Chapter Text
Barbara Gordon remembers the first time she cut her own hair perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly, eidetic memory and all, but the memory of that night is so poignant in her mind like she is living it again.
It was her first week back home after being discharged. She wasn’t home, though. She was at her childhood Brownstone, which hadn’t been designed to be navigated via wheelchair, living with her dad for the first time since she had moved out to her first apartment. That apartment, she had come to think of as home. It’s where she had grown her first successful houseplant, where she had learned how to rewire a light switch. It was the place that Jason would crash after he and Bruce had an argument, it was where she invited her friends over, hosted her first party, brought her first boy home from a date. It’s where she would go after a long night of beating up crooks and fighting crime, get undressed and crawl into bed at sunrise. But she hasn’t been back in that apartment since she was shot.
Her dad had moved her out of that apartment while she was still in the hospital. He thought it would be best for her to not revisit the place that she laid on the floor, covered in her own blood, the closest to death she’s ever been. He was probably right, she assured herself over and over.
Barbara felt out of control.
She wasn’t used to it, she felt crazy. Her life had turned from a steady autumn breeze into a wind storm that threatened to rip every last ounce of her to shreds. She needed to find a firm grip to hold onto or she would cease to be.
Everything hurts. It might hurt forever.
She was finding new things every day that she couldn’t do anymore. Barbara has always held the mindset that she could achieve anything, things were only impossible because no one had done them yet; Babs felt that childish optimism become crushed like someone stomping on her chest and breaking her ribs when she came to face her “new normal”. She could take the fucking bus. And she felt another kick in the ribs when she realized this was forever. The rest of her life. For the rest of her life she would have to deal with inaccessibility, she was going to face problems she didn’t even know existed, this was her reality. Barbara from a year earlier may have accepted this as a challenge, and she would learn to do so and she would accept her disability eventually (she’d learn to even embrace it as part of her identity), but at that moment, Barbara was too tired to feel anything except useless rage.
Nothing was right.
Where she was living, public transit, her nights, her nightmares, the lack of recognition when she looked at herself in the mirror, the anger when she saw the surgery scars on her stomach and back, the panic in her body when she heard the front door, her hair.
Her fucking hair.
Barbara wouldn’t consider herself vain, but she always took a bit of pride every time someone complimented her hair. Long, thick, and a stunning red. As Batgirl–batgirl that word put a sour taste in Barbara’s mouth, batgirl was dead, you don’t speak of the dead–it was the defining trait witnesses and the media latched onto. A defiant red that shone down on the dark streets of Gotham.
10 weeks in the Hospital, no one had bothered to tie up, or braid, Barbara’s hair. They didn’t care about it at all.
It just took 2 surgeries (one leaving a scar on her abdomen right to repair damage done to her internal organs. The second left a scar on her back where they extracted the bullet from her L1 disc) 1 medically induced coma and 2 ½ weeks on bed rest for her hair to become a tangled mess.
It was one more thing in Barbara’s life that had been taken completely out of her control.
She needed to take it back. She needed to find her hold in this wind storm. She needed something to hold onto before her atoms were torn apart forever.
She grabbed a pair of scissors.
The bathroom was dead. Babs' face was cast under a dim yellow glow of the fluorescent lights that hadn’t been replaced since she was nine. She felt cramped, her wheelchair barely fitting into the space between the sink and the shower that she used to walk through effortlessly. The scissors had a weight in her hands she swore they never had before, and her fingers trembled as she raised them up to her neck.
She cut her hair.
Barbara didn’t look in the mirror when she chopped, she barely looked in the mirror at all in those days. She brought the scissors all the way up to the bottom of her ear, beyond where the knots and mattes had claimed what was once hers, and she squeezed the scissors closed.\
CHOP.
She went all the way around her head before she looked up in the mirror.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
She felt so stupid, sitting in her wheelchair barely high enough to see herself in the mirror, crying. Over her hair.
She hated herself so much. There were better things to cry about, there were more productive things to be doing, she should be getting on with her life instead wallowing in pity. But, ever stubborn, she couldn’t bring herself to do anything but cry.
This wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t that girl in the mirror. That couldn’t be her.
I’ve lost everything.