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"Where's Yamada ?"
His words echo in the half destroyed building. The intel was wrong… You found more than 50 members of the Paranormal Liberation Front in there. The battle raged for hours. Plans A, B, C, all the way to the letter Z, went south. Nobody foresaw this chaos, not even Nezu. How many of those hideouts does the PLF own? How many more soldiers that the hero society knows nothing about ?
“Where’s… Yamada…”
He says again, but this time to himself. How could he lose him? When were they separated? Confused, Midnight looks around, then stares at Eraserhead, he’s usually the one who knows what to do.
The cops are buzzing around with straitjackets and quirk suppressing handcuffs. The paramedics are overwhelmed. Slowly, more and more big black bags appear. The toll was huge on both sides. It was supposed to be a small operation, only 8 heroes showed up, you were not prepared for that.
“Where is he”
Aizawa whispers under his breath, as he starts pacing in the building, Midnight following him. He passes by Gang Orca, wounded, he’s still giving CPR to a beat up villain. They move to another room where a couple of heroes are crying in each other’s arms.
“Where’s Yamada ?”
His scream shakes everybody in the room. After a few seconds, a muffled voice breaks the silence: “Somebody, come here, HELP!”.
It comes from behind a heavy door that leads to the boiler room. Aizawa almost flies there. He slams the door open only to see Rock Lock, tears in his eyes, both hands pressed on Present Mic’s throat. His variegated costume now has more red than any other color.
***
Hizashi’s chest moves with the rhythm of the respirator. In 5 minutes, a nurse and her student will come to change the dressings. Tonight, at 7pm, he’ll hear the nurse assistant start her round. Approximately 22 minutes later, she’ll reach Hizashi’s room to set a new bag of “food” on the gastric tube. Every day, the same music plays, with a star unaware of his role.
During the dressings change, Shouta forces himself to watch. His eyes want to wander away, so he stares harder. “Look at what you’ve done”. The villain’s quirk gave him sharp and numerous blades extending from his fingers. He cut the hero’s “speaker” away with a hand, then chopped his throat with another. “Where were you when it happened?” According to Rock Lock, the whole thing happened in less than 2 seconds. “What were you doing?” . The villain seemed enraged, he was going for the kill. If Rock Lock didn’t apply pressure thoroughly on the wounds right after, Hizashi would have bled to death. “Useless… just like last time.”
He makes himself watch the swollen cuts, not fully scarred yet, threatening to reopen at the slightest push. On his chest, tiny scars are the only signs of the multiple puncture wounds on his lungs. Shouta learned the role of each tube : a big one to breathe, one to drain the excess of fluids, one for nutrition, one to give him medication on his chest, another one on his arm for the saline, the urinary catheter… He admires the technical skills of the nurses, each move has a purpose, everything stays sterile, no mistake. The one with the red eyes has a very gentle way to clean the glue after removing one of the plasters that secure the tubes on the hero’s body.
Shouta falls asleep in a hallway. At first, nurses tried to shoo him out of the hospital, but they eventually gave up.
“Morning, get up! Get coffee, wash your hands, scrub those filthy nails, we don’t want to give him an infection!”
Shouta gets the brush, comb, and spray bottle from the bedside table. He saw hizashi do it thousands of times, but until then, he ignored that he was able to do it by himself. First, he shakes the bottle (water and argan oil), then sprays some on the length of the hair, but never on top of the head ! Starting with the bottom, he brushes the knots away. The nurse showed him how to move the head safely so he can grab all of the hair and make sure they won’t mate. Then, with the comb, he styles the hair on Hizashi’s left side, and braids them simply. “Here you are, I know you wouldn't go anywhere with messy hair, not even your own bed.”
9am : the physiotherapist comes in. He makes sure Hizashi’s muscles have their daily exercise to make his recovery easier. Then, the nurses are back…
Whenever Shouta cannot be here, Nemuri steps up. Nezu had a long talk with the doctors. Cementos left flowers and a poetry book that Shouta already read. Ectoplasm left a letter. All Might… no, Yagi, had a hard time staying in the room. He tried to hide his shaking hand in his oversized T Shirt.
When they learned the nature of the injury, they all said the same thing “I don’t know what to say.” It seems nobody has anything to say about this. “What for? What is done cannot be undone. You should have been more attentive back there…”
Five weeks pass. Shouta is in the middle of a training session with class 1A, when he’s interrupted by Nezu. “Aizawa-kun… He woke up. Yagi is on his way to teach your class. I’ll stay with them in the meantime.” Nezu spoke with his usual detached tone and calm voice. If one doesn't know him well, one could think he doesn’t care. “I give you 2 weeks of paid leave, this is not open to discussion. We will take turns to cover your classes. Now go.”
