Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The blow came from nowhere, too fast even for Cassandra Cain. It was a simple robbery, but one of them had used flashbang powder, followed by the shattering impact of glass, and the burning of chemical. The last thing she saw was a flash of crimson, then the jarring impact that threw her against the grimy alley wall.

Barbara Gordon was at her side in minutes, her voice a muffled, distant sound, her words just… noise. When Cassandra’s racing mind finally processed the terrifying truth — that she couldn’t see. A wave of raw fear washed over her, and her body began to tremble uncontrollably, her throat tight with a silent, primal terror.

/|\ ^._.^ /|\

She lay beneath the sterile lights of the Batcave’s infirmary. The familiar hum of computers pressed low and constant against her ears. The scent of ozone and metal once comforting now tethered her to a world she could no longer fully perceive.

Fingers worked gently at the gauze wrapped around her head. Soft, slow, careful. The bandages peeled away, layer by layer, cool air brushing her skin. She waited for light and colours to return, anything. Nothing came.

“Cass?” someone asked. “Can you see me?”

She said nothing, the dread realisation of what that meant grew, that was her answer.

“Cass,” the voice said. “Your retinas are damaged. The doctors say it could take days, maybe weeks. But… they think you’ll recover.”

Cassandra didn’t need to see to know who was speaking, she recognised Barbara by the weight beside her, the distinct rhythm of her touch.

But her words? They were a confusing jumble. Prior to the fight that took her vision, Cassandra was still struggling with vocal and written language Barbara was teaching her, it was a constant effort, a translation process her brain performed with painstaking slowness. Now, without the visual cues of body language, of lip movements, the struggle was amplified to an unbearable degree.

Barbara’s tone was calm, an attempt to soothe, but her trembling hands betrayed her measured voice.

Bruce was there as well, the heavy presence on the bed beside her, he spoke in hushed tones, his words like a distant rumble that she couldn’t interpret.

Movement, tension, subtle shifts in posture were the only words she knew, body language was language. Now, that language was gone. The true struggle was not just with the physical limitations, but with the loss of her primary mode of understanding. Without the ability to read the subtle shifts in posture and muscles, the fleeting expressions that spoke volumes, the world became a cacophony of disembodied noise.

Cassandra just nodded slowly to everything they said, she couldn’t understand anything they were saying.

“They are telling me that I’m blind. I am blind. I am blind. I am blind. I am blind…”

/|\ ^._.^ /|\

Days blurred, indistinguishable from one another. The soft thrum of the Batcave became oppressive. Familiar voices floated past her like detached leaves on wind. Words like ‘temporary’, ‘healing’, ‘recover’ carried no weight when she couldn’t understand them. Her mind, already labouring to translate, now buckled under fear.

She felt the emptiness like a physical thing. Her world once alive with nuance, breath, intention was blank.

“Forever? Forever.”

Certain words echoed in her skull, louder than any voice.

If she couldn’t see, she couldn’t understand. If she couldn’t understand, she couldn’t fight. If she couldn’t fight…

She was now neither a Batgirl, nor a weapon. She was broken. Useless.

“Useless.”

Sometimes she cried, she couldn’t stop it. The tears came when she reached for a cup and missed. When she heard others training and couldn’t join. When Alfred said something kind and she couldn’t find the words and meaning behind his gentle voice.

She stopped speaking. Not that she’d ever spoken much since the incident, but now, she said nothing at all even when spoken to.

Sometimes she sat for hours, unmoving, wrapped in Alfred’s thick wool blanket, staring at nothing. Because there was nothing. Her eyes were open, but the world gave her no response. No light. No movement. Just a crushing, indifferent void.

She started to avoid the others. When she heard footsteps in the hall, she’d slip away. She didn’t want to be touched, or helped, or pitied. Barbara’s voice, usually a comfort, began to feel like pressure. Words asking things of her. Encouragement felt like a burden she couldn’t carry. Hope, like a knife twisting in her ribs.

Sometimes, when she heard soft voices talking about her behind closed doors, she imagined they were saying what she already feared:

“She’s not getting better.”

“She’s not who she was.”

“She may never be.”

“She is useless.”

“Useless.”

She began to withdraw, retreating deeper into herself. She curled into herself, away from the world.

Paranoia began to fester in the dark. Every creak of the cave, every distant clang of metal, sounded amplified, menacing. She imagined shapes lurking just beyond the edge of her awareness, enemies she couldn’t perceive, couldn’t counter. Her breathing became shallow, her muscles perpetually tensed.

