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You weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high [...] People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you.
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
“Hello, this is the Second Ingenium Hero Agency, how can I help?” the receptionist chirps. He tucks the phone under his ear and waves apologetically towards the door as he talks. Just inside, a girl in a UA uniform clutches her costume case closer to her chest and nods frantically in understanding. “Yes, I can handle that for you… Yes, of course, I understand, I’ll make sure Uravity gets your message as soon as possible… oh, I’m actually the head of the admin department for the agency… I’m afraid that won’t be possible, but I’d be happy to take your message, and — you know what, since I know she’ll want to hear it, I’ll make sure it’s marked priority and she’ll see it by the end of her shift, is that all right? …Right, okay, that’s wonderful, thank you… Yep, I’ll make absolutely sure… You have a great day too, sir.” He sets the phone back on the receiver and sighs gustily, closing his eyes for half a second. Then he draws himself up again and beams at the girl in the doorway.
“Hi!” he says. “You’re our intern, right? Interstellar?”
“That’s me!” She waves, and then immediately snatches her hand back to her side in obvious embarrassment. The receptionist’s smile doesn’t dim.
“Great!” he says. “I’m Midoriya. I do a lot of the behind-the-scenes and administration stuff here.”
“Yeah, you’re the head of the admin department, right? I heard — I mean, not that I was listening to your phone call, but, like, I was right here, and I try to pay attention to my surroundings because that’s important, so I heard what you were saying, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop or anything?”
“Don’t worry, all of that makes perfect sense to me.” He laughs a little, rubbing at the back of his head. “And, well, I’m the entire admin department, we’re not that big an agency. But that does make me officially the head of it.” Before she can ask any questions, he turns his chair and clicks at a few things on his computer screen.
“Okay, so, Uravity was the one who formally requested you, but Ingenium II wants to work with you too, and you’ll probably spend some time with the sidekicks too. I have a schedule here I’m going to print off for you, but it does tend to shift around a lot as heroes get called in, so be prepared for that. I’ve marked some substitute options for the things most likely to change.” Behind him a printer whirs to life. “We’re definitely going to find plenty for you to do, though. Everyone’s really excited to have you.”
“I — really?” she squeaks.
“Yeah!” He grins at her. “You probably know this already, but you’re our first intern. We’ve been talking about it all week.”
“Wow.” She blushes immediately, but he doesn’t laugh at her, just nods seriously. Interstellar is still mostly pink when the door behind the desk opens, and Uravity floats through.
“Hi!” she says, beaming. “You must be Interstellar!” Interstellar waves again, nodding. “And you’ve already met Midoriya, that’s great. Interstellar,” she says with grave seriousness, “Midoriya is the most important person in this agency. Do everything he says.”
“Aw, Uravity,” Midoriya says, laughing. “I’m not that special. Oh, right!” He sits up. “Those creeps from Strawberry Sportswear called again, they want you to do a photoshoot with their stuff.”
Uravity makes a terrible face.
“I know,” he grimaces back. “But I think we can use it to get you a better offer with Mollo, or maybe see if we can leverage this to get Ingenium a commercial with — hm, let me just update the spreadsheet —”
Uravity points. “Most important person in the agency,” she repeats. Midoriya shakes his head, fingers not pausing on the keyboard, and Uravity nods like an emphatic bobblehead. When she looks over to Interstellar, though, there’s no joke in her face. “That’s lesson one, okay? You can’t save anybody if you don’t have someone to make sure you keep the lights on.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Interstellar says, with the nod of someone committing something resolutely to heart.
“Hey, you’re Eraserhead and Eri, right?” The man who greets them at his office door has a white coat over a T-shirt and jeans, and three pencils and a pen stuck through his curly green ponytail. “It’s great to meet you, come in.”
“Just Mr. Aizawa,” Aizawa says, accepting the offered hand. “I’m not here as a hero.”
“Just a father, right,” the young man says. Aizawa’s expression softens infinitesimally; Eri’s shoulders untense a bit. “Mr. Aizawa, then. Well, um, it’s an honor either way, I really admire your work.” He shakes Eri’s hand too. “And I’m excited to meet you too, Eri. I’m Dr. Midoriya. Do you want to sit?”
