Chapter 52:
Pain wasn't an unfamiliar sensation for Aizawa. He had his fair share of injuries over the years of his hero work, starting with his first year at Yuuei. He had never experienced anything like this before though. Pain surrounded him in a steady thrum, so intense that he couldn't begin to pinpoint where it originated from. He had to be at a hospital. It was the only thing that made sense to him in his drugged state. He couldn't move, couldn't open his eyes. Whether that was because of the bandages covering his body or because of the extent of his injuries, he couldn't be certain. He couldn't think clearly enough to do more than acknowledge the situation.
He must have passed out, because when became aware again the pain had lessened and the drugged feeling had increased. His thoughts slid away from him like water through a sieve. Why was he in the hospital? He tried to catch hold of the last thing he remembered, but everything seemed to be hidden behind the fog of drugs and pain. Had he been on patrol? No. That didn't sound right.
Voices sounded from the room around him. Aizawa wanted to open his eyes, but he couldn't. The words filtered in muffled and faint.
"Izuku keeps asking about him. I don't know what to tell him anymore. You would think that after being released from the hospital he would want to get some fresh air, but he's refusing to leave without seeing him."
"I understand what he's feeling, but you know this would kill him. When he can't ask questions, can't verify that he's going to be okay."
Izuku. The name triggered a spike of worry. Distantly, he could hear the machines in the room, the tempo of their beeping racing faster as his mind tried to pull pieces of memory together through the haze.
Aizawa had been with Izuku hadn't he? They had been… He concentrated as the details drifted closer. They had been at Yuuei. It was a demonstration day for the USJ facility.
"What's happening? Should his heart rate be increasing like that?"
"Hizashi, find a nurse!"
He had gotten the class there fine. Thirteen had met them there. All Might was late, but Aizawa hadn't been surprised by that. The images hit him all at once, a blur of snapshots he didn't have the context to connect at the moment. Dark smoke and a mob of villains. The leader with the dismembered hand covering his face. Students screaming, and the look of Izuku's face before the monster smashed everything else away in a fresh wave of pain and horror.
The moment of realization left him reeling, and he gasped despite the bandages he knew were wrapped around his face. Aizawa couldn't breathe, his lungs refusing to work. The machines screamed as the room suddenly flooded with the sound of panicked conversations. Aizawa couldn't make the words out through the ringing in his ears before the sudden silence that followed dragged him down.
Hizashi collapsed into a chair a few feet from Aizawa's room. He had want to stay when the alarms on the machines had starting blaring, but even his hero status wasn't enough to stand in the way of a very irate nurse who had been tasked with getting him out the of room. He could still hear the sounds of people moving from down the hall, but he couldn't look, his head buried in his hands. What would he do if they exited the room with their heads hung low, expressions somber. Worse yet was the possibility that he would be able to hear the words "time of death" echo in the now empty hallway.
He had faced death before. It was impossible to be in their line of work and never know someone who had died in the line of duty, but never had it brushed so closely to his own heart. If Aizawa Shouta died, a part of Hizashi would die with him. Hizashi didn't think that he would be able to move on from that. They had made plans after graduation. Funeral arrangements. Wills. It had been a thing that was quietly suggested to them from outside the school, and they had both taken the suggestion seriously. Still, a part of Hizashi had foolishly believed that he would never have to face this situation. If he did, he most certainly wouldn't have imagined doing it alone.
Izuku would be waiting for an update, but Hizashi hoped that Inko had managed to convince him to go home for the day. He couldn't face him until he managed to pull himself together. Until he knew what was going on in that room down the hall. Until something in the world made sense again. Because they were the good guys, weren't they? Didn't they deserve better than being almost beaten to death by some kind of genetically engineered monster?
Hizashi had never hated his career more than in that moment. He was supposed to be a hero, and all he could do was sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair waiting uselessly while his best friend might be dying only a few yards away. Hizashi felt a familiar burn in the back of his throat, but he refused to cry.
"Yamada-san?"
Hizashi jumped, so caught up in his worries that he hadn't heard anyone approach. It was the same nurse that had hurried him out of the room. Hizashi forced himself to breathe as he examined her face. She didn't look particularly upset, but then she had to have been used to things like this happening if she worked in a hospital. Her expression was professionally blank, giving Hizashi no indication of what type of news she was about to give him. He felt a hairsbreadth away from shattering.
