Chapter Text
Contentedly, Yoichi had drifted off to sleep in Kaiji’s arms. Unfortunately, he awoke to Sanzou shouting, “Did the hangover cure work? How are you feeling?”
Kaiji went rigid, then admitted, “I don’t think I remembered to lock the door.”
“Dammit!” Yoichi leapt up and yanked on his pants, avoiding the spilled hangover cure on the floor. He hopped over and locked the door.
Sanzou knocked on the door. “Did I hear a click? Why did you just lock me out?”
Shirt, where was Yoichi’s shirt? Dear god, he’d stripped it off last night while drunk and left it downstairs. Many embarrassing memories flooded back to him in vivid technicolor, including getting in a fight with a mop. Yoichi grabbed a new shirt from the closet. Then he pulled on his socks.
Kaiji had gotten his pants back on. The body armor lay in a pile in the corner. Yoichi nudged it behind a chair to make it less obvious. Kaiji reached under the bed for a sock just out of reach. His biceps strained. Green sparks danced down his arm. Then the bed ripped in two like a piece of paper down the dotted line.
From the hallway, Sanzou demanded, “Did you two just break the bed having sex?”
“No!” Yoichi yelped, and yanked open the door to prove it.
On his knees, Kaiji looked up from the ruined bed with a confused and awed expression. “This is my power.”
“Yeah, yeah, you work out a lot.” Sanzou rolled his eyes. “That doesn’t excuse you breaking our furniture when we’re still lying low and can’t go to the store to replace it.”
“No, this is my metapower.” Kaiji sounded dazed. Slowly, he stood up. “My original power. The stockpiling power. The one All for One took from me and gave to…” His eyes went to Yoichi.
Yoichi realized that he felt great. Wonderful, in fact. His lungs felt clearer than they had since his first capture. His limbs felt lighter. He overflowed with energy. And when he reached for the stockpile, he felt nothing. “The metapower is gone.” His eyes sought out Kaiji’s, wide and shocked. “I must have given it to you, somehow.”
Sanzou said, “It’s probably a DNA transfer.”
Kaiji and Yoichi choked.
Oblivious, Sanzou continued, “Since Kaiji was bitching about accidentally swallowing your hair last night.”
“Oh, yes, it was definitely the hair.” Yoichi laughed falsely.
Kaiji shuffled his feet. “I can’t possibly think of any other explanation for it. How strange.”
“Not that strange,” Sanzou said. “Metapowers run in the family. Yoichi’s brother has the ability to give and take metapowers, so if Yoichi had a power, it would likely be something similar. Then consider Yoichi’s urges. Powers want to be used. He had the compulsion to give stuff away. That has nothing to do with stockpiling, and it’s not what you experienced when you originally had your power, is it?”
Kaiji shook his head.
Sanzou said, “Next, consider how sick Yoichi became from a minor—no offense—power. His body isn’t made to hold metapowers. It’s designed to give them away. The metapower must have been constantly trying to escape from his body.”
Yoichi shuddered. “No wonder I felt so sick.” His shock had started to turn into disappointment. “I got the useless part of my brother’s ability? I can’t use it and it makes me sick? This sucks! Why did I lose the metapower lottery so badly?”
Kaiji hung his head. “I’m sorry I took the stockpiling power.”
“Don’t be,” Yoichi said. “It originally belonged to you to begin with. It’s rightfully yours. Besides, I couldn’t even use it properly and it made me even more sick than usual. I’m sure you’ll wield it well, my hero.” Yoichi brushed off Kaiji’s hair and kissed him on the forehead, ignoring Sanzou’s exaggerated groan. “I’m just disappointed that the metapower I was born with turned out to be so crappy. What will I ever be able to do with a power that lets me give powers? It’s not as if those circumstances will ever come up again! Big brother wouldn’t even force a power on me after he sees that I lost the first one!”
Sanzou said, “I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, but I don’t think you have the power to give away powers any longer. You look much less pale.”
Yoichi touched his face. “I feel great.”
“As I thought.” Sanzou nodded. “You were ill because of metapower-related cellular degeneration. It got worse when you obtained two powers. When Kaiji ate your hair, I believe your original power left you along with the stockpiling ability. Now, you should become healthy.”
“That does make me feel better.” A wide grin spread across Yoichi’s face. “No more coughing! No more headaches! Do you think I can eat sodium-rich food now?”
Sanzou said, “I’ll grant doctor’s permission to try it in small quantities.”
Yoichi whooped and leapt up in the air. Kaiji grabbed Yoichi’s shoulders and swung him around in circles. Yoichi landed on the shards of the bed, still stained with spilled hangover cure. “Whoops.” He quickly stepped off before the splinters penetrated his socks.
