FIC: Between the Brushstrokes - [20/?]
Sep. 18th, 2011 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
etheratiTitle: Between the Brushstrokes
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach, Adrian, Laurie, Manhattan in pt 1, Dan/Ror.
Date Written: 2010-2011
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 in general, some language. Philosophy, violence, twilight zone bullshit, time travel, pretentious metaphors, and Waffle House.
Notes: Yet ANOTHER kinkmeme prompt. Post-GN fixit. In progress.
*
Nothing happens.
It’s not as if they expect to hear the uproar from sixteen stories up and through the thick walls of the high-security server room, but the quiet from their radios is pointed; the expectant silence of a hundred team leaders each hesitating with their fingers on the transmit buttons, waiting to see if anything will happen before reporting that nothing has.
On the screen: ILLEGAL OPERATION. COMMAND WILL BE RELEASED AT 12:00:00.
“Shit,” Adrian swears under his breath, and if Dan’s eyebrows raise at the coarseness of it they’re at least not the only ones. By the door, Rorschach’s head cants, questioning.
“What,” he asks.
“It’s what I was worried about.” Adrian leans over the keys, inputting override codes as quickly as his fingers can move, but it’s no use; ILLEGAL OPERATION, the screen keeps saying, over and over.
Dan presses his mouth into a tight line. "If you were worried about this, you maybe should have told us–"
"There's no time for this, Dan. We only have a short window before security figures out what we're doing."
From the door, "Perhaps if you hadn't kept secrets."
Adrian ignores him. “It’s fired once today already, and it's locked, it won’t allow a remote override.”
“I'm assuming there's a manual override.”
"Yes."
“In the transmission facility,” their assistant says, suddenly more nervous than he has been this entire time, all through the security checkpoints and charade.
And with reason, apparently; Adrian reaches to rub at his temples, visibly unsettled. “What your people have been calling ‘the lighthouse’,” he says, steepling his fingers, and didn't they lose two men yesterday at that location? It doesn't sound like the best place to have to infiltrate, but Adrian seems to come to a decision regardless. “It’s only a few blocks from here. I’ll go.”
He's up before Dan can stop him, out the door with purpose, and as quickly as that Rorschach's settling his disguise and moving to follow.
"Wait, where are you–" Dan sets the chair he was in spinning, catches Rorschach by the elbow before he can disappear into the hallway. "Where do you think you're you going?"
"Following Veidt. Should be obvious."
"Why are you... look, we know that place is–"
"Dangerous, Daniel?" Rorschach narrows his eyes pointedly. "Incapable of handling myself suddenly?"
Dan snorts a breath through his nose. The idea is patently ludicrous.
"Don't trust him," Rorschach says, voice lower, "Goes without saying. And am next to useless here. Seems to be the most tactically sound course of action."
Up the hallway, Adrian's footsteps are fading; the trail is going cold.
Dan takes a breath – leans in just close enough to whisper, "Be careful," then steps back and lets him go.
*
There are reasons for following someone into an obvious trap, Rorschach thinks, not that he'd ever say as much to Daniel. Surveillance. Verification of suspicion. Deathwish. An unshakable belief in his own ability to escape anything untouched. The last is idiotic, is what gets good vigilantes killed, but it still feels closest to home. Rorschach frowns.
Up ahead, he watches Veidt cross the lobby, and there is legitimate urgency in his step, a purposeful disregard for anything going on around him. A map comes out of his pocket after a fumbling search, must be folded and refolded until Veidt has what he needs. This isn't part of any plan; if there is a trap here, he isn't the one springing it.
Out onto the street then, and through the crowds, an uncomplicated dead-reckoning path through streets and alleys, ducking between pedestrians and vehicles. It is deceptively normal; there is no hint in the journey to how dangerous the destination will be.
Rorschach does not think about Daniel as he follows, or about injustice wanting resolution, or about Juspeczyk or Donnelly or the hundreds and thousands and millions more whose futures hang on what they do here today.
He does not think about the feeling of hands, warm under his shirt, trying so hard to keep him.
His mind is blank, deliberately, as blank as it was in the warehouse, as blank as it was on the edge of that circle of light, neither it nor the darkness touching him.
*
In the city, a thousand men and women hold their breaths, waiting for the flash, for the moment the entire population stutters and lurches like a phonograph record skipping a groove. Then all eyes will turn toward the roads, toward tall office windows and ledges and anywhere sharp objects can be found, ready to intercede if they have to, to signal panic, to catch and hold the city in its mad, bloody dive for the pavement.
For now, though, they're just waiting.
Waiting isn't something Laurie's ever been good at. She hasn't had a cigarette in three years – hard to come by a trade when the entire prison's chained to their walls, and the habit doesn't age well anyway – but she's craving one now, fingers itchy for something to roll and twist between them, to scrawl an angry red arc through the air with. Mark the city as hers, mark out a trail for wayward fellows to follow home.
The alarm on her watch goes off; she silences it without thinking. Nothing yet; they're officially running late.
"Dammit, guys," she says, shoving her hands into her pockets to still their fidgeting. On the unquiet street, there is no one close enough to hear her: "You've gotten through so much, don't fuck it up now."
*
Adrian figures out that he's being tailed almost immediately. He doesn't have the time to stop and look back and identify the person by sight, but he's got a fair guess, and it doesn't matter anyway. They all, for once, share the same goals; there is no need for secrets and double-crossing and promises extracted under threat of world destruction. He can act openly, here. After so many years, it's a relief.
Across one alley and down another, and every step brings him closer to a moment that he hasn't been able to feel more than the vaguest shape of since he woke up with Rorschach's knife flashing down toward him. It's not as easy as just saving the operation, and it's not as simple as this being his fault, his price to pay and pound of flesh to render. There's Warren and the lobbyists and the foreign governments that snapped up his invention so willingly, an entire populace enthralled with the idea that violent and disturbed people would be so much easier to manage if they would just sit down and be quiet.
