ImmediatelyWriting's One Shots

#45. Naruto) But The Mask, Though

Summary:
The sharingan can read and copy movements. At just twelve years old, Sasuke Uchiha has already nailed this skill. His eyes grant him possibilities not every deaf person gets; he can read people's lips at an immense speed, and he learned to speak by copying their movements.
When Team 7 is formed, Sasuke feels like his life will become easier than it was at school. Instead, he meets his mortal enemy; Kakashi's mask.
Slowly going insane at his difficulty understanding his teacher, he reaches out to his teammates. It soon turns out, though, that removing Kakashi's mask isn't so easy, especially because Sasuke refuses to tell his teammates why the task at hand is important to begin with.

Fandom: Naruto
Ship: None
Genre: Deaf AU

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Some things can be changed, some things can't. It's easy as that.

Sasuke can't change that his parents, along with the rest of his clan, died gruesome deaths because of the brother he'd trusted to be the good guy. Sasuke can't change that he's the last Uchiha in the Leaf Village because of said brother. And he certainly can't change that he was born this way; deaf.

Outside of his family, who kept their vulnerable son away from the chaos that was going on outside, no one has ever had the slightest idea that Sasuke can't hear a damn thing. While in reality, a bomb could explode in a classroom right now and Sasuke won't be able to hear it.

That's just how it is. It's nothing he can change, and honestly, he couldn't care less about that.

In the past he would have trouble with it; he couldn't understand what people were saying, absolutely clueless about everything. It wasn't like he could read people's lips back then, which he can now. Ever since he developed the sharingan everything started to become clearer.

For the first time he knew what people saying, since he could read the movements of lips so clearly now. Of course, he first had to learn for himself which movement collaborated with which letter, but when he did he knew what they said. He could read their pity and he realized soon that the Hokage and his supervisors talked about him as "the mute, and also last, Uchiha". He hated that they thought he'd gone mute because of the trauma. They didn't even try to help him speak after the experience.

Instead of waiting for them to find out that he couldn't hear nor speak, Sasuke started studying hard, trying over and over to activate his sharingan like he did that fateful day. Like he did when he could suddenly see his brother's lips moving as if in slow-motion, and if he'd known what each movement meant, he would've been able to find out what Itachi said in the moment that he killed their parents.

He taught himself to put the small movements of people's lips into letters and then words and sentences. At first it was hard to know what they said, but after a while it became normal to him.

After much practice he slowly learned to sort of copy the moving of other people's lips to the point that he actually learned to speak. He had no clue if it sounded normal, but it probably did, since no one ever suspected a thing about him being deafer than deaf.

He lived life like a normal twelve-year-old student now, apart from that fact that he had become an orphan somewhere along the way; doing pretty okay during class, even though he has to admit translating Iruka's fast lip movements into sentences could get pretty tough. Luckily he was better at the practical things, so he could easily compensate for what he missed because of his deafness.

He dragged himself through years of studying the quick notes he made during class, trying to keep his grades up somewhat, just so he could get to this moment; it's time now, to become an actual member of a team. A team that'll help him and his sharingan become stronger through training and fighting, things like that; not by having him take notes while fixating on Iruka's quickly moving lips.