Complete extrusion of the globe with or without an associated optic nerve avulsion is a rare presentation that may occur spontaneously or results from severe facial or orbital trauma. Globe avulsions are classified as incomplete, in which only the optic nerve is severed, and complete, wherein there is a disruption of the extraocular muscles and optic nerve resulting in a total luxation of the ocular bulb.
—S. Meena, V. Rakheja, S. Sahu, and P. Rathore. “Traumatic avulsion of the globe with optic nerve transection: an unusual presentation.” BMJ Case Reports CP 13, no. 10 (2020).
The Harvestman’s sword sinks into the side of Fabian’s face, cleaves skin and muscle like butter and catches on bone, and drags—and Fabian’s scream tears his throat, his face is on fire, his chest is catching fire where the beam pins him to the floor—and in his right eye he catches a flash of silver, of swordsteel—
—and the tip of the blade breaks into his eye with a tiny pop of the cornea, and his right eye doesn’t see anything anymore, and his left eye blurs with tears, and something that’s not blood begins to drip down his cheek—
—and the Harvestman twists the sword, digs in deeper, and pulls—
—and there’s a pop, there’s a wrenching, and his optic nerve crackles, and his optic nerve severs, and everything goes white and electric, and there’s not pain, there’s something else, there’s something sparkling and sparking, and phantom flashes of color flood the room—
—and something that is blood gushes down his cheek from the ruin of the socket and drips into the corner of Fabian’s mouth, bitterhot, and he can’t move, and there’s a part of the world that was there a minute ago and isn’t anymore and there’s swallowing darkness where that was, and the Harvestman laughs—
—(familiarly, Fabian’s heard that laugh)—
—and the Harvestman holds up his sword, and Fabian’s left eye, his good eye, his only eye can barely make out the shape of something on the end, something roughly spherical, something oozing—
—and this scarecrow motherf*cker wipes off Fabian’s eye from his sword on the front of Fabian’s shirt—
—and when Fabian stabs his own sword through the Harvestman’s hand, it’s pure unadulterated loathing, and it’s pure muscle memory, and he can’t see where he’s aiming.
“Your face there, boy,” his father says, and his father’s shaking hand holds out his father’s eye patch, and there’s something in Fabian’s gut that says something something germs, there’s no way that’s safe (Fabian is not listening to his gut), and there’s something in Fabian’s heart that says no, no, please, Papa, please, no, I thought I wanted to be like you, I thought I wanted to be you, Papa, I’m scared, no, please, you can’t go, I need you to tell me I’ll be okay (Fabian can’t stop listening to his heart), and there’s something in Fabian’s head that takes the eye patch and takes the hilt of his sword in hand and—
In the heat of battle, Fabian keeps faltering, losing crucial seconds to the slip of his peripheral vision, striking at targets that aren’t where he sees them.
In the heat of battle, Fabian’s friends—his party—keep favoring his right side like faithful shadows.
Killing Dayne doesn’t bring Fabian’s eye back. But Fantasy f*cking Christ does killing Dayne feel good.
“Fabian,” Kristen says, when the world is paused around them and the six of them are the only people that are breathing and they’re sitting on the steps outside of the gym and the side of Fabian’s face is tacky, sticky with slow-drying blood and something else. “Fabian, man, you know you gotta go to the hospital for that, right? Like, I can’t heal that.” And because she’s Kristen, she chooses to illustrate that by poking her finger at Fabian’s eye, or rather the space where Fabian’s eye was, forcing Fabian to jerk back to avoid getting a finger jabbed into his wound. His father’s eye patch is wrapped around his wrist. Without the adrenaline rush of active combat, his empty socket is starting to hurt. He’s distantly afraid of infection, and presently afraid that he’ll keep forgetting he can’t blink with that eyelid.
“I am aware, thank you. Not that you’re not, you know, a fantastic cleric, and all that, but somehow I doubt even you could, could recreate an eye that is not in my head anymore. It’s fine. I’ll see a doctor after—after all this is over.”
Kristen nods, but her eyes don’t leave Fabian’s lack thereof. He swallows. “Sorry,” he manages. “It’s—I know it’s not pretty. I can—”
“Dude,” says Adaine, her hand catching around his wrist where he’s gone to put the eye patch on again. “Please do not put that thing back on your open wound. You don’t know where that’s been.”
“I know exactly where it’s been! On my papa’s face!”
“Exactly,” Adaine says, like he’s proven her point. “And we all—I mean, we don’t know where he’s been, but we have, we’ve got a general gist, and none of it’s anywhere that you want the germs from on your, again, open wound.”
“I mean,” Fabian mutters, “it’s been washed since.” A pause. “Probably. It’s probably been washed.” (Although there is a suspicious stiffness to the fabric—)
Kristen butts back in: “If you don’t know that it’s been washed—”
“It’s been washed! Okay! It’s been washed, and you’re, you’re besmirching the good name of my maid by implying that she would ever leave something so important as Papa’s eye patch unwashed. She would never. The insult.”
