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This wasn’t her first fallen building, no. You didn’t get to be in your 30s as a hero without a couple of buildings falling on you per month. This one’s not even the worst one, but it ranks up there with the Tiratu building where she ended up inside the giant UFO bauble for two hours, and the hospital one where she had to navigate uncapped needles and the squealing alarms that bounced around her head.
This one though…
This one was worse.
She couldn’t even recall which enemy they’d been fighting, honestly. Some giant form of someone who’d gone rogue or was in an argument, and oop, there goes the skyscraper.
And then, here she was, covered in rubble and steel with one pinning her arm in just the right way that it was cutting off circulation, and she could feel a tightness in her ribs with each stuttering breath she took. Licking her lips made her taste something quite iron-like and slightly thicker than sweat.
‘Blood’, her mind supplied, and she wonders if her nose is broken or if she’s bit her lip, or if perhaps, she’s knocked her head around so hard it’s leaking out down her chin and onto her neck, seeping into the ground beneath her as her breath rattles inside her.
Nemuri lets out a grunt, coughing sharply as she frees her other arm slowly, her breaths coming faster as she gropes around her belly towards her hips.
The radio the officers gave them when they’d show up to assist was still in one piece, thankfully.
She presses the button down, and draws in a shaky breath.
“H-Hey,” she murmurs, her words coming out rough and splintered for a moment, licking her lips again and tasting the tacky mess of lipstick and blood. “I-It’s Midnight. Anyone out there? I’m, I’m under the rubble…you can get the co-coordinates off my ‘talkie.”
She lets the button go, counting each shaky breath as seconds tick by before the radio crackles to life, and she feels oddly close to tears at that. “Roger that, Midnight. It’s Lieutenant Kizame here, we’re working on getting you unburied. I know it’s rather heartless to say, but thankfully you were the only…almost casualty,” the man coughs a bit before he comes back onto the line. “Civilians were all evacuated thanks your timely intervention.”
“Yay,” she mutters, resting the cool radio against her head with a slow breath. “How…how long do they think, Kizame-chan. Not trying to rush you or anything, but ol’ Midnight’s feeling her age down here,” she lets herself trail over his name slowly, carefully, flirtatious, an echo of her usual self.
Even that small bit has the man stuttering, and she feels a ping of endearment as he clears his throat. “Hour, tops. We’ve got heroes coming in to help out as well. You just rest yourself, Midnight. We’ll get you soon.”
And that was that, she supposes.
It’s dark, down here. It had been so sunny a moment ago, the sun casting warmth across her exposed skin, slightly cool air filling her lungs as she laughed and flirted, her make-up pressed just so across her face and lips and nails.
And now here she was, her suit tantalizingly torn in awkward places, one arm pinned under a bar she can’t quite make out in the darkness, possibly broken ribs, and her, unable to flirt her way out of this.
She shuts her eyes, and hopes an hour passes faster than the creeping minutes that dig their way into her skin.
~~
Her lips feel dry.
She doesn’t even know when she woke up, honestly. She just twitched into awareness, gasping at a sharp lancing pain up her arm.
Her lips feel so, so dry.
She croaks out a word, clearing her throat heavily before picking up the radio again. The small numbers on it show that it had only been a half hour, which has been the most sleep she’d gotten in weeks. “K-“ she devolves into a round of coughing, blood spattering across her chest in a decisively unsexy way before she slams the radio back against her face as if trying to force herself to stop. “Kizame-chan…how’s it going…c’mon, Midnight’s achin’ to get out,” she tries to tease, but it comes out pleading.
The radio is silent for a moment, then crackles to life much to her relief. “Midnight,” the man says, hesitating a bit before he audibly swallows, “Midnight, ma’am, we’ve got a problem.”
“Oh,” she says, slumping back onto what has become her momentary home, the rock under her neck nudging and scratching at her sensitive skin. “I’m sure it’s nothing a fine, fine officer like yourself can’t solve~”
“It’s you, Midnight,” he says, and suddenly, her blood is cold across her suit, her lips, her skin, her nose.
Suddenly, every piece of her is cold.
“It’s-I know you’re not doing it on purpose,” he says, but his words are ringing in her ears, and she feels someone not her scolding herself for not anticipating something this horrendous. “But your quirk. Every time one of my people get in close, from sky or from the surface, they just end up doing a dive against the rocks. Two of ‘em’s ended up with a concussion. We’re having to even pull heroes away. Now, Mt. Lady says she-“
“I don’t like her,” she spits, laughing mirthlessly as blood lands on the radio, circling into strange giggles as she snorts and coughs hard. “She’s so vain. So smug. So needy. You like me, don’t you, Kizame-chaaaaaan~?”
