Summary: Can you call it waiting if there's nothing to wait for?
Notes: Another kinkmeme fill. Prompt was for Rorschach to snap badly due to thinking that Dan is dead for an extended period of time, so it's basically angst ahoy. It's also entirely possible that Ror is being OOC here, but the thought I had was that if he really has never actually cared about anyone before, then he's never lost anyone he cared about either, and having no experience with it and no defenses built up, it could completely blindside him. I dono. Drugs similar to this do exist, I think, and we know Manhattan's existence advanced their world's tech and science a lot, so...
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for some morbid/disturbing imagery. Also: AAAANNNGSTTT. Sorry.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach, Dan/Ror UST.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Quote attributions at the end.
marking days
.
[Somewhere, in a dark and silent place: there are warm hands and the prick of another needle, and the burn of fire in his veins as he surfaces, comes back – and a breath that hurts more than any torture he has endured, lungs spasming and sucking, hard. There are ropes. There are questions, in both directions, the moment his voice returns. They want to know the identities of every mask in the city; information he does not have. He wants to know who the hell they really are, and where Rorschach is, and what they think they're doing; information they refuse to give. There are no answers.
Then there is an answer, just one: They tell him what was in the first syringe. They tell him what they saw, from their hiding place across the room. They're grinning.
He slumps down into the chair he's tied to, mind racing with the implications; he makes a low sound of despair. It's a very familiar sound, they tell him.
He loses track of time, after that.]
.
Walter Kovacs is the name behind the mask, the passive flesh-and-blood daylight counterpoint to the inhuman fury that sings through his veins by moonlight, but even Rorschach has always been a fundamentally sane creature. He's prone to excessive force at turns, grim and slow to smile, bearing more emotional scars than one person should be able to carry, crisscrossed over his chest and catching whatever light is brought to bear – but he has a basic grip on the reality of life that suits one tasked with protecting it.
Then comes the night – just a night, just a date on a calendar, and where Daniel's clean hashes leave off he keeps marking them with thick, shaky X-marks, shakier by the day, by the week – that splinters the illusion. That teaches him that no one good can survive in a bad place, that virtue is worthless, that nothing gold can stay; the night he holds a life in his arms and watches it wink out–
–and everything changes. It may not be instantaneous; it may not be a switch thrown, a button pressed, but it has its roots in this moment:
He is shouting, a mindless litany of denial – the word 'no' loops endlessly through his brain and then on his tongue, and the taste of it is the only thing keeping him from flying completely to pieces – before the syringe even pulls free from the seam of Nite Owl's costume, completely emptied and how full was it before how full was it–
The drug runner bearing it is on the floor in an instant, spine feeling shattered and loose under Rorschach's boot. He's the last, as far as Rorschach can tell. He might be dead. It doesn't change anything.
It doesn't change anything, because Daniel is groaning on the floor, and he's Daniel now, not Nite Owl, not like this; he has a name and a home and he visits with Hollis on some weekends and he has a new owl print he just brought home today, and he has warm human hands that work miracles and unravel mysteries and could pull him to pieces and put him back together again both with the same violent affection if only he'd ever let them, and he's good. A good man. Better than this.
(this isn't the way for him to...)
But the veins in his face are standing out, livid and blue in the half-light, and none of it changes anything, because Rorschach knows what kind of business these people are running, knows how many dozens of compounds could have been in that syringe. Knows how many of them would be fatal, in that kind of a dose.
And so there is a part of him – a primitive chunk of his mind that can understand these things without facing them – that is already grieving when he drops to Daniel's side, popping the cowl open and pushing the goggles up out of the way; lifting him with one arm and pressing fingers in against a pulse that is thready and rapidly slowing. His eyes are moving, but they are unfocused, and the deep warm brown is leaching out, leaving a color like dirty shale and there's an explosion of breath that sounds like it might be the beginning of a word–
And then – nothing. He just stops, like a toy wound down, and Rorschach has lifted men twice his own size but his arms were never meant to bear a weight like this.
He will wonder, later, at how quickly it all happened.
.
They've talked about this, on grim and morbid nights – the fresh, cutting smell of blood filling the air closed up inside of the ship. It's an occupational hazard. There's no getting around the reality, and they both felt validated for having brought it into the open air, acknowledged it, taken away the wolf's fangs by naming it aloud.
("What would you do if I...")
