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“...to the scene of the crime mere minutes after it took place, but were seconds too late to collect any valuable evidence. The perpetrators burned everything in their wake, and the fire department is currently sifting through the ruins. The Hub City police department asks its citizens to do their part in cracking this case by informing the local authorities of any information they have.” The monitor across from Vic Sage goes black and the lights cut out, leaving him in the dim afterglow of another successful broadcast. He sighs and stretches the aching muscles of his back. The chair he sits in to do his reporting is made to look comfortable but it’s anything but.
One of the cameramen pulls off his headset. “AAAAAnd we’re done! That’s it, guys.”
Vic’s co-host, a woman whose name he only remembers because he hears her introduce herself to the camera every morning, slides him a hot cup of coffee and he catches it with a tired grin. “Good show today," she says, voice low.
“If you could call organized crime ‘good’. I’d rather be reporting the requisition of an elderly home or an animal shelter. We all agree that Hub city needs a few more of those.”
“True. But it makes for good reporting, and you have a way with your words that could make anything sound good.” She leads on the desk, playing with her curly blonde hair. Vic can't help but assume that the low cut of her shirt and subsequent display of her cleavage is intentional. He decides to become thoroughly interested in his drink, rather than accept the invitation to stare. Her eyes hold a lot more than business in them, and it seems to him that she hasn't quite caught on to the fact that they're still at work. "What is it?" she asks. "Is something wrong?"
"No. Nothing at all. Just a little tired, I guess. Another long night." That's Vic's story. Insomnia. It's an explanation for the dark rings under his eyes (the result of the nocturnal life of the Question). Of course, that doesn't explain the bruising that usually comes as a secondary side effect of life as a vigilante. But he does his best to cover those up. Bruised and battered is not the best look for a TV reporter to have.
"I'm sorry to hear about that. Are you on sleeping pills? Those'll do wonders for ya."
"I'm not so sure." He suppresses a smile. Wonders how well the Question could fight crime in his sleep. "Thank you for the suggestion, though. And for the coffee, Amanda. I owe you."
She breaks out into an infectious smile. "Oh, don't worry about it! I don't mind. Besides, you're always so kind, and..."
He swallows. Finds himself staring into the depths of his coffee once again, as if caffeine has suddenly become the single most fascinating substance in the world. "Well, I really should be going. Other business to take care of. You know how it is."
Amanda pouts and knits her eyebrows in a mockery of frustration. "Oh, come on. The studio doesn't close down for another half hour. A few colleagues and I were gonna go out for a late-breakfast early-lunch. You could tag along for once."
He doesn't take her seriously (it's hard, when every emotion she expresses is grossly exaggerated), but he feels bad for taking the coffee without offering anything in return. Almost wishes that he could give her what she wanted. But what she wants from him is something he isn't sure that he can give. He doesn't want to go right out and say it ("Amanda, I'm not not interested in girls like...you...") because he isn't sure how to express what he feels, or rather doesn't feel, for the woman without sounding like a pompous ass. But turning someone down (if passive aggressively) is better than pretending to love someone that you have no feelings for, right? So he devises a different plan, standing up and throwing on his overcoat in preparation for the cold outside. “Sorry. Like I said, busy. But hey, I’ll get the coffee tomorrow, okay? Caramel latte, right?"
Her face lights up immediately, nods, enthralled by the idea that he's taken the time to remember her favorite. He realizes his mistake too late, but that can be dealt with later. "Okay then, bye, Amanda! See you tomorrow!"
"Bye, Vic!"
He squeezes past the cameras and their respective equipment. Dodges a few stray employees that are cleaning up their loose ends and preparing to go home, or to a second job. Wades through the inner workings of what makes the morning news tick. Vic opens the back door to the studio with gloved hands and is hit by a breath of cool air. He quickly merges with the foot traffic and ventures to take a tentative sip of his coffee. It's still unbearably hot, but that's exactly what he needs. Something to slap his taste buds into action.
His thoughts are of getting home and building a fire and of sweet solitude. The spoils of a morning's work. Meditation and incense and- Until a searing pain shoots up his spine. Muscles spasm involuntarily and for a few blinding seconds, he has no idea what he's doing or where he's going. The busy sidewalk, the busier street, the air full of sounds, it's all gone. He staggers to his right and leans into the side of an unnamed brick building. His vision spirals and mutates like the spinning barrel of a kaleidoscope, minus the colors and the sense of discovery that come with them. His world is quickly reduced to black and white and he forces himself to open his eyes, if only to get a handle on his surroundings.
Unmoving eyes take glitchy snapshots of the world. First, the streets of Hub city, their edges fuzzy with morning fog. Then, endless white. It doesn’t take long for things to go out of focus entirely, the world to become an impenetrable cloud of haze.
The temperature instantly drops a good 15 degrees. Fog dissipates slowly and he’s left with a city drenched in darkness, not terribly unlike his own. Rain is pouring down around him, filling indented patches of the street to create temporary lakes, the result of drains clogged past the point of no return by garbage and waste. A strangled scream splits the night air. A long way away, Vic can hear faint police sirens carving paths out of nothing.
It is as though some depraved animal has taken it upon itself to gnaw on his exposed spine. He feels as though it's been hit by something metal and unyielding. Not broken, but it sure feels like it.
