MHA: Lust Quirk

The sentence was already half over when Ryo arrived.

"-rational enough. I'm Shota Aizawa. Your homeroom teacher."

He was sitting at a desk. The desk was bolted to the floor. His hand was wrapped around a pencil and his back was against a plastic chair and a man with black hair and bruised-looking eyes was standing at the front of a classroom that didn't exist thirty seconds ago.

No. That wasn't right. The classroom had existed. Ryo hadn't.

He blinked. The fluorescent lights buzzed. The man at the front, Aizawa, was pulling a yellow sleeping bag off the floor and bundling it under one arm. Gray scarf looped around his neck like it had been wound by someone who'd given up halfway through. Eyes that looked like they hadn't seen eight hours of sleep in a calendar year.

Ryo knew that face. He'd seen it on a screen. A flat, animated screen with clean lines and consistent lighting, and now it was in front of him with pores and a crease between the eyebrows and stubble that the anime had never bothered drawing.

His fingers tightened on the pencil.

The memories were just there, like discovering his computer had a second hard drive he'd never formatted. He was Ryo Hayami. He was an orphan. He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Musutafu with a ceiling stain shaped like a bird and a fridge that hummed too loud at night. He'd had two girlfriends in junior high, both of whom he'd kissed, one of whom he'd done more with. He'd passed the U.A. entrance exam by punching robots until they stopped moving, and he'd pulled a round-faced girl out from under a piece of concrete the size of a car.

He knew all of this the way you know the plot of a movie you watched twice. Clearly enough. None of it felt like it had happened to him.

The pencil snapped.

Clean through the middle. Both halves clattered onto the desk and one rolled off the edge. The kid two seats over, blond with a black streak, slouching like his spine had given up, glanced sideways. Ryo didn't look at him. He was staring at his own hand. At the two pieces of pencil that had been one piece a second ago.

The body was strong. Stronger than it looked, which was already stronger than it had any right to be. The original had chalked it up to his Quirk, "Enhance," generic physical augmentation on the registration file, and never thought about it harder than that. Because the original hadn't had a reason to think harder.

Ryo had the reason. He just couldn't think about it yet because Aizawa was talking again and the classroom was full of people who were supposed to be drawings and his heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

"Put these on and head outside."

Aizawa tossed a bundle of blue fabric onto the nearest desk. P.E. uniforms. The class started moving. Chairs scraped. Voices rose. Someone in the back dropped a book and someone else laughed about it.

Ryo didn't move.

He was counting heads. Twenty desks, twenty students. Row by row, left to right. Seat 1, blond kid with a belt that sparkled, Aoyama, Navel Laser, ate too much cheese. Seat 2, empty, she'd already grabbed a uniform and was bouncing toward the door. Pink. He'd get back to her. Seat 3, green hair tied low, wide mouth, huge dark eyes that blinked once while looking directly at him. Tsuyu Asui. Frog. Finger pressed to her lower lip, watching him, expression undecided. She held the look a beat too long, then turned away.

A real face. Depth, texture, dark eyes that had looked straight at him.

He made himself keep scanning. Seat 4, Iida, tall, glasses, sitting with the posture of someone who'd been raised by furniture. Seat 5-

Seat 5 turned around and looked right at him.

"Hayami-kun!"

Ochaco Uraraka. Short brown hair that curled under her jaw. Round face. Cheeks permanently flushed, pink enough that he'd assumed it was an art style choice, except no, she actually looked like that. Big brown eyes and a smile that was doing more work than it had any right to at eight in the morning.

She had freckles. Light ones, across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. A handful. Just enough that someone paying attention would notice.

The anime had never drawn those.

"Thank you again for the entrance exam," she said. She pressed her fingertip pads together, all five, both hands, a nervous tic that he recognized from episodes he'd watched on his couch in a life that might not exist anymore. "I never got to properly- I mean, I said thank you at the time, but it was all so crazy, and you were bleeding from your forehead, and I just- thank you. Really."

She was thanking him for something someone else had done. The original Ryo had pulled her from under the Zero Pointer's rubble. This Ryo had been living a completely different life thirty seconds ago. But the body remembered the weight of the concrete and the girl's voice and how his knuckles had split open, and his mouth moved before his brain caught up.

