Chapter Text
A gale howls, the noise permeating this bleak fortress like an uneasy spirit, although the chill fingers of the Antarctic wind will never penetrate its monolithic walls. Rorschach thinks of a shroud of snow, of blinding white falling over granite and obliterating it from the world, entombing and silent. He thinks of a bitter end.
Ozymandias is talking and talking, an endless expository monologue that has been meticulously rehearsed, every phrase afforded its own careful weight and cadence. His words are a counterpoint to the violent storm outside; his voice echoes against blood-smeared marble, reverberates around the immense chamber and shudders the last few clues into place, everything interlocking and smooth like a completed jigsaw puzzle.
This is the part that Rorschach usually takes the most pleasure in, satisfaction beyond the primal gratification of snapping bone. There is no satisfaction to be had here, though. This time, he is not the one pressing the final piece into place. He is not the one standing back to admire the completion of a job done well. There is nothing admirable about this.
The finished picture is a horror, a Lovecraftian monstrosity underpinned by something very human and gallingly sanctimonious. So convinced of its own righteousness that even a million screaming souls could not perturb it.
They've been played for fools, every step along the way. Manipulated by one of their own, by this golden puppeteer. Strings jerked in a danse macabre, and for all their striving, they couldn't snarl the wires. They didn't even see the wires. He is shaking, whole body vibrating with a brittle, harsh fury and a swelling despair that threatens to overwhelm him, seeping up through his skin and leaking into the gulf between his face and his disguise.
Daniel stands beside him, soft under that ridiculous cape. He is shivering too, the plush fabric magnifying every tremor.
He sees Silk Spectre move in the periphery of his vision, a drift of yellow and snow-burned pink. She slips her hand under the cape to rest on Daniel's arm, either seeking comfort or offering it. Possessive, either way. Rorschach spares a glance at Manhattan. He is stoic and unreadable, waiting to be told what to do.
Veidt is still talking.
"No," Daniel says. He sounds small, weak. His voice doesn't fill the air the way that Veidt's does—lacks the glamor and the flair, the alluring quicksilver quality—but it still stops him mid-sentence. "No, you can't do this, Adrian."
"Do this, Dan?" The amusement in Veidt's voice is affected. He is like rock under that glittering exterior. Must be, to not have crumbled under the weight of his actions. "It is already done."
Daniel doesn't believe it, simply can't comprehend what Veidt is capable of. In his naïvete, probably imagines that Veidt wants to be stopped, and so he is rallying to a battle that is already fought and lost. The snow owl falls to the cold marble, a swirl of white reflected against the dark polish of the stone in captivating balance. "No," he says again, and Silk Spectre clutches at his arm as he lunges forward.
"Dan," she says, voice wavering even on that single syllable. Perhaps she has been crying. Rorschach feels nothing at that.
Daniel takes her hand, is gentle when he removes it from his arm. He draws himself up. He is Nite Owl now, truly Nite Owl in a way he hasn't been since 1975. Since Rorschach had split open and cauterized, expelling everything he had thought he did not need.
(He still remembers the way the sky had disappeared, obliterated by heavy smoke and heavier ink; the way Daniel had found him and tried to get him back. He was too noble for it all, too untarnished, and Rorschach was too newly reborn, too brutal and unchecked.
He had gutted him there on the filthy sidewalk with nothing but words, left Nite Owl to shrivel away until there was only Daniel Dreiberg left—tired, hurt, disillusioned and ready to quit.
He thinks of old ghosts, and of regrets.)
Veidt is reaching for something in his belt, and he catches his breath because Daniel is not going to back down, and he is human and vulnerable beneath the costume, beneath the persona. What kind of weapon does Veidt have, what kind of technology? Veidt points, and presses, and Rorschach feels his throat tighten even as he wills himself to move, as everything slows to a crawl, but there is no retort of gunfire nor the high-frequency whine of a laser.
The television bank behind him flickers into life, illuminates their hopeless tableau in harsh artificial light.
