FIC: Between the Brushstrokes - [10/?]

[etherati]

Title: Between the Brushstrokes
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: Daniel, Rorschach, Adrian, Manhattan in pt 1, Dan/Ror (gee you think?) later on.
Date Written: 2009
Summary: A lot happens in the in-between spaces; in the tiny intervals of time in which no one is watching, we are free. Dan and Rorschach face the future more head-on than they expected; Adrian learns about regret and what happens when you're wrong.
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, some language. Philosophy, violence, twilight zone bullshit, time travel, pretentious metaphors, and Waffle House.
Notes: Yet ANOTHER kinkmeme prompt. Post-GN fixit. In progress.
Art Note: Illustration in this chapter is by wednesday42 , <3


*

Dan goes to the address. He does not bother to disguise his route this time; they obviously already know where he is or the phone call would never have come, would not have split the air with such theatrically precise timing. He should be thinking about that, should be forming contingencies, but they haven’t stormed the fort yet and the deepest his mind is willing to go on the issue is 'they're biding their time.'

Because they want him to see this.

On the street, the lunch crowd is mechanically and methodically slotting its way back into routine. He's been thinking of them as sheep, as obstacles, as annoyances to get around and past as they gape brainlessly at the electronic overlords glaring down at them – because there are too many, and like a newspaper story about a catastrophic plane crash or an earthquake, read with coffee and frowned over indistinctly and moved on from, statistics are cold for a reason. The human brain can't wrap around anything else.

It could also be a blatant trap he's walking into, here. Like the awareness of his hideaway location’s breach and the greater futility of fighting this, any of this, that fact isn't connecting.

None of these blank faces are familiar. He doesn't know what was lighting them before, what expressions have been smoothed flat, what drives and passions have been yanked out by the roots. He can't see what's missing.

(You will.)

He would stop and watch them – acknowledge their tragedy, really feel it deep in his bones for the first time since they've arrived, because he owes them that much – but he can't seem to still his racing feet or his racing mind or the instincts telling him to run and run and hurry, cover distance, make time. They haven't realized yet that there is no need to hurry, that haste will accomplish nothing; that it is already too late.

*

It's an office building, not the most modern or high-tech or by any means the tallest in the immediate vicinity; unremarkable, and with an unfamiliar logo that Dan's sure must be on the outermost edges of the Veidt corporate umbrella, if only he'd had time to look. On the top floor – and he's not even entirely sure how he got there, or how he knew where to go, and it could be something insidious but he's hoping it's just this daze he's in – he expects to find Adrian, gloating and boastful; or rising from another massive desk, dark and luxurious, confused by his appearance and trying valiantly to conjure a convincing smile.

Instead, a sterile upper-management style office, and a stranger: a man on the far side of middle-aged, thinning hair forming a light crown around his bowed head, thin hands bulging with veins where they shuffle and organize paperwork. He reaches for a stapler, and doesn't look up. "Mr. Dreiberg," he offers, squaring the stack, fastening the corner, and his tone is all annoyed boredom. "Come to pick up your pet?"

(...Pet.)

(You unbelievable b-)

And Dan's about to send this all tumbling down, shoot the situation straight to hell – his fists are clenched, and they should be stretching leather that isn't there, and he suddenly understands the violent, uncontrollable bursts of anger Rorschach's always been prone to when someone manages to hit just the right buttons – when the little man, all done up in a dour black suit that an undertaker would be proud of, nods to the dim corner across the room.

There are shadows pooling, away from the windows, and there's a chair, straight-backed and functional, and Dan shoves his goggles up onto his forehead and crosses the room without even feeling the floor on his feet because if he'd thought Rorschach had been blank and inhuman and frightening after the prison break, in that space between the only half-required rescue and the moment the mask slipped back on inside of Archie's quiet humming solitude and under tons of crushing water – he'd really had no idea how deep the fall could go.

