There’s nothing better you can do, like literally in all of life, than adding onto drama that’s already there. It’s free therapy. Witnessing reality TV unfold right before you without the subscription. I’m a glam girl but I love a steal. “Mhmyeah,” I said to the giant before mad ducking, a fraction of a second away from getting my head lobbed off by a tentacle, “y’know, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let him have all the rescue points.” I grinned, a dark, evil thing as I whispered. “If you really want, set him up at the end so that you have no choice but to save him. Then totes all his points would go to yours, right?” I was lowkey, highkey sure that wasn’t how it worked at all. But you can’t blame a girl for trying.

Magenta irides peer over to where our target was. He was easy to find, cute halo propped over his head and all. And I… couldn’t help but be in awe, despite myself. Couldn’t know exactly what his power was - constructs, invisible platforms? - but there was no denying the presence of a Hero in the way he lead the flock, a grand shepherd to the sheep, his prior words bouncing about in my head like holy bells. Whatever his intentions, Sinclaire would be a good Hero. This guy too. Was his a muscular quirk? I look back on over to what’s in front of me when –

WHAM!!!

I screech like a bat out of hell when one of the writhing tentacles slams me straight into my chest, knocks me off my feet. Thank God for barely-above average coordination! Soaked high heels zip back atop the rubbery appendage before I can fall off, hands prying for clearance. I clear my throat, pretending like nothing happened despite the red mark ghosting over the point of impact. Looking cool as possible as I get to Zenkai’s side, I bare both halos in front of me, bangs totally shook and awkwardly out of place. “Villain. Sinner. You have one chance to give up your misdeeds or bear the consequences of what he said. The ass-kicking.” I like to save cuss words for moments just like these. Plus I’m still supes embarrassed.

Sebastian Sinclaire Zenkai Hatake

I was totally caught off guard by the dame in the storage room. Totally shouldn’t be; with her soft pink hair and the voluminous luster of her eyes, she’s the type of person you’d recognize from the literal ozone. No way she was blending in with the monochromatic silence of plastic bins and white vials. That UAU outfit tho?... On main, in public? I scrunched my nose internally. She had too sick a tattoo to be going around wearing that old fit in public. I observed her, rbf doing its thing, wondered what was going on with that pink heart bandaid over her arm.

“Yeah.” Awkward as I am, I strode on over to one of the shelves, mindlessly busying myself with looking for whatever the previous doctor wanted. I eyed her still out of my periphery, wondering where to even start. Girls like me, we don’t make small talk. Nor friends, nor goals, wishes, whatever. My heart’s born in blood. A familial obligation, and that’s that.

But something compels me.

“I…” I’m almost biting the words back - “Go to UAU too. Aren’t the outfits this year so ugly? You’re totally modeling it though.” I grabbed what I needed, cradling it in arms hugged with leather. Then followed her where she stood by the door, nodding at her. All the way up at her, supermodel giant she was. “What do you think about the start of the school year? Totes crazy, right?”

It was then my soulmate dreamboat’s text came through my halo. My face lit up in an automatic smile, super uncharacteristic for me, something I quickly tried to hide away as soon as I was doing it. Couldn’t stop the flush crawling up my neck face. you’re literally everything. i love you. Shooting it off via halo, pressing the neon edge of the ring, I looked back to the supermodel.

Assuming we started walking, it wouldn’t be long before I overheard a conversation. Hooded magenta eyes flew over to one of the windows, a young doctor present with someone with what looked like wrapped up arms. A foxbabe, only way that made sense to describe her. I squinted.

Bestie?

Like, people actually have friends?

Ugh.

“She has impeccable bedside manner.” I rolled my eyes. “Some girls just get all the luck in this world. She’s cute too but that coat being way too big for her is totes, like, last year.” I gave May that look before strolling into the door.

“Hi doctor. Here are some supplies for this room. Or whatever. Isthereanythingyouneedfromus.” Total physical dread.

May Twenty-First Miroru Rui Matsui Farrin

A few weeks into the school year brought me to Tokyo University Hospital.

I was mad behind schedule in my bid for becoming a top Hero candidate, asap. Didn’t help that some people, like my most amazing dreamboat significant other or the two dudes at my Hero exam, just had that much more rizz than I ever could. Better quirks. More finesse. Were just meant to do Heroism, felt it in just about everything they did or stood for. Okay, maybe not entirely that Sinclaire guy, but you know what I mean!

