32 – Nemuri
The classroom emptied out and I didn't leave.
Midnight was at her desk sorting through hero name submissions. The rejected ones went into a pile on her left. She'd crossed out STUN GUN with a red pen and written "trademark - resubmit" in the margin. Another whiteboard had LADY KILLER on it and she'd drawn a single line through it with no notes. The line said enough.
The last student, Sero, grabbed his bag and glanced at me still sitting in the front row and shrugged and left. The door closed behind him and the hallway noise cut off and the room was just us and the fluorescent hum and the click of her pen against the stack of whiteboards.
She'd told me to stay after class three weeks ago. Brief, between periods, her voice the public-Midnight register. "Hayami. Stick around after hero names. I want to talk about your approach." I'd said yes because you don't say no to a teacher and because she was going to die in two years and I wasn't going to waste any chance to be in the room.
She looked up from the stack. Without the stage energy she was quieter. The domino mask was still on. The whip was coiled on the desk next to the pen cup. She was sitting with one leg crossed over the other and the heeled boot bounced slightly when she moved.
"Havoc," she said. "That was fast. Most students agonize for days. You walked up and wrote it like you'd known for years."
"I had."
Her eyebrow went up. "Since when?"
I didn't answer that honestly. "Since I started thinking about what kind of hero I want to be."
She set the pen down and leaned back in her chair. "And what kind is that?"
"The kind that breaks things."
"Heroes don't break things, Hayami. They protect people."
"Sometimes breaking the right thing is how you protect people."
Her mouth pulled to one side. She picked up the whiteboard with HAVOC on it and turned it in her hands. "You know what most students write? Something aspirational. A symbol. A metaphor for their ideal self." She set it down. "You wrote a verb."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's interesting." She stood up and walked around the desk. Her heels clicked on the tile and she leaned against the front edge of the desk, arms folded, three meters from where I was sitting. The costume was the full Midnight outfit and the mask made her eyes harder to read but her posture was different from the performance she'd run during class. Looser. The persona was still on but she'd turned the volume down.
"A hero name isn't a brand," she said. "Most people think that's what I'm teaching. Marketing. Image management." She uncrossed her arms and gestured at the stack of whiteboards. "Half those names are brands. The students picked words they thought sounded cool. They'll grow into some of them. Most they won't."
"What's a hero name if it's not a brand?"
"A choice. Who you decide to be when the cameras turn on and the villain is in front of you and the crowd is watching and you have one second to act." She tapped the desk behind her. "Some of your classmates understood that. Froppy. She picked the name people are already calling her. That's confidence. Red Riot. He picked a tribute to the hero who inspired him. That's legacy." She picked up Bakugo's rejected whiteboard and held it up. The words KING EXPLOSION MURDER were crossed out in thick red ink. "And some of them are still working on it."
"You vetoed that pretty fast."
"I vetoed it because it's a tantrum, not a name. Bakugo is brilliant and angry and he'll figure out who he wants to be eventually, but right now he's naming his rage, not his purpose." She set the board down. "Yours was different. Havoc isn't aspirational. It isn't poetic. It's a promise."
She wasn't wrong.
"Midnight chose to be fearless about the uncomfortable truth," she said. Her voice shifted. Slower. The theatrical edge gone. "That heroism and desire coexist. That the person saving your life might also be the person you fantasize about, and that's allowed."
The R-Rated theme. The leather. The whip. The costume that made parents write complaint letters and hero forums debate whether she was setting a bad example.
"Is that why you chose it?" I said. "The R-Rated persona."
She looked at me. The classroom was quiet. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead and her shadow fell across the first row of desks and her eyes behind the mask were steady.
"Most people assume it's for attention."
"Most people are idiots."
She didn't laugh. Her mouth moved and her jaw loosened and she set both hands flat on the desk behind her and her shoulders dropped half an inch.
"When I was a student here, my Quirk embarrassed me." Her voice was lower. The stage-Midnight register was gone. "Somnambulist. Sleep-inducing aroma released through exposed skin. Works on everyone. Works better on men." She looked down at her hands on the desk. "The hero commission reviewed my file when I graduated. They recommended I wear a sealed suit. Full coverage. Minimize skin exposure, control the gas through vents." She pushed off the desk and walked to the window. The evening light came through the glass and caught the edge of her mask. "I refused."
