MHA: Lust Quirk

The apartment had been quiet all day.

Ryo had woken up around ten, which was late for him and late for the body, but Recovery Girl's healing had burned through his stamina like a credit card bill and the sleep had been the price. The ribs were fine. Tender when he twisted wrong, a dull ache in the left side that reminded him they'd been cracked twenty-four hours ago, but fine. He could move. He could breathe without it stabbing.

He'd eaten rice for breakfast because there was rice. He'd eaten rice for lunch because there was still rice and nothing else. The eggs were gone. The milk in the fridge had expired sometime during the USJ attack and smelled like a decision he wasn't going to make today.

School was closed. The official statement from U.A. was "facility damage assessment and enhanced security review," which meant seventy villains got inside your building and you need more than one day to figure out how. Reporters had been at the gates since morning. Ryo knew this because Kaminari had texted the class group chat a picture of the media vans from his apartment window, captioned with nothing, which was probably the most honest response anyone had managed.

By evening the apartment was dark and Ryo was on the floor between the bed and the desk, back against the wall, doing nothing. Just sitting in the apartment that the body had come home to every day for years, in the quiet that had always been here, and noticing for the first time how much of it there was.

The bird stain on the ceiling was still there. The fridge was still humming. Through the wall to the left, a neighbor's television was playing something with a laugh track.

The doorbell rang.

He didn't have a doorbell. He had a buzzer that made a flat electronic noise like a smoke alarm with half a battery. He'd heard it maybe twice since arriving in this world.

He got up. His ribs twinged on the left side when he stood. He opened the door.

Mina Ashido was standing in his hallway in an oversized pink hoodie and black leggings and sneakers that had acid-burn marks on the toes. She was holding a plastic bag from a convenience store in one hand and her phone in the other. She looked like she'd already decided how this was going to go.

"Your ribs are broken and you're alone and that's stupid," she said.

"My ribs are healed."

"You're alone and that's stupid." She walked past him into the apartment. She didn't wait to be invited. Her shoulder brushed his arm on the way through and the contact was warm. Mina ran warm. She'd been warm on the first day when she'd leaned over his desk to introduce herself, and she was warm now walking past him into his one room.

She stopped in the middle of the floor and looked around. He watched her take it in. The bed with the cheap detergent pillow. The desk with nothing on it. The kitchen counter with the rice cooker and the two bowls in the drying rack and the fridge that hummed. The window with the blinds half up. The bird stain on the ceiling.

"You live here," she said.

"Yeah."

"Like, actually. This is it."

"This is it."

She looked at the ceiling stain. Looked at the empty desk. Looked at the fridge. Then she sat down on the floor between the bed and the desk, back against the wall, exactly where he'd been sitting, and started pulling things out of the convenience store bag. Two bottles of green tea. A package of mochi. A bag of shrimp chips. A can of coffee that she set aside like it was for him specifically.

"I brought stuff." She crossed her legs under her and the leggings stretched over her thighs and she didn't notice or didn't care. "Sit down. You're making me feel weird standing there."

He sat down next to her. The floor was cold through his sweatpants. Their shoulders weren't touching but the gap was small enough that he could feel the heat coming off her skin. She opened the shrimp chips and stuck the bag between them and ate three before she said anything else.

The neighbor's laugh track bled through the wall. Something crashed on the TV and someone shrieked and then the laugh track played again. Mina tilted her head toward the sound.

"Is that always going on?"

"Most nights."

"That's terrible."

"You get used to it."

She ate another chip. Looked at the ceiling bird again. "Does that thing have a name?"

"No."

"It looks like a Gerald."

He looked up at the stain. It looked like water damage shaped vaguely like a bird. It did not look like a Gerald. He didn't say this.

She pulled out her phone. "Okay, so. I was thinking. We can talk about yesterday or we can not talk about yesterday and watch something instead. And I vote watch something because every time I close my eyes I see the purple mist and I'd rather see literally anything else."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Horror movie." She said this like it was obvious. "This one's about a girl who moves into an apartment and the walls start bleeding. It's terrible. Three stars. Exactly what we need."

She queued it up on her phone and propped the phone against his rice cooker. The screen was small. They had to sit close to see it. Close enough that when she shifted to get comfortable, her arm pressed against his and stayed there.

The movie was terrible. The acting was wooden, the effects were cheap, the dialogue was written for people who weren't paying attention. Mina talked through most of it. About the movie, for once, instead of USJ.

"Why would you go into the basement. Why would ANYONE go into the basement. The walls are BLEEDING. Take the hint."

"Maybe she thinks it's paint."

"Nobody thinks bleeding walls are paint, Hayami."

"Could be a plumbing issue."

