MHA: Lust Quirk

I knew about the scar before I saw it up close. The father, the kettle, the hospital, the decade of silence. I knew the fire was in there even though the kid standing across the arena had decided it wasn't.

Shoto Todoroki. Half-Cold Half-Hot. Right side ice, left side fire. Heterochromatic eyes, one gray and one blue, split down the middle like he'd been assembled from two different kits and nobody had bothered blending the seam. White hair on the right. Red on the left. The burn scar over his left eye was worse in person than the anime, puckered and tight, the skin pulled so the eye looked permanently half-closed.

I rolled my shoulders. The arena was still marked from Ochaco's fight, cracks and scorch marks. Cementoss had patched the worst of it but the surface was uneven underfoot.

Todoroki's breath was visible. Frost crawled across his right arm and shoulder. His posture was clean, feet set, weight centered. The posture of someone who'd been drilled since he was five. Drilled wasn't the right word. Beaten into shape was closer.

"SECOND ROUND. HAYAMI VERSUS TODOROKI. BEGIN!"

Todoroki stamped his right foot.

The glacier came fast. A wall of ice erupting from the floor, taller than a house, rushing at me with the grinding crunch of tectonic plates moving in real time. The crowd gasped. It was spectacular and absurdly overpowered for a first-year. This is what I can do with half of what I have.

He wouldn't use the other half. I knew he wouldn't. The reason was the scar and the kettle and the hospital room and I was never going to push that button because it wasn't mine to push.

I punched through the glacier.

My fist hit the ice face and the wall shattered from the impact point outward, cracks spiderwebbing, chunks breaking free and tumbling. My knuckles stung. The cold went through my skin and into the joints and for a second my fingers wouldn't close. I punched again. A section the size of a car door broke loose and I stepped through the gap.

Todoroki was already sending the second wave. Lower, faster, less spectacle. Ice racing across the ground toward my feet, trying to freeze me in place. I jumped it. Came down running. The frost caught my right boot on the landing and climbed my ankle and my calf and my knee and the cold burned, genuinely burned, muscles going tight and slow. I ripped my foot free. Kept moving.

Todoroki watched me come. The gray eye and the blue tracked me with the same flat expression, calculating. He sent ice from the right in waves, building walls and spires that forced me to change direction, and every surface I touched was cold and every breath had frost in it and the arena was becoming a frozen maze with him at the center. A wall rose on my left, three meters tall, and I punched through it and ice shards scattered across the ground and another wall rose behind the first and I punched through that too. The crowd was making sounds but the blood in my ears was louder.

I closed the distance anyway. Todoroki could keep me at range if the arena was infinite. It wasn't. Maybe forty meters across and I was fast enough to cover it in seconds and every wall I punched through was a wall that wasn't between us anymore. My knuckles were raw from the ice. My right hand was losing feeling at the fingertips.

Inside the ice radius. Close range.

Todoroki shifted his weight and threw a right cross.

Technically perfect. Hips rotated, weight transferred, fist tight, elbow aligned. I took it on my forearm and the impact was solid but the power was body weight, nothing enhanced, and the post-Mina gains meant the punch didn't move me.

I threw an elbow at his ribs. He blocked with his right arm, ice forming instantly as armor, and my elbow hit ice instead of flesh. Cold shot up my arm from the contact. I pulled back, shook it out. My skin was red where the ice had touched.

"Your footwork's really good," I said. The words came out on their own. "Did your dad teach you that, or-"

The temperature dropped. The ice on his right side surged, thicker, sharper, spires forming on his shoulder and forearm. His jaw tightened and both eyes went hard.

"Right. Sore subject."

He lunged. Right hook with ice-armored knuckles aimed at my jaw. I ducked it and came up with a knee to his midsection. He twisted, absorbed it on his hip, pivoted, sent an ice column at my feet from point-blank range. I stamped it flat. The impact jarred my ankle.

He pressed the advantage. An ice-coated backfist that caught my temple. My vision blurred for a half-second and then his knee drove into my thigh and the frost on his leg transferred to my gym pants and the cold bit deep. I grabbed his arm, tried to pull him off-balance. He froze his feet to the ground and didn't move and the ice was climbing my grip.

I let go. Stepped back. My fingers were white where they'd held him.

Up close, Todoroki was better than me. Cleaner. Every movement was economical, every block positioned correctly, and his counterattacks came from angles my brawling couldn't match. I fought ugly because ugly was all I had. Knees and elbows and shoulder checks and a headbutt that caught his collarbone and sent us both stumbling.

