Ryan Armsford (blindsides) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-01-29 23:03:00 |
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Current mood: | calm |
Commonalities
Who: Ryan and Bazzer
Where: not far from the tree
When: Week 1, Day 5, late afternoon
What: blind guys gotta stick together
Rated: PG
Ryan was being cautious about venturing too far from the tree where everyone had been sleeping according to what he'd been told. His main reason was because he was not yet familiar with the terrain and with how to get from one place to another and then back again. As someone who was close to being blind, it was important to have landmarks and to have everything the same one day as it was the next in order to find his way around. He'd wandered into the woods to use the bathroom a time or two, counting trees as he touched each one in passing, then turned around and retraced his steps. But he knew that he was not going to feel comfortable venturing any distance without having someone with him.
Anyone who knew him would have asked him why he was so quiet this afternoon, but of course nobody here did. He'd said hi to several people he couldn't see all that well because they hadn't been close enough, had actually dozed off propped against his folded-up sleeping bag and pillow for a short while, and now he was up and walking away from the fire toward the tree line in the fading light (and he didn't even want to think about full dark getting here, because his vision would be even worse then) just to have something to do.
Something moved just in front of him, and Ryan realized it was another person. "Hey," he said, stopping before he ran into them.
"Hey," Bazzer replied, he was still mostly undressed from working in the stream with Thorne, but he was going to dress now. He hadn't wanted to get redressed while wet. Pulling on his pants first, he tried to wipe his glasses with them, then gave up and pulled on his sweat shirt. "I'm Bazzer. You're new," it was a statement, not a question.
Ryan was close enough now to realize that the guy was putting on his clothes, and he opted not to ask how come he'd had them off. That was most likely TMI for a new acquaintance. "Yeah," he said. "There's nothing like waking up in a field first thing, right?" He figured Bazzer had gone through the same thing at some point, if his and Clay's experience was anything to go by. "I'm Ryan."
"Good to meet you," Bazzer replied out of habit, offering his hand. "Where are you from?" He was sort of distracted as he tried to get his glasses a little cleaner. What was the point of them if he could barely see through them?
It took Ryan a few seconds to realize that Bazzer had extended his hand to shake; he took a couple of steps closer, trying to strike that delicate balance between invading personal space and being able to see what the person to whom you were speaking was actually doing. He shook and then let his hand drop back to his side. "New Orleans," he said slowly, wondering if Bazzer would disbelieve him like Clay had at first. "How about you? And uh, is there anything that can be eaten around here?" It might've been an odd segue, but he was really getting hungry.
There was something slightly off about Ryan, but Bazzer wasn't sure what yet. "Kansas City," he wasn't from there, but he lived there so it was good enough. It was interesting where everyone was from, all over the place, but so far as he knew, only Rowan wasn't from the USA. Strange. "There's a little. We have beans once they've been soaked and cooked, berries or some tuber things. Not a lot."
The thing about Ryan was that, unless he was quite close to another person, he tended to look as if he was daydreaming; his eyes sometimes didn't seem to focus upon them. They looked normal, intensely blue and ringed with lashes that were lighter than average, due to his fair coloring, no doubt, and because he looked so normal, often people didn't realize that his vision was very poor unless he told them. "Not in Kansas anymore," he said with a smile, willing to find humor anywhere he could in these dire circumstances. "Well, I guess that beats nothing, right?" Lucky for him, he wasn't much of a meat-eater anyway. He wasn't vegetarian, vegan, whatever the current PC term was, but he just didn't eat a lot of it.
"Right now things are sort of difficult, no pots and pans and the like for cooking," plus, an open fire if they could build the fire in the first place. Success once did not mean success repeatedly. Cocking his head to one side, Bazzer tried to place where he'd seen that look before. It startled him when he did - in pictures of himself from when he'd been in the hospital. "Can I ask you something personal?" he asked, unsure exactly how to phrase it. The kid sort of looked like he did...but he sounded completely lucid, "Are you stoned?"
"If I had a knife, I bet I could make one out of some kinda wood," Ryan mused, though he knew most people wouldn't be keen on giving the (nearly) blind guy a knife. He knew he could do it, though; he used knives all the time in his artistic woodcutting projects, and he hadn't lost a finger yet. He was distracted from this thought when Bazzer wanted to know if he could ask him something personal. "Sure," he said, turning his face toward the other man's and squinting to try to make out his expression. When he asked if Ryan was stoned, Ryan couldn't help but break into laughter. "Aw, man, I wish," he told him. Time for personal confessions about what was wrong with him, something Ryan had done so often that it seemed perfectly normal. "No, I had cancer when I was a kid, some kind of retinal thing, and I don't see very well." He took one step closer to Bazzer and his features jumped into focus. "Like, when I'm standing here, I can see you pretty well, but if I step back, you're kind of a blur."
