Fire and Lightning (Book One) [Young Justice fanfic]

Prologue

Silence. Complete and utter silence. A silence coupled with a darkness so overwhelming she could hardly think. In an effort to ease her mind, she tried to open her eyes to get her bearings, only to find they were already open. She blinked hard twice, thinking perhaps she was just disoriented, but not a thing changed. She was completely blind and held at the mercy of the world.

She managed to move a hand to her face, and touched her useless eyes, clawing at them with her fingertips in a desperate attempt to rid herself of the dark curtain that was covering her world. As she smelled the blood on her hands, she realized it was hopeless. She tried to calm herself by thinking about simple truths that were irrefutable like her name and age, but she found that information was not present. Her heart rate was accelerating at a rapid pace; her breathing became ragged, her previous discomfort turning into panic. Why couldn't she remember? What was this, some kind of sick amnesia cliché?

She touched her head, flinching when it caused her pain, and forced herself to calm down, turning her focus into figuring out where she was. Since she couldn't use her eyes, she used her hands, feeling around. There was stone all around her, perhaps a cave? She continued to search with her hands before a faint sound reached her ears.

It was birdsong. She followed the sound, turning her head, and a slight breeze ruffled her hair, flowing through what felt to her like a tunnel when she investigated with her hands. She crawled through at a snails pace, eventually emerging into the outdoors as she felt the sun on her face. If she had been able to see, then she would have noticed it was sunset. She stayed on all fours, not trusting herself to stand just yet, and felt wood beneath her hands. When she crawled further she felt a dirt path, and inching forward yet again she felt the edge of a grassy area.

She coughed a little, an involuntary action, and an odd schematic of the three foot radius around her popping into her head, suddenly realizing how strong her ears really were now. She coughed again to test her suspicions. It was like an almost black and white image of the world, but only in basic shapes, like what you might expect animals that use echolocation see. She wondered briefly how it was possible that her body had adjusted so quickly to the loss of her sense of sight, but then she realized she really didn't care. As long as she had some kind of "vision" to rely on, maybe she could find help.

She coughed yet again, a tall shape coming into her line of "sight", and reached out to it, her hand finding the rough bark of a tree. Using it as support, she pulled herself unsteadily onto her feet. Now that she trusted herself to stand, she decided to formulate a plan. She would just go slowly until she found a hospital, and they could help her.

A boom of thunder echoed through her new world, revealing a larger area to her, a cluster of trees appearing one by one, seeming to stretch out forever. She couldn't try to make her way to the hospital now, storms were dangerous, so she decided to seek out shelter. She didn't want to go back to the stone prison she liberated herself from earlier, so she took baby steps into the woods, unknowingly headed into an entirely new life.