20/21 Vision

 📅 Early July, 2021

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀɴᴏʀᴇxɪᴀ, ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴀɴᴅ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ】

Anarchy and Chey’s wedding had been beautiful. Perfect for them, really, just gorgeous—even if Kato had found some parts of it a bit of a blur.
…Literally.

At first Kato thought it was his hair’s fault. It had gotten long over the course of quarantine: He hadn’t been going out or playing shows and at the beginning of it all he’d gotten steamrollered by the return of his own history, anyway, and in all that mess he’d stopped cutting it. So his hair was long again, able to be tied back for the first time in five years, but strands of it still got loose and fell into his eyes...and so had his bangs before, but god damn, he wanted his hair to be the reason buildings down the block or exit signs at the backs of stores were sometimes seeming blurry. When rationality overtook that idea, he decided it was stress, instead. He had memories back, he was pent up as fuck from not hurting himself with strange men, the past year had been a fucking circus anyway—maybe stress was affecting his vision. 
But he’d been stressed his whole life.
He’d been stressed to hell in 2017, in October, sitting on the ground with a gun in his hand.
And the sunset had still been sharp as a photograph to his eyes then, the crisp line of the horizon cleanly bisecting the sinking sun like a mirror shard. It had only blurred into a watercolour of golds and reds when the tears had reached his eyes.

But he wasn’t crying at a constant, and his cigarette smoke wasn’t always in his eyes, and he kept his hair tied back, and still...the view of the city off the balcony was seeming out of focus. He tried to convince himself it always had been; that he was worrying himself over nothing, that human eyes didn’t have telescopic vision anyway, and so probably Anarchy and Chey couldn’t read the billboard on that building past the motel a street over, either.
Except they both could.

“Can you not?” Anarchy asked, blinking curiously at Kato, who failed to answer. He squinted at the yellow sign. He knew it had letters on it, they were just...blurry. Too blurry to read.
“When’s the last time you got your eyes checked? Maybe you need glasses,” Chey offered.
“Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe it’s just a brain tumor. Or malnutrition,” Kato replied. He hunched his shoulders; his friends frowned.
“...It might be that last one, K, yeah. You could afford to eat more,” Anarchy said too gently, making Kato want to flinch. Worrying ‘Key didn’t quite scratch an itch for him anymore, and Kato avoided eye-contact, regretting the comment while Anarchy continued;
“...It wouldn’t hurt to get a check-up anyway, though.”

Kato knew Anarchy and Chey wanted him to go to his GP, that the aim of their encouragement was less about his vision and more about the rest of him. But his last televisit with his doctor for a refill on his Adderall had already produced a comment or two about his weight. Even though it had mostly been encouragement to eat more and follow up if that didn't seem to be working—because he was man, so hyperthyroidism apparently seemed more likely than him choosing not to eat or purging what he did—Kato didn’t want to risk it as a topic again, whether he was armoured by societal blindness or not.

So he went straight to an optometrist instead, hoping against hope that somehow, anyhow, whatever the fuck was happening to him was temporary. Maybe he’d scratched something and it just needed to heal. Maybe it was the cocaine, and whenever he quit, it’d go away. He tried to just not use for a while before the appointment and see if his vision would clear up, but it—like the rest of the attempts he’d started intermittently making to quit—ended up an experience of abject misery, with crushing depression and vivid, traumatic nightmares leaving him suicidal enough to shoot himself then and there in his room, but with him too exhausted to summon the strength to get up and do so. When he finally did manage to haul himself out of bed for the first time in several days for something other than a piss, he did a line instead of eating lead and felt that his friends ought to be proud of him.
The view out the window had been blurred the whole time, anyway.

He left the optometrist appointment without a lecture on his weight but with a glasses prescription and the information that he was, indeed, nearsighted. It wasn’t temporary, it wouldn’t pass. He could still drive safely enough without glasses for the moment, but really, he ought to get a pair.
“Hey K-O, how’d it go?” Chey greeted from the kitchen when he returned home. Kato lay face-down on the sectional instead of answering, throwing the script onto the coffee table and not knowing if he wanted to tear it to pieces or be able to see again.
He felt so awful, these days. Headaches all the time, and tired as fuck unless he was “up.” Maybe eye strain was part of it. But god. Glasses…
He groaned like a gut-shot game animal; a low, hunted, pathetic sort of noise that drew his flatmate over to him. He heard the crinkle of the paper being picked up and read.
“...I guess it really isn’t 2020 anymore, huh?” Chey joked gently. He rubbed Kato’s back. “What’s up?”
“I don’t fuckin’ want glasses,” Kato mumbled into the couch.
“You’ll look good in them, I think,” Chey said, sitting down. “They might suit you, honestly. All those books you’ve got on Ancient Rome...the scholarly vibe is there already. The Van Gogh throat tattoo, too, very dark academia.”
“Ugh.”
Chey let out a kind, soft laugh. “C’mon, Gunner. What’s the matter with glasses?”

“...Both my parents wore glasses,” Kato said. His voice seemed suddenly too soft, too small. He wondered which of his parents he actually did look more like. People had said his mom when he was younger; his dad as he got older. He tried to picture his father’s face. He’d last seen him nearly ten years ago, looking stern in the bedroom doorway, telling him to pay attention to the time... 
“...Lots of people wear glasses, K-O. Both Seth and ‘Tae have them, too.”
“...I know,” Kato said, burying his face deeper in the couch cushions. “But I won’t be risking seeing them by looking in a mirror.”
“I’ll come with you to pick out frames, if you’d like,” Chey offered, along with another rub of Kato’s shoulder; “We can find ones that feel like yours. Yeah?”
Kato imagined the sort of frames that Chey might find appealing and nearly chuckled. “...Pft, yeah...Alright. Sure. Give me a couple days to wallow first, though.”
“...I can be with you for those, too, Kato.” His voice, like Anarchy’s, came out too gentle for the moment. Kato frowned against the leather cushion he’d buried his face in.
“Thanks. I’ll be fine though. I’m good.”

Chey stayed quiet too long; finally he just let out a little sigh and rubbed Kato’s back again.
“What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?” he asked, his voice still softer than it ought to be.
“I don’t want cake.”
“Please, K-O.” Chey’s voice pitched upward; it should have been towards laughter and an “Of course you do!” Instead, he sounded almost tearful. His fingertips stayed on the ridge of Kato’s spine.
“F...Fine! Uh, I don’t know. Cheesecake. It was good enough for the Romans.”
“...The Romans ate cheesecake?” Chey asked, audible intrigue making itself heard past the concern in his voice.
“Yeah. Ancient Greeks, too.” Kato rolled over and shrugged at Chey, trying to further reassure him. “Romans co-opted cheesecake along with the pantheon. The recipes in De Agri Cultura identified them as being for religious uses, actually.” 
“Hm. Good to know...”
“The writer of the oldest Greek cheesecake recipe was named Athenaeus. Fun fact. Maybe. I told ‘Thena that in high school and I don’t think she gave two shits.”
Chey finally let out some sound of amusement; a breath too kind to be a snicker. He smiled. “You know, I think you’re only proving me right about glasses suiting you.”
Kato rolled back over. “Ugh. Whatever. Here’s hoping.”