"Responded atypically," the man spools out, still audibly overwhelmed by the tedium of all of this, and the packet of papers lands somewhere vaguely near Dan's feet with a rustling thump. "Still nicely docile, but he didn't seem to have much of a happy place to retreat to."

And there aren't even any quotation marks there, as if the idiotic phrase has just passed into common parlance, but Dan isn't hearing, isn't absorbing any of it – is taking Rorschach by the shoulders, ducking to try to catch his gaze. There's nothing there to catch. He drops into a crouch, eyes pressing closed for a moment – slips his hands down to rest on the seat of the chair, and they curl there, into the pinstripes.

"Rorschach?" he asks, quietly, but 'Rorschach' is vengeance and fury and justice, is violence, is all the darkness a man can have crusted on his heart without being completely subsumed, and he knows already that there is nothing and no one called Rorschach inside of this shell. He doubts there's a Walter Kovacs in there, either, the name still shaped strangely where it sits on the tip of his brain. He lets out a shuddery breath, like steam escaping through a thousand rent seams and burst fittings, rattling the pipes.

(What is the name of power for-)

But there must be some old and deeply trained-in response to the sound of that word, that name, and Rorschach lifts his head fractionally – looks in Dan's direction, unfocused, with something on his face that is not familiarity with any of its warmth or recognition with any of its surprise, but some kind of dim consciousness of the figure in front of him as a non-threat, as something that does not need to be flinched away from or avoided, and that is apparently enough for him.

The man is talking again, something about how they have no plans to come after Dan himself, that they don't expect him to be any further trouble and that he should take this as a lesson, but Dan is zoning him out, stomping down on any awareness he has of the slithering grey weasel of a human being before the physical ache to pummel him into something unrecognizable becomes a need, something that burns in his veins like obsession. He flattens his hands over the fabric, palms against either thigh, and holds the staring, empty eyes for as long as he can, almost expecting this to happen like it does in movies and books – eye-to-eye and intent and he'll be the one person that can break through the haze and elicit a tiny spark of something, back there behind the slate-grey blue, struggling to break free –

(No, idiot, it's never the friend or the partner that manages that, has to be someone deeper, it's always someone they lov-)

But that's a pretty useless proposition, right there. And there's nothing – just a bottomless stare that doesn't end at fifty yards or a hundred. Goes on and on.

"Can you walk?" He asks, quietly, pushing down on a lurching swell of nausea.

A nod – just one, efficient and precise, and the shell is pulling itself to its feet, leaving Dan to roll back onto his own. He doesn't even notice himself grabbing the stack of papers, shoving them under one arm, some tactical instinct acting on a level lower and more automatic than the dull shock that's otherwise rising up, roaring, around his ears – and though he seems to need no support, seems physically functional, Dan still presses one hand between Rorschach's shoulderblades, maneuvering him towards the door. He can't really believe they're just being let go like this – it's almost anticlimactic, after the SWAT-style invasion yesterday and all the running around and the covert secrecy of it all – but every shuffling, apathetic step Rorschach takes, feet scraping the carpet in apparent unconcern for how much noise he's making, drives home the reality: The worst has already happened.

In a voice that isn't his, cynical and taunting: (Can only go downhill from here.)

"It will be better, eventually," the manager says, and there is something like sympathy there, drowned in layers of damp cheesecloth. "When you get careless or your watch breaks, or you just get tired of fighting it, and you get hit too. Then you'll be the same again. It's better that way."

Dan can't feel the expression on its face, but he knows it must be something terrible, something furious and afraid and lit with violence as yet undone – but then the man glances up from his desk for the first time, actually looking him square-on with eyes just a bit too sharp, and Dan gets the creeping, eerie sensation of looking at a house with lit windows in the middle of a power outage.

"How would you know?" Dan finally asks, voice cold and knowing.

