Ouroboros
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Nothing ever ends: Rorschach struggles with the eternal return.aka Manhattan zaps Rorschach into an alternate past instead of vaporizing him.
A gale howls, the noise permeating this bleak fortress like an uneasy spirit, although the chill fingers of the Antarctic wind will never penetrate its monolithic walls. Rorschach thinks of a shroud of snow, of blinding white falling over granite and obliterating it from the world, entombing and silent. He thinks of a bitter end.
Ozymandias is talking and talking, an endless expository monologue that has been meticulously rehearsed, every phrase afforded its own careful weight and cadence. His words are a counterpoint to the violent storm outside; his voice echoes against blood-smeared marble, reverberates around the immense chamber and shudders the last few clues into place, everything interlocking and smooth like a completed jigsaw puzzle.
This is the part that Rorschach usually takes the most pleasure in, satisfaction beyond the primal gratification of snapping bone. There is no satisfaction to be had here, though. This time, he is not the one pressing the final piece into place. He is not the one standing back to admire the completion of a job done well. There is nothing admirable about this.
The finished picture is a horror, a Lovecraftian monstrosity underpinned by something very human and gallingly sanctimonious. So convinced of its own righteousness that even a million screaming souls could not perturb it.
They've been played for fools, every step along the way. Manipulated by one of their own, by this golden puppeteer. Strings jerked in a danse macabre, and for all their striving, they couldn't snarl the wires. They didn't even see the wires. He is shaking, whole body vibrating with a brittle, harsh fury and a swelling despair that threatens to overwhelm him, seeping up through his skin and leaking into the gulf between his face and his disguise.
Daniel stands beside him, soft under that ridiculous cape. He is shivering too, the plush fabric magnifying every tremor.
He sees Silk Spectre move in the periphery of his vision, a drift of yellow and snow-burned pink. She slips her hand under the cape to rest on Daniel's arm, either seeking comfort or offering it. Possessive, either way. Rorschach spares a glance at Manhattan. He is stoic and unreadable, waiting to be told what to do.
Veidt is still talking.
"No," Daniel says. He sounds small, weak. His voice doesn't fill the air the way that Veidt's does—lacks the glamor and the flair, the alluring quicksilver quality—but it still stops him mid-sentence. "No, you can't do this, Adrian."
"Do this, Dan?" The amusement in Veidt's voice is affected. He is like rock under that glittering exterior. Must be, to not have crumbled under the weight of his actions. "It is already done."
Daniel doesn't believe it, simply can't comprehend what Veidt is capable of. In his naïvete, probably imagines that Veidt wants to be stopped, and so he is rallying to a battle that is already fought and lost. The snow owl falls to the cold marble, a swirl of white reflected against the dark polish of the stone in captivating balance. "No," he says again, and Silk Spectre clutches at his arm as he lunges forward.
"Dan," she says, voice wavering even on that single syllable. Perhaps she has been crying. Rorschach feels nothing at that.
Daniel takes her hand, is gentle when he removes it from his arm. He draws himself up. He is Nite Owl now, truly Nite Owl in a way he hasn't been since 1975. Since Rorschach had split open and cauterized, expelling everything he had thought he did not need.
(He still remembers the way the sky had disappeared, obliterated by heavy smoke and heavier ink; the way Daniel had found him and tried to get him back. He was too noble for it all, too untarnished, and Rorschach was too newly reborn, too brutal and unchecked.
He had gutted him there on the filthy sidewalk with nothing but words, left Nite Owl to shrivel away until there was only Daniel Dreiberg left—tired, hurt, disillusioned and ready to quit.
He thinks of old ghosts, and of regrets.)
Veidt is reaching for something in his belt, and he catches his breath because Daniel is not going to back down, and he is human and vulnerable beneath the costume, beneath the persona. What kind of weapon does Veidt have, what kind of technology? Veidt points, and presses, and Rorschach feels his throat tighten even as he wills himself to move, as everything slows to a crawl, but there is no retort of gunfire nor the high-frequency whine of a laser.
The television bank behind him flickers into life, illuminates their hopeless tableau in harsh artificial light.
There is a moment of terrible silence.
"I did it," Veidt says, breathlessly. A monstrous limb arcs over Madison Square Garden, discharging ichor from its punctured skin. There is blood, viscous and black, everywhere. "I did it!" He is tearful in his appalling triumph.
More and more monitors offer grisly commentary over visuals of New York's streets, sidewalks running red, gutters bubbling like a severed artery. He feels anguish wash over him with every new scene; every shattered building; every pale, wild-eyed reporter; every still body. It tears the breath from his lungs and he cannot draw more in, he's drowning in the imagery that assaults him. He feels pressure on his arm. Daniel has seized him, fingers digging like talons. He's shaking violently.
—alien contact, or—
"Don't you see?" Veidt says. His eyes are shining, and Rorschach wants to put them out.
—the dead, the insane... there are children—
Silk Spectre—Laurel—is spitting words at him, rage and grief smeared down her face in symmetrical black rivulets. She has never looked so fierce and terrifying. Despair makes her a valkyrie. Veidt calmly smiles at her, serene in the face of her wrath.
—an end to the war in—
"Let's compromise," he says. The words are the antithesis of everything that lives in Rorschach, that steels his fists, runs in his blood, quickens his face. To hear them uttered so brazenly from this man who stands silhouetted by genocide, haloed by the atrocity he has wrought, is stunning. It is profane.
—millions, millions dead—
Daniel moves before he can, takes the steps up to Veidt's altar two at a time. Rorschach lets a fierce pride flare briefly beneath the wretchedness when Daniel strikes Veidt cleanly across the jaw, sleek bronze lines and an intense snarl and for a moment it's just like old times, just like—
But he's overextended himself, has let his momentum carry him too far and telegraphed his next move like a rookie, and it's bad, very bad, because Veidt isn't caught unawares any more, he's dropped into a combat stance and he's still fit and fast and Daniel isn't.
There is a sound like cracking ice, sharp and deadly.
Veidt straightens slowly, looking at his hands as if he hadn't known his own strength. Disingenuous to a fault. A corona of tentacles frames him.
Laurel gasps. Perhaps it was supposed to have been a scream.
"I'm sorry." Veidt holds his hands out, palms upturned as though seeking forgiveness. "I'm sorry that had to happen." He says it as though he had expected a different response. As though Daniel would have rolled over and accepted this madness.
Something gives, and Rorschach feels his knees hit the marble, fabric of his pants sliding on the smooth surface and making him scrabble for purchase. His hat slaps as it hits the floor. His gloves squeak and slip so he tears them off. Daniel's skin is warm against his fingertips.
"Daniel," he tries to say. It sounds like a low whine in the back of his throat. His ears roar. This is every worst-case scenario, every what-if that they stowed in the back of their minds before every patrol. Dead and dead and dead, three million and one—
"Do something!" Laurel is crouched over Daniel too, sitting on the other side of him, fingers curled into his shoulder. They flank him like guardians. They will bring their chosen to Valhalla, bear them mead. "Jon, you can fix this, can't you? Please Jon, god, please..."
The world narrows to a pinprick, Laurel's pleading and Manhattan's indifferent responses are nothing but steady white noise. Rorschach already knows it is no use, can feel an incomprehensible ache of loss deep in his bones, deep in his chest and he can taste salt in the corner of his mouth and blood in the back of his throat.
He knows he is supposed to express this, somehow. He has to, somehow. He can't push it down, can't lock it away, can't rein it in. His defenses are failing him.
He digs his fingers into his neck, flays off his face and scrubs at the film of grief that tightens the skin beneath. Daniel is still warm when he leans in to press his forehead to his cheek, eyes squeezed so tightly shut he sees yellow sparks. His chest knots tight and he feels himself convulse and shudder; it hurts, and he is profoundly aware that there will never be enough vengeance in the world to kill it away.
The hand on the back of his neck surprises him. Laurel is touching him, and when he looks up she reads something in his face that makes her expression crumple until she's saying, "oh god, oh god," in open-mouthed sobs.
It's too raw to watch, too difficult, so he turns his eyes back down to Daniel, laid on a cold marble slab. He had imagined many deaths for himself, but never any for Nite Owl—not beyond quitting ignominiously to live a comfortable, meandering life. It shouldn't be like this, never should have been like this, he wasn't the one who was supposed to end here, it's all wrong. Wrong.
He unclips the goggles, pushes back the cowl so he can take a final look at his partner's face. No, no—
A reflection shifts on the icy floor, a bruise of dark yellow and violet. Veidt, hovering over them. He seems about to speak, but Rorschach is upon him before he can utter a silver-tongued word, barreling him backward to crash into the raving wall of televisions, and only when they fall silent and the tinkling glass falls silent and Veidt's breathing falls silent does he realize he is screaming.
His mask is wrapped around one hand (and that long-cauterized wound has split open, it stings viciously as everything rushes to fill the vacuum. It was always a mask. He was always Kovacs. Soon he will be nobody). Daniel's goggles sit heavily in the other, lenses freezing against his palm, memento mori.
Manhattan raises his hand. Hesitates. Snowflakes hang in an impossible matrix.
He throws more words, hears them tumble into existence and then cease to be. Fleeting and ineloquent, serving only to hasten his own end. Do it, do it.
Manhattan is easily persuaded. He tightens his fist around a nova of blue light. For a fraction of a moment Rorschach sees deep summer skies suspended endlessly over concrete rooftops; a burning afterimage of a bold figure and gentle eyes; hears an easy laugh.
Before he can say 'thank you', there is nothing but howling in his ears, and white, and oblivion.
It sears his retinas, so he closes his eyes again, just for a moment.
There is something sticky beneath his fingers and in the creases of his palms. He thinks it might be blood. It seems likely to him, though he cannot say why. He watches the sky while he tries to make sense of himself, of the garbage bag under his leg, and of why the warm, gritty asphalt feels so wrong.
The shadows stretch and deepen, and the geometric slices of sky overhead transition from chemical orange to a streetlit indigo, spread under a bank of dirty clouds.
(There are no stars left.)
There is the itch of healing skin on his forehead and around his left eye, and it triggers some recollection that he can't quite pin down. It slides like rain down a window, almost taking shape before parting and trickling away as he tries to grasp at it, pooling in some dark recess that he can only see when he doesn't look directly at it.
It eventually occurs to him that he is sprawled in a stinking alleyway in the dark, and that is probably not normal behavior. He should get up.
His joints ache and creak abominably, limbs stiff and sluggish to respond. The cold makes it worse, a stray thought informs him, but he ignores it because it doesn't make sense. It's warm here. He hauls himself to unsteady feet, one hand braced on greasy brickwork that is scribed with a dull patina of graffiti: pale horse; krystalnacht;
(falling glass, none of the fragments as sharp as the shard burrowing into his chest)
who watches the—
It's familiar. It's New York. There's the shriek and rumble of a passing train, ensconced deep in the city's belly, and here's some subconscious mechanism, a cued recall that tells him he's on Eighth Avenue, near Penn Plaza. Near Madison Square—
It all comes back, rolling over him and pushing down on him as though he's a mile underwater, pressure enough to crush him entirely. It fells him like a blow to the head, presses him to his hands and knees, bows his shoulders and makes him shudder and retch and moan.
—millions, millions—
And yet the train is still rumbling. There are no screams, no grotesque alien limbs. The asphalt under his palms does not bleed.
A bad dream. Hallucination? Desperation. He is driven mad. He is dead, has faced his judgment and this is his purgatory: tasked to scour the city clean for an eternity.
A car horn blares, bending with a Doppler shift as it passes the mouth of the alley.
Too visceral to be a figment of his imagination. A sham?
A hoax. It must have been a hoax. The writer, artist, musician and enough money to stage a production, to play his sick fantasy out in front of them all. But to what end?
Bile stings the inside of his nose and sits in the back of his throat, coats his mouth with vile flavor. He spits. His hands flex against the sidewalk and he pushes himself upright.
To what end?
Ozymandias must have been insane. Mind turned, a result of his excesses, his sense drowned in decadence and indulgences. Only explanation. Only thing that makes a modicum of sense, but that doesn't say much. A warped performance by someone with too much wealth and too much power, and it had ended—
It had ended.
It had all been for nothing; the city lives but his partner is dead, his friend, his—
And that glass splinter has barbs, but the pain is numbed under the cold rush of fury. It raises the hairs on his arms and grinds his teeth together. Veidt's neck under his hands was merely a prelude. Daniel will not go unavenged.
He hates this city. He hates this city, and he will choke the life from her fetid underbelly, squash every parasite that clings to her oilslick skin. Cut through to her very heart, and chase out the vermin that have hollowed it and left it an echoing void. He will be an instrument of justice; a hundred times more furious than anything they have previously known, because—
His mask is sticky under his fingers, and it tastes of salt and copper when he draws it over his face.
—because, what else can he do?
There will never be enough vengeance, but it's all he can do. It's all he can do.
It's his first priority; to take it back and look over his notes, refresh his muddled mind with the events that led up to this nightmare. It is doubly pragmatic—he would not want the evidence he had gathered on Veidt publicly known, if the world's smartest man is going to turn up missing and eventually dead. He is already thought of as paranoid and violent, he does not need to add 'delusional lunatic' to their list of grievances. Nor does he care to incriminate himself with evidence written in his own hand, enough to pin another murder on him.
(Guilty, though. Guilty.)
His stride falters as he recalls with a jolt: they know who he is, know Kovacs' face, and he is a wanted man. He instinctively moves deeper into the shadows. Daytime existence is going to be challenging. He will not be able to move freely. He is no longer invisible, no longer one of the disenfranchised, designed to go unnoticed and ignored.
Difficult, but there is value in hardship. His life was never easy.
He draws up in front of the New Frontiersman office. The shutters are down, so he slips around the building and attempts to pick the lock on the side door. Impatient after a minute or two of bouncing the pins, the door swings open with some gentle encouragement from his left foot instead, rattling noisily as it rebounds off the interior wall.
It's pitch black inside. He digs a flashlight out of his trench pocket, flicks it on. Smacks it with the heel of his hand until it works, barely. It's a piece of cheaply-manufactured garbage. He spares a wistful thought for his good flashlight, languishing in a box somewhere in Sing Sing.
He trails the feeble beam around the office, searching for the in-tray. He locates it under a drift of paper, scatters the loose leaf over the floor as he scrabbles through manila envelopes and parcels. Not there.
He doesn't even need his picks to open the shoddy filing cabinet lock, but again he comes up empty-handed.
He systematically ransacks every drawer, box and cabinet in the office.
"Hrm," he says to himself, and with a grudging sigh, rifles through the crank files. He feels slightly vindicated—but mostly frustrated—when he doesn't find his journal there, either.
He sweeps his flashlight around the room one more time. His eye is caught by a series of framed spreads on the wall. Some of them are of costumed heroes. He steps closer to inspect the article. It's familiar, from an edition published some months before the Keene Act was passed. There is an editorial on Nite Owl, on Doctor Manhattan and Ms Juspeczyk. The Comedian, and Ozymandias.
The page devoted to Rorschach is conspicuous in its absence.
He grunts, filing that curiosity away to think about later. For now, he has more pressing concerns.
Finding someplace to sleep, for a start. He can feel himself beginning to flag, his traitor body groaning under the strain of the past few days, mind wandering and mulling over inconsequential things. His downtime in the alleyway was evidently not a restful one. It's exasperating, but he needs to recuperate his strength.
