Chapter Text
Rorschach shutters himself into the communal bathroom, fills the basin with cold water and then puts his head in it. He is starting to seriously reassess his current approach to the situation with regard to Nite Owl. While it seemed comforting at first to fall into old habits, the cognitive dissonance is not abating and it is becoming increasingly difficult to resolve it.
Daniel is dead. Daniel is alive. Their shared history is dead, and cannot be resurrected, only reincarnated. There is weight to their interactions, but only to Rorschach. There is a different configuration of scars on Daniel's knuckles.
Rorschach will make a mistake. Eventually, he will make a mistake, and there is every chance it will be terminal.
He holds his breath for as long as he can, tiny bubbles of air escaping from between his compressed lips, each one a compromise. He waits for this state of despair to lessen, to stop knowing what he feels. His lungs burn. His face is numb. He is almost numb. Almost.
He surfaces, draws in a deep breath, and does not look at Kovacs, grimy in the mirror's cracked reflection. There is nothing to be gained from inspecting the man there; the mirror would not come out of the experience unscathed, nor his fists. Instead he watches the ripples in the dirty basin as the water drips from his hair. He is tired but already knows he won't sleep tonight—too on edge, too sick-feeling—but resolves to at least try.
He pulls the plug.
"About time." His neighbor, of course, waiting in the hall. Her lank hair is piled up on her head, and the pink terrycloth robe slung on her narrow frame is stained and full of snags. She puts her hands on her hips and it pulls tight across her belly, and Rorschach notices, with a shock that leaves him swaying nauseously on his feet, that she is with child. "Thought you'd drowned in there. Why are you always up at stupid o'clock anyway? Hey, you okay, Red? You look like shit."
Another pregnant whore, her children born to live under the stormcloud of her resentment and her temper, fearing the back of her hand as much as they do the creeping touch of her johns. Malleable creatures, ready to be shaped by their environment. There is no certainty that they will be lucky like he was, taken away from her withering influence, given an education and opportunity to find purpose. Little chance they will stumble across any catalyst for change. He feels nothing but contempt for her, and her mindless perpetuation of the cycle.
She notices him looking at her, and flushes, hands moving from her hips to spread protectively across the swell of her stomach. "C'mon," she says, "I need to clean myself up."
He stands in the doorway, held fast by his disgust.
"Come on," she says again, sharply. "What, are you one of those perverts who likes pregnant women? Because I already had enough of that tonight. Stop staring at me."
"Why do you let strangers," Rorschach asks her, and he sounds detached even to his own ears, too tightly screwed down to be truly calm, "how can you let them touch you like that. When you have— when you will have a child to care for."
She raises her eyebrows at him as though he has said something stupid, then she scoffs, hands back on her hips. "I guess it's just so much fun," she says. The sarcasm fits her well, animates her tired face. "Asshole."
Rorschach lets her into the bathroom. She slams the door hard behind her and it echoes into the corridor, violent in the early-morning silence. The faucet runs and runs.
Rorschach turns and turns in his bed, springs digging into his body no matter how he arranges himself, the past digging into his thoughts no matter how much he tries not to think. The dawn is breaking and he is sweating through his underclothes.
He pulls on some pants and goes up to the roof to watch the sky phase through shades of ash. At the edge of the building, he settles on the tar beach among the spidery shadows cast through television antennae and the dark blot of advertising blimps hanging under the clouds. The morning is soft for early May, warmth licking his bare arms. It's going to be a humid summer this year. He remembers the closeness of it, the heat shimmering off the blacktop during the day and clinging to the alley brickwork at night.
Not that long after Keene. His fury hadn't yet subsided into something manageable. Rough year in a string of rough years.
He shakes his head clear of memories, and turns his thoughts to more useful concerns.
It is difficult to figure out his next move. He will leave Nite Owl to bark up trees for now. He is interested in Deschaines, his connection to Moloch, and by extension, to Veidt. Another month until he appears at Moloch's club. Another month for Rorschach to figure out a way to approach him without revealing himself. Not so much his identity—although that is once again something to consider—but more his nature.
He has never put any stock in psychics or other such New Age quackery. Such things are the remit of the soft-headed looking for easy solutions to their problems, reeled in by the promises of charlatans peddling snake oil and crystals. Robert Deschaines is a proven quantity, however, and he finds that more unsettling than he'd like.