Nothing this big is ever one man's fault.
But the building is as imposing as he remembers – appearing all at once around one left turn and another, a windowless monstrosity full of security traps and the most heavily armed guards the new city has to offer – and the shape in his head is starting to feel like sacrifice, regardless. He eases the door back, code a one-time use but there's no timer on it, and it's a trivial thing to nudge a stray piece of concrete into the frame. He doesn't have the time to worry about Rorschach knowing that it wasn't an accident, that he's leaving the way open deliberately.
Soon, maybe the world will finally be put back to rights. His own role will be whatever it is, and it feels like a revelation, accepting that.
Things seem to move very quickly in its wake.
The guards are trivial to take out, confused enough by the contradiction of his presence to stop short in their assault, give him enough time to drop them. Those that get past him, hare down the hallway to sound the alarm and gather reinforcements, well– they don't get past Rorschach, and likely wish they'd simply stood their ground and faced him instead.
The fights blur together. He couldn't say how much time is passing.
Through security, through locked and coded doors and just under probing glass eyes, to the most central part of the system. There's a ladder down into the core, and he drops down it three rungs at a time and settles into the abandoned chair, pulls the casing off of the panel in front of him with the wrenching scrape of metal on metal. Somewhere above him, he senses his tail hovering by the ladder, no longer concerned with being spotted.
It's a simple system, this one. On and off, and a few timers, winding down. A small, primitive terminal. An override, cartoonish knife-switch waiting to be thrown. On a hunch, he punches up the terminal, runs through the log of latest alterations, possible booby-traps or precautions put into place in the last few min–
Ah. Damn it all. Two and a half minutes ago. If he'd been faster...
"You might want to stand back," he says to presumed thin air, one hand settling on the switch, doing his best to sound nonplussed.
There's no response, and he doesn't bother turning to look, but there is a symmetry in this that he imagines Rorschach would appreciate. Personally, Adrian has always been less interested in symbolism than in results. This, he supposes, manages both.
"Not that you would have followed me, of course," he whispers, half-smile faint. "Trustworthy as I've always been."
A flutter of regret, butterfly-soft, that he won't live to see all of these mistakes undone–
–then he closes his eyes on the last ten years, and pulls the switch.
*
Noise. Tremendous noise, building and building like a roar of thunder that never quite breaks. The switch is wrenched from his hand, or his hand from the switch. There is wind in his hair. There will be heat, at any moment.
Then he's caught up, is sailing backwards and upwards on the force of the explosion and it feels almost like pulling more than pushing, jerky and uneven– but in a moment the wall of fire will catch up, all his organs bursting inside of him as the rest of him burns into nothing. He knows what to expect, in this shutter-quick snapshot of a moment. He knows, for just an instant, exactly how he will die.
But the violence does not continue – no pain, no sickly pulling-apart and collapsing – and when he opens his eyes, the explosion is below him, fireball eating up the console, questing tendrils licking at the soles of his feet.
The point he's dangling from is a fist, small and tight, wound into the back of his jacket.
Rorschach pulls him up onto the ledge, sends him sprawling across its wire-mesh surface, and it's all Adrian can do to stay there a moment, catch his breath, settle into the awareness that it's done and it's fixed and he isn't a martyr after all and what does that make him, then? What's left?
"Don't get off that easily," Rorschach growls, fists clenched. He glowers to back it up, but he's worse for wear after all the fighting and his voice sounds tired, more tired than any of them ever were back in the seventies, when they were all a little younger and a little stupider – even the smartest man in the world. It's hard to say who he's talking about.
Then he's turned and stalked off, head down and hands in pockets, and it will be a long and dangerous fight out of the building and into the world, but the hard part is over.
*
It happens without warning, like a circuit brought together at the last possible moment, held closed by hands that know only the rush of current, of impossible success. There's no place in that white-hot euphoria for warnings, considerations.
And it's always a struggle for Laurie to keep her hands down, to not cover her eyes – there's always the fear, even after all these years, that this will be the time her resistance fails, that like some magical ward it will desert at the worst possible moment. It's fantasy though, nonsense, and she's learned to look these things in the eye.
So: a half-second of staring into the flash, a half second after that of blinking silence, stillness–
And then, chaos.
From above, the streets must look like an ant farm gone terribly wrong, all the orderly lines shattered and run amok. It doesn't look much better from down here; Laurie thought she'd prepared herself for this, for standing and facing it.
Nearby, the shrieking of breaks as cars swerve and duck, drivers caught between saving the people running in front of them and effecting their own demise, everything happening too quickly.
Imagine the riots of '77, she'd thought to herself, ahead of time. Firebombs, burning cars. It couldn't be much worse. Her hands curl into fists; out of the corner of her eye, the others on her team don't move. They are observers, that's all they're meant to do unless (until) this all goes wrong.
She's never been good at observing, either.
Above, the shattering slam of a dozen windows flying open, bouncing in their runners, screens shoved out. In her pocket, the radio, and she remembers Jon in the riots, teleporting the crowd away for their own safety. All she has to do is key up and this will stop, the same kind of magic, and was it ever really magic? But damn it, just a few more seconds...
A child, staring catatonically as her father rips his hand from her grip to step, automaton-steady, off of the curb. She doesn't cry out. She doesn't seem to notice.
Laurie's feet feel like lead. She thought– she was sure she'd– but there is a screaming now, from no child's lungs. It's like the tearing of metal or softer things, and it rises in pitch, fire alarm-piercing and air raid-urgent, rising and rising even it seems like there is no higher register for it to climb to–
Silence again, suddenly. Under her hands, her head throbs, and Laurie opens her eyes. She doesn't remember closing them.
