"You can stick around, if you want."
My girlfriend stopped in the doorway, twisting around with her arms crossed over her chest to shoot me a small smirk. Girlfriend. I'd gotten myself a girlfriend. How the fuck did that even happen?
Mirko- or was it Rumi now? That was a big thing in Japanese culture that I'd kinda been ignoring throughout my entire stay here. I'd called her Rumi earlier, while we were in bed, right before she'd gone ahead and shattered all my preconceived notions that she was nothing more than a murderous hobo with bunny features and one hell of an ass.
Which she was, but that wasn't the point. Compared to our first little encounter out in the woods, this fuck up was just waiting for the strings holding it over our heads to be cut, so it could crash into the ground and kick up enough dust to blot out the sun.
We were teetering on the edge of an artificial winter level of catastrophe because neither of us could keep it in our pants. Hell, I'd gone my entire life being good at keeping it in my pants, and all it had taken to break that was way too fucking much honesty.
The way she'd been looking at me… it was like I'd been holding the moon and stars in the palm of my hand. Like I could offer all of them to her and more.
"I'd love to, but some of us have actual jobs we need to wake up for."
It would make everything that much more complicated. It would draw more attention than I wanted, and inspire more risks than I could even account for. It would almost certainly end in disaster. And yet despite all of that, above all else that could and would eventually come of this, it was what I wanted.
Sure, if I'd said no, she could have made my life very difficult, but that hadn't really been a factor. She didn't strike me as the type to report me out of revenge. No, if anything, she'd just strike me.
She was wild. Gorgeous. Aggravating. Passionate. If her texts were any indication, she was clingy. She was teaching me how to fight. There was nothing saying that she couldn't give me another reason to fight, too.
Most importantly, for whatever reason, she wanted this. Sure, I had a lot of good reasons why I shouldn't have agreed to it, but being good didn't automatically mean they were compelling.
I didn't know all that much about her? Well, that's what the whole 'dating' thing was supposed to be for. I was going to make her a target before long? She'd enjoy it, especially when I would be around before long to make sure she could walk away in one piece. I had no plans of sticking around? Well…
Well, regardless of my best efforts, unless I stumbled into the perfect Quirk, that one wasn't ever going to be in my control. In an ideal world, I would be able to go back and forth as I wished. If I couldn't find myself a Quirk to do that, then the next best bet was making one.
Realistically, that wasn't going to happen. Even if everything I had done and everything I was going to do was in pursuit of that goal…
If it all came crumbling down around me, I didn't want to be left with nothing. I guess, if you weren't counting my friends, or my money, or my power, or my land, or all the influence I was garnering, or the sheer comedic value of how hard I was going to be fucking with the entire world in a few weeks…
I'd give it all up to see my sisters again. To listen to my dad's terrible jokes. To crack some beers open with my uncles and tell them the crazy fucking dream I had where I was in a superhero world, wherein my power was being short and annoying. My youngest uncle would love that. He, too, was short and annoying.
If I had to leave my family behind, like my mother before me, then I at least wanted a chance to build a new one here. Hell, before coming here I'd never even considered having kids, or even adopting. There was just something about having the ability to reshape the world at my whim that made taking care of a whole kid a bit less intimidating.
And yeah, sure, Mirko wasn't perfect, not by a long shot. If we ever did get that far I'd probably have to stop her from teaching them how to kick before they could even walk. Or stop her from eating them, I don't know, I wasn't an expert on rabbits.
But it wasn't like I was perfect either. Part of me was Chisaki, after all.
Shoot for the moon, land amongst the stars. Though knowing my luck, I'd shoot for the moon, score a perfect critical hit, and blow it up with my forehead, irreversibly fucking up the pull of gravity on Earth forever. Then a chunk of it would fly into the stars and pop them like cosmic pinatas, despite logic and physics being pretty firm in the opinion of that sort of shit being impossible.
…This analogy was getting away from me. Rumi was giving me an odd look from the doorway. Fuck, how long had I been silent?
Wait, did I do that often!?
"Do… do you need a ride back?" Smooth, dipshit. Thank fuck she didn't like me for my intelligence.
She snorted at that, crossing her arms and leaning her hip against the doorframe. Her rabbit ears swayed with the motion, more so than they usually did. "Not unless you wanna make it a roadtrip. I'm in Kitakyushu this week."
