The kitchen smelled of fresh pear and honey.
Jordan worked at the cutting board in Genos's apron—which fit badly across the shoulders and he hadn't bothered to adjust—slicing with the efficiency of someone who had absorbed a grandmaster swordsman's technique and found, somewhat unexpectedly, that it had domestic applications.
The knife moved. Pears arrived whole and left as juice in the time it took most people to find a peeler. The Atomic Samurai's gift was less useful for cutting through armor than he'd imagined it would be, and more useful for breakfast preparation than he'd expected.
He was feeding the pulp into the blender when Fubuki appeared in the kitchen doorway still holding a sandwich, hair damp from a quick wash, and took in the scene with the systematic attention of someone gathering evidence.
Tatsumaki was sitting on the table.
Not at the table. On the table, legs dangling over the edge, still in the slightly subdued state that two cups of shochu and an insufficient night's sleep had produced. The green light around her was at conversational levels. She looked, for once, like someone who was not in the process of evaluating everything around her as a potential threat.
Fubuki took a bite of her sandwich and asked, in the carefully casual tone of someone asking a question they've been rehearsing, "So when, exactly—how long has this—how did you two—"
Tatsumaki's legs stopped swinging.
She turned her head away, which accomplished the goal of not meeting Fubuki's eyes and accomplished nothing else, because the color that had arrived in her cheeks was visible from multiple angles.
"Adults' business," she said. "Children shouldn't ask."
"Sister." Fubuki lowered the sandwich. "I'm not a child. I haven't been a child for years. You know I'm an adult—"
"In my eyes," Tatsumaki said, with the serene authority of someone delivering an official position, "you will always be a child."
Fubuki's toast stopped tasting like anything.
She closed her mouth, turned back to her breakfast, and directed her feelings into the sandwich rather than the room.
Fine. Fine. She can just—fine.
F-boy appeared at the natural conclusion of the meal—the moment when the last plate had been appreciated and the table had served its purpose—and cleared everything with the systematic efficiency of someone who has done this enough times that it requires no thought. He was gone again before Fubuki had fully registered his arrival.
Jordan untied the apron and set it on the counter. "Ready. Let's get you back."
Tatsumaki floated over to his side without the particular deliberateness that would indicate she'd decided to—just moved there, the way things find proximity when proximity is comfortable.
Fubuki stood. "Shouldn't we say something to Silver Fang? He hosted us."
"Master Bang is—" Jordan's attention flickered briefly inward—the Mind Network conducting a quiet survey of the dojo's back mountain, the results feeding back with the clarity of a live image.
The back mountain training ground.
Dust. Two sets of marks carved into the earth—the parallel gouges made by heels dragged backward under significant force, the spacing unmistakably human. Bang stood with his hands clasped behind his back in the precise center of the clearing, dressed in black, absolutely still. Ten meters in front of him, Garou was down on one knee with a bruise developing along his jaw, one hand on the ground.
For five minutes, Garou had attacked with everything he had. Bang had defended in Flowing Water formation and counterattacked exactly once. The single punch—two-stage burst force, delivered through the precise gap Garou had left in his attack pattern—had sent him ten meters backward.
Even now, after that, the wolf was pushing himself back up.
Still not convinced, Bang was thinking. The thought had the quality of a decision rather than a frustration.
Then we'll keep going until you are.
The two of them came together again—the training ground erupting into motion, the blue energy of Flowing Water stirring the mountaintop air.
Jordan withdrew his attention and smiled pleasantly at Fubuki. "Master Bang is currently engaged in some one-on-one training with a disciple. Very harmonious. Very loving. I don't think we should interrupt."
Fubuki processed this. "Ah. Then... we go?"
"We go."
Jordan put his arm around Tatsumaki's waist—not the careful gesture of someone doing something deliberately, just the easy movement of someone who has settled into an arrangement—and reached into the spatial authority of the Herrscher core.
The dojo dissolved.
City A materialized below them—the dense modern grid of a major metropolitan center, the Hero Association's headquarters tower rising from the middle of it like a statement. Steel and glass catching the mid-morning light, the familiar silhouette visible for kilometers in every direction.
Fubuki hovered beside them and waited for her sense of spatial continuity to reassemble itself. The distance they'd just covered was something she understood theoretically and experienced as a sustained, quiet shock every single time.
She knew what it took to move matter through space. She knew what the energy expenditure for something like this should look like.
Jordan showed no evidence of having done anything.
There's my sister, she thought, looking at Tatsumaki. And then there's him. She watched them for a moment—the height difference, the ease, the complete absence of the careful distance her sister maintained around everyone else in the world. And then there's me.
The gap between S-Class heroes and the top of B-Class had always been abstractly enormous. Today it felt geometrically precise.
I need to go home, she thought. I need to see my team. I need to be somewhere that I'm the strongest person in the room.
She was composing the goodbye when Jordan's voice reached her.
"I've been to City A a dozen times," he was saying, looking down at the city with the mildly frustrated expression of someone reviewing a pattern they don't love, "and every time it's been Association business. I've never actually seen the place."
Tatsumaki's small hand had found the lapel of his jacket. She looked down at the city below with the proprietary comfort of someone in their own territory.
"Then let's fix that," she said. "I haven't gone shopping properly in ages."
Fubuki stood in the air above City A.
Watched her sister—her older sister, who had never once in Fubuki's memory voluntarily initiated casual social plans with another person, who treated most human interaction as either necessary or annoying—suggest a shopping trip.
With a soft voice.
While holding someone's jacket.
Fubuki quietly turned around and began the flight back to her organization's headquarters, where at least the social dynamics were ones she understood.