Chapter Text
Kusuo can tell something is wrong from the second he wakes up. It’s a sad thing, that he can recognize the feeling of waking up somewhere different from where he went to sleep because it keeps happening. He’s definitely not in his room, since the ceiling on top of him is inexistent. The blue sky and white, fluffy-looking clouds (not fluffy at all when you fly though them. All you’ll ever get from trying to touch the clouds is a wet hand) greets him instead. The ground behind his back is hard. It’s not ground at all, he realizes a moment later; it’s concrete, because he’s lying on some kind of rooftop. Of course he is. Not the end of the world, all he needs to do is teleport home and—
This is not his home. It’s not even a home. The place where his house should be is instead occupied by a public park. It has swings and a climbing wall. There is no trace of the Saiki household. The place doesn’t look like Hidariwakibara at all. It’s then that the thoughts of the people around him process properly. It’s the sight of it too: the people with strange features, with scales or objects instead of heads, the constant thoughts about ‘quirks’ and ‘powers’ and ‘heroes’. Of course his nighttime accident landed him in some kind of alternate universe. At least it’s one where powers are common.
At least I can be a normal boy here until I can go back.
Right. What was he thinking? Saiki Kusuo? A normal person? No way. He sighs in disappointment as he comes to terms with the fact that he is still leaps and bounds above everyone else here. A few minutes of walking down the streets to find a suitable place to try to go back (he has a bad feeling curling in his gut, close to the mysterious sickness that befell him at Saiko’s cruise—yes, the one that sunk—but not quite) prove worthy when he finds an abandoned building without any human inside. There’s a mice colony planning world domination and a rat colony trying to stop them, but none of that is Kusuo’s business.
He concentrates on his home, on his universe, and gathers his powers to force an interdimensional teleportation. Wasn’t time travel bothersome enough? His vision flickers and satisfaction fills him. Then something snaps inside of him. Kusuo is still inside the abandoned building, but he’s tired. Really tired, wow. It doesn’t take him long to realize what’s happening. None of his attempts at teleporting home work at all. After six different attempts—the moon and the bottom of the ocean look just the same as they do in my universe—Kusuo ends up sprawled on the floor with blurry eyes. Everything he can see is a big blob of grey.
Kusuo can’t go home. Kusuo is trapped in an alternate dimension (because of course he is) where powers are the norm. This should be good, but it’s not, because the powers the people of this world have are much weaker than his own. Quirks are singular, well-defined powers directly tied to the body. Like mine now, he supposes, but quirks have physical drawbacks psychic powers do not. If he uses his powers, then he has to pick just one. A single mistake will get him caught in a world where he can’t count on people not believing superpowers are real to explain away anything strange. He also needs, he realizes as he checks his pockets with a sense of dismay, a way to make money. The meagre bills in his wallet are not going to last him long. If they’re even usable here. Kusuo needs to acquire native money to check the compatibility without standing out.
Rested—as much as he can be after sleeping on the unfinished flooring of the abandoned building he took a nap at—and with clear eyesight, Kusuo needs to make a plan. He has to find a way out of here, and if his powers alone aren’t enough. . . A shudder crawls up his spine at the comparison his brain makes: he will have to be more like Kusuke and build a machine to help him get home. Which will cost money. He looks back down at his wallet, dejected. Thinks back to the coffee jellies in the fridge and the new awful game he bought waiting for him in his room. Why couldn’t this happen to someone else? Kusuo sighs and puts his wallet away. He glances around the area he’s in. The walls are either half-constructed or completely lacking, mostly, and there’s no plaster covering the bricks. The structure was abandoned before the build was complete. Maybe they heard the rats’ plans. Kusuo doesn’t know who the ‘short and wide’ human is, but he hopes they have all of their shots. For their own good.
Making the space liveable is going to have to wait until it’s dark out; Kusuo refuses to get caught diverting plumbing and cables to get running water and electricity. He has other things to take care of that are better done with daylight. Like, ugh, getting a job. He better not waste his entire vacation trapped in here. A worse thought enters his mind. He shakes his head to push it away. If Kusuke becomes aware of the situation and how he couldn’t get himself out of it fast enough. . . Kusuo can imagine the gloating already. Truce or no truce, there’s no way Kusuke would let the oportunity to prove he’s superior pass him by. He wouldn’t put it past his brother to make a universe hopping machine just to prove he’s better.
Job hunting is complicated when you don’t have any documentation, so Kusuo makes some. It takes two tries to make the perfect fake, but the mental image he gets from the judgy clerk at the variety shop is helpful. It’s hard to make someone see a Japanese ID when the one you have in your head is different from the one they expect—his bias interferes with the hypnosis. The quirk issue is also solved easily enough. People can notice Kusuo is not moving his mouth when he speaks, which means his ‘quirk’ is decided for him. One-way telepathy, he calls it when the tired manager behind the counter asks about the name. Many people get paranoid at the thought of someone listening to the inane babbling going on inside their brains, so he won’t advertise he can do it.
It’s not like I want to listen to how awful your husband actually is, Sakura.
When he’s done running errands, corner store onigiri half eaten in his hand, he goes back to the building he had already decided he was sharing with the rats. As long as they each kept to their territories, no one would get hurt. The rats might have been trying to decide if they should contact their ‘speaking one’, but Kusuo had stopped paying attention. Whoever that was, he would be weaker and would be entering a skewed playing field. He isn’t worried. Turning the floor he is staying at into a liveable space takes longer than he wanted to spend playing blue collar worker, but the technology is different to what he is used to. The people in the streets are different too, more aware that someone they couldn’t see could be there. Of course, the ones without illegal plans in mind are quick to dismiss the thought because it’s ‘the heroes’ problem’, but it forces Kusuo to be more careful nonetheless.
“The pink one is back!” the rats squeak.
Kusuo glances at the group of them huddled on the roof, not too far from where he’d landed. Their tails are wriggly and their whiskers twitch.
“It flies,” one says.
“It’s in our territory,” another squeaks.
“Let’s kill him. Its flesh will sustain us all,” a third, more murderous one adds.
That escalated quickly. What do you think you are, planning to kill me?
Kusuo forces out his psychic presence in a way that never fails to make people terrified. It has the same effect on rats, even if a few try to hide it.
“No one claimed the roof,” he projects, “and don’t think I can’t throw you off this roof.”
Kusuo is not actually going to do it, but the rats don’t know that. He jumps down the actual hole in the roof to the story below and walks down to his floor.