Rorschach is concerned that he will be detected immediately as a man out of time, shunted into a reality that is not his own. Seems like that kind of cosmogony is something a clairvoyant would be sensitive to. He wonders if the kid will be able to scry his own death from Rorschach's memories. The thought makes the back of his neck prickle.
Or perhaps that's just his neighbor, staring at him.
"Only two kinds of people come up on the roof this time of the morning," she says, crouching beside him and tapping a crumpled cigarette out of its packet. "Smokers, and jumpers." She offers it to him.
Rorschach glances at her side-long, and shakes his head in refusal. At least she is adequately dressed now, for a given value of adequate.
"Suit yourself," she says, and balances the cigarette on her lower lip while she pats at her pockets for a lighter. "Just wait til I'm gone before you make yourself a sidewalk pancake, alright? I'm throwing up enough as it is."
"What do you want," Rorschach says.
"Just came to apologize for being a bitch." She shrugs. "I try to be on good terms with my neighbors, whether they like it or not."
Rorschach is not on particularly good terms with apologies, but he knows one when he hears one, and he hasn't heard one so far. He ignores her.
"So what are you doing up here? And why are you always about so early in the AM? Shift worker? I bet you work down the docks, huh. I mean, just look at those arms."
Rorschach hunches over, conscious of her scrutiny. It makes his skin crawl, and he wishes for the protection of his trench coat.
This seems to amuse her. "Didn't have you pegged as the shy type, Red. Hey, what's your name, anyway?"
He tries to project an icy silence, but her incessant prattling seems to melt it before it touches her. She is nothing if not persistent, he will give her that. "None of your business," he growls.
"Oh, please," she says, and he can practically hear her rolling her eyes. It makes him bristle. "You stand there and judge me for trying to do the best with what I got—and that was fucking rude, by the way—you can at least tell me what name to curse you out by."
"Hehn." Rorschach straightens up, looks at her. Appalling, the way she's framed her whoring as a work ethic. Perhaps it's how she lives with herself. "Trying to do your best? Get a real job," he suggests.
"Oh, you got it all figured out for me." She finally locates her lighter, sparks it. "That's nice. I've got two other jobs. They cover rent and food but it's not gonna make a dent the hospital bills." She lights her cigarette, blows a plume of smoke out into the morning air. "You know?"
Hospitals being expensive is something Rorschach is aware of. He has always known it in the context of injury, though. Had he given any consideration to the nature of birth, he might have realized it would come with similar price-tags.
But then, she shouldn't be having a baby if she can't afford it. It's not fair on the child, and not fair on the honest tax-payers who have to pick up the slack. He doesn't wonder where the father is.
"And I want my kid to go to college. I want him to be better than all this," she's saying. "Can't do that on two-sixty an hour, honey. There just ain't enough time in the week." She taps her cigarette; the breeze catches flakes of ash and settles them in her hair. "We all do what we can to get where we want to be."
"A boy?" Rorschach asks, before he can stop himself. He doesn't care if it's a boy. It makes no difference. The traffic blares in the street below, the city rousing from its torpor.
"God," she says, and runs her hands over the mound of her belly. "God, I hope so. You got any kids?"
Rorschach just stares at her, unable to understand why she would ask something like that, when the answer is self-evident. "No," he says, simply.
"You're pretty old, though. Most guys end up with kids, one way or another. Maybe you got some you don't know about." She is looking at him again, that lewd, speculative raise of her eyebrows, assessing him like he is a slab of meat.
It incites a strange, defensive anger. He takes a sharp breath. "I don't," he tells her, firmly. "Not interested in that."
"Is that so. Well, what does interest you?"
"Not you."
"Oh, don't flatter yourself." She laughs, getting to her feet. She pitches her cigarette over the edge of the building. "Anyway, I gotta get moving. My shift starts in an hour. I wanna say it's been nice, but it hasn't."
"Appreciate your honesty," Rorschach says, and that much is true. "Let's not do it again sometime."
-
One of them is his mother.
Rorschach wakes up shaking and tired, and memories keep buffeting at him: his mother's face at the hearing, when he was taken from her and given to Charlton. The way she had grasped for his sleeve as he was escorted away—my baby, she'd cried. Don't take my baby. He could almost believe she was distraught. It was the last time she'd ever touched him.
