MHA: Lust Quirk

Aizawa's office was on the second floor of the faculty building. Small. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a sleeping bag rolled up in the corner. The window looked out at the campus courtyard where a group of second-years were practicing Quirk drills. The blinds were half-closed.

He didn't offer me a chair.

He was leaning against his desk, arms crossed, thermos in reach. His eyes were dry and tired and the bandages on his hands had been changed since the exam.

"Sit."

I sat.

He opened a folder on his desk. Manila. Thin. My name was on the tab in handwritten kanji. The folder had been there before the exam. He'd been building it.

"Your Quirk is registered as Enhance. Physical augmentation. Mutant-subtype."

"Correct."

"Your Entrance Exam performance was consistent with mid-range physical augmentation. You placed in the upper middle of the cohort. Standard for an enhancement-type."

He flipped a page.

"Your Apprehension Test placed you tenth. Also standard." He looked up. "Your Sports Festival performance placed you third. You defeated Todoroki Shoto, who is the strongest Quirk user in the first-year cohort."

He said "strongest" without emphasis.

"During the Stain incident in Hosu, the attending physician noted accelerated wound closure inconsistent with your registered Quirk." He flipped another page. "Recovery Girl flagged your healing speed after USJ. She noted that your cellular regeneration was, and I'm quoting her, 'anomalously fast for a vanilla enhancement type.'"

He closed the folder. Placed his hand flat on the cover.

"You tore my capture weapon during the exam. That weapon's tensile strength is rated for fighters at my weight class. Bakugo can't break it. Todoroki's ice can't shatter it." He looked at me. "You ripped it apart with your hands."

He pulled a second sheet from the folder. A graph, visible from across the desk. A line that started flat and went up. The x-axis was labeled in weeks. The y-axis was labeled in units I didn't recognize. The line didn't curve. It went straight up.

"This is your grip strength progression. Measured at the Apprehension Test, then at the Sports Festival medical check, then during your post-Hosu physical, then at the pre-exam fitness evaluation." He set the graph down. "The slope is consistent. And it's steeper than any enhancement Quirk on file."

The office was quiet. The second-years were visible through the blinds, throwing Quirk attacks at training dummies. One of them missed and hit a lamppost. Nobody seemed concerned.

"In four months," Aizawa said, "your measurable physical output has increased by approximately forty percent. Your grip strength, reaction time, and impact force have all climbed on a curve that doesn't match any registered enhancement Quirk in the database."

He let that sit.

"I've compared your growth rate to every recorded case of adolescent Quirk development in the HPSC files. Late-blooming enhancement types peak at eight to twelve percent growth over a school year. You've done forty in four months."

"I train hard."

"Everyone trains hard. Kirishima trains harder than you do. His growth rate is eleven percent." His voice was flat. "Training doesn't account for this."

I looked at the folder. My name on the tab. Inside it, every data point that didn't add up. Entrance Exam baseline. Apprehension Test. Sports Festival. USJ recovery. Hosu doctor's note. The capture weapon. A graph, probably, with a line that went up too fast and didn't level off.

"I'm your homeroom teacher," he said. "It's my job to understand my students' Quirks. I know what Bakugo's sweat composition is. I know Todoroki's frostbite threshold. I know the exact voltage at which Kaminari's brain shorts." He uncrossed his arms. "I don't understand yours."

The courtyard was loud. Someone had activated a Quirk that made their arms glow, and the light was flashing through the blinds in irregular pulses. A teacher yelled something about property damage.

"My Quirk is more complex than the registration suggests," I said.

Aizawa waited. His face didn't change and his posture didn't shift.

"Enhancement Quirks sometimes have secondary characteristics that manifest during adolescence. Late-developing components that the initial registration doesn't capture. Mine is still developing. The growth rate you're seeing is part of that development."

"Secondary characteristics."

"Yeah."

"Can you describe them?"

"The strength increases in bursts. They're not linear from training. The curve you're seeing isn't training progression. It's Quirk development."

He was quiet for a few seconds. His eyes moved to the graph on the desk. The straight line going up.

"Quirk development produces growth that correlates with emotional and physical stress events. Your growth events don't correlate with combat or training." He looked at me. "They correlate with nothing I can identify."

Because they correlated with Mina. With Ochaco. With every sexual encounter that fed the engine. The growth events he couldn't identify were happening in my apartment on nights the school didn't track.

