A/N: This unexpected twist WRECKED ME. Oh, Matt.
Spoilers for 1x02. Title loosely from "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel-apropos, I thought.
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
That child-fear, that flutter of a heart that beats too fast—the screams of I can't see, I can't see—rush vividly in, and he is overcome.
Strange—or it would be strange, if he could think—that a blind man could feel invincible. He had not thought it of his own pride, yet here it is, shattered as he must believe the glass to be. He had lost something utterly, then built up everything else almost in defiance around it. For would God rob a blind man again?
But the world he knows is silent and his body has betrayed him. I can't see becomes I can't hear, and that is only a very few seconds away from I can't.
It is as though his mind has been taken from him, as though there is nothing around him anymore, and the blackness had become evermore eternal because the quiet is over all.
He has never been a coward, he likes (liked) to believe, but now he is afraid. Because if darkness is loneliness, silence is despair.
He screams and he prays and he begs. All of this to a God he has never seen, in a world he will never see again—but even if God can hear him, he cannot hear himself.
(When Karen comes, he will smile. He will savor her words and the sound of her skirt moving, heed sharply the flutter of the fly's wings on the windowsill, the welcome tinkle of glass on his floorboards. He will smile, and tell Karen that it will be alright.)
(He will be afraid.)