"Oh! That makes sense," Bazzer nodded, not at all upset by the violation of personal space, "You were reminding me of myself...Without glasses I can't see anything either. There're pictures of me as a teenager without them...I look like you," that is, eye out of focus and generally not with it. Then again, he'd been on enough medications and things back then that it really hadn't mattered if he could see or not, because of the visions in his brain. He hadn't liked those visions though. They hadn't let him have his glasses too often for fear he might try to hurt himself and no one was about to put contacts in his eyes or let him try to either. It had been a strange, strange time. Not a good one either. "Would my glasses help?" he asked. They could maybe share? "I have a very strong presciption."
As nice as it was for a near-stranger to want to be helpful by sharing his glasses, Ryan knew it wouldn't really work. "Thanks, but glasses don't help. My retinas are totally messed-up. Guess I'm lucky I can see at all." Ryan smiled ruefully. He'd learned a long time ago that moping around about his disability didn't accomplish anything. It didn't make him see any better, and it didn't make those around him like him any better, so there was no point. It was what it was, and most of the time he was okay with that. He shrugged a shoulder. "So that's why I won't know who you are if you, like, waved at me from across the clearing or something."
"Okay," Bazzer kept his glasses on instead of handing them over, "I just have shitty eyes. No cancer or retinal problems. Oh, well, I have astigmatism," oh, and he was crazy and saw things. Not really, or at least not technically, but he did still wonder. More and more he was beginning to believe this was real. His hallucinations had never been this consistent, this detailed or this long. "But I won't get offended. If you need any help...I don't know how to survive without my glasses so if they broke, I'd be shit out of luck. You'd need to teach me your tricks. But if you do need help...I'll try."
"Thanks," Ryan said, his tone brightening. The guy seemed a touch awkward but very sincere, and Ryan felt as if he'd meant his offer of help if it was needed. "Guess we blind guys gotta stick together, right?" He heaved out a sigh, relaxing a little. "I have to see if my tricks work around here. I hate not knowing what to expect, what's gonna happen next." He tended to be a fairly secure person, poor eyesight and all, but he had issues to consider that others did not, and that was making him more than a little tense.
"Exactly," Bazzer agreed, though he had never really considered himself blind before. It wasn't that he wasn't, it was just that he had always been able to get his glasses fixed or replaced or switch to contacts or something. He hadn't ever quite been in a situation like this, "I don't think anyone likes not knowing what's going to happen next and whatnot. Whether they can see or not...but we all make do," it seemed to Bazzer that it would worse not to see or know. "Right now...we're just sort of exploring and doing the best we can."
"Yeah, I know everyone's freaked out," Ryan said. Well, most everyone. A couple of the older guys he'd observed around their makeshift camp hadn't seemed to be all that perturbed, but possibly they just hid it well. "Nothing else we can do but get by," he added. He wasn't the sort to whine, particularly to someone he barely knew, so he mustered a reasonable amount of cheer to his tone. He was pleased that at least one person here had offered to help him if he needed it. Ryan prided himself on not needing all that much help to get along in life, but obviously this was an entirely different and unprecedented situation.
Bazzer nodded, "I'm freaked. But yeah, trying anyways. It's all anyone can ever do, right? Try? Anyways, what did you do before you came here?" Ryan looked younger than him, but that didn't always mean anything. People frequently thought that he was much younger than he was. "College?"
Ryan was used to people thinking he was about twenty or twenty-one. He figured it was the boyish features or the placid look that he wore a lot of the time, but still Bazzer thinking he was still in college made him grin. "Nah, I graduated from Tulane about three years ago. I'm an artist." He couldn't have said how old he thought Bazzer was, even though by now he was close enough to see him clearly. Older than him probably, but beyond that he wasn't sure. "What about you?"
Okay, so he was a little off, but not that much. "So about 24 then?" Bazzer mused. He'd still been in school then so his question wasn't exactly that far off, "I'm a librarian. I specialize in the preservation and archiving of old documents. Really old documents. I don't restore damaged things though, that's different." He had gotten used to explaining this to people because they always thought he worked in some elementary school or public library somewhere and he didn't. He worked in a laboratory that was a part of a library, but he wore lab coats and worked with machines, not people.
"Twenty-four, yeah," Ryan nodded. He tilted his head slightly to one side, gaze intent on Bazzer as he explained what he did. "Sounds like a pretty cool job. 'Least you're not checking out books and telling people to shush, right?" He'd always thought of librarians as old lady-with-glasses-on-a-chain types. Just went to show you that stereotyping was bad, he guessed. He wasn't really the typical artist, either, but it worked for him.