Newsies Oneshots 2.0

Irrevocably Human-Blush

When Blink was nine, he was in an accident, the kind people try to cover up so as not to start trouble for themselves. It was mudded and dirty, filthy and rotten to its core, and covered so effortlessly in white—pure, trustworthy. Blink knew what it was.

He listened as his mother explained to him that his father had a temper, a bad one he didn't have control over; he was a man, and men often expressed themselves with anger because they carry so much on their shoulders. Blink caught his father on a bad day, that's all. It wasn't his dad that stabbed him, watched as crimson blood fell down his face through his piercing screams—it was another man. A man who was not his father.

So there was no point in telling the doctors and nurses that he did it because he didn't. There was no point in telling the police that his father hurt him because they were men, so they know about the temperament. There was no point to any of it.

There was even less of a point in showing anyone his eye—he wouldn't want to scare his classmates, or anyone walking down the street. He didn't want to attract attention to the ugly cave where his eye should be, red and and pink and simply gone because people would find it disgusting, and he should not be a display of attraction. It was not God's way.

Blink argued that an eyepatch would only garner more attention, bring more eyes to stare at the boy who looked like a pirate, but his mother insisted: "Just until we can get the money for a prosthetic." They never found it.

It seemed that eye stuffed his insecurity, his impurities and differences that no one wanted to see. All of the other boys had two eyes, and all of them didn't have to dress as a pirate every Halloween. They all hugged their dads while Blink was hardly awarded a handshake. But his eyepatch covered that, distracted them from what was so obvious to him. He was given a blanket to cover his muddy life for a few hours, and no one had to leak under it.

But Blink craved love, needed it so badly his heart rumbled like an empty stomach. He needed the hugs and kisses and genuine compatibility of another person with him, someone to dream about amidst his nightmares, and someone to feel when he had his sense of touch taken away. He and his parents just didn't expect that person to be a man.

So Blink lived on his own for a while. Then he met Mush, and it was as if he'd came to existence for the sheer purpose of restoring Blink's faith in humanity. How could anyone with a smile brighter than the lights of New York City be anything less than an angel.

But if Blink remembered correctly from the grueling hours spent sitting through sermons longer than his life, angels were warriors; they were sent to earth not to protect, but to defend. If Blink is a freak to humanity, surely Mush would have to push him away and defend the beliefs that were so irrevocably human.

Yet there he lay with him, softly stroking his forehead with his index finger, smiling softly down at him like the sun's rays to flowers. Light cascaded him, surrounding every corner of his body with a glow so enticing Blink wasn't sure he was alive—he was in heaven, lying with an angel and waiting for it to corrupt him. "You're gorgeous."

Mush giggled quietly, and Blink felt his heart clench. "You are, too."

The blond boy smiled. "You really think so?"

"Mhm", Mush hummed. "Patch and all."

Blink knew what he meant; knew that Mush was so beautiful he could find the attraction in anything. The patch on his eye wasn't a marker of a boy who'd been mauled by someone meant to love him, a visible valise of his unsolved. To Mush, Blink was simply a boy with an eyepatch.

For a while, he was okay with that—there was a satisfaction is finally being seen by someone for who he was. He didn't have to think about his eye because it wasn't an existing issue between them—his eye was simply that: his eye. Mush still looked at him like he hung the moon. It was fine.