MHA: Lust Quirk

I heard it before I found it.

A guitar, somewhere on the third floor, coming through the walls. I'd been looking for an empty classroom to sit in and think about the Hosu internship because the common room was loud and Kaminari was doing impressions of Present Mic that were getting worse with each attempt and I needed quiet. The stairwell was empty. The third floor was empty. School had ended twenty minutes ago and most of the hero course was in the locker rooms or heading home and the hallway had that after-hours feeling where the fluorescent lights were too bright for the number of people left.

The guitar wasn't quiet, but it was the kind of sound that replaced thinking instead of competing with it.

I followed it past the art rooms. A watercolor of Mount Fuji was drying on an easel near an open classroom door. The paint smelled like tap water. The guitar got clearer around the second corner. Acoustic, nylon strings, played with fingers instead of a pick. The melody was angular, built from intervals that didn't resolve where you expected. It kept turning left when the chord wanted to go right.

The music room door was open a crack. I pushed it wider.

Jiro was sitting on a folding chair near the piano with a guitar across her lap. Her earphone jacks were coiled around the fretboard, tips pressed against the strings above the nut, and her fingers were moving on the neck. She was playing with her eyes closed.

Her eyes opened. She saw me.

"Get out."

I leaned against the doorframe. "Play that again."

"I said get out."

"I heard you. Play it again."

She stared at me. Five seconds. Her jacks tightened around the fretboard and the strings bent under the cable pressure and her jaw was set and her dark triangular eyes were narrow and hard. She was deciding whether to throw me out or throw the guitar at me and neither option was off the table.

She played.

The same piece. From the top. Her fingers found the positions without looking and the melody came back, the angular thing with the intervals that turned wrong on purpose, and I stood in the doorway and listened. She played with her eyes open this time, watching me, watching the doorway, watching whether I'd react. Her jacks loosened from the fretboard and hung at her sides, swaying slightly with the rhythm.

It wasn't a cover. This was hers. The chord progression had a logic to it I couldn't name. It moved from tension to almost-resolution to new tension, and each time it almost settled it twisted again.

She reached the end. The last chord rang and faded and the music room was silent except for the string vibration dying off, the nylon buzzing against the fretboard for a second after her fingers lifted.

I didn't clap. She would have killed me if I'd clapped.

"That's good."

"I know it's good." Her voice was flat. She set the guitar across her knees and looked at her hands. The calluses on her fingertips were visible from the doorway. "Why are you here?"

"Looking for somewhere quiet."

"This isn't quiet. I'm playing guitar."

"Was," I said. "You stopped."

Her mouth twitched. One side. She caught it and killed it before it became a smile.

I walked into the room and sat on a folding chair near the piano. She tracked me with her eyes and her jacks tracked me independently, both cables angling toward me like antenna finding a signal. The chair was cold through my pants. The music room smelled like old piano wood and dust and the faint chemical tang of new guitar strings.

"How long have you been playing?" I said.

"Guitar?"

"Yeah."

"Since I was four." She plucked a string absently. The note hung in the room. "My dad plays. My mom sings. Our house has more instruments than furniture." Another pluck. Different string, different note. "It's not heroic. It's just what I do."

"Nobody said it has to be heroic."

"Nobody has to." She looked at the guitar. "The hero course doesn't have a music credit. Mic does the band for the cultural festival and half the class treats it like a chore. Kaminari plays air guitar. Sero thinks EDM counts as a genre. The bar is on the floor."

"You wrote that piece?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

She plucked the E string. "Last week."

"What's it about?"

She didn't answer for a long time. Long enough for the E string to stop vibrating and the room to go fully quiet. Then she set the guitar flat on her knees and put both hands on the body and her jacks coiled loosely in her lap.

"Your heartbeat is different around different girls."

Quiet. Level. She said it to her jacks, not to me. The late-afternoon light came through the window and put a strip of gold across the floor and across her knees and across the body of the guitar.

I didn't say anything.

"Around Ashido it speeds up and holds steady. Like a drum track. Consistent. She makes you feel one thing and you stay there." She wound one jack around her index finger. Tight. The cable dug into her skin. "Around Uraraka it spikes and dips. Irregular. She catches you off guard. You'll be steady and then she does something and your heart jumps and then it settles and then it jumps again. Like a rhythm section that can't decide what time signature it's in."

"Around Yaoyorozu it stays flat but your blood pressure changes. I can hear the difference in how the blood moves through the carotid. It's-" She paused. Unwound the jack from her finger. The skin underneath was red from the pressure. "-honestly, I don't even know what that means. Your heart rate doesn't change but your body does. Like you're keeping it level on purpose and your circulatory system disagrees."

She'd been listening for weeks. Every homeroom, every hallway, every time I was in range. Twelve meters. That was her detection radius. Every time I'd been within twelve meters of a girl, Jiro had been running my heartbeat through whatever internal analytics her Quirk gave her. Building a profile. Sorting the data. Coming to conclusions she didn't want to share.

"The girl in the workshop." She said it flat. "The pink-haired one. Hatsume." Her jaw tightened. "Your heart rate spiked seventy-eight to ninety-one in four seconds when she touched your hands. That's the fastest spike I've recorded."

"She was fitting gauntlets."

"I know what she was fitting." The jack curled around her finger again. "I walked past the door."

The music room was quiet. A metronome on the piano had its arm stopped mid-tick. Someone had put a sticker on it that said PROPERTY OF PRESENT MIC DO NOT TOUCH. The window was open and the air from outside was cool and smelled like the athletic field.

"And around me?" I said.

She didn't answer. Her jacks were wrapped around the guitar neck again, tight, the strings bending under the cable pressure. Her knuckles were white on the fretboard. She was looking at the tuning pegs like she was going to adjust them but her hands weren't moving. The light from the window had shifted and the gold strip was on the wall now and the room was getting dim.

I waited.

She unwrapped her jacks. Set the guitar on the stand beside the chair. Stood up. Picked up her blazer and put it on and buttoned the top button and straightened the collar. The blazer was armor. She was putting it on before she said the next thing.

She walked to the door. The room was small enough that it took four steps. She stopped next to me. Close. Her shoulder was near my arm and the tips of her jacks brushed the doorframe beside my elbow. The cable was warm where it grazed my sleeve. Her eyes were on the floor. The triangular shapes under her bangs were dark and sharp and she wasn't looking at me.

Her jacks were trembling. Both cables shaking with a fine vibration she couldn't stop.

"Around you it does something I haven't heard before," she said. To the floor. To the doorframe. To the piano and the drum kit and the guitar stand and anything in the room that wasn't my face.

She walked out.

Her footsteps faded down the hallway. Fast. Almost running. The sound of her school shoes on tile got quieter and quieter until it was gone and the third floor was silent and the music room was empty except for me and the guitar she'd left on the stand and the chair still warm from where she'd been sitting.

The metronome's arm was caught mid-tick. The strip of afternoon light had moved from the wall to the ceiling. The room smelled like old piano wood and nylon strings and the faint trace of whatever shampoo Jiro used that smelled like green tea.

The guitar string she'd been bending under her jack was slightly out of tune. A quarter-tone sharp. The E string humming faintly from the tension she'd left in it.

I sat in the music room for a while after she left. The light faded. The guitar hummed.

Then I stood up and walked the other direction.