"You know, there's no chance of you getting into UA with a useless quirk like that."

"Then it's great that I don't want to get into UA," Kaito says cheerily, throwing firework sparks from his fingers. If he snapped, they'd travel further and higher, but he was trying to build the smoke up more, not light up like beacons.

"Everyone wants to be a hero and get into UA. You can't use your quirk without a hero license. Well, unless your quirk suited your job. Are you going to join a circus or something?"

Kaito scoffs, pausing in the middle of practice to stare Hakuba down. The other boy had a quirk well-suited to hero work, or even to the police if that's the route he wanted to take instead. He had tawny hawk wings and golden hawk eyes that with training would make him an excellent asset in hero or police work. His father was on the Hero Commission, his mother was a famous retired hero, and Edoka Middle School boasted a high UA acceptance rate.

But that's not Kaito's path.

He won't become a hero.

"I am going to become a magician. And when I'm the number one magician in the world, I'll wave at you from the sidelines of the less than top 200 rated heroes." Kaito turns back to his practice, rubbing his hands together and filling his immediate vicinity with a musty, sulfuric smell. Black smoke follows his hands as he parts them, faint sparks falling from his fingertips to mix into the smoke.

"A magician?" Hakuba says, and the condescension is palpable.

"My father was a magician," Kaito says, unable to stop his smile from taking on a faint manic edge.

Hakuba notices the landmine he'd stumbled on, and wisely he lets it go. He backs away, taking a few quick strides to toss himself up in the air.

They only have a few hours for Quirk Practice and Kaito will glue his wings if he continues to bother him. As it is, Kaito's wasted enough time.

He wasted eleven years thinking his father's death was an accident. Accidents in magic shows weren't uncommon, though the thought of his father failing a trick never made sense. Other magicians made mistakes. Not his father.

Not the Kaitou Kid.

Kaito rubs his hands together briskly, surrounding himself with dense black smoke, and he snapped his fingers to send up a blinding flash of white sparks. Other students nearby cry out in surprise, maybe a few with awe, but their teacher doesn't say anything about it.

Of course, that's likely because he's still trying to separate Akako's allure quirk from the male students on the other side of the room.

He doesn't need a fancy quirk to become a thief. He just needs to use what he has to his advantage. Let the heroes try to catch him. He'll be the Phantom Thief they'll never be able to catch.

And it's not like he won't have a little help.

He makes sure that Hakuba isn't tailing him when school lets out. He takes the extra precaution to change into a disguise on the way, using his mother's horror makeup skills to become an exaggerated skull-faced teen. Most people don't like mutation quirks unless they were beautiful. So fewer people look him in the face if it looks like they can see his skull peeking out of his skin in a pronounced way, rather like a skull was pushing through his face.

A mother actually pulls her child away from him while they stand at the crosswalk.

Kaito hums to himself as he reaches his destination and vaults himself over the Kudou Manor's back fence. He nearly stumbles as he lands on ice rather than grass, wheeling his arms through the air to get his balance back.

"Shin-chan! Mean!"

Shinichi makes a face, but he does touch his hand back to the icy ground. It flows back to him in a gentle wave, and his hair freezes back into the funky cowlick, a subtle frost over his dark hair.

It's adorable.

"Why are you always breaking in? One day, I'll turn you into an ice sculpture and what'll you do about it then?"

Kaito grins widely, fluttering his fingers as the white sparks that fly up with a snap actually dance over his fingers. They flame higher, into a proper little burning flame, hot enough to become blue at his fingertips.

"I guess we'll test if my fire beats out your ice."

"Well, good luck beating zero Kelvin." Shinichi lunges with a hand coated in crystalline white frost, but Kaito dances back out of range, easily since Shinichi is so small.

"You're awfully hostile for a grade-schooler," Kaito teases, but Shinichi doesn't continue the chase.

"You're in a bad mood," he says instead, and those blue eyes are too shrewd to be in such a young face.

Kaito hums instead of agreeing and drops to the ground to lay back and stare at the clouds. Shinichi joins him with little prompting, which must mean that his bad mood is more obvious than he thought.

