Not mine.
Notes: Strange story. Strange idea. The last sentence came to me randomly when I was reading a sci fi novel, and I decided to make something of it. Ah, well.
He had sat helplessly by his parents and then by his brother as they were consumed by the disease. He hadn't known what it was then, and he didn't know what it was now, but he knew that he carried it deep inside him. He could feel it pushing at his heart and scraping at his lungs. He could feel it pulsing through his blood. He knew that, in time, his voice would rasp and his body would tire. He knew that he would surrender himself when he could no longer stand the pain. He had seen it happen three times, after all.
Everyone had wounds, everyone had shadows in this life. No one escaped unscathed from society. He could see his friend's agony easily. Once, when he'd had a few too many beers and was feeling unusually poetic, he decided that he really did have two good eyes. His normal one, of course, he used for regular vision. But with the other eye, he could see inside of people.
He clung to that little analogy for quite a while. It was true, really. He used to secretly watch them all, with a kind of morbid curiosity to know the dark secrets that haunted them. Just as everyone had their own secrets, he realized, everyone had their own way of showing them. They tried to be cold, aloof, removed, hardened, but none of them could. No one ever could after being through what they'd been through. So he watched and learned as the young one with the red hair cried out in his sleep (no, no, please don't hurt me), as the thinnest one shied away from anyone's touch (I'm okay, really), how the look of horror invaded the eyes of that tall one who was his age (c'mon, can we go this way instead?), how the long-haired one sobbed with his arm over his mouth when he thought everyone was sleeping (don't leave me…I need you). He saw the scars that life had left on body and on mind, and he was not frightened.
Instead, he found that he loved to study those who would be left on the earth long after he would. In watching them, he soon realized that he was less like them than he thought. He reached deep into his mind and knew that there was no pain there. He knew that he did not bear the scars that others did. His manner was not just an act, as so many were. His was true.
His favorite study was far from one of his own. It was the one who was supposedly the strongest and hardest, but who seemed to him so vulnerable. It was his eyes, blue eyes that mirrored his own. Blue eyes that held in their depths all the agony, the sadness, the memory, and the anger that the world will ever know. Sometimes they seemed so out of place in his determined, shielded face. When he caught brief glances of the hopelessness in those eyes, he wanted to hold the shorter boy and kiss him until they were tranquil for once.
Even these thoughts did not hurt him. They startled him mildly, but didn't surprise him. He knew that he had learned how to distance himself, or how to disregard. Perhaps it was because he knew that his time was ever limited, knew that he had to enjoy what he had, because this was all. This was everything. And it was wonderful.
And so he lived for almost another year, day by day, nonexistent pain locked deep behind one laughing eye.