Chapter Text
Katsuki isn’t really sure how it happened. One minute, he was sitting in class listening to Aizawa drone on about some subtopic of ethics of rescue work for the seventh time that lesson, and the next, he was lying face up in a ditch, staring at the cloudy sky through the thick foliage of trees, body aching and head pounding. Clearly, something had happened between those two moments, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember.
Reaching up (thankful that he could still move his arms), he touched the spot on his head where the pain was the most intense. He could feel his hair matted down and caked in something he couldn’t see, and upon bringing his hand back into his vision, he guessed that what was matting it was blood. His fingers were coated in the bright liquid, and for a moment, he pondered on whether his blood had enough nitroglycerin to explode. Katsuki pulled his hand away from his face and tried setting off his quirk, but nothing happened.
Too groggy to be worried about it now, Katsuki ran a mental check of his body. He could feel a pressure on his chest, but it wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to. At the very least, the lack of pain in his chest told him that he hadn’t been wearing his binder for too long, and that meant that it hadn’t been more than eight or so hours since he put it on. Of course, he usually pushes the recommended time, but the deep ache he felt wearing it all day hadn’t really set in yet. Moving down, he could feel his arms and wrists aching, but that was normal for him. Clearly, he had just been actively using his quirk no more than an hour ago, but he hadn’t gotten a chance to stretch out his arms after whatever he had been doing. Other than that, he didn’t feel particularly hurt besides what was likely a concussion and some temporary retrograde amnesia. If he was lucky, the amnesia would pass in a few hours.
Grunting, Katsuki pushed himself up, powering through the tilt that the world did and the rush of nausea that hit him. It only worked to confirm that he had a concussion, but he would have to be a genuine idiot to not notice that, he figured. Looking around, he saw his classmates rousing from various states of unconsciousness. Some of them, like Deku and Teacher’s Pet, were already up and about checking on injuries. Katsuki could see Teacher’s Pet’s mouth moving, arms chopping away as he did, as he and Deku talked to Ponytail. They weren’t far away, but he couldn’t hear them past the muffled, underwater sounds that usually followed him late at night.
He felt a flare of anger and reached up to take out his hearing aids. Unfortunately, one was smashed - probably from whatever he hit his head on - and the other was dead. Pissed that he was now in some kind of accident that left him with retrograde amnesia, the severity of which he wouldn’t know till he talked to his classmates, without the ability to even hear, he stuffed the hearing aids into his pocket and zipped them. Maybe he could have Pikachu charge his one dead hearing aid without him knowing what was going on. He glanced around to see if anybody had seen him handling the hearing aids, but nobody seemed to be paying attention to him.
A wave of anxiety washed over him, chilling his skin and settling his heart in his stomach. Do any of his classmates know sign language? Does he even remember telling his classmates that he’s mostly deaf? Katsuki doesn’t remember ever telling anybody, but he wouldn’t really know that right now. Once again, he’d have to wait until he could talk to his classmates. It was utterly frustrating - having to depend on other people for basic information.
Shoving his anxiety down for now because the feelings weren’t at all helpful, Katsuki assessed the area that they were in. More of his classmates were waking up and moving about than a few minutes ago. It didn’t look like anybody was dead, which he guessed was probably a good thing, but there were quite a few people with injuries if the blood and wincing faces were anything to go by. Deku, Teacher’s Pet, Ponytail, and, now, Shitty Hair going around checking on the various injuries of their classmates.
Looking past his scattered classmates, Katsuki found that they were in a clearing; the grass wasn’t tall, per se, but it did enough to cover a few of his classmates from view. The clearing wasn’t massive, but it was a welcome reprieve from what lay beyond. The forest around them was dense, the tree cover so thick that the light didn’t permeate down to the forest floor (though the underbrush probably had something to do with that). The trees were tall, and though the trunks were smaller, their canopy laced together to form some kind of impenetrable barrier between the sky and the ground below. The fact that it was cloudy made the darkness of the forest around them appear even more threatening - though Katsuki would never admit that to anybody.
However, what didn’t make any sense to Katsuki was that there wasn’t a path or road anywhere he could see leading to this specific clearing that they found themselves in. Furthermore, there wasn’t any wreckage that indicated they had crashed, and it was unlikely that they had every single one of his classmates had all been thrown in the same direction without any sign of wreckage. So, it wasn’t any surprise then that Katsuki wondered how it was they had ended up there, and his apparent amnesia was making that topic even more difficult to ponder.
He felt like he was working with half the information he really needed, and he wasn’t some genius like his friends made him out to be. He worked hard to be where he is and know what he does. Unlike people like Ponytail and (Katsuki hates to admit it) Deku, he wasn’t someone who naturally excelled at the things he did. He worked his ass off until it paid off.
A hand on his shoulder startled him out of his musings, and he looked over to see Shitty Hair looking down at him with a concerned frown on his face.
“...okay…calling you,” Shitty Hair’s mouth appeared to say, but all Katsuki heard was silence. He wasn’t surprised - just angry. He didn’t know how long they were going to be out here, and the idea of all his classmates finding out he’s deaf wasn’t something that sat right with him. There wasn’t anything wrong with being deaf, Katsuki knew; however, he couldn’t help the burning fuzziness that filled his chest at the idea of letting them in on that particular vulnerability. That particular weakness.
“I’m fine, Shitty Hair,” Katsuki said, pushing the redhead's hand off his shoulder so he could shift his weight forward to stand. Once again, the world tilted and felt bile in the back of his throat, but he gritted his teeth. Like hell would he collapse when everybody else was doing just fine. He glanced at Shitty Hair and smirked at the leaves that found themselves lodged between his gelled locks.
“...look…head wound…rough,” Shitty Hair continued, and Katsuki only scoffed in response. He wasn’t really good at lip-reading, but to be fair, nobody was really good at lip-reading. Too many words used the same motions. Logically, if lip-reading were reliable enough, there would be no use for sign language, but here he was - living in a world with sign language. If anything, lip-reading was 90% context clues and 10% everything else. Take right now, for example. Shitty Hair was probably saying something along the lines of Well, from the look of it, your head wound is pretty rough, and even if that’s not what he was saying, that’s what Katsuki pretends he said.
“I said I’m fine, Shitty Hair. Go check on the other extras.”
Shitty Hair seemed hesitant to leave but nodded anyway and went to help Elbows, who was a few meters away from him. Katsuki wasn’t stupid. He knew that Shitty Hair was keeping an eye on him, but he acted as if that wasn’t something that worried him. His head was pounding, but he had powered through worse.
Movement caught his attention. Teacher’s Pet was chopping his arms in the center of the field, mouth moving as people moved toward him. Katsuki guessed this meant there was now an impromptu class meeting (see, context clues), and he hoped he might be able to gain some idea about where and why he was here instead of in that rescue ethics lecture he remembers just sitting in. Turning to look at Shitty Hair and Elbows, he waited until the two of them reached him before turning back to the class meeting. Racoon Eyes and Pikachu were already standing in the group of classmates around where the three would enter the meeting.
At least Katsuki knew one thing other than the state of his own health: his idiots, the ones he got stupidly protective over like they were the siblings he never got to have (though, again, Katsuki wouldn’t admit it), were okay. They weren’t fatally injured, and that was something he could latch onto. There were a lot, too many, unknowns right now, but at least he had that.