He hits the streets, head down. He decides to walk into Manhattan instead of taking the 2, lets his feet guide him into familiar territory while he concentrates on not thinking. Dinner is a half-eaten croissant filched from an empty sidewalk cafe table. His reserves of cash are once again dwindling—rent, food, thrifted clothes—and he is loath to spend any of it if he doesn't have to.
The pastry is stale and chewy. He finishes it in three bites, barely even tastes it.
He could get more money, shake down a street-corner pusher or two, flush their drugs and take their dirty money, but his conscience has started gnawing at him. It's not truly theft if he is taking from thieves, but it's not morally sound in a way he can maintain, either.
We all do what we can, he hears his neighbor say.
He spits into the gutter.
He has three dollars in his pocket, peeled from the diminishing roll of notes secreted in a paper bag behind the single kitchenette cupboard. They will last him five days.
As he walks, he considers taking a detour through the Garment District to see if any of the factories are looking for work—he is certain that he has not forgotten how to turn a seam—but the idea of working a shift, spending hours and hours, day after day, among inane chattering drones and indecent clothing, feels like putting on a lead coat.
The years have encroached on him despite his resistance, steadily working their entropy. He is not twenty-two any more, or even thirty-something. If he feels tired at the mere thought, then it's not worth his time pursuing. Besides, he needs to dedicate himself to stopping Veidt; the world won't hold itself together while he picks up a wage. There are infinitely more important things he has to do that is not handling women's undergarments.
The responsibility of it hangs over him like the sword of Damocles, and this time he can can see the string all too clearly, fraying fiber by fiber.
It begins to rain as the sun drops, humidity of the day transmuted into a spring shower. The clouds are backlit an acidic orange that matches the awakening streetlamps, and everything is starting to smell like wet garbage. Rorschach turns up his shirt collar.
The newsvendor at Fortieth and Seventh is shuttering his stall for the evening, and arguing with a black kid over the damp pages of a comic book. Rorschach eyes the headlines stacked up on the sidewalk as he passes, then stops short.
SOVIETS CONDUCT BOMB TESTS IN BERING SEA, reads the New York Gazette, dark splotches of rain diffusing into the newsprint. Rorschach frowns, searches out the New Frontiersman. COMMIES WARMING UP.
"Give me a copy," he says to the vendor. He's too busy bickering to pay any heed to a customer, so Rorschach waits with a patience he doesn't feel until the vendor gives up and lets the kid jog off with the comic book.
This is wrong. The timing is all wrong.
"I'm trying to close up here," the vendor says. "You couldn't come by ten minutes earlier?"
Rorschach ignores his grousing and shakes some change out of his pocket. His hands feel unsteady. "Frontiersman, please. And a Gazette."
"Really?" The vendor shrugs. "Well, there ain't nothing wrong with having more'n one perspective on things, that's what I say. A newsvendor gets all that as a matter of course, you know. Not like most folks. Most folks'll stick to what reassures them, cosy in their little black and white worlds—"
"Rain's getting heavier," Rorschach says, before the man can get into the rhythm of his spiel. He's heard it before, and it's substantially more tedious when there is an urgency driving him. He slides the papers out of the tied-up stacks himself rather than wait for the vendor to do it for him.
"Sure is." The vendor squints up at the dark sky. "Best get the rest of this bundled up before it turns to pulp—not that it ain't gonna end up like that anyhow. Well, here's your change."
Rorschach barely registers the cold coins pressed into his palm, or the rain sliding down the back of his neck. There is the miasma of foreign food from the Gunga across the intersection, onion and garlic and spices carried on a drift of steam, and his stomach growls.
He considers ordering a coffee, sitting in a booth next to the steamed-up windows and poring over the papers, but decides that's an unacceptable luxury. He can read them in his apartment, over a mug of the freeze-dried stuff. He has a whole jar of it, and it cost him less than a single cup at the diner would.
It tastes disgusting no matter how much sugar he puts in it, but that's beside the point.
He takes the subway back, braces himself against the graffiti-coated car wall rather than sit on the filthy seats. The sway and jolt of the train vibrates through his body, familiar and tiresome, keeping him tense for balance and alert for trouble. He skims the newspaper articles; Gazette first, then the Frontiersman to compare for the unadorned facts.