There's confusion, then, and a quick and quiet shuttering-away, and fear – as if he hadn't expected Dan to pick up on that, to divine his secret through all of the carefully practiced dry detachment. It's satisfying, the look of panic glittering momentarily in otherwise dull eyes, and it's the only vengeance Dan can afford to take, here in the great churning and devouring belly of the beast.

He lets the threat hang, implicit, and turns to guide Rorschach out the door – down the elevator, onto the street, carefully shutting down every part of his brain that isn't involved in navigation or in tracking the warmth pressed against one splayed hand, putting himself on autopilot for the duration. Can't think, can't try to process. Not yet – not until they're back at the warehouse, back where they are less exposed, safer, surrounded by windowless walls and dust and the shuffling silence he has a feeling he will need to get used to, spreading loud and syrupy to fill out all the gaps between them.

*

"Daniel," the flat, quiet voice had said, a few hours after they'd made it back to ground, and Dan had felt a sudden upswell of hope before he remembered: this thing didn't erase memory. Just damn-near everything else. The recognition had meant nothing at all, not shaped like had been, tongue working around a word that existed only in long-term storage with no muscle-memory behind it. Something to eat, he'd asked for; was there something to eat, and the monotone had been far more disturbing in this passive and neutral voice than it'd ever been in the affected growl. He'd accepted the offered protein bar without comment, processing it mechanically and efficiently and unenthusiastically.

Now, afternoon going down into evening, Dan is digging through journals and medical publications, grateful for the camping lantern he'd finally gone out and bought, spreading a corona of hazy white light around him. Rorschach is sitting against a crate just on the edge of the spill, half his face in and half out of the light, and is looking at precisely nothing.

Dan is talking. Hasn't stopped talking for more than a few minutes at a time in the last three hours. His throat is raw and dry, but he can't bring himself to let quiet settle into the room; stuffy and dark and full of dust, it already feels like a tomb, and he imagines Rorschach crawling into this space, back in '66 or '67, bleeding out and vision spinning black and chaotic at the edges – huddling into a corner and wrapping the wound in his scarf and waiting to either live or die with the same stubborn, fatalistic patience.

It's an unwelcome image and one conjured far too easily – with the right equipment, he could probably find all the old bloodstains – and so Dan talks. About old cases, the first cases, the ones where they'd stood tremblingly on opposite sides of some line or another, strangers, cast starkly against the shadows or winding up along fire escapes, eyes that locked across that line and didn't know what to make of what they saw. Weren't sure which line it was, or if it was one that mattered; two night creatures with overlapping territory, posturing and studying and, for some inexplicable reason, unwilling to just let it go and move on. He talks about the first time he'd felt a back against his in a fight, a surprise, too overwhelmed by the numbers pressing in on him to have seen the blur of brown and violet drop down from the window ledge.

He talks about Big Figure and the Underboss and all of the minor gangs, about the one summer that the Top-Knots seemed to have had a recruitment drive, tripling their numbers almost overnight, and how hard the patrols had gotten after that. How many knives had hit their mark, how many bruised and cracked ribs they'd both had to wrap, cloth binding tightly against the memory of chains and iron piping and two-by-fours whistling through the dark.

He talks about the satisfying cases: the ones where they'd stayed two steps ahead of the scum they were tracking, were able to cut off the drug shipment before it hit the streets or bust in doors and windows and slide into the blacklight-poisoned parlors of the flesh traders before another young girl or boy could be shuffled off into greedy and possessive hands. The times – and was it really so long ago? – when people were relieved to see them instead of terrified, thanked them instead of cursed them, saw the masks as a sign of heroism rather than a sign of cowardice or perversion.

Then there's a silence that stretches just a second or two too long for the thread of one-sided conversation to remain continuous, and the sound it makes as it snaps is like dry bone splintering under teeth.

The neurobiology journal in his hand stares up accusingly; it is the last in the stack, and there have been no answers.

