Work Text:
Fifteen years ago...
"Johnathan, can you hear us? We need you to resp-"
He couldn't see anything. It was dark - no, pitch black - and his ears rang like crazy. His brain felt like a vibrating phone. And the sirens didn't help.
"Sir, you need to breathe slowly. Don't panic."
Don't panic. Don't panic. Don't panic.
But he couldn't see. And he couldn't control the pain behind his eyeballs. The sockets felt like they were going to melt at any moment.
"Sir, you-"
Shut the fuck up! He screamed, maybe out loud, maybe only in his head. The car - truck - van bumped around and made his head surge to a new level of pain, prompting him to scream louder than ever thought possible. Why was he hurting this way? The reason for this torment had been known, but he had forgotten when the curtain of darkness and violent death stabbed at him.
When the van stopped, he was still screaming murder; So unbearable was the pain that he could not form one word to cry out. It was a long stream of shrieking that made his head bang around even worse. The voice belonging to the man he could not see warned him they would be moving his body to a - the ringing became a sharp scream that struck him so hard and abruptly that he vomited.
"S-" he managed to cough out. What he meant was to say sorry, but the ringing interrupted his motor skills and he regurgitated again before passing out.
Eleven hours later...
"Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Johnathan." The doctor's soft voice could be heard just above Johnathan on his right side. "I'm afraid there is nothing we can do for your son. He is permanently blind."
Sobs could be heard from both Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, John's parents, on his left. His father caressed his face and kissed his forehead before a slew of reassuring words were uttered. Johnathan, of course, heard zilch. After the words 'permanently blind', his mind went completely blank. So the coward had beaten him to near-death, but the best he could do was the absolute possible worst..He didn't kill him, he had left him mangled and dependent a week before his nineteen birthday.
Mrs. Andrews managed to ask a question through her tears, and the doctor rustled a few papers on her clipboard before answering back. Whatever the question was, Johnathan had not heard and did not care to understand. He was irreversibly blind, and it was all because of his very horrible sister.
Belinda had tried to visit him earlier that day, but he had screamed loud enough that the nurses asked her to leave. There was no reason to ever talk to his sister again - she was the reason he was in this mess. That could have been an hour ago, ten minutes. He had no idea since he couldn't see the damn clock ticking away on the wall opposite his hospital bed.
The doctor - he never caught her name - prescribed some antibiotics, pain medication, and recommended his parents set up a physical and mental therapy appointment or two once he was discharged. That discharge didn't come until three weeks later once the scarring on his eyes had begun to heal and a million and one tests had been run on his brain. All seemed to be well and working right - except for his eyes, that is. His parents wheeled him out of the Riverview Heights Hospital and took him back home to the mansion he had been planning to leave just four weeks earlier.
Fifteen years later...
"Happy birthday, son!" Martina Andrews exclaimed excitedly before placing the triple chocolate cake - Johnathan's favorite - down in front of him.
Johnathan tried his best to smile when he felt Martina lean down to kiss him on the cheek. He hated his mother's guts, but today was a day he had to put his bias aside and make everyone else feel better about themselves. They all knew that he hated attention, and would probably go back into his room once the parade - er, party - was over.
He didn't have many friends. In fact, he only had one who somehow tolerated his hatred of most humans, and calmed him down when his anxiety set in. That friend's name was Ayden Demi, and he was sitting right beside him, congratulating him on his thirty-fourth birthday. Thankfully Ayden's six foot frame was acting as a wall to separate John from his sister Belinda, and her new boyfriend who was obviously gay.
After John haphazardly blew out his candles, his mother read his cards out loud to him, including the one from his ex-wife Jenna. Why in the world she would send him anything was beyond John; Jenna knew he hated her guts.
There was small conversation, mostly everyone talking at John rather than with him. None seemed to notice or care that he gave very simple, often one-word replies to most of their questions, but he knew everyone except Ayden was there to stroke their own egos and give charity to what they considered a disabled peasant reject.
Finally the party was over, and the only one left was Ayden, still sitting beside John, still getting bits and pieces out of him. Ayden was the only one he could count on to understand and accept him, without considering his disability a hindrance; a truly rare type around these parts.
Riverview Heights was an exclusive, upper-class area for those considered the cream of the American 1% crop. You couldn't get in or be accepted if your annual income was anything under ten million dollars with interest. Souless snobs, plastic surgeons, and their lion-faced clients were the usual residents, and parties to inflate one's head with more delusions of grandeur were just as common.
Johnathan Andrews and his family lived right in the middle of the city, exclusive Cassil Avenue, which lent the Andrews family a title John hated with a fervent passion: the richest family in Riverview Heights. The title attracted too much unwanted attention and faux adoration even cold hard cash could not buy without bloodline perks; Women and men practically threw themselves at his feet, grasping for a chance at the prestigious Andrews fortune his deceased father, Jesse Andrews, had curated through real estate and corporate investments.
