10

Izuku sat at his desk, slowly twirling his pin through his fingers. It was early enough in the morning that Izuku couldn't head into the workshop without risking either disturbing someone or worrying his mother. Instead, he sat there, staring at his screen that was covered in informatics. It had become evident to him that he would need a source of funding early on. Sure, they could make a vast majority of the parts they needed from the beach scrap, but there were certain critical pieces that he would not risk being faulty. Besides that, there were tools, daily expenses, and now, Dabi's commissions. Which, Izuku was happy to note, were being completed at a rather judicious pace. He had been surprised at the discretion with which Dabi was able to operate when given the incentive. Not displeased, certainly. Just surprised.

As such, he was spending this particular ungodly hour of the morning playing the American stock market like a fiddle. There was plenty of short term money to be made from the daily playing of stocks. It had taken him a bit to actually establish the accounts to do so, but now that he had them, he wouldn't really have to worry about their funding when in conjunction with his other method of gathering funds.

One would be surprised at just how many bank accounts out there belonged to dead people, wherein the banks couldn't touch the funds and the families didn't know or think about them. Was it the most ethical? Oh, most certainly not. But Izuku wasn't about to let that get to him. After all, they couldn't use it, and if it was just going to sit there, then he had better uses for it.

So here Izuku sat, twirling away as info flittered by. He rubbed his eyes and stretched, before deciding he needed some fresh air. Looking at the clock, he decided that he had just enough time for a quick snack on the roof before he would have to finish out his final bids and prepare for the day.

He went to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water and a granola bar, and made his way to the fire escape. He had spent a lot of time up on the roof when he was younger. For him, it was a place he could get away to. One where he could look out over the city without anything, or anyone, to worry about. There Izuku sat, the sun just preparing to crest the horizon and warm the city in its golden glow, and simply watched the lights of the city glow in the twilight.

Deep breaths of morning air and the faint rays of morning light had nearly worked their wonders on his disturbed psyche when a light set of bootsteps landed on the roof behind him. Out of everyone that Izuku had encountered since returning to Japan, the person behind him certainly rated the highest in terms of both mobility and stealth if they just came from the roof beside theirs. The footsteps were slowly making their way towards him when he spoke to the noise.

"If you are attempting to sneak up on me then I must say you are the closest to someone capable of it that I've met recently." The noise stopped and Izuku glanced over his shoulder. There he saw what he might have considered to be the single most exhausted human being he had ever seen.

Standing around six feet, the man looked like an absolute mess. Black hair cascaded to his shoulders in a waterfall that disappeared behind a coil of what appeared to be a scarf. He wore black from head to toe with a belt of pouches around his waist. The man had stopped when he had spoken to him and was now taking him in, a careful look on his face.

"What are you doing up here, kid? Shouldn't you be asleep? It's nearly five in the morning." It was clear the man was wary of him. The kid recognized the man through the footage he was always surveying, of course. One of the few heroes that still had his respect, Eraserhead didn't do it for the media attention. In fact, he actively went out of his way to avoid it. Izuku waved his hand in circles around the air, gesturing at nothing, while still leaning against one of the roof edges.

"I'm just catching some air. I live down below. It's been a long night, and I wanted to see the sunrise before heading into the workshop. How about you join me? If I had to guess, you've not had a moment's rest all night, either." The man was still cautious, of course, but had relaxed considerably upon hearing him to be a resident of the building. He leaned against the edge of the roof beside the kid.

The kid was a curiosity, Aizawa decided. He recognized him from The Line of Duty. Snipe had given him the kid's file when he had asked to see it, so he knew the kid was only fifteen. Yet, standing there with the kid on a rooftop awaiting the first rays of the day, he didn't see a teenager. If it was possible, he saw someone that was as tired as himself. Not the kind of bodily tiredness that he was so used to dealing with, but a kind of weariness that sank into the very spirit of a person.

They were only there for a few minutes, simply relaxing in the peace of the moment when the first golden rays peaked over the horizon. For the first time since the boy asked Aizawa to join him, he spoke. "In the first warming rays of the sun's ascent, we find a self-evident truth. That every day is a fresh start, a new chapter in this saga we call life. And knowing that, we can be happy knowing each day is a gift."

Midoriya sighed and stretched, before turning and heading back towards the fire escape. He stepped over to the edge and was preparing to drop down to the landing when he stopped. "Go home and get some sleep, Eraser. I'm sure Hizashi is worried about you after last night."

Aizawa jerked as if he had just been stabbed by a cattle prod. How did the kid know about the raid he was part of? How does he know about Hizashi? But by the time his brain had caught up with the shock, the kid was already gone. Midoriya Izuku, just who are you?