“Aren’t you a little young to be a doctor?” Aizawa asks, raising his eyebrows. Eri glances up at him — not far up, she’s tall for a teenage girl — and then away.
“A little, yeah,” Dr. Midoriya admits, sheepish more than anything else. “I got kind of obsessive about my thesis, I guess.” He waves off the achievement of an early doctorate with no more than that, dropping into his desk chair.
Eri bites her lip, taking the seat next to Aizawa. “Just so you know, I’m adopted,” she says, a little rushed. “So my quirk isn’t a mutation of his or anything like that. It’s just — me.”
“Right, he mentioned when we emailed,” Dr. Midoriya says, nodding. “We’re looking at convergent evolution, if they even turn out to be that alike. Thank you for letting me know, though, it saves us from running down a blind alley.” He reaches into his desk and pulls out a notebook, crisp-cornered and new. “And we have some quirk and medical history from your birth family, but you’re not in contact, right?”
“Yeah.” Eri’s voice is small, but relieved, an impression that only grows when no follow-up questions appear. She clears her throat. “Um. Is that a Lemillion Funko Pop?”
“It is, yeah!” He grins and turns the little yellow-headed figure so it faces her head-on. “All Might, too.” He taps one plastic hair-antenna. “I have some other figures at home, but I didn’t want to bring in any rare stuff.”
“You’re a hero fan, huh,” Aizawa sighs. Dr. Midoriya just shrugs.
“I mean, it only makes sense to study what you love, right?”
“Can I take a picture?” Eri asks, tugging her phone out of her pocket. “I want to send it to him.”
“Absolutely! Absolutely, whatever you like.” Dr. Midoriya scoots his chair sideways, taking himself out of the shot. “Did you know each other when he was at UA, then?”
Eri’s spine goes tight again, and Dr. Midoriya’s smile collapses into a second of naked remorse before he reassembles it on his face.
“Yeah, he used to babysit me,” she says, hunching over her phone. “And, um, he rescued me from something when I was little.”
“Oh,” Dr. Midoriya says, in visible understanding. “Right, your father mentioned you had a bad history with unethical quirk experimentation.”
“Yeah.” She picks at the seam of her jeans. “That.”
“Yeah, I did want to say something about that before we start, actually.” Dr. Midoriya rolls his chair out from behind his desk. It’s a boyish motion, deeply unintimidating. “Look at me for a second, Eri?”
She glances up.
“This is for you,” he says seriously. “This is so you can understand your quirk better, and use it better, for whatever you want to use it for. Because it’s a part of you, and you should get that. So if you want to stop for the day, or stop a particular test, or even stop the whole thing, it stops. Right then. You’re in control every step of the way. Yeah?”
“I — oh.” Eri blinks twice, sniffs, and quickly swipes her eyes with the back of her hand. Aizawa squeezes her shoulder. The look he gives the doctor is brief and naked and unspeakably grateful. “Thank you,” Eri whispers.
“Of course,” Dr. Midoriya says, like a promise. It’s quiet and calm, but there’s a distinct note of All Might about it. “And you can always ask me any questions you want, too.”
“Okay.” She nods. “I want to start.”
“Then we can,” he says, very matter-of-fact. “I wanted to get a look at what you do and then talk history, just to cut down on the preconceptions.” He leans over to grab something off the floor behind his desk. “So I brought these to play around with!” He brandishes a tray of rather wilted-looking plant plugs. “Don’t worry about what happens to them, they cost about a hundred yen each.”
Eri giggles, looking surprised at herself, and pushes her hair out of her face. Her fingers rub at the base of her horn. “What do I try first?” she asks, serious but without fear.
“Everyone, this is Mr. Midoriya,” Aizawa says, in tones of impressive apathy. “He’s a… quirk consultant. Principal Nezu says he’s going to watch your class for the next week or so, see if he can come up with any useful suggestions.” This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard manages, unspoken, to approach Present Mic levels of volume. “Try and answer his questions. He’ll answer yours.”