He's pretty sure he hadn't answered 'throw up until it feels like my insides are coming up too, and panic because maybe they are and maybe they should be, maybe that's the way this works - and run and run until the blurred, jagged-edged horror stopmotion of the city makes more sense than reality does and pass out from exhaustion on your front step,' but it turns out that some things are too big to wrap words around – beyond addressing or taking the bite out of or naming.
.
He will also wonder how he could have just run and left Daniel behind. He will forget the way he had seen his consciousness skittering sideways in the darkness, separating and detaching from him like a bloodstain lifting from an old shirt; the way he almost felt something shuffle loose, something important, in the instant Daniel's eyes emptied out – fall, and clatter, and break. It may be what people call temporary insanity, or it may not be temporary at all. It is no excuse either way, and when the sun goes down again, the shadows gather at the dark edges of his mind, and poke and prod and jeer.
.
An 'X' on the calendar, and today becomes yesterday and it will never be just a bad dream, never less than something that has already happened – the past, real, beyond waking up from and wiping the cold sweat away and murmuring 'thank god, thank god,' mindlessly into the quiet.
.
Three days pass, and Rorschach is still eating, but only what he can find in Daniel's pantry. He is sleeping on the kitchen floor, sleeping badly - barely sleeping at all. Resting, though, because he is flesh under the coat as Daniel was flesh under the armor, and flesh gets tired, breaks down. Stops.
The first night he'd gone scouting for a place to rest, had found Daniel's bed heaped in soft and inviting blankets, screaming out a familiarity that he thought he needed – but he'd only been there for a few minutes, wrapped in that warm and human-smelling cocoon, before he'd made a noise horrible to even his own ears and kicked himself free and stumbled downstairs. The couch presented the same problem, and so the kitchen floor it is. His own apartment seems out of the question, and he tries not to think about that; here, there are ghosts and there is an absence of what was but there, oh, there – there was never anything to lose there, just the hollow emptiness of creaking walls and a nothingness he knows well, and that's unthinkable right now.
He throws his cans away after he finishes them, because Daniel always gets upset when he doesn't. He'd picked the front door lock too, carefully, because Daniel hates it when he breaks the frame. There are accusing words in his head, 'weakness' and 'denial' and 'let it sink in', but the truth is that this ugly piece of reality hasn't even skimmed the surface. When it does, the ripples will roil along and chase each other to the dark and uncharted edges of the world/sea/mind,
(here there be monsters)
and somewhere, a ten-year-old boy is standing in the street, the stink of burning paper like something physical in his hands, and he is sinking and sinking.
.
A week. A solid seven days of thick black X-marks, and there's something in the way the owl in the photograph is looking at him as he draws in the eighth, like he has some secret understanding, some desperate measure, some key, if only Rorschach could make sense of it.
The ninth day, the black marker seems to move of its own volition as it scribbles out the creature's eyes, leaving only dead and hollow shadows under the feathered brow.
.
He still patrols, or tries to. The minor injuries are stacking up, starting to riddle his frame with a termite-eaten weakness, each new ache and pull and sharp, lancing pain compounding the last. It is because he has no one to watch his back, he realizes, and that– that is because he failed to watch Daniel's. He has no right to complain.
It is the twelfth day, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, trying to stitch a slice with his off hand – not quite sure why he can't see very well, and not interested in his logic center's insistence that he get up and hit the light switch – when he finally lets himself whisper it aloud:
"Daniel's dead."
The thread is pulled taut and it resonates in the small space like a strand of catgut. What had been a slow and gradual process of tiny cracks spidering into other tiny cracks, webbing out, careful careful careful – shatters.
.
Two and a half weeks, and he has stopped bothering to eat. It is not a conscious thing, not particularly self-destructive or violent; it just no longer occurs to him.
.
He sets a police scanner up in the kitchen, skims through it for every hour that he is awake. He is no longer going on patrol every night or really any night; he is a single man flailing at the oncoming flood,
(who will stand on either hand...)
and he cannot hold the bridge alone. And maybe the bridge doesn't even deserve to be held, anymore.
He still hates himself for the obsessive weakness that keeps him here, useless, falling apart on the tile floor while the city bleeds, and he tells himself that he's keeping abreast of criminal activity as he twists the dial, but really he's listening for found body reports. He keeps imagining the river by the warehouse, and how cold it is this time of year, and how long someone can stay down there without being found and–
.
