Chapter 2
Keiko has to physically hold back a shout of glee as she jumps across from one building to another. She’s sprinting to her last patrol site of the night, practically flying across the rooftops as she goes, and she’s having the time of her life. Free running, and parkour in general really, has always been one of her favorite things to do during what little free time she has nowadays, but being able to do it during her hero hours is just as fun. She’s always vigilant about keeping her eyes and ears peeled for any sort of villainous activity, but she’s also able to allow herself to sink into muscle memory and glide from one location to another. Some days she allows her internal monologue to wax poetic about the massive crushes she has on her two best friends, some days she thinks over the events of the day or anything that’s bothering her, and other days she doesn’t think at all beyond basic thoughts like “jump now” and “turn here”. Today is one of those last kind of days. She’s just simply enjoying the moment and movement, content to zone out – or at least zone out as much as a hero can when on active duty.
It’s only because of how long she’s been doing this that she’s able to stop herself mid-run and focus on the scene playing out on the street down below her. There, hidden in an alleyway below, are three men who appear to be attempting to break into the backdoor of a business that Keiko doesn’t know the name of. She crouches down and cocks her head to the side while she looks them over, assessing their appearances and most likely threat level.
The first man is thin and gangly, with sunken, sallow skin, and noticeably dirty and torn clothing. Based off the bulge in the back of his pants, he appears to be strapped with a gun, so speed will be key to ensure he can’t get the chance to grab it. From the bits of conversation that are drifting up to her, Keiko can tell that he’s slurring his words a little and is most likely on some sort of unknown substance. Gun Boy’s quirk is unknown at first glance.
The second man’s quirk, however, is obvious once the light from a nearby streetlamp glints off his fingers, which are elongated and blade-like. He seems more physically fit than the first one, which could be a problem if she’s not careful. He’s also the only one who seemed to be dressed for a sneaky operation, considering that he’s wearing all black, though his pants seem to have a lot more metal on them than strictly necessary, with zippers all over the place. “Edward Scissorhands looking ass,” Keiko quietly mumbles to herself.
The last man is, by all intents and purposes, huge. He’s muscular across his body, and Keiko would be absolutely shocked if his quirk didn’t have something to do with either strength or muscle mass at the very least. He’s currently arguing with Gun Boy, saying something about how this is the best night for the “heist,” and Keiko snickers to herself at the phrase. What is this, a movie? Who actually calls it a heist? Just for that she decides to call him Hartley based off that shitty American heist movie from Heroflix that starred the actor with a rock quirk.
Making a quick decision, Keiko decides to keep the element of surprise and use her quirk on them first rather than let them see her and potentially dodge or retaliate before she gets any good hits in. She holds out her hand, watching as it glows a neon green for three seconds, before several things happen in quick succession.
One: Gun boy’s gun goes off while still in his pants, shooting himself in the ass and taking him down to the ground where he begins to scream and writhe in pain.
Two: Knock-off Edward Scissorhands jumps back from the door startled at the sound of the gunshot, trips, flails his hands out to try to catch himself from falling, and immediately stabs Hartley in the arm on his way down.
Three: Hartley, reeling back in pain and confusion at the events unfolding in front of him, takes one glance at the blood pouring out of his arm and promptly passes the fuck out.
Keiko bolts over the edge of the building as those events are occurring and jumps down the fire escape to quickly reach the ground where all three are currently laying. Knock-off Edward Scissorhands is already scrambling to try to stand back up, but before he can manage much more than getting his knees under him, Keiko swiftly kicks him in the side of his head, knocking him out cold. Meanwhile, Gun Boy is actively sobbing in pain from shooting himself in the ass, so Keiko knocks him out too. She looks down at her handywork and shakes her head, grabbing her phone out of her utility belt to dial this in. Two of them need medical attention, and the third will most likely have a concussion so he’ll probably need to see a doctor as well.
Her quirk is so weird.
Roughly twenty minutes later after explaining to the paramedics what the injuries are, Keiko is riding in a squad car with a couple of officers on her way back to the police station to file her paperwork. As a teacher at UA, Keiko is technically “signed” with the UA Hero Agency along with the other heroes who teach there, but the UA Hero Agency is very different than most other agencies out there considering the heroes aren’t stuck with any specific schedule beyond needing to ensure that they’re available to teach during normal school hours, or at least normal school hours for UA. This gives a lot of leeway to the heroes employed there, which is something that really helps Keiko out as an underground hero. However, one of the things other agencies has that the UA agency doesn’t is a group of employees that assist active heroes with their paperwork at the end of their shifts. This means that Keiko gets to go to the police station after every incident to file her own paperwork, and because of how her quirk works she has a lot of paperwork.
