47 – Sensei
A hand closed on my collar and pulled.
I'd been walking to Modern Literature. Second period. The hallway was thinning out, students finding their rooms, Tokoyami walking past with Dark Shadow pulled tight against his back, and I'd been half-reading a text from Ochaco about borrowing my rescue protocol notes when the hand came from behind and the fabric tightened against my throat and I went backward through a doorway I hadn't seen open. My bag caught the frame and spun off my shoulder and hit the floor. The door shut. The hallway noise cut to nothing.
Midnight had me by the collar of my school shirt in an empty classroom on the second floor. Desks pushed to the walls. Morning light through dusty windows. A stick of broken chalk on the tray. Her grip was tight enough that the top button pressed into my throat. She let go. Stepped back. Crossed her arms.
She wasn't in costume. Fitted blouse, cream-colored, buttons to the collar. Gray pencil skirt. Reading glasses pushed up on her head like a headband, the wire frames catching the overhead light. Her hair was loose, dark purple past her shoulders. No mask. No whip. The same civilian look she'd worn on the observation walkway the day she'd watched me fight five rounds and offered to fix my technique.
Nemuri. The woman who'd given me her name in a room like this one six weeks ago.
"You fought the Hero Killer," she said.
"The official story says-"
"I don't care about the official story." Her voice was low and hard and the theatrical register was gone. "Todoroki's father didn't capture Stain. Three first-year students who had no business being in that alley captured Stain. And one of those students is standing in front of me with bandaged hands."
She grabbed my wrists. Both of them. Her fingers were warm and her grip was strong and she turned my hands palm-up and looked at the gauze. The cuts underneath were closed to pink scars now but the wrapping was still there because Recovery Girl had said to keep them covered for another week and I'd listened because Recovery Girl scared me more than Stain.
She pressed her thumb along the edge of the gauze on my right hand. Along the line where the deepest cut had been. Her thumb found the deepest point and paused there. Pressed. I didn't flinch but the cut was still tender and she saw my hand tighten.
"Here." She traced the line through the fabric. "Across the palm, diagonal, into the thenar eminence." She named the anatomy without looking it up. Thirteen years of field work. She read injuries by touch.
She took my right hand. Turned it. Found the matching cut. Both palms. She held them next to each other and her warm fingers were steady on my wrists.
"You caught it. A descending blade, between your palms." She looked up at me. Her reading glasses slid forward on her hair and she pushed them back without breaking eye contact. "These are katana wounds, Hayami. The Hero Killer's blade. You're seventeen years old and you stopped a serial killer's sword with your bare hands."
"They're healing."
"That is not the point."
She dropped my hands. Stepped back. Ran her fingers through her hair and the glasses slid down her forehead and she caught them and pushed them back up with an irritated shove. The gesture was clumsy. She'd choreographed every movement since she was a teenager and right now her hands weren't getting the memo. She folded her arms, unfolded them, put her hands on her hips. Gave up on her hands entirely and started pacing.
"I've been teaching for nine years." She was pacing. Two steps left, two steps right, in the narrow lane between the teacher's desk and the front row. Her flat shoes were quiet on the tile. "Students get hurt. It happens. Combat training, internships, the Festival. I've signed off on more infirmary reports than I can count." She picked up a piece of broken chalk from the tray. Turned it in her fingers. Set it back down. "A kid breaks his fingers trying to channel a Quirk that's too strong for his bones." She glanced at me when she said that and we both knew she was talking about Midoriya but neither of us said the name. "I've visited the hospital rooms. I've filled out the forms. It's part of the job."
She stopped at the window. Morning light on her profile. The tight line of her jaw. Second-years crossing the courtyard below, normal morning, normal school. She put one hand flat on the window frame and her fingers were tense against the painted wood.
"But when I heard your name on the Hosu incident report, I-"
She stopped talking. Her mouth closed. She looked at the window and the morning light was hitting the side of her face and her jaw was tight and the beauty mark under her left eye shifted with the tension. Her eyes were bright.
She'd been about to finish that sentence. She'd swallowed it instead.
"Nemuri."
Her whole body went still. Her hands stopped at her sides. Her back was to me, facing the window, and her reflection in the glass was looking at my reflection.
