MHA: Lust Quirk

The day before the Sports Festival, U.A. stopped pretending to be a school.

Classes ran but nobody was listening. Gen Studies kids stood in clusters outside the hero course hallway staring through the windows like they were sizing up livestock. A girl from the Business Course chased Iida down the corridor with a voice recorder asking for pre-event quotes and Iida gave her a seven-minute answer with hand gestures that she probably couldn't use any of. Two Support Course second-years cornered Midoriya near the vending machines asking about Todoroki's ice output and Midoriya gave them numbers so specific they pulled out notebooks.

In the cafeteria, Bakugo stood on his chair.

"I'm going to win."

He said it once. The cafeteria went quiet. Aizawa was three tables away eating soup and didn't open his eyes. Bakugo sat back down. The cafeteria resumed.

Todoroki was already gone. He'd said his sentence to Midoriya yesterday and apparently considered that sufficient social interaction for the week. His tray was in the return stack, untouched except for the rice.

After school, Gym Gamma. Ochaco ran the combat toggle drill for twenty minutes and the improvement was visible. Her four-finger contact was clean now and the release was fast and the whiplash through the pads was consistent. Near the end she threw a tennis ball at the gym wall and activated mid-throw, four fingers on release, and the ball went weightless halfway through its arc and curved around a support pillar and hit the back wall.

She stared at the wall. Stared at her hand.

"I learned that from you," she said. "The idea of using it mid-throw. You said 'what if you don't need contact at the target' and I just- that was the whole thing. That was it."

He hadn't remembered saying that. His mouth ran through a lot of things on autopilot during training while the rest of him was busy with other problems. But she'd heard it and she'd built a technique from it and the tennis ball was rolling along the baseboard behind the pillar.

"Good luck tomorrow," she said at the gate. Her headband was in her hand and she was twisting the fabric between her fingers. "You're going to do great."

"You too."

She smiled. The big one, the one that went all the way to her eyes and made the permanent blush look intentional. Then she turned and walked toward the train station and the headband was still twisting in her hand.

Mina showed up at his apartment at eight in gray sweatpants and a hoodie with the sleeves pushed past her elbows and her hair was flat against her head and her horns weren't polished and she wasn't wearing makeup.

"I can't sleep before big days," she said from the doorway. "I tried. I lay there and stared at my ceiling for an hour and my ceiling doesn't even have a Gerald."

"Come in."

She went to the fridge. Opened it. Looked inside.

"You have rice and eggs and a thing."

"The thing is pickled radish."

"Is it supposed to be that color?"

"I don't know what color it's supposed to be."

She closed the fridge. The fridge made a sound when the door sealed, a low groan that was louder than the usual hum. Mina looked at it. Looked at him.

"That's a bad sound."

"It's always made that sound."

"It hasn't. I've been here enough times. That's new." She patted the fridge like it was a sick animal. "You're dying, buddy."

She sat on the floor. Her spot. Between the bed and the desk, back against the wall, knees up. He sat next to her and their shoulders touched and she was warm through the hoodie and the apartment was quiet except for the fridge, which was making the bad sound.

"My parents are both heteromorphic," she said. She was looking at the wall across from them. "Mom's blue. Lighter than me, but blue. Dad's got the horns, bigger than mine, and his skin is more purple. I got the pink from somewhere in the mix."

She pulled a thread from the pillowcase on the bed behind her. Wound it around her index finger.

"When I was little, maybe six, Mom took me to the grocery store. We were in the produce section and this woman saw us and grabbed her kid's hand and pulled him away. Didn't say anything. Just saw two pink-and-blue people picking out tomatoes and decided that was too close." The thread wound tighter. "Mom held my hand the whole way home. Didn't let go until we were inside. She never said anything about it. I think she thought if she didn't talk about it, I wouldn't remember it."

The thread snapped. Mina looked at the broken ends on her finger.

"I remember it."

She put her head against his shoulder and her horn pressed into his arm, warm from the blood flushing the keratin pink.

"I want them to see me on TV tomorrow," she said. Her voice was getting slower. "I want Mom to see me in the stadium and think 'that's my kid' and not think about the grocery store."

"She will."

"You sound sure."

"I pay attention."

She was quiet for a while. He could feel her breathing slow against his shoulder. The fridge groaned. Gerald watched.

