Chapter Text
1.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Do you know what it feels like to hold the weight of a person’s life in your literal hands?
Few people can claim so. It happens that Midoriya Inko is one of them.
Beep. Beep.
As an emergency medical responder, her job had always been fast-paced and required superhuman focus. Even in the middle of chaos, she had to mentally isolate herself and her patient from the rest of the scene. Check vitals? Done. Clean up wounds? Done. Calm the patient? Easier said than done, when you have to make sure you first remain calm. Burning buildings, floods, or world-shaking earthquakes were not any more merciful to the EMR than the victim themself. Of course, what’s missing from the equation is how the rest of the affected people act. And if your background, in place of the comfortable white noise of a medical teacher’s lecture, is heartbroken relatives pushing each other from door to door or children crying the - unmistakable - cry of near-death; nobody’s going to ask you how you feel about it.
After a point, though, all the noise would blend together in her head. She couldn’t tell if the ringing was from another ambulance outside, a heart monitor, or her own ears. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford to worry.
Beep.
Beep.
Sometimes, it felt like ages passed between each beep. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t worry.
Beep. Beep.
Sometimes, the beeping was irregular; that’s when she really had to worry.
Your heartbeat naturally slows when you get older. In younger patients, bradycardia can be caused by genetic conditions such as congenital heart defect, changes in the level of body minerals such as potassium or calcium, sleep apnea which was the case for many of her patients, and certain medicines, mainly sedatives, which her career called for a good percentage of the time. In emergency situations, slower heartbeats were normal, faster heartbeats were normal, but irregular heartbeats meant something was definitely out of the ordinary. For her, abnormalities that could be explained by pre-existing conditions were the best case.
But they were not always the case.
Sometimes things happen inexplicably, insolubly and irreversibly.
Beep. Beep.
Shortly after the start of her son's 2nd year in highschool's spring break, when an all-out war broke out in Jaku City between the heroes and the Paranormal Liberation Front, Inko was sent to station at Jaku General Hospital. Wow, Inko in the frontlines of a war? You’d say, what a strong woman, and she would respond, thank you, but Inko knew that was a lie. She knew she was not strong.
Inko knew to survive was to detach, and to detach was to survive.
She knew that in order to continue working, she would have to not think about it. About how many people she had held back from the cliff of death, barely able to drag them up by their mutilated hands. About how many people she had watched fall down that cliff. About how many of those she had seen were dead to begin with. And that’s what made her weak. She knew that detaching faces from heroes, from regular people that used to have lives, was the only way to continue working. But she had to continue working. Someone had to do her work.
Someone had to do this work so that humanity had hope. So that they didn’t have to come home to empty rooms filled with furniture, so that they didn’t have gaps in future family photos, so that the heroes’ coworker-brunch table did not have a single vacant chair.
Someone had to do her work so mothers like her would not have to bury their children.
Even if it meant she had to turn her heart into stone and think of her patients as subjects .
Even if it meant she had to suppress all emotion when the family of a hero-in-training, a young soldier, collectively burst into tears at the bad news she had delivered with a straight face, as if her own son hadn’t been fighting in the frontlines alongside him.
Even when the body of Kayama Nemuri futilely writhed and spasmed in pain underneath her hands.
What a weak, pathetic being! So weak, unable to do her job and be a human at the same time.
Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeeep.
…
It’s not right.
Of course it’s not right.
But it’s necessary. And, although she does not want to admit this, it has become easy.
Convenient.
But what happens when a familiar face is on the operating table?