“Sorry I broke your bed,” Kaiji said. “You can sleep in my bed.”
“What a great idea,” Yoichi said a little too fast.
Sanzou looked between them with a raised eyebrow. “So you transferred the metapower by eating a hair. That’s your story and you’re sticking with it.”
Kaiji puffed up and glared in a way that failed to be threatening. Yoichi rubbed his forehead and failed to think up anything witty to say. He didn’t feel ashamed of it, he’d just hoped the subject would come up in a less embarrassing fashion.
Sanzou laughed. He turned to leave. Over his shoulder, he called, “Leader, I expect you in the med bay for an examination. I think your body should be able to handle two metapowers if one was your original power and only a mild body-strengthening ability, but I’d still like to check your vitals. Also, did you practice safe s—?”
“Sanzou!” Kaiji barked.
The timer on the oven dinged. Kaiji pulled out a molten lava chocolate cake.
Yoichi sniffed the air. “It smells perfect! Are you sure you don’t want some?”
“I’m not hungry.” Kaiji shrugged. He added a spoonful of vanilla ice. “Here you go.”
Yoichi carved out his first bite. Chocolate mixed with melting ice cream hit his tongue. “Mmmmmmm.”
Kaiji added more ice cream to the blender. “One milkshake, coming up.”
Sanzou poked his head into the room. “Hey! I said he could try small quantities of rich food!”
“Even if I spend the night bent over the toilet throwing up, it will be worth it.” Yoichi shoveled more cake into his mouth.
Sanzou sighed. “Slow down. I won’t try to take it away. Is that a milkshake too?”
Yoichi grabbed the milkshake and guzzled it. Then he clutched his head. “Gah!”
“It was too much?” Kaiji asked anxiously.
“No, I just had brain freeze.” Yoichi straightened. “It was delicious.” He reached for his fork.
Kaiji grabbed the fork first. “Slow down, or you’ll make yourself sick even if your illness is gone.” He held up a small bite of cake. “Say ah!”
Yoichi obediently opened his mouth.
Sanzou groaned. “Now you’re acting lovey-dovey in front of me? I’m out of here.”
Kaiji blinked. “Whoa, he left for once instead of lurking around whenever we wanted to be alone.”
Yoichi grinned. “Let’s weaponize this.”
Yoichi had picked out a cheesy romantic movie to set the mood. Kaiji had popped a bowl of popcorn. Just as they’d settled down on the couch, Hikage barreled in. “Hi! Can I watch too?”
They’d already told Hikage they wanted an evening alone and asked Sanzou to watch him, so Yoichi had no compunctions about activating their back-up plan. He placed his legs on Kaiji’s lap and snuggled closer. “Sure, if you don’t mind kissing movies. Guess what they put me in the mood to do?” Yoichi pecked Kaiji on the lips.
“Ew!” Hikage shrieked. He beat a rapid retreat from the room.
Kaiji grinned. “PDA scares off the young and old alike! Genius!”
“Finally, a little privacy.” Yoichi sighed in relief as he rested his head on Kaiji’s shoulder and started the movie.
This time, Yoichi was bound and determined to get sexy martial arts right. It had helped that he’d clued in Kaiji before the game.
Yoichi pinned Kaiji’s arm behind his back. “Got you!”
“Whatever will I do?” Kaiji deadpanned before flipping Yoichi over his shoulder. Catching Yoichi as he fell, Kaiji lowered him to the mat. A smirk covered his scarred face.
Sanzou pushed open the door, calling, “Don’t mind me, I just came to get the headband I left here yesterday.”
“Then we won’t mind you,” Yoichi said, unbuttoning the top of Kaiji’s shirt.
“Ah! My eyes!” Sanzou shrieked. “What the hell? Are you doing this on-purpose?”
Yoichi smirked. “Were you doing it on purpose when you kept interrupting us during date time?”
Sanzou adopted an injured look. “I’m a huge supporter of you two. I only came by to check up on how everything was going. And I couldn’t resist documenting the failed mating dances of the rare gun-obsessed romanticus oblivious. It was valuable anthropological research.”
Kaiji glared. Then he leaned down to loudly kiss Yoichi.
“Fine! I’m leaving!” Sanzou fled, slamming the door behind him.
It was late in the evening. Yoichi lay on the bed, snuggled with Kaiji and three blankets. He’d moved into Kaiji’s room after his bed broke. It had been an excellent decision. Kaiji’s natural body heat provided a great deal more use than the base’s barely functional heater. Yoichi had placed half a dozen scented candles around the room. Now that Sanzou had been trained to knock on doors (and the door was locked anyway), Yoichi enjoyed lying together and reveling in his lover’s company.