His apartment is out of the question. It is no doubt already rented to a new occupant, probably some glory-seeker desperate to tread the same rotting boards as Rorschach had, strain their ears at the walls in the vain hope that they will speak his secrets.
They will be disappointed. He only ever talked in his sleep, and he knows whatever surfaced from the sludge at the back of his mind could only seed nightmares.
He idly wonders whether Shairp doubled the rent in the aftermath of his arrest, or maybe tripled it. Seems obvious that she would. Once a whore, always a whore.
His bolthole by the docks is occupied, cleaned up and used as the offices of a freight company. He must have forgotten to check it for some weeks, for it to have happened without his notice. The lapse dismays him. Dangerous to have nowhere to go to ground, dangerous to not be certain about his options.
He hunkers down in a grimy doorway, padlock leaking rust down the peeling paintwork, shabby and disused. As good a place as any. He tucks his mask into his pocket, pulls up the collar of his trench. He feels vulnerable without his hat to protect him from the chill night air, without something to hide his eyes in shadow.
He scrunches the rest of his face up as he rubs at the knotted muscles in his neck and shoulders (as he is disgusted by the grime that rolls under his fingertips and the unwashed stiffness of his scarf). He opens his eyes when a shadow falls across him, extinguishes the soft red of the morning light on the inside of his eyelids and sends his stomach into an uncontrollable lurch.
A longshoreman looms over him, weatherbeaten face hard-set and scowling, hardhat dangling beneath his folded arms. "This is private property," he says. He has a thick accent, Polish perhaps. An illegal immigrant taking yet another honest American job. "Get the fuck out of here, you bum."
Rorschach tightens his jaw as he gets to his feet, draws himself up and squares his shoulders. Waits for the man's expression to break as recognition sets in. Nothing, not even a flicker. No indication that the longshoreman realizes who he is talking to. Rorschach knows his mugshot was plastered above the fold of every newspaper in the city. Is it likely that this man is oblivious?
"Do you know who I am?" Rorschach rasps, voice cracked and uneven from sleep. He hates how imperious the question sounds, but the response will be telling.
The stevedore leans in, close enough that Rorschach can smell his breath, heavy with tobacco. Close enough to make him want to bare his teeth and growl. His hands ball into fists. If he is touched, he will not be held responsible.
"Apologies, your majesty," the man drawls, goading. "I did not recognize you without your jeweled crown." He grabs for Rorschach's scruff. "Get the fuck out."
The hardhat rattles noisily onto the cement, and Rorschach twitches as hot blood spatters his cheek. The longshoreman reels back, clasping his nose and grunting. The look on his face is gratifying, but Rorschach is not one to gloat.
He loses himself between the towering shipping containers, moving at pace away from sounds of outraged shouting. The docks were never their territory, though their leads occasionally brought Nite Owl and himself to the darkened warehouses and rotting piers. Often enough that the memories dive at him like spiteful ghosts, clinging to him as he escapes back into the city.
He's hot. It's warm. He smells. It's not the alleyway or the river, it's him, and the temperature is making the bloodstain on his trench swelter, disturbing the ingrained filth. The fetid odor is rolling off him in ripe waves, making him shudder and—
He stops abruptly and tilts his face skywards. He's not certain of the time, but it feels like nine-thirty at the latest, and it's fully light and warm, like spring, like late April. No icy crystals chasing his breath, no bite of winter air. No smashed pumpkins on the neighborhood stoops, soft flesh stringy and decomposing.
He exhales loudly, soft vowel sounds marking his sudden realization.
(So obvious; he's slipping, badly.)
He turns on his heel and breaks into a jog, back towards a main street. He knows where he is. What he needs to know is when he is. His hands shake. Please, he thinks, barely daring to hope that he could be this lucky, that he would be deserving of—
He fumbles a quarter from the depths of his trench pocket, feeds it into a newspaper box. Please, please.
The date is Thursday, April 19th, 1979 and there is the headline, irrefutable and undeniable in bold print, there in black and white and buckling under his fingers, announcing the retirement of the masked hero, Ozymandias.
The paper falls to the ground, pages spreading haphazardly, skittering over the sidewalk as a light wind catches them and tugs them into the gutter. Rorschach steadies himself against the newspaper box. He takes a deep breath, and another.
Eventually his surroundings stop blurring and shifting out of focus, and he can crouch to collect up the drifting pages before they become urban tumbleweed. He folds the paper under his arm, tight to his side, secreting it as though it is something illicit to be hidden from casual observation.
The headline is still the same the second time he reads it, the newsprint dappled under green shadow and midday sun. He perches on a section of the wrought-iron fence that laces through Washington Square Park and lines the pathways that meander around the fountain and the arch. There are many dead beneath his feet here; the nameless and indigent, centuries gone. He finds it morbidly appropriate, for reasons he can't quite articulate.
He skims the article quickly at first. Looking at Veidt's face makes something squirm and crawl beneath his skin, so he folds the paper lengthwise, splitting his smug expression, and tries again. His eyes are immediately drawn to a familiar name two-thirds of the way down the column, but he forces himself not to skip ahead, to read slowly and thoroughly (it helps to steady his hands and calm his stilted breathing).
The journalism is typical liberal propaganda, full of whitewashed half-truths glorying in Veidt's celebrity, garbage written to appeal to the lowest common denominator. He is slightly depressed to have spent money on it. If he had been thinking more clearly, he could easily have found a paper abandoned on a subway platform or tucked between the slats of a park bench. He furrows his brow, digs around in his trench coat pocket for a pen. This will take some deconstruction.
He only has his own knee to rest on, and the ballpoint rips through the soft, cheap paper, even folded over. He makes a displeased noise and gathers himself up, moving toward the chess tables. They are mostly unoccupied, though soon it will be busy. He glances at his wrist; remembers that his watch is keeping good company with his flashlight. He looks up at the sun instead. Must be almost lunchtime, and then this place will be teeming with corporate drones and NYU students, all desperately trying to break up the tedium of their day. Best be gone before then.
Lunch. His stomach growls demandingly as he tries to remember the last time he ate. Matters little, he brought everything up in the alleyway. The smell still clings to the cuffs of his trench coat, a sour high note over the reek of sweat and old blood and heavy smoke.
He frowns at himself, at the tangents his mind seems determined to take. He pushes the pointless distractions aside, returns his attention to the newspaper, pen hovering.
Most of what Veidt has to say is trite and fatuous; Rorschach grudgingly notes that much of his eloquence has been dulled by the poor writing. There's a paragraph he circles, nonetheless. One that makes reference to 'pursuing a personal project,' and an 'ambitious, long-term plan'.
Of course, it could be yet another Veidt Enterprises venture. More consumer fodder like the cologne or the action figures. On the other hand, he could be cracking, even now, and there is no telling how many he had murdered—will murder—in order to facilitate his black fantasy, his twisted experiment. His—
His hoax?
No. Wait—
No.
This is not the New York he left behind for Antarctica, days ago. This is not the same New York that criminalized its heroes, drove Nite Owl into retirement and Rorschach into the shadows. This—
This is not his New York.
And he finally lets that knowledge impact him, full force. The illusion cracks and melts like breached ice, sucks him down into the dark, freezing waters beneath and leaves him gasping.
Somewhere else, along some tangled skein, there is a reality where unnatural flesh is putrefying in blood-washed streets, while a hero lies cold and lifeless at the edge of the world. Where the entire city is a potter's field and monoliths to Veidt are built upon the mass grave of the millions he murdered.
His tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, thick and dry. The pen clatters to the table, rolls in an arc and falls to the ground, forgotten.
He did it.
He did it, and he will do it again, is going to do it again. He must be stopped, at any cost. Must be—
"Hey. Hey... you okay?"
Rorschach looks up. A man stands next to him, leaning over slightly, face pulled into an expression like concern. Cheap brown suit, muddied shoes, tie unclipped and dangling. Glasses. Rorschach's throat tightens, but the man is a stranger.
"Uh, sorry," he's saying, faltering as he gives Rorschach the once over.
Rorschach knows how he must look; dark-eyed and drawn, stinking. Hunched over disorganized sheets of newspaper and trembling as though the world is ending all around him. Yet, he still waits for that spark of recognition and the fear that should follow. What he gets is the tangible discomfort of someone who has accidentally made eye contact with a vagrant.
"Here," the man says, fumbling a couple of dollar bills onto the table. Predictable, self-serving response of the wealthy, designed to alleviate their personal guilt. So very magnanimous. "Just don't spend it on..."
Rorschach is too busy grimacing indignantly at the money to care that he trails off, backs up and leaves, not quite hastily enough to be impolite.
As Kovacs, he had depended on the alms of anonymous strangers for a long time, regardless of their motives, but never would one have dared to press charity into Rorschach's hands—and certainly not accompanied with such condescension.
Of course, he thinks, dipping his hand into his pocket, fingertips skimming the wadded latex. '79 cares nothing for Kovacs.
Rorschach is still the only face they know.
The vendor does not flinch or cower. Does not call for help or for the police, or in fact exhibit any suspicion beyond what Rorschach expects—and with breaking clarity, he finds that he is expecting a particular reaction. He is more self-aware than he can ever remember being, and if he can barely stand himself, why should anyone else?
Regardless, his suspicions are confirmed. Kovacs is anonymous, still. His disguise is intact.
He indulges himself with an edition of the New Frontiersman (although he's certain he must already own it, somewhere, somewhen) and folds it around the paper he bought earlier.
He wanders the Lower East Side throughout the afternoon and into the evening, scouting out derelict tenement blocks for a likely bolthole. While exhaustion, necessity or an injury has occasionally found him hunched in a doorway or on a park bench or squeezed between dumpsters for the night, he's never truly been homeless. He dislikes losing that small measure of security: a place to keep evidence; scavenged medical supplies; scant morsels of food. Never anywhere he would call home, but somewhere he can sleep well enough.
(Somewhere with clean sheets, and the smell of engine oil and jet exhaust. Somewhere he can sleep securely, and wake to find a warm mug of coffee tucked next to the cot leg.
But he can't go there, not yet.
Not until—)
The newspapers make him ungainly, wedged in the inside pocket of his trench where his journal used to sit, but he manages to haul himself up a drainpipe and onto the fire escape of a particularly dilapidated tenement. He elbows in the boarded-up window with a little more force than it strictly needed.
A shake of his flashlight, and the dingy room is revealed to be mostly abandoned. Scattered drug paraphernalia and a heap of unlaundered clothes on a bare mattress are the only signs of occupancy. He tries the light switch. No power; most likely squatters, then.
"—seriously man, I heard something, I ain't fucking having a bad trip, shut the fuck up—"
Muffled voices nearby. Rorschach clicks off the flashlight, slips his mask from its pocket. The sun has almost set, distended and sweltering on the horizon, streaking red across the sky, drenching everything a sanguine hue. The fabric of his mask is like bright arterial blood, clotting as he draws it over his face.
He steps behind the door as it opens.
"Aw, what the hell? Someone busted in the window!" A couple of skinny punks with lank hair and twitchy limbs. Rorschach knows the kind: strung-out bottom feeders, dangerous only in large numbers. Easily spooked.
"I fucking told you man, some motherfucker going for our stash. Is it...?"
One of them crouches, lifts a corner of the mattress. "Nah, ain't been touched, man. What—"
Rorschach clears his throat.
The pair spin around. One of them stares gape-mouthed; the other has enough time to shriek, "what the fuck is that!" before Rorschach slams his fist into his stomach.
"Get out of here," he rasps, shoving the wheezing kid into his friend, driving them both out of the door and into the hallway beyond. They stumble backwards, eyes dilated and cavernous in the dusk light.
"Where's his face, man," one of them says with horrified reverence, clinging to his groaning, hiccuping friend with hands that float like pale ghosts. "Where's his face!"
Rorschach takes a step towards them, and whatever paralyzing fear or vestige of courage was holding them there disintegrates. They hurtle out of the apartment in a frenzied panic, raving about ghosts and haunted places. Rorschach wrinkles his nose at the stench of warm urine left in their wake. They might come back when they are sober again, but he doubts it.
For now, adrenaline is flushing through him in a sweet pulse, and night has fallen. The city calls to him, howling like a cat in heat, a familiar sordid chorus.
(Reassuring that he still has a purpose.)
Orchard Street is easy pickings. He interrupts a pair of furtive creatures tucked into a side street, skulking against a shuttered dime store window. Money and small packets discreetly change hands, lit dimly by a sphere of dirty sodium that mires their faces.
Rorschach drags them out into the saturated light of the street. It reveals their expressions with the suddenness of a shock cut, mouths widened grotesquely in terror, neon flickering over them and etching fear into their faces, twisting them like any number of horror film victims. Their surprise seems disproportionate, as though they'd never seen him before.
They loll unconscious as he checks their pockets and then lashes them to a spark hydrant, stretching their sleeves and knotting them together when he can't find any rope on his person. He stands over them for a long moment, fold of cash in one hand, packets of white powder in the other.
The money is unpleasant to hold, tattered and greasy and tainted with vice, and he should destroy it or turn it in to the precinct house along with the drugs. Take it out of circulation.
He thinks of his bolthole. It's not secure, with its broken window and easily jimmied lock, but that is not his main concern. His old apartment was not secure either (and he suspects Shairp regularly snooped), but nobody knew the secret places: which floorboard could be pried up; where best to get at the hollow space behind the drywall. But this new place, it was favored by squatters and junkies, and they always know the secret places. He cannot keep any measure of security there. Only good for when downtime is a necessity, nothing more.
The money rest heavily in his palm, heavier than the drugs.
He looks down at the two punks, slumped in the gutter where they belong. Nudges one with the toe of his boot. No response. He makes a noise in the back of his throat. Justice has been dispensed to his satisfaction, he decides. Anything beyond physical punishment has not been part of his MO for many years. He is uncertain why he is being so indecisive about this.
He empties the packets of snow into a storm drain and tucks the cash into his pocket. He can use the dirty money to sustain himself (can maintain his dignity, rather than scrabble for loose change, sign resting uncomfortably on his shoulder), to better destroy the criminals who taint it. Fitting. Ironic, even. He can find a respectable landlord, and introduce it back into the economy through legal means. A purifying process. He can justify that.
New situation, new rules. He can justify that.
He can.
He steps over the prone body of a would-be rapist and makes his way back to his hideout, leaving the city to its own grim devices.
He sits on the sill instead, nearby streetlight spilling its chemical light across the newspaper in his hands. He finished reading the article a little while ago, and is battling with a slew of unpleasant responses. His hands crumple the edge of the pages. He feels sick to his stomach. Angry, he tells himself as his eyes stray once more to the offending sentence. Just a small aside, throwaway words.
—states that his partner, the hero known as Nite Owl, will not be retiring.
Angry, he thinks again, trying to swallow around the knot in his throat. Years and years ago, a part of him had been desperate to read something akin to those words. He'd stamped it down and ignored it because that's what he does, but here is a reminder, vomited in front of him in cheap newsprint, mocking and cruel. He should be angry.
"Ozymandias?" he says to the empty room. "Daniel? Veidt?"
He pitches the paper out of the window in disgust and watches it plummet to the sidewalk below. Errant sheets shake loose and drift slowly in its wake.