“Go. Go now. Faster. He’s probably terrified, GO!”
***
“He’s shaken, we explained to him the implications of his injury…” the doctor explains.
“Why didn't you WAIT for me? He cannot go through this alone, why do you think I basically LIVED HERE for 5 weeks?” Shouta cannot stop his voice from trembling. “useless.”
“You have to understand he was very agitated. But now he seems calmer. We gave him a tablet to write with, but he didn’t use it yet. Make sure he knows how to use it.”
Shouta wants to punch that stupid face. “calmer?” “how to use it?” Hizashi is probably in a state of shock right now.
When Shouta opens the door, the silence makes his blood run cold. Hizashi is awake, he turns his head to Shouta. His gaze follows the man from the door to the visitor’s armchair. Somewhere, in his head, Shouta still expected to be welcomed by a shout of joy. Something, in his brain, refused to acknowledge what happened to the love of his life.
It seems they had to remove the tracheotomy when Hizashi woke up, of course he fought it… A huge white compress covers the lifesaving wound. Shouta remembers the quick gestures of the doctor who cut the trachea open as Hizashi was choking on his own blood, to place what seemed to be an oversize tube in it. He remembers the blood and the weak wheeze. “All you could do was to watch.”
While his face seems frozen, both hands of the former Voice Hero are shaking, fists clenched on the sheet. Aizawa notices the tablet on the floor, far away from the bed. He slowly gets up to fetch it. Good thing those have a thick rubber cover. He puts the tablet on Hizashi’s knees. The patient won’t look at it.
“You can throw this away again, even a thousand times. I’ll pick it up.”
No reaction.
“I know I’ve been a difficult patient after the USJ. I wouldn't rest, I left the hospital early, I pretended to be fine while looking like Mummy Man… I always do that… I shut in. And you always gave me your hand to help me out of the darkness.”
Hizashi stares at the wall.
“You’re smarter than me. Always have been.”
Silence.
“Take your time then… I’m on paid leave, and I just decided to spend it in this hospital. Let me know when you get tired of it, and I’ll take us to the sea.”
We’ll have to get used to this silence.
***
Hizashi lays in his bed, turning his back to Shouta. But on the bedside table, the tablet is on its stand, emitting a pale blue light. Shouta slowly takes it in his hands. It seems Hizashi deactivated the “text to speech” option.
“I’m not ready to become a different person. I have no idea how to do that. I was a loud kid, I was a loud and obnoxious teen. Then I was the Voice hero, an English teacher, a radio host, the only voice able to wake you up when you overslept.
“I don’t know how to exist without my voice. I never could.
“Many tried to shut me up. Parents, teachers, all wanted me to focus on a “quiet” activity, but I always ended up talking or singing. I tried, I swear. Like every little kid, I wanted my parents to be happy.
“I don’t know if it’s a “quirk factor” thing, but the more I tried to stay silent, the more noise I ended up making. Even now, all I want is to scream. When you were away, I tried. It didn’t work, and it hurt, of course. I feel stupid. All I want is to feel myself again.
“I tried the “text to speech” thing. It’s worse. Please, don’t make me use it… Good thing you love reading. I’m sure you can hear my voice when you read me, I can hear it as I write. As long as it exists in my head, as long as it’s not replaced by a boring AI, I can still be myself, just a little bit.
“I stopped existing at the second that villains destroyed my voice box. They made me see a shrink, he talked about PTSD, depression, grief… I let him talk… I’ve known grief, and sorrow, I’ve been clinically depressed before, even if you’re the only one aware of that last one. But I have no idea what it is that I am now. There’s a stranger in the mirror, there’s a voice in my head that won’t shut up and won’t let me sleep, that demands to get out. I wish I could unplug my brain and put it on the bedside table.
“I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live either. I wish I never was. Does it make sense to you? I want everybody to forget me, who I was and what I became. I don’t want to die because then I would be remembered. I don’t want to live because then I have to become something else, that is not me. “Me” was a mistake I wish to erase entirely.
“Please, don’t be too hard on yourself… tell the other voice, you know the one, to go to hell. You don’t have to fix me, you don’t owe me shit. Will you let me disappear? As long as you love me, I have to exist. So please, leave me.”