Everyone has their own workload. As a student, you take your first year to get your bearings. How could you know you're able to work in your free time if you don't know how much that is? Well, Team CFVY is second-year now.
Coco works on campus in the off time I'm surprised she even has, and Yatsu does shifts in the kitchen when he can. Fox's lack of eyesight means he can't work computers; he's lucky his sixth sense lets him become a Huntsman. I recently started freelance camerawork for the Vale News Network. Thanks to me, they air video packages detailing the recent advancements at Beacon Academy. If I don't send them, they don't air them. If they don't air them, there must not be any Beacon news even if a new building just opened.
I love my camera. I can't fight with it too much, but sometimes I get the weirdest weapons from my time with the VNN. I've killed beowolves with lampposts before. They were from a great piece about repairing the courtyard after an impromptu fight between a drunkard and a woman from Atlas.
It's crazy how similar cameras are to eyes. They were made before we had any idea how eyes work. Now, we know. The eye defines, adjusts, focuses, and simplifies the world into shapes and movement many times a second. It is the window allowing us to know where we live.
I have eyelids, and my camera has shutters. I have an iris and pupil— it has exposure settings. We both have lenses. I have rods and cones, and I cannot begin to comprehend how my camera stores colors and movement. I'm in awe of the unknown.
There are a great many convoluted steps to understand how an eye could come to be. Light passes through the cornea, the outer window. We can keep whatever light bounced off the world around us. It passes through the iris and pupil. We can now adjust to lights switching. It passes through the lens. We can now focus on the greased film on the glass or on the glowing city passing behind it. It passes through the retina. Thanks to its rods, we can now spot a peripheral threat rustling grass at night. Thanks to its cones, we can now appreciate expansive vistas, flaunting water near and far, wave crests catching light mixed with those that do not. It passes through the optic nerve and to the brain. We can see.
The eye makes an art out of science. When the world turns black, the black of our eyes rises in greeting. The woven iris filaments lead from the white sclera to the black pupil and may show every color in between. They are the tangled arms of anemones in seas of blackness. Colors we wear "bring out our eyes"— or, more appropriately, our irises. It's so poetic, yet not everyone beats the odds. With any number of unlucky mutations, a baby is born blind. His name is Fox Alistair.
He— he can still find his place in the world. I know that, but I have to convince myself of it. I know he can, but a part of me— some part of the back of my mind always wins that in some way he must have it worse. I watch him. I watch him because I'm not typically allowed to fight, and it seems he is never more aware than when on the battlefield. I've seen him elbow his way out of a pack countless times.
Even then, I tell myself he can't see. He has this sixth sense about him, which I'm sure his hearing contributes to, but he has no pupils. He has no irises. His eyes are just white. I've never told him what I think, but I feel he knows. He sometimes walks over to me after fighting and taps my shoulder, still walking to wherever he can rest.
He has no eyes, though. I do, and I have my camera too. It can see. It's seen a lot. I've taken amazing landscape photography of the mountains east of Vale. I feel like if I gave it to him, he could work it, but he wouldn't get the peaks in the frame.
It helps me mentally to assume he can't see. I use it to my advantage on the late nights in Beacon's co-ed dorms when Yatsuhashi has long fallen asleep and Coco hasn't returned yet and I still need to change into pajamas. I tell myself that even though Fox is up and about, it is okay for temporary undress if he can't actually see me. It's much more convenient to think this than to have to go to the attached bathroom to do it.
I get stressed over these little things when I know in that instance he cannot physically see me. It troubles me still to wonder if his sixth sense can map angles and contours or merely how far away an object is. I never cared to ask him. Whichever one it is, he's mastered it well enough anyway. If either is good enough, I suppose he could get a pretty good idea of my shape, and we've known each other long enough that he's gotten the full picture by time alone, so this is moot. I drone, and I ramble about this small thing, but I just feel certain about it.
