Archive of Our Own ^beta

There are things from Rorschach's — Kovacs' — childhood that lie buried in the muck at the bottom of his memories. They return to him only in gunshot, knife-slash flashes, burning holes in him in early mornings and late nights, wrenching him screaming from vague nightmares, scattered images of faceless men entering his childhood bedroom. It always ends there, now, with a man-shaped silhouette looming over him — but he knows it didn't end there, then, when he was a child and the men were real, rather than branded impressions on his subconscious. He was a quiet, lethargic child, prone to fits of flightiness that drove him to hide in broom closets in the middle of the night. The counselors at the Charlton Home attempted to pry these things from him, seeing the signs, but the words were lost to him even then. He told no one.

It doesn't come for him until he emerges on the other end of puberty at eighteen, as though to make the cat-and-mouse game it plays slightly less unfair. Had it come for him immediately, when he was a child locked behind the gates of Charlton, it would've been too easy, poor sport, like hunting hatchling birds that haven't yet learned to fly. Rorschach forms the understanding that it is less an unfeeling manifestation of the Condition of Man and more a sadistic animal, the kind that plays with its food, intelligent enough to be cruel. It appears in different forms, but most often his mother, bloated and dribbling Drano down her wobbling chins, or any of the men whose afterimages torment Kovacs' sleep, naked and smiling, blood on their pricks, shushing him with their fingers to their mouths.

("Quiet," they'd say, worried that the child's mother might overhear, unaware that they needn't be, that it wasn't that she didn't know what was happening down the hall; she was just too drunk to care.)

Kovacs was terrified of it; he ran from it screaming and praying every time, his head full of childish delusions that he'd been cursed, that it was the demon his mother became when she died, risen from Hell to torture the son who failed to grieve her, who said, "Good." Rorschach is a different creature entirely, and he understands terror only as an illness Kovacs suffered from, that made him weak. When Rorschach stepped outside the dress shop, wrapped in smoke and terrible enlightenment, it was there, watching him from across the street. It wore the girl's face, mousy brown hair and shadowed eyes, a tattered dress. He came to stand beside it, and it made no move to kill him or eat him or whatever it had wanted all that time. It only watched him curiously, an almost innocent tilt to its head, while he watched the fire grow.

It follows him still, never far behind — but it keeps a distance now. If he stops, it stops and watches from the opposite curb, the opposite side of the room. Its appearances are more tailored, more calculated, and it takes on the shapes of hideously maimed children and disfigured women, as though it's chasing his reaction now more than him — as though it wouldn't be enough to come forward and do its work. It needs him afraid; it needs him human, and human he is no longer. Rorschach comes to think of it as an extension of his shadow, not a companion, but an attachment and a reminder.

It has never spoken to him or responded to Kovacs' questions — "What are you?" "What do you want?" "Mama?" It has never eaten or slept, as far as he knows. Like Rorschach, it is something other than human; rather, a predator that feeds on them, the sort of creature that inspired the first monster myths.

Kovacs tried to explain it to Dreiberg once, but he quickly retracted the explanation when it became clear that Dreiberg thought he was either drunk or insane. It is with Rorschach when he comes to show Dreiberg Blake's pin, creeping a little closer than usual, as though hoping that Dreiberg's company will bring out something in Rorschach that's human enough for it to feed on. Nothing comes of it; Dreiberg is less of a man than the last time they saw each other, a hollow shell emptied out by his own pathetic attempts at finding fulfillment in what he calls normalcy. Rorschach is more sickened than anything by their reuniting, and when he leaves the Owl's Nest, it follows him sullenly down the dark tunnel, radiating bitter disappointment even as it wears Blake's grinning face, the head burst apart like a melon dropped from the roof of a high-rise.

Rorschach is never able to fully understand it, why it follows him now and where it came from in the first place, the chain; that he could pass it on to another if he so chose — but he is viscerally repulsed by the notion of sex, and even if he knew, he would do nothing about it.

It boards Archimedes with Rorschach, a butchered little girl lurking in the shadows at the back of the ship, silently mouthing, "Too late. Too late." It accompanies them to Karnak, a brutalized young woman who died in reach of help slouching through the Antarctic snow, her hair thrown wildly by the wind. It watches their confrontation with Veidt through the impassive, bloodshot eyes of a dead prostitute, seemingly unmoved to learn that the herd it hunts has been thinned considerably.

When Rorschach rips the mask off and Kovacs cries out, it lurches forward with a raw, hopeful hunger on his mother's stolen face, its favorite disguise — but Kovacs was never its kill. With a despondent motion of Osterman's hand, throwing hot blood across the surface of the snow, it is too late.

There is a moment of disbelief, that it had pursued one man for four decades and been denied in the end, but it is brief; it is old, older than any building that still stands, and it is patient. There is always the next link in the chain. It turns mechanically and walks back into heavy snowfall, unbothered by the cold, in a straight line towards the one that came before. It has always been this way; one after the other.