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Seeking Relief From Bad Genes?
Call me Morie. My quirk lets me replace half of anyone’s genome with half from another person, just once. I didn’t know it could do this until now, but now that it’s known I have to leave the country in 14 days - I don’t trust Japan’s government or the HPSC not to disappear me. Fuck ‘em.
Anyone who wants to have it used on them, message me on Holocomm at…
The post had lasted only minutes on the forums before it was deleted, but Izuku - like many - was a quick-draw on the screenshot function, never mind that his hands were shaking. Here it was, after years of searching: his one and only chance.
The user of Reverse Adoption, as they’d called it, had penciled him in for the last day they were ‘open for business’ before leaving the country: he’d just received the location via Holocomm this morning, and spent three hours traveling to get to it, an office building in Kyoto. Izuku had hidden his hair in a plain knit hat, his face behind a black surgical mask, and his shaking hands in his pockets, and now he steeled himself to go inside.
Two bodyguards were positioned in the entryway, just out of view from the outside. Izuku had no doubt they were here to keep Reverse Adoption safe. He recited the ten-word passphrase that had been generated for him and sent over comm last night, and they let him through.
The waiting room, formed of folding chairs behind a privacy screen, contained several other people awaiting the quirk user. An arthropod mutation with a non-mutation companion; a purple-haired woman and a person of indeterminate gender who seemed anxious; a boy smaller than Izuku was, with an urn. (Would that even work? Izuku wondered, but bit down on any muttering lest he be overheard.)
Only Izuku was there alone.
He hadn’t planned far enough ahead. He hadn’t even been sure Morie-sensei would agree to his request - he’d said he had a genetic condition he wanted out of his body, but gene therapy was even more illegal in Japan than deliberate errors in the quirk registry, what if they didn’t want to assume the extra risk? - and thus hadn’t even looked for someone to be his gene donor until last night when the comm came through. But when he had looked, he realized the only adults he knew either hated him or were friends with his mom - so he had to find a stranger, and how was he going to convince a total stranger to help him-?
Izuku stood up and bolted for the door. “I-I need air,” he told the bodyguards as he dashed by, “I’ll be right back-”
He had considered asking a hero, because at least then he knew what their quirk was, but those were heroes - they’d draw the line at unlicensed quirk usage, well before refusing to let him become their son. That whole idea was summarily thrown out - he wasn’t going to get Morie-sensei so blatantly in trouble with the law.
Vigilantes, then? But the locations of vigilantes weren’t as well-known or predictable as heroes; Izuku only knew of a couple, and didn’t have contact information for any of them. A general post on the darknet forums would only look suspicious: ‘unaccompanied teenager wants to meet an adult’, hell no.
So he needed to find someone else, in this all-but-abandoned street, or maybe he could ask one of the bodyguards, if they hadn’t already gotten Reverse Adoption used on them before.
Just then, Izuku’s eyes lit on a shape lurking in the shadows: a man in a suit, looking around the vicinity. He had a similarly tight-knit cap on his head as Izuku’s, actually - and his heavily-tinted sunglasses were taped onto the side of his head, for he obviously lacked a nose. Or ears. The man seemed like he might be looking for something, and pushing aside all considerations of just who this might be, yakuza or vigilante or whatever, he kind of matched Izuku, which felt in that moment like the heavy hand of fate.
“E-excuse me,” Izuku went up to him, “are you also here for Dr. Morie?”
Ito Yoshitaka, 42 years old, quirk registered as Hybrid - able to cross-breed plants by touch, once per generation. The man had worked in agriculture research for nearly twenty years, developing new cultivars of grains and legumes: a steady, stable job which All For One doubted was the true source of his income, if he had enough money to hire the Russian mercenary group that was concealing his hiding place from All For One’s senses. That or Ito had been personally scouted by that country’s shadow government - a clever play, as they were one of the few organizations that wouldn’t cooperate with All For One’s reign.
He could almost appreciate that cleverness, except that it was turned against him. Instead, he had spent more than a week using a combination of twelve quirks to detect the concealment quirk indirectly, spiraling inward from Japan’s borders in a high-stakes hunt for the most useful genetic engineering tool of the century. All For One was sure Ito and his mercenaries were hiding out somewhere in this neighborhood, and as long as he could pinpoint their location, he could warp through the concealment without needing an invitation-
“-are you also here for Dr. Morie?”
All For One flinched, genuinely caught off guard by the interruption of deeper thought as he very rarely could be. He whirled on the source of the surprise - and found a child staring nervously up at him. (Or so it registered to the cameras in his sunglasses, that he was using as eyes via Interface.)
The boy cringed at the sudden attention, wringing his hands in front of him. “Ah! Sorry if I startled you - I just, I can escort you if you can’t see the building? Only, um, your sunglasses made it seem like you might be blind-”
“That,” All For One interrupted, feeling his mood brightening immensely, “would be very helpful, young one.” He held a hand out to let the boy ‘guide’ him - confirming, as he did, that there was no quirk to be found beneath his skin - and grinned widely as the connection to someone who was invited allowed him to circumvent the protection quirk, and walk right in the door.