The candle on the nightstand flickered out. Yoichi grumbled, “I don’t feel like getting out of these blankets to light that.”
“Eh, I’ll do it.” Kaiji propped his head up on his elbow and puffed a very small flame from his lips, igniting the candle wick.
Yoichi gasped. “That’s your other metapower? It’s lovely!” He switched to analysis mode by habit. “How big a flame can you make? Can you control the temperature?”
“I never told you?” Kaiji blinked. “I suppose it never came up. I can barely use the power. Anything except a tiny flame does serious damage to my throat. I wasn’t born with the metapower, so my body isn’t suited to it.” His body tensed. “It was originally my older brother’s metapower.”
Yoichi remembered Kaiji saying that his older brother’s death was a sore subject. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Nah. This feels like a good time.” Kaiji took a deep breath. “I told you that my brother worked for All for One, didn’t I?”
Yoichi nodded.
“My big brother was deep into metahuman supremacy shit. We should all rule over the normies, blah blah, we are the superior form of humanity, blah blah. I think it was an overreaction to how our parents hated metahumans and mistreated us.” Kaiji looked away. “Or maybe I’m just making excuses for him.”
“I know all about making excuses for your brother,” Yoichi said. “No judgement from me.”
“My brother was a huge simp for your brother.” Kaiji snorted. “Kinda ironic.”
“There’s no accounting for taste.” Yoichi shook his head.
“I meant it’s ironic because I’m a simp for you.” Kaiji winked. “In a more carnal sense of the word.”
Yoichi flushed.
Kaiji said, “Our parents threw him out before me because his metapower developed first. We didn’t meet again until years later when I stopped this asshole from getting violent at a metahuman rights march and it turned out the asshole was my own blood relative. My brother wanted me to join his side, but I was extremely not interesting in his bigoted bullshit and world domination delusions.”
“We have a lot in common.” Yoichi brushed Kaiji’s hair to offer comfort, his fingers next tracing the facial scar. “Did you become a vigilante because you wanted to stop your brother?”
“Nah, I joined up before he started working for All for One.” Kaiji shrugged. “I told him that meant I had dibs, so if he didn’t want to fight me then he’d have to quit his job. We ended up on opposite sides of the conflict a lot. We fought, but we weren’t gonna murder each other. He was still my bro. I had hopes he might change his mind someday, and he thought the same about me. My brother rose up in the ranks and became All for One’s bodyguard. It was a high-ranked position—All for One only had two.”
Yoichi wondered if Kaiji’s older brother had been the bodyguard who’d knocked him to the ground during his aborted vault escape attempt, or if that had been the other bodyguard.
Kaiji’s tone turned distant and strained. “Shortly before I met you, my brother’s wife fled from All for One’s side. She was pregnant. She told me that my brother was dead and asked for my help. Apparently All for One decided to conduct experiments to see if he could give his bodyguards multiple metapowers. One of them survived the process, one of them didn’t. My brother drew the unlucky straw and died.”
Yoichi shuddered. “Kaiji, I’m so sorry.” Somehow this seemed worse than when he’d assumed that Hisashi had killed Kaiji’s brother. It felt especially unforgivable for Hisashi to end the life of someone loyal to him in his wretched experiments, because he didn’t care enough about other people’s lives to know when to stop.
“My sister-in-law was bitter and just wanted out of the whole mess. I helped her escape the country. I hope she and the nibling are doing well.” Kaiji shifted, holding Yoichi tighter. “I ran into All for One on patrol not long after. I’m pretty sure he lured me into a trap. He wanted my metapower.”
“He took your stockpiling power to give it to me,” Yoichi whispered, feeling a surge of guilt.
Kaiji said, “Before he left, he forced my older brother’s fire-breathing power on me. He said that my brother wanted me to have it. He also said that he was curious to see if metapowers were more compatible when transferred between family members, so I don’t think his motives were entirely altruistic. Whether as a favor to his dead bodyguard or to see the results of his experiment, he let me live.”
“I hate that he did that to you,” Yoichi said. “For what it’s worth, I’m sure he regretted letting you live after you saved me.”
“I’m sure he did.” Kaiji hesitated. “Yoichi…when we first met, I came to kill you. I thought you were a valuable member of All for One’s organization, but I also had selfish motives. I wanted to avenge myself on All for One by killing his brother like he caused the death of mine. I’m sorry. I’ll do anything for your forgiveness.”