"...we'll find a way to fix this," Dan mutters, tossing it aside, turning to look at Rorschach squarely; he's still turned away, so the best he can do is the side of his head. "I promise."

(Promises you can't keep, Daniel,) the growling voice in his head condemns, disappointed. (Useless. You know that.)

At the outer limit of the lamp's circle, edges of dark and light bleed over into each other into a hazy grey boundary, indistinct. Inside, there is Dan and the cheerful glow of the lamp and the piles of research materials that mean nothing so much as the fact that he's trying, that his fingers and eyes and brain are itching together for a solution, wired up into something that is devastated and searching and trying like hell to hold it all together. Outside, darkness and all the memories of blood and violence and cold shivers on summer nights, black and red running together to pool around battered leather boots.

Rorschach sits in that grey space, split up the middle by it, features cast into stark and monstrous relief - all jagged edges and deep black lines and hollows where the eyes should be, skin blanched almost white in the cold artificial lighting. He reacts as he has to everything else Dan has blathered on about for the past several hours: just looks at him indistinctly, shrugs one shoulder, and goes back to staring at nothing.

(Ragdoll,) Dan thinks, studying the limp posture, the glass-bead eyes shining almost black, the unwashed hair like carpet wire. He can almost see the sawdust pooling from ripped-out rows of stitches that aren't actually there.

("Make me real.")

Dan shudders out a breath that would be a sob if he had the energy for it, if his throat and heart weren't worn raw from all the memories he'd shaken free tonight, watched miss their mark entirely, shatter and diffuse against the distant walls.

Wasted.

This is too much. Too much for any person to bear stoically, to soldier through without stopping to face it, to feel it – and Dan is hoping for a protest, for a stiffening posture, for a sharp jerk away, when he shifts over to the same crate and gathers Rorschach against him, back to chest, arms threading around the front of his coat. There is no struggle; there is no protest. Rorschach collapses bonelessly, strings cut.
 

And Dan keeps talking, quieter now, more solemn, mostly nonsense. They sit only halfway in the light, touched on one side by the darkness of bleaker and bloodier moments, and the words twist into fear and doubt and the visceral terror of warm red slickness over hands and arms – into the particular set of the moon in the sky on the nights Dan was certain he'd be finishing patrol alone, alone for good, dragging deadweight wrapped in trenchcoat through the streets and sure it would never stir again. He says the twisting and strange things that people only dare say in their sleep, words that are also not words, jagged and raw and outlined in bright oilslick ripples,

("Make me real.")

and he knows the science and the science fiction, the mythology and the fairy tales; he knows all of the thousands of ways these things can work. What he does not know is how to deal with feeling a body breathing against him and not feeling the person inside; just a clockwork spinning of biological parts, pumps and valves and air gaskets and pistons, blood and muscle and bone and if they mechanically collude for just a moment to curl a light, hesitant grip into his forearm, Dan is sure – it breaks his heart how sure he is – that it means nothing.

 

*

The first day, Dan keeps a careful eye on his watch, waiting for that vital last minute before noon and hoping that something will surface in his friend, however briefly. The hands slide up close together, as close as they can without becoming one, the second hand jittering along. There is no flash of fear or anger or awareness; no twitch around the mouth, no deepening of the hard lines around his eyes, and then it is noon and the moment has passed and Dan is palming over Rorschach's brow, protecting him from the knife that wants to twist and work its way even deeper than it already has.

Rituals; intangible and barely there, they hold a powerful grip on the human psyche, a thousand strands tangled together into the deepest places. It is no surprise that this becomes one: The 11:59 vigil. Very little's ever come of any other observation Dan's held to in the past; the lack of results is not a deterrent.

*

The packet of papers reads like a release form from a hospital; there's even a chart, tracking Rorschach's behavior after his capture, noting down incidents with timestamps and strange, unreadable signatures. His level of compliance had waxed and waned over the 24 hours; he'd tried to run six times. Twice he'd gotten his hands on an improvised weapon; the second time he'd had to break out of the restraints they'd put him in after the first. Once – just once – he'd gotten to within feet of the building's front door before the security forces had caught up with him.