She elbowed him. Her elbow was sharp and warm and hit the soft part of his arm right above where Shigaraki's fingers had been. She didn't know about that. She just thought she was elbowing him for being funny.

They watched. The girl in the movie went into the basement because horror movie characters always went into the basement. Mina ate mochi and offered him the second one and he ate it because it was there and because the sweetness was more interesting than the nothing he'd been tasting all day.

The jump scare came at the forty-minute mark. The screen went dark and then something lunged out of a closet with a sound effect that was mostly bass and the phone's speaker did a bad job of reproducing it but it was loud enough that Mina grabbed his arm.

Both hands. Her fingers wrapped around his bicep and her nails dug in through his shirt sleeve and she pulled herself into his shoulder with a "HAH-" that was half scream and half laugh. Her forehead hit his collarbone. Her hair was against his jaw. Pink and soft and it smelled like citrus shampoo and something underneath that was fainter, sharper, chemical. Acid chemistry. Her body's baseline, the thing she probably stopped noticing years ago.

She didn't let go.

The scare passed. On screen the girl was screaming and running up the basement stairs. Mina's grip loosened from a clench to a hold and the hold stayed. Her fingers were still around his arm. Her shoulder was pressed against his. Her hair was still close enough to his face that every breath pulled in the citrus and the acid and something else that was just her skin and the hoodie and the warmth she carried everywhere.

"Sorry," she said, into his shoulder. She didn't move. "That was- okay, that was actually scary."

"It really wasn't."

"Shut up." She adjusted her grip. Not releasing. Repositioning. Her hands slid down from his bicep to his forearm and she held on with both hands and her fingers were warm on his skin and neither of them said anything about the fact that she was still holding on well after the scare was over.

The movie kept playing. They watched it. Her hands stayed on his arm. At some point her head tipped sideways and rested against his shoulder and that was a decision she made without announcing it and he didn't move away from it. She was warm against his side. Warmer than the apartment, which wasn't hard because the apartment was cold and she was Mina Ashido.

A hum low in his chest. Deeper than the ribs. Like an engine idling in a car that wasn't moving yet.

The movie ended. The girl survived. The walls stopped bleeding. Credits rolled on the rice cooker. Neither of them reached for the phone.

"Hayami."

"Yeah."

"You really went at those guys on the ship." Her voice was quieter. Still Mina, still her, but the volume was lower. She was looking at the phone screen but not seeing it. "Kaminari told me. He said you punched a shark."

"It was a shark villain. I punched him in the face. He had it coming."

"And then you went to the plaza."

"Yeah."

"Where the Nomu was."

He didn't answer that one.

She turned her head. She was still leaning against his shoulder and the turn brought her face close to his. Close enough that he could see the gold of her irises in the black of her sclera and the individual lashes around her eyes and her lower lip, slightly fuller than the upper one. Her horns caught the light from the phone screen and threw tiny shadows across her forehead.

"You're kind of dumb," she said. "Going toward that thing."

"Probably."

"Definitely."

She was very close. The citrus was stronger this close, and the acid underneath it, and the warmth of her breath. Her eyes were on his and the gold was wide and steady and not blinking.

His heartbeat was louder.

She shifted. Her weight moved toward him. Her hand on his forearm tightened and her chin tilted up and her lips parted, just enough that the gap was visible and the gap was closing.

His ribs seized.

Sharp. Left side. The exact spot where the cracks had been. The pain was brief and electric and it shot through his torso and his breath caught and he pulled back an inch and the inch broke it.

Mina blinked. Pulled back. Her hands came off his arm. The warmth left.

"Your ribs," she said.

"Yeah."

"I knew they weren't healed."

"They're healed. Mostly."

She looked at him. Her mouth was set but her eyes were still gold and close and the pupils were wide. She breathed out through her nose. Nodded once. Stood up.

She picked up the empty chip bag and the mochi wrapper and the green tea bottles and put them in the convenience store bag. She left the canned coffee on the floor next to his knee. She walked to the door and put her sneakers back on.

"I'm coming back tomorrow," she said. She was facing the door. Her voice was normal volume again.

"Okay."

"I'm bringing food. Real food. Not rice."

"Okay."

She opened the door. Stopped. Turned her head. The pink of her hair and the gold of her eyes and the set of her mouth. She looked at him like she was memorizing where she'd left off.

"Don't argue," she said.

She closed the door behind her.

Ryo sat on the floor of his apartment. The rice cooker was playing the movie's end credits to nobody. The convenience store bag was gone. The canned coffee was by his knee. The fridge hummed. Gerald stared down from the ceiling.

The apartment smelled like citrus and something sharper underneath.