MHA: Lust Quirk

She'd been in the hallway for two hours.

I knew because hospital walls are thin and Mirko doesn't breathe quietly. Not loud, either. Just present. You can hear someone standing on the other side of a door when the building goes still enough. A shift of weight on tile. The soft drag of fabric against the wall when she adjusted her position. Her ears probably picked up my heartbeat through the drywall, so she knew I was awake. She was standing out there choosing not to come in.

Two hours. The hospital smelled like floor cleaner and recycled air. Endeavor had come and gone. The police. The paramedics. Todoroki had visited. Iida had visited. A nurse had changed my IV bag and asked if I needed anything for pain and I'd said no because the cuts were already closing and explaining why I didn't need painkillers would mean explaining why my hands were knitting themselves back together.

Through all of it, she'd been in the hallway. I'd heard a nurse say "ma'am, there's a waiting room on the second floor" and Mirko's response had been silence, and the nurse hadn't asked again.

It was past midnight when the hallway went quiet for good. The last doctor finished rounds. Iida's room went dark. The fluorescents in the corridor dimmed to their overnight setting and the ventilation and a distant monitor somewhere below were the only sounds left.

Her footsteps came to my doorway. Two steps. Then nothing.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling. White. Flat. A water stain in the corner that looked like a boot print if I tilted my head. The mattress was the kind that kept the shape of the last person who'd slept on it and that person hadn't been my height.

She walked in. The chair by the bed creaked when she sat. The vinyl seat cover compressed under her weight and one of the metal legs scraped a quarter-inch on the floor.

I turned my head.

Mirko was sitting with her elbows on her thighs and her hands between her knees. Still in civilian clothes from patrol. The tank top had a tear near the collar that hadn't been there this morning and the line of her collarbone was visible through the gap, the muscle in her shoulder tensed even sitting down. Her white hair hung loose and forward, falling past her jaw, and her ears were down. Flat against her skull. I'd been around her for a week and I'd never seen her ears down. Swiveling, constantly. Pinned back in combat. But down, pressed low like she was trying to make them disappear, that was new.

She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at my hands on the hospital blanket. The gauze wrapping, the tape the nurse had smoothed flat, the spots where blood had already seeped through and dried to brown circles on the white fabric.

She didn't say anything.

A minute passed. The ventilation hummed. Down the hall a door opened and closed and someone's shoes squeaked on the linoleum and then that stopped too.

Another minute. Her jaw worked once on nothing. Her throat moved like she'd started a sentence and swallowed it. Her fingers laced together between her knees and unlaced and laced again. The hospital room was cold and the blanket was thin and Mirko was sitting close enough that warmth was coming off her skin. She ran hot. All that muscle, all that explosive energy compressed into someone sitting still in a plastic chair.

Mirko didn't do silence. I'd spent a week with her. She yelled orders during runs. She trash-talked during sparring. She gave single-word commands that hit like kicks and she said everything the instant it was true with zero gap between the thought and her mouth opening.

I waited. Anything I said right now would let her off the hook and she wasn't ready for that.

Three minutes. I counted the boot-print water stain's lace-holes. Five on each side. The ventilation cut out and the room went dead quiet and then it kicked back on with a click and a hum.

"I don't take interns," she said.

Her voice was lower than I was used to. Flatter. The sharp edge that usually sat on every word was gone and what was underneath was just a woman's voice, tired, in a hospital room past midnight.

"I don't take them because I can't do both. Protect someone and fight at the same time. If I'm watching your back, I'm not watching theirs, and if I'm watching theirs, I'm not watching yours, and if I'm watching anybody's back I'm not throwing kicks." She was still looking at my hands. "So I work alone. Because alone means nobody else gets hurt."

I didn't say anything.

"I took you because you were different." She sat back in the chair. The vinyl creaked. "You were tough. You didn't cry when I kicked you through a wall. You kept up on runs even when you were a block behind and puking in alleys. I thought-" She stopped. Her jaw worked again. "I thought you didn't need protecting."

She looked at my hands.

"I was wrong."

"I'm alive."

Her head snapped up. Her red eyes in the dim hospital light were steady and hard and her ears came up an inch off her skull and for half a second the Mirko I knew was back, the one who'd eat a protein bar while watching me vomit behind a dumpster.

"That's not the point."

"It is to me."

"Because you're seventeen and you think surviving is the same thing as being okay." She leaned forward. Elbows on her knees again. Her hair fell over her face and she pushed it back with one hand, rough, impatient. "If I'd been thirty seconds faster, you wouldn't have fought him alone."

"If you'd been thirty seconds faster, Iida would have died."

She stopped moving.