She was looking out the window. The campus was quiet. Students heading to the gates. The sun was low and orange.
"My power requires my body. My skin is the delivery system. If the commission wanted me to cover up, they were asking me to be weaker so other people would be more comfortable." She turned back toward me. "So I did the opposite. I wore less. I made it loud. I made the body the entire point so nobody could pretend it wasn't there. And the people who were uncomfortable with that had to deal with it, because I was saving lives and I was doing it on my terms."
Her voice was firm on the last word. She'd said this to herself before. Maybe a lot.
"Aizawa calls it stubborn," she said. Lighter. A half-smile. "Present Mic calls it 'peak Nemuri energy.' He's been saying that since we were students." The half-smile faded. "The commission stopped pushing after my first year as a pro. I was too effective. You don't argue with results."
She stopped. Her hands were at her sides and her fingers twitched once against her thigh.
In two years she was going to climb onto Gigantomachia's back. She was going to be knocked off by Mr. Compress and she was going to land in a forest and bleed and use the last of her strength to call Momo and tell her how to sedate the giant and then a masked soldier was going to find her on the ground and she was going to die. In her Midnight costume. With her skin exposed. With the body she'd refused to cover still being the weapon she'd chosen.
Unless I was there.
She looked at me and whatever she saw in my face made her pause.
"I don't know why I'm telling you this." Quieter. "I've never told a student any of that."
The classroom was empty. The sun was going down outside and the light was orange on the tile and her shadow was long across the floor.
"Because I asked about the hero," I said. "Not the costume."
She stared at me. Her lips parted. Closed. She turned back toward the desk and picked up her pen and I thought the moment was over and she was going to put the persona back on and tell me to go home.
"Kayama."
I stopped. "What?"
"My name." She was holding the pen. Her fingers were tight around it. "Nemuri Kayama. You've been calling me sensei and Midnight. If you're going to sit in my empty classroom and make me accidentally honest, you should know my actual name."
Nemuri. The kanji for sleep. Her parents had named her for her Quirk before she was old enough to be embarrassed by it.
"Nemuri," I said.
First name. No suffix. No honorific. Too familiar for a student talking to a teacher She was looking at me and her eyes behind the mask were wider than they'd been during the whole conversation.
She didn't correct me.
The light buzzed. Students outside on the walkway below the window, distant voices, someone laughing.
She picked up the pen and turned back to the stack of whiteboards and her shoulders were set and her jaw was tight and the pen scratched against the surface of a rejected name and she didn't look at me when she spoke.
"Don't use that in front of anyone."
"I know."
The pen kept moving. She was writing notes on a whiteboard she wasn't reading. The handwriting was uneven. She crossed something out and rewrote it and the correction was worse than the original.
I stood up. Picked up my bag. The chair scraped against the floor and the sound was loud in the empty room.
"Hayami."
I stopped at the door.
"The agency in Hosu. The handwritten one." She was still looking at the whiteboard. "That's Gran Torino's territory. He doesn't take interns. The agency that sent you that note is small, underfunded, and in a district that's been flagged for increased villain activity in the last three months." A pause. The pen tapped against the desk twice. "Be careful what you go looking for."
She knew about the Hosu note. She'd seen me pull it from the mailbox, or she'd checked the intern offers herself, or Aizawa had mentioned it. She was a teacher and she noticed things. She'd given me her name and warned me about walking into danger in the same conversation and neither of those were accidents.
"Good night, sensei."
She flinched. Just the smallest contraction around her eyes, the mask shifting a millimeter.
"Good night, Hayami."
I walked out. The hallway was empty and the lights hummed and my footsteps echoed on the tile. Behind me, through the open door, the pen had stopped scratching.
I kept walking. My bag had the Hosu note in it. Stain was in that city and the internship was next week. I had a hero name stamped in red ink and a real name I wasn't going to use in front of anyone and the hallway was long and quiet and the sun was down.