Chapter Text
Izuku tiredly leaned against the rain-streaked window to watch mile after mile of road pass. The bus was quiet. Too quiet perhaps, given how vibrant and lively they (collectively) normally were, but it was late - the kind of late that was so late that it could easily be considered to have come all the way around to early - and it had been a long, draining day.
They were all Heroes (or close enough anyway. Technically they were first year heroics students from the premier hero school in the country, but they all mostly all had their Provisional Hero License so it was close enough for government work) so when the call for help went out, so did they. There had been an... Incident... up in Sendai which had left a good-sized chunk of the city near in the more mountainous area utterly destroyed. Local heroes had, of course, stepped in at the time of the Incident to handle the immediate issue but due to the sheer scale of the destruction it had been decided that class 1-A would be shipped up to help with the rescue efforts as, while the disaster hadn’t been planned, it offered up a good, fairly safe hands-on learning opportunity. After all, practicing rescues in one of the USJ facilities was all well and good and did offer a firm grounding in what was involved in working a rescue mission. But those practice missions always had an unavoidable element of unreality due to their very nature as a planned lesson and thus predictable (class 1-A’s first trip to the USJ being a glaring exception). You could plan for a lot but, as class 1-A was proving to prove, not even Nezu or Sir Nighteye could plan for every possible contingency.
It wasn’t pretty work. Class 1-A was far from the first on the scene. Sendai was about a three-hour drive north from UA (depending on traffic of course), and even before they boarded the bus they had to wait for their inclusion in the rescue efforts to be proposed and then green lit. And then there was the matter of the logistics; making sure they had what they needed - including said bus and someone to drive it, getting geared up, riding herd on twenty teenagers who are both hopped up on nervous energy (on one hand, yay! They’re actually going to be doing Official Heroing Work. On the other hand, oh shit! They’re actually going to be doing Official Heroing Work) and half asleep (to be fair, it was four in the morning)... When it came to rescue work in the aftermath of a disaster, time was of the essence. The longer it took to find and treat someone, the less the odds of success there were. When they had finally arrived, it had already been over a day (closer to two in fact) since the disaster had occurred.
Uraraka and Kirishima were the first ones of the class to find a body. Yes, the possibility of that had been explained to them, both by Aizawa-sensei on the bus on the way up and by a few of the more experienced rescue heroes who were already on the scene, but there was a marked difference between hearing about the likelihood of it happening and having it actually happen. They’d been working together for a couple of hours at that point and had managed to rescue a scant handful of injured and trapped people amongst a whole lot of nothing at that point. Uraraka was starting to feel a bit of strain from overusing her quirk but had been determined to keep going - at least a little longer before switching out for a small break
(Aizawa-sensei had been very clear in not only what they could expect, but what was expected of them. He’d lectured that it was a good thing that they wanted to help but that they would do no one - least of all the civilians that they were going up to rescue - any good if they worked too far past their limits and ended up needing help themselves. Therefore breaks were mandatory. Quirk overuse (and I’m looking at you Deku, Uravity, Sugarman), any injuries more severe than minor cuts and bruises (I’m still looking at you Deku; and before you say anything, yes bone fractures no matter how minor you think they are count), both physical and mental exhaustion, dehydration... these were all things that had sidelined heroes (permanently in a couple of spectacularly fucked up cases) in the past. Yes, as heroes there would be times when they would have to push far beyond their limits and accept the risks of doing so, but this was not one of those times. The time critical part of the rescue efforts had already past so there was no need to rush. Yamada-sensei and Kayama-sensei backed him up on this one hundred percent)
At first it had seemed like any other rescue they’d performed that day. Kirishma had spotted a splash of purple through a small gap in the gray concrete of what used to be a low-rise apartment building, so he and Uraraka had started to carefully remove the rubble to get a closer look. Once it became clear that the splash of color that had caught Kirishima’s attention belonged to the clothes someone had been wearing (as opposed to something like someone’s laundry or a children’s toy - both things which they had run into more times than they could count in their first hour of searching alone. They still made sure to check it out each and every time since they could never be sure there wasn’t someone trapped near whatever it was that just so happened to catch their eye in their search), they began to work quickly. From the waist up the young woman they uncovered looked relatively fine; lots of bruising and a few cuts and scrapes here and there. The whole time they’d been working the woman had been completely unresponsive, but given the rather nasty head wound they saw on her they figured that she’d been simply knocked out by the falling debris. In hindsight they probably should’ve checked the woman for a pulse at that point. That was one of the first things they’d been taught to check for during this kind of rescue. But they’d been at this for a couple of hours by this point and were kind of tired (and they were almost done searching this building. They’d agreed that they’d take a break once they were done before diving back into the rescue efforts) and thus far every person they’d found had been a successful rescue. So why would this time be any different?