Dan reaches over to where Rorschach leans against a crate, shifts down the trenchcoat's collar – sees the stungun burns on his neck, red and angry against skin too pale. Something like rage bubbles up; escapes as a harsh exhale through his nose, echoes in the grim set of his mouth.

He'd been muttering something in the aftermath, the guards reported, voice rushed and broken, writhing on the tile floor as they'd snapped on the restraints. They hadn't been able to understand it but, they'd said, it'd sounded like it might have been a name.

Twenty minutes later, the clinical typeface reports, treatment had been completed and, despite his highly unusual lack of an appropriately pleasant mindspace to burrow into, deemed a success.

Time of discharge had been penciled in by hand, another 27 minutes later.

*

Dan is paging through yet another medical journal; its cover the acid-bright cross-section of a brain under MRI, dark patches in places they don't belong. "Hey, remember when you said about Adrian, the idea that he’d gotten his brain split, on purpose?"

Rorschach nods vaguely, looking somewhere else, because the memory is there and there is no reason not to answer.

"I'm not sure if that’s actually what's going on. I mean, that can mangle the intent a little – one hand picks things up, the other puts them back – but on the level of what he's been doing? I'm wondering if maybe this is something... dissociative, or some compartmentalization he's managed to set up for himself."

(Amateur psychology doesn't suit you, Daniel.)

The response isn't the usual expectant and prompting 'and...?', waiting for the point, the relevance. It is not even that invested; the wall is, somehow, more interesting.

*

He reads, and he reads, and in the spaces between the books and the maps and the notes he's taking in every scrap of margin he can find, and the runs to food stores on the edge of the district, and the twenty minutes at a time that he can stand to listen to the news on the portable radio he's bought, Dan keeps trying.

*

"I think I've figured out where all the resistants are," he says one day, spreading a blueprint of the Riker's Island prison system across the dusty floor; it's not as impressive as the maximum security facility they'd busted Rorschach out of what feels like only a week ago –

(It was only a week ago.)

-but still complicated enough to require some planning. He has a thick black marker, and is marking the blocks most likely to house the seditious, the inconvenient, the 'missing', and who's even aware enough to file a missing persons report anymore? "Well, okay. Not all of them. Obviously some of them are just hiding in plain sight, evading the authorities, but the rest... well. I'm going to need some help figuring out how to pull this one off."

He looks up; is met with a blank stare. Rorschach at least looks at him when he's speaking now, but all Dan can think of in the face of that obedient attention is that damn stupid dog again, bounding off into the road, near-miss after near-miss and no sense of anything except doing what was asked of him.

The map folds closed with a fluttering up of dust from the floor. "...all right, well. It can wait."

*

"These people need us," he says some nights, voice whisper-quiet in the dark. He rarely knows whether Rorschach is awake or asleep; only that he doesn't flinch away from the words unwinding next to his ear, and sleep-conditioning has some basis in reality anyway. "And I can't do this alone, it's too big."

It's a weak things to say, a weak thing to feel, and he'd welcome the admonishment, but none comes.

"I'm willing to fight this time," he says into the stinking wiry hair – they're both unwashed, living in a place only meant to house shift workers, crates coming and going, no basic human amenities. "Probably think I'm just saying that. God, sometimes I think I'm just saying it." A laugh, short and all sharp edges. "Can't walk away from this one, though. But now you're quitting on me."

("You quit," he said, disappearing down the tunnel, but who stopped coming around first, back in '75; who started working alone, a solitary shadow of the man he'd been? Who quit on who?)

(Who walked up to a man who could grant any desire and screamed for oblivion?)