The singular fact is this: Russia is carrying out military exercises in the Bering Strait. Both papers fail to enlighten Rorschach further, instead engaging in some circumspect fearmongering and then descending into speculation over how it will affect the next year's presidential elections. There is no mention of intervention, by Doctor Manhattan or otherwise.
There is a copy of the Nova Express on one of the empty seats. Rorschach eyes it with contempt, then picks it up.
FIVE TO MIDNIGHT
The front page is dominated by the Doomsday clock.
More talk of elections, and the aftershocks of Watergate. Bernstein and Woodward are apparently alive and well in this reality. Seems that Underboss—or whoever set him up—didn't have any designs on them. Interesting.
Mention of Manhattan, this time. Apparently didn't intervene in Vietnam. Too busy playing hero, a military puppet shaped to raise America's morale, but only on their home turf. Poor strategy. Looks like the Comedian wasn't shipped out, either. Makes sense. He's not in the government's employ, and out of Veidt's loop.
The war continued until '75. Victory was much more ambiguous. Another twist in the chronology, another complication.
Overall, positioning of key figures seems like a conspiracy to cast Nixon in a bad light. Rorschach isn't overly surprised. The reaction when he extended the presidential term was mixed, to say the least. Would have been more so, if he failed in Vietnam.
He crumples the papers up and stuffs them into his coat pocket. This is his stop.
-
He has come to the conclusion that he has little choice. The world is on a crash-course five years sooner than it should be, and the only people he has exchanged more than a handful of words with are a whore, and Nite Owl.
He has to get Nite Owl to talk to Deschaines. Chase him away from the city. He just doesn't know how to explain it to him without giving himself away.
Nite Owl is six stories up on 110th, crouched on the lip of a building, binoculars trained on a window across the street. He manages to get three paces away before Nite Owl drops the binoculars and pivots around, throwing crescent whickering past inches from Rorschach's nose. It hits the roof access door behind him with a resonating clang.
"Oh," Nite Owl says, getting to his feet. "It's you. Sorry."
"Lousy shot."
"Lucky for your face. How's it going, pal?"
He retrieves his weapon, clips it back onto his belt. Rorschach notes an awkwardness to his movements, a certain stiffness to the way he's holding himself. Pain from the impact of the bullet last night, bruising likely spread like stormclouds over his back.
"Variable," Rorschach says. "Working a case?"
"Just doing some legwork. Thought I'd finally tracked down one of the Brethren, but unless he's a piano tutor now, I think I was fed some bullshit."
"Should have a quiet word with your informant," Rorschach suggests.
"Yeah, probably," Nite Owl says distractedly, fiddling with something at his belt. The Archimedes appears overhead, shaking loose a wreath of artificial fog-clouds. "Listen, since you're here…"
Rorschach tilts his head. Yes, he is here, despite the reservations he has about his own behavior. He thinks about how to draw Nite Owl in, how to frame his interest in Deschaines. Suggest he may be involved with the Brethren, perhaps? It wouldn't be strictly untrue. Nite Owl seems cagey for some reason. That may be an advantage.
"Since you seem serious about being a masked vigilante, there's some people you need to meet." Nite Owl gestures toward the airship. "If it's not an imposition."
Rorschach is immediately cautious. "What kind of people."
Nite Owl grins at him, lopsided and painfully sincere. One hand fidgets with the hem of his cape. "The Crimebusters," he says.
"Don't see why," Rorschach tells him. "Met them already."
"Really?"
"Hrn." That did not deflate him as much as expected, and Rorschach knows better that to dissemble in the face of Nite Owl's interest. "Well, the Comedian. Ran into him down at the docks."
"What were you doing by the river?"
"Getting a shotgun in my face."
Nite Owl's mouth pulls tight under his goggles. "Yeah, that sounds like him." His laugh is anemic; he rubs the back of his neck. "He likes to throw his weight around, and that's his territory."
"Figured as much."
"So," Nite Owl says, and gestures at his airship. "Are you coming, or…?"
The question hangs heavily in the air. Are you going to be one of us, he is asking. Or are you going to be a problem. Rorschach usually considers 'being a problem' something of an advantage and had railed against the idea of an organized group the first time around, but this time he finds that he doesn't have the fortitude for it. Besides, they're already a crime-fighting outfit whether he joins them or not. Even after all this time, it still strikes him as unnecessary posturing.