There is a moment of terrible silence.
"I did it," Veidt says, breathlessly. A monstrous limb arcs over Madison Square Garden, discharging ichor from its punctured skin. There is blood, viscous and black, everywhere. "I did it!" He is tearful in his appalling triumph.
More and more monitors offer grisly commentary over visuals of New York's streets, sidewalks running red, gutters bubbling like a severed artery. He feels anguish wash over him with every new scene; every shattered building; every pale, wild-eyed reporter; every still body. It tears the breath from his lungs and he cannot draw more in, he's drowning in the imagery that assaults him. He feels pressure on his arm. Daniel has seized him, fingers digging like talons. He's shaking violently.
—alien contact, or—
"Don't you see?" Veidt says. His eyes are shining, and Rorschach wants to put them out.
—the dead, the insane... there are children—
Silk Spectre—Laurel—is spitting words at him, rage and grief smeared down her face in symmetrical black rivulets. She has never looked so fierce and terrifying. Despair makes her a valkyrie. Veidt calmly smiles at her, serene in the face of her wrath.
—an end to the war in—
"Let's compromise," he says. The words are the antithesis of everything that lives in Rorschach, that steels his fists, runs in his blood, quickens his face. To hear them uttered so brazenly from this man who stands silhouetted by genocide, haloed by the atrocity he has wrought, is stunning. It is profane.
—millions, millions dead—
Daniel moves before he can, takes the steps up to Veidt's altar two at a time. Rorschach lets a fierce pride flare briefly beneath the wretchedness when Daniel strikes Veidt cleanly across the jaw, sleek bronze lines and an intense snarl and for a moment it's just like old times, just like—
But he's overextended himself, has let his momentum carry him too far and telegraphed his next move like a rookie, and it's bad, very bad, because Veidt isn't caught unawares any more, he's dropped into a combat stance and he's still fit and fast and Daniel isn't.
There is a sound like cracking ice, sharp and deadly.
Veidt straightens slowly, looking at his hands as if he hadn't known his own strength. Disingenuous to a fault. A corona of tentacles frames him.
Laurel gasps. Perhaps it was supposed to have been a scream.
"I'm sorry." Veidt holds his hands out, palms upturned as though seeking forgiveness. "I'm sorry that had to happen." He says it as though he had expected a different response. As though Daniel would have rolled over and accepted this madness.
Something gives, and Rorschach feels his knees hit the marble, fabric of his pants sliding on the smooth surface and making him scrabble for purchase. His hat slaps as it hits the floor. His gloves squeak and slip so he tears them off. Daniel's skin is warm against his fingertips.
"Daniel," he tries to say. It sounds like a low whine in the back of his throat. His ears roar. This is every worst-case scenario, every what-if that they stowed in the back of their minds before every patrol. Dead and dead and dead, three million and one—
"Do something!" Laurel is crouched over Daniel too, sitting on the other side of him, fingers curled into his shoulder. They flank him like guardians. They will bring their chosen to Valhalla, bear them mead. "Jon, you can fix this, can't you? Please Jon, god, please..."
The world narrows to a pinprick, Laurel's pleading and Manhattan's indifferent responses are nothing but steady white noise. Rorschach already knows it is no use, can feel an incomprehensible ache of loss deep in his bones, deep in his chest and he can taste salt in the corner of his mouth and blood in the back of his throat.
He knows he is supposed to express this, somehow. He has to, somehow. He can't push it down, can't lock it away, can't rein it in. His defenses are failing him.
He digs his fingers into his neck, flays off his face and scrubs at the film of grief that tightens the skin beneath. Daniel is still warm when he leans in to press his forehead to his cheek, eyes squeezed so tightly shut he sees yellow sparks. His chest knots tight and he feels himself convulse and shudder; it hurts, and he is profoundly aware that there will never be enough vengeance in the world to kill it away.
The hand on the back of his neck surprises him. Laurel is touching him, and when he looks up she reads something in his face that makes her expression crumple until she's saying, "oh god, oh god," in open-mouthed sobs.
