Let me tell you something about fresh starts.
Everyone talks about them like they're these clean, cinematic things — you pack your bags, you walk out of your old life, some inspirational song plays, and you arrive at your new place looking like a protagonist. Sun's out. Shoulders back. Future's bright.
Nobody tells you that a fresh start at eighteen, six months after the worst war Japan has seen in a generation, looks like me standing in a four-and-a-half tatami studio apartment at seven in the morning, in my boxers, burning instant miso.
That's it. That's the scene. No music.No Pervy manga.
My name is Mineta Minoru. I am a licensed hero — provisionally, technically, on a conditional basis pending quarterly review — and I have just discovered that the burner on my rented stove runs about forty percent hotter than advertised, which is the kind of thing you only learn after you've already committed to the miso.
I stirred it anyway. What else was I going to do?
---
The apartment was fine. That was my practiced answer whenever Kaminari called to ask how I was "settling in," which he did with the enthusiasm of someone who did not have to live here. *It's fine. Yeah, it's good. No, I'm not lonely. Yes, I have furniture. Kaminari, I have a bed and a hotplate and three forks, I'm an adult.*
Hanabi Residence, they called it. *Hanabi* — fireworks. Someone had named this building after fireworks. I'd tried not to read into that too hard on my first night, lying on my new futon and staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like a grape. The universe has a sense of humor. I've made my peace with it.
The building was six floors, thirty-two units, one malfunctioning elevator that smelled like someone had, at some point in recent history, transported fish in it. My apartment was on the third floor — 304 — and it had a window that looked out over a small convenience store and, if you craned left and pressed your forehead to the glass, about four centimeters of actual sky. I'd craned. I'd pressed. Four centimeters was enough.
Six months post-war, Musutafu New District was still figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up. Half the streets were still repair zones, fenced off and busy with Quirk-assisted construction crews who moved faster than any normal contractor. The other half had already reinvented themselves — new shops, new hero agencies, affordable apartments full of young pro heroes who'd graduated early because the war had needed them to and who were now attempting to quietly decompress without anyone noticing. It wasn't glamorous. It was real, and real was good enough.
I had moved here to prove something. To myself, mostly. Possibly to everyone else who'd known me at U.A. and formed an opinion.
The miso smelled like burning. I turned down the heat.
---
I was in the middle of deciding whether to add the tofu before or after removing the pot from the burner when I heard it.
Humming.
Not from inside my apartment — from the hall. Low, cheerful, a little off-key in the way that meant whoever it was didn't care how they sounded, which I'd always privately thought was the most confident thing a person could be. The kind of humming that comes with morning routines and comfortable familiarity, like this person had been here a while and knew it.
I set down my chopsticks. Listened. The sound moved — past my door, toward the elevator, then back. Footsteps. Light ones. My neighbor.
I hadn't met my neighbor yet. I'd been here four days. In my defense, I'd been working three of them, and on the fourth I'd tried to knock and chickened out at the last second and spent the next twenty minutes telling myself I hadn't chickened out and then gone to bed.
*Today*, I told myself, *is different.*
I looked down at myself. Boxers. Just boxers — a dark purple pair, at least, with little lightning bolts on them because Kaminari had bought them as a housewarming gift and I'd run out of other clean options. My hair was doing the morning thing where several of my grape-shaped Quirk bulbs had shifted overnight and now I looked roughly like a root vegetable that had recently survived a natural disaster.
I looked at my reflection in the black screen of my turned-off TV. I looked like I had been assembled from leftover pieces of a person by someone working under time pressure.
*Today*, I amended, *I will introduce myself like an adult, and I will not say anything weird.*
I opened the door.
---
I don't know what I was expecting. I genuinely don't. I'd lived next door to invisible things before — Toru had been in my class for three years, we'd fought a war together, I'd sat three desks from her for more mornings than I could count. My brain *knew* about Toru Hagakure. My brain had filed her correctly.
What my brain had apparently failed to update was the contextual information that *my neighbor* and *Toru Hagakure* could ever occupy the same category of information simultaneously.
I opened the door. There was nobody there.
And then:
"Good morning, Mineta-kun~!"
The voice came from directly in front of me, warm and delighted and absolutely zero percent surprised, which should have been my first clue. A floating ceramic coffee mug — pale blue, with a small painted rabbit on the handle — bobbed cheerfully in midair at approximately chest height. Steam rose from it in a lazy curl. Next to the mug, at roughly shoulder height, a fuzzy cream-colored bathrobe tie moved gently in the hall's ambient draft.
My brain connected the dots.
It connected them slowly. It took a scenic route. It paused to appreciate several irrelevant things, including the specific shade of the bathrobe fabric (soft, thick, well-washed), before completing the journey.