The boy chattered a bit on the way in, quietly, as though he expected any moment to be silenced: I’m Mi-kumo, Akatani Mikumo, that is… All For One mostly tuned him out after a while, letting young Mikumo lead him to a chair next to his in the waiting room, playing up the ‘feeble old man’ nonsense for the guards. Who would he be to discard a ready-made excuse for accompanying the boy in without an invitation of his own?
Mikumo-kun glanced his way a few times as he continued to helpfully fabricate a cover story, as if wanting his permission; All For One went along with whatever he said, turning his focus inward, already halfway into the fantasy of what he would do once Hybrid/Reverse Adoption was in his hands - ah, he’d call it Splice, that was a nice name for it-
Quite abruptly, an unfamiliar hand was on his wrist, and just before All For One (the quirk) fully activated to steal it, there was a tingling feeling and a flash of bright blue light that he had to pretend not to see, and both Mikumo and the stranger - ah, right, that’s Ito - stepped back.
The boy rushed to a nearby mirror, frantically examining his reflection, and started tearing up at what he saw.
“Nothing changed,” Mikumo all but wailed. “There’s no visible difference - Morie-sensei,” he turned to Ito, a tired bald man with blue palms, “I’m sorry, but are you sure it worked?”
“Reverse Adoption definitely activated,” Ito promised, “see? My hands don’t glow when I hold them toward you - that means the process has been completed!”
(It was true, the quirk had activated; the pigmentation would take a day or two to fade, now that Splice was added to All For One’s collection, which gave him a convenient bit of leeway in deceiving the man and his mercenaries right now.)
“In any case, that’s all for the day… you can have a talk with your new father outside the building, yes? Sometimes the results of the change aren’t obvious…”
All For One waited until the mercenaries had (oh-so conveniently!) herded him and Mikumo outside to ask the boy, “... ‘New father’?”
Then he realized. “Oh. Oh, dear.”
The boy - his new would-be son - turned frantic eyes on him. “W-what do you mean, ‘oh, dear’? What kind of quirk do you have?” He paled. “You - you do have one, right?”
One? Try several thousand, All For One thought. Aloud, he said, “There’s a diner two blocks from here. How about we have this conversation there?”
Fifteen minutes later, ‘Akatani Mikumo’ sagged against the window beside his booth seat. “This was my only chance to get a quirk,” the boy despaired. “I scoured the darknet for years, looking for anyone with a gene-altering quirk, or even a rogue geneticist - and Reverse Adoption was my only hope.”
“What about the Cryptid?” All For One asked. Surely the underworld hadn’t forgotten about
him?
Mikumo-kun raised an eyebrow. “You mean All For One?” he asked, very quietly. “I exhausted any leads for him over a year ago - no one could even refer me to an acquaintance of his. It’s like his network blinked out of existence. Or something happened to him that made him lay low,” he added, thoughtful, muttering into his hand. “Didn’t All Might have that battle…?”
“Fair enough,” All For One interrupted, before the boy pondered the matter too intensely. He seemed unusually bright for a middle schooler, unless there was some brain enhancer poisoning the water supply nowadays. (Tomura could use some of it, if so.) “Well, shall we talk about my quirk then?”
Mikumo lit up. “Oh! Yes, absolutely!”
“-and he said his quirk only activated for the first time when he was twenty, in a near-death experience,” recalled the ninth holder of One For All to his mentor on a sunny afternoon, many years later. “So I still don’t know whether I got it - for all we know, I was still quirkless.”
“That’s quite a predicament, Midoriya-shounen,” Toshinori agreed. “Did he say what it was? The quirk?”
“Well… no,” Izuku grimaced. “He said it was highly sought after by villains, and powerful in the right circumstances, so I assume it was some kind of healing quirk? Maybe it was like Eri’s,” he thought suddenly, “since he was all bandaged up - if it needed time to stockpile a healing factor? But, um, anyway-” Izuku tried to rein in the mutter-storm before it started - “he described the signs of it developing, just in case I started to manifest it someday, and gave me a phone number to call if it happened.” He held up a contact on his phone - ‘Dad’, which was apparently why Toshinori was ‘Dad #2’.
“Increased calorie load, around three times what it used to be,” Izuku listed off, “a vague craving for some specific food he couldn’t identify, and his hair started growing in white everywhere, except for his eyelashes, or was it including the eyelashes? Ugh, I can’t remember exactly, let me check the list-”
Toshinori saw Izuku freeze, then, looking at his reflection in the black mirror of the inactive phone screen. “Wait…”
He grabbed a lock of his curly green hair and pulled it straight, and Toshinori immediately saw what had caught his successor’s eye.
It was growing in white.
“It rather suits you,” Toshinori declared, with slightly forced cheer. “Even if it does look a little ominous!”
“Eh? Ominous?” Izuku patted his hair down self-consciously. “Why would it be?”
Now it was Toshinori’s turn to be self-conscious. “Well - because of All For One, you know? His urban legend in the underworld, for decades, was that of the White-Haired Man.”
Izuku’s blood ran cold as he finally, finally put two and two together.
'Oh, dear,' he’d said.