MHA: Lust Quirk

Recovery Girl's office smelled like antiseptic and hard candy.

Ryo was on a cot. He didn't remember getting on it. The last clear thing was All Might's fist connecting with the Nomu and the shockwave flattening every standing body in the plaza, and then there was a gap, and then a bus, and then a hallway, and then this cot with a paper pillow that crinkled every time he breathed.

His hero costume was gone. Someone had swapped it for a medical gown at some point during the gap. The armored vest was folded on a chair next to the cot with the forearm guards stacked on top. One of the knuckle plates had a dent in it he didn't remember making.

Recovery Girl was four feet tall and moved like a woman who had been navigating this office for longer than Ryo had been alive in either of his lives. She had a syringe-shaped cane that she used for balance and, based on how she held it, probably also for hitting students who didn't sit still. Her lips were disproportionately large. Quirk side-effect. She had a bowl of gummy bears on her desk that she'd already made him eat six of.

"Three cracked ribs, left side. Contusions across your back and shoulders. Minor concussion. Abrasion on your right forearm." She read from a clipboard without looking at him. "You went through a stone pillar."

"That's what they tell me."

"Don't be cute." She set the clipboard down and walked over. "Hold still."

The Heal Kiss was exactly what it sounded like. She pressed her lips to his forehead and his body went warm from the inside out, like someone had turned on a heating element behind his sternum. The cracked ribs shifted, more like a joint popping into place but slower. The bruises across his back stopped throbbing and settled into a dull ache and then the ache faded too. His vision sharpened. The ringing that had been sitting in his left ear since the pillar, so constant he'd stopped noticing it, went quiet.

It used his own stamina to heal. He knew that from the source material. He should have been exhausted. Drained. Midoriya always looked half-dead after Recovery Girl worked on him.

Ryo was tired but functional. His legs weren't shaking. His head was clear. The gummies helped but not six-gummies'-worth.

Recovery Girl noticed.

She was checking his ribs, pressing with small, firm fingers along the left side where the cracks had been. Her touch was clinical and efficient and she paused twice. The second pause was longer. She pressed the same spot again. Then a third time.

"Your recovery rate is abnormal," she said.

"Is it?"

"For an Enhance-type, yes." She went back to her clipboard. Wrote something. "Your musculature is denser than your file suggests for a first-year. Your bone density reads closer to a third-year's. And you should be unconscious right now. A normal Enhance user with three cracked ribs and a concussion would need eight hours of sleep after my Quirk. You look like you could walk out of here."

He could walk out of here. That was the problem.

"What are you eating?" she asked.

"Rice."

She looked at him over the clipboard. Her eyes were small and sharp behind wrinkled lids and they didn't believe him.

"Rice," she repeated.

"And eggs. Sometimes."

She wrote something else. He couldn't see what. The pen moved in small, precise strokes, and when she finished she closed the file and put it in a drawer and the drawer had a lock on it and she used it.

"You can go," she said. "Drink water. Eat something with protein. Come back if you feel dizzy." She handed him two more gummies. "And Hayami-kun."

"Yeah."

"I'll be checking that file again after the Sports Festival."

He took the gummies and got off the cot. Grabbed his folded costume and gear from the chair on the way out. His ribs and back were fine. His concussion was gone and his hearing was normal and none of that should have been true and Recovery Girl knew it and now she had a file with his name on it in a locked drawer.

First data point.

The hallway outside Recovery Girl's office was wide and clean. Fluorescent lights, tile floor. A window at the end showed the U.A. campus in late afternoon light.

Classmates were scattered through the hallway in clusters. Sero leaning against the wall with a piece of tape hanging from his elbow he'd forgotten to retract. Tokoyami at the far end with Dark Shadow pulled tight against his body, smaller than usual. Momo on a bench near the stairwell with her ponytail down and her eyes closed.

Kaminari was sitting with his back to the wall and his eyes unfocused, the derp-face from overusing his Quirk, except this didn't look like the derp-face. This looked like a kid staring at nothing. Kirishima was next to him, talking, but his hands were shaking and he was talking too fast and Kaminari wasn't responding.