It's too raw to watch, too difficult, so he turns his eyes back down to Daniel, laid on a cold marble slab. He had imagined many deaths for himself, but never any for Nite Owl—not beyond quitting ignominiously to live a comfortable, meandering life. It shouldn't be like this, never should have been like this, he wasn't the one who was supposed to end here, it's all wrong. Wrong.
He unclips the goggles, pushes back the cowl so he can take a final look at his partner's face. No, no—
A reflection shifts on the icy floor, a bruise of dark yellow and violet. Veidt, hovering over them. He seems about to speak, but Rorschach is upon him before he can utter a silver-tongued word, barreling him backward to crash into the raving wall of televisions, and only when they fall silent and the tinkling glass falls silent and Veidt's breathing falls silent does he realize he is screaming.
-
His mask is wrapped around one hand (and that long-cauterized wound has split open, it stings viciously as everything rushes to fill the vacuum. It was always a mask. He was always Kovacs. Soon he will be nobody). Daniel's goggles sit heavily in the other, lenses freezing against his palm, memento mori.
Manhattan raises his hand. Hesitates. Snowflakes hang in an impossible matrix.
He throws more words, hears them tumble into existence and then cease to be. Fleeting and ineloquent, serving only to hasten his own end. Do it, do it.
Manhattan is easily persuaded. He tightens his fist around a nova of blue light. For a fraction of a moment Rorschach sees deep summer skies suspended endlessly over concrete rooftops; a burning afterimage of a bold figure and gentle eyes; hears an easy laugh.
Before he can say 'thank you', there is nothing but howling in his ears, and white, and oblivion.
-
It sears his retinas, so he closes his eyes again, just for a moment.
There is something sticky beneath his fingers and in the creases of his palms. He thinks it might be blood. It seems likely to him, though he cannot say why. He watches the sky while he tries to make sense of himself, of the garbage bag under his leg, and of why the warm, gritty asphalt feels so wrong.
The shadows stretch and deepen, and the geometric slices of sky overhead transition from chemical orange to a streetlit indigo, spread under a bank of dirty clouds.
(There are no stars left.)
There is the itch of healing skin on his forehead and around his left eye, and it triggers some recollection that he can't quite pin down. It slides like rain down a window, almost taking shape before parting and trickling away as he tries to grasp at it, pooling in some dark recess that he can only see when he doesn't look directly at it.
It eventually occurs to him that he is sprawled in a stinking alleyway in the dark, and that is probably not normal behavior. He should get up.
His joints ache and creak abominably, limbs stiff and sluggish to respond. The cold makes it worse, a stray thought informs him, but he ignores it because it doesn't make sense. It's warm here. He hauls himself to unsteady feet, one hand braced on greasy brickwork that is scribed with a dull patina of graffiti: pale horse; krystalnacht;
(falling glass, none of the fragments as sharp as the shard burrowing into his chest)
who watches the—
It's familiar. It's New York. There's the shriek and rumble of a passing train, ensconced deep in the city's belly, and here's some subconscious mechanism, a cued recall that tells him he's on Eighth Avenue, near Penn Plaza. Near Madison Square—
It all comes back, rolling over him and pushing down on him as though he's a mile underwater, pressure enough to crush him entirely. It fells him like a blow to the head, presses him to his hands and knees, bows his shoulders and makes him shudder and retch and moan.
—millions, millions—
And yet the train is still rumbling. There are no screams, no grotesque alien limbs. The asphalt under his palms does not bleed.
A bad dream. Hallucination? Desperation. He is driven mad. He is dead, has faced his judgment and this is his purgatory: tasked to scour the city clean for an eternity.
A car horn blares, bending with a Doppler shift as it passes the mouth of the alley.
Too visceral to be a figment of his imagination. A sham?
A hoax. It must have been a hoax. The writer, artist, musician and enough money to stage a production, to play his sick fantasy out in front of them all. But to what end?