"Kitakyushu?" It took a moment for my head to place that. When I focused on Rumi again, my eyes were wide. "That's on the other side of the country."
"Yeah."
I squinted at her, tilting my head. "You covered a half day trip in less than an hour?"
She mirrored me, though her expression was ruined by the corner of her lip twitching.
"Yeeaaahhh?"
Her voice warbled slightly, a single push away from collapsing into laughter. As though what she'd accomplished wasn't incredible, even in the context of this world. That was a thousand kilometres. About six hundred and twenty miles. A whole damn megametre, which was my favourite unit of measurement, and also fucking absurd.
Even if there was a bullet train that went that way, she would have been outspeeding it. By a significant margin. She'd kept a consistent pace at about half the speed of sound, and still had enough stamina on the other side to almost break my bed after I'd specifically fixed it up to survive an encounter with her.
My first instinct was to tease her about how desperate that made her seem to see me. My second instinct, the one that triumphed in the end, was to shake my head in silent awe. My arms hung awkwardly to my sides, a consequence of forgetting that the sleeping shorts I was wearing didn't have pockets.
"You're incredible." Even though I made no effort to not be heard, my voice was soft.
"I know." Rumi wasn't even trying to not sound smug anymore. She unclasped her arms, idly examining her nails and pretending that she didn't know that I could see the furtive glances she was shooting at me through her eyelashes.
If she'd actually been paying attention to her nails, she would have noticed that I'd cleaned them up for her, after the third time her jagged claws had almost managed to cut my shoulder blades down to the bone. Just because it had never been easier to get blood out of the furnishings, didn't mean that I needed more practice doing so.
Ego sufficiently stoked, Rumi dropped the act, reaching out towards me with both hands. A hug was pretty tame for her standards, but the ever-present caution I carried like a shield was already lowered. I stepped forth, my own arms raising-
"Throw me."
-And stumbled on the last step, a lock of hair barely managing to catch against the wall before I could crash into her and send both of us to the ground.
Prior experience suggested that we'd enjoy it, but anyone who happened past the scene probably wouldn't.
No, wait, we were both hot. They totally would.
With my mind once again failing me in the times I needed it the most, I straightened up, arms still awkwardly raised for a hug. "What?"
"Throw me!" I blinked dumbly at her as she grabbed at the air in my direction with both hands. One of her feet was thumping, shaking the entire doorway. "I wanna see how fast I can go with a boost!"
That… yeah, that tracked. Going off the wide grin on her face, she probably thought this was one of the greatest plans she'd ever concocted.
I wasn't quite as convinced. How high would be too high for her to stick the landing? How low was too low? How were we supposed to make sure she didn't land on anyone? Was the landscape on the way back as easy to traverse as it had been on the way here?
It was a horrible idea. But it would also be way more entertaining if I indulged her, and I was trying to be a good boyfriend… Eh, fuck it.
First thing's first, though.
Mirko squawked when I grabbed her hands and dragged her back towards me, rather than spinning her around like an Olympic hammer. She either knew better than to protest further, or wasn't actually all that upset as I grabbed her around the waist. It was probably the latter, seeing as her legs had automatically curled around my hips, her arms settling around my neck the moment I freed them both.
She hummed against my lips as I kissed her, tugging me closer. I pulled away before she could pry my mouth apart enough to shove her tongue down my throat, swallowing the instinctual smirk upon hearing her whine of protest.
Really, she was too easy.
"Which way is Kitakyushu?"
Her face lit up, all the way to the tips of her ears that were now standing at attention. Absolutely adorable, so long as I ignored the fact that it was because I'd agreed to help her get the fuck away from me as fast as she possibly could.
Considering she'd broken my neck earlier, it was arguable if that statement was better or worse with the proper context.
Rumi unhooked her legs from around my waist, perhaps the greatest loss of my life thus far, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. I'd have to bank her slightly to the left to avoid some of the bigger mountains. There wasn't enough wind for that to impact the trajectory. Maybe go a little higher than originally anticipated, because she was so densely packed with muscle… ok, got it.
The joyful giggle she let out as I swept her ankles up into my grip and left her hanging upside down was proof positive that there was something broken in there. Even with Overhaul, I didn't really believe I could fix it.