“How did you become a quirk consultant?” one student pipes up from the back of the class, raising her hand. Aizawa rolls his eyes.
Midoriya laughs, rubbing at the back of his head. “Um, more or less by accident, to be honest. I went to college with Phantom Thief’s little sister, and all three of us ended up friends. He and I started talking a lot about how to use some of the quirks he copied, and then he introduced me to his teammates and we ended up bouncing some ideas around, and they introduced me to another couple of people, and then suddenly someone was asking me how much I charged and I had to come up with an answer. And here I am!” He grins. “I don’t want to take up too much of your class time, but I’ll be around for a while after anyway, if anybody wants to talk more.” He nods to Aizawa, whose eyebrows are rising despite his best efforts.
“All right,” he says. “Half of you run the obstacle course, the rest of you get sparring. Work it out among yourselves. Switch out as you finish. Don’t think you can get away with skipping either half, I’ll notice.” Variations on this theme are a common lesson plan; it lets the kids practice a decent array of skills, lets him see not only what flaws they’re developing but what they gravitate towards, see where they’re leaning too hard and not enough. Gives him some warning about tensions that he might need to deal with, too. And it’ll let this consultant of Nezu’s get some idea of what they can do without disrupting his class too badly.
Midorya moves from kid to kid with a kind of thorough patience, and as the afternoon wears on, Aizawa is forced to admit that the questions which drift back to him don’t sound too asinine: “That seems like it could give you some mobility options, what have you tried?” “Talk me through your limits.” “How far can you reach?” “What’s your plan for cold temperatures?”
To Ota, who can absorb and redirect kinetic energy, but can only hold so much at once: “Do you think your support department could help you add something to your suit that would let you vent energy safely? Maybe something like a wheel or a gear that takes a lot of force to rotate?”
To Hayashi, who manipulates plant matter: “How processed can it be? Can you do anything with cotton or hemp, or maybe paper?” (Hayashi’s jaw drops in slow-motion wonder before he grins.)
To Matsui, who commands the weather for a short radius around her and fights with fog and wind and lightning: “How quickly can you switch between extremes? It’s not something that you’d want to use lightly, but switching between a hot environment and a really cold one can mess somebody up a lot faster than you’d think, so it might be an option if you need to knock out someone dangerous.”
When the day reaches its end, the class doesn’t so much disperse as converge on Midoriya like cats hearing a can opener. It goes on for long enough that Aizawa finds himself a patch of wall and settles into a half-attentive doze, letting the sound of excited young heroes wash over him.
The shadows are starting to stretch out over the sunlit ground by the time the last of the stragglers drift away. Midoriya doesn’t make any effort to move them along. He doesn’t seem in any hurry to leave himself, either, turning instead to look again over the obstacle course. The sun behind him hides his face.
“You had some good ideas,” Aizawa says quietly. Midoriya jumps, laughs.
“Thanks,” he says. “I guess I just always liked thinking about this stuff, you know?” He hesitates. “I actually… can I ask you something? Did you know a Bakugo Katsuki? He would have been a student here a while ago. I don’t know if you’d remember.”
“Bakugo Katsuki? He was in my class, when he was here.” Aizawa remembers all his students.
Midoriya blinks. “Really? I didn’t — oh. I mean, I guess you can’t tell me anything about what happened, but I wondered…”
“Why I expelled him?” Aizawa asks, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah. That.” Midoriya looks at the ground, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“Same reason I expel most of the students I do,” Aizawa says. He shrugs one lanky shoulder, slow like a weight is hanging off it. “I hoped it’d teach him a lesson he wasn’t learning any other way. That boy was a danger to everyone around him, himself most of all.”
“Oh.” Midoriya’s voice is very quiet. “We knew each other when we were little kids, is all. I always wondered…”
“Redid his first year over at Shinketsu and graduated there, from what I heard,” Aizawa says. “Ms. Joke told me. Haven’t heard much about him since.”
“Huh. That's...” Midoriya shakes his head. “Well, thanks for telling me. See you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow,” Aizawa echoes, and turns his back to go. “Lock up behind you when you leave.”