"Anyone...t there?" the radio crackles, and it's Dan, and it sounds like he's gone around the bend on stress and grief both, has found a special new dimension of each. "Anyone? God, somebody pick u–"
All around her, dazed people, looking at their hands, down the lengths of themselves, scrubbing at their heads and faces. Windows shudder closed, shaky. A father moves, weeping, to scoop his unresponsive daughter from the curb.
There are no bodies. It's almost too good to be true.
"I've got it," she says into the handheld, before anyone else can respond. "I've got it. Dan?"
"Laurie," the radio says, spitting static. "What's going on, no one's said anything."
"There's nothing to say." She's edging down the sidewalk warily, unconsciously passing her free hand over shoulder after shoulder. The quiet after all the screaming violence feels like crystal, like she could break it so easily, and she handles these people with care; You okay? her eyes ask, and they each nod, dazed. "At least where I am, there don't seem to be any casualties. God fucking knows how."
Touch, question, nod. The radio is quiet except for the static. Across the street, the wreck of a delivery truck caught sidelong by a telephone pole, but the driver is extricating himself, is on his feet. Cab drivers are out of their cars, wandering through a sea of broken vehicles, confused.
"There was an explosion," Dan says finally, tinny on the cheap speaker. "I'm not sure if–"
Then it cuts off, but Dan doesn't let off the button, and she could wear she hears him breathing, a rising and falling in the static.
Laurie counts the seconds, still moving from person to person. Some part of her cannot believe their luck, can't fathom how this actually worked, still hasn't really registered that it has. She imagines it will creep up on her later, the magnitude of it. Another part of her wonders: if she was so sure it wouldn't work, why did she go along with it?
Still, she waits. She's had time to learn patience.
"Good to hear the operation was a success," Dan's voice says finally, stripped of the panic and without it, there's not much left. He sounds distant, shutting down. "Would appreciate reports from other sectors."
The radio lights up then, voices calling through in organized clockwork, one casualty here, none there, six hurt but stable out near the park. It sounds like a military report, or a fucking shopping list. It should sound like victory – that's what this is, here, or at least the beginning of it – but.
But there's been an explosion, and the casualty list may be longer than what her people are reporting. Laurie bites her lip.
"Here," she says, pocketing the radio, because a woman has just emerged from a doorway, second story staircase visible behind her, with a shallow cut all down the length of her wrist. Laurie catches her by the hands and guides her to the light post on the corner where the Greyson kid is, the best medic on her team, and he's already overwhelmed.
"It'll be okay," she assures the woman, but she's already juggling these things– treating the injuries, how they're going to handle the children, how they're going to avoid retaliation, how they can possibly take this worldwide and, under it all, the sound of a warm and expressive voice gone cold and what exactly that could mean, for him and for her and for everyone.
*
So: there are these things to do, but for the moment all they can do is regroup. Laurie is handing out makeshift bandannas for six hours before they run out; everyone else will have to just learn to close their eyes and mean it, no horror movie curiosity, no peeking. There is nowhere big enough to house them all under the radar—they are a city's worth of people, and they already fill out all of its cracks and crevasses to bursting—but fuck, should it matter? Mindless control was the only power their oppressors ever had; even the military should fall on their side now. The city is basically theirs.
Hopeless optimism, she hears an inner voice say, and it sounds a little like Donnelly and a little like Hatch and a little like poor Anya, though she can't quite remember her voice—sound memory goes first, they say, and it's been years—and, strange as fuck but a little bit like Rorschach, too. It shouldn't surprise her that he's keeping company with the militants and crazies, but that he's settled in with her favorite crazies is a little worrisome.
She decides not to care, regardless. Optimism's something she hasn't had much use for in years, is something she would have condemned herself for a week ago, but now she just wants to enjoy it. Let them try to tear this place back out from under us, she thinks, the stripey evening light painting them all like stalking tomcats, making her feel feral on the long walk back to the camp. We'll show 'em what they get.
*
Dan's supposedly already there when she gets back—with no crowd control duties, his part of this had been done with hours ago—but she's not sure she'd call him present, really.
It takes some searching to find him. It's pretty obvious he's not going to be out in the revelries, and the foodlines hold nothing but half-strangers and half-friends. So... probably waiting up at 'home', the ramshackle hut with the pushed-together mattresses and, unfortunately, just enough room for a third. She frowns; that isn't going to be a fun conversation, assuming...
Assuming two plus one is still the equation to be using. Damn it, she thinks, shoving her hands into her pockets. Couldn't have been a little more specific than 'explosion'?
“Dan?” she calls, quiet, pulling back the curtain.
A questioning noise in response, a little startled. When she pokes her head in, he’s sitting on the edge of a mattress, looking up at her, running a scrap of paper through his fingers. “Oh, Laurie. Hey.”
“Hey.”
Silence like a taut wire between them, tugging more painfully on her skin with every second. She takes a hesitant first step inside, and the rest fall naturally after that, carrying her to where she can settle next to him, head pillowed on her knees. “No word yet?” she asks.
He shakes his head, flips the paper between his hands. “No. No sign of either of them.”
She nods, and has no words, and the wire pulls.
“You were right, you know?” Dan says, sounding a little hysterical. “Getting attached is really, really stupid.”
She glances down; the sheet has one ragged edge, is scrawled over in writing she can’t read. “You were already attached,” she says, and she knows it’s not helpful but it at least feels important. “You’ve been attached for twenty years.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway,” she says, “I don’t know if I was right. I’ve been blazingly, stupefyingly wrong before.”
A sharp laugh, no humor in it. “Yeah. We all have.”
*
They don’t bother saying that maybe he’s okay, that they don’t know, because of course he’s maybe-okay—in the same way he’d been maybe-okay for months and years at a time after ‘77, disappearing into the city like a stray cat, emerging to confirm its continued existence only when it chose to. Dan’s gotten used to having a Schrödinger’s partner.