Bile stings the inside of his nose and sits in the back of his throat, coats his mouth with vile flavor. He spits. His hands flex against the sidewalk and he pushes himself upright.
To what end?
Ozymandias must have been insane. Mind turned, a result of his excesses, his sense drowned in decadence and indulgences. Only explanation. Only thing that makes a modicum of sense, but that doesn't say much. A warped performance by someone with too much wealth and too much power, and it had ended—
It had ended.
It had all been for nothing; the city lives but his partner is dead, his friend, his—
And that glass splinter has barbs, but the pain is numbed under the cold rush of fury. It raises the hairs on his arms and grinds his teeth together. Veidt's neck under his hands was merely a prelude. Daniel will not go unavenged.
He hates this city. He hates this city, and he will choke the life from her fetid underbelly, squash every parasite that clings to her oilslick skin. Cut through to her very heart, and chase out the vermin that have hollowed it and left it an echoing void. He will be an instrument of justice; a hundred times more furious than anything they have previously known, because—
His mask is sticky under his fingers, and it tastes of salt and copper when he draws it over his face.
—because, what else can he do?
There will never be enough vengeance, but it's all he can do. It's all he can do.
-
-
It's his first priority; to take it back and look over his notes, refresh his muddled mind with the events that led up to this nightmare. It is doubly pragmatic—he would not want the evidence he had gathered on Veidt publicly known, if the world's smartest man is going to turn up missing and eventually dead. He is already thought of as paranoid and violent, he does not need to add 'delusional lunatic' to their list of grievances. Nor does he care to incriminate himself with evidence written in his own hand, enough to pin another murder on him.
(Guilty, though. Guilty.)
His stride falters as he recalls with a jolt: they know who he is, know Kovacs' face, and he is a wanted man. He instinctively moves deeper into the shadows. Daytime existence is going to be challenging. He will not be able to move freely. He is no longer invisible, no longer one of the disenfranchised, designed to go unnoticed and ignored.
Difficult, but there is value in hardship. His life was never easy.
He draws up in front of the New Frontiersman office. The shutters are down, so he slips around the building and attempts to pick the lock on the side door. Impatient after a minute or two of bouncing the pins, the door swings open with some gentle encouragement from his left foot instead, rattling noisily as it rebounds off the interior wall.
It's pitch black inside. He digs a flashlight out of his trench pocket, flicks it on. Smacks it with the heel of his hand until it works, barely. It's a piece of cheaply-manufactured garbage. He spares a wistful thought for his good flashlight, languishing in a box somewhere in Sing Sing.
He trails the feeble beam around the office, searching for the in-tray. He locates it under a drift of paper, scatters the loose leaf over the floor as he scrabbles through manila envelopes and parcels. Not there.
He doesn't even need his picks to open the shoddy filing cabinet lock, but again he comes up empty-handed.
He systematically ransacks every drawer, box and cabinet in the office.
"Hrm," he says to himself, and with a grudging sigh, rifles through the crank files. He feels slightly vindicated—but mostly frustrated—when he doesn't find his journal there, either.
He sweeps his flashlight around the room one more time. His eye is caught by a series of framed spreads on the wall. Some of them are of costumed heroes. He steps closer to inspect the article. It's familiar, from an edition published some months before the Keene Act was passed. There is an editorial on Nite Owl, on Doctor Manhattan and Ms Juspeczyk. The Comedian, and Ozymandias.
The page devoted to Rorschach is conspicuous in its absence.
He grunts, filing that curiosity away to think about later. For now, he has more pressing concerns.
Finding someplace to sleep, for a start. He can feel himself beginning to flag, his traitor body groaning under the strain of the past few days, mind wandering and mulling over inconsequential things. His downtime in the alleyway was evidently not a restful one. It's exasperating, but he needs to recuperate his strength.
His apartment is out of the question. It is no doubt already rented to a new occupant, probably some glory-seeker desperate to tread the same rotting boards as Rorschach had, strain their ears at the walls in the vain hope that they will speak his secrets.