Anyway, someone like me had to get going, super mega pronto, on finding other ways to shine. Tracing the shadow of a doctor who led me through the immaculate white walls, a volunteer pin stabbed through my chest, was just the right way to go. My mind filtered out her words somewhere, lost in the strong antiseptic and occasional groan across the halls. Glossy heels tapped along, nowhere near out of place with everyone else’s fits. We were at the Hero trauma unit, first floor, where they brought injured Heroes or Hero-associated in for fast relief. Major impact injuries, like third degree burns or shot wounds. Get them healed up, then bounce them right back to the fray. Or discharge them with a day off. idk I don’t make the rules. Anyway, since I was finally eighteen after like ten thousand years of waiting, they let me shadow and heal. Healing as long as I was under the doctor’s direct supervision, just in case my quirk accidentally grew someone a third eye or whatever. Would be super sick if it did. That’s much radder than quirk laws or whatever.

“Now Sada, a major consideration we have as doctors is something called our bedside manner,” the doctor said as I clutched her clipboard to my chest, side-eyeing everyone I saw. “Building an empathetic, supportive link with our patients begins with how we speak to them-”

“Hey, where’s my bandaid?!”

“LISTEN!!” I smirked. “IF YOU HAVE ENERGY TO COMPLAIN YOU MUST NOT NEED IT!!” The dude stretched out with his leg in a pretzel keels forward, eyes bulging out of his head with anger. The doctor smiles back at me. “As I was saying, bedside manner is an ongoing priority here at Tokyo U. Will you please retrieve this vial from the storage room?” She scrawls out something in that wicked doctor handwriting, and it’s by a miracle of God I can read it. I nod, halo over my head slightly tilting forwards, then backwards too, as I turn heel to the other side of the hospital wing.

My arms greedily looped around his chest when he pulled me in. I was so sinfully into all things Farrin O’rourke. His touch, his sweetness, musty moss-and-manly magic and all that, lion-like boldness and courage that brewed a fire at my heart. Misunderstood as I was by the world, it felt like he was the only one who got me. Saw through me, treated me with a kindness I just didn’t deserve. It wasn’t just about the way he loved me it was so much more, it was the incomprehensible spellbinding nature of him. Handsome as he was strong, so amazingly good to everyone around him it blew my mind he didn’t believe in God. I prayed every night, right now even nustling up to his furnace of a soft-hard chest, that nothing would break him. That the world fall into his time-weaving fingertips, all of his dreams come true with it.

“Hands off,” I teased in a low whisper, the hot tip of my tail lying flush against his pelvis. It inched downwards, a sinful giggle bubbling up. “Something different.” But I gasped out in surprise two seconds later, my lips curling into a soft o. All to be met by his lips, so perfect against mine I thought again that we might be made for each other. Like two interlocking pieces that finally found their way to each other, separation for even a day, a second, a lifetime far too long. “N-no like, I made you something!” I pouted after the kiss, pressing my fingers to my lips. Would I even be able to find it later in my mountain of luggage? I was so light headed just standing next to him, like his very presence warped the elevation around us because I was sky high with him. Way out of the ozone, out of this world.

I gently poked him in the ribs when he rolled his eyes, an evil smirk over my face all the while. Knew he meant no disrespect, it was all part of our jests. And fussy as I was with food choices, none of my restrictions really mattered when it came to our time together. I just wanted to be with him more than anything. Would cook him anything, go to any gastropub joint he wanted, even risk having a bite of… ew, a greasy, sizzling, juice-bleeding burger, if it came to it. But my healthy food choices otherwise were a great way to get out of 99% of social occasions and keep my figure. “How about I make you the chicken and veggies, and I’ll watch you eat and pat your head and you’ll tell me I’m pretty and that’s that?” I blinked up at him, tail tightening around him. “That fills me.”

What else filled me, beyond anything and everything imaginable? Farrin, his lips over mine, an all-consuming desire building in abdomen, arms and wings circling around him. There was nothing I wanted more than to kiss him, cuddle him, spoil him with an absurdity he’d never known growing up homeless. Everything that’d been taken away from him… It never stopped blowing my mind how kind he became despite it, a true Hero in every sense of the word. My Hero. Mine, no other way around it. “No you,” I murmured somewhere between the kisses, a fierce pout over my face. “And me, for you.” My whole heart glowed at his words, desire so hot I thought I might melt through the floor. Hung onto my dreamboat like he was my lifeline, my whole life in a soft, incredibly hott person.

