Chapter Text
Bakugo was in middle school when it first happened. He’d been practicing for something with his quirk (he can’t exactly remember what he’d been so worried about) and after a couple hours of continued blasts, his right ear had an ache in it that he couldn’t quite describe. Pushing it off until tomorrow, he found that after a couple of days, he was back to normal. This same phenomenon happened several times, and by the second-to-last year of middle school, he found that he occasionally had some trouble hearing. Not enough to cause a problem in the classroom; where reading the teacher’s lips was secondhand nature, but sometimes when the old hag or his dad spoke to him or when Deku was doing that fucking muttering again and he wasn’t paying total attention, he found himself either having them repeat it (in the case of his father) or yelling at the person (most everyone else).
His school ended up doing a hearing test at the begging of his final year of middle school. Bakugo walked in, heard two or three beeps, stared down the lady who seemed to be waiting for him to do something, and left. Later, his parents got a call from the school. The next day, Bakugo was half-dragged half-carried into the doctor’s office and again, some stupid woman made notes while test were run. Whatever. It didn’t matter anyway. He could still hear, and so what if he couldn’t hear high pitched noises? Finally, a stupid doctor (who happened to be a top audiologist that specialized in quirk-induced hearing damage) told him that he was going deaf and that, with continued consistent use of his quirk, he would be deaf by the end of high school. Bakugo didn’t remember much after that, but, according to his mother, he cussed out the doctor and demanded hearing aids within the same sentence. So, three months before school ended, Bakugo got hearing aids. Deku noticed, and he knew the fucking nerd was judging him. So, Bakugo slapped him around until the nerd swore to never tell anyone.
And so, life continued. Bakugo got into U.A., persuaded his parents to let him go, and carried on. The LOV attacked, he got kidnapped. He failed the Provisional License Exam and had to go to classes with Icy-Hot. Some days were worse than others, ear wise, and he was pretty sure fucking Deku wanted to say something. The first week back from Christmas break Bakugo wasn’t feeling great. Flying around using explosions to propel himself allowed him to be faster than Endeavor, but the extreme training had taken a toll on him more than anything else had. He felt like his hearing aids weren’t working properly, everything seemed dulled. Then, his class had to practice with the other class of extras to “show what they had learned over the break”. After a long fight against Icy-Hot, he was able to quite literally blow that fucker away. However, as soon as he saw Icy-Hot fly at least 20 feet, his hearing went. Bakugo checked to make sure that his hearing aids were in and on, but even flicking them on and off didn’t help. He walked over to the sidelines, and noticed Shitty Hair was right next to him, and all he could hear was some sort of garble coming out of his mouth. Bakugo trailed behind Shitty Hair and Electro-fuck desperately trying to get his hearing aids to work. *Author’s note: Bakugo’s hearing has been bad up to this point, but his hearing aids were largely to make his kind of busted hearing work perfectly, and now he’s almost completely deaf.* All he could hear was his own voice in his head, screaming too loudly for him to think.
Bakugo didn’t remember how he got back to the dorms. He was pretty sure he let his body go on autopilot, ignoring everyone and changing as quickly as possible. His dorm room, meticulously clean, was where he spent the rest of the day crying, debating whether or not he should call his parents or tell Aizawa, attempting to fix his hearing aids, finishing homework (Shitty Deku wouldn’t beat him), and crying again. By the time 8:30 rolled around, Bakugo was a wreck. Physically and mentally exhausted, he didn’t hear the knock at the door until the person just invited themselves in.
“Problem child.” Aizawa’s hand tapped his shoulder, waking him up from half-sleep. “Are you alright? You missed dinner, and your classmates said you were acting strange after training today.” *Author’s note again: Bakugo is really good at reading lips, it’s how he’s gotten through the last couple months, but he’s used to having the noise from the world reinforce what is being said.*
”Huh…I’m fine. Just leave me alone. My hearing aids just won’t fucking work is all.” Bakugo rolled over and attempted to get rid of his teacher, but Aizawa just stared at him with a small amount of concern visible in his eyes.
“Problem child, get up.” With that, and no small amount of struggling from Bakugo, he was forced down to Recovery Girl’s office. Clutching his hearing aids in one hand, he sat on the bed and waited for the small woman to finish her inspection of his ears. Eventually, he’d had enough of waiting.
“What is it? Why won’t you just fucking tell me, hag?” The woman turned around, facing him once more.
“It appears that your ears are damaged. I—“ Recovery Girl was quickly interrupted by her patient.
“I already know that. It’s on my fucking forms and shit. My hearing aids are damaged! Fucking fix them!” Bakugo was now truly mad. He’d had a fucking long day, and this lady didn’t seem to be helping one bit.
“Problem child.” Now this fucker was in his line of sight again, and appeared to actually be concerned. “It appears that your ears are damaged more than what they were before today. I will be calling your parents to let them know something has happened, and I assume that they will take you to your doctor.”
“Fine.”
The woman then decided to make his fucking day even worse. “I’m also going to recommend having you sit out of training until the problem is fixed. If there’s a chance that something has happened to your ears, we don’t want to aggravate it. If you need help for your regular classes, I’m sure your teachers will be able to accommodate you. Sitting up front, making sure you can read their lips—we have to deal with lots of kids with special requirements, so—“ She was again cut off.
“Fucking fine! They don’t need to do anything special! I’m fucking fine!” With that totally fine outburst, Bakugo walked out of the nurses’ office and stomped back to his dorm. He was just fine. They’d see it was just the aids again.