Then they removed a boulder sized chunk of what used to be the floor off the poor woman. Above the waist she might’ve looked injured but otherwise fine. Below the waist... Crush injuries are ugly things. One leg and part of the pelvis were basically gone: nothing more than denim clad pulp. The other one wasn’t looking much better. To her credit, Uraraka didn’t actually scream, although she came perilously close throwing up (part of that could’ve been from overusing her quirk). Kirishima was doing roughly the same (only without the quirk induced nausea) but he still did his best to shield Uraraka from the disturbing sight while not looking at it too much himself.
That hadn’t been the last body any of them had found. By the time the guys in charge had called a stop for the day, all of them had encountered at least one corpse. Kaminari had been the one ‘lucky’ enough to find the three-year-old (child deaths - especially those of young children - were always the hardest. He should take what comfort he could in the fact that the boy hadn’t been alone or suffered too much before he’d died). This was the part of heoring that hardly if ever got mentioned by the media (and the few times it did, it was almost always completely glossed over; a brief mention in the form of a no-nonsense death toll sandwiched in between extolling the virtues of whatever heroes happened to be on the scene, uplifting anecdotal stories about some of the more spectacular rescues, and either condemning whatever villain or commiserating over whatever natural disaster had occurred depending on what had happened). It was a sobering lesson, as well as a valuable one.
It had started to rain as they made their way back onto the bus, tired and subdued. None of them really had had much of an appetite for dinner (or lunch for that matter, albeit for somewhat differing reasons) but they’d all managed to choke down something. Aizawa-sensei, Yamada-sensei, and Kayama-sensei had taken the opportunity that the dinner break had offered to talk to them frankly about what had happened that day. Hero work wasn’t always glamorous the way the media (heavily backed by the Hero Commission and/or the government) made it out to be. Especially for those who choose to go the rescue hero route. It was still important work that needed to get done, and while they weren’t able to save everyone (not even All Might at his prime could save everyone. Sometimes the damage was done long before the hero could get to the scene), there were some people who even now would live to see a new day thanks to them. They’d helped. They’d saved people. They were Heroes.
(Counseling sessions would be available for those who needed it.)
It felt like it had come out of nowhere. Between having been up since before dawn, putting in over eight hours of search and rescue work (work that, with all the people they weren’t able to find and save, had become more and more disheartening as time crawled on ), and the hypnotic combination of watching both the rain and the road as the bus drove on, Izuku had slipped into a kind of waking doze; not quite awake but not exactly asleep either. One minute everything was fine (or about as fine as things could be given the circumstances) the next, the sleepy contemplative quiet that had enveloped the bus as 1-A processed their first real taste of rescue hero work was replaced with a wary and alert quiet; as if they were anxiously waiting for the next shoe to drop (and given that this was 1-A dealing on a field trip, of course there was going to be something. If their past field trips were any indication, it was probably some sort of League of Villains attack although just how they’d be able to pull it off would be a mystery. It’s not like this trip had been really planned, and even if the League had somehow known that they not only went up to Sendai to help but were just now coming back, the bus was still a moving target. It wasn’t even the only bus on the highway!) An uneasy murmur began to build up as the others began to look around and wonder about just what had set everybody on edge. Yamada-sensei and Kayama-sensei focused on keeping everyone calm while Aizawa-sensei focused on finding out what was going on from the driver. The bus swerved amongst the squealing of the brakes as Ashido screamed. The last thing Izuku remembered seeing was a bright flash of light.