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Logically, Atsuhiro knew that if Dabi had amnesia (post-traumatic, specifically, with severe retrograde and minor anterograde symptoms, if they were judging it correctly), there would be things he didn’t know or didn’t remember that most of them could. It most often came up in the form of occasionally needing to be reminded where a city or ward was, or having some more obscure pop culture references explained to him. Usually, it was nothing too troublesome.
However, they had never really accounted for the small things, the ones that weren’t immediately thought of as a problem with amnesia.
“No, fuck you!” Dabi snapped at Spinner. “I am the epitome of being polite, dickhead!”
Sometimes Atsuhiro wondered why their investigation into Dabi’s identity moved as slowly as it did, and then he would be reminded that he was surrounded by children.
“Do you even hear the words out of your mouth right now?” Spinner asked incredulously. “The reason we keep having to fight yakuza families on this investigation is because you’re an asshole!”
Toga and Twice were watching the two go at it, heads turning back and forth like they were watching a tennis match. Shigaraki was doing nothing to stop the argument (although, Atsuhiro had to admit to himself that his interference probably would’ve made it worse), instead playing some game on his phone with earbuds in, and Kurogiri was nowhere to be found.
Sometimes Atsuhiro wondered if he was a villain or a babysitter.
“Shigaraki does even more damage when he keeps calling them ‘NPCs with shitty AI!’ How the fuck am I the problem?”
“Because yakuza are more likely to react to the obvious insult of ‘dickhead’ than something as weird as the way Shigaraki speaks!”
“Not my fault yakuza can’t take fucking trash talk!”
“It’s not trash talk!” Spinner exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “You’re intentionally aggravating them, you idiot!”
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way I talk!”
“And the Earth is flat,” Spinner commented sarcastically, rolling his eyes.
There was a pause, and Atsuhiro suddenly found himself paying attention to the sudden silence instead of passively processing the argument. He glanced at Dabi, whose face was screwed up in confusion.
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he asked, looking at Spinner like he was an idiot, which, to be fair, wasn’t much different from how he always looked at Spinner.
The mutant looked taken aback at the odd response - Atsuhiro admittedly found it odd as well, and Toga and Twice looked as if they’d finally gotten to a particularly juicy part of a soap opera. Spinner opened and closed his mouth a few times before hesitantly giving a response. “I - ‘and the Earth is flat?’ It’s a saying?” he said, lack of confidence displayed by his awkward hand gestures. Dabi’s facial expression didn’t change, so he weakly continued speaking. “It’s like saying ‘yeah, right,’ in a way?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dabi’s face began to look particularly degrading. Spinner shifted on his feet.
“It’s like implying that what you’re saying is also false, y’know?” Spinner shrugged. “‘Cause the Earth is round and all-”
Dabi reared back with a horrified expression.
“The Earth is what?!”
Atsuhiro could have heard a pin drop in the stunned silence that followed. Everyone stared at Dabi with disbelieving expressions.
“You’re… you’re kidding, right?” Spinner asked. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Dabi, did you really not know that?” Toga giggled at the shocked look on his face.
“No, seriously, what the fuck are you saying?” Dabi asked uncertainly.
“The Earth is a sphere, man,” Twice said. “Flat as can be!”
“No fucking way.” Dabi shook his head, giving them all a pissed glare as if they were the ones messing with him. “Nuh-uh, you’re all fucking with me.”
“What the fuck’s happening now?” Shigaraki interrupted, finally pulling an earbud out and surveying the room. “If we’re bullying Dabi, I want in, but if Spinner and Dabi are just gonna keep going at it, tell Spinner he sucks at arguing.”
“I’m right here, dude,” the lizard in question muttered incredulously. Atsuhiro felt slightly bad for him but was unable to feel surprised.
Dabi turned to Shigaraki, not rising to any of the bait laid out for him, and simply pointed at the rest of the room. “They think the Earth’s a sphere.”
Shigaraki slowly raised an eyebrow, and Atsuhiro groaned, burying his head in his arms. He desperately wished for Kurogiri to be there to help mitigate the coming fight.