He unfolds the New Frontiersman. The familiar rhetoric is a relief after the vacuous fluff of the tabloid, but the content is largely similar. Veidt is decidedly vague even through Godfrey's more perceptive eye. There's scathing criticism of his retirement, a sentiment of un-Americanism that Rorschach is glad to agree with. Derision of his new focus on business and profit. Another mention of Nite Owl as Ozymandias' erstwhile partner.
He briefly wonders if this is Manhattan's idea of a joke. Rorschach doesn't think much of his sense of humor.
Thinking, he presses his tongue into the gap where a tooth used to sit. Of course, it does make sense. Daniel was always companionable, eager to work as part of a team. He would seek another partner, in the absence of Rorschach. And an absence of Rorschach would be key to Manhattan's reason for bringing him here in particular.
Why he did that instead of reducing him to his constituent particles as he had quite clearly asked, well. That is something currently beyond his understanding.
As it is, there is no indication that Rorschach exists here. Ever existed here, before now.
He feels out of time.
(He thinks of men with cruel fists and of being touched until he is sick, and of overripe fruit and cigarettes. He thinks of how dog's blood feels, oozing over his hands, hot and stinking like its breath had been.
Remembers pepper burning in his nose, bare skin of his cheek pressed against the cracked sidewalk.
He thinks of the time he was almost gutted, sliced navel to sternum, and how slippery hands had held him together, panicked voice telling him it's okay, just hang on, I can fix this.
He thinks of all the ways it could have ended.
Stay with me, buddy.
He hopes Walter's death was merciful.)
He stares into iced-over glass, shreds the pale skin from his face to reveal a grinning death's head. That sloughs away in turn, though he doesn't see what's underneath. His vision is suddenly obscured, and he has to claw himself out of a miasma of scarlet droplets that thicken the air, that cling to him and contract like a womb.
He's wading knee-deep into cold cold hot meat, putrid, rotting. There's slick fluid pooling under his tongue and it tastes of iron, it is sometimes viscous like raw egg and sometimes it is leaden, oily like smoke. It always renders him mute.
Wood creaks, shrill and disturbing. Ice blue skies expand to crush him and he cannot make a sound.
The sagging mattress looks even more suspect by daylight, and Rorschach is glad he chose to not sleep on it. Living in his own filth is one thing. Living in someone else's is a different matter entirely. He tips it up against the wall so he doesn't have to look at the stains, to stop his mind analyzing and feeding back in lurid detail exactly how they got there.
His skin crawls and shudders under layers of stiff fabric as he pulls on his trench. He doesn't feel any better about things than he did yesterday, but he has something he needs to do.
More efficient, he'd always insist, grinning foolishly. Rorschach had come up with the goods first almost every time. Kovacs, W.J.
There's the rapid click-click of heeled shoes on the polished floor, slowing gradually and halting nearby. He looks up. A clerk stands, frowning, nose wrinkled as she glances around. She notices him with a start and smooths her face out, distaste still pulling at the corners of her mouth. Her skirt is an inappropriate length.
"Sir," she says, as he fixes her with a blank look. "We close at one p.m. today."
The clock on the wall reads 12:35. "Will be done by then," he says, gruffly. She nods, and strides away, sharp report of her footfalls echoing through the archives. He rubs the flat of his hand against his suit jacket as though he can press the smell out of it, thins his lips unhappily.
After a moment he manages to shake himself out of this latest bout of painful cognizance. No time for that now, or ever. He has no tolerance for self-pity, particularly his own. The index cards show him where to find the relevant microfiche. He starts with the vital records.
KOVACS, Sylvia Joanna (Née GLICK)
BORN: 1919, January 17th
DATE OF DEATH: 1956, August 14th (age 37)
PRINCIPLE CAUSE OF DEATH AND RELATED CAUSES:
Corrosive injury of the stomach
Severe chemical burns to esophagus
Severe hypernatremia
Seizure
DUE TO OR CONSEQUENCE OF:
Forced ingestion of sodium hydroxide cleaning solution ("Drano")
HOMICIDE
"Good," Rorschach mutters, and even after all this time he cannot find a more fitting sentiment. He tries to remember why he wanted to look at her death certificate in the first place. Making sure, perhaps.
The glossy film slides beneath his fingers, leaves a scratched, off-white square in its wake. He nudges the next sheet into place and scrolls through to the correct index number. He finds he is bracing himself with clenched teeth and takes a deep breath, adjusts the dial to bring the text into focus.
KOVACS, Wanda Josephine
He frowns, scrolls back an entry; then forward one. Double-checks the card, then focuses his attention back on the reader.
BORN: 1940, March 21st
DATE OF DEATH: 1964, April 26th (age 24)
PRINCIPLE CAUSE OF DEATH AND RELATED CAUSES:
Something lurches in his gut, and he stands abruptly. His chair teeters over, clattering to the floor and dislodging his trench from where it was slung over the back.
He takes a few paces away from the reader, needing to breathe suddenly, fingers pulling at the scarf at his neck. A shiver works its way through him from the base of his spine to the back of his neck, raising the hair there, like someone's walking over his grave.
That's a little too apt. He wants to scrape the idea out of his brain.
He rights the chair, just stands there with his hand clenched around the top, white-knuckled. The viewer has become some kind of malevolent seer, offering a glimpse of his ultimate fate, and he regards it with the appropriate level of dread.
He recognizes his mortality, has imagined many deaths for himself. He has never wanted to know exactly how it will end, because he knows life is often cruelly poetic in its irony. He is not superstitious, but he does not want to carry the subtle influence of such knowledge, even as distorted as it would be through the cracked lens of this new world.
He has what he came here for: confirmation that he (she) is—that he will not encounter his... counterpart.
The clock ticks around to 12:54.
He gathers up the microfiche sheets, conscientiously returns them to their rightful places, shrugs on his trench and leaves.
It's not important, he tells himself as he heads to the library, weaving through stationary traffic and harried, jostling pedestrians. Not important who she might have been, who she could have been. She is not, was not him. Was never going to be him, could never...could never...
Female, he thinks, with a fresh surge of disbelief, and then: whore, so inextricably associated, sharp and stinging like a slap across his face. Because what kind of chance, living like that. What kind of chance would she have had, living with that.
Those who are strong enough, struggle.
A pained noise escapes his throat before he can choke it down. The crowd opens up around him for a beat, faceless citizens skirting him with hive-mind uniformity, unconsciously aware of the anomaly in their midst.
Then the crowd swells and he is swallowed again, pulled along like flotsam caught in a riptide.
He wonders if he is allowed to feel betrayed by someone who has never met him.
He leaves the library in much the same state he left the Municipal Archive, though not without having garnered some more important information. Keene never ran for senator, ergo there is no Keene Act. For some years there has been a tenuous alliance between NYPD and a loose association of vigilantes: the Crimebusters.
He swipes a paper from an overflowing trash can. Veidt, Veidt, Veidt, facetious prattle. He scans the articles for a mention of Nite Owl, and finds himself, instead.
A subhead reads New Mask?, followed by a few column inches of witness reports, recounting some of his nocturnal activities. Some conjecture over whether more masks will appear from under Ozymandias' glittering shadow.
The Inkblot, they call him. He lets his mouth curl in a brief smirk.
They won't call him that for long.
A low-pitched keening noise cuts into Rorschach's skull, gradually growing in pitch and intensity as his grip tightens. He can feel the resistance of bone under his fingers, the subtle creak that tells him he's pressing too hard, any more and the punk's face will break. He imagines it caving in like a rotten watermelon—his fingers sinking in and splattering the pulpy insides all over the brickwork—but in reality it's never that easy, nor that dramatic.
Despite what some people believe, he is not a sadist. Beyond a primal, lizard-brained satisfaction, he does not take any particular pleasure in brutality. It's simply the most practical and effective course of action most of the time. It sends an emphatic message, and the reputation he garners as a consequence is useful.
Was useful. He has been rebuilding it on a nightly basis, piecemeal: one mugger, dealer, pimp at a time. For each one he takes down, five more learn his name. It's dirty work, but he has to break a few eggs
(to save billions)
to make an omelet.
He shudders, eases up. The keen becomes a gurgle.
"Fucking mask," the kid gasps, and then, "please," as terror finally crests behind the stoned glass-sheen of his eyes. The back of his head is pressed into the alley wall, face and hair smeared with paint where Rorschach rolled him into his own graffiti. The aerosol can rattles around their feet where it was dropped; yellow, fluorescent.
Rorschach draws his arm back, feels the tension winding deep into his muscles and releases it with a snap of his fist. He tries not to feel gratified as the kid's skull rebounds against the brickwork. Tries not to feel repelled at the crunch of cartilage. Tries to not feel anything at all, but that's harder than he remembers it being.
The punk folds to the blacktop, makes a wet, bubbling sound. Rorschach stares down at him, at the blood dribbling from his nose and between cupped fingers, then at the interrupted slogan thrown across the brickwork. Who watches—
He was cocky, overconfident. Far too sure of himself, for a feckless excuse of a criminal. Impudent. It only underscores the fact that Rorschach no longer has decades of notoriety working in his favor.
He shakes out his hand, massages each knuckle in turn. They're bruised and dark with blood. Not all of it belongs to other people. His nails are ragged and torn, finger joints swollen. They ache with it, somewhere deep down that popping and rubbing can't reach. He resolves to acquire some gloves, and slots this new task into his hierarchy of priorities.
Later on, he moves it closer to the top of his mental list when he climbs a broken fire escape and jagged metal bites into his palms.
Good metaphor. His hands move to his chest, pat at the void of his inside pocket. There's still empty space where his journal should sit. He reorders his priorities once again: new journal, then new gloves. He frowns at himself, annoyed that he is becoming overly concerned with such minutiae.
He tilts his head back and tucks up the mask to taste the air, exhaust and smoke and the burning grease of fast food. The sky is cloudless and chill, not so much that his breath ghosts but enough that it's healthy encouragement to keep moving.
He takes a half-dozen paces back, runs and launches himself forward. He feels the reflexive bunch and stretch of his body, the fraction of time where it reaches something like equilibrium, and then the minute, instinctive adjustments before the jarring impact of his feet on the roof of the adjacent building.
He crouches for a moment then straightens up, adjusts his fedora. His knees complain, and there is a brief flare of pain in his ankle that quickly subsides back to an ignorable dull throb.
This would be a lot easier with his grapnel gun. He regrets the loss of it beyond the mild annoyance he feels over his missing flashlight and watch, and its absence is perhaps even more pronounced than that of his journal. As much as he never admitted it to Daniel, it was remarkably useful.
(It was a gift.)
He wonders if this Nite Owl will be willing to part with such a practical tool. He wonders if he has even built one, lacking a partner who often scales rooftops. He doesn't imagine that Ozymandias would deign to climb a drainpipe.
He immediately cuts off that line of thought before it can spiral out into something uncomfortable. He hasn't given the discovery of their... partnership any consideration beyond anger and frustration. The implications are too brutal when it comes to his overarching goal here. He will deal with it when it becomes necessary.
He twists and lowers himself, catches a tentative foothold on the ledge below. It's a small leap onto yet another fire escape ladder, and from there, only seconds until his feet are back on alleyway asphalt. He hunches his shoulders as he stalks through spilled garbage, weaving between trashcans and dumpsters.
"Hey," says a voice from behind him. "You."
He turns slowly. There are a number of youths emerging from the shadows, slinking out of a doorway. Leather jackets and tattered shirts, hair pulled back like samurai, as though they know anything of honor. One is tapping the flat edge of a blade against his palm in a syncopated rhythm.
"Looking for a good time?" Their leader flashes a provocative leer, sharp like dog's teeth but the bravado is paper thin. His eyes flicker to the adjoining alley to the right, and he licks his lips.
This is a different species of criminal from the tagger. Still callow, but these punks have something to prove. They know enough of Rorschach that they want to take him down as a trophy kill. They know enough of him to realize that he is a threat. Stupid to try, but smart enough that they plan an escape even as they challenge him.
Good.
"Yes," he says, the word sparking like a knife against grindstone.
The punk circles, a gauche attempt to get the upper hand. Rorschach turns, keeps him pinned under his gaze, and it's obvious that his mask is aggravating the kid, keeps him from staring back. His contempt is palpable, and if Rorschach were a lesser man, he might feel inclined to goad.
As it is, he breathes and stares and lets adrenaline sharpen him. It feels like anticipation sinking into his muscles, a taut energy waiting to be unleashed, prickling static before a lightning strike. The kid keeps glancing to the alleyway. He won't last long.
"Fag."
He could be anywhere, any when, but some things never change.
Rorschach feints away from the amateur swipe of a blade and catches the kid with a left hook to the jaw. He makes a sharp, shocked gasp and staggers backwards, hand pressing to his face, stumbles until his shoulders hit the wall behind him. He gives himself a shake, spits, hefts the knife in his hand and if Rorschach doesn't think much of his combat skill, he can at least admire his persistence.
The kid lunges, and his face meets Rorschach's knee with a crunch. Perhaps he will learn to cut his losses in future.
Leader taken out, it usually goes one of two ways. It's satisfying when they turn tail and run. It's even more so when they don't, when instead they hurl themselves at him, driven to revenge by their stunted sense of loyalty.
This night, they are good to him.
Rorschach loses himself in the chaos, blood pounding with exertion as his body moves two steps ahead of cognizant thought, riding on pure instinct. Another punk goes reeling back, booted into the alleyway wall, and somewhere on his periphery there is the snap and flutter of leather.
He hesitates only a second, a series of moments where the rhythm of his violence is lost and becomes discordant, jarring, and then he forcibly flat-lines his thoughts. He drives his fist into an unprotected belly and then into a soft throat, spins, and he is face to face with Nite Owl, midnight for eyes and a hunter's smile.
The first time they met, Rorschach had merely been a man in a costume, and had recognized another man in a costume. After decades and ash, that is not what he sees now.
He catches a sharp breath on his tongue, chokes it into a snarl as he deflects a thick-soled boot aimed at his head. This is not how it went, the first time. His fedora flips into the gutter, but his more pressing concern is the fist striking for his ribs, and what is Nite Owl is doing, why doesn't he—
Rorschach parries, blocks each successive blow with the ease of long practice. They have sparred together a hundred times and Rorschach has watched him a hundred times more. He knows his partner's moves intimately, knows how to counter his cheap shots—block with the forearm, twist away so he can't cripple him with a hit to the groin—but Rorschach keeps on the defensive, intends to stay that way.
This Nite Owl is still youthful, unlined under the cowl. His body is trim and his technique is disciplined and technical, lacking the recklessness to his form that Rorschach realizes was his own influence. It's possible that he has the advantage here, could dart past Rorschach's guard, swoop in and pin him. It has happened before.
But the assault abruptly ceases, and Nite Owl steps back, panting lightly. Rorschach keeps his fists raised.
"Come on," Nite Owl says, and he sounds just the same, just like Daniel. If Rorschach makes a noise, it's because he's still keyed up from the fight.
"Come on," Nite Owl repeats, and this time he sounds more like a stranger. He flows back into a combat stance, sleek and dangerous. "Okay, you're good, kid—really good—but you can't do this thing if you're squeamish." He gestures, a flick of his hand that's far too close to being a taunt. "Come on, give me your best shot."
Kid.
He thinks—
He doesn't know, and he's hazing him, like he's—
He really doesn't know. He doesn't recognize him at all. There's no flicker of recollection behind the goggles, no affability rounding his words. He sounds brittle and forced in that way he does when he feels upset, or threatened.