She leads him out of the hut instead, out into the weaving channels of people all headed in one direction or another. “If word comes,” she says, and he’s not sure where exactly ‘word’ would come from anyway, “it’ll get to you faster if you’re out here.”
It’s an excuse. She’s trying to keep him from drawing into himself, and he can appreciate the concern, at least. Ground himself in it, in her solid presence at his side, but it’s still the most disconnected he’s ever felt, drifting through this celebratory crowd. Even in those shitty, grey, endless-autumn days after Keene he hadn’t felt this cut adrift, because maybe he could still do something, maybe things would change...
They don’t know. But he does, in some itchy part of his brain that always seems to have the right answer two seconds too late. He knows, and it aches like something he can only describe in shades of hospital green and 1961’s unrelenting summer heat, in the feel of tombstone engraving under his sixteen-year-old fingers. Sweat and gravel.
Wait.
He holds a hand out to halt them, sniffs the air, a sudden sharp acridness filling his head. More like sweat and flashpowder, he thinks, something burning... and a hand settles onto his shoulder from behind, turns him forcefully around.
"Oh, god," Dan mutters, before his brain even catches up with what he's looking at, because the man in front of him is in terrible shape—clothing singed, hair too, face a dense patterning of overlapping bruises, blood running from a cut on his temple and from other, more covered places to judge from the smell, one arm held protectively up against his ribs—but it's still Rorschach, still Walter fucking Kovacs, out the other side of his own little war and stubbornly still breathing.
He can see Laurie grinning widely out of the corner of his eye, and it's all he can do to only grip Rorschach by the shoulders—nothing else seems appropriate to subject him to, out in public like this, in front of Laurie—but Rorschach himself seems to have no such reservations, gripping Dan by the back of his neck and pulling him down, down. It’s a drowning man’s kiss, pulling and taking, and Dan’s never felt so fucking whole.
Or so glad to be wrong.
Dan slides his hands up to bury in the shaggy, overgrown hair at the nape of Rorschach’s neck, and they break apart to breathe, cracked lips straying over the corner of his jaw and the arm thrown around his back tightening.
“Thought I was dead?” Rorschach mutters into his neck, and Dan can feel the way he’s almost smiling. “Again?”
“Asshole. Shut up.”
A slow clapping, then, just one pair of hands. Laurie’s being obnoxious again, but it’s affectionate, the smile on her face sincere, and Dan’s perfectly happy to bask in the awkwardness.
Rorschach straightens up away from him, reaches as if to touch the brim of his hat except that it isn’t there; he’s still dressed in his technician’s clothes, out of context. “Good to see that you’ve also come through your trials safely, Miss Juspeczyk,” he says, and there’s not even any venom in it, no indignation or shame, and Dan wonders just how many fights Rorschach almost lost out there today.
*
Rorschach lies on the edge of the mattress, body awkward as always, all jagged bits that don't fit. But the usual tension has drained off, is gone. He’d thought he was being dragged into the shadows here for another sort of reason, had disgusted the old ghosts of himself with how little he'd minded the idea, so much more inexcuseable in the high light of day. Instead: this.
Daniel is curled around his back, clinging with more ferocity than Rorschach thought he possessed, with more possession than he would ever have tolerated, before. Daniel might be half-hard or he might just have something jammed in a pocket—an idiotic old joke, but he is not used to being held this way and has no point of reference—but either way, seems less interested in addressing it than in being here, pressed against the hard, twisted length of Rorschach’s body, breathing him in slow and deep.
He knows from others’ comments that his hygiene has never been good; he never cared, still doesn't, but he's always been aware. It’s been worse since they arrived here, compounded further now by gunpowder and soot and blood, sweat and aggression. He can only assume Daniel is the victim of temporary insanity.
“I can’t tell what you want,” Daniel says, a little muffled by Rorschach's shirt. “A lot of the time.”
Justice. Retribution. To make the city whole again. Waffles with double syrup and double bacon. Rorschach almost gags against the unfamiliar tickle of laughter rising up his throat; adrenaline intoxication, clearly.
“I don’t think you’d ever go down easy if you didn’t want to,” Daniel continues, and suddenly Rorschach doesn’t want to laugh anymore. “I just don’t know what you...”
“Still worried about that?” He can hear the chastisement in his own voice, familiar from long years of use but inappropriate right now. He tries to school his tone; it makes little difference. “Discussed it already.”
“Yeah, I know we did.”
A rough snort. “Problem with hearing, or memory?”
Daniel’s grip around him tightens; why harsh words bring this affection out in his partner, Rorschach has never understood, and he has had twenty years to figure it out. “Little of both, I think," Daniel says, then a sharp laugh, breathed against his neck. “I guess I just need some reminding sometimes. Especially when you come home looking like this.” A broad hand slides up under his shirt, rucks it up, finds the bruises and soothes over them, warm. "The way you just... walk right into traps sometimes, I don't know, man. I guess you've always done that."
"Yes. When I thought they were escapable."
Outside, the camp is noisy and boisterous, gaudy. Lives lived with no regret and no time for looking backward at all the other possible paths, for staying inside the lines. It is a strange place to call 'home'.
Rorschach rolls in Daniel’s grip, faces him down.
"Expected a trap. Did not expect a bomb. Daniel," he says, willing steel into it, because steel is strong and uncompromising and not sentimental at all. It puts distance between these things and what they mean. “Not sure what I want. Not used to wanting things. But.” He shakes his head. “Not going anywhere. Not by choice.”
And there are a lot of things that are not their choice, and they will both come back bloodied and ragged many times in the near future—and they are both exhausted beyond thought and will eventually sleep. But for now, it is enough to lie still and revel in the complete miracle of their continued existence.
Against all odds.
