Fitz

Fitz is blind, which is very noticeable because of the way he acts and is almost always the first thing people address him or ask him about when they meet. He doesn't find questions about it annoying as some might think, and actually thinks it's pretty funny whenever someone is afraid to approach him about it or hesitate to bring it up because they think that they might offend him.

Not very many people know exactly why he's blind because there are only a few who have actually asked, but it happened when he was just a child. Fitz had had pretty bad eyesight since birth and within just a few months of his hatching, his eyes had already started to cloud up. His parents were far too poor to afford any kind of medical care for him, so he learned how to live with it and quickly adapted.

At around two years old, Fitz's eyesight stopped getting worse and sort of plateaued with him just on the brink of complete blindness. It was when he got caught outside during one of the raging seasonal summer storms that he completely lost his vision when a bolt of lightning struck close to him. It didn't directly hit him, but the brightness and intensity of the strike was enough to destroy his sight in his left eye and almost the right. He can still vaguely sense light in his right eye, but it's very, very minimal and hardly ever helpful.

Fitz is surprisingly okay with it, which is something that most people don't expect. He views it as a part of his identity, and in fact, the only thing he really hates is when someone feels sorry for him or expresses sympathy about his lost sight. He doesn't see it as a disability and has learned to rely on other things to get him around. More often than not he gets profiled as helpless and in need of someone to guide him. In reality, he is perfectly capable of handling himself, even if being blind does make some things more difficult.

With his sight gone, his hearing took over as his dominant sense and it is nothing short of impeccable. His ears are highly sensitive to any sound, so much so that he can visualize his surroundings in a way by hearing how sounds bounce off of the environment around him. This is a blessing and a curse though-- it goes both ways. Fitz can easily get overwhelmed by sound if there's too much of it, and if one knows how to do it, he can be disoriented. If he's too bombarded by noise, it's like actual blindness to him, as his best way of knowing what's going on around him is being able to hear it.

One of Fitz's worst fears is forgetting; specifically, forgetting what things look like. He's afraid that he'll wake up one day and suddenly not remember what his parents looked like or that he won't remember what colors are which-- it's not something that comes up a lot or that he thinks about often, but it's very debilitating for him and he doesn't want to lose any of it. He's developed a sort of a pattern that he goes through daily in order to keep those memories by visualizing certain things as vividly as he can. But in recent years it hasn't been working as well, partly due to him growing older and partly because he was so young when he had those memories.

Related to his fear of forgetting is his tendency to become very sentimentally attached to things. A lot of baubles and trinkets he's gathered over the years stay with him. He keeps them all together in a small corner of his home and is extremely touchy about anyone holding them.

Songs -

• All Eyes
• Take It From Me