Summary: Something's only truly lost when all the lines are cut; even a single thread can lead the way home.
Notes: Dan goes into deep cover in a cult for investigative reasons and needs help getting back out. Out-of-sequence narrative.
Rating/Warnings: PG-13.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach
Disclaimer: Don't own any of this, of course.

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"I just don't know, son." Mason is crouched in front of Daniel where he's sitting placidly on the couch; in full costume, Rorschach paces nearby. "Knowing what they actually did to him, that'd be a start."

"It was drugs," Rorschach grumbles. "Probably in his water supply."

Mason shakes his head. Lifts three fingers to trail across Daniel's field of vision, watches as he follows them obediently. His pupils have been dilated since Rorschach found him. "It'd certainly be easy to blame it all on pharmaceuticals, and I think I'd be tempted, too. But in my experience – and I've had plenty of experience with mind-benders of every stripe – it's almost never just the drugs."

"Implying they actually got to him?"

"I'm just saying that usually, the drugs can soften a mind up, make it suggestible, but that's not enough to do this. I mean, look at him, for goodness' sake."

A short sound from Rorschach, making it as clear as it needs to be that really, he'd rather not.

"No, there's something else at work here." Mason drops his hand; Daniel's eyes shift to follow Rorschach's circling tread around the room, something of the caged animal in his step. Mason narrows his eyes. "Something deeper."

"Will you help him?"

A long moment that registers intellectually as awkward, though Rorschach has too many more important things on his mind to really feel it. Mason touches the couch, carefully pulls himself back to his feet.

"I'll do what I can, but…" A glance between them, following Daniel's dogged gaze. "…in all honesty, I don't think I'm the best man for the job."

That stops Rorschach cold, and the mask bunches over his brow. It's the one expression he can't help giving away. "Why not? Trusts you, respects you."

"To be blunt, that's exactly the reason. Do you understand how these places work?"

Rorschach grunts dismissively, gestures vaguely with one hand. "Use drugs or coercion, often require substantial donation from wealthy targets–"

"They offer people support and acceptance that they're lacking elsewhere," Mason interrupts, voice weighted with experience. "Maybe their family's all busted up, maybe they don't have many friends – but getting that all at once, it's a powerful thing."

Daniel leans back against the couch cushions, seemingly content with the way they fold around him. He's been mumbling since he woke up, but neither of them can make out what he's saying, even in this momentary silence. His voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere deep and empty.

"As for me," Mason continues, glancing back at his successor, visibly pained. "There's nothing he needs from me right now. He already knows what I think of him, and knowing what these people play off of, I don't think that's enough."

His voice comes out like a warning. "Suggesting–"

"I'm suggesting that he may need his partner right now," Mason says, emphasizing the word pointedly – and he's one of those few that always manage to hit his eyes right through the mask – "more than some old fool he used to look up to when he was still learning up from down."

.

The pamphlets drop from Daniel's jacket pocket as Rorschach wrestles him out of it; he kicks them aside, focus entirely on getting Daniel into his bed and familiarity. He doesn't bother picking them up, doesn't bother with conversation that'll be wasted on the unhearing, uncomprehending. There's a red-hot burning in the back of his mind, fury over Mason's implications. It's true that he's the best person to look after Daniel, but not for the reasons the old man had given. There's nothing lacking; he's a good partner, dependable, always has his back, always there when Daniel gets sloppy or misses something and needs his help. This isn't his fault.

He pulls the covers over his friend, switches off the lamp, and Daniel drifts off, still mumbling incoherently until the last of his own lights go out.

Rorschach doesn't move from the chair near the bed until dawn.

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[He wakes in the middle of the night to a darkness that doesn't hide the fact that he isn't alone in the room, is being watched over, guarded. It seems important somehow, but he can't remember why; he drifts back off, restless.]

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The first day, he catches Daniel with a broom from the hall closet, dutifully sweeping nonexistent dust in the kitchen. He's humming, something tuneless and strange, and when Rorschach snatches the broom away the look in Daniel's eyes is total heartbreak, mixed with a child's fear of being caught away from his chores, of being punished.

"No," Rorschach says, tossing the broom back into the closet. "Don't need to do that anymore. Not here."

Daniel nods, seeming to understand, but he's at it again the next day. This time, Rorschach throws the idiotic thing out the window and if anyone's hit by a falling bristlebroom, it's not important enough to make the evening news.