*
--->Chapter 21
*
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach, Adrian, Laurie, Manhattan in pt 1, Dan/Ror.
Date Written: 2010-2011
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 in general, some language. Philosophy, violence, twilight zone bullshit, time travel, pretentious metaphors, and Waffle House.
Notes: Yet ANOTHER kinkmeme prompt. Post-GN fixit. In progress.
*
Nothing happens.
It’s not as if they expect to hear the uproar from sixteen stories up and through the thick walls of the high-security server room, but the quiet from their radios is pointed; the expectant silence of a hundred team leaders each hesitating with their fingers on the transmit buttons, waiting to see if anything will happen before reporting that nothing has.
On the screen: ILLEGAL OPERATION. COMMAND WILL BE RELEASED AT 12:00:00.
“Shit,” Adrian swears under his breath, and if Dan’s eyebrows raise at the coarseness of it they’re at least not the only ones. By the door, Rorschach’s head cants, questioning.
“What,” he asks.
“It’s what I was worried about.” Adrian leans over the keys, inputting override codes as quickly as his fingers can move, but it’s no use; ILLEGAL OPERATION, the screen keeps saying, over and over.
Dan presses his mouth into a tight line. "If you were worried about this, you maybe should have told us–"
"There's no time for this, Dan. We only have a short window before security figures out what we're doing."
From the door, "Perhaps if you hadn't kept secrets."
Adrian ignores him. “It’s fired once today already, and it's locked, it won’t allow a remote override.”
“I'm assuming there's a manual override.”
"Yes."
“In the transmission facility,” their assistant says, suddenly more nervous than he has been this entire time, all through the security checkpoints and charade.
And with reason, apparently; Adrian reaches to rub at his temples, visibly unsettled. “What your people have been calling ‘the lighthouse’,” he says, steepling his fingers, and didn't they lose two men yesterday at that location? It doesn't sound like the best place to have to infiltrate, but Adrian seems to come to a decision regardless. “It’s only a few blocks from here. I’ll go.”
He's up before Dan can stop him, out the door with purpose, and as quickly as that Rorschach's settling his disguise and moving to follow.
"Wait, where are you–" Dan sets the chair he was in spinning, catches Rorschach by the elbow before he can disappear into the hallway. "Where do you think you're you going?"
"Following Veidt. Should be obvious."
"Why are you... look, we know that place is–"
"Dangerous, Daniel?" Rorschach narrows his eyes pointedly. "Incapable of handling myself suddenly?"
Dan snorts a breath through his nose. The idea is patently ludicrous.
"Don't trust him," Rorschach says, voice lower, "Goes without saying. And am next to useless here. Seems to be the most tactically sound course of action."
Up the hallway, Adrian's footsteps are fading; the trail is going cold.
Dan takes a breath – leans in just close enough to whisper, "Be careful," then steps back and lets him go.
*
There are reasons for following someone into an obvious trap, Rorschach thinks, not that he'd ever say as much to Daniel. Surveillance. Verification of suspicion. Deathwish. An unshakable belief in his own ability to escape anything untouched. The last is idiotic, is what gets good vigilantes killed, but it still feels closest to home. Rorschach frowns.
Up ahead, he watches Veidt cross the lobby, and there is legitimate urgency in his step, a purposeful disregard for anything going on around him. A map comes out of his pocket after a fumbling search, must be folded and refolded until Veidt has what he needs. This isn't part of any plan; if there is a trap here, he isn't the one springing it.
Out onto the street then, and through the crowds, an uncomplicated dead-reckoning path through streets and alleys, ducking between pedestrians and vehicles. It is deceptively normal; there is no hint in the journey to how dangerous the destination will be.
Rorschach does not think about Daniel as he follows, or about injustice wanting resolution, or about Juspeczyk or Donnelly or the hundreds and thousands and millions more whose futures hang on what they do here today.
He does not think about the feeling of hands, warm under his shirt, trying so hard to keep him.
His mind is blank, deliberately, as blank as it was in the warehouse, as blank as it was on the edge of that circle of light, neither it nor the darkness touching him.
*
In the city, a thousand men and women hold their breaths, waiting for the flash, for the moment the entire population stutters and lurches like a phonograph record skipping a groove. Then all eyes will turn toward the roads, toward tall office windows and ledges and anywhere sharp objects can be found, ready to intercede if they have to, to signal panic, to catch and hold the city in its mad, bloody dive for the pavement.
For now, though, they're just waiting.
Waiting isn't something Laurie's ever been good at. She hasn't had a cigarette in three years – hard to come by a trade when the entire prison's chained to their walls, and the habit doesn't age well anyway – but she's craving one now, fingers itchy for something to roll and twist between them, to scrawl an angry red arc through the air with. Mark the city as hers, mark out a trail for wayward fellows to follow home.
The alarm on her watch goes off; she silences it without thinking. Nothing yet; they're officially running late.
"Dammit, guys," she says, shoving her hands into her pockets to still their fidgeting. On the unquiet street, there is no one close enough to hear her: "You've gotten through so much, don't fuck it up now."
*
Adrian figures out that he's being tailed almost immediately. He doesn't have the time to stop and look back and identify the person by sight, but he's got a fair guess, and it doesn't matter anyway. They all, for once, share the same goals; there is no need for secrets and double-crossing and promises extracted under threat of world destruction. He can act openly, here. After so many years, it's a relief.
Across one alley and down another, and every step brings him closer to a moment that he hasn't been able to feel more than the vaguest shape of since he woke up with Rorschach's knife flashing down toward him. It's not as easy as just saving the operation, and it's not as simple as this being his fault, his price to pay and pound of flesh to render. There's Warren and the lobbyists and the foreign governments that snapped up his invention so willingly, an entire populace enthralled with the idea that violent and disturbed people would be so much easier to manage if they would just sit down and be quiet.