If Rorschach makes a noise, it's because he's keyed. If he's shaking, it's because of the adrenaline. He doesn't try to speak.
Nite Owl tilts his head, tucks his chin down and Rorschach can picture the questioning rise of his eyebrows behind the goggles' mirrored glass. The familiarity of the gesture is unbearable.
Rorschach shrugs at the bodies littering the alleyway. He trusts himself with an echoed word, sent rasping through the night air. "Squeamish?"
The sharp edge of Nite Owl's battle-grin falters and becomes unstrung, shaken out by something like inquisitiveness. Rorschach bends to scoop up his hat so he doesn't have to look at him, turns on his heel as he tugs the fedora into place. Too soon for this.
Nite Owl doesn't follow, nor does he call after him like Daniel might have done.
Rorschach knows what providence granted him this chance, and how ungrateful it is to resent it, but there is something cruel in all of this. He wonders if Manhattan will realize, will recall Rorschach's snow-numb wish and return to spare him, turn him to salt, scatter him to the winds.
He doubts it.
He looks back as he turns out of the alleyway. Nite Owl is watching him, arms folded and head cocked like he's puzzling out a lead, and for a moment it's 1964, it's the heart of summer and they're working a case. He's on reconnaissance, and they'll rendezvous later.
The material is stiff, caked with grime and crud. Unlike wounds, cloth can stand to remain unwashed. Flexing it sends wafts of odor into the room. It makes him snort and breathe through his mouth, nose wrinkled. It used to bother him, the damp smell of his apartment clinging to his clothes and hair, the rank odor of a hundred back-alleys, the tang of blood on his uniform. He doesn't know when he stopped noticing it.
He presses his lips into a pale line, folds the jacket and sets it to the side. There's enough cash in the trench's hidden pockets for a month's rent, maybe two if he's lucky. No self-respecting landlord would take on a tenant in his state, though. They would suspect him, and he will not abide any level of scrutiny. Too intrusive and too dangerous.
There are plenty of less savory landlords who will take him, no questions asked, concerned only with the money and not with the source. But scum attracts scum, and he will not find himself in another hellhole like that.
Daniel, though. He'd seen him with the missing buttons and grubby cuffs, and had offered to heat up his food. He can hear the pity in his voice now, and Rorschach is not certain that it's an embellishment of his memory.
(He makes a mental note to investigate at a later date.)
Sitting on the hard plastic bench, wrapped in his trench coat while his suit washes, he thinks it was a wise decision to seek out an empty establishment. He can see a distorted reflection of himself in the front of the dryer: pale, bony legs protruding from the bottom of his coat; hands tucked under his arms; face drawn tight. He looks like a pervert, and, irrationally, he feels like one.
Someone passes by on the street and it sets his heart shuddering in his throat. The chill coursing down his spine and prickling up his arms doesn't subside until long after the person walks on. He wills the dryer to finish its cycle so he can get dressed and get out.
After an eon, it does. He dresses hurriedly, fabric still warm as he pulls on socks and undershirt, buttons his shirt cuffs. It feels tighter, too fragile against his skin—too soft, as though it will tear like tissue paper—though it's better when he shrugs on the hard shell of his trench.
The knees of his pants are threadbare and faded, his shirt irrevocably grayed, but there's nothing to be done about that. No amount of detergent can fix the frayed edges of his scarf, either.
He checks each machine's coin return before he leaves. Habit.
At some point he stops thinking and starts dreaming.
He is lying on his back, somewhere. He can't tell where, because the world ceases to exist anywhere beyond the shoulder of the man who is bent over him. This seems normal. He is not worried. The man is a stranger, though Rorschach knows he doesn't like him. He's familiar in an untouchable way.
The man has a needle, and he is stitching Rorschach's mouth shut. It hurts in the abstract, a theoretical pain, only the itching of a ghost limb and not the real, sweat-sharp sting of a wound being sutured. He is speaking in tongues as he sews, a glossolalia of Masonic symbolism that slides over Rorschach and leaves cryptic geometric imprints on the inside of his skull.
Rorschach's legs part. The man pushes them further, and further still. Too far, and Rorschach needs to bring them together, to draw himself closed, but he has the weight and strength of thistledown. He's tearing, straight up the middle. The only thing that is holding him together in the end is the thread.
Wrong tenacity, he tries to say, tries to yell, because he is panicking now. He remembers this much: if the thread is stronger than the fabric, the fabric will rip before the thread breaks. It's like shouting into the wind. His throat hurts with the effort, but he does not make a sound.
He wakes up sweltering and disgustingly hard, the midday sun glaring in his face.
The lock is cheap and would be easy to slip open with a knife or credit card, but there are ways to remedy that.
He tugs the window open and leans out, casing the side of the building to make sure there is an adequate route to street level or up onto the roof. Fire escape is in good order; alley below is narrow and looks as though it will be badly lit come night-time. He grunts in approval.
"It's not the nicest view," the landlady says. Ms. Green is in her early forties, reedy, neat and bland with a gray skirt suit and legal pad. She has been generally inoffensive so far, but Rorschach wishes she would stop fidgeting with her expensive pen and being habitually apologetic.
"Good enough," he says, closing the window over. He slides a hand into his pants pocket, touches the fold of bills tucked there.
"Okay, that's fine then." Her pen goes click-click. Rorschach once incapacitated two felons using only a pen. "So, get your details to me and I'll review your application, then we can go from there, mister...?"
"Kovacs," Rorschach says, and with the realization that this is in fact going be a tiresome exercise in bureaucracy that will eventually amount to nothing, asks her, "What details."
"Kovacs. That's an interesting name," she says, jotting on her notepad. "Current and past addresses with contact details for previous landlords. Your, ah, employer, and the length of your employment. Just the usual references." She frowns at his irredeemably scuffed shoes, at the tear in his suit jacket and then squints at his face. "It sounds European. Eastern European."
"I am American, Ms. Green," Rorschach says. He dislikes the passive accusation that is her tone. "Believe in an honest day's work."
He doesn't care that this sentiment seems to take her aback. She plucks at her hair and straightens her blouse, her expression all flat lines. "Yes, of course. Let me show you out," she says.
His neighbor is a whore.
Rorschach clips shoulders with a man in the stairwell, and it's only when he sees the woman leaning in her doorway that he realizes. She's young, naive and ugly, illuminated by the light in her room. He can see the space between her legs and between her breasts, and shadows delineate the swell of her belly. She watches him watch her, rakes dull and starving eyes over him and curls a smile with lips like bruised vulva.
He sits on the sagging cot in his room and feels sick at the thought of her.
Rorschach keeps back, trails him as he swaggers along the waterfront. He is a broad silhouette against the black of the Hudson, shotgun slung over his back as he pulls on the stub of a cigar. He takes one last draw before flicking the butt in an arc. It scatters brief embers into the void of the river.
Blake cuts between a pair of freight containers. He seems perfectly complacent in his patrol, hasn't looked over his shoulder even once, and that's how Rorschach knows that Blake is entirely aware that he has a tail. As a consummate professional, it's not in Blake's nature to ignore this fact. Rorschach expects to be confronted very soon.
What he does not expect, as he steps out from the other end of the shipping crates, is the barrel of a shotgun wedged behind his ear. It skews his fedora and grates against the bone of his jaw when he opens his mouth.
"Good evening, Comedian." He keeps his voice perfectly level. He has never liked guns, though it would be narrow-minded of him to find fault in Blake's methods. He has always gotten results.
"Dockside is my stomping ground, newbie," Blake says. There's a compact noise as he pulls the bolt and chambers a round. At this range, the sound alone would make most men cringe like a frightened dog. Most men. "What the fuck are you doing."
"Am I cramping your style."
There's silence for a beat, and then Blake laughs, deep and smoke-rough and not at all sincere. He lowers his weapon. "Well, you got balls, I'll give you that."
Rorschach straightens his hat and turns to face him. The yellow badge smiles, pinned to Blake's harness, blithely ignorant of its eventual fate.
"Been hearing things 'bout you. Come to play with the big—the hell?"
Rorschach tilts his head and frowns, but his puzzlement doesn't last long when Blake's thick fingers prod at his cheek hard enough to push his head back. He catches Blake's wrist, feels the flex of sinew through the padded leather of the man's glove as he casts him away. "Don't touch me," Rorschach growls, shoulders drawn up tight and tense.
"Easy, tiger." Blake chuckles, routine humor that doesn't pretend to touch his eyes. He fishes a fresh cigar from his belt pouch. "Just 'preciating your squishy face. That's why they call you the Inkblot, huh?"
"Tabloids have no imagination." He rolls his shoulders back, raises his chin. "Rorschach."
"So they saw your mask and picked the first thing that came into their heads. That bother you?" He bites the cap off his cigar, spits it out. "Cause there's a word for that."
"The irony hasn't escaped me," Rorschach says.
"Okay, sure, whatever. Let's get down to brass tacks: whatcha chasin' me for? See, I got a meeting with an important associate here and he ain't too trusting. He don't take kindly to strangers, and I don't take kindly to having my mark spooked by an amateur blundering in on my game."
Rorschach curls his lip; two decades of experience warns him to let it go. "Tell me about Veidt," he says instead.
"Pick up a newspaper." Blake's face is illuminated in the sudden flare of his lighter. The livid scar creeping across his cheek is freshly-healed, not yet worn into his face.
"I want to know about his project," Rorschach presses.
Blake blows a stream of pungent smoke into Rorschach's face. "The fuck should I know? You ain't much of a private dick if you think I give a damn about anything he's throwin' his Nazi gold at. Go ask his ex."
Rorschach would rather stab himself in the ear than listen to Daniel, the shade of Daniel, talk about Veidt. "Nite Owl?" he says, to cover the spark of temper that is threatening to catch. He lets it smoulder.
"Yeah. Bird-boy. Feed him a cracker and he'll sing for ya." Blake snorts, leaning with one foot propped against the freight container, cigar clenched between his teeth. "Now get the fuck out of here before I tar your scrawny ass."
Rorschach wants to warn Blake about Veidt, but he remembers what Veidt told them: Blake had discovered the island while on government reconnaissance. Things are different here. With no Keene Act, Blake may never work for the government. He won't discover Veidt's plan, won't be murdered as a consequence.
The house of cards begins its swift collapse. There will be no death as a catalyst and no investigation he can use to hook Daniel's attention, to draw him in so that he will be with Rorschach when they uncover Veidt's conspiracy.
He will need a new lead.
"Appreciated," he says, and cracks the mugger's head against the asphalt.
"Hey," Nite Owl says, and falls into step far too easily. He smiles, and Rorschach wishes he would stop. Just stop it. "I think we got off on the wrong foot."
Interstitial I
His goggles have been playing up all night. He's isolated the issue and he knows how to fix it, no problem—it's elementary stuff, just some wires that needs soldering back into place—but it's close work and he's misplaced his loupe.
His glasses slip down his nose, and he curses under his breath as everything shifts out of focus. He puts his soldering iron down before he ends up bridging the contacts and ruining the whole circuit.
"I can take a look at that, if you like," Adrian offers. He's sat on the other side of the workbench, green tea at his elbow, overseeing Dan's tinkering with a critical eye. "It could be the—"
"I know what's wrong with them," Dan says. "It's just... fiddly."
"Just an offer, Dan."
"I'm aware of that. I can actually tie my own shoelaces, though, thanks." Dan pushes his glasses up his nose and grips a watchmaker's screwdriver between his teeth. "I 'ew what the prob'em was before I e'en took 'em off."
Adrian falls silent, sips at his drink. Finally, Dan gets things as they should be, and runs a quick diagnostic.
"There, see?" Dan says, irritation immediately dissipating. He clicks through the different settings. "Good as new."
"I'm going to retire," Adrian says.
"Huh?" Dan frowns, brought up short by the non sequitur, doubly so by it coming from Adrian. "You're—hey, okay, so I was snippy, but that's a bit of an overreaction, man."
"Oh, Dan, no," Adrian says, and shakes his head. "I've been thinking about it for some time."
Dan lays his goggles on the workbench, sighs a short breath. "Look, Adrian. I know things haven't been so great with me since the Grice case. I've just been a bit..." He shrugs.
"Yes," Adrian says. "To say you've been 'a bit' is something of an understatement. This isn't about you, though."
"Please spare me the 'it isn't you, it's me' speech. I don't think I could stand the embarrassment." Dan adjusts his glasses. "So, why?" he says. He's shuffling through his electronics kit, not particularly avoiding eye contact but not going out of his way to make it, either. "And when?"
"Next month, in all likelihood," Adrian replies.
"April. New fiscal quarter, huh."
"Very astute. I'm investing myself a new venture; it'll take a great deal of my time and all of my business acumen, more so than anything I've undertaken before. I can't afford to divide my attention on this."
Dan looks up at him. He's stood up, hands clasped behind his back, staring into the middle distance.
"Adrian," he starts, and then stops because his frustration and disappointment are far too evident. He takes a breath, gets his emotions in check. "It's important, isn't it."
"Yes. Very. At least, I think so." Adrian turns, smiles tolerantly. "Are you going to try to talk me out of it? I know how much all of this means to you." He encompasses the Nest, Nite Owl, their partnership, in a brief sweep of his arm.
Dan wipes his hands on an oily rag and chews at his lip. Adrian is generally aloof when he's not being unintentionally condescending, but for all his distance, he wants to save the world as much as Dan does.
"I've never been able to talk you out of anything." Dan quirks his mouth into a lopsided grin. "Is it going to see you nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?"
Adrian's smile turns tight-lipped, the way it does when Dan cracks a joke he doesn't find very funny.
Rorschach is conscious enough of his dignity to resist the urge to cut and run. He lengthens his stride, fists his hands in the hope that Nite Owl will get the message: don't engage.
No such luck.
"Hey, wait up," Nite Owl says, even though he's easily keeping pace. He skips ahead, turns around and walks backwards as he continues talking, presumably to better convey his earnestness. Street lights flash in the dark glass of his goggles. "Look, I didn't mean to piss you off."
Rorschach slows down. As ambivalent as he is about this Nite Owl, he doesn't think he could bear to watch him stumble over a curb or trip over his own fool cape.
"I can tell you know what you're doing," Nite Owl says. "I'm sorry I was a jerk about it. Just, well. I'm sure you've seen the news. It's been kinda... not great for me lately."
Rorschach draws to a halt, pushes his hands further into his pockets. He isn't certain what Nite Owl wants from him. He shouldn't need Rorschach to accept his apology. They are nothing more than strangers, after all. He certainly is not happy about the unprompted confiding of his emotional state. He wonders if he would usually pour out his woes to Veidt, the way he used to sometimes, when—
Rorschach grits his teeth, focuses back on the here-and-now. Nothing to be gained from wallowing in empty nostalgia.
"...but that's no excuse. I shouldn't be taking it out on other people." Nite Owl takes a step forward, hand outstretched. "I'm Nite Owl."
"I know." Rorschach makes no move to complete the handshake.
"I, uh." Nite Owl's smile wavers. Rorschach falters, takes pity, takes his hand.
"Rorschach," he says, tries to keep his voice flat and plain. His fingers tighten convulsively around the stiff leather of Nite Owl's gauntlet.
"Rorschach! Great, that's... if I was gonna hang a name on you, I wanted it to be the right one. Can't believe everything you read in the papers, right?"