"You're fine. Don't worry about it."

His voice. Same vocal cords as the body he'd woken up in, but he'd never heard them from the inside before. Deeper than he expected. A little rough.

Ochaco's smile got wider. "I'm glad you're in 1-A too." She turned back to grab her P.E. uniform, and for a second he could see the strap of her school bag cutting a line across her blazer between her shoulder blades, the white collar tag sticking up at the back of her neck. His eyes went there on their own.

A hand landed on his desk. Pink.

Not metaphorically. The hand was pink. The skin was pink. The girl attached to the hand was entirely, aggressively, unmistakably pink.

"Seat 19, right? I'm Seat 2!" Mina Ashido leaned over his desk like the concept of personal space was something that happened to other people. "We're practically neighbors."

They were not practically neighbors. Seat 2 and Seat 19 were on opposite sides of the room. She'd crossed the entire classroom to deliver this information.

Up close, she was worse than the anime. More. The pink skin was real. It had texture, a faint warmth where her wrist hovered near his arm. Her eyes were black where they should have been white, and the irises were gold, and the pupils were darker gold, and the whole thing looked like someone had poured honey into obsidian. Two small horns poked out of short, fluffy, pink hair. When she grinned, and she was grinning, wide and immediate and without any of the social hesitation that normal people used to gate their introductions, he could see teeth that were a fraction sharper than a baseline human's, packed into a smile that was too big for her face in a way that made her face better for it.

She was also the first person in this world to voluntarily touch his desk.

"Mina Ashido," she said, like he might need the clarification, like there was another pink girl with horns and black-gold eyes he could be confusing her with. "What's your Quirk? You punched through, like, four robots at the exam. I saw you. That was crazy."

"Enhancement," he said. "I hit things."

"That's SO cool. I melt things. Acid." She wiggled her fingers over his desk and a tiny drop of clear liquid sizzled against the surface. It left a dime-sized mark in the finish. "Oops."

He looked at the mark. He looked at her. She wasn't sorry.

"Cool desk," he said.

She laughed. Loud. Louder than the joke deserved, which meant she was either easy to amuse or wanted to be amused and he'd given her an excuse. Two other conversations stuttered when it hit, and the blond kid with the black streak looked over again, and somewhere behind Ryo a chair creaked like someone had turned to see what was funny.

Mina Ashido existed loudly. She was close enough that he could smell a faint sweetness under the school-soap baseline, and the room sort of rearranged itself around her when she decided to be somewhere. Right now she'd decided to be at Seat 19, and Seat 19 was dealing with it.

"Come on, we're changing!" She snagged a P.E. uniform off the stack and tossed one at him. He caught it before he thought about catching it. She was already heading for the door, pink hair bouncing, still talking to him over her shoulder about whatever she was saying because his brain had left the conversation two sentences ago.

He stood up. The chair scraped back. His legs worked fine. His hands were steady. He probably looked like a kid who'd broken a pencil and talked to two girls and was now heading to get changed for gym class. Normal first-day stuff.

He picked up the P.E. uniform and walked toward the door. The hallway was wide, clean, institutional. A window showed trees and a courtyard and a sky that was the same blue as every other sky he'd ever seen.

As he walked, he cataloged the future.

USJ. The League of Villains was going to attack the school. Soon. Weeks, maybe. A teleporter named Kurogiri would warp the class into a fake disaster zone and a thing called a Nomu would break Aizawa's arms and smash his face into concrete.

Sports Festival. Todoroki, the kid in Seat 15 with the two-tone hair and the scar that was redder and uglier and more raised than any still frame had suggested, would fight Midoriya and use his fire for the first time. Or not. That depended on whether things still happened the same way with Ryo sitting in Seat 19.

Stain. Hero Killer. Hosu City. Iida's brother would get paralyzed and Iida would go looking for revenge and nearly die for it.

Forest Camp. Bakugo gets kidnapped. Muscular. Moonfish. Toga Himiko, who would show up wearing someone else's face and smiling with her own teeth.

Kamino. All Might's last fight. The end of the Symbol of Peace. After that, dorms. After that, everything gets worse.

The War.

The deaths. Nighteye. Midnight, who taught Modern Hero Art History, who was probably somewhere in this building right now, alive, with no idea she was going to die in a forest giving orders with her last breath. Twice. Toga.