“I already knew.” Yoichi chuckled. “You weren’t as subtle as you thought. It’s okay. I understand. I’m glad you changed you mind.”
“I am, too,” Kaiji whispered into his hair. “All for One’s experiment was a failure, because I’m not compatible with my brother’s power at all. I have no fire resistance in my throat. The first time I tried to breathe fire, it nearly killed me. Now I avoid anything except lighting candlesticks.”
Yoichi remembered the pain and violation of having a metapower forced on him. He shuddered. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m even more sorry that I forced a power on you, too.”
“Don’t be. It was an accident. I would have accepted if I’d known. I often wished I could cure your pain by taking away the power unsuited for your body. Maybe that’s part of why the accident happened. You’ve got to use willpower to force an ability on someone. It’s a painful process, as we both know. I think the transfer went so smoothly because we both wanted it, even if we didn’t know what we were doing.”
“You’ve got my original power too,” Yoichi said. “How does that feel?”
“It hasn’t made me sick, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Any strange urges to give stuff away?”
“I felt a little flicker when Hikage admired one of my guns yesterday, but then I remembered all the reasons it’s a bad idea to give a child a gun. I think you had the urges much stronger because the stockpiling metapower wanted out of your body like crazy. I can shrug it off.”
“I’m glad.” Yoichi exhaled. “I would take it back from you, if it made you suffer.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” Kaiji said, arms tightening.
“I know you wouldn’t.” Yoichi smiled into his lover’s shoulder. “You’re my hero.”
Kaiji’s cheeks pinked. He looked at Yoichi with a flat, emotionless line to his mouth. It was the same expression that Kaiji had the night they’d first made love. Yoichi had come to know Kaiji well enough to see the intensity of the emotion behind that seemingly stony look.
Yoichi blurted out, “I love you. You don’t have to say it in return. I just wanted you to know.”
“Of course I love you, dumbass,” Kaiji said, then kissed him.
Yoichi woke up because he’d gotten cold. Even Kaiji’s body heat had failed to stop the tips of his toes from turning icy. The ever-present hum of the heater had stopped.
Guided by the flickering lights of the candles, Yoichi reached over Kaiji’s head and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. Nothing happened.
Kaiji groaned and mumbled.
Yoichi pushed his lover’s shoulder. “Wake up. Something is wrong.”
Sanzou pounded on the door and shouted, “Put all your clothes on, then let me in! We have an emergency.”
“There was a power outage?” Yoichi asked.
“There was a power outage across the entire city,” Sanzou said grimly. “It’s All for One.”
Kaiji’s eyes shot open, suddenly awake and alert. He exchanged a grim glance with Yoichi. Then they dove for their clothing.
OMAKE TIME!
Omake: The Picture All for One Carries in His Wallet
Hisashi: Has anyone seen my brother around here? (Holds up picture of Yoichi inside a vault sticking up his middle finger.) He’s got this unmistakable feral glint in his eyes.
#
Omake: Believe It or Not, Hisashi Meant Well Just This Once
Kaiji’s Brother: If I die, please offer my little brother my metapower. It’s stronger than his and I want him to be able to protect himself.
Hisashi: Since you’re dying for my sake, I guess I can do you a small favor. I’ll ram the power down his throat.
Kaiji’s Brother: That’s not exactly what I said. I wanted you to ask Kaiji if he wanted the power.
Hisashi: As if any younger sibling in the history of humanity ever knew what was best for them. I’ll make sure he doesn’t have a chance to refuse. I can have your brother’s metapower in payment for my trouble, right? You’re dead so I’ll take your silence as a yes.
#
Omake: In the Future
Third: Take my quirk!
Hikage: How should we do it, big brother?
Third: …I think eating a hair is the best option here.
Hikage: Is that how my other big brothers transferred the quirk?
Third: Yup! You’re too young for any other answer to that question!
Hikage: Ugh, I’m twenty-five and you’re still treating me like I’m ten.
In the Void:
Hikage: You lied to me! We One for All holders spent generations eating hair because I thought that was the only way to make the transfer, until someone bled on someone else and we figured out it was DNA.
Yoichi: Look, eating a hair was probably the best way regardless.
Hikage: Spoken like someone who’s never had to do it…
#Sex scene in Part Four #If you’re old enough to know the truth about how OFA was transferred.
#
Omake: In the Void
Third: I am stuck being the third wheel between two lovebirds for eternity. This is a fate worse than death.
Hikage: Hi, I died. Great to see everyone again!
Yoichi: Aw, it’s little Hikage.
Hikage: Little? I died in my forties. You all died way before me!
Third: You’ll always be our little baby.
Hikage: This is the true fate worse than death.
