Chapter Text
The office building was a drab grey-brown in the midday sun, one of a set of similar buildings on the street. From the outside, it was entirely unassuming, even unimportant. Inside, a large sign on the wall of the well-lit lobby listed all of the medical specialists housed there, floor by floor: orthodontists, plastic surgeons, laser treatment facilities, dermatologists and endocrinologists and gene therapists-
-and the quirk counselor Izuku was here to see.
He took the stairs, because the two elevators were both occupied by a steady stream of the elderly and infirm going to and from the second-floor chemotherapy and dialysis centers; as he ascended, for his destination was five stories up, Izuku’s mind wandered to the reason he was here.
The thing was, Izuku had done all the research that he could, with every material legally available to him at age thirteen and several that weren’t - he had read every published study on his question, diversified into the broader field and narrowed down again, used his deadbeat dad’s credit card to commission translations of the newest literature outside Japan - and then, with increasing certainty of his hypothesis, had combed the census statistics directly.
The conclusion: a truly quirkless person just didn’t exist in his generation in Japan.
Specifically in Japan - his home country had had a majority-quirked population for more than a hundred and fifty years, more than seventy-five percent quirked in the last hundred years, and in the past twenty? Ninety-eight percent. It was climbing with every generation, and when Izuku really looked, filtered out anyone who wasn’t at least one generation removed from any other country’s population, the truth was that everyone born in Japan had a quirk.
This was not the case everywhere else in the world; in fact, American quirk-to-quirkless ratios hovered around fifty to seventy percent in most states, with some as low as twenty percent. (He started trying harder in English class, even if the teachers at Aldera refused to grade him higher than a C.)
In short, quirk inheritance was dictated by multiple genes, some of which were dominant, others recessive. Everyone - Izuku included - was a carrier of various secondary traits, theorized to have emerged decades before the ‘first quirk’ appeared in China; and most people had the genes for a quirk, of some kind, which were (approximately) recessive. If both parents had quirks, then so would you - barring a genuine genetic mutation, but those came with physical deformities that would have been detected before he was born.
Izuku’s mother had a quirk: Small Object Attraction. Izuku’s father had a quirk: Fire Breath. Therefore, according to all known laws of genetics, Izuku also had a quirk.
What this meant, then, was that he either had an unprecedented gene mutation, the kind of thing they did case studies for, or he had been misdiagnosed as a child, something Izuku thought quite likely after reading just an overview of how quirk counseling was supposed to work. Namely: the toe joint test hadn’t been considered clinically significant in decades.
(Izuku wrote a scathing letter to the licensing board, and several months later, noticed with satisfaction that ‘Doctor’ Tsubasa’s name had been removed from the signboard for his office. What a quack.)
Final conclusion, read the last page of his entry in Quirk Analysis For The Future, Vol. 11B, 99.9% chance I have either (a) a quirk whose effect is invisible at first glance, or (b) a latent quirk with some kind of esoteric activation requirements.
To determine the truth, he needed to find a specialist.
And somehow, a bit unsurprisingly, his province of Japan had only one.
Akatani Hisashi, read the understated gold plaque on the fifth-floor office door, in between two unoccupied offices and across from a water fountain.
Izuku composed himself - he was still nervous, just too exhausted from all the stair-climbing to show it - and went in.