when she put them down in her own hand.

"Evan, are you in need of anything? I've pills for dizziness if you need."

[evantuality]

"I'll be alright," he quickly answers.

In all honesty, having the two out of his room sounds like an incredible relief just then. Turning off all the lights and hiding under his covers is about the only thing that Evan legitimately wants to do just then, but not even he's enough of a wuss that he'd admit to as much while they were there.

He shakes his head, and then regrets it as his eye aches so strangely. "No, go ahead, I'm just, just going to take it easy for a bit."

everyone down for an endcap here?

[asscan]

"In that case, rest now, and contact me over the jewel network if you feel anything suddenly change," Laedo reiterated. He brought Seiglinde's crutch near, but, thinking better of it, offered her an arm as well. "Let us retreat to the library... or perhaps the kitchen. I'm half-starved from all of that..." But, making no lies about allowing the human to rest, he was already ushering Sieglinde from the room, hopefully to give Evan the respite that he needed to adapt and endure.