All of it made his stomach hurt; People who didn't know him (or didn't want to) had continually tried to fake their way into his life and heart, and all had failed. All but one - his ex-wife Jenna Marcus-Andrews. She, too, came from a big name Riverview family, and the match had been approved by the local media and socialite groups around the city. At first, John had really loved Jenna - in fact he still did - and the relationship was great until he had learned her real motives for marrying him eleven years in. Not to mention, she cheated on him with the pool boy, so to divorce court they went.
Of course she didn't go out without a fight; She employed Martina to whisper in her son's ear that she was sorry, would do better next time, was having a hard time dealing with his disability, yada yada yada. He wasn't hearing it. As much as he loved Jenna, he was not going to be used anymore - not by his mother, Jenna, or anyone else for notoriety that wouldn't matter when they were dead and gone.
Martina's obsession with uniting John into what she called a "power couple" had loomed over him practically all his life. It was drilled into him to be a respectable, boring, droll, abnormally good looking young man, while keeping the family fortunes and reputation at an equally respectable level. The first step was to marry into that special power couple Martina dreamed of; the second step was becoming a politician, dentist, doctor, or real estate agent like his father. None of those things happened, and when he was beaten all those years ago, Martina's love for him died with his sight.
Still, she loomed around him and paid for most of his bills and care. The first five years after he became disabled and married Jenna, Martina faked compassion until she couldn't anymore.
Johnathan was not the son she had wanted - he was quiet, relaxed, always in his own head, and far from extroverted - and he was perfectly okay with that. She had never been a good mother to him, never tucked him into bed or told him she loved him without expecting something material in return.
His father, on the other hand, had always been there for him and loved him like any parent should. There was no one on Earth John related to more than Jesse Andrews, so when Jesse contracted cancer and died six months after Johnathan had been admitted to the hospital, his heart had nearly shattered. The only thing that kept him from doing what was supposed to be the unthinkable were his relationships with Jenna and Ayden.
Johnathan had fallen in love with Jenna during one of the worse depressions in his life. The people he had called friends and family left him when they felt he had nothing more to offer, which left him alone to suffer through the grief of his father's death. He became a recluse and alienated even more people, but it didn't matter to him. His plans to leave Riverview and the aristocratic fast life behind had failed, he had lost everything dear to him - his eyesight and Jesse's love, along with his dream of becoming a painter.
They had married not long after they met, six months to be exact, and he couldn't have been happier. Jenna made him feel like he could do, be, want anything and succeed as long as he tried. But she was a master manipulator. Maybe he had let her in because he was vulnerable, maybe he wanted his mother's approval, or to feel genuinely wanted by someone, because he always knew on the outskirts of his conscious mind that she didn't want him. She wanted to be that power couple Martina craved, to be name-recognition royalty. The reality of the nature of the relationship officially made itself known soon after their third anniversary when Johnathan had heard his loving wife tell all to one of her high and mighty friends on the phone.
Even after that he lied to himself and let reality pass him by. There were tears, but he had devoted himself to her too much to shake her.
The final straw came when his housekeeper revealed the truth to him shortly after their tenth anniversary in a whispered breath about the relationship Jenna had with their pool boy and one of his assistants who helped him walk or run errands. She had screwed both men in their bedroom - the bed, the floor, on top of the vanity, in the walk-in closet, on top of the dresser, and anywhere else any able-bodied couple with eyesight could use for sex. He could have overlooked that, too, but the use of the bed was too much.
The divorce came quickly; the two parted despite Jenna's protests, and that was that. She got the house, three of five cars, and John got to move back into the old family mansion with his mother and sister. Lovely.
That was two years ago. In that short amount of time, Ayden Adisa Demi appeared and became his best and only friend. They had bumped into each other quite literally in a men's restroom in some cafe Johnathan didn't bother to remember the name of. The story goes that Ayden helped John back to his seat, the two struck up a conversation, and John made some snide comment about each woman who got up the nerve to flirt with the very beautiful Ayden.
This seemed to entertain Ayden to no end - and consequently irritated the living fuck out of John - and after that they somehow got along. Ayden's many careers interested Johnathan (though he would never admit it because of the Riverview in him); Ayden was a model, a professional partier, an art curator and seller, and playboy with the most interesting stories of sexcapades, obsessions, and vacations. He was tall, dark, ambitious, and handsome - and everything Martina would have hated in a son, which excited Johnathan.
Ayden grew up as a young Black kid in North Greenwood before moving over to Riverview's neighboring middle class town, Havenshire, which allow him to find himself in the area's underground art scene. Once he made a name for himself, he packed his family's stuff up and moved them all to Riverview.
John, on the other hand, had never lived anywhere else except Riverview (besides a few months in Spain and England in his early teens), and definitely had never worked a day in his life for the money that appeared in his bank account once a month. Besides that, Ayden was extroverted whereas he was a shy asshole; Ayden was tall, muscular, and sporty, and John - he was bony, and could barely kick a soccer ball before he went blind. But they solace in their love of books, politics, and art, which kept them talking for ages.
He knew he could always count on Ayden for anything, and he did, which is why he went to him to ask what he should do about the party invitation he had received from Jenna..