He apologizes to the owl in the calendar every night, for taking away his eyes. He tries to draw them back in; when this makes the visage no less angry, no less accusing and unforgiving,
(as if you deserve forgiveness)
he starts gathering all of the owl knickknacks and clocks and small pictures and books and even a tiny, delicate creature worked from twisted steel wire he found in a dresser drawer, and arranges them on the table facing the photograph, like some bizarre tribute. This doesn't help either, and one night he can swear he hears claws clicking across the tile floor, stalking towards where he's sprawled by the cupboard. In the morning he is relieved to put the month behind him, and he changes the calendar and forgets about the hollow, dark stare he'd given the bird
(your fault, and how can you resent him for...)
(staring hating leaving)
and runs his scabbed and bitten fingers over the feathered lines of December's poster child. Snowy Owl. Daniel used to go on about this one, and he shouldn't be thinking about that but it was something about prophecy and rebirth and two roads that never meet. He almost believes it, standing there before his new watcher, hand shivering against the paper, dropping down some strange new rabbit hole in his mind, faster, faster, away from the talons before they hit–
The trinkets stay on the table, arranged into something like a diorama, a stageplay of dedication and denial and grief, because they were never really there for him, anyway. They're there for Daniel.
.
It's almost a month – almost a moon cycle passed, and he only knows this because it's printed on the calendar, little icons of quarter, half, full, half, quarter. New. New moon, the most poorly named, because it is no moon at all, and it is on one of these hollow and endless nights that the door to the basement heaves open on neglected hinges. There is a sound of footfalls, of a large body – too large to be the avenging horned owl with its horrible black stare, at least – moving through the space. It's a kind of half-awareness, partway into a dream that is no dream, and Rorschach does not stir, invisible in the dim light and half under the table.
Then the figure pauses – and there's a scrape as the wireworked owl is picked up, turned over in wondering hands.
"Don't," Rorschach almost-shouts, springing awake in an instant, but he has so little strength left in his body that there isn't much to spare to his voice. He's scrabbling for a handhold to pull himself up, to defend his creatures, when the figure crouches down next to him, the owl still in hand. It's catching the light from the streetlamp outside the window, but the face remains in shadow.
"Shhh," a voice gentles, and there's something familiar even in the hissing vocalization. "It's okay."
The voice. The voice and the shining rims of glasses and the shape of the face all filled in with black – and he's actually going crazy now, legitimately delusional. This is the first time the possibility has occurred to him. He understands the double-negative paradox of questioning sanity, but it's never given him cause to worry until this moment.
(If I think I'm... if I don't...)
"It's okay," the voice repeats, a hand reaching to run shaking fingers through his hair – he must have taken off his mask, too stiff with blood and dried tears to breathe through, but he doesn't really remember – catching in the filthy snarls. He hasn't washed in weeks, and the smell fills the kitchen. This cooing, soothing ghost doesn't seem to mind, sitting down next to him with a motion too careful and pained to truly be something incorporeal; an arm threads over his shoulders, solid, pulling his broken and emaciated frame in close. He isn't alone in this; the ghost is also thinner than he remembers, bony elbows and knees that don't know what to do with themselves and a quiet gasp of pain when even Rorschach's diminished weight falls too heavily across straining ribs.
Outside, the new moon hides behind its own shadow, losing its memory, resetting the world,
(rebirth. prophecy. can the roads be forced to meet?)
(all roads meet, far enough out on the horizon.)
churning over something new.
"I'm glad you kept up my calendar," the impossible creature next to him finally says, a thin thread of something entirely unlike humor stringing the words together like beads on a cord – each dropping into the air with an audible thunk, a rattling roll across the hard edges of darkness.
Rorschach buries his bruised, hollow face into the ghost's shirt, feels the warmth leeching up through it, and the last of the fracture lines give. Daniel holds him there until well past dawn.
.
(c) ricebol 2009
Several attributions to make in this one.
1. 'nothing gold can stay', from the Frost poem of the same name.
2. 'who will stand on either hand', from the Macaulay poem 'Horatio at the Bridge'.
3. The bit about the moon losing its memory, paraphrased from the Eliot poem 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'. "The moon has lost her memory."
4. "each dropping into the air with an audible thunk, a rattling roll across the hard edges of darkness." – what I'm thinking of here is the ball-dropping sound-effect in Depeche Mode's 'Blasphemous Rumours'. OBSCURE REFERENCES FTW.
5. Two roads that never meet – taken from totem legends regarding owls. The Blue Road of Spirit and the Red Road of Physical Life; ie, the dead and the living.
6. I AM OBVIOUSLY A HUGE NERD.