“Okay,” says Gorgug, “your, um, your dead dad’s eye path is totally clean, or, you know, was totally clean until you put it on, or whatever. And Cathilda’s really cool and has never done anything wrong ever, we can all agree on that. But, Fabian, man, you don’t need to—like, none of us are really that squeamish, anymore. We’ve seen worse. So if you want to put the eye patch on, that’s cool, but you don’t need to cover up around us. Okay?”
Fabian swallows. He lowers his hand into his lap. “Okay.”
When their timer runs out and they go back to kill Kalvaxus, Fabian slips the eye patch back on and pretends there’s not fire where the fabric rubs up against the wound.
“You don’t have an eye. Take his eye!” Riz says, an alarming grin, dragon’s blood red staining his mouth and dripping. Fabian is fairly sure that’s a scale lodged between two of his front fangs. “Take his eye, man!”
“The Ball, calm it!” Fabian snaps, but his sight drifts, and there’s a severed hand seeping into the lining of his letter jacket (a trophy he took with the faint thought of his father, and now that there’s a stain set into the fabric he doesn’t know what he was planning on doing with this—keep it in a jar or mount it on the wall with nails through the fingernails?), and he does consider the offer, for a moment. The symbolism. Carrying the token of his victory in the crook of the scar Dayne carved out of him.
But Riz asks, “Do you want me to bite it out for you?”, and Fabian is brought back to the reality: the visceral queasy-stomached squish of whatever eyes are made of, shoving a foreign object into the sag of the socket.
Much more eloquent inside his head.
“No, The Ball,” Fabian says, but puts a hand on his shoulder, and resolves to convince him to sleep as soon as possible.
“Right, Mr. Seacaster,” says the ophthalmologist, a cheerful half-elf who’s got to have some gnome blood somewhere down the line because he barely comes up to Fabian’s chest. “Now, it’s rather hard to get a good look with that eye patch in the way, fetching though it is, so I’ll have to ask you to slip that off, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Right,” Fabian forces out, hand going behind his head to the band. He hesitates. “It’s, um—I feel like I should warn you—”
“Mr. Seacaster,” Dr. Crouchwater says kindly, “I appreciate the heads-up, but I’m not a newcomer to this line of work. I’ve seen some sh*t. I promise, whatever’s under there, I’ve seen worse, and there’ll be no judgement here, understand?”
Fabian slips off his eye patch, and Dr. Crouchwater sucks in a sharp breath. “What,” Fabian protests. “You promised—!”
Dr. Crouchwater shakes his head and his hands, waving away Fabian’s indignant concern. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s not—don’t mistake this for disgust, dear boy, I’m simply terribly sorry that you were—well, I’m sure this must hurt a great deal, yes?”
“Well,” Fabian mutters. “I mean, yeah. Sure. It’s, it’s not great.”
“Mhm,” Dr. Crouchwater hums sympathetically. “Well, I’ll need to get a closer look and all that, but I can already tell you you’ve got a nasty infection working there, nothing we shouldn’t be able to handle, don’t you worry a wink, and we’ll need to discuss our surgical options—”
“Surgery? Why, why would I need surgery? The eye’s gone. I’ve already been, you know, surgeried. Surgered. Whatever. That.”
“Well, someone removing your eye against your will, that’s really—I wouldn’t call that surgery, per se, I’d say that’s, er, grievous injury, or mutilation, or generally some sort of crime—but regardless, even though the eye is gone, there’s still some work we can do to make all this a little easier on you.”
“Like…like what?”
“In your, well, more typical enucleations, that’s what we would call the surgical removal of the eye, we’d replace the eyeball with an implant, looks a little like a marble, that’s going to mimic the shape of the eye and fill up the socket.” He leans forward, tipping up onto tiptoes, and peers at Fabian’s socket. Fabian shifts and concentrates as hard as he can on not getting up and running out of the room. “Again, I’d need to get up in there properly, but I suspect you’ve still got the musculature intact in there, or some of the musculature, at any rate, and we can sew that on up to the implant. Now, that’ll help support the shape of your face and especially your eyelids, and after that, we can start thinking about prosthetics—”
“No,” says Fabian.
Dr. Crouchwater blinks at him, sinking back with feet fully on the floor. “No?”
“No to the, the prosthetics. I don’t want one.”
“Well, alright,” Dr. Crouchwater says with a shrug. “Nobody’s gonna force you to get one, but can I ask why the, er, conviction?”
Fabian stares at his hands, at the eye patch dangling from his fingers. “I’ve got—” He holds the fabric up. “I’ve got this.” He swallows. “My—it’s my father’s. He was…” A pause. “He was a privateer. And he lost his eye when he was younger, and he wore this for as long as—as long as I knew him, and I never saw what was—So. Nobody needs to…see anything.”
(This is a minor lie, although Fabian does not remember the night clearly enough to know this as a lie. Fabian saw his father barefaced once, when Bill offered him the eye patch, when Fabian drove a sword into his father’s chest.)