*Toru Hagakure*, I thought with the dawning horror of a man watching a wave approach from a distance and having nowhere to run, *lives in apartment 307.*
"You look surprised," said the floating mug, tilting at an angle that communicated amusement.
"I'm not surprised," I said immediately. "I'm — you've been here the whole time?"
"Two weeks." She sounded *deeply* pleased about this. "I asked Yamada-san at the front desk not to say anything. I wanted to see your face when you found out."
"What does my face look like right now?"
"Honestly? A little like you've seen a ghost." A pause. "Which would be pretty rude, since I'm not a ghost."
"I know you're not a ghost."
"You're in your underwear."
Every single blood cell I possessed made an executive decision to relocate to my face simultaneously. I felt my cheeks go from normal human temperature to surface-of-the-sun in approximately 0.4 seconds.
"I —" I started. "I was just —" I gestured vaguely at my own apartment behind me. "This is — I wasn't expecting to —"
"It's fine," she said, and she sounded genuinely unbothered, which somehow made it worse. "It's early. Do you want some coffee? I made too much. I always make too much."
The floating mug tilted toward me in offering.
I should have said *thank you, let me get dressed first.* I should have said *one moment.* What I did instead was reach for the mug — or for what I thought was the mug, because I was flustered and sleep-deprived and not thinking about spatial geometry — and my hand missed the handle entirely and landed somewhere soft.
The hum of casual conversation stopped.
I looked at my hand. My hand was very clearly not holding a mug. My hand was resting on a shoulder — I could tell from the shape and the warmth and the small intake of breath that accompanied the contact. The bathrobe was thick, yes, but not so thick that I couldn't tell that whatever was beneath it was arranged in a way that confirmed Toru Hagakure did, in fact, exist as a physical three-dimensional person and I was currently touching her.
The hallway was very quiet.
The steam from the coffee rose between us.
She said nothing. I said nothing.
I removed my hand from her shoulder like it was a hot burner. I grabbed the coffee mug handle, which was slightly to the left of where I'd reached, and held it with both hands in the careful, deliberate manner of a man who was absolutely not thinking about anything.
"Coffee," I said.
"Coffee," she agreed.
We both looked at the wall for a moment.
"I should get dressed," I said.
"You mentioned that, yes."
"And I should — the miso."
"It smells like it's burning."
"It was already burning a little before."
"I think it's burning more now."
"Yeah." I cleared my throat. "I'll — yeah."
She invited me in anyway. Of course she did, because Toru Hagakure had apparently decided at some point during our three years of class together and one war that I was going to be a part of her life whether I had processed that information or not. I came back six minutes later — dressed, grape-bulbs somewhat organized — and spent an hour drinking coffee across from a floating mug while her bathrobe tie moved occasionally when she gestured and the morning light came through her window and she told me about the building. The fish elevator smell. The good convenience store on the corner. The third-floor laundry machine that needed a specific sequence of hits to start (she demonstrated it with her hands, which meant I watched a sequence of invisible gestures mime-striking something and somehow followed it completely).
She had plants. Not many, but a few. Small succulents on the windowsill in pots she'd apparently labeled in marker — *Kenji, Tomoko, Satsuma —* and when I raised an eyebrow she said, with complete authority, that plants needed names. I didn't argue.
It was the most comfortable morning I'd had in six months. I went home and burned the miso entirely and didn't care.
---
Kaminari called at noon.
"How's the new place?" he asked. "You settling in? You make any friends yet? You talk to your neighbors? You should talk to your neighbors, it's good to —"
"Nothing's weird," I said.
"...I didn't say anything was weird."
"Nothing is weird and I am fine and everything is completely normal."
There was a pause. "Mineta. What happened."
"Goodbye, Kaminari."
I hung up. I stood in the middle of my apartment. Through the wall — thin enough that I'd already learned its acoustic properties in four days — I could faintly hear humming again, that same off-key, comfortable, unbothered sound drifting through the plaster like it had always been there. Like it was never going anywhere.
---
Across the hall, in apartment 307, a pale blue coffee mug with a small rabbit on the handle lifted itself from the kitchen counter and floated to the windowsill, settling between *Kenji* and *Tomoko*.
Toru Hagakure smiled at it.
She'd known, obviously, when she asked Yamada-san to keep it quiet. She'd known it would be funny. She'd known he'd be embarrassed.
She hadn't entirely predicted the part where she'd be flustered too.
She picked up the mug and took a sip. Outside, the morning stretched over the New District, all scaffolding and new glass and the smell of a city deciding to try again.
*Apartment 304*, she thought.
*Right across the hall.*
She set the mug down on the windowsill next to *Satsuma*, and she smiled at nothing in particular, the way you smile at something you've been looking forward to for longer than you've let yourself admit.