“That’s fucking stupid,” Shigaraki said after a moment, and Atsuhiro’s head snapped up, looking at him, like the rest of the League, with shocked disbelief.
“I know, right?”
“As much as I hate to agree with Dollar Store Harvey Dent over here-“
“Fuck off, you reject cabbage patch baby.”
“-I’m with him on this one,” Shigaraki said, giving them all a look that was somehow even more degrading than it usually was. If Atsuhiro were a weaker man like, say, Spinner, he probably would have begun to doubt his own argument in the face of such scathing confidence. “What the fuck are you all on? If it’s anything harder than weed you’re getting kicked out of the party.”
“We’re not on anything!” Spinner said defensively. “The Earth is a sphere, that’s a scientific fact!”
Shigaraki scoffed. “That’s the fakest shit I’ve ever heard. The Earth is a sphere? That doesn’t even make sense, what would it even be in?”
Twice decided to speak up, raising his hand excitedly as if he were in school. “Ooh, ooh! It floats around the sun because of gravity!”
Dabi squinted at the other man. “I… think I’ve heard of that?”
Shigaraki was a lot more unimpressed. “What the fuck is gravity?”
Atsuhiro felt a strangled noise claw at his throat.
Toga bounced her way in between the two. “It’s why things fall down!” she cheered. “The Earth is really really big, so small things fall towards it, and the sun is super super huge, so the Earth is always falling around it!”
Not the most eloquent way to explain gravity, Atsuhiro supposed, but it was at least nice to know she’d paid a little bit of attention in school.
Shigaraki’s face didn’t change. “Then how the fuck have we not fallen into the sun?”
“It’s because of, uh…” she paused, holding a hand to her mouth as she thought, and Atsuhiro had to fight down his instinctive reaction to pull it away because she forgot she was holding a knife again. She hummed for a moment before looking up, her face brightening. “Oh, I remember! It’s because the Earth goes around the sun really fast, and you can’t slow down in space, so it always goes fast enough to not fall at the sun!”
Twice nodded along sagely. “Centripetal force, I remember that from high school. Copernicus didn’t know shit!”
Dabi looked like his brain was melting, and Shigaraki was still unmoved. Atsuhiro continued to keep his mouth shut, desperately trying to ignore the situation until Kurogiri was back.
“That’s the stupidest fucking thing. How’s the Earth round, much less floating around the sun, if you look out and it’s so fucking flat?”
“Oh come on, Shigaraki!” Twice whined. “How do you explain all the other planets being round if the Earth’s flat? Astronomy is fucking bullshit!”
“Wait, other planets are real?” Dabi interrupted, speaking for the first time in several minutes. “I thought those were just sci-fi tropes or something.”
Atsuhiro slammed his head onto the bar and shrieked.
Hawks shivered and ducked his head further into the fur collar of his flight jacket. It was well into autumn, and it was quickly getting to the temperatures where he’d rather stay at home under his heat lamp all day, but alas, duty calls.
‘Duty’ in that specific instance meant going to the League hideout with the groceries Kurogiri had asked him to pick up on his way over. He shifted the paper grocery bag to one arm and reached out to open the door to the bar and-
“YOU’RE FUCKING KIDDING ME!”
-well, that boded good news.
Hawks reluctantly pushed the door open and stepped in.
“Wait, Tomura-kun,” Toga said, the first person he saw as he peeked his head in. “Dabi thought it was just water forever and you said that was stupid, so you don’t believe that, right?”
Shigaraki scoffed. “Of course I know it’s not endless water!” he waved a hand dismissively. “You just get out pretty far and then you reach the end of the map!”
“The what?!” Mr. Compress shrieked.
Hawks paused hesitantly for a moment before calling out, “Is Kurogiri in?”
The League froze in place, all of them turning to look at him. It wasn’t as if he’d never been to the bar before - he’d been plenty of times, but the scene that was laid out before him looked particularly ridiculous. Dabi and Shigaraki on one side of the bar, the rest of League minus Kurogiri (who, unfortunately, did not seem to be in) on the other side, clearly caught mid-argument.
