-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen released Charlotte Hikaru and her brother from its frame — the training sequence, the whale's interior, Izuna's patient instruction — and shifted to Central City.
The establishing image was Borsalino and Gwen Stacy being physically removed from the Liberty Bar by a security team whose collective muscle mass could have supported a small building. Borsalino did not resist at any point during the removal process. He simply went where they directed him, his expression carrying the mild dissatisfaction of someone who had made an honest mistake and was considering the sequence of events that had led to it.
Gwen walked beside him and gave him a look that communicated several things at once, chief among them: this is your fault.
"You leaned in and said something directly to him. Whatever it was, he recognized you — and then he completely lost it, in front of all his fans." She folded her arms. "Venom is a professional. He has never broken composure publicly. Not once. And you managed it in about thirty seconds."
Borsalino was still processing.
The sequence that had produced this outcome had started reasonably enough.
Venom's fan interaction session had followed his set — the star descending from the stage to move through the crowd, shaking hands, creating the kind of personal-contact moment that cemented loyalty in people who already considered themselves devoted followers. His black liquid form was startlingly tactile in close quarters, the surface of him shifting with his movements, the long tongue occasionally making an appearance in a way that the fans seemed to find charming rather than alarming.
Using his considerable physical presence to advantage — which was less Borsalino's own height and more the general fact that the crowd moved around him whether he wanted it to or not — he had guided Gwen to the front row. She had gotten her handshake, obtained a borrowed signing pen from a neighboring fan without much ceremony, and received Venom's autograph directly on the fabric of her dress. She held the garment away from her body and looked at the signature with the calm assessment of someone doing mental calculation about its resale value.
Borsalino reached the front.
They shook hands. He had questions. He asked one of them.
"Venom — young people say you've been around for centuries. Is that true? Did you actually see the Marine Admirals from that era?" He removed his pink sunglasses as he said it, with the guileless quality of a man who genuinely did not expect this to be provocative.
Venom looked at the face that had been under the sunglasses for approximately three seconds.
Then Venom screamed.
Not the cultivated rock-star register he used on stage — an unfiltered, full-volume sound that had more biological urgency in it than performance, a sound that made the immediate crowd take a collective step back before they registered that it was their favorite celebrity doing it.
"Kizaru." The name came out like a thing Venom had not wanted to say and couldn't stop. "You cannot be alive. You are absolutely not alive right now—"
The black liquid surface of his body became unstable. The suppressed wildness of the thing underneath the celebrity persona was visible in the way the fluid moved — irregular, agitated, reaching toward shapes that his current life did not permit. His mouth opened to a dimension that did not fit comfortably in a bar setting.
The security team arrived before the situation could fully express itself. Venom's professionalism reasserted, barely, on top of whatever instinct had taken over. He stepped back. He let them do their job.
Borsalino was escorted out calmly. Gwen was escorted out beside him, an innocent casualty of proximity.
Behind them, Venom resumed his fan session — composed again, performing again, the screaming already on its way to becoming an anecdote his fans would circulate with affection. The time a cosplayer rattled the Venom. The legend of his professionalism would survive this, marginally improved by evidence that it took real effort to maintain.
Gwen looked at the street outside the Liberty Bar and breathed.
The autographed dress was still worth what she'd calculated. That, at least, had survived.
Borsalino stood on the pavement and organized his thinking.
Venom had recognized him. Recognized his face — not the sunglasses, not a name, not an introduction. The moment he'd removed the sunglasses, the recognition had been instant and visceral. Which meant they had met before, and not in any context that Borsalino could currently access, because the timeline running forward from where he currently was had not yet produced whatever encounter was responsible.
He was in the future. This was historical to Venom. And Venom's reaction to seeing him had been the reaction of something that remembered the encounter very badly.
He was filed somewhere in this creature's memory under a category that did not produce pleasant associations.
Interesting.
"Gwen." She looked at him. He had put the sunglasses back on. "Tell me what you know about Venom. The research your predecessors have done. It matters — don't summarize."
The female college student whom he had accidentally gotten banned from the Liberty Bar for life gave him a brief look that acknowledged the irony of being asked for favors, then accepted the situation with the practical good humor of someone who had not had a bad enough evening to refuse.
She described what was known: an alien symbiote, capable of bonding with living hosts, absorbing their memories and capabilities in the process, enhancing the underlying physiology through the partnership. It had spent a long period in private custody — maintained by a single family within the Empire across generations, stored in a sealed container — before recently reacquiring its freedom and discovering that it preferred celebrity to captivity.
The powers were real but the fatal weaknesses were documented and public knowledge: sufficiently high-decibel sound disrupted its control over itself, and any sufficiently determined institution could recapture it if they chose to press the issue. The reason no institution had pressed the issue was that Venom had no interest in doing anything that would provoke one. Chocolate beans satisfied its dietary requirements in a way that had eliminated the previous complication of its menu preferences. It received donations from the LGBTQ coalition — it was, per the relevant cultural consensus of the era, a protected minority of one — and its concert revenue was substantial.
The music, by all accounts, was genuinely good. Whatever it had been before, what it had become was something the new generation of Central City received without qualification. Its fanbase would age with it and remain loyal, and as long as Venom kept performing and kept off the documented diet, nothing would touch its reputation.
Borsalino absorbed this.
He had been, in some moment that existed forward from his current position, involved with this creature in a way that it had not forgotten. He could not know the content of it. He could know that he would be meeting it again — he could see the shape of the encounter in Venom's reaction the way you see the shape of a wound before you understand its depth — and that whatever happened in that meeting, Venom had survived it and he had, presumably, as well.
Reasonable odds. He filed it and let it go.
He had kept Barry's money in his pocket and his nephew — his alleged nephew — had probably been wondering where he was for the past several hours.
"Gwen. I owe you a drink. Next time — I'll actually deliver on it." He meant it, in the way he meant things that were not promises but were not dismissals either. "Your friend will be happy with the dress."
He turned toward the direction of the university district and walked, the pink sunglasses catching the streetlights in passing.
Gwen watched his back recede from the bar entrance. There was something about the way he moved that did not match anything she'd put in the category of ordinary uncle, but she'd decided not to examine that too closely. She'd heard the name Barry before. Had a classmate named Barry. Never said anything was true straight out — always a sideways answer or a look that carried the implication without confirming it.
She stayed where she was and waited for her friends to come out of the bar.
She would give the dress to her bestie. Help her restore the image. It was the right conclusion to a stranger evening than she'd planned.
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