Chapter Text
Contrary to what his medical documents said, Alhaitham was not, in fact, blind. His grandmother had explained to him, when he was old enough to understand, that his affliction would more accurately be describe as hyperchromatic vision, if such a term were ever to be coined: he saw light in a wider spectrum than a regular human did. It was an unfortunate effect of being a light mage. Since that was not a term that afforded him the medical or social concessions a normally visually impaired person would have access to, including access to special education schools, subsidy for braille lessons, and most importantly, equipment aid. Sure, healthcare in Sumeru was free, but only for those who qualified, and to qualify, he had to be legally blind.
Grossly inaccurate as the term might be, the fact was that until the age of eight he had been effectively unable to function in a visual world. He could barely distinguish the rays on a humanly visual spectrum from those that were not.
Alhaitham was lucky, however, for the presence of two people in his life.
The first was his grandmother. A sound mage from Kshahrewar, she had dropped all her existing projects in developing audio technologies for commercial use to devote eight years to finding a solution for him. Eight years that culminated in the headphones that he was never seen without ever since.
See, these headphones were a technological marvel in themselves. They emitted frequencies that directly affected his brain’s visual perception center, helping it ignore light waves on non-visual spectra and allowing Alhaitham to “see” like a normal person.
His innate light mage fought. It was a war between his powers and his grandmother's.
How dare she chain us so!? The mage roared in outrage, over the inaudible frequencies emitted by the machine crafted only with love, and Alhaitham's best interests.
Alhaitham fought against his inner mage. He fought on his way to the doctor’s office for the final time to get his “blind” status revoked. He fought the headaches that threatened to tear his head apart as he learned how to read and write. He fought the urge to ask for a braille keyboard during his entrance exams into the Akademiya, all of which were written tests.
Every waking moment, he fought against closing his eyes and relying on his ears alone, as he had done so for eight years of his life. Why couldn't he just listen? He had learned a lot from listening to his grandmother speak. Why must he use his eyes? He had functioned well enough without them, what could they possibly have to offer in their suboptimal state, when they could not even serve him at their best?
But for his grandmother, he persevered.
Contrary to what the light mage in him believed, the headphones were what allowed Alhaitham to engage with his powers over light in a constructive manner. Through observation and experimentation, Alhaitham quickly learned how light behaved in different circumstances, and how he could influence it.
He learned how to bend light, how to create light. He learned how to lessen its intensity when the sun was too bright, and increase it on dark, moonless nights.
Sometimes, when he was feeling brave, he even took off the headphones and experimented with the rays of light that he learned in school could be extremely dangerous. He learned how to use it to his advantage, should he one day find himself in a position to protect his grandmother.
He even learned how to become invisible, to diffract the light around himself and make it such that no one would bother him as he studied in the library. The teachers would not be able to find him when he skipped classes to research on more interesting and enlightening topics. Neither would the bullies.
Life was peaceful in his invisibility. Never mind his ongoing war against his light mage, who still demanded to be seen, to be released.
One day, a student approached him, and everything Alhaitham thought he knew about the visible world was disproved all at once. On a superficial level, Alhaitham was confused by how he was able to perceive him through the cloak of light rays he had woven around himself, hiding his presence.
On a deeper level, however, (and it was only in hindsight that Alhaitham realized that this was the moment when) the world finally snapped into focus for him. When the light mage in him stopped their silent protest: stopped exerting their authority to over-refract rays in their attempt to get more to enter his eyes. Instead, man and mage worked together, for the first time, to bring all the light rays together to converge at the focal point now introducing himself as Kaveh, student of Kshahrewar.
In that moment, Alhaitham truly became a light mage.