Nothing this big is ever one man's fault.
But the building is as imposing as he remembers – appearing all at once around one left turn and another, a windowless monstrosity full of security traps and the most heavily armed guards the new city has to offer – and the shape in his head is starting to feel like sacrifice, regardless. He eases the door back, code a one-time use but there's no timer on it, and it's a trivial thing to nudge a stray piece of concrete into the frame. He doesn't have the time to worry about Rorschach knowing that it wasn't an accident, that he's leaving the way open deliberately.
Soon, maybe the world will finally be put back to rights. His own role will be whatever it is, and it feels like a revelation, accepting that.
Things seem to move very quickly in its wake.
The guards are trivial to take out, confused enough by the contradiction of his presence to stop short in their assault, give him enough time to drop them. Those that get past him, hare down the hallway to sound the alarm and gather reinforcements, well– they don't get past Rorschach, and likely wish they'd simply stood their ground and faced him instead.
The fights blur together. He couldn't say how much time is passing.
Through security, through locked and coded doors and just under probing glass eyes, to the most central part of the system. There's a ladder down into the core, and he drops down it three rungs at a time and settles into the abandoned chair, pulls the casing off of the panel in front of him with the wrenching scrape of metal on metal. Somewhere above him, he senses his tail hovering by the ladder, no longer concerned with being spotted.
It's a simple system, this one. On and off, and a few timers, winding down. A small, primitive terminal. An override, cartoonish knife-switch waiting to be thrown. On a hunch, he punches up the terminal, runs through the log of latest alterations, possible booby-traps or precautions put into place in the last few min–
Ah. Damn it all. Two and a half minutes ago. If he'd been faster...
"You might want to stand back," he says to presumed thin air, one hand settling on the switch, doing his best to sound nonplussed.
There's no response, and he doesn't bother turning to look, but there is a symmetry in this that he imagines Rorschach would appreciate. Personally, Adrian has always been less interested in symbolism than in results. This, he supposes, manages both.
"Not that you would have followed me, of course," he whispers, half-smile faint. "Trustworthy as I've always been."
A flutter of regret, butterfly-soft, that he won't live to see all of these mistakes undone–
–then he closes his eyes on the last ten years, and pulls the switch.
*
Noise. Tremendous noise, building and building like a roar of thunder that never quite breaks. The switch is wrenched from his hand, or his hand from the switch. There is wind in his hair. There will be heat, at any moment.
Then he's caught up, is sailing backwards and upwards on the force of the explosion and it feels almost like pulling more than pushing, jerky and uneven– but in a moment the wall of fire will catch up, all his organs bursting inside of him as the rest of him burns into nothing. He knows what to expect, in this shutter-quick snapshot of a moment. He knows, for just an instant, exactly how he will die.
But the violence does not continue – no pain, no sickly pulling-apart and collapsing – and when he opens his eyes, the explosion is below him, fireball eating up the console, questing tendrils licking at the soles of his feet.
The point he's dangling from is a fist, small and tight, wound into the back of his jacket.
Rorschach pulls him up onto the ledge, sends him sprawling across its wire-mesh surface, and it's all Adrian can do to stay there a moment, catch his breath, settle into the awareness that it's done and it's fixed and he isn't a martyr after all and what does that make him, then? What's left?
"Don't get off that easily," Rorschach growls, fists clenched. He glowers to back it up, but he's worse for wear after all the fighting and his voice sounds tired, more tired than any of them ever were back in the seventies, when they were all a little younger and a little stupider – even the smartest man in the world. It's hard to say who he's talking about.
Then he's turned and stalked off, head down and hands in pockets, and it will be a long and dangerous fight out of the building and into the world, but the hard part is over.
*
It happens without warning, like a circuit brought together at the last possible moment, held closed by hands that know only the rush of current, of impossible success. There's no place in that white-hot euphoria for warnings, considerations.
And it's always a struggle for Laurie to keep her hands down, to not cover her eyes – there's always the fear, even after all these years, that this will be the time her resistance fails, that like some magical ward it will desert at the worst possible moment. It's fantasy though, nonsense, and she's learned to look these things in the eye.
So: a half-second of staring into the flash, a half second after that of blinking silence, stillness–
And then, chaos.
From above, the streets must look like an ant farm gone terribly wrong, all the orderly lines shattered and run amok. It doesn't look much better from down here; Laurie thought she'd prepared herself for this, for standing and facing it.
Nearby, the shrieking of breaks as cars swerve and duck, drivers caught between saving the people running in front of them and effecting their own demise, everything happening too quickly.
Imagine the riots of '77, she'd thought to herself, ahead of time. Firebombs, burning cars. It couldn't be much worse. Her hands curl into fists; out of the corner of her eye, the others on her team don't move. They are observers, that's all they're meant to do unless (until) this all goes wrong.
She's never been good at observing, either.
Above, the shattering slam of a dozen windows flying open, bouncing in their runners, screens shoved out. In her pocket, the radio, and she remembers Jon in the riots, teleporting the crowd away for their own safety. All she has to do is key up and this will stop, the same kind of magic, and was it ever really magic? But damn it, just a few more seconds...
A child, staring catatonically as her father rips his hand from her grip to step, automaton-steady, off of the curb. She doesn't cry out. She doesn't seem to notice.
Laurie's feet feel like lead. She thought– she was sure she'd– but there is a screaming now, from no child's lungs. It's like the tearing of metal or softer things, and it rises in pitch, fire alarm-piercing and air raid-urgent, rising and rising even it seems like there is no higher register for it to climb to–
Silence again, suddenly. Under her hands, her head throbs, and Laurie opens her eyes. She doesn't remember closing them.
