-Broadcast-
Barry Allen had views on the physics of their situation.
He had been explaining them for what felt like a considerable amount of time, though time inside a black hole's interior was not a reliable metric for anything. The explanation involved parallel timeline stacking, dimensional compression, the flattening of temporal sequence into simultaneous layers — each moment of history preserved as a distinct stratum that could theoretically be navigated if you could find the one that corresponded to where you belonged.
Borsalino listened to this with the polite attention of a man who has decided that understanding the theory is less urgent than solving the problem.
"That was a significant amount of words," he said, when Barry paused. "None of them told me how we leave. We will eventually run out of food and water, which I'd prefer to avoid."
"We don't actually need to worry about breathing in the same way—"
"We're both experiencing slow poisoning from whatever the gas composition is in here. I can feel it." He could. The Pika Pika no Mi's (Glint-Glint Fruit's) light-conversion was handling the worst of it, but the toxic component of the atmosphere — whatever the atmosphere was — was accumulating at a rate his body was having to actively work against. "So. The leaving."
Barry regrouped. "Theoretically — and this is important — if we can identify the timeline we each came from, we can use our speed to enter it the same way we navigate any temporal medium. You'd return to your present. I'd return to mine."
"What's the probability of finding the right one?"
Barry looked at the surrounding space, which contained what appeared to be an uncountable number of visible time fragments — windows, each one showing a different version of something, arranged in no discernible pattern across a geometry that had no consistent orientation.
"Small," he admitted.
"Small but nonzero."
"Yes."
"Then we start."
They moved through the fragments at speed. Borsalino as gold, Barry as red, browsing through the multiverse's filing system with the efficiency of two people who had no better option and were choosing not to discuss that.
Most of what they passed was either incomprehensible or irrelevant. Some of it was neither.
One fragment showed Marineford. Borsalino slowed, registered what he was seeing, and spent a moment longer than he had planned.
The battle layout was recognizable — Marineford's geography, the execution platform, the assembled forces on both sides. The participants were not. Three figures in Marine uniforms on the defender's side were fighting together with the coordinated efficiency of people who had done this many times: Garp, Dragon, Luffy, three generations moving as a unit, the morale of the Marine visibly lifting around them in ways it had not in the version of events Borsalino remembered.
On the pirate side: the Whitebeard Pirates, as expected, and at the front of them, fighting with the fury of someone protecting a brother — Blackbeard Teach. Without the Yami Yami no Mi (Dark-Dark Fruit). Without the strategy of a man who had been waiting for the right moment. Just a man throwing himself at the Marine line because Ace was behind it.
The outcome was the same. Ace died. The Whitebeard Pirates took catastrophic losses. Teach survived with a hole in his chest that would have been fatal for something without his constitution.
Luffy, in this world, was on the side that had made the hole.
Red Hair never went to the East Blue in this one, Borsalino thought. The hat never changed hands. Without that, the boy grew up differently. He noted this the way he noted most things — without significant emotional response, filing it accurately. He was going to tell the old man about this when he got back. Garp had seemed recently like a man who could use something to think about other than his own regrets.
He moved on.
The next coherent fragment was harder to take seriously, so he didn't try. In one world, Sakazuki, Kuzan, and himself had all left the Marine and become Yonko. Three Emperors of the Sea. The Marine in that timeline apparently did not leave port with any regularity. He couldn't evaluate whether their version of justice was better or worse, but it was certainly different, and he suspected Sakazuki's territory was managed with considerable efficiency.
The variations expanded from there into territory that was genuinely strange. Multiple versions of all three of them as Celestial Dragons, as pirates, as politicians, as generals in non-sea-based militaries, in worlds where the sea did not exist in the relevant form. In none of them were any of them ordinary.
Gold shines in any medium, Borsalino thought, without particular pride about it. It was simply a consistent observation across a large sample.
"Senior." Barry's voice, from a distance. "I think I found something."
He navigated toward the red light. Barry was hovering in front of a fragment — looking at it with the particular attention of someone who has been searching for a face in a crowd and found it.
Borsalino looked at the fragment.
"That's the future," he said.
"I know. My predecessor's era should be nearby — the fragments from adjacent periods cluster in this region." Barry was already beginning to look excited in the way young people got excited when they were about to go home, which Borsalino recognized as a sign that they were in the right part of the filing system even if the folder hadn't been found yet. "We're close—"
The shadow arrived without warning.
There was no sound. No detectable approach. At the speeds Savitar operated, the concept of approach was optional — he simply chose to be somewhere, and then he was there, and the intervening space had not been given the opportunity to object. He was behind both of them simultaneously, which was a geometric impossibility that speed made practical.
Two sets of hands. Two pushes.
The fragment's surface yielded.
The world kaleidoscoped — every visual reference cycling through versions of itself at a rate that bypassed comprehension, buildings and streets and crowds and empty spaces all occupying the same position in sequence too fast to track. The disorientation was complete. Borsalino felt the temporal medium pulling at him the way currents pulled at a swimmer who had misjudged the depth of the water, something larger and more organized than he was making decisions about his direction.
He was being moved through time.
Forward, by the feel of it. Toward something that had not happened yet from the perspective of his own timeline.
Barry was somewhere to his left, equally unable to do much about it, equally watching the future arrive at them rather than them arriving at it.
"This is going to be complicated," Barry said, at a volume that suggested he was not entirely certain Borsalino could hear him.
"Almost certainly," Borsalino agreed.
The future resolved around them.