They will be disappointed. He only ever talked in his sleep, and he knows whatever surfaced from the sludge at the back of his mind could only seed nightmares.
He idly wonders whether Shairp doubled the rent in the aftermath of his arrest, or maybe tripled it. Seems obvious that she would. Once a whore, always a whore.
His bolthole by the docks is occupied, cleaned up and used as the offices of a freight company. He must have forgotten to check it for some weeks, for it to have happened without his notice. The lapse dismays him. Dangerous to have nowhere to go to ground, dangerous to not be certain about his options.
He hunkers down in a grimy doorway, padlock leaking rust down the peeling paintwork, shabby and disused. As good a place as any. He tucks his mask into his pocket, pulls up the collar of his trench. He feels vulnerable without his hat to protect him from the chill night air, without something to hide his eyes in shadow.
-
He scrunches the rest of his face up as he rubs at the knotted muscles in his neck and shoulders (as he is disgusted by the grime that rolls under his fingertips and the unwashed stiffness of his scarf). He opens his eyes when a shadow falls across him, extinguishes the soft red of the morning light on the inside of his eyelids and sends his stomach into an uncontrollable lurch.
A longshoreman looms over him, weatherbeaten face hard-set and scowling, hardhat dangling beneath his folded arms. "This is private property," he says. He has a thick accent, Polish perhaps. An illegal immigrant taking yet another honest American job. "Get the fuck out of here, you bum."
Rorschach tightens his jaw as he gets to his feet, draws himself up and squares his shoulders. Waits for the man's expression to break as recognition sets in. Nothing, not even a flicker. No indication that the longshoreman realizes who he is talking to. Rorschach knows his mugshot was plastered above the fold of every newspaper in the city. Is it likely that this man is oblivious?
"Do you know who I am?" Rorschach rasps, voice cracked and uneven from sleep. He hates how imperious the question sounds, but the response will be telling.
The stevedore leans in, close enough that Rorschach can smell his breath, heavy with tobacco. Close enough to make him want to bare his teeth and growl. His hands ball into fists. If he is touched, he will not be held responsible.
"Apologies, your majesty," the man drawls, goading. "I did not recognize you without your jeweled crown." He grabs for Rorschach's scruff. "Get the fuck out."
The hardhat rattles noisily onto the cement, and Rorschach twitches as hot blood spatters his cheek. The longshoreman reels back, clasping his nose and grunting. The look on his face is gratifying, but Rorschach is not one to gloat.
He loses himself between the towering shipping containers, moving at pace away from sounds of outraged shouting. The docks were never their territory, though their leads occasionally brought Nite Owl and himself to the darkened warehouses and rotting piers. Often enough that the memories dive at him like spiteful ghosts, clinging to him as he escapes back into the city.
-
He's hot. It's warm. He smells. It's not the alleyway or the river, it's him, and the temperature is making the bloodstain on his trench swelter, disturbing the ingrained filth. The fetid odor is rolling off him in ripe waves, making him shudder and—
He stops abruptly and tilts his face skywards. He's not certain of the time, but it feels like nine-thirty at the latest, and it's fully light and warm, like spring, like late April. No icy crystals chasing his breath, no bite of winter air. No smashed pumpkins on the neighborhood stoops, soft flesh stringy and decomposing.
He exhales loudly, soft vowel sounds marking his sudden realization.
(So obvious; he's slipping, badly.)
He turns on his heel and breaks into a jog, back towards a main street. He knows where he is. What he needs to know is when he is. His hands shake. Please, he thinks, barely daring to hope that he could be this lucky, that he would be deserving of—
He fumbles a quarter from the depths of his trench pocket, feeds it into a newspaper box. Please, please.
The date is Thursday, April 19th, 1979 and there is the headline, irrefutable and undeniable in bold print, there in black and white and buckling under his fingers, announcing the retirement of the masked hero, Ozymandias.
—