"Anyone...t there?" the radio crackles, and it's Dan, and it sounds like he's gone around the bend on stress and grief both, has found a special new dimension of each. "Anyone? God, somebody pick u–"
All around her, dazed people, looking at their hands, down the lengths of themselves, scrubbing at their heads and faces. Windows shudder closed, shaky. A father moves, weeping, to scoop his unresponsive daughter from the curb.
There are no bodies. It's almost too good to be true.
"I've got it," she says into the handheld, before anyone else can respond. "I've got it. Dan?"
"Laurie," the radio says, spitting static. "What's going on, no one's said anything."
"There's nothing to say." She's edging down the sidewalk warily, unconsciously passing her free hand over shoulder after shoulder. The quiet after all the screaming violence feels like crystal, like she could break it so easily, and she handles these people with care; You okay? her eyes ask, and they each nod, dazed. "At least where I am, there don't seem to be any casualties. God fucking knows how."
Touch, question, nod. The radio is quiet except for the static. Across the street, the wreck of a delivery truck caught sidelong by a telephone pole, but the driver is extricating himself, is on his feet. Cab drivers are out of their cars, wandering through a sea of broken vehicles, confused.
"There was an explosion," Dan says finally, tinny on the cheap speaker. "I'm not sure if–"
Then it cuts off, but Dan doesn't let off the button, and she could wear she hears him breathing, a rising and falling in the static.
Laurie counts the seconds, still moving from person to person. Some part of her cannot believe their luck, can't fathom how this actually worked, still hasn't really registered that it has. She imagines it will creep up on her later, the magnitude of it. Another part of her wonders: if she was so sure it wouldn't work, why did she go along with it?
Still, she waits. She's had time to learn patience.
"Good to hear the operation was a success," Dan's voice says finally, stripped of the panic and without it, there's not much left. He sounds distant, shutting down. "Would appreciate reports from other sectors."
The radio lights up then, voices calling through in organized clockwork, one casualty here, none there, six hurt but stable out near the park. It sounds like a military report, or a fucking shopping list. It should sound like victory – that's what this is, here, or at least the beginning of it – but.
But there's been an explosion, and the casualty list may be longer than what her people are reporting. Laurie bites her lip.
"Here," she says, pocketing the radio, because a woman has just emerged from a doorway, second story staircase visible behind her, with a shallow cut all down the length of her wrist. Laurie catches her by the hands and guides her to the light post on the corner where the Greyson kid is, the best medic on her team, and he's already overwhelmed.
"It'll be okay," she assures the woman, but she's already juggling these things– treating the injuries, how they're going to handle the children, how they're going to avoid retaliation, how they can possibly take this worldwide and, under it all, the sound of a warm and expressive voice gone cold and what exactly that could mean, for him and for her and for everyone.
*
So: there are these things to do, but for the moment all they can do is regroup. Laurie is handing out makeshift bandannas for six hours before they run out; everyone else will have to just learn to close their eyes and mean it, no horror movie curiosity, no peeking. There is nowhere big enough to house them all under the radar—they are a city's worth of people, and they already fill out all of its cracks and crevasses to bursting—but fuck, should it matter? Mindless control was the only power their oppressors ever had; even the military should fall on their side now. The city is basically theirs.
Hopeless optimism, she hears an inner voice say, and it sounds a little like Donnelly and a little like Hatch and a little like poor Anya, though she can't quite remember her voice—sound memory goes first, they say, and it's been years—and, strange as fuck but a little bit like Rorschach, too. It shouldn't surprise her that he's keeping company with the militants and crazies, but that he's settled in with her favorite crazies is a little worrisome.
She decides not to care, regardless. Optimism's something she hasn't had much use for in years, is something she would have condemned herself for a week ago, but now she just wants to enjoy it. Let them try to tear this place back out from under us, she thinks, the stripey evening light painting them all like stalking tomcats, making her feel feral on the long walk back to the camp. We'll show 'em what they get.
*
Dan's supposedly already there when she gets back—with no crowd control duties, his part of this had been done with hours ago—but she's not sure she'd call him present, really.
It takes some searching to find him. It's pretty obvious he's not going to be out in the revelries, and the foodlines hold nothing but half-strangers and half-friends. So... probably waiting up at 'home', the ramshackle hut with the pushed-together mattresses and, unfortunately, just enough room for a third. She frowns; that isn't going to be a fun conversation, assuming...
Assuming two plus one is still the equation to be using. Damn it, she thinks, shoving her hands into her pockets. Couldn't have been a little more specific than 'explosion'?
“Dan?” she calls, quiet, pulling back the curtain.
A questioning noise in response, a little startled. When she pokes her head in, he’s sitting on the edge of a mattress, looking up at her, running a scrap of paper through his fingers. “Oh, Laurie. Hey.”
“Hey.”
Silence like a taut wire between them, tugging more painfully on her skin with every second. She takes a hesitant first step inside, and the rest fall naturally after that, carrying her to where she can settle next to him, head pillowed on her knees. “No word yet?” she asks.
He shakes his head, flips the paper between his hands. “No. No sign of either of them.”
She nods, and has no words, and the wire pulls.
“You were right, you know?” Dan says, sounding a little hysterical. “Getting attached is really, really stupid.”
She glances down; the sheet has one ragged edge, is scrawled over in writing she can’t read. “You were already attached,” she says, and she knows it’s not helpful but it at least feels important. “You’ve been attached for twenty years.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway,” she says, “I don’t know if I was right. I’ve been blazingly, stupefyingly wrong before.”
A sharp laugh, no humor in it. “Yeah. We all have.”
*
They don’t bother saying that maybe he’s okay, that they don’t know, because of course he’s maybe-okay—in the same way he’d been maybe-okay for months and years at a time after ‘77, disappearing into the city like a stray cat, emerging to confirm its continued existence only when it chose to. Dan’s gotten used to having a Schrödinger’s partner.