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Every night, Rorschach turns up the heat in Daniel's room, lets him sweat the chemicals out of his system. He doesn't know how to operate the washing machine downstairs – the coin-ops at the laundromat down the street are much simpler – so he just keeps replacing the damp, stinking sheets with fresh ones, all the while wondering why someone who lives alone has so many sets of fresh bedding stashed away. Has a guest room that's never used with an attached bathroom that's always stocked. Has four chairs at his kitchen table.

And every morning, Daniel comes around with a look of surprise on his face, thrilled at waking in an unfamiliar bed and surrounded by walls he doesn't recognize, watched over by a stranger. Rorschach has stopped bothering to introduce himself, because it doesn't last the day; rarely lasts an hour, and the memory will come back on its own when it's ready. He knows how to make oatmeal, the instant kind, and learns how to manage toast. Daniel never complains about the lack of variety.

The day Daniel looks at him with those quietly sympathetic eyes emptied out and vacant, tells him he can see the past hanging on him and asks if he wants to shed any of it away, it's all Rorschach can do to walk away before that blackened eye becomes one of a matched set. It's not really his partner he's angry at anyway, but he's the nearest target to hand and that's a dangerous situation.

When he comes back an hour later, Daniel has forgotten him again. This time, the wall is a good enough target, and the plaster gives more easily than he'd expected.

.

[The noise is frightening but it doesn't frighten him, is a threat that doesn't feel like one. Pulse pounding through his veins is an alien sensation now but he can almost bring it back, muscle memory and nerve memory and the memory of every drop of blood, spinning through him in concert–]

[Punches thrown and punches taken and it's violent, that hidden place in the high rafters of his mind. He shies away.]

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"You're so nice, " Daniel muses one morning, nibbling on the corner of a piece of toast, staring blankly at the calendar on the wall. It hasn't been changed over, but he doesn't seem to notice.

The canister of coffee Rorschach's holding hits the counter, hard. A long silence, only uncomfortable on one end.

"No, " Rorschach finally says, spinning to snatch the toast away, slap it down onto the plate. There's no rhyme or reason here; he's just had it. "I'm not nice."

Daniel stares, bewildered.

"Difficult," Rorschach continues, and it's really not regret he feels slipping into his voice, coloring it in jagged spikes. It's not. "Critical. Argumentative. Never nice."

One hand reaches for the toast, hesitant. There's so much childlike apprehension on his face now that it's all Rorschach can do to hiss through his teeth and turn back to the coffee. When he sets two mugs down on the table and slides into the chair facing Daniel, he has to will his hands to stay on the edge of the tabletop where he's put them, to not wind into Daniel's shirtfront and shake him. He remembers Mason's advice; has been ignoring it for a week, and has made no progress and maybe...

It's out before he can stop it: "They were, though. Weren't they."

Daniel looks up from his toast. "Who?"

"The people where you were. They were nice to you. Filled some..." He pauses, and the phrase is handled carefully, like a particularly disgusting creature pulled, all jointed legs and slime, from under the refrigerator. "...emotional need?"

No answer immediately, Daniel regarding him with a look that says he doesn't quite understand the question. Then, "...they listened to me sometimes."

He remembers this, from the long nights of note-taking; them cornering Daniel about his past, his childhood. His father. Rorschach had always assumed his partner to have had a perfectly normal childhood, maybe filled out with material excess where a parent's time might have been stretched too thin to pay constant attention, but still stable. Had never imagined the rejection Daniel had spoken so freely of with this stranger, never pictured him thrown out, sleeping in the yard, practically excommunicated from his own blood – but then, he'd never asked, had he?

Listening isn't just listening. It's being willing to ask, too, and wanting to hear the answer.

"Daniel..." Rorschach says, trailing off, mouth working under the mask. He wants to say that Daniel can tell him these things, that he won't judge, but he doesn't honestly know how true it is and right now, the last thing this twisted and folded mind needs is more lies. "...know I've been judgmental in the past," he finally settles on, forming the words carefully. It's distasteful, but it has to be done. "I'll try not to be from now on, if there are things you need to say."

And the simple apprehension doesn't fade, but there's something there inside of it now, trying to show itself through the cracks; something like longing, but being unsure what it is that's longed for. "That would be nice," he says, quiet, breaking off another corner of toast.