"Whatever you say," he mutters.
The smile that lights up Daniel's face is searing.
"Just a formality," he says, tries to take the edge off that crescent-moon grin. "Don't see point of it otherwise."
"Sure, sure," Nite Owl says, but he's suddenly more concerned with the scrolling green readout on the Archimedes' dashboard. "Huh. Should probably have refueled before tonight. Do you mind if we make a pitstop?"
"Go ahead."
Nite Owl nods and punches in some new coordinates. The city reels out beneath them, streamers of neon lights and streetlamps between the hulking tenement blocks, but as they bank to the east Nite Owl hits a button and the shutters drop over the airship's windscreens. A new display screen lights up on the dash; a mess of wireframe cubes that must be a rendering of the streets below.
"Nothing personal," Nite Owl says. "But you understand that, right?"
"Of course." Rorschach settles back into the co-pilot's seat and tries to ignore the way his stomach drops.
-
"This won't take long," Nite Owl says, still cape and cowled, pulling off his gauntlets. His hands, bleached pale by the harsh lighting, twist the fuel coupling into place with a brisk efficiency. "Usually I run him off the spark, but that takes an overnight charge. Or, uh, day, I guess. Gonna have to check on his batteries, he shouldn't have run down so quickly."
The workshop fills with the heavy odor of aviation fuel. It is overpoweringly nostalgic, and Rorschach puts his hand to his nose before he can stop himself, tries to ward off the awful crowding of his memories.
Nite Owl looks over at him, inscrutable behind the dark glass of his goggles, and Rorschach resents him for an instant for not peeling back the mask and exposing himself, even though this is how it should be—how Rorschach always maintained it should be, strangers under the uniforms.
"Sorry," Nite Owl says. "I guess the smell's an acquired taste."
"It's fine," Rorschach says. He turns his back on Nite Owl where he's propped with one hand against the Archimedes' hull, and makes a circuit of the Nest instead. Still the same rickety military cot set up in one corner, though its blankets are neatly turned down instead of the rumpled state he used to leave them in. Seems unlikely that Veidt ever slept here. He takes petty satisfaction in the thought.
Same display case, same appalling signed photograph of the Twilight Lady, same array of framed newspaper clippings, except he isn't in any of them.
There's a manila folder tucked behind a chipped plastic statue of the first Nite Owl, on the lowest shelf. Rorschach slides it free. It's thin, practically empty, and the corners are dog-eared and grubby. He flips it open and the familiar repro of a ransom note hits him square in the gut.
"Hey," Nite Owl says from behind him, voice quiet and clipped. His bare hand tugs the folder from Rorschach's lax grip. "Give me that." He folds it closed, runs his finger over the spine of it as though to bind its contents in place and puts it back in the display, unassuming among the celebratory paraphernalia. "Nobody ever tell you it's rude to go through other people's stuff?"
"Habit," Rorschach says. "Apologies."
"It's okay," Nite Owl replies, though from the tone of his voice Rorschach isn't so certain. Forgiveness was often a reflex with this man. "I keep meaning to file it, I guess." He stands awkwardly in front of the display case, clearly eager for Rorschach to move away and stop prying. Rorschach obliges him, for now.
-
"Just a formality," he says, echoing Rorschach's earlier deflection. He eases up on the thrust lever and sets the ship to autopilot, glances over. "But I'll be vouching for you tonight."
"You barely know me," Rorschach points out. His jaw clenches around the words, at how much that bothers him despite the care he took to always keep Daniel an arms length away.
"Well, yeah. Truth is, we all barely know each other," Nite Owl says, slides a thumb under the elastic strap of his goggles and snaps it in emphasis. "There's only so far you can go. But still—you can't just walk into a vigilante meeting. You could be anyone under that mask. But you've had my back lately, so I owe my friends an introduction."
"Not interested in making good impression, you realize," he growls. He is only doing this because it will earn him further trust. He wonders for a moment if that in itself marks him as untrustworthy. He brushes the thought aside; he has only righteous intentions.
Rorschach expects some kind of pushback, or at least a chagrined look from Nite Owl, but the man just laughs. "Don't worry, neither are they. Like I said, just a formality."
—