She leads him out of the hut instead, out into the weaving channels of people all headed in one direction or another. “If word comes,” she says, and he’s not sure where exactly ‘word’ would come from anyway, “it’ll get to you faster if you’re out here.”
It’s an excuse. She’s trying to keep him from drawing into himself, and he can appreciate the concern, at least. Ground himself in it, in her solid presence at his side, but it’s still the most disconnected he’s ever felt, drifting through this celebratory crowd. Even in those shitty, grey, endless-autumn days after Keene he hadn’t felt this cut adrift, because maybe he could still do something, maybe things would change...
They don’t know. But he does, in some itchy part of his brain that always seems to have the right answer two seconds too late. He knows, and it aches like something he can only describe in shades of hospital green and 1961’s unrelenting summer heat, in the feel of tombstone engraving under his sixteen-year-old fingers. Sweat and gravel.
Wait.
He holds a hand out to halt them, sniffs the air, a sudden sharp acridness filling his head. More like sweat and flashpowder, he thinks, something burning... and a hand settles onto his shoulder from behind, turns him forcefully around.
"Oh, god," Dan mutters, before his brain even catches up with what he's looking at, because the man in front of him is in terrible shape—clothing singed, hair too, face a dense patterning of overlapping bruises, blood running from a cut on his temple and from other, more covered places to judge from the smell, one arm held protectively up against his ribs—but it's still Rorschach, still Walter fucking Kovacs, out the other side of his own little war and stubbornly still breathing.
He can see Laurie grinning widely out of the corner of his eye, and it's all he can do to only grip Rorschach by the shoulders—nothing else seems appropriate to subject him to, out in public like this, in front of Laurie—but Rorschach himself seems to have no such reservations, gripping Dan by the back of his neck and pulling him down, down. It’s a drowning man’s kiss, pulling and taking, and Dan’s never felt so fucking whole.
Or so glad to be wrong.
Dan slides his hands up to bury in the shaggy, overgrown hair at the nape of Rorschach’s neck, and they break apart to breathe, cracked lips straying over the corner of his jaw and the arm thrown around his back tightening.
“Thought I was dead?” Rorschach mutters into his neck, and Dan can feel the way he’s almost smiling. “Again?”
“Asshole. Shut up.”
A slow clapping, then, just one pair of hands. Laurie’s being obnoxious again, but it’s affectionate, the smile on her face sincere, and Dan’s perfectly happy to bask in the awkwardness.
Rorschach straightens up away from him, reaches as if to touch the brim of his hat except that it isn’t there; he’s still dressed in his technician’s clothes, out of context. “Good to see that you’ve also come through your trials safely, Miss Juspeczyk,” he says, and there’s not even any venom in it, no indignation or shame, and Dan wonders just how many fights Rorschach almost lost out there today.
*
Rorschach lies on the edge of the mattress, body awkward as always, all jagged bits that don't fit. But the usual tension has drained off, is gone. He’d thought he was being dragged into the shadows here for another sort of reason, had disgusted the old ghosts of himself with how little he'd minded the idea, so much more inexcuseable in the high light of day. Instead: this.
Daniel is curled around his back, clinging with more ferocity than Rorschach thought he possessed, with more possession than he would ever have tolerated, before. Daniel might be half-hard or he might just have something jammed in a pocket—an idiotic old joke, but he is not used to being held this way and has no point of reference—but either way, seems less interested in addressing it than in being here, pressed against the hard, twisted length of Rorschach’s body, breathing him in slow and deep.
He knows from others’ comments that his hygiene has never been good; he never cared, still doesn't, but he's always been aware. It’s been worse since they arrived here, compounded further now by gunpowder and soot and blood, sweat and aggression. He can only assume Daniel is the victim of temporary insanity.
“I can’t tell what you want,” Daniel says, a little muffled by Rorschach's shirt. “A lot of the time.”
Justice. Retribution. To make the city whole again. Waffles with double syrup and double bacon. Rorschach almost gags against the unfamiliar tickle of laughter rising up his throat; adrenaline intoxication, clearly.
“I don’t think you’d ever go down easy if you didn’t want to,” Daniel continues, and suddenly Rorschach doesn’t want to laugh anymore. “I just don’t know what you...”
“Still worried about that?” He can hear the chastisement in his own voice, familiar from long years of use but inappropriate right now. He tries to school his tone; it makes little difference. “Discussed it already.”
“Yeah, I know we did.”
A rough snort. “Problem with hearing, or memory?”
Daniel’s grip around him tightens; why harsh words bring this affection out in his partner, Rorschach has never understood, and he has had twenty years to figure it out. “Little of both, I think," Daniel says, then a sharp laugh, breathed against his neck. “I guess I just need some reminding sometimes. Especially when you come home looking like this.” A broad hand slides up under his shirt, rucks it up, finds the bruises and soothes over them, warm. "The way you just... walk right into traps sometimes, I don't know, man. I guess you've always done that."
"Yes. When I thought they were escapable."
Outside, the camp is noisy and boisterous, gaudy. Lives lived with no regret and no time for looking backward at all the other possible paths, for staying inside the lines. It is a strange place to call 'home'.
Rorschach rolls in Daniel’s grip, faces him down.
"Expected a trap. Did not expect a bomb. Daniel," he says, willing steel into it, because steel is strong and uncompromising and not sentimental at all. It puts distance between these things and what they mean. “Not sure what I want. Not used to wanting things. But.” He shakes his head. “Not going anywhere. Not by choice.”
And there are a lot of things that are not their choice, and they will both come back bloodied and ragged many times in the near future—and they are both exhausted beyond thought and will eventually sleep. But for now, it is enough to lie still and revel in the complete miracle of their continued existence.
Against all odds.
*
--->Chapter 21
*
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Date: 2011-10-03 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-03 10:49 am (UTC)