"Aizawa-san is stable," she said, and Hizashi almost felt like he could breathe again. "Unfortunately, we aren't sure what triggered the incident. His heartrate spiked, and he seemed to have trouble breathing. It was noted in his file that he has a history of panic attacks. It's possible that he was aware enough to remember the details of the attack. He's unconscious at the moment, but we think it's best that he doesn't have any more visitors for the day. We're going to keep him under observation, and if anything changes about his status you will be the first to know."
"I…Can I…" Hizashi wasn't even sure what it was that he wanted to ask. Aizawa was stable. He was fine. Then why did Hizashi feel like he was falling apart?
"Go home, Yamada-san. You've barely left the hospital. I know that when you leave here you go to visit your students. Sleeping in a hospital lounge chair isn't going to help anyone," she said. Hizashi knew that she was trying to be encouraging, but wasn't that the point? He couldn't help anyone no matter how much he wanted to. "Go home and sleep in your own bed."
Hizashi could see in her face that she wasn't going to be argued with. He forced himself to his feet and nodded. "And you'll let me know?"
"As soon as anything changes," she confirmed.
Decision made for him, Hizashi headed out of the hospital in a daze. He considered heading back to his apartment like the nurse had suggested, but he immediately dismissed that idea. The thought of sitting in his empty room thinking about the worst-case scenarios wouldn't give him the break that he knew his brain needed. He would go and check on the cats. His other visits had been brief, and Aizawa trusted no one else from the school with his apartment. They probably needed the company as much as he did. Marlo's too intelligent eyes had watched him warily the last time he visited. It was closer to the hospital than his own place anyway.
Izuku may have protested leaving the hospital, but he was asleep the moment Inko got him settled into his room. It was a relief to have him back under her roof, but she wouldn't be able to take advantage of the feeling to get some rest of her own. She had too much to do, too much to consider.
Her meeting with Nedzu hadn't gone as planned. Inko had known that she couldn't expect it to given everything she knew about the principal, and while she couldn't call it a complete success it wasn't necessarily a failure either. It was an opportunity, and Inko needed to come to terms with the situation she had found herself in before letting Izuku and Hizashi in on her decision. They would probably try to make her change her mind, but Izuku had developed his stubbornness for a reason. She wouldn't be persuaded by their attempts. That was part of the reason that she hadn't told them about her meeting. She had too much to do to waste time arguing with their misguided good intentions.
Nedzu was waiting for her when she arrived at Yuuei. She almost thought that he would have avoided her, knowing that she wasn't happy with him at the moment, but she was directed straight into his office. Hopefully he was aware enough to realize that delaying the meeting wouldn't do anything to dissuade her from confronting him. Inko had spent enough time with Aizawa and Hizashi in recent years to know the kind of scheming that Nedzu was prone too, and she had no interest in playing his games.
"Ah, Midoriya-san," Nedzu said, gesturing to the chairs in front of his desk with a smile. Inko didn't move to take a seat, and Nedzu's smile fell.
"I'm going to get straight to the point," Inko said. "I do not blame you for the attack. I have seen your security, and there was no way you could have predicted what happened. Your response since that day has been lacking at best. You have a lot of responsibilities on your plate, and I do not envy the position that you are in, but your students should be your first priority. Not the press. Not the school's reputation. The students. And telling a room full of distraught parents that an attack that left their children injured was a 'learning experience' is misguided at best."
Nedzu began to interrupt, but Inko refused to give him an inch. "I am not done speaking," she said, "and it would be in your best interest not to interrupt me." She waited a moment to see if he would continue, but he sat silently, watching her with a calculating look in his eyes that did not comfort Inko in the least.
"I have been chosen by the parents of 1-A to speak on their behalf. From what I understand from Shouta and Hizashi, you do not speak to parents often. Unfortunately, that shows. Since the initial meeting about the attack, you have given no new updates on how the situation is being handled. What changes are you making to ensure that this doesn't happen again? What other plans are in place to help the students return to school? What accommodations are you planning on making to help them recover from this?"
She paused, wondering if Nedzu would take the opportunity to interrupt her, to explain, but he followed her advice and didn't say a word. She couldn't read in his expression what he thought about her questions, but in the end that didn't matter. He could think whatever he wanted as long as she got the results that she needed.
"If you are not more transparent with your plans for 1-A, you are going to lose your students. Multiple parents are considering removing their students from Yuuei. Particularly those whose children here harmed by Thirteen's quirk. Obviously, no one is blaming Thirteen for what happened. Thankfully, none of them will have lasting injuries, but there is not enough being done to help them mentally deal with the fact that they were injured by their teacher even if it was an accident. Therapy was a good idea, but mandating it as a condition of their return to school is putting unnecessary pressure on the students to be okay with what happened in a time frame that might do more harm than good. The last thing we want is for a child to pretend that they are fine in order to return to school."
