Chapter Text
“Hey, kid.”
Izuku looked up from his notebook to see a stranger lurking in the nearest alley, lit from behind so their features were deep in shadow. For a second he didn’t respond, just stared, baffled: nobody just stood suspiciously in an alleyway like this anymore. It was such an old cliche that he’d seen it as an example of out-of-date tropes in a library book published fifty years ago.
The stranger stifled a laugh behind his hand. Izuku realized he’d muttered all that out loud. “Sorry,” he exclaimed, frantically waving his hands around, “I didn’t mean to, um, diss your style-!”
“Don’t worry about it,” the stranger chuckled. “Just, c’mere for a second.”
“...Why?”
“I’m selling,” the man looked around, and lowered his voice, “quirks. You want some?”
Izuku would like to say that he stepped back and ran away. Or that he pressed the emergency alert button on his phone. Or that he at least hesitated for more than five seconds before making a decision.
“Quirks, plural, you said?” he blurted out, already stepping off the street and into the shadows.
He went to school the next day with a spring in his step and his head held high, a giddy anticipation in his heart that made it feel like he was floating.
“The fuck are you smiling about, Deku?!” Kacchan snarled when he saw him.
Izuku smiled at his friend, not caring one bit about the punch about to come his way. Because:
He had a quirk.
Actually, technically, he had two. The quirk dealer - “you can call me Akatani-sensei” - had sat down with him at a folding table in the empty warehouse down the alley, and handed him a list: a binder with a chart of over two hundred different quirks, rated for their complexity, power, and offense/defense ratio.
“Ordinarily it’d be one per person,” Akatani-sensei had explained, “but that’s because of conflicting quirk factors limiting them to getting a secondary quirk compatible with their primary. You don’t have a primary, yet, which means you can pick one, and then a secondary, and then a third if it fits with the other two.”
They’d spent what felt like hours poring over the chart together, after that. Izuku had worried eventually that he was taking too long - but Akatani-sensei had grinned from ear to ear and insisted that he had all the time in the world, going so far as to order takeout from a nearby noodle place and have it delivered to the warehouse. (Those noodles were fantastic. Izuku was going to become a regular.)
“Y’see, everyone nowadays just cares about their own quirk,” the dealer had lamented between mouthfuls of yakisoba. “You’re the first person in years to be as interested in quirks as I am.” And he rewarded that, it seemed, by teaching Izuku how to identify compatibilities between quirks, until Izuku finally grasped the pattern of it about an hour in and was able to start picking a combination for himself.
So:
Air Walk, the only floating/flying quirk on the list that didn’t have some esoteric activation requirement, was a weak-looking quirk at first glance - until you realized it had the highest defensive stat of any general-purpose quirk, higher than some of the quirks specialized in defense. Its intuitive ability to control air centers around the feet at first, Akatani had demonstrated, but one can learn to focus the power anywhere within their range, with practice.
It was an eccentric pick for a primary quirk, with limited combat capability, but Izuku had chosen carefully; his secondary, Infrared, let him see via heat signature independent of his eyes, and in all directions, which eliminated the natural blind spot - and conveniently made it easy to see when Kacchan was about to ignite his palms for an attack, as Izuku was discovering right now.
He dodged to the left without looking up from his notebook, then shrank down in his seat to avoid the following right hook, by which point the teacher’s half-hearted admonishment was enough to stop Kacchan for the rest of the school day.
“You’re gonna get it later, damn nerd,” Kacchan grumbled under his breath. “Actin’ like you’re better than me, dodging like that.”
This time, however, when classes let out, Izuku went to the roof instead of the ground floor - which threw Kacchan and his lackeys off his tail for long enough that he could activate Air Walk and dash over to the next rooftop before anyone below saw him.
“Yes!” Izuku whispered, fist-pumping in the shadow of an office building’s roof access door. He took out his phone and texted Akatani-sensei the good news. [It worked!]
[distributor, 3:30pm: Excellent.]
[I’ll be over in 20,] Izuku replied, already giddy with anticipation: after all, he hadn’t picked his third quirk yet, and it was Friday, which meant he’d have two whole days to try out different combinations until he was satisfied. Akatani had promised he wouldn’t charge anything while Izuku borrowed the quirks and tried them out; who would buy without time to test drive, right?
So, back to the warehouse.
The dealer had ordered more take-out from the same shop as yesterday; he was halfway through a big order of dumplings when Izuku got there, waving him toward the second box on his side of the table. “Quirks take energy,” Akatani reminded Izuku while he reached for a bowl of soup. “You just used both of yours today; I’m sure you noticed it already.”
Izuku totally had. His lunch bento - spared from Kacchan’s wrath - had seemed woefully insufficient after using Infrared like that. He hadn’t been about to admit it, but after using Air Walk several times to get here from school, he was ravenous.
“So, does holding onto your quirks take energy too, or are the energy demands just for using them?” he wondered between bites. “Or are they double what you’d need if you just had the quirks, since your meta-quirk is active at the same time? Can you use multiple quirks simultaneously? Does the energy cost grow exponentially or just by addition-?”
Akatani’s chopsticks had stopped halfway to his mouth as he stared at Izuku, wide-eyed. Then he broke into a grin so bright it was almost literally sunny - an expression Izuku couldn’t remember ever being on the receiving end of, before. “Holy shit,” the dealer beamed, “you’re brilliant, you know that?”
“W-what? No I’m not,” Izuku stammered out, flustered. “I just - I wonder things a lot-”
“Don’t sell yourself short, kid, you’re really cool.” Akatani took out a pocket-sized notebook from his jacket, which was slung over the back of his chair. “And here, check this out, I picked out some tertiary quirks that aren’t on the regular list.”
Oh? Izuku set aside his lunch, wiped his hands, and accepted the notebook with great interest. “Are these all compatible?”
“No idea, but we can fuck around and find out.”