Shoes at the Door, a watchmen fanfic

Summary: Home (n): 1 : one's place of residence, domicile, house. 2 : the social unit formed by a family living together. 3 : a familiar or usual setting, a congenial environment.
Notes: Set between 'Superstition' and 'Breeding Lilacs'.
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Z!Rorschach
Disclaimer: Don't own any of this, of course.

shoes at the door

It starts in the guest room, and it's a practical thing: a few large maps tacked to the walls, identical unfolded subway diagrams with the city grid overlaid. Each has a different arrangement of pins stuck scattershot into it – and it occurs to Dan that they're stretching themselves a little thin, working three cases at once like this, but the city doesn't deliver these windows of opportunity on their schedule.

"Daniel," a voice says from the doorway, partly challenging and partly just curious. He hadn't even heard the door open.

Dan doesn't bother with looking contrite; just continues peeling the bedding back from the mattress, balling it up in his arms. "Hey. Was going to throw my sheets in the wash, thought I'd grab these too."

Rorschach doesn't move from the doorway, but the accusation in his posture softens, loosens up. Shakes out.

"That's the North Shore case, right?" Dan asks, nodding towards the nearest map, all the pins concentrated along the edges of the Hudson. New gang, operating out of the warehouses there, all petty and small-time encounters so far but it's best to take these groups out while they're still finding their feet, while they're manageable.

A nod, and Rorschach comes over, pale fingers ghosting along the trail of pins, catching on them roughly as if he's used to tracing flat ink. They skirt close to an area hastily marked out in red, a boundary. "Only a matter of time before they start getting big ideas about the Dark Hands' old territory."

"We should make them a priority, then," Dan says, and it's incongruous, discussing these things with a load of laundry in his arms, with a crimefighting partner who's wearing only a loose pair of pajama bottoms, hair still stuck to his face from the shower. But then, time was these maps would have been folded into the pockets of Rorschach's coat, a portable crime lab to be accessed wherever he was at the time, scribbled over and edited until they were incomprehensible even to him. This is a better system.

"Yes," Rorschach says, and starts pulling clothes from a pile on the floor, the damp towel over his shoulders dropped carelessly onto the stripped bed. "Have worn out their welcome."

One day, Dan comes in with the shopping, is headed to the kitchen to get the perishables put away quickly – there are a lot of them, and it always takes some special voodoo to get all the meat for the week into the freezer alongside all the rest and he really should just get a chest freezer at some point – when the bookshelf in the living room catches his eye.

Setting the bags on the table and wandering back to the other room, one eye and ear on the kitchen doorway because otherwise Rorschach will descend on the food there like a perpetually starving and particularly silent cat, Dan crouches to eye level with the shelves.

They're full to bursting where there'd been breathing gaps and wide spaces before, thick spines artfully tipped sideways to keep gravity at bay for the rest of them. Research books and case files and historical volumes he expects, crime and criminals and the justice system, but the occasional piece of fiction is wedged in there too. Milton and Dante, unsurprisingly, but also Melville and London and Carroll, older copies clearly once owned by a child, and an assortment of Holmes titles, mismatched editions and publishers. Thick books of poetry. A tattered old collection of Poe's short stories, and while he at first can't reconcile the gothic wet dream modern youth culture has turned the author into with his grounded-in-reality partner, it only takes a little memory tugging to remember that most of Poe's murderers and criminals got what was coming to them, driven mad by their own guilt, confessions complete and incontrovertible. Justice served. They're there under his searching fingers, corners folded down carefully, the Telltale Heart, the Black Cat. Masque too, and that makes sense; the rich and privileged getting what they deserve for ignoring the plight of those around them.

There's a sharper, more recent dog-ear at House of Usher, and it makes Dan think of the sickly-pale and given up on and buried alive, of dead and limbless trees, and he wonders.

They're clipped out of magazines and photocopied out of art books, these haunting photographs of things that are long since dead. Nothing artsy or experimental or idealized, just realistic portraits of life in the city as it was before, neither fixating on the darker elements nor shying away from them. Black and white and gone, and finding their way onto his walls by way of thumbtacks and masking tape, wedged under owl-shaped refrigerator magnets alongside shopping lists and utility bills.

One of the pictures, a turn-of-the-century shot of a group of people being driven off-camera by a flock of pigeons, running scared from the assault, has been taped over February's owl in his calendar to obvious comic effect – and people say Rorschach doesn't have a sense of humor. Most of the people who say it only ever see his fists, to be fair, but Dan's still caught so off guard that he laughs until he can't see straight, glasses pushed onto his forehead, and after the last few nights it's so welcome.

A few blocks down from the grocer, there's an art store that sells generic frames, and he buys a stack the next time he's out, sets the photographs into them, hangs them properly. Rorschach never mentions it, and the calendar stays exactly as it is.

'Sugar', says the bottom of the shopping list the next time he looks, as if Dan won't recognize the difference in handwriting, as if he'd ever forget. Duct tape, cereal, eggs. 'Justice', further down, as an afterthought or a joke, or both.

He never catches him at it, just stumbles onto these things when he's alone, these little additions and alterations that mark his as a home shared, not just a residence with a lodger. His first impulse is to think that Rorschach's wary of being caught, but he knows better; if he thought doing any of it were actually wrong, he wouldn't do it at all. It's likely just easier to indulge himself when there's no one there to witness these momentary weaknesses – running hands over a map of the city, flattening creases and willing its secrets to sink into his flesh, to deliver its epiphanies. Pressing his favorite words onto a shelf alongside the tattered old books of mythology that Dan still reads, as if the two might bolster each other's simple beauty in the face of an ugly and complicated world. Smoothing the black and white finality of history into the warmth of the present, stark against the clean wooden doors and beige paint, all these scraps and reminders that life existed before they did, will exist after they don't. That people have found belonging everywhere and anywhere and suffered in all the same places. That the city has always been full of stories with nowhere to settle.

He never catches him, but when Rorschach turns to him one night after an especially grueling patrol, light starting to peek over the horizon and reflect dizzily through the maze of glass-fronted buildings, a thousand suns in miniature, and says "Let's go home," well. It's a slip, or he's too tired for filters, or after watching the city try to murder itself overnight and with blood drying on his clothes and gloves, maybe anywhere off these streets and out from under the dawn-fading stars would feel like a refuge.

Nite Owl doesn't even crack a smile – just puts an arm across Rorschach's shoulders, squeezes. "Yeah. Come on."

Morning light curling through the windows, Dan falls asleep to the sound of too-slow breath and the smell of blood and the feel of an unfamiliar book, spread open and heavy across his chest.

They are home.