Rorschach considers this, weighing it against Daniel's personal leanings and what kind of publications he always favored, the skewed presentation of facts and events that he swallowed whole and inevitably regurgitated in the midst of what he called their quiet night, huh debates. Perhaps this Nite Owl has had his perspective challenged more thoroughly. His curiosity flares. Interesting.
Rorschach realizes that their handshake should have ended some seconds ago, but before he can pull away Nite Owl makes his own vague attempt to disengage, his smile tightening almost to a grimace. Rorschach yanks his hand back and makes a show of adjusting his gloves.
Nite Owl tugs at the strap of his goggles and glances down the street, then up at the rooftops. Clears his throat. "So, uh," he says. "You working a case or anything?"
"No," Rorschach says, and turns on his heel. Past time he was leaving.
"Okay, that's good. I mean, because, well," Nite Owl says. "You've heard about the weird shit turning up around Hell's Kitchen, right?"
Rorschach hasn't. He's been dissecting the papers meticulously, watching for heralds and harbingers of Veidt's plan, but there's been nothing unusual so far. Too late, he realizes he has stopped and turned a shoulder towards Nite Owl, broadcasting his interest loud and clear. Stupid.
Nite Owl seizes on the opening with something verging on zealousness. "I don't think anyone's made the connection yet, but when they do, oh boy. Gonna be big news. It's the kind of thing the papers love, all the grisly details. I figured something was up a couple weeks ago, just started to put things together but I kinda got... uh, blindsided, and—"
"Nite Owl," Rorschach interrupts. Get to the point, he means. Like he always means when he says it that way, with that particular inflection.
"Yeah?" Nite Owl looks at him, crooked smile on his lips that is halfway anticipatory and entirely uncomprehending.
Rorschach clenches his jaw, exhales through his nose. Swallows hard. "Get to the point," he says.
Nite Owl looks taken aback, but recovers quickly enough. "Right," he says, a little tightly. "Okay. I'm on my own now, but this thing is looking like more than a one-man investigation."
Careless of this Nite Owl, willing to let his guard down so quickly, and with a stranger (and it is arduous to keep having to use that word, to keep reminding himself). Next thing he will be pushing back his cowl, offering him coffee. This is happening much faster than Rorschach had anticipated, but it may be his only chance. He tries to settle himself. "And you want me for your new partner."
"No," Nite Owl says with barely a pause. "I'm done with partners. Just your assistance on this case."
This discomfits Rorschach more than he would have expected. He remembers all the times he rebuffed Daniel, back when they were starting out, and wonders at his persistence. Of course, back then they didn't have a history. Such blunt rejection would have carried less of a sting.
Now, he realizes, the history they have is one-sided, only in his memories. In his head. He wonders how long he can exist here before it stops being truth and starts being delusion.
Something must have shown in his body language, because Nite Owl adds, "No offense, man," and shrugs.
Sloppy. Get a grip. "None taken," Rorschach says. It is technically the truth.
They walk together until they hit the next intersection. Rorschach is conscious of how easily they fall into step—how effortlessly he keeps pace despite the disparity in their heights—but Nite Owl doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are on the portals of shadow in doorways and between buildings, as watchful over the city as his namesake over fields.
"I'll think on it," Rorschach says, and peels off down the intersecting avenue. He has to regroup, do some investigating of his own, first. "Be seeing you."
He unmasks in a dead-end alleyway, shouldered up against a chain-link fence with razorwire curled though it. He hasn't secured a place to stash his uniform yet, so he folds his trench around his fedora, rolls them as small as he can and carries them with him. Perhaps in time his suit will be recognizable at a distance, but for now it feels safe enough to wear back to his apartment. Dangerous to keep his things there long-term, though.
He should be chewing over the night's events as he returns to the tenement building. There is plenty to think about. He lets his mind wander along pointless, inconsequential paths instead. He needs a new watch, needs a different set of clothes.
His neighbor is in the stairwell, clad in a bathrobe over a satin undergarment that looks like it was sent to haunt him. She's sitting splay-legged on the narrow concrete steps. There's no easy way to get past her without touching her or asking her to move. He stands, indecisive, uniform clutched under one arm. His stomach feels leaden.
"Hey neighbor," she says. "You're up late." She tilts her head to light a cigarette. The conversational tone raises Rorschach's hackles. Why does she think she can talk to him like that, as though he doesn't know what she is?
"So are you," he replies. Out of my way. Move.
She blows out a plume of smoke, and his skin crawls as she takes in his body with a speculative once-over, tip of her pink tongue caught between her teeth. "I'm waiting for someone."
The invitation is not lost him. He attempts to maintain some measure of civility in his rebuff, despite his disgust at her brazenness. "Your pimp, or your dealer?"
He expects her to snarl and hurl a defensive retort, but she just barks out a laugh and leans back with an elbow propped on a step, cigarette spreading lazy drifts of ash and smoke. Her other hand comes to rest low on her belly. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
"I would not," he says. "Excuse me. Please."
Her expression is mocking as she shuffles to one side. "Certainly, sir."
He grunts, steps past her as fast as he can, doesn't look back even when she shouts after him. Dream of me, darlin'! echoes in the dark tenement hallway and follows him into his room, sinks its barbs into his brain more invasively than any insult.
It takes him a long time to get to sleep, long enough to hear her door open and close and lock, hear the voices and the slap of a hand on soft flesh that echoes in some dark chamber of his memory. He squeezes his eyes tight, draws his shoulders up around his ears and tries not to listen any more, face pressed into the stale fabric of his mattress.
This is profoundly depressing, so he sweeps the empty tin cans off the sill in a fit of displeasure. They clatter and rattle under his feet. He kicks them aside as he leaves his stinking, wretched little room in favor of trudging through the city's trash instead.
It is strange to walk the streets with no weight on his shoulder, but he no longer feels the urge to preach. Not now that the end is an event crystallized in his consciousness, more than just a prediction of the turning tides and a warning to humankind that their wickedness will destroy them.
He skips the turnstiles and stows away on the first train into Manhattan, becomes just another swaying commuter. By the time he reaches Grand Central he is desperate to be away from the crush of bodies, their odors and their noises, the incessant mindless thronging. Cattle.
He can walk the rest of the way. He hasn't got all the time in the world, but he has got all day.
He jigsaws through the borough, treading over streets that are intensely familiar and yet completely different in daylight (and in missing graffiti; in a billboard carrying an old ad; in a news vendor who looks half a decade younger than expected).
There are more direct ways to get where he is going, but Rorschach takes a winding route, soaking in cognitive dissonance whenever it hits him. It is an unpleasant sensation, but a useful reminder that he does not fit in this mirror-world, may never fit, may be ingloriously expelled just as he was deposited in it. But the grit crunching under his boots and the borrowed gloves in his pocket tell him that even as an anomaly, he can effect change upon it, make it better.
He is determined to do so, while he still can.
Hell's Kitchen simmers in the midday sun. Rorschach pays its inhabitants no heed. They will not concern themselves with him either, not with the color of his hair, the scars and freckles that mar his face, and the bruises on his knuckles.
He doesn't know what he is looking for here. Nite Owl's vulgar description of 'weird shit' was singularly unhelpful, and he regrets not pumping him for more information when he had the chance.
There is a store on the corner of this block, a Korean establishment, by the signs. It's closed, maybe permanently. One shutter is stuck halfway down, the boarded-up windows beneath interfering with the runners. The other shutter has seen better days: it's dented and bent, and has graffiti scrawled on it. You lost go home. Go back to Nam, and in fresh paint: Dog eaters.
Rorschach stops for better observation, and frowns, thinking. He's seen similar sentiment a thousand times, scrawled over a hundred walls and doors and bits of beaten flesh, but this seems odd to him. For all the reasons he could think of to object to Korean immigrants taking work here, he doesn't think the fact that they may eat dog should be the biggest cause for concern—especially if they are routinely mistaken for Vietnamese.
(Then he stops thinking about dogs, and eating.)
The shutters rattle, slung up by a ligneous-faced old man. He has a broken broom handle, held low against his side. "Shop's closed," he says. "Go now. No trouble, leave us alone. Go on." From inside, he hears a female voice; though she's speaking rapidly in a foreign tongue, her distress needs no translation.
Rorschach doubts there is anything he can ask here without things escalating. He nods, slowly, and carries on. Behind him, he hears the squeal of metal against metal as the shutter is drawn closed once again.
A few blocks over, a utility pole is stapled with colorful fliers, layered like scales. Rorschach pays them no heed until he encounters a second pole similarly clad, and a third, and yet more cable-tied to the chain-link fence surrounding a vacant lot.
Missing, the first one he reads says. Friendly Labrador, 2yrs old. Answers to Buck. Beloved Pet, Please Call if Found. $$$ Reward
MITZY, the second one says, above a fuzzy repro of a cat. missing since saturday 28th. B&W tux long fur green collar
There are probably two dozen different posters, duplicated and pinned with dwindling hope. The effect is undeniably eerie, this wall of fliers standing like a memorial, but a rash of family pets missing? Is this Nite Owl's big case? He scowls, turns on his heel to backtrack. No. Soft-hearted as the man is, surely there will be more to it than this.
He can't get anyone's attention at the Korean store by addressing the shopfront and loudly but politely asking to talk. He doesn't bother trying to shout, or to bang on the shutters. He knows abject fear when he sees it.
There's a bodega another two blocks north, in better shape. Open, at least. The man at the register regards him with an equal measure of undisguised suspicion and contempt; he keeps one hand below the counter. "Your boys already been in today, man," he says, after Rorschach acknowledges his protracted stare with a raised eyebrow.
Based on the man's overall demeanor, Rorschach decides his assumption is not a favorable one and he would do better to take a different tack than to go with it. "Not my boys," he tells him. "Don't belong to anyone and nobody belongs to me."
He didn't expect that to reassure the man any amount, but it seems enough for him to take a step back from the counter and fold his arms. "What do you want, hombre."
"I lost my dog."
The man laughs, shakes his head. "You and everyone else. Don't worry, you probably find him soon. A bit in this alley, a bit in that. You gonna buy anything?"
Rorschach picks up a candy bar, fishes up a few crumpled bills from his pockets. "What do you mean by that," he asks, as he flattens the bills out one by one, places them on the counter-top; two fives and a ten. Expensive chocolate. Cheap information.
The man hesitates, then leans in. "It ain't right, man. Some sick shit going on here, and it ain't the gooks, or just kids like people been saying. Kids don't do shit like this, you know what I mean? Tie firecrackers to their tails, pop a bb in their rump, yeah, cruel shit, but not like this, not even close. You know what I'm sayin?"
"Spell it out for me," Rorschach says, hand flattened over the notes.
The man shifts uncomfortably, glances at the door, the back at Rorschach. "Fucking cult or something," he says, finally. "Skinned them dogs and left their intestines in fucking patterns, man. Found cat teeth on the corner one morning, not put random and not only a couple, neither. Folks just clear up the mess and carry on, but I got the worst feelings, you know? Like it won't stop at animals."
The man lapses into a kind of silence that Rorschach recognises well. Nothing more to press out of him. "Thank you for your time," he says, and steps back, hands finding his pockets. "Keep the change."
Then again, maybe not.
He thinks over what the shopkeeper told him, aligns it with his own experiences at Charlton. Some of the boys there had turned their aggressions from each other long enough to torment the janitor's dog, but always backed down once it burst into a frenzy of growls and snapping teeth.
(Rorschach shudders at the memory of those bared fangs.)
It is conceivable to him that, given enough bravado and incitement, one of the boys would have killed that dog without much remorse. What would be less reconcilable is the careful distribution of the dog's internal organs after the fact. That speaks of a different kind of disturbance—something that ritualistic he would attribute to a savage religious fervor or similarly clouded state of mind. Men brainwashed with promises of power, revenge, virility, ascension. Portents read in the viscera of sacrificial lambs.
Overhead, the familiar whine of the Archimedes' engines. Rorschach looks up, watches the ship's shadow move over the clouds. Nite Owl will moor it atop a warehouse he owns nearby, and in a matter of minutes will pass by on the first stretch of his patrol.
Approaching footsteps. Rorschach's timing is impeccable.
"Tell me about Hell's Kitchen," he says. There's a split-second of surprise on Nite Owl's face—plain, despite the goggles, and how many times has Rorschach told him that they do not adequately mask him—and then it's gone, tucked away as Rorschach falls into step.
"Good evening to you too, Rorschach," he says. Rorschach notes how his shoulders push back a fraction, how he stands a little taller. "Didn't see you there."
"I know."
Nite Owl glances sideways at him, bemusement in the set of his mouth. "You don't have to ambush me for information. We're on the same side, right?"
Rorschach nods. "Right. Did a little investigating, too. Compare notes?"
Nite Owl flashes a wide grin, familiarity that lands like a punch to Rorschach's gut. "So, you're good to help me out with this one?"
"Maybe," Rorschach says. "If it's more than rounding up strays. Or you can play dog catcher by yourself."
"Ha ha." Nite Owl is still smiling, but it's turned grim, a midwinter crescent moon. "You know it's more than that, or we wouldn't be having this conversation."
Under the mask, Rorschach mirrors Nite Owl's expression, lets it become distorted and exaggerated by the ink. Nite Owl watches in plain fascination.
"That is so cool," he says, and to Rorschach's amusement, catches himself just short of gawking. "Uh, anyway. I've not had a whole lot of luck in Hell's Kitchen, everyone is keeping schtum about the situation. But I did see one dog carcass first-hand. In an alley, skinned and butchered neatly, kinda spread open like an autopsy, you know? It was weird to look at. Pink. I thought it was a person at first."
"Hrm." Rorschach tries to shake off the way his skin is crawling. He shivers as though he's been bared to the cool night air. "Locals think it might be cult activity. May just be superstitious fear, though. Could be a disturbed individual at work. Or several, feeding on one another's sickness."
"Yep, that sounds like a cult to me," Nite Owl says, with a wry tilt of his head. "But you got people to talk? All I got was the same story about missing pets, wouldn't say more than that except to blame street kids." He sighs. "I don't know, things like that have gotten difficult since Ozy retired. I didn't realize I was so bad at it."
Rorschach wonders if he should point out that it's not likely that Ozymandias was better at talking to people so much as nobody knew he was disgustingly rich. He doubts the revelation is reflecting well on Nite Owl when it comes to needing a tip, even if nobody knows that he is rich in his own right. But he was never one to let tact get in the way of honesty. "Not well-known for having a wealthy associate," he says. "More forthcoming when approached on equal terms."
Nite Owl groans. "God, it just gets worse and worse. This whole thing is a clusterfuck."
"Not important right now," Rorschach snaps. He's not interested in dealing with Nite Owl's personal crises, especially when it involves Veidt. The waters are already muddied enough where that is concerned.
"Okay, sure," Nite Owl says. "Whatever." He's bristling, and Rorschach finds a strange satisfaction in how easily he can rub him the wrong way. Daniel had always been so placid, letting so much slide without complaint. I... look, Rorschach. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said all that. Without warning, the satisfaction gives way beneath him and his stomach feels like it's plummeting a hundred feet. He is suddenly nauseous.
He squeezes his eyes shut, clenches his jaw. No time for this, no reason for it.
"Hey, you are okay?" He feels Nite Owl's hand on his shoulder, tentative. "You seem pretty beat."
He shrugs the hand away. "Fine," he says. "Just tired."
"We should go somewhere else to talk," Nite Owl says. He smiles boyishly, any pique forgotten in a sudden burst of enthusiasm. "Let me show you my ship."