"That one's going to bruise," I said. "Sorry." Pause. "Actually, no."

He came at me again. Right side leading, ice trailing from every surface he touched, and the arena floor around us was a skating rink of frozen concrete. My boots slid on a patch and he caught me with a straight right to the ribs that drove the air out. I grabbed his wrist before he could pull back. His skin was freezing cold and the cold transferred instantly and my hand burned but I held on and drove a short left into his solar plexus. Close. Ugly. The kind of punch a boxing coach would cry about.

Todoroki folded. I let go and he slid backward and hit the arena floor on one knee.

Frost was spreading across his right side, uncontrolled now. His right arm was white from the shoulder to the fingertips and the ice was creeping up his neck and his breathing was shorter and his movements were stiffening. Ice on one side and nothing on the other and the cold was eating him because the fire that would balance it was locked away.

I stood in the middle of the arena and looked at him.

"You're fighting me with one arm tied behind your back," I said. Loud enough for the microphones. "I'm going to beat you anyway."

Todoroki stood. Right side half-frozen, left side untouched. He'd rather lose this fight than use what his father wanted him to use.

In the manga, Deku had yelled at him. Said the fire was his, not Endeavor's. Pushed until the fire came roaring out. That was Deku's thing. His moment to give. The timeline was cracked but some things needed to happen even if they happened differently.

Todoroki charged. Right arm leading, ice building for one big push, all committed because the frostbite was too advanced for sustained fighting. One shot.

I sidestepped the ice and grabbed his right arm at the wrist. The frozen skin burned my palm. I pulled, twisted, got my hip under his center of gravity, and threw him.

It was ugly. A wrestling throw without technique, all leverage and brute force. Todoroki left the ground and hit the concrete past the boundary line and slid to a stop with frost in his hair and his chest heaving.

The stadium was silent.

Somewhere in the upper section, a man was eating yakisoba. Steam rising from the paper tray. He'd stopped with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

The roar hit.

I stood in the center with cold-burned hands and frost on my pants and my right leg still half-numb. The scoreboard flashed HAYAMI WINS and Present Mic was screaming and I wasn't hearing any of it because the kid past the boundary line was staring at the sky with both eyes open and his left hand pressed against the arena floor.

His left hand. His fire side. The fingertips were orange. A glow, faint, heat rising from the palm like a mirage. There for a heartbeat. Then gone. The glow faded and the hand went pale and he closed it into a fist and stood up.

We looked at each other across the line. His jaw was tight. His left fist clenched.

I raised two fingers. The lazy half-salute. He didn't return it. He walked toward the tunnel with his frozen right arm hanging at his side and he didn't look back.

I turned toward the stands.

Mina was on her feet with both fists in the air, mouth wide open, whatever she was screaming lost in the noise. Her horns were catching the stadium lights and her whole body was leaning over the railing and Kirishima had a hand on the back of her shirt to keep her from going over. The lean put a line of pink skin between her gym shirt and her waistband and my eyes went there for a second before my brain caught up.

Ochaco was clapping. Both hands, bandaged from Bakugo, pressed together carefully. Eyes bright. Lips pressed together.

Momo was sitting with her hands steepled in front of her face, fingertips touching her mouth. She was looking at the shattered ice, at the craters.

Tsuyu had her finger to her chin. Same look she'd had at USJ when I'd hit the Nomu. One slow blink.

Jiro was still. Her earphone jacks lay flat against her thighs. She'd tracked my heartbeat through the entire fight.

From the 1-B section, Kendo was watching with her arms crossed and her teal eyes narrowed.

And in the guest section, on the elevated platform with the pro heroes, a man built like a furnace stood with flames licking along his jaw and across his shoulders. Endeavor. The number two hero.

He was looking at me. His son was walking into the tunnel with a frozen arm and a fire that had almost surfaced and hadn't, and Endeavor was watching the kid who'd won with bad technique and brute force.

I looked back. His eyes were blue and flat and the flames around his face burned hotter.

A seagull landed on the railing above the guest section and immediately left.

I turned and walked toward the tunnel. The concrete was cold under my boots. The hallway was fluorescent and quiet and my hands were shaking, the fine tremor of adrenaline leaving, and the cold burns on my palms were starting to sting.

The fire had flickered. Just once. And the person who was supposed to make it catch was a green-haired kid with bad self-preservation instincts whose moment was still out there somewhere in a timeline cracking at the edges.

Cracks in concrete stay.