Not that I really wanted to.
The first few spins passed without incident. The slightly unhinged laughter started bubbling up out of her throat after we rotated through the sixth. By the time we were hitting ten, her body was parallel to the ground. Our surroundings passed me by in a chaotic mess of colours and shades.
Thank fuck we didn't have any neighbours close enough to actually see the shit we got up to over here. The only sound breaking the otherwise perfect serenity of this insanity was a car engine shutting off somewhere nearby.
A few more spins later, and we had the momentum we needed. I hitched my shoulders up a bit, adjusting her angle for takeoff. It would be a sour start to this relationship if I fucked up the launch and sent her headfirst through a tree.
Yeah, she'd done the same to me, but…
Uhh…
I could take it? No, she probably could too. I could heal it off? I could heal her too. I deserved it? No, come to think of it, she probably deserved it more than I did.
Ok, fine, I didn't have a good reason not to, but I also didn't want to. Curse me and my bleeding heart or whatever.
"Let's go on a proper date this weekend."
I hadn't honestly been expecting her to hear me, given how much wind must have been whistling past her ears by now. Hell, I was getting disoriented, and that was with a Quirk actively keeping my equilibrium stable. It really was a good thing that Overhaul couldn't actually really think for itself, because the first thing it would probably do with sapience would be to go on strike.
Evidently, I'd yet to stop underestimating her. Rumi craned her neck to look at me, the laughter coming to a strangled stop. She took a breath right as we reached the perfect speed, her mouth opening right at the beginning of our final rotation.
"Sounds-"
I let go.
For the first second of her flight, Rumi was flat, her body stiff and streamlined like a board. The strangest rocket I had ever seen get off the ground. After that moment, she flipped around, her body swimming through the air as though she'd been born to do so.
The last thing I saw before she was too far away to make out the details were her hands coming up to cup her mouth.
"-goooooooooooooooooooood!"
After that, she was over the mountain, out of sight. It was tough to pick up on this far away, but the strand of hair that I'd stuck to her leg wasn't indicating to me that anything awful had happened. She should have landed just on the other side of the mountain, in the perfect position to use the decline to pick up some speed.
The potential for that to go wrong was astronomically high, but Mirko wasn't the kind of person whose story would end like that. If memory served, she would have her own brand of tragedy for a destiny.
Well, had.
All for One wasn't my fight. If he made himself an issue then I would happily deal with him, but he wasn't a priority for me. No, he had his own storm to weather, one that I would be brewing with time. Shigaraki was much the same, safe in his bubble until I happened across a good enough reason or opportunity to pop it.
Destroy Japan? Fair play, I'd been planning the exact same thing until I realised it was a dumb idea. But Shigaraki was a dumb person, so it was fitting.
But their doctor? Oh, I had plans for Garaki. So many questions about his pet projects. It would be a fascinating conversation, just some peer review between a couple Quirk researchers.
Hopefully Giran would have something useful for me soon.
I sighed, letting my spine slouch as I dusted off my pants. That would all come later. For now, I had a different world-altering endgame to play towards.
The apple seed still residing in the palm of my hand would need a new home eventually. It was just a shame that it wasn't going to find one in Japan.
Soon. There were still a few weeks between then and now. A few weeks to finalise some destinations, hunt through obituaries, figure out exactly how the Quirk implanting process worked. So much to do, so little time.
With a yawn that cracked one side of my jaw, I turned back towards the house. A flash of silver caught my eye, and I realised it was one of the cars we'd bought not too long ago.
Then I finally realised that I had an audience.
I was supposed to have over an hour to myself still. How damn long had Rumi kept me in bed?
Gentle and La Brava were both staring at me with dropped jawsdropped jaws, vaguely horrified. It was almost as though they'd watched me pick up my girlfriend and then hurl her over the horizon. Eri stood between them, taller than La Brava now, also watching me with an open mouth.
Unlike either of her parents, she was grinning.
"My turn!" She cheered, throwing her hands out in front of her as she charged towards me.
She made it three steps before Gentle scooped her up from behind.
She made it three steps before Gentle scooped her up from behind.
It was the fastest I'd ever seen the man was the fastest I'd ever seen the man move.