— Broadcast. —
Stussy's identity had been exposed. Her history with Garou remained unresolved. The situation of Caesar Clown and Vegapunk in Rome had reached whatever conclusion it was building toward. The Sky Screen, in its characteristic way, shifted its attention.
The segment on Admiral Kizaru returned.
While the other Admirals of the Marine were somewhere in the present or future fighting for their lives in events of consequence, Borsalino was in Central City, and Central City's largest bar had heavy metal music, and heavy metal music was, it turned out, something he understood instinctively.
Barry Allen was at his university, suffering through coursework.
He was intelligent — genuinely, exceptionally so — and in most practical situations this manifested as an advantage. Academic credits operated by different rules. They did not respond to intelligence alone. They required attendance, submission of work on deadlines, the sustained engagement with institutional requirements that Barry found difficult to shortcut without consequences. His professor controlled the hurdle. The hurdle remained.
Borsalino had taken the pocket money Barry provided and decided that spending it on the Central City nightlife was a reasonable allocation of resources. Barry, as a person who had grown up in a household and then a university and had not spent significant time in large crowds of people who were not there for a purpose, would not have gone to the bar alone. He was, in a technical sense, still something of an innocent. Social anxiety in certain high-density environments.
Borsalino experienced no such limitations.
He had identified the largest bar in Central City within the first week of their arrival, filed it as a future destination, and was now on the dance floor with a group of people half his apparent age, in the full possession of a skill that nobody at this bar had expected an old man to demonstrate.
The music came in at a physical level — the bass frequencies doing something to the chest, the rhythm establishing itself before the conscious mind could negotiate with it. The lighting rig above the floor was being operated by someone who knew what they were doing: red, blue, green, purple rotating across the moving bodies in combinations that made the whole scene feel slightly outside normal reality. Borsalino moved through all of it with complete comfort, his body tracking the rhythm with the ease of someone who has simply spent many years moving and knows how movement works.
He was wearing pink glasses. He was the oldest person on the dance floor by a significant margin. He was also, by the assessment of everyone within visual range, the best dancer in the immediate vicinity.
The girl near him was not having the same experience.
Her movements were fighting her. She knew where her body was supposed to go and her body was consistently arriving somewhere adjacent to that, just slightly off-beat, just slightly wrong in the angles. Her face communicated a sustained negotiation between effort and frustration, with frustration maintaining a narrow lead.
Borsalino noticed this. He stopped his own dancing, crossed the distance between them, and placed a hand briefly on her shoulder.
"Young person." He had to project to be heard over the speakers. "Don't be discouraged. It takes time and practice. Your own happiness is what matters. Don't worry about the audience."
She looked up at him. He looked, objectively, like an old man who had wandered into a bar and was enjoying it with a degree of enthusiasm that could be read as either charming or unsettling, depending on the angle. But there was something in his manner — a settled quality that came from having spent a great deal of time in the world and stopped worrying about most of it — that was not easily imitated by people who hadn't lived there.
"Teach me then," she said, louder than she intended due to the volume. "My friends always say my dancing is terrible."
She had a light build, short golden hair catching the colored lights, and the particular energy of someone who is annoyed about something and would prefer not to be. She was approximately Barry's age, Borsalino estimated. Young. Not his type — he liked a woman who had developed fully into herself and knew it. But Barry was an otaku who had no friends at his university and had certainly never been to a bar with someone who would talk to him voluntarily.
"Here is enough room," Borsalino said. "Follow my movements. A few repetitions and you'll be the most impressive person on this floor."
He began to teach her. He was patient about it in the way that people who have genuine competence in something are patient — not condescending, just . He corrected the angles of her arms, the weight transfer in her footwork, the timing relative to the beat. She listened, tried, tried again. Her companions, watching this exchange, decided that a free teacher was a free teacher and joined the formation.
Borsalino had, without planning it, become the center of a small dancing masterclass in the middle of the largest bar in Central City.
He was enjoying himself thoroughly. The house had been becoming oppressive — Barry was taciturn when he was stressed about his studies, which was most of the time, and a silent apartment with a man who communicated primarily through apologetic expressions was not stimulating. This was stimulating. These young people were alive in the way that bar crowds are alive, and being surrounded by that aliveness was good.
Also the dress code for this establishment was, in his professional assessment, very permissive. The camera infrastructure on Central City's streets was a constraint on many things. Inside the bar, the ambient chaos was its own form of cover.
He moved. The girl matched him. Her movements were no longer fighting her.
"That's it," he said.
She smiled — a different smile from the earlier frustrated one, the one that belongs to someone who has gotten something right that they couldn't get right before. They were keeping pace with each other now, and the small circle around them was doing its best to follow along.
Someone was recording. Multiple people were recording. This would, Borsalino understood, appear somewhere on whatever the equivalent of a news network was at this university, and be discussed.
He found he did not object to this at all.
"Uncle." The girl had gotten close enough to project her voice adequately. "What's your name? Your dancing is incredible."
He almost said it. Borsalino was on the way out of his mouth before Barry's voice arrived in his memory: anyone who has taken a history class would recognize you without the disguise. This was Central City. This was Year 1940 of the Holy Roman Empire calendar. His face was in the history books and his name was in the history books and the combination of both, in a bar full of university students, was not compatible with the low profile he and Barry had discussed.
He pivoted without visible hesitation.
"My name is Barry." He watched her expression for the flicker of recognition that would mean he'd made a mistake. Nothing. "Do you have a partner? I'm trying to introduce my nephew to someone. He's very talented but doesn't get out enough."
She burst out laughing. The gap between the explanation she had been constructing and the one she received was wide enough to be genuinely funny.
"Gwen Stacy. I'm at the university nearby." She recovered her composure. "Is your nephew studying there too?"
Before Borsalino could begin the introduction he had been improvising toward, the bar changed.
A sound rose from the crowd — not the regular noise of people enjoying music, but the surge of recognition that happens when someone famous enters a room that didn't expect them. A cheer, building from one end of the bar toward the other, following something that was moving through the crowd.
Someone had arrived. Someone Central City apparently knew.