…

Izuku had a problem. He had been carrying the final parts they needed to finish the prototype reactor to the workshop. The problem arose when he got to the door and realized that there was no way he was going to be able to open it without putting the parts down, and frankly that thought annoyed him for some odd reason. He kicked the door several times to try to get Hatsume's attention, to no avail.

He was just about to kick in the door when happily, for the door, Hatsume opened it. She went bug-eyed when she saw his knee up and chambered and dove back into the workshop, as if she had just seen the fist of god itself coming down on her. Which, considering how training had been going for her since they'd started sparring, she might actually have seen her life flash before her eyes.

"Relax, Mei, I have no plans on attacking you at random. Not only would it not serve as effective training, but it would also just make you paranoid." Izuku stepped into the workshop with his pile of boxes and set them down in a corner. "That's the last of the parts we'll need for the prototype. Also," Izuku tossed a box to Mei. She stumbled but managed to catch it. "Merry Christmas five months early."

Mei was confused until she opened the box to find everything she would need to put together a kit for plasma arc welding. She jerked her head up, thanking Midoriya profusely before narrowing her eyes at him. "Are you only giving me this because we need it for the reactor?"

"Absolutely. Otherwise, you'd be waiting the extra five months for it." Izuku was already grabbing pieces out of the boxes and putting them aside in the order they would be needed. Hatsume chuckled and rolled her shoulders. Today was going to be a good day for science.

…

Jiro had seen a lot of strange things since becoming friends with Midoriya. She'd seen him, quirkless, lift an entire car as if it were made of aluminum foil. She had seen Hatsume almost blow them up with items that shouldn't even have been able to catch fire, much less blow up. So when the heavy metal door of the two's garage went flying off its hinges fast enough to imbed it in the concrete across from it, Jiro wished she could say she was surprised. The noise of the metal door slamming into the concrete still made her jump, but surprised she was not.

The two people in question stepped out of the garage with a mixture of expressions. Wonderment, surprise, and Jiro narrowed her eyes because she was fairly certain that was a fervent joy. To Kyoka, they looked like lunatic mad scientists one would see in old movies. Their hair was sticking practically on end and their eyes had this crazy energy to them. The image certainly wasn't disproven when the two looked from her, to the door, and then at each other. Only to then start cackling maniacally. "What the hell is going on here? Why is the door now part of the concrete?"

Izuku wiped the tears out of the corner of his eyes, hair still standing up, and choked out a response. "We completely and utterly underestimated the electrical field that would be generated by the reactor when we turned it on. It polarized all of the metal in the room and launched it away. In the case of our tools, they're all stuck to the walls. In the case of the door, well." He went back to laughing and Jiro looked to Mei, who was finally getting herself under control. Jiro's expression must have been enough to say that she was still confused, because Hatsume finished the explanation.

"We accidentally turned everything in the room into magnets. Because of that, the reactor flung absolutely everything away from it. In the case of the door, because of the size of the now magnetized door, it was launched far harder than everything else.

Jiro shook her head and was about to retort on why the two smartest people she knew didn't anticipate this when she realized what it meant had happened. "You got it working? The reactor is operational?"

Hatsume's smile was wide and crazy, while Mirdoriya's would have been tempered by the knowledge that he would be the one fixing the heavy door now embedded in the concrete retaining wall. Had the two of them, of course, not just revolutionized practically everything. Izuku told them to wait a moment while he went inside and turned the reactor off. He didn't have to tell them when it was off, as the loud clang of metal indicated when he had.

Jiro stepped inside to find the garage an absolute disaster area. Every single thing with metal in it that wasn't the reactor had been practically launched at the walls. Despite this, the two crazies acted like nothing was wrong and were both hunched over their blueprints, acting as if a reactor hadn't almost destroyed their workshop only moments before.

"Uh. Not to downplay the massive accomplishment you both just achieved, but why did you call me here? We all know I won't be much help with," Jiro waved her hand around, gesturing to the workshop, "all of this." She was confused. While she had certainly been at their workshop before when she helped them carry materials or met them here before heading to the beach, they had never called her here without a reason.

Midoriya looked up from the blueprints on the desk. The crazed look he had been sporting until now faded into a warm one. "Ah yes, you are correct. We didn't call here just to witness this. Though it is a happy coincidence that we got the prototype working for your appearance." Izuku walked away from their blueprints to one of the several device storage containers they kept in the corner of the garage. After a moment, Izuku pulled a small silver case out of the container before closing the container and turning to Jiro.