She barely ate, barely slept, convinced that any moment of weakness would leave her vulnerable. Her silent world became a prison built of fear and misinterpretation.

At night, she would wake gasping from dreams she couldn’t see. She’d fight phantom enemies in her sleep, only to wake up with fists clenched, body slick with sweat, heart hammering like a war drum. Her mind craved the clean logic of battle and motion, but now there was no enemy to fight, no one would want to fight a blind weapon.

She imagined herself vanishing, atom by atom. A ghost haunting the Batcave. No eyes. No voice. No use. Useless.

“Useless.”

Once, she reached up and touched her face, pressing her fingertips to her own eyes.

“What am I without these?”

The answer was not in a word or a lesson, but in the memory of her own strength. She had to know if the person she was still existed.

Weak from malnutrition, Cassandra forced herself to the mansion’s gym. Her steps were slow, her breath shallow, but she made it because she had to.

She tried to train alone, but every punch felt wrong. She couldn’t read the weight of her imaginary opponent, couldn’t see when the dummy shifted on its hook. Her body still remembered how to fight, muscle memory etched deep, but now her perception was incomplete. She moved in mechanical echoes, her instincts were gone. When the training dummies swung toward her, she flinched because the timing and angles were wrong. Without sight, her body no longer felt certain. Her punches lost their conviction, her kicks landed with hesitation.

She repeated the movements, until her muscles and joints screamed for rest. She welcomed the pain, it was something real, something she could feel.

She crouched in the corner afterward, hugging her knees. Wondering if the girl who once moved like shadow and fire was gone forever.

Chapter Text

Alfred remained a constant, gentle presence, bringing her warm and fragrant food, and guiding her hand to the fork. His sentences were always simple and clear, and he would patiently repeat words, waiting for her slow, internal mind to process them.

“Tea,” he’d say, holding a steaming mug to her nose. “Warm.” She’d smell the familiar bergamot and register the heat, connecting the sound to the sensation.

Barbara’s approach to teaching was more direct. She used exercises from her own rehabilitation, adapting them for Cassandra. She’d place an object in Cassandra’s hand a smooth stone, a rough piece of wood and repeat its name and texture, like "Stone, smooth" or "Wood, rough." This built a basic vocabulary by linking words to touch.

She also played recordings of everyday sounds: a distant siren, rustling leaves, a dog’s bark. She’d connect each sound to a concept, like "Siren, loud, danger" or "Dog, bark, friend." In this way, Barbara was teaching Cassandra to understand the world’s sounds the way she once understood its sights.

There were moments during those lessons where Cassandra broke, flinging items away in frustration. Sometimes she lashed out blindly, slapping the recordings off the table. Once, she shouted, the sound ugly and abrupt in her throat.

Barbara never flinched, but simply waited. Sometimes she would sit beside her in silence, not touching, just being there until Cassandra’s breathing slowed.

Barbara also recited poems in the evenings, not for understanding the literal meanings, but for the cadence. Cassandra couldn’t grasp the full meanings, but she felt the rhythm, like footwork, a dance of sound. Sometimes, Barbara would hum, then sing, her voice a steady, clear melody. She wasn’t asking for comprehension, only for Cassandra to feel the flow, the changes in pitch and volume, the subtle emotional weight carried in a human voice. It was a foundation for understanding the inflections that gave spoken words meaning.

/|\ ^._.^ /|\

The Batcave was quiet, but not empty. Cassandra heard the footsteps before she recognised the gait, deliberate but lighter than Bruce’s: Tim.

She didn’t move from the mat. Her knees were drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them. She had stopped expecting anyone to approach her while she trained, if you could call it that. Her movements were clumsy echoes of old routines, broken pieces of rhythm she couldn’t glue back together.

“I will run drills,” Tim said casually, his words slow and broken up so she could follow more easily. He knew she was still struggling, her understanding of language fractured without the aid of vision.

She didn’t answer.

Then in a soft voice, he added, “You don’t have to do anything. I will just be here.”

She heard him shuffle across the mat. The whisper of his breathing. The dull thud of his footwork. He wasn’t showing off. He was marking a rhythm, the familiar patterns they used to do together.

She stayed still and listened, counting the beats in his breath, the rhythm of his presence. When she finally stood, it was slow and hesitant. She raised her hands and stepped toward him.

Tim didn’t speak. He didn’t break the pattern. He moved closer, then further, marking a rhythm in space. When he was near, he tapped her shoulder; when he retreated, he dodged her reach. Again and again, he repeated the motion, and she followed. She missed, and missed again.

But on the fourth time, her fingers brushed his arm. She had caught him.

