MHA: Lust Quirk

U.A. was quiet the way a building gets quiet when most of the people in it have already left for somewhere else.

Summer session had ended two days ago. The campus was skeleton crew: a few third-years finishing makeup work, a custodian dragging a mop across the first-floor tiles, Cementoss doing something structural to a wall near the west entrance that involved him talking to the concrete in a low voice. The hallways had that polished-floor emptiness where your footsteps echo and you can hear the ventilation system doing its job.

I was here for the camp briefing. Aizawa had called the class in for a final logistics meeting at three. Bring this, don't bring that, here's the bus schedule, here's what happens if you miss the bus. The meeting had lasted eleven minutes. Aizawa talked fast when he wanted to sleep and he always wanted to sleep. Midoriya had taken notes. Iida had asked four questions. Bakugo had put his feet on the desk and Aizawa hadn't bothered to tell him not to.

Now I was walking back through the second floor and my bag had the camp supply list folded into the front pocket and my head had the list of things that were going to happen at that camp that no supply list could prepare anyone for.

Muscular. I'd thought about him more than anything else in the last four days. The man who'd killed Kota's parents. The man who was supposed to fight Midoriya and push One For All to its limit. In canon, Deku broke his arms to win that fight. In this timeline, where I'd changed things, where I'd taken fights that should have been his, where I'd moved pieces on a board that nobody else could see, I didn't know if that fight would still be Midoriya's. It might be mine.

And I didn't have One For All. I had a Quirk that got stronger when I slept with people, and the last time I'd measured, I could benchpress a car. Muscular could benchpress a building.

The second-floor hallway curved past the faculty offices and the specialty classrooms. Present Mic's English classroom was locked. Ectoplasm's math room was dark. Power Loader's workshop door was open but he was somewhere else and the room smelled like solder and burnt coffee.

Midnight's classroom door was open.

I stopped.

The room was lit by the windows. Late afternoon, the sun coming in at an angle that turned everything warm and orange. She was at her desk. Not teaching. Cleaning. She had a box on the chair next to her and she was sorting papers into stacks. Hero name submission forms. I recognized the format from across the room because she'd used the same forms when she'd vetted our class's hero names months ago.

She was in civilian clothes. White blouse with the sleeves folded to her elbows. Dark pencil skirt. Hair down, falling across her shoulders, longer than it looked when she had it up in costume. No domino mask. No whip. The beauty mark below her left eye was more visible without the mask. Her reading glasses were on, wire-framed, perched on her nose.

Nemuri. Not Midnight. The woman in the empty classroom where she'd told me her name.

She looked up. Her glasses caught the light.

"Hayami."

"Hey."

She set down the papers. Took her glasses off and folded them and put them on the desk. "Camp tomorrow."

"Yeah."

"The Pussycats are good. Mandalay ran two of our training camps when I was a student. You'll be fine."

She said it looking at the papers. Then she looked at me and said it again, quieter. "You'll be fine."

I walked into the room.

The desks were empty and pushed to the walls for summer cleaning. The whiteboard still had the last lecture's notes in her handwriting: HERO IMAGE AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION, with bullet points about media responsibility and a doodle of a cat in the corner that might have been Mandalay's hero motif. The floor was freshly mopped. The room smelled like lemon cleaner and, underneath it, jasmine. Always jasmine with her. It wasn't perfume. She'd told me once it was her body wash and then looked like she wished she hadn't.

This room. Where she'd given me her name and I'd used it and she hadn't stopped me. Where she'd grabbed my collar after Stain and shown me her hands were shaking under the anger.

"Nemuri."

She didn't flinch. She used to. The first few times I'd said it, her chin would come up and her mouth would tighten. That had stopped. Now her name just landed and she took it.

"Don't get hurt at this camp," she said.

She was sitting behind her desk with her arms folded across the stacked papers and her sky-blue eyes were on me and the afternoon light was catching the side of her face and she looked tired. End-of-term tired. The kind of tired that accumulates over months of teaching teenagers who can shoot lasers from their stomachs and create explosions from their sweat glands.

