-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen was still running.
Gwen stood at the top of Central City University's main building — on the head of the bronze figure that watched the campus below — and looked out at the city while she got herself ready. She had done this before. She knew what it cost.
"Please don't let my head explode this time," she said to no one in particular. She pulled back her hood, pressed her fingertips to her temples, and opened herself to the spider sense.
The moment her mind quieted, the flood began.
The spider sense, given space and silence, expanded without limit. Fragments of the future poured in — not sequential, not organized, not anything she could navigate easily. They arrived the way light arrived through broken glass: every angle at once, none of it complete. Her head throbbed with the input.
She filtered. It took time. She had learned to look for threads rather than try to hold the whole thing, and she pulled for her friends — their faces, their voices, the particular shape of the paths that led to them.
She had tried to change someone's future once. A boy whose timeline showed him dying. She had intervened, adjusted things, pushed the story in a different direction.
He had died anyway. So had his family. More people than the original future had taken.
She had not tried to play the architect of fate since then. But this was different. These were not strangers — they were the two people she couldn't afford to lose — and she was not going to let the shape of a future she had seen stand unchallenged just because the last time had gone wrong.
The fragment she was looking for surfaced.
The wretched old man.
She recognized him immediately, despite the setting being different from any context she had seen him in before. In the future fragment, he was in an underground tunnel — no markings on the walls, no sign of what city or structure this was. He had both of her friends over his shoulders, one on each side, moving quickly. Something behind him was pursuing.
She pressed for more detail. The spider sense declined.
She knew its limits. Getting this much was already more than she had any right to expect.
The tunnel. She had seen it somewhere — not in person, but described. She knew someone on campus who spent an unreasonable amount of time memorizing civic infrastructure layouts. She dropped off the bronze figure, spread her arms and legs, and glided toward the boys' dormitory on the updraft.
Barry Allen occupied a room that was technically a teachers' apartment — a single unit built onto the dormitory roof, with a private entrance and more ceiling than any standard student room. This was an arrangement that suited his introverted habits. He was rarely bothered up there.
He had been bothered rather considerably, however, ever since a moment of impulsive overconfidence had led him to use his speed to cross a temporal boundary and bring someone back from a point in history that predated the current era by a significant margin.
Admiral Borsalino — Kizaru, as the newspapers had once called him — was now his roommate.
The room accommodated two beds, technically, though sourcing a bed of appropriate length for a man approaching three meters had required an expedition through several neighborhoods before anything suitable was located. Prior to that, Borsalino had slept on the floor without complaint, which somehow made Barry feel worse about the situation than an expressed grievance would have.
"You used my name," Barry said, not for the first time. He had his notebook open but wasn't writing in it. "At The Liberty. You told someone you were me and used it as an opener. That person is going to tell people. People are going to look at me differently starting tomorrow."
Borsalino was trimming his nails, seated on the edge of his newly acquired bed, with the serene expression of someone whose relationship with consequence was fundamentally philosophical. He shrugged.
"I didn't use your name to deceive anyone," he said.
Barry waited.
"I used it intentionally," Borsalino added. "There is a difference."
Barry closed his notebook. He had thought about asking Borsalino to leave — had built the argument in his head twice now, rehearsed it, believed it was reasonable. The problem was that he couldn't outrun Borsalino, which made the conversation theoretical, and also — more uncomfortably — he had been the one who had pulled Borsalino across time in the first place.
His parents had raised him to own his mistakes. He owned this one, even when it used his name at bars.
Borsalino had noticed, over the course of their cohabitation, that the young man was carrying something heavier than ordinary student stress. He kept things inside that wanted out — something about his family, something about the word "murderer" that people on campus attached to his name when they thought he couldn't hear. He needed someone to talk to. He was just constitutionally incapable of being the first one to start.
Borsalino had been considering how to approach this when his Observation Haki flagged a moving object coming from the north at considerable speed.
"Something's coming," he said, glancing at the window. "Human-shaped. Fast."
Barry looked up. He raised a hand toward the figure that materialized outside the window, because his mother had also raised him to be polite.
"Hello," he said. "...Lady."
Gwen processed the scene on the other side of the window: Barry, whom she knew from class as the famously reclusive nerd who could explain the load-bearing structure of any building in the city from memory, and next to him the very tall older man who had borrowed Barry's name at The Liberty and then taught her three dances she had not asked to learn.
She pushed the window open and stepped inside.
Barry stared at her for approximately two seconds. Then he turned and started going through a cabinet.
"I have the newspaper," he said. The social anxiety that defined most of his interactions with new people appeared to have temporarily lost access to his motor functions. He was pulling out a folded broadsheet and a pen with the focused urgency of someone who has been waiting for exactly this situation. "Could you — would you sign it? Just the newspaper is fine. I've followed your work since the Riverside incident and I think what you're doing is important and I built a small model—" He stopped himself. "The newspaper is enough. I won't keep you."
Spider-Woman, standing in the middle of a boys' dormitory roof apartment with an Admiral of the Marine looking on with mild curiosity, considered her options.
She took the pen. She lowered her voice enough that the register changed.
"I need a favor," she said. "You can use the autograph as payment."
She signed the paper in the compact angular script she had developed for exactly this — the Spider-Woman mark, with its distinctive loops, and at the bottom corner, the small spider she drew at the end of every signature. It was the only consistent personal detail she ever left behind.
Barry held the signed newspaper in both hands and stared at it for a moment. Whatever had been troubling him about the morning — the noise from the floor below, the conversation he had been avoiding, the latest round of gossip from people who called him what they called him when he passed — had gone somewhere else for now.
He looked up.
"What kind of favor?" he said.
He was, Borsalino observed, a child carrying a weight that other people had placed on him without his permission. That was a kind of heaviness — one Borsalino had seen before, on people who had enough good nature to absorb what should have been refused.
The son of a murderer, they called him. As if he had pulled the trigger himself.