A/N: Kid Blink's oneshot. I aplogize. I know I haven't updated in a while, so here it is. Hope you like it - please tell me what you thought of it!
Why Change What Works?
Nobody knew why he had the eye patch, because he never told. They all thought it was some terrible secret that he couldn't talk about, or at least the scar of an enormous and vicious battle, which he'd barely escaped from. In truth, he didn't tell for an entirely different reason.
It had been a perfectly mundane occurrence as these things went - one man with a knife against an 11 year old kid with nothing. Blink'd gotten off 'cause the bulls had taken his assailant away - though not before he'd been slashed across the eye. So he'd high tailed it while he could, and later cut out a crude eye patch because he knew he looked awful. End of story.
But why tell anybody that?
Everybody needed a reputation, a gimmick, something besides being able to sell papes. This was his. He let the stories circulate about ten to one fights and factory accidents, vicious cats, rats, mice, dogs, and even horses. Some people speculated that he'd been born disfigured, others even thought perhaps he merely wore the patch for effect (and they were, he supposed, closest to the truth).
He hadn't even had to feed the flames. Gossip and imagination were more than enough. All he did was never tell. He never told how he'd come to have an eye patch, and then the rumors flew.
Les figured he had been a pirate when he was a kid, and begged for tales of adventure on the high seas, and Blink obliged, grinning. Spot was one of the ones who figured he just wore it for effect, because it was something he himself might do. No one knew what the key around Spot's neck unlocked - Blink suspected that he'd just found it and wore it for effect. But who knew? Race liked to joke that he'd put that eye patch on Blink, especially when there were new newsies around, to give them all a good scare, and Blink went along with the story, nodding solemnly and wincing when people touched the area near his eye patch for effect. It was Jack that wove the tall tales about the horse - apparently Blink had been shoeing it and gotten too near the feet.
Everyone had a different story about it, everyone wanted to know. And whenever they asked, he wouldn't tell them, and it only made the stories get better and better.
Race had his gambling, Jack had his rope tricks, and he had his eye patch. That was how it was, that was how it worked.
Mush sometimes guessed, Blink suspected, about the real reason for that eye patch. But if he did, he didn't say anything, and he certainly told just as many tall tales over card games as the rest of them did concerning that eye patch - orphanages, rabid dogs, sewer rats, and gang bosses - Mush's were some of the best.
Race had his gambling, Jack had his rope tricks, and he had his eye patch. That was how it was, that was how it worked. And he didn't mind. In fact, he got a kick out of it. It was fun, watching people try to come up with the answer to the puzzle and knowing that only he knew they were having a colossal joke played on them. He loved practical jokes, and this was the biggest one. He carried if off with style.
Sometimes he'd consider telling everyone, just to see the look on their faces. Taking off the eye patch to show them an eye that had healed considerably since its encounter with a knife, in fact, one that hardly showed signs of scarring anymore. Just to watch them adopt stunned looks and then slowly start to laugh. But in the end he always decided to keep it.
After all, it worked for him. And if there was one thing you learned as a newsie, it was that you didn't change what worked.