-Broadcast-
The hillside was quiet. The city was not.
Borsalino lay on his back in the grass for a moment after consciousness fully returned, cataloguing what his senses were reporting. Sunlight through leaves. A breeze that carried no salt. The sound of vehicles — not Marine vessels, not ships, but something land-based and numerous, a constant low hum from the direction of the dense structures visible through the tree line. Buildings in numbers and at heights that had no precedent in anything he had personally visited. Glass and steel in configurations that suggested an industrial capacity operating at a scale he was not familiar with.
He sat up.
"This isn't my world."
It wasn't a question. The conclusion required no deliberation. In a world where pirates dominated the sea and the Marine was the primary organizing force of civilization, the infrastructure in front of him could not exist. Order of this scale required something other than the Marine's version of order. It required centuries of it.
He looked at Barry, who was also sitting up, and also looking at the city, and looking at it with a completely different expression.
"Whenever you appear," Borsalino said, conversationally, "something inconvenient happens. Do you have any idea why Savitar has such a interest in disrupting your life?"
Barry was not listening. He had already stood up.
He was looking at the park, the streets visible beyond it, the skyline. His face had done something that faces did when people arrived somewhere they had not expected to see again. He was not performing happiness. He was experiencing it without the available vocabulary to contain it.
He opened his arms. He shouted at the open air of the evening:
"I'm home."
The echo carried across the hillside and into the park's open space. A few distant tourists glanced toward the sound and then away, as tourists generally did when they encountered someone shouting, which was: they noted it, filed it as someone else's concern, and continued walking.
Borsalino watched this with the patience of a man who had extensive experience with young people experiencing emotions and had decided some time ago that patience was the most efficient response.
Several hundred meters down the path — Barry had started walking before fully remembering there was someone else on the hillside — he apparently recalled that he had not come here alone. He turned, and jogged back, not at speed, keeping himself within the range of what a person running normally in a park looked like, his eyes moving to the surveillance equipment visible on the light posts with the automatic awareness of someone who knew what he was doing in this city and what it could cost.
"Borsalino." He arrived slightly out of breath, which was a choice he was making rather than a physical requirement. "Welcome to Central Park. That's Central City behind you. I didn't think—" He stopped. "I came home by accident. I actually came home."
"That's good," Borsalino said, and meant it, because home was a thing he had watched a significant number of people lose over the course of a career and he did not begrudge anyone the version of it they still had. "However."
He indicated his general state.
Barry blinked. Then looked down at himself. Then looked at Borsalino's almost three-meter frame wearing nothing, having been wearing nothing since Arabasta, which had not become less true during the subsequent traversal of a black hole and multiple parallel timelines.
"I was excited," Barry said.
"You were."
"There are spare clothes in the ring." The ring on his right index finger flashed briefly, and a set of civilian clothes appeared. Not large clothes. Barry Allen's civilian clothes, sized for Barry Allen, which was not a person approaching three meters tall.
Borsalino put them on anyway. The trousers became three-quarter length. The shirt achieved coverage by the definition of coverage that required the least charitable possible interpretation. He looked at the result and found it adequate for the purposes of not appearing in public unclothed, which was the current standard he was applying.
Barry gave him a beard. A false one — adhesive, covering the lower portion of his face.
"Anyone who's taken a history class will recognize you without it," Barry said, positioning the beard with the focused attention of someone who had done theatrical disguise work before and knew the stakes of doing it poorly. "We need to look like two ordinary people taking a walk."
"I frequently look like an ordinary person taking a walk," Borsalino said.
"Not recently."
He conceded the point.
They left the park as two citizens — one extremely tall, one at normal height, both in clothes that suggested at minimum that they had gotten dressed today and at maximum that they had gotten dressed in the dark. The other park visitors processed them as interesting and then continued on their way, which was the correct response to interesting things in a park.
They had been walking for ten minutes and had not yet reached the park's exit, which was itself information about the scale of the city they had arrived in. A snack stand on the path was doing reasonable business in cold drinks, and would have continued to do so without interruption if not for the electronic advertisement display the owner had positioned beside it.
Borsalino stopped.
The advertisement was promoting a discount — the occasion was a anniversary of something — and listed the year as part of the relevant context.
Year 1940. Holy Roman Empire.
He stood in front of the display and read it again. The year was not ambiguous. The calendar it referenced was not ambiguous.
The Holy Roman Empire. Artoria's project, the institutional outcome of everything the Marine had been building toward — the thing that existed in the future of his own timeline and that he had watched the Sky Screen discuss and predict and argue about. The thing that had not yet happened from the perspective of the lecture hall he had left.
And the year: 1940.
He did not know the Marine Calendar year corresponding to this. He did not know how many years separated him from the moment he had been standing in a desert in Arabasta negotiating conventions with a time remnant mecha. He did not know how many years separated him from the lecture hall, from Artoria Pendragon and the other Admirals, from the fog that had covered Rome and everything happening inside it.
He knew the Holy Roman Empire was real, in this timeline, and had been real long enough to be counting its anniversaries in four digits.
The feeling of displacement was not panic. Borsalino had not panicked in a professional context in a long time. It was something more — the particular disorientation of a man who has just learned that home is further away than the distance between two points in space, that it is instead the distance between two points in time, and that the instrument for measuring that distance was not currently available to him.
Barry had stopped beside him and was reading the same display.
"That's the Holy Roman Empire," Barry said.
"Yes."
"That's your future."
"Apparently."
The breeze moved through the park. The cold drink stand continued its business. The year 1940 of the Holy Roman Empire calendar continued being the year it was, indifferent to the Admiral standing at its edge trying to determine how far he was from where he had started.
"How do we go back?" he asked.
Barry considered this with appropriate seriousness.
"I don't know yet," he said.
"That's what I expected," Borsalino said.
He looked at the advertisement for another moment, then looked at the city, then began walking again. There was very little else to do, and the cold drinks were probably fine, but he did not think he needed one right now.