“So you two should get along,” he teases back, and she’d normally enjoy this bout of friendliness, but all she can feel is the cold, cold, cold rubble around her and the knowledge that her Quirk-usually so easy to reach, so easy to gentle into contentment-is so far from her reach that she feels once more like a babe upon her first steps, the knowledge that you’ll fall on your face and fear settling in like unwelcome visitors.
She can’t stop it.
She can’t turn it off.
All she can think of is blood, blood, blood dripping from her head, head, head.
‘Traumatic brain injury,’ a voice that sounds astounding like Aizawa’s slithers into her mind, and she hysterically agrees with it, coughing again as she holds the button down. “I don’t-there’s a reason, people aren’t-they-I don’t…”
“Midnight…Midnight, what are your injuries?” he sounds serious then, and she wonders what he’s thinking, if she can cheer him up with a kiss and a wink, and she sucks in a breath, letting it bounce out of her in an agonizing groan.
“One…two? Broken ribs? Blood. Lots and lots…blood.”
“From your head? Inside?”
“Mm.” She sucks in another slow breath, realizing her hair is sticking to her face, and she wonders why she didn’t notice it before. “…my arm.”
“What about your arm?”
“Don’t know…where it is. Numb,” she starts to slur, her thumb slipping over the radio button, and she has to blink hard to focus. “It’s…pinned, yes, pinned. Can’t move it.”
“Don’t move it. Look, Midnight…Kayama-san. Stay very still. We’ll work around your quirk, we just need some specialized gear. Maybe…maybe two hours.”
Someone is crying and laughing and she wonders who that can be as she slips the radio up closer to her (when did it move away?). “Do you…do you…” she trails off, the thought ending with a silent, yawning chasm, and she stares into the void of the darkness around her.
Time.
Passes.
So.
Slowly.
She thinks it does, at least.
She counts her breaths-794 uneven broken things-and counts the ticking of her heart (??? Thumping beats beneath broken bone). She moves one leg, and then the other, shocking that neither are broken.
But her arm.
It’s stuck.
It’s…starting to itch.
She reaches for where the junction of the shoulder is, tracing down a bit near the bicep, scratching at where it’s impaled through with a steel beam.
It doesn’t abate.
Her fingernails, once so precious and bright purple today with little gemstones on them, grind against the seeping wound and scratch over the peeling fabric as if it were their only job. She grits her teeth, breathing through the smell of blood and the throb of her head, whining with each pass of her nails.
It doesn’t help.
It doesn’t help.
It doesn’t helphelphelphelphelp-
“Nemuri.”
She stops.
The radio sits on her lap, and she stares at it. “Nemuri.”
Aizawa’s voice.
“Stop that,” he says, and she stares, wide-eyed, wondering if he can see what kind of ugly, broken sight she was. “You’ll get an infection scratching.”
“I can’t,” she says, smearing her fingernails over the wound again with a hiss. “It feels good. I can feel my arm. I need. I need to. How are you…Kizame-chan said no one can get close.”
“Well, I’ve always been immune to your wiles,” he says, and Nemuri laughs so hard a bone shifts and stabs against something fragile, making her hiss and curl up. “I told you. Stop moving, stop itching, and just…relax.”
“I can’t,” she’s close to whining, close to tears, sniffling and coughing up gobs of blood now. “I can’t…”
“Nemuri.” His voice takes a kinder tone now, and she feels close to breaking down in tears. “How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
She ignores him, and goes back to scratching, over, and over, and over, making criss-crosses in the blood seeping from her wound in her arm.
She doesn’t need to sleep, not with a head wound, not with…not with this.
She needs to…
She…
There’s a movement off to the side.
She stills, eyes wide and roughly breathing.
Nothing should be moving.
Everything should be asleep, or at the very least, half-asleep and avoiding the edges of her aroma.
Something clatters from the roof of unsteady rocks, clicking against walls and steel.
Her breath comes faster.
There’s a rat.
She can see it
It’s pitch black, how can she see anything, and yet, and yet, and yet-
She stares back at its tiny little black eyes, and more appear. More and more and more, large, standing around as rocks clatter around them slowly. They inch forward slowly, almost sheepishly.
A thought slips into her mind.
They want to burrow into you.