The League argued a lot, that was nothing new. But Dabi and Shigaraki apparently being on the same side of the argument?
Hawks wondered if he should’ve come the next day instead.
“Heyyy…” he started, slowly inching his way inside under their stares. “Uh, I got the stuff Kurogiri wanted.” He held the bag out in front of him and carefully set it down on the bar.
“Hawks.” Mr. Compress was the first one to move, taking long strides across the room to put his hands on Hawks’ shoulders.
“Hey, Compress,” he greeted hesitantly. “You look, uh,” deranged, “a little ruffled.”
“I’m aware,” the showman stated dryly. “However, more important matters are afoot.”
And Hawks was suddenly pushed in front of Compress to face Dabi and Shigaraki.
“Back us up on this,” Compress said. “The Earth is round and there are other planets, right?”
Hawks paused. “Uhhh… Yes?” Wow, A+ for confidence right there.
He could feel Compress freeze behind him and was spun around once again to face him. “Hawks, please tell me your hesitance was because of the situation and not because you agree with them.”
He ducked his head into the collar of his jacket instead of responding.
Toga and Twice laughed loudly and at length in the background.
“Hawks.” The grip on his shoulders tightened. “Dabi has amnesia and Shigaraki didn’t go to school, please, for the sake of my sanity, tell me there is a good reason for you not knowing that.”
The hero felt a flush crawl up his neck and onto his cheeks, and he averted his eyes. “The Commission sponsored my education, they didn’t really see astronomy as an important subject.”
“Really?” Compress threw his hands up disbelievingly, walking away from Hawks with an agitated huff. “Really, Hawks? It’s not like I’m asking you to name all the constellations or explain how black holes are made!”
“Hey!” Hawks snapped, puffing his wings up defensively. “It never comes up in real life! But I’m pretty sure the Earth is round. I mean, it looks sorta curved when I fly up really high, at least. And I swear I heard about there being like - other Earths out there? But they aren’t real Earths. Some of them are solid. And also you can’t stand on some of them unless you try really hard.”
Hawks’ attention snapped to Spinner as he groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Oh my God.”
“At least he agrees that the Earth is round, though!” Twice chimed in, always the optimist. “He’s a fucking idiot!”
“Hey, it’s not like I don’t know they didn’t teach me a lot of things,” Hawks said. “I didn’t know what a washing machine was or how to use them until I was like, eighteen and a half.”
Toga laughed hysterically.
Shigaraki made an annoyed noise before saying, “The fuck is a washing machine?”
Dabi raised his hand. "While we're at it, can someone explain to me what the fuck a graduation ceremony is?"
Hawks hesitated for a brief moment before speaking up as well. "I mean, if you guys are offering to explain shit, I've always wondered what the nutrition facts labels on food meant."
Compress buried his head in his arms and released a muffled noise that sounded strangely like a sob.
Kurogiri wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he arrived back at the bar after having left for a few hours to run some errands. He had left Compress in charge, but he understood that attempting to corral the younger League members into a semblance of order would be taxing on even the most patient of people.
In short, he wasn’t sure if the bar would be disintegrated or burned down when he got back.
While he wasn’t expecting to see Tomura, Dabi, and Hawks all sat down on a couch while Spinner and Compress wrote furiously on a whiteboard (interestingly labeled Shit you don’t know) and Toga and Twice laughed hysterically in the background, he wasn’t exactly complaining. Tomura looked annoyed, Hawks somewhat shamed, and Dabi as if he was going through a revelation, Kurogiri supposed that while he wasn’t quite sure what was going on, he was at least thankful that they weren’t fighting.
Compress looked… particularly agitated, though Kurogiri supposed he couldn’t blame the man.
He quickly noticed the bag of groceries sat on the bar counter and made a note to thank Hawks later, along with giving Compress a strong drink in thanks for watching the League while he was out.
Kurogiri let the chatter and shouting of the League wash over him in a familiar whitenoise as he gathered everything into his arms and headed into the kitchen to put it all away.
It was nice to know that he could leave for a few hours and not have to worry about anything going wrong.