But the words don't come. Instead, Nite Owl slides back a section of paneling that houses the coffee machine and asks if Rorschach would like a drink. Rorschach nods, vague disorientation washing through him.
"Sit down if you like," Nite Owl says, ever the gracious host.
Rorschach finds the co-pilot's chair, and lowers himself into the plush leather. It is not as comfortable as he remembers; the seat does not fit him as well. It's too high, for a start. He reaches down and under the right-hand side, seeking the mechanism he knows is secreted there. His fingers happen over the button, and with a hiss of hydraulics, the chair sinks downward until his feet sit flat on the floor. Better.
The friendly tink tink of a spoon stirring coffee abruptly stops. Nite Owl half-turns and looks at him. Rorschach freezes, and tries to gauge how badly he has just misstepped. He wonders if Nite Owl will tell him to put the chair back as it was, the way Ozymandias prefers it.
"Huh," Nite Owl says. He seems puzzled. "That's usually a pain in the ass to adjust."
Rorschach shrugs. "Got lucky," he says, managing nonchalance even as he is dry-mouthed at his own carelessness.
Nite Owl seems happy enough to accept this, because what reason would he have not to. He hands Rorschach a coffee. Rorschach clutches it near, lets the steam rise off it and condense on his mask. He realizes that he doesn't want to show his face to Nite Owl, not even his mouth and chin, in some irrational belief that it will break this world like it is an illusion, shatter it around him and leave him standing in the snow, alone.
He lets the drink cool between his palms.
"Locals are scared," Rorschach tells Nite Owl. He leaves his cold coffee on the floor next to his—next to the co-pilot seat, and hopes Nite Owl will not ask why he didn't drink it. "Think their kids might be next."
Nite Owl's mouth pulls into a grimace. It doesn't suit his face, draws hard lines in the wrong places. He looks a little ill. "That'd be kind of an escalation. What do you think?"
Rorschach doesn't want to think about dead dogs and dissected children. "Don't know enough," he says, consciously loosening his grip on the padded arm of the seat. "Can you take us to one of the scenes?"
"Yeah, sure." Nite Owl spins his chair to face the airship's console. He taps at a few buttons, pushes the thrust lever. The Archimedes whirrs to life, engines thrumming under his feet. "But I dunno what you expect to find there. Nobody likes butchered animals lying around in their neighborhood, you know?"
"Might not have cleaned up everything." It's a long shot, but worth investigating. Residents may keep their gorge down long enough to haul the carcass away, but not many will scrub the blood out of the sidewalk cracks. Not unless they have something to hide. "When was last animal found?"
"Hmm." Nite Owl frowns. "I left my case notes at ho—back at my base, but two nights ago, I'm pretty sure.
Some rain since then. Not ideal. Rorschach leans back in the co-pilot seat, reaches inside his trench for his journal before he remembers that it's not there. He will find a new one, very soon. Now that he's on a case, he'll need it.
The Archimedes banks, and the skyline tilts at a nauseous angle. He catches up the coffee cup before it can spill.
He smiles over at Rorschach. "Billie Holiday," he says.
It's not quite a question, and Rorschach isn't certain what the expected response is, so he maintains a silent indifference. The ink of his mask swirls lazily in time with his breathing, and not to the music. Still, he doesn't have to wonder what Nite Owl intends to gain from this. It's conversational bait. Sharing. Daniel had pulled this trick a lot in the early days of their partnership, trying to eke out details about Kovacs just as eagerly as he was dropping clues about Dreiberg.
Rorschach catches his tongue between his teeth, bears down.
"Not a fan, huh? So what do you listen to?" Nite Owl's attention is back on the skies.
The baying of a rabid city. The crunch of twisting cartilage. The rhythmic thump on an adjacent wall. The pounding of his own blood.
"Nothing," Rorschach says.
"Oh." Sensing a dead end, Nite Owl changes the subject with precision. "So, why'd you get into the mask business?"
Rorschach doesn't feel like he owes him a response, not even after walling him on the music front, but he gives him one anyway. It's an easy question, after all. Even easier answer. It won't change the trajectory of their relationship. "To punish the guilty. Make them pay for their crimes."
At that, Nite Owl turns away from the controls. "Really?" he says. He makes no effort to hide the disapproval in his voice, and Rorschach finds himself taken aback by it. "What about protecting the innocent?"
"Victims aren't always innocent."
"Children are innocent." He says it quickly, snapped out on the back of Rorschach's assertion. It is obviously an emotional thing, for him to so readily associate victims with children; the sore anger is plain on his face, but then the incandescence fades and Nite Owl adopts that smile again, rendered blank by the dark glass of his goggles. Rorschach is not sure how much to trust that smile any more. It is a familiar mask that hides unfamiliar behavior.
Except that behavior, that particular response is not unfamiliar at all. Rorschach knows it intimately well. But it doesn't—shouldn't—belong to Nite Owl.
It belongs to him.
He wants an explanation. Beyond the superficially unsettling nature of the crime, he is struggling to find anything of substance. Something catches his eye. He crouches, runs his fingers over some matter congealed in a valley of the frost-heaved asphalt. Wax flakes off onto his gloves.
"I dunno," Nite Owl says. "Well. Do you remember a few years back, there was a street gang calling themselves the Brethren? They had a kinda spookhouse aesthetic, probably trying to one-up the samurai thing the Knot Tops had going on."
Rorschach doesn't remember. A divergence in their timelines? He makes a non-committal sound in the back of his throat.
"Mostly small-time racketeering and vice, but their profile blew up when they tried to wreck a church. It caused quite a hubbub in the press, especially once the ringleaders were arrested and they found a bunch of occultist bullshit at their flophouse. Remember?"
Rising to his feet, Rorschach makes a more affirmative noise. He will have to wing it. "And you think they're responsible for this?" His brain is already spinning, pulling up half-remembered trivia about occultism: grimoires and sigils, pentacles and candle wax and black magic.
Black magic. Something tugs at his memory, then slips away. He chases it, only for it to retreat further. He scowls in frustration. It will come. In the meantime, he notes that Nite Owl has not mentioned Moloch. Unrelated despite his attraction to demonic motifs? He resolves to visit Jacobi later, and find out.
"Maybe." Nite Owl folds his arms, rests his hip against the alley brick, watching Rorschach as he scuffs some garbage around: sodden cardboard, tufts of fur. "I'd be more sure if I could find any of them."
There are some marks on the asphalt. Chalk, probably. Faded already, sluiced away by people clearing up the mess of entrails. Still enough residue to tell it was a geometric shape, perhaps spanning the alleyway. Five-pointed star, waxy residue where the lines intersect.
He rubs his chin, thinking. Black magic.
Rorschach looked him up in a phone book. It was so easy he suspects a trap.
There is nobody home when he makes his call, so he shimmies up the guttering and levers open the most vulnerable-looking window. Rorschach finds himself in a glossy, veneer-paneled kitchen, replete with all the mod-cons and a cocktail bar on top. Seems Moloch is doing well for himself, but then again, crime does pay. He understands that's generally the appeal.
He has a quick rifle through the kitchen drawers, but there are no apricot-pit placebos here yet. The most incriminating thing he can find is an egg whisk.
The cheese in his refrigerator tastes expensive.
In the living room, Rorschach finds what he is looking for. The coffee table sits atop the expanse of a plush fur rug, bedecked with the excesses of the night before: empty martini glasses and half-full bottles of liquor; overflowing ashtrays and a powdery residue on the glass tabletop. More pertinently, there is a box of fliers for a nightclub downtown, still with a newly-printed smell.
It features the lithe silhouette of a woman, dancing on a backdrop of neon flames. The club appears to be called 6 6 6, and is operating out of a Meatpacking District address. Rorschach tucks one of the fliers into his trench pocket.
There are a pair of heavies guarding a door. Looks like he is home. "You got an appointment?" one of them bellows at him over the driving beat, apparently unfazed by the appearance of a masked vigilante at their nightclub. Rorschach wonders what incidents have transpired here in the past to assure their indifference.
He shakes his head.
"Get lost, then." The heavy grabs Rorschach's shoulder, obviously intending to escort him from the premises. Rorschach twists under his grip, kicks out the back of his knee and uses his weight against him to plant his face against the sticky carpet. He holds his hand up to the other, palm out. It keeps him at bay. Moloch appears to have over-trained his lap dogs.
"Listen carefully," he says, crouched by the bouncer he's got kissing his boots. "I want a friendly word with Jacobi. Short. Innocuous. No trouble unless you cause it."
"Okay, okay," the man replies, and goes slack in Rorschach' grip. "No need to get all psycho. Just let me give the boss man a heads-up, okay?"
Rorschach releases him. He brushes himself off with an air of cat-like indignation then ducks in through the door. Left alone, his partner eyes Rorschach with trepidation. Rorschach openly sizes him up, which seems to unsettle him further. He pretends to scan the dance floor instead.
"Alright." The first heavy reappears, jerks his head towards the door. "You got ten minutes."
"Won't take that long," Rorschach tells him, and pushes into the back corridor. The music is muted immediately, to his huge relief. He can still feel it shaking up through the floor, but it's not relentlessly pounding in his body cavity any more.
There's only one door back here. He opens it, steps inside the dim room.
"Ah," Moloch says, slouched lazily in a velvet armchair. He looks slick and business-like, turned out in a neat three-piece suit, barely a hint of the kohl-smudged mystic nor of the cancer-riddled ghoul he will become. He gestures with a cigarette, smoke curling into the dark. "Good evening. So. To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?"
"Edgar William Jacobi," Rorschach starts, "AKA Edgar—"
"Please," Moloch interrupts. "It's Vaughn. Legally, legitimately, and preferably, if you don't mind. I've no use for aliases any more. Would you care for a drink?"
"No," Rorschach says, and decides to cut to the chase. The smoky atmosphere is making him weary and irritable. "What do you know about situation in Hell's Kitchen."
"It's on the house," Moloch says. He holds up a startlingly blue cocktail. "Mister... Inkblot, I believe? No? Very well." He holds the paper umbrella aside with a long finger and takes a sip.
"Rorschach." He shakes his head impatiently, paces back and forth. "Funny things happening. Dead animals. Candle wax. Pentagrams. Someone trying to scry in viscera, maybe. Seems your speed, Moloch the Mystic."
Moloch's expression darkens. Seems there is still residual power in that name.
"Okay, then, Rorschach." He sits up in his chair, elbows on his thighs, fingers tented between this knees. "Listen. I will give you a friendly caution, since you're apparently not au fait with the way things work here. I am a reformed man. I've done my penance and now I'm running a clean business. I don't appreciate your barging in, assaulting my staff, and casting aspersions on my character. Whatever chicanery you're chasing around Hell's Kitchen has nothing to do with me."
"Clean business?" Rorschach snorts. "Cover alone is daylight robbery."
Moloch smiles devilishly. "Ah, but it's not daylight, is it. Was there anything else?"
Rorschach has no hard evidence that Moloch is involved, only his gut instinct. He will take him at his word, for now. That's not to say he won't be keeping tabs. "That's all," he growls, turns to leave but pauses with his hand on the door. There is something. "Dimensional Developments. Do you know it?"
"I have heard of it," Moloch replies. He seems cagey. "Why?"
"Suggest you stay away, if you value your life."
"Was that a threat?" Moloch stubs out his cigarette, draws himself to his feet. He is taller than Rorschach remembers, but then his last memories of him weren't flattering. He's wearing a cape. Old habits die hard, Rorschach supposes.
"Friendly caution," Rorschach says, touching the brim of his hat. "Be seeing you, Vaughn."
"I sincerely hope not," Moloch tells him.
He needn't have worried. She has a customer tonight. A loud one. Rorschach's stomach turns in revulsion, makes his mouth water. He shoves his mask and hat under his bed, ducks out of his room and heads to the roof.
The pale wash of dawn touches the horizon, etching out the city's skyline and limning the blimps that hang under the clouds. The air smells crisp and green, and Rorschach feels his mood settle low, dragging in his chest. He perches on the edge of the rooftop and rattles the night's events around in his head to distract himself, organizing them as best he can without his journal.
Rorschach finds himself wondering about Nite Owl, and the strange details of him that he doesn't understand. They are a jarring contrast to his familiar mannerisms and it grates on Rorschach's awareness, that constant reminder that he is not the same man he spent the better part of a decade fighting alongside.
Maybe it's better that way; a perpetual reminder that he may eventually be put back where he came from.
He is suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. His face feels tight.
The flier in his trench pocket crinkles as he straightens up. He fishes it out, intending to throw it away—he would not like to be found carrying it—but catches sight of the advertisement printed on the back.
Robert Deschaines, it reads. Famed Clairvoyant ~ Appearing Friday June 15th at 6 6 6
You Must Know Your Fate To Master It
He tosses on the hard mattress, eyes screwed closed against the midday sun. He remembers now, details jarred loose by Deschaines' name: an article in the New Frontiersman that is yet to be written. It's about Shea's disappearance, including a meandering side note about a deceased medium, his head stolen from the mortuary. Chalked up to black magic cultists.
He remembers Veidt telling them about the monster's brain, cloned from a human sensitive.
Deschaines is a critical part of Veidt's monster. He is the accelerant that spreads the psychic poison through the city. He is what elevates the stunt from obscene to devastating. Without him, it will be nothing but a grotesque practical joke.
If he can protect him, Veidt cannot succeed.
He finds a pen abandoned in the crease of a subway seat. It mostly works.
He stays out of Nite Owl's way for a while, chases down reprobates in Queens where he knows their paths are unlikely to cross. He needs some time to gather himself and to replenish his resources.
His journal steadily fills as he attempts to impose structure on this mirror-world. He makes note of the most significant divergences from his own time, tries to work out the consequences. They branch and branch again, jumping everything he knows out of its groove like a warped, scratched record: familiar snatches of words and melody, but all in the wrong place, broken up and distorted.
It's still overwhelming to think about, too much to process.
Instead, he turns his journal upside-down, opens it from the other end and writes down everything he doesn't know about Nite Owl.
"They seem to be slowing down," he says, leaning against the fire escape railing. Rorschach can't stop looking at the tableau of organs spread in the alley below them. The dog's head has been removed entirely and its brain is AWOL. The rest of it, the candles and the kaleidoscopic geometric shapes, is verging on art. It makes Rorschach intensely uncomfortable. Nite Owl shakes his head. "But they're getting a lot more elaborate. Poor thing."
"Still no leads?" Rorschach asks as they descend the ladder. He already knows the answer.
"Nope. Every name I've turned up on the Brethren has been a dead end. Deceased, missing, or incarcerated. It's like someone's using them as a cover." Nite Owl sighs in frustration, fidgets with the settings on his goggles. "I just don't know who. Or why."
Rorschach knows who, and why. This whole business is a masterclass in misdirection. First, a slew of occult-tinged animal sacrifices, then more of the same with the ritualistic removal of the brain. Next, a decapitated psychic. It wouldn't take a genius to link the two cases together and land the blame squarely at the Brethren's feet.
They must protect Deschaines. The urgency of it batters at him.
He has no idea how to convey this information to Nite Owl without seeming completely insane. He is aware that his trust is a tenuous thing that must be earned, and he no longer has the requisites to ask him for such abstract leaps of faith, even without the touchy subject of Veidt's involvement.
