Two months passed, much quicker then they usually did for the past of couple of years.
Jobs came in steadily, deliveries mostly, the occasional collection, one night where Sho had him stand outside a building in Edogawa for three hours doing nothing while something happened inside that he wasn't told about and didn't ask.
The work paid and the work was consistent and Kai stopped thinking of it as something temporary he was doing until something else came along. It had just become what he did.
Then Saturdays filled in too, without anyone making a plan of it. Tetsutetsu at the arcade, Tetsutetsu at the noodle place near the station, Tetsutetsu appearing from around corners with a sports bag and the expression of someone who had been hoping to run into you specifically.
Kendo and Kosei when schedules aligned. Sometimes just the two of them, Kai and Tetsutetsu, walking somewhere or nowhere in particular while Tetsutetsu talked and Kai listened and the city did its thing around them.
It had become a habit before Kai noticed it was one. By the time he noticed he'd already stopped minding.
* * *
They were at the noodle place on a Wednesday when Tetsutetsu asked.
Not about anything important. He'd been talking about exam prep, the way he'd been talking about it more and more lately, and then he'd taken a long pull of his drink and looked at Kai with the particular directness he brought to everything.
"Hey, when's your birthday?"
Kai looked up from his bowl.
"Why."
"Just asking. Mine's in October. Kendo's is in September, she already had hers, I got her a book which she said was fine which means she actually liked it." He paused. "Yours?"
"It passed," Kai said.
"When?"
"Week ago. September twenty-fourth."
Tetsutetsu put his chopsticks down. He had the expression of someone who had just been told something that required a response and was working out what that response was.
"You didn't say anything."
"It's a birthday," Kai said. "Not a national event."
"You turned sixteen and you didn't say anything."
"I turned sixteen and I ate a convenience store rice ball and went to sleep," Kai said. "Same as any other night."
Tetsutetsu was quiet for a moment, which for Tetsutetsu was unusual enough that Kai actually looked at him.
There was something on his face that wasn't quite hurt and wasn't quite something else either, just a kind of settled consideration, the look of someone deciding what to do with information they'd been given.
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," he said, and picked his chopsticks back up.
"It's really not," Kai said.
"We're celebrating."
"Tetsutetsu."
"Not a negotiation," Tetsutetsu said pleasantly. "Saturday. I'm telling Kendo and Kosei."
"I have things on Saturday."
"What things?"
Kai opened his mouth. Closed it. He didn't, as it happened, have anything on Saturday. Sho hadn't sent a job since Monday and the weekend was genuinely clear.
"Things," he said, which even he recognised was not convincing.
Tetsutetsu looked at him with the calm patience of someone who had already won and was just waiting for the other person to realise it.
Kai thought, not for the first time, about why it was that Tetsutetsu was specifically the person he found it difficult to say no to.
It wasn't that he was pushy. He wasn't, not really. He just operated from the assumption that the people around him were worth doing things for, and he made that assumption so openly and without agenda that arguing against it felt like arguing against something true.
Maybe it was because days like this reminded him a peaceful time, when he didn't have to count every yen and deal drugs to earn a living. Days like these made him reminiscent of those times.
And not to mention Tetsutetsu accounted for him like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Kai partially enjoyed that feeling, which was probably why he kept showing up on Saturdays when he hadn't technically agreed to.
"Fine," he said.
Tetsutetsu grinned.
"Great. Don't eat beforehand."
"I'm not going to celebrate my own birthday which already passed."
"You were going to eat a rice ball and go to sleep."
"So?."
"Kai," Tetsutetsu said, with great seriousness. "You need to look after yourself man."
* * *
Saturday turned out to be yakiniku.
Tetsutetsu had found a place near Chofu station that did lunch sets on weekends and had apparently been planning this since Wednesday because when Kai arrived Kendo and Kosei were already there and the table had been pushed together with the easy familiarity of people who'd done it before.
"Happy birthday," Kendo said, when he sat down, without ceremony. "Tetsutetsu was very upset on your behalf."
"I was appropriately upset," Tetsutetsu said.
"He sent approximately three hundred messages about it," Kosei said, to no one in particular.
"That is an exaggeration," Tetsutetsu said.
Kai sat down and looked at the three of them and felt something he didn't have a clean name for.
Not discomfort. Something closer to the feeling of being somewhere you hadn't expected to fit and finding out that you did, just slightly, just enough to notice.
The food came and the afternoon went the way afternoons with these three tended to go, Tetsutetsu loud about most things, Kendo precise and dry, Kosei contributing exactly one observation per topic with the timing of someone who'd learned when to speak for maximum effect.
Kai ate more than he usually did because Tetsutetsu kept adding things to his side of the grill without asking and it seemed easier than arguing about it.
"So," Kosei said, at some point between the second and third round of meat, "you planning to apply anywhere? Since you're sixteen now." From what Kai had told them, he had graduated middle school and was taking gap year after some family issues. They didn't pry too much into his private life.
"Apply where," Kai said.
"High school. We've all got six months." Kosei tilted his head. "Tetsutetsu and Kendo are gunning for U.A."
"Obviously," Tetsutetsu said, with the tone of someone for whom this had never been in question. "Hero course. I've been training for it since I was ten."
"General studies for me," Kosei said. "Less pressure."
