Inside Your Mind

66 - Shinsou

You knew the game and played it

Kaori Shinsou could barely keep her eyes open. She had gotten to bed at around 6 in the morning. She had slept for two hours, then pulled some random clothes out of her closet, threw them on and headed to the police station to give her statement. No time for breakfast, no time for a shower, no time for coffee.

Thank God for that one police officer - Sansa was his name, she believed - who was busy all morning brewing coffee and handing it out to her, Natsuo Todoroki, Aizawa and Kan. They were all barely able to keep their eyes open and they had been at this whole interrogation thing for an hour now.

Sure, it all seemed pretty easy and relaxed when you were the one asking questions. But when you were the one being interrogated while sleep-deprived, hungry and still traumatized from what had happened, things were very different. It was exhausting, it was robbing them of every little bit of nerve they had left. If someone had asked Kaori what it felt like to be at the brink of insanity, this would have probably been her answer.

Natsuo Todoroki was probably the one that was suffering the most here. He really had barely seen anything. He had been in his room and had stayed there when he heard the announcement. He hadn't seen anything important or heard anything important. He just had the misfortune of being at the scene and being one of the people that had some sort of responsibility over the younger students.

The other thing was that Natsuo had nothing to do with all of this in his regular student life. He was studying Health Economics and working part-time as a bartender. He wasn't used to being in a situation like this. Kaori, Aizawa and Kan all had been giving statements before, they have all taken statements before. For Natsuo, this was all completely new. And he was all the more nervous.

A close second to who was taking it the worst was Aizawa. Not because of the lack of sleep or the lack of food or the general situation, but because it was one of his students that had been kidnapped. And because he was the one that gave permission to fight back. He seemed convinced that his job as a professor at U.A. was over. Of course he couldn't have foreseen any of this, but everyone knew how these things worked - the media needed someone to blame and he made a good scapegoat.

It was sickening. Kaori had seen and heard some of the newscasts this morning and she was disgusted by how everyone seemed to blame this on Aizawa. They also blamed it on Kan and on the administration, but mostly on Aizawa. It was his fault because he said it was okay for the students to fight back. And everyone knew how young people were, right? Full of energy, always doing dumb stuff, never thinking.

It was sickening to Kaori. None of these reporters had been there. None of them knew what it was like. So how come they all just knew so much fucking better? At least Aizawa had given them some clear guidelines on what to do while no one even had the remotest idea of what they were dealing with.

The other thing that had a lot of the parents riled up was the fact that there had been no word about Bakugou so far. No life sign, nothing. Sure, it had only been a few hours, but everyone was on edge, waiting for some sort of offer for a ransom, some life sign, some indication of what the League wanted from Bakugou.

And of course the media got incredibly hung up on his performance at the Sports Festival. Sure, he had won the thing fair and square, but he definitely hadn't made the best impression. Now everyone was certain he'd go and join the League. The thing was that everyone was afraid, he would do exactly that. Not that anyone said it out loud, but everyone was thinking it.

Tomoko Shiretoko, who was one of the trainers at the camp, was also still missing, but of course no one made a big deal of that. She had signed up for it, hadn't she? And so had her colleague Tsuchikawa, who was still in a coma. Midoriya was also still in hospital, but apparently he had woken up already, if only for a short while.