Intoxicating. The second those doors closed and my legs stradled his chest, I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, wouldn’t want to anyway because I’d been avalanched by he who I loved the most. A childish whimper made way for a barely-contained moan, legs tightening all the harder around him as he kissed me. My hands found his hair, those gorgeous chestnut locks, ruffled them as a drunken smile found my face. He made an animal of me and me for him? In those seconds that became minutes with his magic, I’d leave a few savage marks of my own over his neck. A little teaser of what’d come next.

Giggled still when the elevator doors opened, popping us onto the floor. Latched onto him the whole time, fingers squeezing around his own, I’d reluctantly pull them apart only to fish out the key the campus gave me. Pulling him in, Mt. LuggaMore’s fate up to God, I’d lock the door behind us the same second I playfully threw him onto the bed.

Farrin

You and me, I whisper in a hush as I press pink-kissed fingertips up to my mother’s horns, and everyone else who’s gone. The scarred, draconic ribbing thins out at some points. Like a tree trunk without its rings, Saturn out of orbit, a life gone far too soon. How, oh how, does Jupiter live without it? Blood in its cosmos, of course.

My heels slip on the platform, zephyrs of torrential downpour battering me on all sides. Putting my hair up in a ponytail, magenta eyes subtly dart around the platform. A sinking ship, separated participants, Civilians who needed to be rescued. What was Farrin’s exam like? Kenta, Emile’s too? I sniff. Cold goosebumps pop up through the scales. They were stronger, better, faster, so much more capable than me. I needed to make it. Not for me. For us, for what we’d lost.

Landing on the precarious hull, I’d scan the trembling ship, sprint right towards the first gaggle of people hunched together. I spoke those words you never got to hear. “The Heroes are here! Who’s hurt?” A snotty brat with scraped elbows and knees wails, clinging to a slightly older brat. “W-w-w-w-we crashe-” they start, practically leaping onto me with booger-mashed tears. Ewww ew ewew. One arm curls around the kid; the other hand reaches the top of his head, a pink healing halo finding its way above his head. Did he need it fam? No. Even in the glaring sensory overwhelm that was this whole ordeal, it was clear his wounds were surface-level at best. But I was going to do anything to make him stop crying on my fit. My arm takes the other kid, tail wrapping around her for extra security. “I’m going to take you over to safety now! Please hold on!”

“What about me??” the third asked, a mutant rhinososoaurus easily weighing like a billion pounds. Yeah, what about you- I was about to ask when some Civilian scream shot out on the horizon. I craned my head. People were… flying?! Through the exam zone? Was it a Villain attack? I squinted, rocking the kids in my arms like babies.

Omg, it’s a guy… God put a little less in their cup. In my evil girl mind a plan had formed. “Right this way, Sir! They’ll lead you to safety in the safest way!” I pointed right towards the giant and the guy with the celestial hair. He’s your problem now. Then I sprinted up and over the edge of the boat with the kids in tow, ready to swim back to the rescue boat.

Sebastian Sinclaire Zenkai Hatake

Lunar eclipse.

Though his predilection against the star magic would dictate otherwise, there was no other way to describe this feeling. The sensation of being surrounded by so much joy and feeling nothing; swathed in the bright mores of UAU, infectious laughter bombinating up and down the infinite manured lawns. It’s all dead, dark, barren from where I stand. Yes, I made it to one of the greatest Hero institutions in the world. Even though others’ fits disrespected that very idea. (And themselves, if we were being honest.) I made it anyway, one small stepping stone towards where I really wanted to go.

Plastic indifference molded my face, rhinestones lining thick black eyebrows. Between my heels, miniskirt and black crop top, Farrin’s Halo over my high ponytail was the brightest thing I wore. All the more voluminous in my heart, he lit me up places even God couldn’t reach. So despite my veneer of apathy I went looking for him, eyelashes fluttering looking for him. Despite the mission, it’s just not nearly complete without him here… I’m not complete without him.

And just like that, he races towards me with that godly speed, picks me up. I squeal, pouting when he does what he does to my fanny. My wings, tail, arms immediately coil around him in the kiss, right leg reaching up to straddle his sculpted ribs as he holds us in our sin. “I missed you more,” I promise, I plead, breath hot against his perfect face. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Farrin O’rourke, handsome, lion-hearted, kind, courageous, generous, is God’s favorite and mine too. What made God drop him in my life so?

I snuck a kiss to his cheek, flushed to straighten out my clothes when he put me down. “Mint. Rest of my stuff’s just over there.” I motioned towards the U-Haul semi parked at the curb. “You even looked for it?” My eyes grew wide. “That’s literally so rad of you!”

“Where’s your room?... Did you call Mr. Barty to let him know you made it in okay? They’ve been feeding you alright these past couple of days?”