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Waking up had been both massively comforting and incredibly painful. Comforting because that meant he wasn’t dead but painful because he wasn’t dead. His right arm was wrapped so heavily in bandages it looked like a marshmallow was trying to eat it and his left leg wasn’t fairing much better. Despite the heavy coverings, there was a constant stinging coming from all over his body. Small cuts that were exposed to the air and bruises that were being pushed reminding him just how alive he was.
Luckily, the fluorescent hospital style lights had been dimmed and the windows closed to stop any extra sunlight from seeping into the room. Wincing against the pain in his neck, Bakugou looked around the room. Recognising it quickly as Recovery Girls office, he instead tried to find something, anything, to tell him what time it was. The clock high on the wall above the door told him it was almost 2 in the afternoon which only begged the question, how long had he been in here?
Carefully, he stretched his left arm over to the bedside table and, after a few failed attempts of blindly slamming his hand onto the hardwood, managed to find his phone. The bright screen blinded him for a few seconds but soon enough his eyes adjusted. The date on his phone confirming his theory. He had been asleep (unconscious?) for nearly a full day. Great, he had missed a full day of classes just because he couldn’t handle the stupid award ceremony for the bullshit sports festival.
Some god had to be looking down on him though, because despite the number of notifications on his phone being in the triple digits, no new notifications were coming through. Most of the messages could be dealt with once he wasn’t confined to the Nurse’s office and hooked up to what looked like an IV and a blood bag. Texts from his parents, random game notifications and scam emails could all be ignored, he would answer the texts from his classmates once he could sit up, Deku would launch a search party if he ignored them for too long.
What was catching his eye however, was all of the news articles that were showing up. The notification bubble on the “Hero news” app had over 100 alone, and that's ignoring the messages he had of people sharing the same articles. All of them had some combination of himself, All-might and UA in the title, along with some rather “colourful” words. A couple of them mentioned Midnight but it seemed like everyone was focusing on the number one hero and the beast of 1-A.
Curiosity finally piqued and, with nothing else to do, he clicked onto one of the articles. Staring back at him was a poorly photoshopped photo of All-might, stock image handcuffs (that didn’t look the slightest bit realistic) pasted onto his arms.
The main chunk of the article wasn’t loading but there was a delightful montage of photos that were loading in. Close ups of him trapped in that damned muzzle, another that showed just how big of a crater he had made and multiple photos that catalogued the injures he had collected. There was a lot less than he thought there were, he had honestly thought his skin was being torn off but these photos looked far too tame to be causing this much of a fuss. Sure, those marks on his face looked like they would scare but battle scars and all that jazz.
There was no way for him to tell anyone this of course, he was stuck to a white-sheeted bed in the nurses office with something being pumped into his system to keep his blood pressure high enough to not pass out. Midnight clearly hadn’t read his file because not giving him any form of general anaesthetics because it would kill him. He had seen his file, that little fact had been highlighted, was underlined at least five times and even had a massive arrow pointing at it in the margin, even someone glancing at it for a second would see it. Midnight had, somehow, missed it.
The beeping heart monitor to his right made him think that perhaps he had gotten close to dying (Kirishima would later tell him that he had flatlined twice before someone could give him an adrenaline shot). That, combined with the Iv, blood bag and mass amounts of bandages made him realise that maybe sleeping through the day hadn’t been such a bad thing. Not even he could debate that he had been hurt, badly.
Despite how damaged and broken he looked in all the photos, the only people who had helped him were his classmates. No pro-heroes had come to his rescue like they were supposed to and not a single person (bar Todoroki he would find out) had tried to stop All-might until AFTER he had been rushed out on the stretcher. He couldn’t blame anyone for that, how could he when not a single person in the arena would be able to stand up to All-might without getting seriously hurt. All he had done was refuse a medal and look at how he turned out. No-one would, or could, stand against him when they could be killed by a single flick of a pinkie finger.
Finally, the main chunk of the article loaded in. Paragraphs and paragraphs about him and what UA had done. Surprisingly they were not blaming him, nor were they demonising him like he expected, instead all the hatred and insults were being thrown at UA and the Pro-heroes. The article was very well structured, it sounded professional and not like an angry twit-longer but it still managed to be filled with some very entertaining insults.
“A hero who was doing more than he should to keep a halfway-good image but still managing to run himself through the mud and down to hell faster than a racist sonic” was one of his favourites.
The more he read, the clearer it became that all these people were not fighting against him, they were fighting for him. People from across the country were calling for justice and for UA to take ownership over what they had done. There were even a few quotes from American viewers. The internet was going to war with Hero Society and he was in the center of it all.
Finally, the title of the article loaded in.
"Symbol of Murder - #1 Hero or #1 Villain"
Suddenly the attempted murder charge that had been mentioned in the article made a lot more scence. The worst thing about it, they weren’t completely wrong. They were his teachers, they had his file, they chose to ignore it and he had nearly (he had, twice) died because of it.
He could have died, yet here he was, looking at a photo of All-might next to one of his own, bloodied and broken face.
He could have died.
Finally, his damaged voice box and scratchy voice produced one word.
Shit.
HIs shock induced, watery laughter could be heard from the hallway for hours until Recovery Girl came back to check on him.