Author's Notes

Ok, here's the next part. Kouji's price. And I thought this particular one was rather predictable. Come on, what's the first thing that comes with light? What happens when there's no light, what's the first thing you can't do?

You probably would have noticed this fic is a little overly pessimistic. That's sort of the point though. Hit the top, then the only place to go from there is down.

Enjoy, and tell me what you think.

The Price One Must Pay

Frontier-verse. They find that everything comes at a price. With interest attached.

Genre/s: Angst/Friendship

Rating: T

Part 2 of 6: Kouji

He had, since a very early age, taken an interest in those sorts of things that required a quick eye. He excelled in kendo, taekwondo and other forms of martial arts because his blue orbs managed to snatch little details and utilise them before his opponent really knew what was going on. Weaknesses were relatively easy to spot, and it didn't take him long to pick up new moves when watching someone else.

He was more of a visual learner as far as school went. Sure he paid attention in class and took notes where necessary, but he learnt better with pictures and maps and demonstrations than words. Words seemed empty, hollow. A picture always said far more.

If someone else looked into his eyes, they wouldn't see much. Because he walled them off from the world. But he saw far more, little things that didn't always register, things he didn't always consider. He saw things, and for a time, he ignored them. Depending, sometimes he acted on what he saw, but despite his hunter-like sight, he tended to be quite blind in understanding.

In the digital world, things changed. The walls, the blindfold if you will, crumbled with the sheer power placed in his hands, in his sight. He saw more than he ever had, understood more. He was light. Like that shone, light that illuminated, light that saw. He found the truth. He found power. He found a love he had never fully accepted.

Coming back to the real world, he was a new person, for a bit. He had friends, a family that was whole and happy again, no longer the boy who blocked out what he saw and stayed dark and angry inside. Essentially, he could see the world with new eyes, understand more, appreciate more…

It took him a long while to realise he was seeing less and less every day.

It began with missing or misreading simple things. Like skimming through a physics test when pressed for time and mistakenly not seeing the superscript. Like not noticing the slight weakness and prolonging a spar because of it.

It seemed rather insignificant for a time; except the self defence. He had picked up rather fast reflexes in the digital world after all, but he could feel those slowing because he couldn't catch things as fast as he once used to. It reminded him of the Phantomon; while he tried his brother's way of handling them, he realised he was simply too reliant on his sight.

What he hadn't realised at that point, was it was failing him.

In another year, it got bad enough so that he needed glasses to see the board in school. An annoyance, but he assumed he had inherited it from his father.

Problem was, he was long-sighted. It didn't add up.

But there were many kids his age that wore glasses. It was no abnormality.

What was odd was that the optometrist had found no physical defect upon a more thorough examination when the glasses failed to last five months. She was baffled, but there was nothing to be done except to prescribe a stronger pair.

He pulled out of his self-defence classes; there was more pain than gain in them now. And having left for good, he realised he had somehow lost a part of himself. Fighting, as much as he sometimes loathed it, was his life.

His eyesight simply got worse over time. Colours and shapes blurred. Eventually, all he could see was a hand in front of his face…and then, not even that.

Light still shone. Darkness glared. But that was all. And he realised how dependent humans like himself were on sight. How much depended on what they saw and understood from that.

There wasn't all that much to do after that. He still played, the guitar he had received from a distant relative, his stepmother's piano…he still went to school and studied, but his dream in the physical industry was lost. He searched, but without sight, he had no way of knowing where he was going, and what lay ahead. He still heard. He still felt. But he realised then he had never put much stock on those senses. And it was costing him now.

At one point in his life, he had seen the world. Now, he saw nothing.

It didn't occur to him until too late that he was essentially giving up. Wandering endlessly, with no goal.

'Aren't you going to do something?'

I am doing something. But ultimately, where was it leading? Nowhere he could tell.

If someone else looked into those eyes, they would see no light in them. Not even that reflecting off the world.