Riku woke up with a blonde head on his left shoulder and dark hair in his mouth.
He spat out Midnight's hair. She didn't stir. Her face was pressed into his neck, her arm heavy across his chest, breathing deep and slow. She smelled like sweat and sex and the last traces of her aroma that had baked into her skin overnight.
Yu was on his other side, face-down, one leg thrown over his thigh. She was drooling on his shoulder. A small, steady stream that had soaked through to his skin. Her blonde hair was a catastrophe. He could see the dried tear tracks on her cheek from where last night's mascara had run.
The sheets looked like a crime scene. Dark stains, spots where Midnight's aroma had chemically bleached the fabric. Yu's apartment was going to need professional cleaning. Possibly an exorcism.
Riku lifted his arms carefully. Yu mumbled and burrowed deeper into the mattress. Midnight's arm tightened across his chest for a second, then relaxed. He slid out from between them.
They rolled toward each other in the space he left. Yu's face ended up against Midnight's collarbone. Neither woke up.
He stood and his body was different. He flexed his hand. The grip strength was more than yesterday. He took a step and his balance was sharper, lighter, his reaction time running ahead of his thoughts.
The Vitality Drain had been feeding for hours. Two women, both with powerful quirks, both pushed past their limits. The energy was still humming through him, woven into his muscles, sitting behind his eyes. He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips.
He went to the bathroom. The mirror showed him scratches down his chest from Midnight's nails and bite marks on his shoulder that were definitely Yu. A hickey sat below his jaw that could have been either of them. His eyes were wrong. The amber was brighter, the gold in them catching the bathroom light like it was being backlit from inside.
He turned on the shower. The water hit his skin and he could feel every droplet individually, each one registering as a separate point of contact. The Drain had pushed his senses past their normal ceiling.
He scrubbed off the night. The soap washed away the smell of them, the dried sweat, the traces of everything they'd done. His body underneath felt like a loaded weapon.
UA ENTRANCE EXAM - REPORTING TIME 0730.
UA ENTRANCE EXAM - PRACTICAL COMPONENT - WEAR APPROPRIATE ATTIRE.
UA ENTRANCE EXAM - GOOD LUCK.
He got dressed in the kitchen. His clothes from yesterday, wrinkled, smelling faintly of Midnight's aroma because everything within a quarter mile probably did. He ate two of Yu's protein bars from the counter and drank milk straight from the carton because she wasn't awake to stop him.
He checked the time. 6:15. Ninety minutes.
He went back to the bedroom. The two of them had migrated fully into the center of the bed, tangled together. Yu's leg was over Midnight's hip. Midnight's arm was around Yu's waist. They'd found each other in their sleep and the arrangement looked comfortable in a way that would make them both deeply uncomfortable when they woke up.
He pulled the blanket over them. It was the only part of the bedding that wasn't destroyed.
Yu's phone was on the nightstand. He picked it up and typed a text to himself from her number so he'd have it, then put it back. He already had Midnight's.
He found a pen on Yu's desk and a receipt from a convenience store. He wrote on the back:
Gone to take the entrance exam. Left you both sleeping. Yu, you drool. Midnight, your hair tried to kill me. Thanks for last night.
R
He left it on the nightstand between their phones.
The apartment door clicked shut behind him. The hallway was quiet. Early morning, the building still asleep. He took the stairs instead of the elevator because his legs wanted to move and the stairwell was seven floors and he took them two at a time without breathing hard.
Outside, the morning air hit him and he tasted it. Actually tasted it. The Drain had his senses cranked so high he could pick apart the exhaust from the bakery from the rain coming from the east. Someone had used a quirk on the street last night. He could still taste the chemical residue.
He walked. The city was waking up around him. Salarymen on early trains and a hero patrol car rolling past with its lights off. He moved through the morning crowd and people stepped out of his way without knowing why. The Allure Aura was at resting level but his resting level was higher now. Charged. A woman walking her dog glanced at him and walked into a mailbox. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
He ran the entrance exam in his head while he walked. The robots and the zero-pointer nobody was supposed to fight. Midoriya would trip over his own shoes. Bakugo would blow things up because that was all Bakugo knew how to do. A cast of characters he'd read about in another life, walking around in front of him as real people who had no idea he'd already seen how their stories went.
After the exam came UA. Class 1-A. Aizawa's expulsion threats. Then the USJ, the sports festival, the training camp, Kamino. The war, eventually. He had a rough map and most people walking through those gates today didn't even know there was a road.
And Midnight was going to be on the faculty. His teacher. The woman whose cum was probably still drying on Yu's sheets right now, walking the halls of UA with a straight face and a lesson plan.
He grinned at the sidewalk.
The gates of UA were at the end of the road. He'd seen them a hundred times on a phone screen in a different life. The manga had drawn them wider. In person they were taller, and the shadow they threw reached the sidewalk and covered his shoes.
Students were already arriving. Nervous kids in school uniforms clutching papers, checking their phones. A few had visible mutation quirks. Most of them looked terrified. A green-haired kid was speed-walking toward the gate with his head down, muttering to himself, and Riku recognized the posture before he recognized the kid.
Midoriya Izuku. Future Symbol of Peace, ninth holder of One For All, currently about to eat concrete because he wasn't watching where he was going.
Riku watched him stumble. A brown-haired girl caught him with a touch of her fingers and he floated for a second before she set him down. Uraraka. She smiled at Midoriya and walked inside. Midoriya stood on the sidewalk with his mouth open.
Riku shook his head and walked to the gate. Body humming, senses sharp, two pro heroes tangled together in a wrecked apartment across town. The entrance exam was in forty minutes and he was the most prepared person on the planet for it.
He stepped through the gates and the morning sun hit concrete that smelled like fresh paint.