Tim didn’t say anything, but he paused long enough for her to feel the weight of her small victory.

They continued like this, a slow, patient dance. She would miss far more than she succeeded, but with each session, the misses became a little less frequent. At the end of the day when they were both exhausted, breathing hard with sweat on their brows, Tim picked up the training gear and turned to leave. Before he did, he paused and said quietly, “Same time tomorrow?”

Cassandra didn’t answer, but she nodded.

They continued like that for days, no words and no instructions. Just presence and patience. With each session, Tim adjusted the routine, raising the difficulty. Soon, she wasn’t just reacting, but also anticipating.

She wasn’t fighting an opponent, but was learning to trust space she couldn’t see, and to move without fear.

/|\ ^._.^ /|\

Slowly, painstakingly, a new world began to emerge. Her other senses, sharpened by necessity, began to pick up the slack. The subtle shift in air currents told her someone was moving nearby.

Barbara noticed it first. Cassandra no longer flinched when someone entered the room. She tilted her head toward sounds instead of away. She didn’t always recoil from touch anymore and began to move through the Batcave without stumbling into walls or furniture, slowly and carefully, but with increasing certainty.

One evening, Barbara laid a book across her lap, a children’s dictionary with raised tactile print. Cassandra traced the bumps with careful fingers. They weren’t Braille, just thickened ink on paper, but the texture made her pause. She smiled. It was small, but it was real.

The distinct clink of Alfred’s teacup against its saucer announced his presence. The faint metallic tang on Bruce’s uniform told her he had just returned from patrol. Her hearing, already extraordinary, became her eyes. She learned to pick out individual footsteps, the creak of a floorboard, the distant hum of traffic above. She could tell people apart by the rhythm of their breathing, the cadence of their walk, the particular way their clothes rustled.

Barbara adapted her lessons. Now they experimented with spatial audio. Cassandra wore headphones that played layered environmental recordings: footsteps approaching, receding, the whistle of wind, the catch of a breath. Afterward Barbara would ask, “Which side? How many? Who is it?” and Cassandra’s answers grew steadily more accurate.

Bruce soon added his own challenge: a training room wired with low-volume speakers, where foam projectiles fired at her from unseen angles. She had only sound and timing to rely on. At first, every strike left a bruise, but with each passing day, fewer landed. Each mark on her skin was proof she was improving.

The language barrier remained formidable, but in the darkness a different kind of understanding began to blossom. She felt the world in vibrations, echoes, and shifts of air, forced to trust the raw signals her body registered. Intuition became her vocabulary.

One night Bruce returned to the cave to find her standing perfectly still in its centre, eyes open but unfocused. She clapped her hands once, tilting her head toward the echo. Another clap, another pause, then she walked forward, fingertips brushing the wall. She was mapping the room with primitive echolocation, like a bat. Bruce didn’t interrupt. He only watched, and smiled.

Another day, during a sound exercise, Alfred dropped a fork on the stone floor. The sharp clatter made Cassandra flinch, then turn.

“Alfred,” she rasped, her voice hoarse from disuse. “You’re nervous.”

He froze. “Pardon?”

“You dropped it,” she murmured. “You never drop things.”

Silence stretched, then Alfred inclined his head. “That is correct, Miss Cassandra.”

She had read his emotion not from his face, but from the accident itself. She was reading the world again.

The darkness was still there, an unyielding presence, but it was no longer absolute. Within it, new pathways were being forged, new connections made. The world was still a mystery, but now, a mystery she was learning to unravel, one touch, one sound, one profound silence at a time.

/|\ ^._.^ /|\

Five weeks after the injury, Cassandra awoke to a soft, greyish light, a new presence at the edges of her vision. The crushing blackness was gone, replaced by a vague, swirling blur.

Someone walked into the room, a tray in her hands. Cassandra squinted, and her heart leaped.

Dull red hair.

A single, silent tear tracked a path down Cassandra’s cheek.

Barbara’s own eyes welled with tears as she watched the unseeing void in Cassandra’s eyes clear slightly. “You can see me,” she whispered.

Cassandra’s lips trembled into a small, wobbly smile. “Hi.”

The silence never truly left Cassandra. Not just the physical loss of sight, but the profound quiet of isolation, helplessness, and the unraveling of her identity. Yet, from this emptiness, she had constructed a new kind of fluency. She became fascinated by Braille, a language of touch, a code in texture.

Cassandra Cain, once fluent only in body language, had added new dialects to her soul. She could now hear fear in a heartbeat, read kindness in footsteps, and understand sorrow in silence. In a city where so much is unspoken, she had become one who truly listens.