"You were dealing with the Nomu distraction," I said. "Three of them hit Hosu simultaneously to cover for Stain's operations. You were fighting one when the alley fight happened. If you'd broken off to come find me, the Nomu you were handling would've killed civilians."

She was looking at me. Her face was completely still and her ears were up and angled forward and she was breaking down what I'd just said like she'd break down a fight.

"How did you know about the Nomu?"

My stomach dropped.

The room was quiet. The ventilation hummed. My heart was hammering and her ears could absolutely hear it.

"I heard the explosions during the fight," I said. My voice was steady. My heart wasn't.

"The fight was in a back alley." She didn't blink. "Between buildings. I could hear you from two blocks away because my hearing covers that range. You couldn't hear me because yours doesn't. And even if it did, the alley where you fought Stain was hemmed in. High walls on three sides. Sound bounced inward, not out. I ran the route after. You couldn't have heard my fight from inside that alley."

I looked at her and said nothing.

The other near-misses had been indirect. Aizawa tracked data points across months. Jiro heard biological anomalies she couldn't explain. They were assembling puzzles with missing pieces. Mirko wasn't assembling anything. She'd been there, boots on the ground in the same city on the same night, and the facts I'd just handed her didn't match the geography she'd run with her own legs. My mouth had moved before my brain did. It always did.

I held her gaze. Any lie would contain information and any explanation would give her another thread to pull. So I gave her nothing. Sat in a hospital bed with my pulse pounding and let her hear it.

The silence went on. My heartbeat was loud enough that she was hearing it and I couldn't slow it down and the inability to slow it down was making it faster. The question was whether she'd push.

Her jaw shifted. Her lips pressed together and released. She looked at my bandaged hands one more time.

She stood up. The chair scraped back. She filled the doorway when she turned around.

"When you're healed," she said. She was looking at the hallway. Not at me. "I'm training you. For real."

"You already trained me for real. My ribs remember."

"That was a week." She still wasn't looking at me. "I mean ongoing. Regular. Not some one-week internship where I kick you around and send you back."

She turned her head. Enough to see me over her shoulder. One red eye. The angle of her jaw. Her ear on that side was up, angled back toward me, listening.

"Because you're either going to get yourself killed," she said, "or you're going to become something worth watching. And I'd rather be there for whichever one it is."

She left. Her footsteps went down the corridor, even and steady, and the stairwell door opened and closed and the sound of her was gone. The hallway was empty again. The same hallway she'd been standing in for two hours before she'd been able to walk through my door.

I breathed.

Boot-print water stain. Five lace-holes on each side. The gauze on my hands was already tighter than it should be because the skin underneath was closing faster than cotton could accommodate.

I shifted on the bed. The IV line tugged in my elbow. The pillow smelled like bleach and old sweat and whatever hospitals smell like underneath the cleaning.

That had been close. The closest anyone had come. Aizawa watched data. Jiro listened to biology. Mirko had just been standing in the same city and remembered what the geography sounded like.

I'd told her the Nomu deployment was coordinated. Simultaneous. A cover strategy. I'd described it like a military operation because that's how the anime had presented it. Endeavor's official account called them "unrelated incidents during the Hero Killer pursuit." The coordination, the tactical read on Shigaraki using the Nomu as a distraction play, that was information from a briefing I'd never attended. From a narrator's voiceover in an anime I'd watched on a couch eating takeout, half-paying attention to a Hosu arc I'd thought was less interesting than the Sports Festival.

And I'd handed it to a woman who could hear my heartbeat spike from across a room.

She hadn't pushed. She'd heard the lie in my silence and let it sit. Same as during our patrols when she was tracking Stain. Stored. Ears still on it.

She'd be back. Ongoing. The internship was over and the woman who worked alone had just told me she'd rather be there.

My phone buzzed. I picked it up with stiff bandaged fingers.

Mina: hour and a half. stop being heroic for like 90 minutes i am BEGGING you

I typed back: no promises

HAYAMI RYO

I put the phone on my chest. The screen went dark and reflected the ceiling back at me, water stain and all. Down the hall, Iida's room was dark. His left arm would hurt for weeks. Nerve damage I could've prevented if I'd gotten there ten minutes earlier, and nerve damage he'd earned by going to Hosu looking for revenge, and the two facts sat on top of each other and neither one cancelled the other out. I wondered if he was asleep. Probably. He'd looked exhausted when he came to my doorway, his good hand holding his cracked glasses by the frame.

The ventilation clicked off. Kicked back on. The boot-print on the ceiling hadn't moved.

Mina was on a train. Mirko was coming back.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep before the next thought finished.