Summary: Skin on skin is its own confession, and we are all caged.
Notes: Not slash, despite the summary.
Rating/Warnings: K or K+, nothing objectionable.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach.
Disclaimer: Don't own any of this, of course.

prisoners

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This is wrong.

It's a repeating chorus, wandering over a monotonic meter. He couldn't name the melody, put a label on the pitch and timbre of the notes, but he knows: this is wrong.

This isn't Nite Owl, standing in front of him, with wide warm eyes the color of the cheap cocoa he buys in winter. Owls are hunting creatures; their eyes are gold, fixed and intent, with no care for anything but the jagged, panicked path of their fleeing prey. They do not gaze in expectation, pinch in nervousness, light up in misguided delight. Their beaks cannot accommodate the childish and hopeful smile sliding off of his partner's unmasked face by disappointed degrees.

There's a hand out, in the air in front of him, and it is ungloved; flesh and muscle and blood and all the mess of the human condition. Soft, for all of its visible calluses - the gauntlet on the workbench beside them is incapable of bleeding. It's hanging and it's asking manipulative questions: I trust you, do you trust me? This is what I look like, what do you look like?

Everything is transactional.

It's not as if he'd thought his partner an automaton or a suit of Kevlar animated by some errant hunting-owl spirit; of course there has always been a man underneath it all, just as there is one beneath his own mask. But it's enough for him that he trusts Nite Owl, the hunter, the kindred spirit, the arms and legs and fists that work alongside his own, the voice that alerts him to danger he's missed in the darkness or in the fever-hot waking dream that the worst fights become, everything blurring together around the edges, vital details dissipating myopically. It's enough. He didn't need the bird to shake off its feathers, to push its vivid, all-seeing eyes back onto its head, to crawl out of its skin and become a mere man. To name itself with a man's name.

Daniel.

Men are weak, and debased, and foolish, and given to unsettling notions of what is wrong and what is right. They are flesh, and flesh has its own needs; it crawls and bleeds and calls out to other flesh and of course there has always been a man under the dark, dark goggles but if he could only see himself reflected in them then he wouldn't have to acknowledge that Nite Owl is no shining, brilliant exception to the rules.

There is a hand hanging in front of him; above the hand, an armored sleeve and the sharp line of the costume's shoulders, and that's where it starts getting dangerous because there is an exposed jawline and a smooth, young face that is still trying to smile. The skin is flushed with adrenaline and fight; sweaty brown curls of hair press against it where only feathers should be, sharp and intimidating and all gesture in the edges and angles of the design.

And the eyes, still watching him, still piercing, and they are too expressive and too dark but he realizes he was wrong about one thing: they are a hunter's eyes.

He could reach out, and take the hand, and agree to everything or agree to nothing. He could turn and walk away and pretend this never happened, but the name Nite Owl has given himself – the shape of it like a strange new vocabulary of trust that makes him dizzy, makes his head spin and his knees turn to water – is already at work, changing all of the labels and designations, reworking his definition of the man in front of him even as it shifts and skitters out from under his attempts to pin it down.

Daniel's airship. Daniel's armor. Daniel's workshop. Daniel's blood, running from under the cowl, shining lurid and dangerous in the streetlight.

Daniel's deep brown eyes, still watching, still waiting.

Rorschach reaches up, pulls one glove free. Accepts the grip, skin to skin, acknowledging the cage and curse of flesh for what it is; accepts the reveal as a confession, held somewhere sacred. He cannot show his face and he cannot name himself but he can do this: he can take a hand offered in trust and loyalty and say that yes, yes, we are the same – under the costumes and masks and the thick, caked layers of the city's filth and the bright-hot sheen of believing and trying and doing while the rest of the world slides merrily into hell, we are both these machines, these weak and writhing things, these prisoners.

We are both only men.

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(c) ricebol 2009