Coco and I are from Vale. Fox and Yatsuhashi are from Mistral. No mission has taken me out of the kingdom, so I have them, the CCT system, and my imagination to learn what Mistral looks like. When I get there, maybe I'll send a video package back to the VNN.
When there is a story, a moment, to be captured in a photo or video, my eye tells my camera where and how to look. When I send the finished product to the news station, I am telling my audience where and how to look. If I cannot capture a moment, it does not exist to my audience. That means if I have not been to Mistral, my audience does not see it. In my own limited experience, have I truly seen it?
I have asked Fox, and he said he sees what I cannot.
"You feel," I said. "It's not sight."
"Everything is sight," he said. He got an idea. "So, you haven't been to Mistral?"
"No, but I've always wanted to see it. Can you feel Mistral?"
"I'm there right now," he said. He smiled and moved his cheek muscles, continuing, "A sakura petal just hit my left cheek. It's staying there." This all seemed like a game, but I played along and thought his smile should have forced the cherry blossom off. He turned his head and said, "The mountains around me stand like turrets, watchtowers flanking a castle. Buildings clutch their sides like a really bad mason left stones sticking out. This is the northern valley. Do you know the place?"
I said yes.
"Then follow me. Close your eyes." I did. "Welcome to the imagination. This is where I live. When it rains, the water finds ways to rush in rivers down the mountainside. It's carved little gutters visible everywhere, even in dry spells, traveling all the way to Lake Matsu. It's always windy here. The mountain ranges define the jetstream and lower paths too. Just about this time of year, the sakura trees in Haven Academy are starting to shed, leaving the petals travelling free in the wind everywhere— all around you." Part of me wanted to hold my arms away from my sides. It succeeded. It succeeded, so I was losing at this game.
He stepped it up; he stood behind me and laid a finger on each of my temples, helping me balance. I refocused. He painted a new picture, saying, "You walk across the street to Matsu Station, and you have taken the train. It travels through a mountain tunnel, and things are temporarily dark. Your eyes must acclimate. Soon enough, you reach the light at the end of the tunnel. You wish to see the city you departed from. Your eyes are still focused near— to the greased film on the glass— and you refocus to see the glowing city passing by. Your back was to the untamed lands. You turn around. Just then, you've spotted a rustling in the grass in your peripheral, but it was in the shade, and the train has forced you to move on. Was it a Grimm? It's too far away for you to care. Your eyes move to see farther out. You can now appreciate the expansive vista of Lake Matsu, an endless lake flaunting many floating islands. Wave crests catch the setting light and mix with those that do not. You've passed through Mistral and to the countryside. Can you see?"
"Yes," I said.
"I do not need eyes to see, bunny." In all the imagining, I did not notice he had removed his fingers and moved to my front. He would have known if we were swapped, though. "And I never told you to envision me. Plus, you are in a train car— there is no wind to blow your hands like that."
I opened my eyes with a roll. The game he was playing— he beat me. "I'd like to believe so," I said.
"What a dreamer. Not bad for your first time, y'know. Mistral came to you. I'm actually a little flattered. You've got a big imagination but a long way to go."
"I guess I don't have to use it as much as you."
"Enjoy what you have. It's way better. Trust me. Anytime I'm somewhere new, I'm lost. I rely on memory, sound too. Not only do you have eyes, but your camera— it remembers everything for you. You could really pack the whole world into it."
"I get to see a lot, but I haven't left Vale."
"When you do, who knows."
"Thanks, Fox. You're right. I just want to see things."
"You seem to like feeling too."
Fox was right. I'm in awe of the unknown. It's a big world, and I could see it, but if I leave nothing up to the imagination, what is left? I want to see it because I haven't yet.
Even now, there is no doubt left in me that he really can see. It's simple. Fox knows everything going on around him. I think back to the fights. As he walks to get a respite, his hand on my shoulder is not just to get his bearings or prop himself up. He knows me. He caught the tilt in my head as I pondered what his sight is. He felt it. My imagination leads me to wonder, but it also traps me, so whenever I ask myself if he saw, I'm just going to answer "Yes."