"You know, I think that one looks like Hakuba," he says, pointing out a blob that has two lop-sided blobs sticking out from it.

"It's okay to be upset, you know. I'm not really in a place to judge you for it," Shinichi says.

"And that one looks like Aoko," he says, pointing at another blob that looked kinda like her messy hairstyle if he squinted.

"Nothing about this situation is fair to either of us," Shinichi says.

"And that one looks like Jii-chan."

"You don't have to take them on alone."

"Like you're trying to?" Kaito asks, tilting his head to look at Shinichi's face. He's looking at the ground, not Kaito, but the way he's curled in on himself is all the defensive body language that Kaito needs.

"I don't want anyone else to get hurt."

"Good thing you've got such an expert thief on your side then."

"You're not a thief yet," Shinichi says, uncurling a bit to frown at him, "I mean, you shouldn't be one ever, but you're not one yet that I'm aware of."

"I wouldn't try to hide that from you. Anyway, I'm sure you'd sense it across the city if I took so much as a free piece of candy without thanking the person handing them out." Kaito sighs, holding his hand up to roll little white sparks over his fingers. "You've got a harder job than I do, besides."

"At least I don't have to pay attention to class. After you've covered everything once before, it's not like it's difficult to keep up."

"So you're just using me for my class notes and homework. I see how it is." Kaito laughs at the scowl on Shinichi's face, and he rolls to the side to poke at his cheek. "My poor little genius."

"You'll be short a hand if you call me your little anything."

"Mean," Kaito sighs, and he lets Shinichi grab his hand.

His fingers are small, freezing cold, and too tight at first. They relax as Kaito stays limp.

"Your job'll be harder soon enough. Have you picked a high school yet?"

"Maybe Shiketsu. They've got snazzy hats."

"But they're West. Could you not pick somewhere closer?"

"Only good place in the East is UA." Kaito scrunches his nose. "And they're obviously weighted towards their Hero program. I'd maybe try for Support, but even then the focus is on the hero students and not on our own projects."

"Normally you hide your dislike for UA better than this," Shinichi comments. "Hakuba again?"

"Don't act like I'm the weird one about it. You watched their Sports Festival this year too. Since when is mangling yourself an expected part of your training? That kid destroyed his left arm just to try to win a competition that ultimately just feeds into the overblown popularity contest heroes operate under. For a chance to save people, or wait, I mean make money. And use your quirks. Your quirks that are as much a part of you as your appearance. And the government gets to tell you how to use it. Won't let you use it. Makes a goddamn registry."

Kaito stops himself, feeling suddenly the heat in his eyes and the stillness of Shinichi's hands. He tugs once, but Shinichi won't let go, so he uses his other arm to cover his face.

"You know what that sounds like. I'm not saying I'm agreeing with the way that our society exists. There are flaws." Shinichi pauses. "There's corruption in every system. Free quirk use can have just as many drastic consequences."

"And yet here we are. My name on a registry that says I shoot fireworks. My father on a registry that says he did much the same. And his father. All the way back to the first Kuroba who had a meta ability. Just like the first Kudou made water freeze in place. And we get no say about it. Except that unless we choose an approved path for our quirk we're not to use them. That we'll be fined if we do. That useless gloryhound heroes chase after money instead of saving people."

"You should focus on the problem in front of you right now. It's useless to moan about the current system. Do something about it. Force them to admit to their own corruption." Shinichi tugs his hand hard, enough to make Kaito look at him. "Someone high up in the Hero Commission okayed that drug that made me like this. Maybe several someones. Maybe every single official agreed that their best chance to manipulate quirks was through a secretive biochemistry group that doesn't hesitate to murder, assassinate, sabotage, and stage suicides of prominent outspoken figures."

"That's why you don't take them on alone." Kaito says.

"I thought that's what you were for," Shinichi says, "And to be clear, the first Kudou had a memory quirk. He could replicate pieces of his memories perfectly onto paper in pictures or words. The ice quirk comes from my mother."

Kaito laughs, because that tracks well with the woman he's met in the company of his father. "She doesn't really use it much, right?"

"It's low level for her. Mostly just gives her immunity to sub-zero temperatures and keeps her drinks cold."