Izuku would definitely be inclined to try that if it was a condition of returning, and she felt certain that he wasn't alone in that. People who wanted to be heroes in order to protect others tended to be self-sacrificing. It wasn't a tendency she wanted to encourage in children who had just started high school. Having them suppress their feelings and their natural reactions to the trauma that they had experienced was only going to hurt them in the long term.
"As parents," she continued, "we understood the risks that would come with supporting our children in their goals. We would have supported them if this had made them change their minds about what they wanted. But they are still children, and they should be able to expect a reasonable level of safety at their school no matter what kind of danger they will be putting themselves in after graduation. It is your job to find a way to guarantee that."
Done with what she wanted to say, Inko had struggled not to collapse in the offered chair. She didn't enjoy confrontation, but it was something that needed to be said. Considering her friendship with two of Yuuei's teachers, she was in the best position to ensure that the parents' concerns were heard even if the other parents didn't know it.
When Nedzu finally spoke, Inko expected it to be platitudes she didn't want to hear. Vague hints of plans that he hadn't fully pulled together. Useless reassurances that talked around the issues she had pointed out to him. Instead, he said the last thing she could have ever imagined.
"Midoriya Inko," he said, a cool smile curling at the corner of his mouth. "How would you feel about a job?"
Kaminari Koharu was tired. The hadn't been back to the hospital since she had lost her family, and she wished that it wasn't necessary to be there now. Denki had finally woken up after his surgery, but he had taken one look at her and insisted that she not stay the night again. She loved her grandson and the fact that he cared so much about other people, but she wished that he would care a little more about taking care of himself.
Finding out that he hadn't been entirely honest with her about the effects of his quirk had been hard enough to hear with Denki sitting in front of her clearly okay. He had stammered through the admission and immediately followed it up with the news that his new teacher would be helping him find a way to avoid hurting himself further. It would take a little more prying on her part to discover that he was admitting the problem-and getting help for it-because of his new friends, but Koharu had gotten there eventually. She owed those two children more than she could say.
Discovering what had happened to her grandson at school without being able to see him had been one of the most difficult things that she had ever endured. She had listened to the description of what he had undergone in a horrified silence. It was only when she was finally left alone to process what she had been told that she realized what she needed to do. She turned the decision over and over in her mind, but she didn't see any other options. Denki had a big heart, but if she didn't intervene he was going to get himself killed. She had lost too many people. She had no one else to lose, and she would do whatever was needed to prevent anything more happening to him. Even if it meant that Denki would never forgive her.
Denki must have seen the decision in her face, because the first thing he said to her-after telling her he loved her and assuring her the he was fine despite the bandages covering the wound on his face- was that he wasn't going to leave Yuuei. Her resolve didn't crumble like she knew Denki wanted it to, but she agreed that the conversation could be saved for a later date. The long argument that it was sure to turn into wouldn't help Denki heal. She would let him think that he won for the moment while she used her time to come up with convincing reasons to make him see things her way. She could pull him out of Yuuei without his agreement if she had to, but she would prefer to have him on board.
It was during this time, waiting until she could take Denki home and life could start to get back to normal that she had a visitor. When the knock came to her door, Koharu had a few guesses to who it might be. Midoriya Inko had stopped by several times, despite how worried she must have been over her own son. Hatsume Natsumi and Yamada Hizashi had as well. It wasn't the circumstances she wanted to meet the mothers of her grandson's friends, but she had appreciated that they cared enough about Denki to check in on her and see how she was doing.
The man who waited outside her door wasn't anyone she recognized though. He had too have been around her age, thin and sickly. Koharu had never before seen someone she thought would be knocked over by a slight breeze before, but this stranger seemed as though he shouldn't even have been standing. Shocked as she was by his appearance, it took her a moment to gather her words. In that time, he coughed wetly, and Koharu shoved down the instinct to shuffle the man inside so that she could ensure that he was alright. Her grandson had just been attacked. She couldn't invite strangers into her home, no matter how close to death they may have looked.
"Can I help you?" She asked, hoping that he would ask her to call the hospital for him. She couldn't think of any other reason that he would have stopped at her door.
"Kaminari Koharu?"
"Yes?" Her worry spiked. How did he know her name? This couldn't be just a random stranger needing help if he was asking after her specifically.
"I teach at Yuuei," he said after clearing his throat. He looked up, eyes burning into hers. "My name is Yagi Toshinori, and I'm here to offer speak to you about a proposition for young Kaminari Denki."