Prompt: Eyes
Characters: Mikkel
He could not for the life of him figure out why everyone who found out insisted on telling him. He could manage just fine as he was, thank you very much.
So what if he hadn't seen the hole in the bottom of the pan? When one of your crewmates generously offers you the use of her saucepan, there shouldn't be any reason for you to suspect that there's a hole in it—much less that it's been taped up with cardboard. That could in no way, shape or form be put down to any fault of his.
His crewmates, he knew by voice, hair color, and build—they were different enough in their overall aspects that he didn't need the fine details to tell them apart. A flash of red hair, long or short; a sparkle of golden locks; chattery little Tuuri or her silent, skinny shadow—that was all that he needed.
"Does nobody here know how to aim?!"
Aiming was not in his job description! He wasn't here to bash troll heads; he was here to patch up the people who did. That was close work, where he didn't need to squint in order to focus. Emil was the one she should have been yelling at; if he'd managed to hit the thing in the first place instead of spraying bullets every which way, it wouldn't have lived long enough to hide under the snow—but as always, it seemed as if her "right hand warrior" could do no wrong.
"If only I knew where to begin searching."
"Medical building?"
…okay, so maybe it would have been helpful if he'd been able to spot the building with the giant red cross on it without Tuuri's help… but surely he would have found it on his own. Eventually. Besides, Sigrun caught them anyway; it wasn't like running a few minutes later in his search would have made any difference in the long run.
Lying in bed that night, stomach still rumbling from his interrupted dinner, tired from the long walk, the adrenaline crash, and staying up far too late to tend to Sigrun's injuries, Mikkel ran a hand over his eyes, and sighed.
"You're nearsighted," they'd told him, back when he was still a teenager. "You need glasses."
"I can manage fine without them," he'd coolly informed them in return, and then refused to wear them when he'd received a pair anyway, and left them to sit and gather dust as his vision steadily worsened until the correction they provided was no longer sufficient. Nobody had bothered to pressure him into getting another pair—glasses were far too expensive to be wasted on stubborn teenagers (or, eventually, on stubborn adults) who put their pride before their ability to perceive the facial features of any person with whom they weren't standing nose to nose.
It didn't hamper his ability to do any of his work—that is, the work he'd actually been hired for. Even if he did have to do something else, he'd figure it out. He always had.
Still, Mikkel could not help but curse his eyes for their betrayal as he drifted off to sleep.
A/N: Witness the reaction of Teenage Me to needing glasses! (Of course, this is one of those times when I desperately want to smack Teenage Me upside the head, because if not for Teenage Me being stubborn and stupid about stuff that wasn't "natural", then Present Me's vision might not have kept on getting worse. Ugh.
(Seriously, kids, if you need corrective lenses, wear them. They will not keep your eyes from fixing themselves "naturally". What they will do is keep your blurry vision from getting even more blurry.)
*ahem* At any rate, this is building on an idea that was once bounced around in the comments section, that Mikkel has poor vision but can't afford glasses/is too proud to admit it. Aside from the evidence mentioned in-chapter, there's also the possibility that his eyes often appear to be closed because he's squinting. Just some food for thought.