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Late that night, Rorschach scrambles through his notes, for once infuriated at his own poor handwriting; for all the years he's spent nose-first in one journal or another, jotting down every thought that occurred, he's never had to reread any of it. Buried somewhere under the mission notes, comings and goings, minutes of the meetings Daniel had attended, theories and conjectures as to their motives and means – some side notes there, known organ trafficking rings in the continental U.S. – he finds a thick sheaf of yellow lined paper.

Conversation transcripts. Logs, basically, of both the mundane and the deeply personal, every word spoken by or to his friend during his incarceration. If there's really anything to what Mason said, and it's starting to look likely, no matter how it chafes to admit it, this is the place to start looking.

Red pen in hand, he starts reading – but after three hours and two complete runs through the stack, one lead after another fixed on and then abandoned, he has to face it. There's nothing there. Whatever need Daniel'd been feeling so acutely in those long tunnels, dark underground spaces with both their voices hollowed and distorted and far away, he didn't speak a word of it aloud, to anyone.

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[A dream: Thick feathered wings, heavy in the air as they beat against gravity, against entropy, against the shape all the world wants to take. On the ground, he's alone, and sometimes there's blood on his hands and sometimes there isn't and there's someone just on the edge of sight who could help him figure out why it won't stay away but the figure is always shifting, black on white or white on black, always moving just out of reach.]

[The sound of wings is deafening.]

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"This is your house," he says for what must be the twentieth time, gloved hangs slung heavily across his knees. In the bed, Daniel is clinging to the sheets in something like terror; had been shocked, today, to wake up in a strange new place. It hurts to see but it's probably a good sign that the giddy elation is fading. "Daniel. You're safe here."

"Don't know you," he says, the distrust obvious in his tone and after days of Daniel blandly accepting a stranger in his space without so much as a narrowed glance, welcome.

"You don't trust me."

"...no."

Under the mask something that might have been a smile, in some other life. "Good."

Daniel's face creases up in confusion. "You don't want me to–"

"As long as you don't know me, then no."

.

He's still and quiet on the landing, head tilted to the side; behind framed glass, a blown-up photograph of a barn owl in flight, stooping towards some prey hidden by the wintry landscape. Daniel's reflection is superimposed over it, glasses another set of mirrors, back and back and back.

"You took that," Rorschach says from behind him, quiet. "Trip to Vermont. Talked about it for weeks afterward. Annoying."

Daniel lifts one hand, runs it down the frame and splays it over the glass, breaking the chain of reflections. It curls into a fist. "I can't remember," he says. "Why can't – what's it going after?"

Rorschach rolls his shoulders in a loose approximation of a shrug. "Mouse maybe. Think that's what they eat."

Narrowed eyes. "But you can't..."

"It's there." One hand settles awkwardly onto Daniel's shoulder; he doesn't flinch out from under it. Some sense of familiarity is returning, but it's still so vague, so deep. "Wouldn't go after nothing."

They're both reflecting now, hard edges all subsumed by the white. Rorschach's mask is half pushed up, and he hasn't bothered with the hat inside for days now, or the gloves; Daniel's hand clasps down over his and it's uncomfortable and possessive but he allows it. He thinks of the safety of underground places.

He thinks of snow.

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[It's cold but he's bundled against it, thick puffy coat making him feel out of proportion, like a child again. Wool scarf, wool hat, wool gloves, fingers peeled back so that the camera doesn't slip from his hands and those bare fingertips are red and aching in the iced-over air, like his face is, like his toes are even inside the boots.]

[A shape splits the air, white and dark and deadly, and he can suddenly smell machine oil and iron and worn leather, hovering just inside his senses.]

[Click, goes the shutter, and the moment's his.]

.

Daniel's shaking and breathing hard, rough. He's almost sobbing; holding it back with a child's determination to not cry, to never cry. The most coherent thing Rorschach's been able to get out of him is that he's remembering some of their cases, the very worst ones, the ones where they arrived too late and someone was hurt or killed and there was nothing for them to do but hover in silence and then turn away, part paths, go each their separate ways to whatever passed for home on those nights.