She screams, startling them back as she starts to rock her body against the steel bar, still pinned there as her hand snags up the radio, thumb pressing down on the button. “RATS! THERE ARE RATS! THERE ARE RATS AND THEY WANT TO EAT ME, HELP, HELP, THEY’RE AWAKE, THEY’RE IMMUNE, HELP-!”
Her shrieks dissolve into horrendous coughing, blood pouring out like a waterfall that drips over her lap, around her legs, pouring out of her in great, horrible leaps.
The radio voices crackle and shout at her, but she can’t hear anything beyond the screaming in her ears as the rats stare at her, and scamper about the small opening they came through, somehow quickly approaching but at the same time, seeming as if they were walking through tar.
No. Not tar, she thought hysterically, the blood that’s filling up the room more like.
She screams louder, her voice cracking as all of a sudden she can smell her Quirk, filling her nose in droves, in ways she had never had it happen, and she’s screaming more and more and then-
Plop
Her body flexes forward, right into the drove of rats staring at her, as she comes free of the steel bar that now has her blood spattered over it, her only thought being that that was far too easy to get her arm free-
And then she was
g-
~~
“I told them I was bringing you some sushi,” the real Aizawa says, gently bringing up the little cloth kitten carrier as said cat pops his head out of the bag, staring ahead with a purr. “They didn’t ask questions.”
Nemuri stares at the little cat, a smile quirking onto her lips as the cat, noticing it was her, scrambles out of the carrier and mews at her almost indignantly before circling in her covered lap and laying down.
Aizawa sits down in the patient visiting chair, hands clasped in his lap, both of them staring at Sushi dozing away. “Docs say you’re doing good. What’s the real report?”
“What do you want me to say,” she says quietly, her remaining hand gently carding over her sleeping cat’s head. Her nails are free of polish, and wrapped individually to prevent more splintering. “I don’t even remember the worst of it. Just that I thought a bunch of rats were going to eat me and then…” She motions at her now empty sleeve, staring at the absence of an arm as she closes her eyes.
“Mt. Lady said that you begged her to rescue ‘the little girl who was lost’ under the rubble. Any memory of that?”
A shake of the head, and a small scoff. “There wasn’t anyone but me. Whatever went on in here,” she taps the side of her head where a bandage wrapped around the shaved part of her head, grimacing, “really sent me off into the depths of no man’s land. I saw things that weren’t real, felt things that weren’t real…”
He stares at her, and her breath still feels like it’s rattling about the pieces in her chest.
“I heard your voice on the radio.”
“You…did?” he asks, somehow seeming both shocked and yet not. “…did I…what’d I say?”
She laughs, smiling once more, teeth glinting in the light of the hospital room. “In true you fashion, you asked me how long it had been since I slept.”
He stares at her, and she stares back, her smile slowly fading a bit. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“You don’t have to ask me anything.” He jerks his head at her pillow, and she slowly leans back, staring for a moment at the ceiling, before soothing sleep seeps into her bones, her Quirk-so scared, so terrified, too large for the body it possessed and drugged under her skin-quiets for the first time since they found her, gentling under her heart like an old friend.
Sushi rolls over when she moves, but doesn’t wake up, and Aizawa tasks himself with watching over her for however long he can stand.
(It takes time, as all things do.
Time to recover.
Time to…really recover.
By the time she comes back to the school, her once shorn hair has evolved into slight fuzz, giving her a lopsided look of half a head full of purple hair, and the other with fuzzy bristles of growing locks.
Immediately upon entering the class, she strikes a pose with her newly minted bright golden arm on her hip, and a peace sign over her winking eye. “Well? Tell your teach how pretty she is, everyone!”
Everyone pauses in their conversations, clearly not expecting to see her, even their representative. A tense few seconds pass, and then, Ida, shutting his textbook close, stands with a sharp thump of his heels as he gives a low bow. “Kayama-sensei! It is our great pleasure…” he sniffs, removing his glasses, tears sliding down his cheeks as he has to pause to gather himself. “Our great pleasure to welcome you back to Class 1-A!”
Like an explosion going off, all her students stood up with a various clatter, some desks being shoved and backpacks kicked as they shouted “WELCOME BACK, KAYAMA-SENSEI!”, a banner unfurling with her name in elegant script and various drawings of flowers with one or two of them popping little confetti poppers.
She pretends she also isn’t crying when she calls them ‘cute little dorks’ for setting this all up.
…she really isn’t crying.
Really.
…but it’s good to be back.)