62 – Tsu
Hallways clear out fast on the last day of term.
I was walking from 1-A toward the lockers with my bag over one shoulder and my blazer unbuttoned because the school year was done and I'd earned the right to not care about the dress code for twenty minutes. The corridor was half-empty already. Kaminari had bolted the second the bell rang, dragging Sero by the collar toward something he called a "farewell feast" at a yakiniku place in Koredera. Bakugo had walked out without speaking to anyone because Bakugo is Bakugo. Midoriya was still in the classroom talking to All Might, who'd shown up in his deflated form to say some kind of end-of-term thing that probably involved pointing and tears.
One week until the Forest Training Camp. One week until the Vanguard Action Squad. Muscular. Moonfish. Toga. Compress. Dabi. A kid named Kota who was going to watch a man try to murder someone in front of him and the person getting murdered was supposed to be Midoriya but might be me now because I'd changed enough that the canon was bending and I couldn't tell how far.
Six days to figure out how much of that I could fix.
A hand closed around my wrist.
Cool fingers. Smooth skin. The grip was light but specific, each finger placed with purpose, and the temperature was wrong for a human hand. Too cool. Constant. A body that ran at a lower baseline and didn't pretend otherwise.
I turned.
Tsuyu Asui looked up at me with those enormous dark-green eyes. Her hair was tied at the bottom with the bow. Her mouth was set in its usual wide line. She was a full head shorter than me and she had my wrist and she was not letting go.
"Come with me," she said.
"Where?"
"Come with me, ribbit."
She didn't repeat things often. I went.
She led me down the hallway, around the corner past the vending machines, and stopped at the second classroom on the left. 1-C's room. Empty. The desks were arranged in clean rows and the lights were off and the windows let in enough afternoon sun that the room was lit in warm stripes across the floor.
She walked in. I followed. She closed the door behind us and the hallway noise cut to nothing.
The room smelled like whiteboard cleaner and old wood. A poster on the back wall showed the periodic table with a coffee stain on the lower right corner, brown-yellow and shaped like a kidney bean.
Tsuyu turned to face me. She stood with her hands at her sides, feet together, spine straight. Looking at me with those flat dark-green eyes. Patient. The same expression she'd worn at the pool when she surfaced next to my ear and said "You're slow in water, Hayami."
She hadn't let go of my wrist during the walk. She let go now. Her fingers peeled off my skin one at a time.
"I want to say something, ribbit."
"Okay."
Her mouth pressed flat. She tilted her head. One slow blink.
"I know about Ashido."
My stomach went cold. She said it the way she said everything. Flat, clear, done.
"Everyone knows about Ashido," she continued. "You eat lunch together. She sits on your desk. She wore your shirt to the common area after the Sports Festival break and Kaminari noticed and told Kirishima and Kirishima told Sato and Sato told Shoji and Shoji didn't tell anyone because Shoji doesn't gossip but by that point it didn't matter."
She paused.
"I suspect about Uraraka too."
I didn't say anything. Tsuyu Asui was standing four feet from me cataloging the exact state of my love life and she could have been reading a bus schedule.
"Uraraka's pulse changes when she talks about you," Tsuyu said. "Her body temperature rises. Her pupils dilate. When she says your name her throat tightens and her skin moisture increases by a measurable amount." She looked at me. Waiting. "I'm a frog, ribbit."
"I know."
"I don't think you know what that means." She lifted her right hand and held it up, palm toward me. Her fingers were longer than average, webbed faintly between the middle joints. The skin was smooth and pale green, almost translucent at the fingertips where the capillaries showed through. "Frogs sense temperature changes through skin contact. Moisture. Pulse. Pheromone shifts. I can read someone's baseline state by touching their forearm for three seconds."
She lowered her hand.
"I've been reading everyone since USJ."
The room was quiet. Somewhere outside, a bird was singing on the windowsill.
"At the USJ," she said, "after the shipwreck zone. When we got back to the shore. I put my hand on your arm to check if you were injured. Your pulse was elevated. Your temperature was high. Your skin chemistry was different from the other boys." She paused. "I thought it was adrenaline. But Kirishima's adrenaline read differently. Todoroki's was different. Yours was different from everyone's."
"Different how."
"Arousal," she said. Like she was naming a weather pattern. "Low-grade. Persistent. It spiked when Uraraka grabbed your arm. It spiked again when Ashido leaned against you during the headcount."
I stared at her.
She stared back.
"I didn't know what it meant at the time," she said. "I catalogued it. I catalogue everything. It's how my brain works, ribbit." Her chin dipped. Her hair fell across one shoulder. "Later, after the Sports Festival, I touched your arm again. Accidental. In the hallway. Your chemistry had changed."
"Changed."
"Stronger. Denser. Like the baseline had permanently shifted upward from the last time I'd read you. And it shifted again after the internships. And again after the post-internship period."