"The triggers aren't always visible," I said.

He studied me. His eyes were steady and his jaw was loose and his arms were at his sides. He wasn't angry. He was a teacher with a student who didn't fit the data, and the data was what mattered to him.

"You're not lying," he said.

"No."

"But you're not telling me everything."

The office was quiet again. The glowing-arms student in the courtyard had been told to stop. The light through the blinds was steady now.

"I'm telling you what I can," I said.

Aizawa looked at me for a long time. His eyes were dark and dry and the lines around them were deep.

He picked up the folder. Put it in the top drawer of his desk. The drawer had other folders in it. I couldn't see the names.

"I'm going to be watching your growth rate," he said. "Monthly assessments. Grip strength, reaction time, impact force, healing factor. If the curve continues at this trajectory, I'm bringing Nezu into the conversation."

Nezu. The principal. The animal with a Quirk that made him smarter than every human on the planet. High Specs. Processing power that could model a city's evacuation routes in seconds, that could calculate the optimal sequence to demolish a building block by block with a crane and a ball, that could take a dataset of anomalies and extrapolate a pattern faster than any human mind could follow.

In canon, Nezu had beaten Mina and Kaminari in their Final Exam by engineering a chain reaction of collapsing buildings to herd them into a dead end. He'd done it drinking tea and narrating his logic aloud. For fun.

If that mind started looking at my power curve, he wouldn't see a late-developing enhancement Quirk. He'd see the correlation Aizawa missed. The growth events lining up with relationships, with specific nights, with a pattern that said "this boy gets stronger when-" and the conclusion would be worse than anything Aizawa could imagine.

"Understood," I said.

"Dismissed."

I stood. The chair scraped the floor. Aizawa was already reaching for his thermos, his attention back on his desk.

I walked to the door. My hand was on the handle.

"Hayami."

I stopped.

"Your partnership with Yaoyorozu was effective. She's a better strategist than most of my third-years." A pause. "Make sure she knows that."

"She does."

His eyes moved to me. His mouth pulled at one corner. Brief. Then gone.

"Go."

I went.

The hallway was empty. The fluorescent lights buzzed. My hands were steady but they shouldn't have been. Monthly assessments. Nezu as the escalation. The cover story had bought time and the time had an expiration date stamped on it.

I walked past the faculty lounge. Present Mic's voice was audible through the door, talking at volume about his podcast, and Midnight was laughing.

My phone was in my pocket. Two messages.

Mina: "how did your fight go?? did you win??"

Ochaco: "Aizawa-sensei kept you after class. Everything okay?"

I typed back to Mina: "We won. Momo's plan."

I typed back to Ochaco: "Fine. Just a Quirk assessment."

Both true. Neither the full version.

The campus was clearing out. End of the day. The exam results would be posted tomorrow. The training camp announcement would follow.

After that, the Forest Lodge. The Wild Wild Pussycats' property, three days in the mountains. In canon, the League of Villains attacked on the second night. Muscular. The villain who'd killed the Water Hose heroes, Kota's parents. Moonfish. Toga Himiko showing up wearing someone else's face. Dabi. The Vanguard Action Squad, eight villains against forty students and six pro heroes, and they'd come for Bakugo specifically.

I knew what was coming. The date, the villains, the plan. I knew Muscular would go after Kota on the cliff. I knew Toga would target Midoriya. I knew Bakugo would be taken and the rescue mission would follow and All Might would fight his last fight at Kamino and the world would change.

The timeline was accelerating. And Aizawa had a folder with my name on it in a drawer that had other folders and I didn't know whose names were on the rest of them.

I walked home. The convenience store cat was on the wall. The orange one. Half an ear. It watched me pass and yawned and looked away.

I went inside. Climbed the stairs. Unlocked my door. The five dents in the doorframe were still there. Mina's hoodie was still on the chair. Ochaco's folded shirt was still on the desk. The gauntlets from Mei were on the shelf next to my school bag, the MH-HAYAMI-V2 stamp visible on the wrist strap. The dents my fingers left in wood. If Aizawa walked in here, or Nezu, or anyone with the right questions, the apartment was a case file with a bedspread.

The apartment was quiet. The fridge hummed.

Monthly assessments. Nezu. The folder.

I pulled out my phone and stared at it. Then I put it down.