Ryo stopped walking. He was standing in front of the boys' locker room. Someone bumped past him, redhead, sharp teeth, spiked hair, said "excuse me, man" with the energy of someone who'd already decided they were going to be friends. Kirishima. Hardening Quirk. Good kid. Ryo moved out of his way.

He had the walkthrough. The plot twists and the death flags. Casual-fan memory, which meant gaps and guesses and a few things he'd probably remember wrong, but enough. Enough to know what was coming.

He just couldn't tell anyone.

He pushed the locker room door open. Changed into the blue P.E. tracksuit. The fabric was cheap and stiff and smelled like the plastic packaging it had come out of. His hands were still steady. His heart rate was coming down.

In the classroom, while Aizawa had been talking, he'd caught it only for a second. Seat 12. Kyoka Jiro. Chin-length purple hair, triangular eyes, earlobes that ended in long cables tipped with audio jacks. One of those jacks had been extended toward him, the tip angled at his chest from across the room. Not plugged into anything. Just pointed. Like a microphone aimed at a speaker.

He hadn't thought about it then. He was thinking about it now.

Her Quirk heard heartbeats. A twelve-meter detection radius was what the wiki said, and his desk was well inside that range, and his heart had been doing things in that classroom that a normal first-year's heart shouldn't do. Spiking without physical exertion. Calming for no reason. He didn't know what she'd heard. He didn't know if she'd been listening on purpose.

He laced up the tracksuit shoes and followed the stream of students outside toward the athletic field. One sentence kept circling in his head.

Don't write anything down.

Obvious rule. First rule. The only rule that mattered before every other rule. If he was going to survive in a world where a hyperintelligent animal ran the school and an underground hero with lie-detecting colleagues was his homeroom teacher and a girl twelve seats away could hear his heart skip, he couldn't leave evidence. No journals. No notes. No lists of future events hidden under his mattress like a protagonist in a bad isekai.

Everything stayed in his head. All of it. The only record was his memory, and his memory was a casual fan's memory, which meant it was already full of holes.

The athletic field opened up around him. Green grass, white track lines, open enough that the main building looked small from here. Nineteen other students in matching blue tracksuits, spread out in loose clusters, some stretching, some talking, some just standing around looking at each other.

Todoroki stood alone near the far edge. Arms at his sides, doing nothing. The scar covered the left side of his face from his hairline to his cheekbone, thick and mottled, skin that had been burned and healed and never fully decided to be smooth again. His left eye was gray. His right was the sharp turquoise of his mother's side. He looked like he'd been assembled from two different people who didn't get along.

Midoriya was near Iida and Ochaco, fidgeting with the cuff of his sleeve. Muttering. Actually, physically muttering to himself, his lips moving fast enough that Ryo could see it from twenty feet away. In the anime it was a character quirk, capital-Q-uirk-less-cute. In person it was a kid working through a problem at a speed his mouth couldn't keep up with, and his right hand, the one that was still whole, still had all its bones in the right place, still hadn't been shattered for the first time yet, kept flexing and unflexing at his side.

That hand was going to break today. During the ball throw. Ryo knew it and couldn't do anything about it and wasn't sure he should even if he could.

Aizawa cleared his throat. Barely. The man had a voice like he was conserving every syllable for retirement.

"Quirk Apprehension Test. Eight exercises. Use your Quirks however you want." He held up a phone-sized device. "The student who ranks last across all eight will be judged hopeless." Pause. Flat eyes scanning the group. "And expelled."

Midoriya went pale. Several other students shifted. Someone behind Ryo sucked air through their teeth.

Ryo didn't react. He already knew it was a bluff. Aizawa's "logical ruse," push them to their limits by threatening the thing every first-year was terrified of. Nobody was getting expelled today. Midoriya would break his finger, impress Aizawa enough to stay, and the class would move on.

He knew the script.

The problem was Jiro. She was to his left with her arms crossed and her earphone jacks hanging loose against her collarbones, and she'd just tilted her head. That same angle from the classroom. That slight pull in her brow, like she was hearing a song with the wrong time signature.

Everyone else's heart rate had just jumped.

And his hadn't.