But Shea and the others won't go missing until '84. He knows this. Deschaines will be safe for another five years. Veidt is playing an extremely long game—standing in the midst of the destroyed animal is just kicking Rorschach's preservation instincts into overdrive. That's all.
There is nothing to this case for them to solve. It's a stage dressing, intended for the tabloids to dredge up when Deschaines happens. No doubt it will continue for the next half-decade, probably carefully cyclical as though the perpetrators are driven by the shifts in seasons, or the phases of the moon. It has the look and feel of an urban killer, to a point that verges on the apocryphal. Nite Owl is right. The press will love it.
He needs to settle himself. He has ample time to gather evidence and to firmly secure Nite Owl's help.
They pick their way out of the alleyway, animal blood sticky on the soles of their boots.
"So, I guess I missed you this past week or so," Nite Owl says, and Rorschach's chest clenches unexpectedly. He takes a deep breath, disguises it as a low sigh. Nite Owl glances at him, side on. "Got something else on the back-burner, or—?"
"No," Rorschach says. He lets a sliver of honesty color his voice. "Busy. Tired. Had to catch up on sleep."
"Oh," Nite Owl says. "Pity. I could use some other distraction. This case is driving me a little nuts, to tell you the truth. I feel like I'm chasing my own tail most nights."
"Always the Rum Runner," Rorschach suggests. "Usually trouble coming or going."
Nite Owl laughs, genuine and easy. "That's true. Wanna go shake things up?"
The establishment doesn't have a gaming license. There's an illegal gambling table out back; a capo and his crew are holding a soirée. The stakes are particularly high tonight. The barkeep has a sawed-off shotgun. He's in on the robbery that's about to go down.
That time, he had neutralized the mobsters first and avoided a shoot-out. It is much later in the evening now, though. It's not the same. Too many variables. This is not the same case he worked the first time, and Nite Owl doesn't know the danger, because Nite Owl quit.
"Gentlemen," Nite Owl says, and clears out half of the bar.
"Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me," the barkeep says.
Nite Owl turns his attention to the barkeep, graces him with an amiable smile. No, Rorschach thinks. Stay back. "Sorry," Nite Owl says, "but it looks like most of your clientele have a guilty conscience."
"They just know a bad night when they see one." The barkeep's hands have strayed below the counter, and this puts Rorschach on edge. His accomplices will be here any minute. "What can I get for ya."
"Just here for atmosphere," Rorschach replies. He stands rigidly in the doorway. Nite Owl is ignoring his hand signals: warning, danger, use caution.
"You buy something or you get out," the barkeep says. He's started sweating. Nite Owl has noticed that, at least.
"Gimme a Coke, then." Nite Owl posts himself on a stool, plays the good patron to Rorschach's bad one. He takes a couple of coins from his belt pouch and slides them over the bar, and folds a note into the tip jar. "What's shaking in the neighborhood?"
Rorschach remains where he is. He is acutely aware that somebody is standing behind him.
The barkeep serves Nite Owl a perspiring glass bottle while shooting desperate glances over Rorschach's shoulder. He hears the metallic click of a safety being disengaged.
"Go home, boys," Rorschach growls. "Game's over." He immediately ducks out to the side; a slug embeds itself harmlessly in the floorboards. The report echoes around the tight room. His ears ring. One of the remaining patrons swears loudly. They've bunched up against the far wall.
"Oh, c'mon!" The barkeep yells. "Don't shoot up my joint, Christ!"
There's a rough laugh from the doorway. There's three of them, in gang regalia that Rorschach doesn't recognize, jittery with adrenaline. All of them are armed. "You didn't say we'd get to bag a couple masks, too, Pete," the leader says, weaving his weapon between Rorschach and Nite Owl. He seems inebriated, or maybe he is just high on his own misplaced confidence. Rank amateurs, all of them.
"Alright," Nite Owl says, drawing to his feet. "I think it's time you called it a night."
Here is where it gets dangerous. Rorschach feels the tension ratchet tight, gun-smoke burning in his nose. The door to the poker room cracks open silently, and there's no doubt that the mobsters back there are armed to the teeth and on edge. The room will be more bullets than air, very soon.
"Nite Owl," Rorschach says. He moves his fingers against his thigh, signaling additional opponents on his six. Nite Owl glances over at him and again doesn't notice, or doesn't—
He doesn't understand.
"Oh, this is not good," the barkeep mutters. "Not good."
Rorschach is inclined to agree. "Nite Owl," Rorschach growls out, louder. He grabs the gang leader's wrist, twists the gun from his hand and shoves him into his accomplices before they can shoot. He hears Nite Owl shout in dismay, and then he's barreling into them, bursting them out onto the street.
"Go," he shouts at Rorschach. The gang members scatter as Rorschach kicks off towards where the Archimedes is moored. He can hear Nite Owl behind him panting hard, feet hitting the sidewalk, and the report of gunfire, yelling.
Nite Owl suddenly careens into him, an agonized curse on his breath. "Keep going," he gasps.
On the airship, instead of heading to the pilot's seat, he leans with both palms on the interior's curved surface and hisses through his teeth. There's a shear in his cape, tattered notch spoiling the line of it.
"You're hit," Rorschach says. Alarm courses through him, breaks a cold sweat down his back.
"I'm fine," Nite Owl says, "armor caught it. Just stings like hell."
"Let me see." Rorschach is at his side before he can catch himself, but he has the presence of mind to keep his hands away. Their association is new; it would be far too familiar a gesture to check him over.
"I'm fine," Nite Owl says again, defensive. Not like Daniel at all, who would always dredge what positives he could from these moments, had tried to use them to bond them closer.
Rorschach had deflected him most of the time. Distantly, he considers that maybe if he had indulged him on more occasions, Daniel would not have been so eager to retire.
Nite Owl straightens up, and Rorschach is surprised by the pride in his expression, though not so much the stubbornness. "It's a military-grade ballistic composite," he says, voice tight with pain, bulletproof vest or not. "Ozymandias sourced it for me. It's practically impenetrable at the range they were firing. Don't be so—" He cuts off, changes the subject abruptly. "What the hell happened in there? Were those wiseguys in the back?"
Rorschach nods. "No-name punks thought they could make Cosa Nostra their thing. Suspect Rum Runner will be under new management, once they scrub them out of floorboards." Nite Owl looks pale under his cowl, and Rorschach doesn't entirely trust that he's unscathed. He lets his irritation at being stymied, and the mention of Veidt, get the better of him. "Tried to warn you. Should pay closer attention."
"You did?" Nite Owl looks at him, mouth dubious under the sheen of his goggles. He lowers himself into the pilot seat, flips at a few switches on the dash. "You just shouted my name a bunch, as far as I recall."
Rorschach sighs, holds up one hand. "Danger," he says, and repeats the signal he made in the bar. Then folds his fingers into the second configuration. "And this means 'behind you'." He repeats them again, hand against his leg, keeps the motions slow and subtle.
"Oh," Nite Owl says, then tilts his head a fraction. "Those aren't standard. Where did you learn them?"
Just when he thinks he is starting to handle things. He had devised the signals with Daniel, after their opponents had understood their more obvious gesturing one time too many. Stupid, stupid. "From a friend," he says, choking on the grief that rides with the words.
Interstitial II
Wanda's mother has told her to put on her best Sunday dress, even though it isn't Sunday at all. It's a school night and it's way past her bedtime. It's exciting, but scary, because maybe Momma hasn't realized and then it'll be Wanda's fault, somehow.
She plays with the ribbon at her neck. It itches where it's unraveling, but she can't stop twisting it around her finger. Her arm is sore where Momma pulled it through the sleeve because she was taking too long to get dressed.
"Put on your shoes," Momma says.
Wanda doesn't have good Sunday shoes like she has a good Sunday dress, so she puts them on without question.
"Where are we going?" Wanda asks. She knows Momma should be going out to work, but normally she stays next door with Mrs Schulman when that happens. Wanda likes Mrs Schulman and her brown woolen cardigans. Sometimes she has candy to share, or cookies and hot milk. Momma says that Mrs Schulman isn't home, though.
"Would you just shut up," Momma says. "I'm so tired of your questions. Why this and what that, all the goddamned time. Do you think I know everything, huh?"
So Wanda is quiet, and doesn't make a noise when Momma pulls a comb through her tangled hair, or even when she pinches her cheeks hard to make them pink. Momma tips her face up by the chin, makes an annoyed sigh and says, "You look like your father."
Wanda thinks maybe that wasn't a nice thing to say, but she can't figure out why. She just sniffs and tries not to sneeze because Momma's perfume is tickling her nose.
They go out into the hall. Momma's shoes go clack-clack loudly on the floorboards. Mrs Schulman is coming up the stairs with a 7-11 grocery bag clasped to her bosom. She looks at Wanda and then at Momma. "Sylvia!" she says, like Momma has done something terrible that she honestly can't believe.
Wanda wishes she could go back into the apartment, because she knows Momma is going to be angry about Mrs Schulman talking to her like that, and will mutter and call her a meddling Jew under her breath. Wanda wraps her hands in the silky skirt Momma is wearing, and looks up, ready to ask if she can go back inside. Momma doesn't look angry, though. She looks how Wanda feels when she burns the toast, or when she gets a hole in her sock.
"Take her," she says to Mrs Schulman, and the silky fabric slips out of Wanda's fist.
Mrs Schulman grasps Wanda's hand, and holds it tight.
Against the spalling brickwork in a vacant lot, she leans and peels back her shirt. The wound is long and deep and if only she had a needle she could stitch it up neatly, because she was taught how to sew at Charlton instead of how to fight like the boys were.
After gymnastics class once, one of the boys had offered to give her boxing lessons if she let him look up her skirt. She'd punched him in the face and made his nose bleed. She'd decided then and there that she didn't need lessons.
Stupid, stupid.
Her stomach aches, and the edge of her vision is gray and specked with bright glints of pain. Her fingers are slippery with blood, and she's miles of city streets from home. She couldn't be more angry.
She remembers Mrs Schulman, and the way her warm hand had squeezed her own, and closes her eyes.
Rorschach shutters himself into the communal bathroom, fills the basin with cold water and then puts his head in it. He is starting to seriously reassess his current approach to the situation with regard to Nite Owl. While it seemed comforting at first to fall into old habits, the cognitive dissonance is not abating and it is becoming increasingly difficult to resolve it.
Daniel is dead. Daniel is alive. Their shared history is dead, and cannot be resurrected, only reincarnated. There is weight to their interactions, but only to Rorschach. There is a different configuration of scars on Daniel's knuckles.
Rorschach will make a mistake. Eventually, he will make a mistake, and there is every chance it will be terminal.
He holds his breath for as long as he can, tiny bubbles of air escaping from between his compressed lips, each one a compromise. He waits for this state of despair to lessen, to stop knowing what he feels. His lungs burn. His face is numb. He is almost numb. Almost.
He surfaces, draws in a deep breath, and does not look at Kovacs, grimy in the mirror's cracked reflection. There is nothing to be gained from inspecting the man there; the mirror would not come out of the experience unscathed, nor his fists. Instead he watches the ripples in the dirty basin as the water drips from his hair. He is tired but already knows he won't sleep tonight—too on edge, too sick-feeling—but resolves to at least try.
He pulls the plug.
"About time." His neighbor, of course, waiting in the hall. Her lank hair is piled up on her head, and the pink terrycloth robe slung on her narrow frame is stained and full of snags. She puts her hands on her hips and it pulls tight across her belly, and Rorschach notices, with a shock that leaves him swaying nauseously on his feet, that she is with child. "Thought you'd drowned in there. Why are you always up at stupid o'clock anyway? Hey, you okay, Red? You look like shit."
Another pregnant whore, her children born to live under the stormcloud of her resentment and her temper, fearing the back of her hand as much as they do the creeping touch of her johns. Malleable creatures, ready to be shaped by their environment. There is no certainty that they will be lucky like he was, taken away from her withering influence, given an education and opportunity to find purpose. Little chance they will stumble across any catalyst for change. He feels nothing but contempt for her, and her mindless perpetuation of the cycle.
She notices him looking at her, and flushes, hands moving from her hips to spread protectively across the swell of her stomach. "C'mon," she says, "I need to clean myself up."
He stands in the doorway, held fast by his disgust.
"Come on," she says again, sharply. "What, are you one of those perverts who likes pregnant women? Because I already had enough of that tonight. Stop staring at me."
"Why do you let strangers," Rorschach asks her, and he sounds detached even to his own ears, too tightly screwed down to be truly calm, "how can you let them touch you like that. When you have— when you will have a child to care for."
She raises her eyebrows at him as though he has said something stupid, then she scoffs, hands back on her hips. "I guess it's just so much fun," she says. The sarcasm fits her well, animates her tired face. "Asshole."
Rorschach lets her into the bathroom. She slams the door hard behind her and it echoes into the corridor, violent in the early-morning silence. The faucet runs and runs.
Rorschach turns and turns in his bed, springs digging into his body no matter how he arranges himself, the past digging into his thoughts no matter how much he tries not to think. The dawn is breaking and he is sweating through his underclothes.
He pulls on some pants and goes up to the roof to watch the sky phase through shades of ash. At the edge of the building, he settles on the tar beach among the spidery shadows cast through television antennae and the dark blot of advertising blimps hanging under the clouds. The morning is soft for early May, warmth licking his bare arms. It's going to be a humid summer this year. He remembers the closeness of it, the heat shimmering off the blacktop during the day and clinging to the alley brickwork at night.
Not that long after Keene. His fury hadn't yet subsided into something manageable. Rough year in a string of rough years.
He shakes his head clear of memories, and turns his thoughts to more useful concerns.
It is difficult to figure out his next move. He will leave Nite Owl to bark up trees for now. He is interested in Deschaines, his connection to Moloch, and by extension, to Veidt. Another month until he appears at Moloch's club. Another month for Rorschach to figure out a way to approach him without revealing himself. Not so much his identity—although that is once again something to consider—but more his nature.
He has never put any stock in psychics or other such New Age quackery. Such things are the remit of the soft-headed looking for easy solutions to their problems, reeled in by the promises of charlatans peddling snake oil and crystals. Robert Deschaines is a proven quantity, however, and he finds that more unsettling than he'd like.
Rorschach is concerned that he will be detected immediately as a man out of time, shunted into a reality that is not his own. Seems like that kind of cosmogony is something a clairvoyant would be sensitive to. He wonders if the kid will be able to scry his own death from Rorschach's memories. The thought makes the back of his neck prickle.
Or perhaps that's just his neighbor, staring at him.
"Only two kinds of people come up on the roof this time of the morning," she says, crouching beside him and tapping a crumpled cigarette out of its packet. "Smokers, and jumpers." She offers it to him.
Rorschach glances at her side-long, and shakes his head in refusal. At least she is adequately dressed now, for a given value of adequate.
"Suit yourself," she says, and balances the cigarette on her lower lip while she pats at her pockets for a lighter. "Just wait til I'm gone before you make yourself a sidewalk pancake, alright? I'm throwing up enough as it is."
"What do you want," Rorschach says.
"Just came to apologize for being a bitch." She shrugs. "I try to be on good terms with my neighbors, whether they like it or not."
Rorschach is not on particularly good terms with apologies, but he knows one when he hears one, and he hasn't heard one so far. He ignores her.
"So what are you doing up here? And why are you always about so early in the AM? Shift worker? I bet you work down the docks, huh. I mean, just look at those arms."