"Ryo," she said. Quieter. "Tomorrow I'm going to-"

She didn't finish. Her weight shifted and her breathing evened out and she'd fallen asleep leaning on him with her horn digging into his deltoid and a broken thread from the pillowcase still wound around her finger.

He sat there. Couldn't move without waking her. Didn't want to.

The sex with Mina a week ago had put him in upper 1-A. Tomorrow he'd be on national television and every pro hero in the country would be watching and the question was how much to show. Too little and nobody noticed him. Too much and Aizawa's notebook got a third data point and the gap between "Enhance" and what his body could actually do became a problem he couldn't explain with protein intake and a training regimen.

Eighth. The outline in his head said eighth for the obstacle race. High enough to qualify, low enough to look like a strong kid having a good day. Todoroki would win because Todoroki won the obstacle race in every version of the story. The rest was negotiable.

He shifted Mina onto the bed. She murmured and her horn caught the pillow and her hand found the sheet and she pulled it over herself without opening her eyes. He lay next to her. Didn't sleep for a while.

The stadium held sixty-five thousand people and all of them were loud.

Ryo stood in the tunnel with the rest of 1-A and the noise came through the walls in waves, bass that he could feel in his chest. Midoriya was flexing his fingers. Bakugo was standing at the front like the tunnel was his. Todoroki was still, arms at his sides, frost visible on his right knuckle.

Midnight walked out onto the stage.

The leather. The mask. The whip. The woman who'd stood on the training ground in a blouse with her hair down and told him he fought ugly was somewhere underneath all of it.

She was going to die at Gunga Mountain Villa. She was going to get knocked off a giant's back and crawl through a forest and bleed out in the dark and he was going to stop it.

"WELCOME TO THE U.A. SPORTS FESTIVAL!"

Her voice hit the stadium and the crowd roared and the sound was physical, a wall of it, and Ryo walked out of the tunnel into the light.

The obstacle race. All eleven classes, two hundred and something students, one course. Todoroki froze the entrance tunnel in the first ten seconds and half the runners were stuck in ice up to their knees. Ryo had seen it coming. He jumped the ice line before it reached him and came down running on the far side and his legs were loaded and fast and the ground blurred under his feet.

First obstacle. A canyon of repurposed entrance exam robots, the zero-pointers from the practical, huge and grinding across the path. Todoroki was already through, he'd frozen two of them and slid past on ice. Bakugo was flying over on explosions. Ryo ran at the nearest one and dropped low and punched its knee joint. The metal buckled. The robot toppled sideways and he ran through the gap before it finished falling and someone behind him yelled and he didn't look back.

Second obstacle. The Fall. A chasm with rope bridges and stone pillars. He sprinted across the center bridge at full speed, feet barely touching the ropes, and halfway across he saw her. Ginger hair in a side-ponytail. A girl swinging between pillars on massive enlarged fists, gripping the stone and launching forward. Kendo. She cleared the chasm fast.

He kept running.

Third obstacle. Mine field. Pink ground, buried charges, Midoriya and Bakugo and Todoroki already picking paths through it. Mines popped under his feet and the blast went through his shoes and up his legs and he kept going. The explosions hurt. The durability absorbed them. Direct line, absorbing cost. A mine blew under his left foot and the flash was bright and his ankle throbbed and he pushed through it and the finish line was ahead.

He crossed eighth.

Todoroki first. Bakugo second. Midoriya third, because Midoriya had used a mine to catapult himself over both of them at the last second, which was exactly how it had happened in the anime. The crowd went insane. Present Mic's voice was everywhere.

Ryo stood past the finish line catching his breath. His ankles were sore from the mines and his knuckles ached from the robot and he was sweating and his heart was hammering and the stadium was deafening.

"Not bad."

He turned. Green eyes. Sharp teeth. Dark moss-green hair and a mouth that was already smiling, tilted left, amused. Purple bodysuit. Arms crossed. Weight on one leg, chin lifted.

"For a 1-A kid," she said.

Behind her, a cluster of 1-B girls. Kendo, drying sweat from her forehead with the back of one normal-sized hand. A girl with dark green vine-hair and a crown of thorns watching from further back.

"Setsuna Tokage," the green-eyed girl said. "1-B. Remember the name."

"Ryo Hayami." He was still breathing hard. "I'll try."

Her smile got wider. Teeth that were a little too sharp. "You'd better."

She turned and walked back to her class and Ryo stood in the stadium with the obstacle race over and the cavalry battle next.

His shoulder was still warm from Mina's horn.