Her eyes were on mine and they hadn't moved and they weren't going to move. Tsuyu didn't look away when things got uncomfortable. She looked at the uncomfortable thing with the same flat patience she looked at everything else.
"I don't know your Quirk, Hayami. I know what your body does and I know when it changes and I know the changes correlate with your relationships. That's all I know."
The periodic table poster rustled in the draft from the window. Its top right edge was peeling where the tape had come loose.
Jiro heard heartbeats. Tsuyu read body chemistry. Two biological polygraphs in my class, working off different inputs, and I'd been walking around between them for months thinking my biggest threat was Momo and her notebook.
"I'm not here to judge you," Tsuyu said.
"Then why are you here?"
"Because I've been thinking about what I want." Her mouth set. Her chin came up. "And I've decided."
She stepped forward.
Both her hands came up and pressed flat against my chest. Cool palms, broad fingers, her touch deliberate and firm. She placed them over my sternum, one above the other, and the temperature difference came through my shirt immediately. Ten degrees below my skin and they didn't warm. Her fingers spread. My pulse under her palms. My temperature through the fabric. She was reading me the way she'd been reading me every time she'd touched anyone since USJ.
I stood still. Her head was tilted back to look at me and her dark-green eyes were wide and close and the room was very quiet.
"Your heart is fast," she said.
"That's because you're touching me."
"Good."
She stood on her toes.
Her hands stayed on my chest, bracing, and her face came up and her mouth met mine.
The kiss was cool. Her lips were smooth and dry and slightly wider than mine and she pressed them against me with precision. She knew what angle she wanted and she took it. No hesitation. No checking.
She tasted like clean water. Or like nothing. Like a cool thing that had been in cool water.
Her tongue brushed my lower lip.
My hands locked at my sides. The tongue was longer than it should have been. Four inches of pink muscle, slightly rougher on the surface than a human tongue, with a texture like wet fine-grain sandpaper. It dragged across my lower lip from one corner to the other in a single deliberate stroke and then it was gone, retracted, and her mouth closed and she dropped off her toes and stepped back.
One step. Clean. Her hands left my chest. The cold spots on my shirt started fading.
"I wanted to know what that tasted like," she said.
"And?"
"Good, ribbit."
She looked at me. Her cheeks were faintly pink at the tops, a color that almost blended into the green of her skin. She blinked once. Slow. A full blink, the eyelids coming down from the top like shutters, which was how frogs blinked and was exactly the kind of detail the anime never bothered with.
Her pupils were wider than they'd been when she closed the door.
She turned and walked to the door. Three steps. She opened it. Hallway light spilled in. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and turned back to face me.
"I'm not going to be dramatic about this," she said. "You're with other people. That's your situation. I'll decide if I want to be part of it after the camp."
She left. The door didn't close all the way. It swung to a stop two inches from the frame, letting in a strip of fluorescent hallway light that cut across the empty desks.
I stood in the middle of 1-C's classroom with my pulse hammering in my throat.
Tsuyu Asui had just kissed me with a four-inch tongue and walked away like she was returning a library book.
I touched my lower lip. The roughness was still there. Faint. My shirt was cold where her hands had been, two patches fading toward body temperature. A desk chair was crooked, pushed out from the row. One of 1-C's students must have left it like that.
Jiro heard heartbeats from across a room. Momo tracked my inflection points in a notebook with red ink. And Tsuyu had been reading my body chemistry through her fingers every time she touched anyone since the first week. Three girls closing in on the same answer from three different directions, none of them talking to each other. Yet.
I walked to the door. The hallway was empty. She was gone.
I'll decide if I want to be part of it after the camp.
She didn't know the camp would be attacked. She thought she was giving herself a week to think.
I pushed through the exit doors and the afternoon hit me, warm and bright. At the bike rack near the gate, Ojiro was unlocking his bike and telling Hagakure that she couldn't ride on the handlebars because that was unsafe and she was arguing that she was literally invisible so nobody would even know.
I walked home. Left at the convenience store, straight past the laundromat, right at the hill. The cat on the wall wasn't there today.
My phone buzzed. Mina: "PACK LIGHT FOR CAMP. jk bring everything. EVERYTHING." Ochaco: "Coming over at 7, I'll bring groceries." Yaoyorozu: "I've completed my preliminary reading list for next term. Fourteen texts. I'll share the citations if you're interested."
None of them knew about 1-C's classroom.
I typed back to each of them. "Noted." "See you then." "Send them over."
The apartment was hot when I opened the door. I'd left the window closed. The ceiling stain was there. The bird shape. My landmark.
I dropped my bag. Sat on the floor. Leaned my head back against the wall. My lip still had the texture of her tongue on it. Frog girl had walked in, stated her terms, kissed me once, and left. Catalogued everything and kissed me anyway.
The most Tsuyu thing that has ever happened.
The rice cooker was on the counter. Ochaco would be here at seven with groceries. Six days until the Forest Lodge.
I got up and opened the window and the evening air came in and I pulled the rice cooker toward me and got to work.