Jordan looked at the dress.
The high slit. The proportions. The way the dark fabric managed to be simultaneously a legitimate hero's battle suit and something that would stop foot traffic in any commercial district in the country.
He scratched his cheek. "If we're going shopping—should we think about disguises?"
Tatsumaki followed his gaze down to her own outfit with the expression of someone who has genuinely never considered this angle. She looked back up. "What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it," Jordan said carefully. "It's just—very recognizable. On you specifically."
She considered this. The dress was practical. Lightweight, combat-ready, nothing that would restrict movement. She'd worn it publicly for years without incident.
The fact that it was also the most immediately identifiable piece of clothing associated with S-Class Rank #3 in any city in the country was, to Tatsumaki, a secondary consideration at best.
Jordan had a cap that handled his situation. Her situation was structurally different.
Her eyes moved sideways to Fubuki with the particular quality of a decision already made presenting itself as a question.
"Fubuki. Lend me your sunglasses and a change of clothes."
Fubuki looked at the sky. The sky offered nothing useful.
"Take whatever you want," she said, in the flat tone of someone who has made peace with inevitability. "Take it all."
A beat.
She straightened slightly. The listlessness sharpened into something more deliberate. "Anyway—I'm going to be busy with the Blizzard Group for the next few days. I won't be back tonight."
The shift in Tatsumaki's attention was immediate.
"How many times," she said, and the temperature of her voice dropped by several degrees, "have I told you not to spend all your time with that—"
"They're not trash," Fubuki said, and the volume surprised even her. She kept going. "You've never actually met them. You don't know what they're like. My team members are not what you keep saying they are."
"Hmm." Tatsumaki's green light began to build—not the explosive surge of direct anger, but the slow, pressurizing kind, the polar ice cap version that was in some ways worse. Her voice went completely flat. "Is that so. You think I misspoke."
Fubuki's neck pulled in slightly. "...Yes."
The air above City A developed intentions.
Jordan reached up and put his hand on Tatsumaki's head.
The light stabilized.
"Fubuki has her own considerations," he said, in the tone of someone stating a fact rather than taking a side. The hand moved—a slow, deliberate pressure against the crown of her head, fingers working through the green hair with the patient attention of someone who has identified the correct application of force and is applying it consistently.
Serious Series—Serious Cat-Petting Mode.
Tatsumaki's mouth closed.
Her eyes went to him with the expression of someone who has been mid-sentence and lost the thread, trying to locate it. The building pressure dissipated without reaching its conclusion, absorbed into something that felt different than dissipation.
"Like Fubuki said," Jordan continued, while Tatsumaki's brows did something involuntary, "she's not a child. She has people she cares about and they care about her. That's worth something."
Fubuki stood very still.
She had prepared—in the experienced, reflexive way of someone who had been navigating this dynamic her entire life—for the lecture to begin. She'd braced for it. The fact that it hadn't was processing slowly, like a weight she'd been holding that had been removed without warning.
He spoke up for me.
She stared at Jordan—twenty-one years old, apparently, according to Association records, which meant she was older than him, which meant he'd just defended her from her own older sister while being younger than her, which was a sentence she wasn't sure how to feel about—and found she didn't have an immediate response.
If we're doing family math here, a small voice in the back of her mind offered helpfully, you probably shouldn't be calling him Jordan.
She very deliberately did not follow this thought to its conclusion.
Tatsumaki was leaning slightly into the hand on her head with the absent contentment of a cat that has stopped making decisions. A faint crease had appeared between her brows—the habitual place where her concerns lived—and it was still there, resistant even to the petting.
"But—" she started.
Jordan leaned down slightly and said something close to her ear.
Whatever it was, it was quiet enough that Fubuki couldn't catch it. She watched her sister's expression move through something—surprise, then a kind of slow recognition, then the particular stillness of someone who has heard something that addressed what they were actually worried about rather than what they were saying.
Tatsumaki turned her head away. "...Fine."
Jordan straightened.
He released something—Fubuki felt it before she understood it, a field passing through her like a change in pressure, specific and precise, different from the ambient electromagnetic hum she'd learned to associate with powerful heroes. Something that moved through her biomagnetic field and left a signature she could feel the edges of but not see.
A faint arc formed between Tatsumaki and Jordan—visible for half a second, blue-white, then gone.
A fainter version of the same phenomenon moved through Fubuki. Like two threads, briefly luminous, connecting different distances.
Both sisters looked at him.
"Biomagnetic field imprint," Jordan said, with the matter-of-fact clarity of someone explaining something practical. "Every living thing has one. What I've left on yours is a marker keyed to my own field. Distance doesn't matter—if your field fluctuates sharply, or you call for help, I'll know where you are and I'll be there."
He looked at Fubuki specifically as he finished. This is what I meant, the look said. She'll worry about you whether she says so or not. This way she doesn't have to.
Fubuki held this for a moment.
She thought about what it meant that the explanation had been directed at her—that Jordan had understood what Tatsumaki's stubbornness was built on top of, and had answered it without making it a confrontation.
She thought about the arc of electricity that had connected her to her sister for half a second through someone else's field entirely.
"Okay," she said, and was surprised to find she meant it completely.
Tatsumaki was looking at the space where the arc had been. Her expression had the quality of someone who has just had something confirmed that she'd wanted confirmed without knowing how to ask for it.
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