There'd always been something shifting there, behind the goggles, in the instant before Rorschach turned his back–

He's holding onto Daniel now, slumped at the base of his stairs, warm yellow light from the kitchen casting a deceptively comforting glow across them. It's a terrible thing to have come back first, without the greater context of all the cases they've worked to success, all the lives they have saved. The people they've sent away with a smile and gratitude. The nights that make the life worth it. It's a terrible thing to remember but it's still a memory, is something he'd shoved down under the layers of drugs and denial and the calm voices telling him it was okay to forget, fighting back to the surface.

Daniel thrashes in his arms, eyes shut tight, a reedy sound working its way up his throat, and Rorschach knows: blood washes out of clothes and off of armor and skin, but there is a deepness beyond that, beyond muscle and bone and the shields they set up to protect themselves, and he should not have ever walked away.

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It's an easy thing, from that huddled, dark place, to move on to holding Daniel not because he needs it but because he simply wants it, asks for it, hands tugging and pulling at his sleeve in a gesture that constantly forgets itself. The drugs are long since out of his system now, his pupils returned to normal and responsive to the light Rorschach shines into them twice a day, and the night sweats have subsided. He can form new memories, and some of the old ones are coming back – he remembers Rorschach's name, remembers what the mask is and that it shouldn't frighten him, remembers the feel of bare, nailbitten hands and why he wants it – but others are maddeningly out of reach, visible only from the corner of vision.

When Daniel narrows his eyes, trying to reach out and grab hold, Rorschach can see them dissolve like day-old dreams and slip clear through his fingers, and it aches.

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[Blood and flight, intertwined, like the gory ascent of the owl with its prey in claws and it's always his hands that crust and crack with it, that swim with it like spinning and morphing blackness in the eerie half light of the dash, but he can't put them around what he wants and owls don't hunt in pairs anyway.]

[He sees a half-face, emerging from shadow, and it's his and it's none of them, it's nobody at all.]

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Days and nights and days and nights. Daniel shakes in his sleep sometimes, and in the vigil he can't afford to keep, Rorschach leans over him, tries to steady him against the tearing-down his mind's pushing through, getting rid of what's false, making room for what's real. Tries to understand even a word of what he's saying; mumbled entreaties too full of shame and secrecy to ever make it into language. Sometimes...

Sometimes.

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["I never thought–" he says, and he's not sure if it's a daydream or a memory or a fantasy, but he's lying crosswise on his bed and his head is pillowed on an uncomfortable lap, all jutting bone and hard muscle. A hand touches his hair, pulls away.]

["I thought you wouldn't–" he starts, but he never finishes because sleep is dragging him either down or up, and he doesn't know which is which or whether he's dreaming or awake but something electric jumps from the fingers to his scalp and it's like every dream he's ever had are piling up on one another, bunching and lifting like cars in a massive wreck, layering and twisting together but god, they aren't dreams, they're–]

[And he's–]

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A flicker of eyes moving beneath closed eyelids, casting about grotesquely under flesh like something alien and disgusting but he just settles his hand back down, feels something in the skin like acceptance–

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[And it all makes so much sense–]

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Rorschach's drifted off somehow, because it's past dawn before he's aware again, the blinds still open from the night before and something cold and uncomfortable in the winter sunlight glaring through the glass. He straightens up from where he'd slumped against the headboard, rubs his eyes through the mask. Upsets the weight across his legs in the motion, and how did he end up–

He freezes, an animal sort of paralysis. Looks down at Daniel, still dozing lightly; is immediately unsure whether to extricate himself and save his dignity or stay exactly where he is and let him sleep a little longer. It's an embarrassing position to be in but Daniel's nights have been so restless, calm like this so rare, and it feels like something bigger than any of that is hovering this morning, waiting to drop on them like a cloudburst.

So he stays still, and waits, and waits. And as soon as Daniel opens his eyes, Rorschach sees the change in them immediately – a filtering in of careful recognition, an easy comfort, and it might still just be wishful thinking. But then Daniel blinks up at the mask, narrows his eyes curiously and it's so like himself that Rorschach can't do anything for a moment but stare, shifting his hand through the soft hair, reaching around underneath to cradle the back of his friend's head like something perfect and precious.

Intact.

"If you ask me what happened," he growls after a long moment, leaning down closer than he usually would. "I will break your hand."

Daniel smiles then, and laughs and laughs, and Rorschach bunches his mask up and runs the back of his hand over his mouth. Breathes against it, rough and shaky.

The moment hangs, refuses to sink in, but he doesn't push away.

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(c) ricebol 2010