“Busy night, Serendipity?” Detective Tsukauchi Naomasa asks when he sees Keiko walking through the bull pen.
Keiko shrugs, “Eh, not really? Just wanted to get a jump start on paperwork for the three bozos I caught breaking and entering earlier.”
“Fair enough,” he says with a nod, “What happened this time?”
“One of the perps had a gun that misfired and caught him in the ass, and one with knives for fingers fell back and accidentally stabbed the last one who promptly passed out upon seeing his own blood. After that it was easy to knock the other two out.”
“Can’t say it’s the weirdest thing I’ve heard from you, but that is very unfortunate for those three.”
“You could say it was serendipitous for me,” Keiko says with a smirk, pouring a cup of the sludge the police department calls coffee into a paper to-go cup. Her smirk turns into a grin when she hears Tsukauchi groaning at her comment. She reaches for the sugar and pours a large amount in, stirring with a wooden stir stick before she promptly takes a huge gulp… and immediately spits it right back out, gagging, “What the fuck?”
“Oh, shit! Sorry, Serendipity-san, that was supposed to be a prank on the detective!” a nearby officer exclaims, rushing over and grabbing the sugar, “We swapped out the sugar for salt! I’m so sorry, you weren’t supposed to be here!”
“How serendipitous,” Tsukauchi, the bastard, chuckles.
“Fuck off, man,” Keiko groans, dumping out her coffee into the sink.
“Again, I’m really sorry Serendipity-san,” the other officer says with a grimace, “Want me to make you a new cup with actual sugar?”
“Nah, it’s alright, don’t worry about it,” Keiko says, waving him off, “I probably don’t need the coffee anyway since my shift’s almost up. Thanks anyway, and no hard feelings about the prank. Just make sure you get this bastard at some point, and we’ll call it even.”
“Deal,” he says with a grin before he promptly scurries off, leaving her with the detective who’s still laughing at her.
“Your quirk is so weird,” he says once he finally calms down.
“You could say that again,” she mumbles, the two of them heading towards his office, “It’s annoying having to keep a lid on it at all times. Makes me feel like an idiot when luck still slips through.”
“Tricky quirks are nothing to be ashamed of, plus your control really is impeccable,” he reminds her, holding the door open so she can pass by him and take a seat in his office. He shuts the door behind him and takes his spot at his desk, “And honestly, it’s not like it’s ever anything too major that leaks out, just minor inconveniences. Plus they only ever happen to you, right? It’s not like everyone you know is constantly having good or bad luck.”
“That’s true I guess,” she says, pulling out the papers she needs to fill out, “But still, it’s exhausting having to keep up with it. If I’m not actively thinking about it… well, you saw.”
“I mean, to be fair, that could’ve been unrelated,” he points out, not looking up from his own paperwork, “They swapped out the sugar about an hour ago and were just waiting for me to make another cup.”
Keiko pauses, looking up at him with narrow eyes, “How do you know how long ago they switched it?”
“Saw them do it,” he says, turning a paper over and skimming it with his pen, “They really need to work on their situational awareness. I was literally in the same room.”
“Tsukauchi.”
The detective looks up at the tone of her voice, raising an eyebrow at her.
“Did you really let me make a cup of coffee knowing that would happen?”
He blinks at her before his mouth slowly twitches up into a shit eating grin.
“You’re such a dick! Ugh, why do I even put up with you?” she exclaims, throwing her arms in the air and shaking her head.
“Because I’m basically the older brother you never wanted,” he jokes, leaning back in his chair, “We’ve been close friends for years now, you wouldn’t know what to do without me in your life, Nakaya.”
“I hate you,” she tells him, trying to keep her grin from forming. She clearly fails by the matching smile on her friend’s face. She rolls her eyes, “Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on.”
Keiko and Tsukauchi met when she was twenty-four and he was thirty-two. She had just moved back to Japan for the first time since she was six, and she threw herself headfirst into her hero work so that she didn’t have to deal with her emotions about being back. Their first meeting involved an interrogation due to the nature of her quirk, a long-drawn-out conversation about what the rules are for her paperwork going forward, and a quirk accident that ended in the interrogation room they were in getting drenched by faulty sprinklers. By the end of the experience the two of them had a mutual understanding and a slowly but steadily building rapport. Cut forward by four years and the two of them now have a close, almost familial relationship. Considering the fact that the two of them work closely together and see each other nearly every day it’s not all that surprising that they’ve become so close.
