Bang thought back.
"The last time we met properly was the meeting in A-City." He said it with the mild rueful quality of someone who'd done the arithmetic and found the number larger than expected.
"Exactly why I came. And I didn't come alone—Saitama is in the side hall waiting." Jordan paused. "He brought his disciple."
Bang's eyebrows went up. "Saitama has taken on a disciple?"
"You'll want to see for yourself."
"Then we should have a proper get-together." The old man's expression warmed immediately—the specific warmth of someone thinking about a drinking companion they hadn't seen in too long. "It's nearly noon anyway. Come eat in the backyard, we can talk while we eat."
"I suppose we'll have to impose on your hospitality."
"Not at all." Bang waved this off with genuine magnanimity. "Stay as long as you like. This place may not have much going for it, but it has rooms to spare."
"Haha, that's very generous~"
They walked together through the corridor, and the side hall opened before them.
"Saitama, Genos. Look who's here."
Saitama had been staring at the wall with the focused expression of someone trying to find something interesting about it. He turned, saw Bang, and immediately brightened. "Mr. Bang! Long time no see!"
"Long time no see, Saitama-san." Bang's nod carried the warmth of genuine affection for this odd young man he'd somehow ended up drinking with on multiple occasions.
"Oh—right." Saitama seemed to remember something and patted the shoulder of the young man sitting beside him. "Genos, this is Mr. Bang. He's a, uh..." Saitama's hand remained on the cyborg's shoulder as he turned to Jordan with the expression of someone confident that the word he needed was very nearby. "How do I put it again?"
"Martial arts master," Jordan supplied.
"Right! A martial arts master!"
You couldn't remember what my profession was for even ten minutes. Bang filed this away under Young people these days and said nothing.
Genos rose smoothly to his feet, bowed at a precise angle, and delivered his greeting with the earnest conviction of someone who had considered the correct approach in advance and committed to it fully. "Hello, Mr. Bang! I am Saitama-sensei's disciple, Genos. As you can see, I am a cyborg."
Bang had indeed noticed this. He was an observant man. He composed himself from the initial surprise—the full mechanical chassis, the golden eyes, the general impression of someone who had replaced most of themselves with hardware—and nodded to the unexpectedly well-mannered young machine. "Hello, Genos."
Genos then lifted the gift box he'd carried up the mountain and presented it with both hands. "Mr. Bang, this is a gift prepared by Saitama-sensei and Jordan-san. Please accept it."
"You even brought a gift." Bang examined the ribbon-tied presentation box—luxury tea, clearly expensive, the sort of thing that took effort to source. He accepted it with a slight smile. "How thoughtful. I'll take good care of it."
"As long as you like it," Saitama and Jordan said, in approximate unison.
"Young Genos, could you help me carry this to the back? My bedroom is through there." Bang held out the box. "These old hands would rather save themselves for training."
Yes! No problem! The response came with full enthusiasm, and Genos followed the old master toward the rear corridor with the gift box under his arm, already composing questions about the Flowing Water style that he intended to ask at the first appropriate moment.
Ten minutes earlier.
The stone steps outside the Flowing Water Dojo were finished. The platform at the top opened onto the dojo's gate, and four figures stepped onto it and stopped.
"We're here." Okamaitachi exhaled the last of her climb and rolled her shoulders back. "Finally."
"Breathe," Atomic Samurai said from behind her. He was adjusting the angle of his sun hat with one finger, which gave the impression he had made the same climb at the same pace and found it entirely unremarkable. An extra-long wooden toothpick moved from one side of his mouth to the other. "You're not impulsive until you start relaxing too early."
Okamaitachi stuck her tongue out and immediately retreated between Iaian and Bushidrill, positioning herself in the gap between them like someone who had found the one place in formation where the comment couldn't easily reach her.
Atomic Samurai's eyes moved to the gate without moving anything else about him.
"Since you still have the energy for that," he said mildly, toothpick shifting, "you can knock."
Okamaitachi accepted this with the good grace of someone who knew when an argument was already over, bounced forward on light feet, and rapped the door knocker twice.
On the other side of the gate, in the shade of an ornamental bush, a large man sat bolt upright and looked around with the expression of someone whose internal narrative had experienced a gap.
Mukuro blinked at the sky. Then at the gate. Then at his own hands.
He shook his head, trying to knock the fog loose. His gaze focused slowly, and he registered his location with growing bafflement.
Why did I fall asleep here?
This was, of course, the wrong question. The more interesting question—the one he didn't have the information to ask—was why his afternoon had a section missing from it and why certain feelings of indignation he couldn't quite source seemed to have been very carefully sanded away.
A certain kindhearted hero, having judged that Mukuro might otherwise spend the afternoon in a state of agitation he hadn't earned, had applied a light touch to the situation before leaving. Mukuro was now well-rested, mildly puzzled about the well-rested part, and entirely unbothered by anything that had happened before the nap.
Two more knocks on the door.
"They're here! They're here ag—" He was halfway to his feet before the word caught up with him. He stopped. "...Why did I say again?"
He turned this over for a while, found nothing on the other side of it, gave up, and opened the gate with the expression of someone who was hungry and would prefer to be eating.
"Who is it! Coming at this hour, people need to—"
He stopped.
Framed in the gate was a young woman with a pretty face and large eyes, which were currently doing the thing where they widened and brightened in a smile that she had deployed before the door was fully open. The kind of entrance that tended to dissolve irritation on contact.
Mukuro's complaint dissolved. A smile replaced it. "Hello there. Who are you looking for?"
Okamaitachi's expression completed its journey in the opposite direction—arrival as delight, current position as someone who had opened a gift and found inside it a large man with unfortunate chin geometry and a look that reminded her of several aunts' descriptions of men she should not date. Her smile went out like a candle.
(Mukuro, internally: I just look older than my age. I'm eighteen.)
"My master, Atomic Samurai, has come to pay a visit to Silver Fang."
"Hey—wait, is that actually your voice?"
Mukuro had been about to follow up on the disconnect between Okamaitachi's face and her voice—which was, he had to admit, a particular register of confident and slightly impatient—when his gaze moved past her shoulder and found a figure in a bright red traveling cloak with a sword at the hip, standing a few paces back on the stone steps.
The pieces connected in approximately one second.
His eyes went wide.
"You—you're—you're really—"
"It's me," said Atomic Samurai, with the easy tolerance of someone who had been recognized in doorways many times. He pulled off his sun hat and tossed it back to Bushidrill without looking. "Is Master Bang home?"
"Yes! Yes, absolutely! Please come in—I'll go tell him right now!"
Mukuro threw the gates open and departed at speed, which for a man his size was a committed and sincere sprint. His thick legs churned. He disappeared around the corner of the corridor like a boulder that had decided to have somewhere to be.
Atomic Samurai watched this with mild philosophical acceptance. He had encountered many fans. He led his three disciples through the gate in single file.
The thick-limbed figure came around the corner at the far end of the corridor at something between a trot and a controlled fall, just in time to nearly collide with Bang and Jordan's group coming the other way.
Bang put his hands behind his back and waited.
"Master!" Mukuro skidded to a halt, grabbed his own knees, and caught his breath in pieces. "It's—Atomic Samurai—Lord Atomic Samurai—he's here—with his disciples—to visit—"
Bang's expression became the particular warm thing it became when something genuinely good happened.
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