Other nights he talks about Adrian and his murder of the city and his complicity in everything they've seen; talks about Warren, a man they've never met with demons they do not know, but who engineered this farce of an ideal human society as surely as he stood trembling over a short grave in '77, losing his mind in careful, delicate pieces – as surely as he rode into office on a road paved with the blood of innocent convicts, rattling their chains in the dark.

Rage, injustice, indignation, retribution –

Some nights, he just tightens his grip and says, "I need you to come back now," with the weight of every terrible secret he's ever held too close to his chest for too, too long.

*

He's going through the pockets of Rorschach's coat for – clues, maybe? Dan's not even entirely sure, but he's been through the books and maps and documents and everything else until his eyes went crossed and there's not much else to do except hope Rorschach had managed to write something down, some piece of evidence or information, before his will was stolen.

The scarf, the journal – not touched, nothing changed or added – the pencil stub and the handwriting sample and a handful of loose change. Then, buried deep, a scrap torn from a larger sheet, the writing barely legible:

'Don't let me live like this.'

It's a minute or two before the shakes pass, and when Dan crouches in front of Rorschach and asks if he wrote it and receives a distracted nod in reply, he can't help but voice a stupid question that he already knows the answer to. "Did you mean it?"

(Does it matter? Whether he meant it or not, you can't-)

A long moment, and a shrug. "Don't remember."

*

The radio dies on the thirteenth day, batteries run down, and as Dan counts out single bills and loose change on the cement floor, he realizes he cannot justify replacing them with their food supply dwindling and these fluttering scraps of paper and silvered tokens diminishing even more quickly.

Something is going to have to give.

*

The possibility – probability, really – that this is simply their life now, a soulless automaton and his keeper, is starting to batter through the hope and the hard work and the desperate, childish optimism. He may not be able to save Rorschach, may not be able to save anyone, may have to leave this world to burn until the wick reaches the wax and puts itself out in a slow hiss of thin black smoke.

Rorschach is sitting across from him, drinking slowly and deliberately from a bottle of water. It's been two weeks, and the doll eyes follow him around the room at times, seem to have a sense of presence and of place – but you'd never know to look at him that this man had once broken rapists and murderers in half with his bare hands and a burning cold fury that could not be contained; had walked out into the Antarctic snow, knowing what was waiting for him but too driven to take any other way out. Had trembled in rage at the murder of his city, his people. Had been crying under the mask when it finally peeled away.

Dan's remembering more and more of the dream as time goes on, and the imagery sticks behind his eyes, in the back of his throat: children pawing at blood, swallowing it away, frosted by snow that never stops falling; shaking apart bones in a dirty yard, more bones than a single body can hold, some small and some large, and they take and take until all he's left with is the heat of fire and the sound of wind through hollow chimes and the memory of a bloody Cheshire smile, teeth rattling like death's head beetles crawling through his walls. Two places, two moments of destruction and dissolution and less left over each time, less breath and meat to animate the skeleton, and now: nothing at all.

(The paper was shaking in your hand, wasn't it, when you asked: "Did you write this?")

(Would it have been easier if he hadn't answered?)

Dan knew a strange young man when he was in college, with hair and eyes and teeth like coal, who smelled like rot and saffron and dealt strange cards between long and knotted fingers – rubbed raw around the edges, creased with heavy use. Ash and bones and fire and a bird with an eye splintered like a black diamond, twisting in its bloody dance to become something new, and he remembers: death is not always death.

*

Comes the day when Dan returns to the warehouse from a long errand, arms laden with supplies, and Rorschach is not sitting beside his crate.

He's not in the warehouse at all, and the dust is scattered, and the spatter of blood is fresh and red and hot to Dan's touch when he kneels to run his thumb through it – a violent explosion of the stuff, sharply sprayed in one direction, gruesome fingers reaching out to wind into cracks in the concrete floor.

(Ohgod.)