“Anyway,” Keiko says, clearing her throat and filling out one of the forms for her takedown earlier in the night, “Is tonight the night you finally tell me about your secret relationship with All Might?”
“For the last time, we don’t have a secret relationship,” Tsukauchi sighs, crossing his arms and looking her up and down, “What about you?”
“Me?” she asks, raising an eyebrow at him and matching his posture.
“Is tonight the night you’re finally going to admit that you have a crush on Eraserhead and Present Mic the size of Japan?”
Keiko freezes for a split second before forcefully relaxing, looking back down at her papers and choosing to focus most of her attention on the last box she’s filling in rather than the smug expression she knows is now on her friend’s face.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, satisfied with the situation for now.
Keiko groans and buries her face in her hands, “Tsuki, what am I supposed to do? They’ve been in a relationship since before I was even in Japan! They’re married! It’s not like I can just waltz up and tell them anything. I need these stupid feelings to just go away already!”
“Sorry, Nakaya,” Tsukauchi says sympathetically, “Look, it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Not that big of a deal?” she asks incredulously, glaring at him, “Of course it is! We’re friends, yeah, but they’ve literally been in a relationship for over a decade. I’m not about to try to break up a relationship, especially one that strong, nor am I about to ruin my friendship with two of my closest friends. I mean, I like both of them obviously, I just… need to get over it.”
Tsukauchi hums noncommittally but before he can say anything else there’s a knock on his door. He shoots her a look, most likely to make sure she’s schooled her expression to be nondescript enough for whoever’s about to walk in, and says, “Door’s open.”
Keiko internally curses her stupid quirk because of course Aizawa is the person who walks in. Of fucking course he is.
“Hey, Serendipity,” he says, his hands in his pockets looking nonchalant, “Didn’t realize you’d be in here.”
Tsukauchi snorts, and Aizawa shoots him an unreadable look before he says, “Detective, I just brought in a suspect in the Nakatani case and require your assistance with an interrogation when you get the chance. He’s been placed in interrogation room C for now.”
“Ah, finally getting ahead on that one,” Tsukauchi says with a nod as he stands, “Let me just run to the bathroom really quick. Feel free to hang out in here with Serendipity until I get back. She’s just finishing some paperwork.”
Keiko narrows her eyes at him as he passes her, which causes Aizawa to raise an eyebrow at her. Once Tsukauchi closes the door behind him, she says, “Don’t worry about it, Eraserhead. Anyway I’m just about done with the paperwork for a B&E, so I’ll be out of your hair shortly.”
“No rush,” he says, leaning against the wall and observing her.
“What?” she asks him after about five minutes of silence while simultaneously wonder where the hell Tsukauchi is since it’s been so long for a simple ‘bathroom’ break.
“How was your patrol tonight?” he asks instead of giving her an answer, which she isn’t that surprised by and decides to just shrug and roll with it.
“Slow, didn’t really have much action, not that that’s a bad thing,” Keiko says, looking over her paperwork one last time before she places it on Tsukauchi’s desk, “I think I had the quickest takedown of the month, so at least there’s that.”
“Quicker than when I knocked out four gangbangers in as many minutes?” he asks with a smirk.
“Oh yeah,” she says with a nod, leaning back in her seat and crossing her arms with a smug look on her face, “I got three in about one minute, give or take a few seconds.”
“Oh?” he asks, intrigued, “How’d you manage that?”
“Eh, they did it to themselves mostly. Quirk made it a cakewalk, honestly.”
Aizawa chuckles, which makes Keiko sit up a little straighter in her chair for getting this reaction out of him. It’s rare that he laughs this openly about something, normally his amusement is just shown in his facial expressions if at all. “I’m not surprised,” is all he says in response, which is good because Tsukauchi chooses that moment to finally come back.
“Serendipity, I’m surprised you’re still here,” he says with a knowing smirk that Keiko elects to ignore.
“Just wanted to make sure to say bye to you, asshole,” she replies with a grin, flipping him off as she struts past him and out of his office, calling back to Aizawa, “See ya Thursday, Eraser!”
Keiko’s not fully out of hearing range when she hears Tsukauchi say to Aizawa in a mocking voice, “Didn’t know she’d be here, huh?”
“Shut up,” she hears Aizawa grumble, and while she doesn’t fully understand she does still grin on her way out of the precinct since it’s rare that she gets to see Tsukauchi tease someone that’s not her.