She turned from the window. Sky-blue eyes. The anger was still there but it was thinner now and what was behind it was pushing through and her blouse was buttoned all the way to her throat and she was standing four feet from a student in an empty classroom and four feet was not enough distance for what was happening on her face.
"Don't," she said. Low. "Don't use that name when I'm trying to be your teacher."
"Then stop looking at me like that."
The room went quiet. A clock on the wall above the whiteboard ticked once, loud. Somebody walked past in the hallway and their footsteps faded. The broken chalk on the tray hadn't moved. The ventilation hummed. The light from the window caught dust in the air between us.
She didn't say like what. Her jaw worked once on nothing and her eyes stayed on mine. Four feet of empty classroom floor and the dust moving in the light between us and her reading glasses sitting on her head catching the fluorescent glare and neither of us moving.
She straightened her blouse. The collar first. Then the cuffs. Her fingers were steady now but the steadiness cost her. The professional mask went back on in pieces.
"Hayami-kun." Her voice was level. Controlled. Almost. "Stay alive. That's an order from your teacher."
She walked past me toward the door. Close enough that the air moved and I smelled her. Jasmine. Warm, floral, sharper underneath. Her perfume. The combination was specific and it stayed in the space she walked through and it was on my collar from where she'd grabbed me in the hallway.
She opened the door. Stopped in the frame. Her hand was on the wood and her back was to me and the blouse pulled across her shoulder blades when she breathed.
"I warned you about Hosu," she said. Quiet. To the hallway, not to me. "The agency. The flagged district. You went anyway."
"I went because I needed to be there."
"I know." Students passing behind her, voices and footsteps. "That's the part that scares me."
She left. The door swung shut and latched with a quiet click.
I stood in the empty classroom. Desks pushed to the walls in two rows. The whiteboard had remnants of an English lesson in Mic's three-color handwriting. A poster on the wall showed All Might with his fist raised and a quote about justice that was faded at the edges where the tape was peeling. The broken chalk was still on the tray. The clock ticked.
The air smelled like jasmine. It stayed where she'd been standing and it didn't fade when the ventilation kicked on. I could trace where she'd paced by the concentration of it. Strongest by the windows. Fading toward the door.
I sat down at the nearest desk. The chair creaked under me. The desk had someone's initials carved into the corner. Old, filled in with years of accumulated pen ink. The clock above the whiteboard ticked. Somewhere below, a class was starting, chairs scraping, a teacher's voice muffled through the floor.
In about eighteen months she was going to climb onto a giant's back and get knocked out of the air. She was going to land in a forest with broken bones and use her last strength to call Momo on the earpiece and tell her how to synthesize anesthetic. Then a man with a mask was going to find her on the ground and she was going to die in the costume she'd designed to prove the commission wrong.
I was going to be there. I didn't know how yet. Gunga Mountain Villa was a specific place at a specific time and I had eighteen months to figure out how to be standing in the right spot. But I was going to be there when the man came for her and I was going to break every bone in his body before he reached her.
She'd told me to stay alive. She'd said it as my teacher. She hadn't meant it as my teacher.
I picked up my bag from the floor. The strap was twisted from where it had caught the doorframe. Straightened it. Put it on my shoulder.
The jasmine was fading. Her perfume. Not a smell I'd confuse with anyone else's. It clung to the collar of my shirt where she'd grabbed me in the hallway and I could smell it when I turned my head.
I opened the door. The hallway was full of students going to first period. Kaminari and Sero were walking past arguing about whether a hero name counted as a legal alias. A first-year from 1-B was carrying a box of supplies that was bigger than her head. The vending machine at the end of the corridor was making the jamming sound it made when someone picked the wrong button.
I was late for homeroom. Aizawa would notice. He noticed everything.
I walked to 1-A. The hallway smelled like floor polish and morning and somewhere under all of it, still, jasmine. It stayed in my collar through the walk, faint, warm. It was there when I sat down at my desk and Aizawa looked at me with the flat expression that meant he was adding something to a list. It was there during heroics class when Ectoplasm ran clone drills and I punched copies of a man who could split himself into thirty.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Mina: where are u ur late aizawa is doing the face
I typed back: got pulled aside by a teacher. coming.
which teacher
I put the phone away. My collar still smelled like jasmine.