A missing person is bad enough; a missing person plus blood, especially in this volume, is tripping all of Dan's fight instincts into overdrive, is sending his extremities numb and his heart to pound triple-time, is screaming emergency.

There's a knife on the floor, but he barely notices, because there is also a meandering trail of gore from the epicenter here by the crate to the far door, the one leading out onto the wharf. It is thick in some places and thin in others, as if he'd had to keep stopping to rest, to regather his strength –

Dan is across the floor and out into the open air before the thought can complete itself, something like yellowed, dirty fog crowding into his head, preventing him from visualizing, from actually anticipating what he's going to find

('Don't let me live like this.')

once the dock comes into view. There are possibilities: A blood trail that leads to the water, ripples only just settling; a body slumped against a piling, face contorted into something like defiance – but the images won't congeal, won't show him anything but the vague outline of the moment, shaky and torn.

He squints through the sunglare, tracing the blood, one hand against the doorframe to steady himself against a rush of lightheaded dizziness. The trail does lead across the cement and onto the dock, where it breaks up into an uneven striation over the pitted and warped grain of the wood. There is a lot of it and it doesn't taper off like it should, sticking to the knots in the boards in thick clotting clumps. But where –

(...oh.)

At the far end of the pier – and Dan lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, willing the panic down, the constriction in his ribs to dissipate – Rorschach is struggling with a body.

The man is big; not all muscle but not all fat either, possibly an old high-school quarterback gone to years of laziness and one six-pack too many. He is completely limp, head falling at an angle his spine shouldn't support. He is likely dead.

Rorschach lifts his eyes, meets Dan's over the corpse's shoulder, and Dan is already jogging down the pier but he doesn't miss the fire there, the wild way his features are jumping and lit up and unable, or unwilling, to settle. There's blood running down Rorschach's shoulder, lurid against the white of his torn dress shirt, and that's why he's having trouble – with every tug on the weight he's dragging a sharp flash of pain pinches his features and he hasn't let these things show so obviously for years-

[It's 1982, middle of the night, and there's a ragged knocking at his door, a black and white ghost stumbling into his living room with a badly broken arm and not so much as a hello. His mask comes up to ease his breathing around what he knows is coming, and goddamn but he doesn't make a sound as Dan fumblingly sets the bone – but it's not for lack of wanting, and the tensing of all the fine muscles in his face, contorting the topography of skull beneath the skin, speaks a language they're both far too well acquainted with...]

(No, no, go back further: Do you remember how he looked when that broken bottle slid in next to his spine, so close, so young then – and he collapsed against you, arms like cords of jelly, babbling on about vengeance and vigilance and paralysis, permanent damage, never walk again – and it's not just pain, not just pain by itself. It's fight and fear and something inside that knows what's about to happen, that tracks the weapon flashing in the light before the eyes can resolve it-)

(Knife on the floor,) his memory pokes at him, as sharp as any blade.

-and Dan should be upset that the man is dead and that there's blood everywhere and this will bring the authorities down on them in a heartbeat but he can't do anything but stare, rooted to the spot, as Rorschach regards him with impatience and irritation and eyes that focus and-

("Petty, angry, looking for an excuse to be moved to violence. I can't let you give them that excuse.")

"Have found our cure," Rorschach says, and there's more inflection in his voice than there's been in a decade. And the chastisement can wait, purely tactical instincts driving Dan to cross the last few yards and take hold of the man's other arm, hands knotting into the stained black T-shirt; to stand back as they roll him off of the planking. Water splashes up regardless, misting into his hair and smelling of silt and minerals and, this far into the harbor, like the salt-marsh stink of death – and he doesn't care, he doesn't care.

*

-----> Chapter 11

*

Comments

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Seriously. 'in dreaming'? My god. I couldn't conjure that kind of imagery if I had a year to do it. Plus the whole subtle way you handled them in the Gratitude series; I've always been kind of hamfisted by comparison.

EVERYTHING NEEDS MOAR LENS FLARE.