Iida was pacing. He'd been the one who ran for help.

Ojiro was sitting on the floor eating a rice ball. The wrapper was from a convenience store. He was eating it slowly, mechanically, like his hands needed a job. Ojiro noticed him, nodded once, went back to his rice ball.

Then Ochaco.

She was standing at the far end of the hallway near the window. Her costume was gone too, replaced with the standard U.A. gym uniform. Her arms were crossed over her stomach, holding herself in place. Her eyes found him the moment he stepped through the door.

Brown. Wet. She'd been crying recently and had stopped and was maintaining the stop through willpower. Her cheeks were pinker than normal, which for Ochaco was saying something. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth and her jaw was tight and when she saw him standing, when she confirmed that he was upright and moving and had two working arms and a face that didn't look like it had been pressed into concrete, her jaw unclenched.

She didn't come over. She didn't say anything. She nodded, one small dip of her chin, and her fingers pressed together at her sides, all five pads, both hands, the nervous tic she did with her Quirk hand when she was trying not to float something. Then she turned and walked toward Iida, who was still pacing, and touched his arm and said something to him that Ryo couldn't hear.

He watched her go. The gym uniform was loose on her but not loose enough to hide the line of her shoulders. This morning she'd bounced when she walked. Now she planted her feet.

A hand on his forearm.

He looked down. Small, wide-padded fingers pressed flat against the skin of his right forearm. The exact spot. The forearm Shigaraki's five fingers had closed around.

Tsuyu.

She'd appeared beside him without sound. Green wetsuit gone, replaced with the same gym uniform as everyone else. Her dark-green hair was still tied at the bottom with the bow but it was damp, probably from the Shipwreck Zone water that nobody had had time to properly dry off from. Her enormous dark-green eyes were looking at his face. Steady and still.

Her palm was flat against his forearm. Warm. Covering the skin where five dry fingertips had pressed in and nothing had happened because a man with a broken face had kept his eyes open.

"You stepped in front of me," she said. Low and steady.

Ryo looked at her hand on his arm. At the wide frog-pads of her fingers pressed against the spot that should have been dust. Her hand was warm. He'd expected cool skin, frogs being what they were, but she was warm and the warmth soaked through the spot where Shigaraki's hand had been cold and dry and wrong.

He didn't say anything. You're welcome felt wrong. Too small for what had happened.

Her hand stayed on his arm for three seconds. He counted. Then she removed it, placed it back at her side, blinked the slow blink, and walked away down the hallway without looking back.

He was still standing there when the gurney came through.

Two paramedics, pushing it fast, and on it was Aizawa. Full-body bandaged. White gauze wrapped around his torso, his arms, his face. Both arms were in rigid splints, straight out, and the splints had padding that didn't quite cover the yellow-purple bruising at the edges. His face was bandaged from the nose up, the wrapping going over his forehead and around the back of his skull. One eye was uncovered. The left one. The right was buried under gauze.

The one visible eye was open.

It tracked Ryo as the gurney passed. The paramedics were moving fast and the hallway was narrow and the gurney's wheels rattled on the tile and then they were past him and through the double doors at the end of the hall.

Aizawa hadn't looked at anyone else in the hallway. He'd looked at Ryo.

The gurney turned the corner and was gone.

Ryo leaned against the hallway wall. The tile was cool through the medical gown. His phone buzzed in the pocket of his folded costume. He fished it out of the pile of gear at his feet. One text, from a number that had added itself to his contacts two days ago with a string of emojis instead of a name.

Mina: ur alive right Mina: tell me ur alive or im coming to find u

He typed back: Alive. Ribs were broken. Not anymore.

Three dots. Then:

Mina: im coming over after school tomorrow Mina: don't argue

He didn't argue. He put the phone down and leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. The hallway was quiet except for Kirishima still talking too fast and the shuffle of someone's shoes on tile.

His forearm was still warm.