"We both know that you would rather be home with family right now, and you're welcome to go home after this, but these are from both of us. Happy Birthday, Jiro." Izuku handed the silver case over to Kyoka despite her considerable surprise. When had he learned her birthday? When she opened the case, she was further both surprised and confused.

There were two small, silver patch-like objects, as well as a nondescript silver wrist band. She looked up to Izuku and Mei smiling. "These two, "Midoriya reached into the case and picked up the two small silver disks, "go right here under your ears." Jiro's earjacks twitched, and she could feel her face flare up as Izuku reached his hands back behind her ears and put the disks in place.

"Meanwhile, this goes here on your wrist." He placed the band on her wrist before pressing a button and having it conform to its new home. "They, together, serve multiple purposes. First, I noticed your interest in the holo tech we've been working on. Your wrist unit wirelessly connects to any of your devices and will display anything from it in front of you, amongst other fun tidbits I'll let you find. The two disks behind your ears serve two purposes. The first is that any of the music you queue up from your device will play through them via bone conduction. We originally developed it for some of my future gear, but it works well in this case, as well. The second, more important, feature is one I think you'll be rather fond of." Jiro noticed Hatsume putting in earplugs and Izuku picking up two large pieces of metal too late to stop him. He slammed the two pieces of metal together hard enough to cause a gust of wind and the two rods to bend. Instinctively, Jiro stepped back and was putting her hands up towards her ears when she realized that they weren't bleeding from the sound wave. Izuku smiled at her shock while Hatsume spoke up.

"The two disks will modulate any sound over a certain decibel threshold down to a more tolerable level. Izuku noticed you flinching at some of the louder noises around us and mentioned we had the tech to fix that issue. We just barely managed to get them done for today."

Jiro was in shock. She knew the two were her friends, but to go to this extent? She hadn't realized that they cared enough to notice, much less help her with her issues. Mei suddenly tensed when she saw Jiro start to cry. "What, what's wrong? What happened? Did we do something wrong, Izuku?" Izuku shook his head, smiling, and Jiro laughed, wiping at her eyes. "No, Mei. We did something right."

…

Jiro spent some time with them after she had pulled herself back together. Hatsume's mother had stopped by and exclaimed in shock that Jiro was actually real. They had all laughed at that, and eventually Jiro chose to go home and spend the time with her family.

Izuku was on his back under the reactor, tweaking part of it, when Mei bit her lip, debating on whether or not to bother Izuku with her plan. Finally, she decided they were partners, and he would need to be in on this. "Izuku, could you come out of there for a moment?" He slid out from under. A bit of black had been smeared from somewhere across his nose, and he had an eyebrow quirked up at her.

"What's up, Mei?" He set his tools aside and dusted himself off, standing and walking over to the desk where she was. She was nervous, he noted, concerned. It wasn't like her to be acting so apprehensive.

"Well, I've been thinking for a while, and we're going to make a lot of money when we announce this. Like I said before, this is revolutionary. But up until this point, we've been calling each other business partners but haven't, you know, made it official. So I thought that maybe. You know." She pulled out what Izuku recognized as a crude floor plan for a workshop with a company name scrawled messily at the top of it. She was fidgeting in place and blushing, clearly waiting on a response from him. He looked at it for a second before giving her a smile.

"It's a good name, but I think I can do you one better on this front." He gestured to the paper before walking over to the containers. From them, he pulled the same black tube he had delivered the reactor blueprints in all that time ago. He twisted the cap off and, much to Mei's surprise, pulled another full set of blueprints from the tube. This time, however, when he sat them down on the desk, he immediately scrawled the name she had on her paper across the top of it. Her mouth opened and closed in surprise as she looked over what appeared to be a detailed floor plan of a now named company building. She looked up at him and was met by the same warm, wide smile she had begun to associate with him.

"Is this what I think it is? Why do you have this… What?" He laughed for the umpteenth time that day and thought how good it was to have friends he could laugh with again.

"I had been thinking of the same thing for a while. Though I hadn't come up with a name that described the two of us so perfectly, I did map out a floor plan and found a plot of land where we can build. If, of course, it looks good to you, partner?" Hatsume snapped out of her shock and looked up at Izuku. Meeting him was the best thing that had happened to her, by far, and this only cemented it. They got back to work finishing their prototype and figuring out how they were going to introduce it to the world. But never did the blueprints for Moonlit Industries move from the top of their blueprint desk.

Notes:

Following this chapter there will be a bit of a six month time skip in order to get the facility built. So be prepared for that. We're getting closer to canon's territory everyone! When the I go to publish the next chapter I'll also be providing a floor plan for the facility. So it may take a moment to get out to you guys!