Kendo was looking at Kai across the table with the calm directness she brought to most things.
"What about you?"
"Haven't thought about it," Kai said, which was true.
"You should," she said, not unkindly. "Six months goes fast."
Kai nodded once and didn't say anything else about it, and Kendo let it go the way she let most things go, without pushing, just leaving it where she'd put it so he could pick it up later if he wanted.
He did think about it, briefly, on the walk home afterward. High school applications. Entrance exams.
The ordinary machinery of a life moving forward in the direction lives were supposed to move. Although U.A was definitely out of the ordinary. He doubted he would be fit to be a hero.
He thought about what he'd been doing for the past four months instead, the deliveries, the sealed cases, Sho's number coming through on the burner phone at seven in the morning, the shelf above his futon getting crowded with things that weren't exactly legal.
The idea of a dealer like him attending the most prestigious hero school in Japan almost made him laugh. Almost.
He didn't know what to do with that comparison so he put it away and went home.
The rice ball he'd bought at the convenience store sat on the cardboard box shelf. He ate it standing up, looking out the window at the wall of the building opposite, and thought about nothing specific for a while.
It was, he admitted to himself, a better birthday than the last couple of years.
He wasn't going to tell Tetsutetsu that.
* * *
Monday came with a message from Sho that said come in, not a job, just come in, which was different enough from the usual that Kai took the long way to Koto ward and arrived five minutes early out of a habit he hadn't decided to form.
The building had changed, or rather what was in it had. The narrow staircase was the same, the ink painting of the mountain was the same, but the room upstairs had two additional people in it that Kai hadn't seen before, standing near the far wall with the particular quality of stillness that came from people who'd been told to wait and were good at it.
One of them he recognised.
It was the one with the stone knuckles from the alley. Older looking than he'd seemed in the dark, broader across the chest, a thin scar along his jaw that might have been recent. He looked at Kai with an expression that was not quite embarrassment and not quite amusement and settled somewhere between the two.
"Huh," he said.
"Yeah," Kai said.
The other one, who Kai didn't recognise, looked between them with the expression of someone who had missed context.
"You two know each other?" Oda said, from the table. Kai noted that despite Oda mentioning him letting his men cool off, he didn't know the exact details of it.
"We've met," the stone-knuckled one said, with a careful neutrality that suggested he'd thought about how to phrase that. "Briefly."
"Very briefly," Kai agreed.
Oda looked at them both for a moment with the expression of someone assembling information they hadn't been given. "In the alley." He remarked quickly understanding the situation.
The other two didn't bother confirming or denying his statement.
"Sit down," he said.
Kai sat. Sho took his usual position near the door. The two men by the wall stayed where they were.
Oda poured tea, which meant this was going to take a while.
"You know roughly what I run," Oda said. "Deliveries, logistics, the movement of things that need to move without drawing attention. What you don't know is the shape of it."
He set the teapot down.
"I have fourteen people working across three wards. Most of them you'll never meet. Some of them you already have." A slight inclination of his head toward the two men by the wall.
"They handle the physical side of things when it becomes necessary. Sho coordinates. I direct."
"And me," Kai said.
"Until now, you've been a runner. Reliable, clean, good instincts under pressure." Oda picked up his cup. "What I'm offering now is different. Closer to the centre of things. You'd know more about what moves and why, you'd work directly with Sho, and occasionally directly with me."
"What does that mean day to day," Kai said.
"It means different things on different days," Oda said. "That's the honest answer."
"And the less honest answer?"
Something moved in Oda's expression, brief and almost warm.
"Time will tell," he said.
Kai sat with that for a moment. He looked at Sho, who gave him nothing, and at the two men by the wall, one of whom was doing a careful job of looking at the ceiling.
He thought about the safe with its although larger, yet still small contents in the longer rin. The rice ball he'd eaten standing at the window on his birthday while a city of millions went about its business without knowing he existed.
He thought about Kendo saying six months goes fast.
"Alright," he said.
Oda nodded once, the way he nodded when something had gone as expected.
"The pay reflects the change," he said. "Sho will walk you through the rest."
Kai stood. He was almost at the door when the stone-knuckled one spoke, quiet enough that it wasn't quite for the room.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you hit hard for a quirkless kid."
Kai looked at him. It seemed that his reputation was growing more than he expected.
"Your neck healed alright?"
The man touched the side of his jaw, where the scar was, and the expression settled into something that was definitely amusement.
"More or less," he said.
"Good," Kai said, and left.
Outside, the October air had the particular cold of a season that had made up its mind.
He stood on the pavement for a moment, hands in his pockets, watching a cluster of pigeons dispute something near the laundromat next door.
More of the operation visible to you, Oda had said.
He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or just an inevitable one. Probably both. With Oda it was usually both.
He turned up his collar and walked home through the long way, which was also the only way he ever went anymore.
Six months, Kendo had said. And deep down a part of him thought about applying, to become a normal kid. Then he paused.
He wondered, for just a moment, what she'd think if she knew how he'd spent the last four. He wondered what anyone would think if they learned of why he was in Japan in the first place.
Also the thought of becoming a Hero stopped any idea of applying with his new found friends. He was far from a hero.
Then he stopped wondering, because that was the kind of thinking that didn't go anywhere useful.
He walked, and the city walked with him, and neither of them said anything about it.