(AN: Two drabbles for this one, because they fit together in the same vague post-Karnak Rorschach-survives AUish thing, and I liked both ideas too much to not do both.)
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The biggest problems in the wake of Veidt’s Squidpocolypse are social ones: looting, rioting, mugging. The city is now sixty percent homeless, and they are common targets, robbed blind in their sleep. It’s disgraceful, and completely expected.
So Laurie isn’t surprised when Rorschach pulls her out of their shared tenement one evening, grunts that they’re going ‘fishing’, bundles her down an alley and onto a fire escape. What she is surprised by is Dan, down in the gutter, faking like he’s passed out and well enough dressed to be worth stealing from.
“Bait,” Rorschach says, pointing at him, and then he pulls the grappling gun out of his coat, presses it into her hand. Its bent-back spines shine in the streetlight like violence both wicked and inevitable.
“Hook?” she asks, hefting its weight and tossing him a razorwire grin, and under the wrapped scarf, she’s sure that he smiles back.
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Two weeks later, Laurie takes him fishing for real--or as real as she can manage, both of them city kids with no one to have learned from, This is how you thread a line, this is how you cast, and be careful of the blue flies at sundown, kiddo...
They’re on the pedestrian strip of a bridge over the harbor, lengths of line held by hand, trailing in the sluggish water below. Have been here for hours, and haven’t caught a thing.
There’s not a lot to catch, these days.
“Dan would know how to do this,” she says anyway, flicking the end of her smoke against the railing, watching the ash fall around their lines. “Bet he was doing this when he was twelve.”
“Hrmn.”
“He’d have the buckets full, and we’d be set for a week.” She kicks at their optimistically large paint pail; it echoes with emptiness. “No dumpsters, no food lines. Hey, we should have him teach us, you know?”
Walter nods, fingering his line, watching the hook jump and skip across the surface, bare. “...would like that, yes.”
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 11:11 pm (UTC)-
The biggest problems in the wake of Veidt’s Squidpocolypse are social ones: looting, rioting, mugging. The city is now sixty percent homeless, and they are common targets, robbed blind in their sleep. It’s disgraceful, and completely expected.
So Laurie isn’t surprised when Rorschach pulls her out of their shared tenement one evening, grunts that they’re going ‘fishing’, bundles her down an alley and onto a fire escape. What she is surprised by is Dan, down in the gutter, faking like he’s passed out and well enough dressed to be worth stealing from.
“Bait,” Rorschach says, pointing at him, and then he pulls the grappling gun out of his coat, presses it into her hand. Its bent-back spines shine in the streetlight like violence both wicked and inevitable.
“Hook?” she asks, hefting its weight and tossing him a razorwire grin, and under the wrapped scarf, she’s sure that he smiles back.
-
Two weeks later, Laurie takes him fishing for real--or as real as she can manage, both of them city kids with no one to have learned from, This is how you thread a line, this is how you cast, and be careful of the blue flies at sundown, kiddo...
They’re on the pedestrian strip of a bridge over the harbor, lengths of line held by hand, trailing in the sluggish water below. Have been here for hours, and haven’t caught a thing.
There’s not a lot to catch, these days.
“Dan would know how to do this,” she says anyway, flicking the end of her smoke against the railing, watching the ash fall around their lines. “Bet he was doing this when he was twelve.”
“Hrmn.”
“He’d have the buckets full, and we’d be set for a week.” She kicks at their optimistically large paint pail; it echoes with emptiness. “No dumpsters, no food lines. Hey, we should have him teach us, you know?”
Walter nods, fingering his line, watching the hook jump and skip across the surface, bare. “...would like that, yes.”
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