Rorschach hunches over, conscious of her scrutiny. It makes his skin crawl, and he wishes for the protection of his trench coat.
This seems to amuse her. "Didn't have you pegged as the shy type, Red. Hey, what's your name, anyway?"
He tries to project an icy silence, but her incessant prattling seems to melt it before it touches her. She is nothing if not persistent, he will give her that. "None of your business," he growls.
"Oh, please," she says, and he can practically hear her rolling her eyes. It makes him bristle. "You stand there and judge me for trying to do the best with what I got—and that was fucking rude, by the way—you can at least tell me what name to curse you out by."
"Hehn." Rorschach straightens up, looks at her. Appalling, the way she's framed her whoring as a work ethic. Perhaps it's how she lives with herself. "Trying to do your best? Get a real job," he suggests.
"Oh, you got it all figured out for me." She finally locates her lighter, sparks it. "That's nice. I've got two other jobs. They cover rent and food but it's not gonna make a dent the hospital bills." She lights her cigarette, blows a plume of smoke out into the morning air. "You know?"
Hospitals being expensive is something Rorschach is aware of. He has always known it in the context of injury, though. Had he given any consideration to the nature of birth, he might have realized it would come with similar price-tags.
But then, she shouldn't be having a baby if she can't afford it. It's not fair on the child, and not fair on the honest tax-payers who have to pick up the slack. He doesn't wonder where the father is.
"And I want my kid to go to college. I want him to be better than all this," she's saying. "Can't do that on two-sixty an hour, honey. There just ain't enough time in the week." She taps her cigarette; the breeze catches flakes of ash and settles them in her hair. "We all do what we can to get where we want to be."
"A boy?" Rorschach asks, before he can stop himself. He doesn't care if it's a boy. It makes no difference. The traffic blares in the street below, the city rousing from its torpor.
"God," she says, and runs her hands over the mound of her belly. "God, I hope so. You got any kids?"
Rorschach just stares at her, unable to understand why she would ask something like that, when the answer is self-evident. "No," he says, simply.
"You're pretty old, though. Most guys end up with kids, one way or another. Maybe you got some you don't know about." She is looking at him again, that lewd, speculative raise of her eyebrows, assessing him like he is a slab of meat.
It incites a strange, defensive anger. He takes a sharp breath. "I don't," he tells her, firmly. "Not interested in that."
"Is that so. Well, what does interest you?"
"Not you."
"Oh, don't flatter yourself." She laughs, getting to her feet. She pitches her cigarette over the edge of the building. "Anyway, I gotta get moving. My shift starts in an hour. I wanna say it's been nice, but it hasn't."
"Appreciate your honesty," Rorschach says, and that much is true. "Let's not do it again sometime."
One of them is his mother.
Rorschach wakes up shaking and tired, and memories keep buffeting at him: his mother's face at the hearing, when he was taken from her and given to Charlton. The way she had grasped for his sleeve as he was escorted away—my baby, she'd cried. Don't take my baby. He could almost believe she was distraught. It was the last time she'd ever touched him.
He hits the streets, head down. He decides to walk into Manhattan instead of taking the 2, lets his feet guide him into familiar territory while he concentrates on not thinking. Dinner is a half-eaten croissant filched from an empty sidewalk cafe table. His reserves of cash are once again dwindling—rent, food, thrifted clothes—and he is loath to spend any of it if he doesn't have to.
The pastry is stale and chewy. He finishes it in three bites, barely even tastes it.
He could get more money, shake down a street-corner pusher or two, flush their drugs and take their dirty money, but his conscience has started gnawing at him. It's not truly theft if he is taking from thieves, but it's not morally sound in a way he can maintain, either.
We all do what we can, he hears his neighbor say.
He spits into the gutter.
He has three dollars in his pocket, peeled from the diminishing roll of notes secreted in a paper bag behind the single kitchenette cupboard. They will last him five days.
As he walks, he considers taking a detour through the Garment District to see if any of the factories are looking for work—he is certain that he has not forgotten how to turn a seam—but the idea of working a shift, spending hours and hours, day after day, among inane chattering drones and indecent clothing, feels like putting on a lead coat.
The years have encroached on him despite his resistance, steadily working their entropy. He is not twenty-two any more, or even thirty-something. If he feels tired at the mere thought, then it's not worth his time pursuing. Besides, he needs to dedicate himself to stopping Veidt; the world won't hold itself together while he picks up a wage. There are infinitely more important things he has to do that is not handling women's undergarments.
The responsibility of it hangs over him like the sword of Damocles, and this time he can can see the string all too clearly, fraying fiber by fiber.
It begins to rain as the sun drops, humidity of the day transmuted into a spring shower. The clouds are backlit an acidic orange that matches the awakening streetlamps, and everything is starting to smell like wet garbage. Rorschach turns up his shirt collar.
The newsvendor at Fortieth and Seventh is shuttering his stall for the evening, and arguing with a black kid over the damp pages of a comic book. Rorschach eyes the headlines stacked up on the sidewalk as he passes, then stops short.
SOVIETS CONDUCT BOMB TESTS IN BERING SEA, reads the New York Gazette, dark splotches of rain diffusing into the newsprint. Rorschach frowns, searches out the New Frontiersman. COMMIES WARMING UP.
"Give me a copy," he says to the vendor. He's too busy bickering to pay any heed to a customer, so Rorschach waits with a patience he doesn't feel until the vendor gives up and lets the kid jog off with the comic book.
This is wrong. The timing is all wrong.
"I'm trying to close up here," the vendor says. "You couldn't come by ten minutes earlier?"
Rorschach ignores his grousing and shakes some change out of his pocket. His hands feel unsteady. "Frontiersman, please. And a Gazette."
"Really?" The vendor shrugs. "Well, there ain't nothing wrong with having more'n one perspective on things, that's what I say. A newsvendor gets all that as a matter of course, you know. Not like most folks. Most folks'll stick to what reassures them, cosy in their little black and white worlds—"
"Rain's getting heavier," Rorschach says, before the man can get into the rhythm of his spiel. He's heard it before, and it's substantially more tedious when there is an urgency driving him. He slides the papers out of the tied-up stacks himself rather than wait for the vendor to do it for him.
"Sure is." The vendor squints up at the dark sky. "Best get the rest of this bundled up before it turns to pulp—not that it ain't gonna end up like that anyhow. Well, here's your change."
Rorschach barely registers the cold coins pressed into his palm, or the rain sliding down the back of his neck. There is the miasma of foreign food from the Gunga across the intersection, onion and garlic and spices carried on a drift of steam, and his stomach growls.
He considers ordering a coffee, sitting in a booth next to the steamed-up windows and poring over the papers, but decides that's an unacceptable luxury. He can read them in his apartment, over a mug of the freeze-dried stuff. He has a whole jar of it, and it cost him less than a single cup at the diner would.
It tastes disgusting no matter how much sugar he puts in it, but that's beside the point.
He takes the subway back, braces himself against the graffiti-coated car wall rather than sit on the filthy seats. The sway and jolt of the train vibrates through his body, familiar and tiresome, keeping him tense for balance and alert for trouble. He skims the newspaper articles; Gazette first, then the Frontiersman to compare for the unadorned facts.
The singular fact is this: Russia is carrying out military exercises in the Bering Strait. Both papers fail to enlighten Rorschach further, instead engaging in some circumspect fearmongering and then descending into speculation over how it will affect the next year's presidential elections. There is no mention of intervention, by Doctor Manhattan or otherwise.
There is a copy of the Nova Express on one of the empty seats. Rorschach eyes it with contempt, then picks it up.
FIVE TO MIDNIGHT
The front page is dominated by the Doomsday clock.
More talk of elections, and the aftershocks of Watergate. Bernstein and Woodward are apparently alive and well in this reality. Seems that Underboss—or whoever set him up—didn't have any designs on them. Interesting.
Mention of Manhattan, this time. Apparently didn't intervene in Vietnam. Too busy playing hero, a military puppet shaped to raise America's morale, but only on their home turf. Poor strategy. Looks like the Comedian wasn't shipped out, either. Makes sense. He's not in the government's employ, and out of Veidt's loop.
The war continued until '75. Victory was much more ambiguous. Another twist in the chronology, another complication.
Overall, positioning of key figures seems like a conspiracy to cast Nixon in a bad light. Rorschach isn't overly surprised. The reaction when he extended the presidential term was mixed, to say the least. Would have been more so, if he failed in Vietnam.
He crumples the papers up and stuffs them into his coat pocket. This is his stop.
He has come to the conclusion that he has little choice. The world is on a crash-course five years sooner than it should be, and the only people he has exchanged more than a handful of words with are a whore, and Nite Owl.
He has to get Nite Owl to talk to Deschaines. Chase him away from the city. He just doesn't know how to explain it to him without giving himself away.
Nite Owl is six stories up on 110th, crouched on the lip of a building, binoculars trained on a window across the street. He manages to get three paces away before Nite Owl drops the binoculars and pivots around, throwing crescent whickering past inches from Rorschach's nose. It hits the roof access door behind him with a resonating clang.
"Oh," Nite Owl says, getting to his feet. "It's you. Sorry."
"Lousy shot."
"Lucky for your face. How's it going, pal?"
He retrieves his weapon, clips it back onto his belt. Rorschach notes an awkwardness to his movements, a certain stiffness to the way he's holding himself. Pain from the impact of the bullet last night, bruising likely spread like stormclouds over his back.
"Variable," Rorschach says. "Working a case?"
"Just doing some legwork. Thought I'd finally tracked down one of the Brethren, but unless he's a piano tutor now, I think I was fed some bullshit."
"Should have a quiet word with your informant," Rorschach suggests.
"Yeah, probably," Nite Owl says distractedly, fiddling with something at his belt. The Archimedes appears overhead, shaking loose a wreath of artificial fog-clouds. "Listen, since you're here…"
Rorschach tilts his head. Yes, he is here, despite the reservations he has about his own behavior. He thinks about how to draw Nite Owl in, how to frame his interest in Deschaines. Suggest he may be involved with the Brethren, perhaps? It wouldn't be strictly untrue. Nite Owl seems cagey for some reason. That may be an advantage.
"Since you seem serious about being a masked vigilante, there's some people you need to meet." Nite Owl gestures toward the airship. "If it's not an imposition."
Rorschach is immediately cautious. "What kind of people."
Nite Owl grins at him, lopsided and painfully sincere. One hand fidgets with the hem of his cape. "The Crimebusters," he says.
"Don't see why," Rorschach tells him. "Met them already."
"Really?"
"Hrn." That did not deflate him as much as expected, and Rorschach knows better that to dissemble in the face of Nite Owl's interest. "Well, the Comedian. Ran into him down at the docks."
"What were you doing by the river?"
"Getting a shotgun in my face."
Nite Owl's mouth pulls tight under his goggles. "Yeah, that sounds like him." His laugh is anemic; he rubs the back of his neck. "He likes to throw his weight around, and that's his territory."
"Figured as much."
"So," Nite Owl says, and gestures at his airship. "Are you coming, or…?"
The question hangs heavily in the air. Are you going to be one of us, he is asking. Or are you going to be a problem. Rorschach usually considers 'being a problem' something of an advantage and had railed against the idea of an organized group the first time around, but this time he finds that he doesn't have the fortitude for it. Besides, they're already a crime-fighting outfit whether he joins them or not. Even after all this time, it still strikes him as unnecessary posturing.
"Whatever you say," he mutters.
The smile that lights up Daniel's face is searing.
"Just a formality," he says, tries to take the edge off that crescent-moon grin. "Don't see point of it otherwise."
"Sure, sure," Nite Owl says, but he's suddenly more concerned with the scrolling green readout on the Archimedes' dashboard. "Huh. Should probably have refueled before tonight. Do you mind if we make a pitstop?"
"Go ahead."
Nite Owl nods and punches in some new coordinates. The city reels out beneath them, streamers of neon lights and streetlamps between the hulking tenement blocks, but as they bank to the east Nite Owl hits a button and the shutters drop over the airship's windscreens. A new display screen lights up on the dash; a mess of wireframe cubes that must be a rendering of the streets below.
"Nothing personal," Nite Owl says. "But you understand that, right?"
"Of course." Rorschach settles back into the co-pilot's seat and tries to ignore the way his stomach drops.
"This won't take long," Nite Owl says, still cape and cowled, pulling off his gauntlets. His hands, bleached pale by the harsh lighting, twist the fuel coupling into place with a brisk efficiency. "Usually I run him off the spark, but that takes an overnight charge. Or, uh, day, I guess. Gonna have to check on his batteries, he shouldn't have run down so quickly."
The workshop fills with the heavy odor of aviation fuel. It is overpoweringly nostalgic, and Rorschach puts his hand to his nose before he can stop himself, tries to ward off the awful crowding of his memories.
Nite Owl looks over at him, inscrutable behind the dark glass of his goggles, and Rorschach resents him for an instant for not peeling back the mask and exposing himself, even though this is how it should be—how Rorschach always maintained it should be, strangers under the uniforms.
"Sorry," Nite Owl says. "I guess the smell's an acquired taste."
"It's fine," Rorschach says. He turns his back on Nite Owl where he's propped with one hand against the Archimedes' hull, and makes a circuit of the Nest instead. Still the same rickety military cot set up in one corner, though its blankets are neatly turned down instead of the rumpled state he used to leave them in. Seems unlikely that Veidt ever slept here. He takes petty satisfaction in the thought.
Same display case, same appalling signed photograph of the Twilight Lady, same array of framed newspaper clippings, except he isn't in any of them.
There's a manila folder tucked behind a chipped plastic statue of the first Nite Owl, on the lowest shelf. Rorschach slides it free. It's thin, practically empty, and the corners are dog-eared and grubby. He flips it open and the familiar repro of a ransom note hits him square in the gut.
"Hey," Nite Owl says from behind him, voice quiet and clipped. His bare hand tugs the folder from Rorschach's lax grip. "Give me that." He folds it closed, runs his finger over the spine of it as though to bind its contents in place and puts it back in the display, unassuming among the celebratory paraphernalia. "Nobody ever tell you it's rude to go through other people's stuff?"
"Habit," Rorschach says. "Apologies."
"It's okay," Nite Owl replies, though from the tone of his voice Rorschach isn't so certain. Forgiveness was often a reflex with this man. "I keep meaning to file it, I guess." He stands awkwardly in front of the display case, clearly eager for Rorschach to move away and stop prying. Rorschach obliges him, for now.
"Just a formality," he says, echoing Rorschach's earlier deflection. He eases up on the thrust lever and sets the ship to autopilot, glances over. "But I'll be vouching for you tonight."
"You barely know me," Rorschach points out. His jaw clenches around the words, at how much that bothers him despite the care he took to always keep Daniel an arms length away.
"Well, yeah. Truth is, we all barely know each other," Nite Owl says, slides a thumb under the elastic strap of his goggles and snaps it in emphasis. "There's only so far you can go. But still—you can't just walk into a vigilante meeting. You could be anyone under that mask. But you've had my back lately, so I owe my friends an introduction."
"Not interested in making good impression, you realize," he growls. He is only doing this because it will earn him further trust. He wonders for a moment if that in itself marks him as untrustworthy. He brushes the thought aside; he has only righteous intentions.
Rorschach expects some kind of pushback, or at least a chagrined look from Nite Owl, but the man just laughs. "Don't worry, neither are they. Like I said, just a formality." back to top