"I'll be fine," I said.

"You're lying."

"I'm being optimistic."

"That's worse." Her mouth pulled at one corner. "You're not an optimist."

She was right. I wasn't. The walkthrough said the Forest Training Camp was where the easy arcs ended. After the camp came Kamino. After Kamino, the war. And the war killed her.

I was looking at a woman who was going to die in two years and she was telling me to be careful at summer camp.

"The Pussycats will run you hard," she said. She picked up a pen and turned it between her fingers. "Mandalay's methods are old-school. She'll work you until your Quirk gives out and then she'll work you more. Ragdoll will monitor your vitals. If you feel like you're dying, you probably aren't. If you feel fine, you're probably not pushing hard enough."

"Sounds fun."

"It's not fun. I hated it." The pen turned. "But I came back stronger. Everyone does."

She gestured at the stacks on her desk. "Next year's hero name submissions. First drafts. I got them early because half the second-years want to change theirs and they all think summer is when I do approvals." She picked up a form from the top of a stack and read it. Her eyebrows went up. "Crimson Smash." She put it face-down. "There's a reason I do this in person."

"You vetoed Bakugo's first three."

"Bakugo's first three were criminal charges, not hero names." She set the pen down. Lined it up with the edge of the papers. She did that when she was thinking. I'd noticed it the second time I'd been in this room.

"Nemuri."

"Stop saying my name like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're about to tell me something I won't like."

I wasn't. I was about to not tell her something. Which was worse. I was about to not tell her that the training camp was going to be attacked by villains. That a kid would watch someone almost die. That Bakugo was going to be taken and the taking would break the Symbol of Peace.

"I'm just saying your name," I said.

She looked at me. The pen was on the desk and her glasses were next to it and the papers were stacked and the room was quiet. Her eyes were sharp and blue and she was reading me the way she'd read me after Stain, looking for the thing I wasn't saying.

She stood up. Pushed her chair back. Walked around the desk. Her heels clicked on the tile. She stopped in front of me, close enough that the jasmine reached my lungs, and she was tall in those heels and her blouse was white and her hair was dark and loose and her face was three feet from mine.

She put her hand on my shoulder.

Her palm was flat. Fingers spread. Her hand was warm through my shirt and the contact was firm and steady. Teacher to student.

Except her thumb moved. A small stroke along the ridge of my shoulder that had nothing to do with teaching.

"Come back in one piece, Hayami."

I put my hand over hers.

Her fingers were warm. Her knuckles were small under my palm and her skin was softer than mine. I held her hand against my shoulder and the room was quiet and the sun was coming through the windows and the jasmine was in my chest.

Two seconds. Then I let go.

Her hand stayed on my shoulder for a half-beat after mine left. Then it dropped to her side. Her fingers curled once against her skirt and opened.

"I'll see you when I get back," I said.

"You will."

I turned and walked out of the classroom. Down the hallway. My footsteps echoed on the polished floor. The building was quiet. The custodian was gone. Cementoss was still talking to his wall.

At the stairwell I stopped and looked back.

She was standing in the doorway of her classroom. One hand on the frame. Watching me. The light from the windows was behind her and her face was half in shadow and her hair was loose.

I raised a hand. She didn't wave back. She nodded, once, and turned back into the room and the door stayed open.

I went down the stairs and through the lobby and out into the summer afternoon. The campus was bright and warm and empty. My bus pass was in my pocket. My camp bag was at home. The supply list was in my bag.

Five days. Muscular. Moonfish. Toga. Compress. Dabi. A gas attack while the students slept. Bakugo in a marble.

I walked to the bus stop. The summer heat sat on my shoulders and the cicadas were screaming from the trees near the gate. The sound was enormous and stupid. A bug that didn't know anything about anything, yelling because that's what it did in July.

I waited for the bus.