“Ah,” says Dr. Crouchwater. “Well, there’s no shame either way, alright? If you’d rather, we can sew that eyelid shut, no need to worry. But there’s no need to decide now, either. Today, I’d like to do a proper examination, and we can figure out where we’ll go from there. How does that sound?”
“Good,” Fabian agrees, only slightly unsteady. “That sounds good.”
Fabian stares at his unfamiliar reflection in the mirror. It’s not the ruined landscape of his sightless eye that’s the problem, though that’s not what he would call welcoming, though he can’t look too long there or nausea swells in his stomach. It’s more that he hasn’t seen himself since—since the small green-grimed mirror of the bathroom in Cell Block C of the Skullcleaver Correctional Center, the morning of prom. He hasn’t seen himself since he saw himself with two eyes. He can’t understand the topology of his cheekbones anymore. He wants his face back.
“Dude,” says Fig. She’s leaning far enough forward that she’s half-lying on the table, her hands fisted in Fabian’s lapels, pulling him upwards. “Dude,” she repeats insistently, her face looming in front of Fabian’s, nearly forehead to forehead. “You need to get a glass eye, Fabian. For us. For your friends.”
“Down, girl.” Kristen tugs on Fig’s hoodie until she reluctantly slides back into her seat.
“I don’t think so,” Fabian says, shifting in his seat; if he’s demurring, who would blame him? “The doctor said—he said there ought to be an implant, so my face doesn’t, I don’t know, collapse in on itself or something gnarly of the sort. But it’s up to me whether there’s a…a prosthesis on top of that.”
“But think of the prank potential,” Fig insists, her elbows back on the table because of her uncouth nature, which Fabian attributes to an upbringing by Gilear. “Think of the possibilities. You can’t tell me you’re not tempted!”
“What possibilities?” Adaine demands. “Name one prank you could do with a piece of glass that looks like an eye.”
“How should I know? I’m not, like, prank R&D for you people, you can’t rely on me for everything.”
“You were the one who suggested it!”
“Yeah,” Fig says, “because I’m a visionary. I’m a big picture guy. I’m not getting down in the weeds with you people.”
“Could be a good distraction,” Gorgug says absently, stirring his milkshake with his straw. “Take the eye out, throw it in the other direction, people are like ‘hey, what’s this eye doing here?’” He shrugs. “Could be cool.”
“See!” Fig gestures at Gorgug. “I mean, that’s not, I don’t know if that’s a prank, necessarily, but it’s a possibility! We can workshop!”
“You are impossible,” Adaine says with a fond huff, flicking her straw wrapper towards Fig. “Fabian, please don’t listen to her, it’s your face, you do what you want with it.”
Fig slumps into her seat and crosses her arms, pouting. “I’m just saying. I think what you want to do with it should be something f*cking rad. And an eye you can take out is f*cking rad.”
“If you think it’s so rad, you get one.”
“Okay!” Fig chirps, her heavy heels slamming into the floor as she springs eagerly into proper posture. “Who wants to cut one of my eyes out?”
“Alright, alright, nobody is cutting anybody’s eyes out, alright?” Fabian waves his hands, and if he sounds too sincere, too frantic—none of his friends say a word. Phantom pain hums in the empty socket. “Fig,” he says, “don’t you dare steal my look.”
It’s warm on the morning of his surgery, summer-kissed late May. Fabian’s papa is a week and a half dead—somehow only a week and a half—and his mama is in intensive rehab somewhere in the wilds of Fallinel, and Cathilda takes him to the ophthalmologist’s office, squeezed into the passenger’s seat of her smallfolk car. As he rests his chin on his knees he thinks of how he used to fit here, how he sat here and chattered to Cathilda every afternoon when she picked him up from Oakshield Elementary, the year that Bill Seacaster was away at sea alone and Cathilda enrolled Fabian in his absence.
“Cathilda,” Fabian starts, softly. “You don’t think… Would Papa be…?” He doesn’t bother finishing, because maids have mild mind-reading capacities, or Cathilda knows Fabian better than anyone in the world—one of those.
“Your father would be ferociously proud of you, Master Fabian,” Cathilda says, hands steadfast on the wheel, staring forward, “and I am so very sorry that he isn’t here to tell you so himself.” There’s a touch of vitriol in the words, like she still can’t believe Bill Seacaster had the audacity to die, like she hasn’t forgiven him for leaving Fabian behind.
Fabian nods, and leans forward to touch his forehead to his knees, and breathes.
He stumbles out of surgery with Dr. Crouchwater’s hand on his arm as a guide, which only lets go once Cathilda catches him by the other elbow, bearing him up. “My dear boy,” she says, and he feels three feet tall, eight years old again and yet to outgrow her, made to fit in her arms. His throat hurts when he swallows. She beckons him down so she can cup his cheek in a small, warm hand. “Oh, Master Fabian,” she murmurs. “Let’s get you on home.”