Something beings to churn his insides, sending shivers through every muscle in his body. It is absolutely the strangest sensation Vic has felt in his entire life, and he's trying to ascertain just what it might be (what might be wrong with him) before something like a phantom silhouette steps out of the place he was standing. A man in a ratty brown trench coat, wearing a fedora that is accented by a purple band. His features are impossible to discern under a white mask. He takes deliberate steps through the filth of the city, a second figure at his right hand. This one wears a skin-tight suit, the surface glimmering in the unreliable glow of the streetlights, grooved as though feathered. A cape flows after him, disturbed by a light breeze. His cowl features pointed ear-like horns. Part of a theme, Vic guesses.
The image of the two of them making their way into the gaping maw of what can only be described as an urban hell seems lacking without a noir soundtrack to accompany it--something heavy in bass.
Vic takes a cautious step forward. Something tells him to go after them, and the steady forward motion of the man in the trench coat makes his bones ache with the desire to follow. Accidentally, he sets foot on an empty fast food container. Plastic breaks under his weight. The man in the trench spins around, fists at the ready. He is wearing a purple suit, pinstripes running neck to ankle. Vic sees the features of his mask for the first time: amorphous blobs of ink migrating unceremoniously on a featureless face.
Whatever universe this is, he thinks, it can’t be mine.
“Come on, we’re gonna lose them,” says the caped man, scanning the street briefly, probably wondering what caught his partner’s attention. He doesn't see Vic, but the one in the fedora does. Vic can't see his eyes--strictly speaking, he can't even determine whether he has them--but somehow, he knows that they must be focused directly on him. “This way. Rorschach.”
Vic is knocked violently back into his own reality by the frenzied honks of an oncoming car that veers into the center of the road, only just barely missing him.
The dazed reporter stumbles backwards as a gust of wind grazes him in the wake of the speeding car. He feels sluggish and raw, back in his own dimension. Back where things are supposed to make sense. He looks down and finds himself three feet into the road, with more traffic on the way. A few more unplanned steps send him to the sidewalk, with only a loose handle on his balance and an even looser handle on reality.
Looks around. Glad no one saw that. Doesn't want to see the headline that reads, "Famous Reporter Vic Sage Loses His Sanity Immediately After Broadcast." Vic hurries to his car. No images of a healthily stoked fire or a warm house dance in his head. This time, he's got places to go.
“I don’t get it. It’s not like I was on something,” he says, settling into an armchair at his mentor’s home, feeling his nerves tingle and set off pseudo alarms as though something might leap through the window and attack. He's always been there for you, and his home has proven to be a safe haven during the years that you've been friends. But none of that quells the inexplicable fear riding your nervous system like a joyride. “Except for coffee, that is. But that doesn't account for the pain in my spine. Or the things that I saw."
“Been using the mask a little too much, perhaps? Starting to experience side effects?” Aristotle Rodor steps out of the kitchen, his own cup of coffee in hand. He sits down across from Vic and smooths a hand through gray hair. “Hmm?”
“No, no. This wasn’t just a hallucination, Tot. This was… more concrete than that. I swear, I could see everything, feel water sloshing around my shoes, feel the frigid night air, hear voices…” He shudders, not liking to admit that last part.
"That's what a hallucination is, son. Can't always trust your own senses, you know. They'll tell you crazy things."
Vic looks away. He isn't sure how to respond to that. What Tot has just described is what he hates most about hallucinogens. It's not exactly as though he has a choice, in the case of the pseudoderm gas that disguises his face and turns him into the Question. The gas acts as a drug, expanding his worldview, aiding in his investigations. It doesn't take away or distort his perceptions of reality. It enhances them. That's what he tells himself, anyway.
"What did they say? The voices?" Tot prods.
“There were two men. One dressed in a hero’s getup. Looked like a giant bird. Tacky, to say the least. But not so much that his intimidation factor was outweighed. He was most likely a meta-human of some sort. I don’t know about the other guy. He was masked as well… The man in the hero’s costume called him ‘Rorschach’...”
“Rorschach, huh? Like, the rorschach inkblot test?”
Vic takes a sip from his coffee, eyes flickering away. He thinks about the mask he saw. Roving clouds of ink. Squirming and alive. Watching him, as if he had been able to see Vic, standing there in the middle of the street, even when his partner couldn’t. Rorschach. Featureless, though Vic doubted there was anything that could get past that face. “Yes. Just like a rorschach inkblot test.”
"Well isn't this a mystery... Not that you aren't good with those, though. I'm sure that if it's important, you'll crack it. I wouldn't worry, though. Like I said, the senses'll tell you crazy things. Sometimes meaningless things. Dreams, for example. Not every dream you have is an all-telling omen of the future. Most dreams don't even make sense."
He can't fault the old man's logic. Isn't it possible that what he experienced was just an uncommonly vivid daydream, brought on by a lack of sleep or an accumulation of stress? He hadn't realized his life was putting that much of a toll on him. "Maybe I just need to give it a break. Take a day off, maybe?"
"Maybe. Maybe so."
The haggard reporter gazes out the window. "Whatever it was, it almost got me killed. I just want to be done with the ordeal." He's not fooling either of them and he knows it. It's why he looked away.
Tot's smile, just barely registered out of his periphery, is enough to make him wince.
Opening his eyes to the cool gray of his ceiling on a soporific December morning, Vic is almost convinced that it was a hallucination.
The icy drain water threatening to seep into his shoes. The bite of winter air. Eavesdropped voices, one reminding the other to hurry. All of these things are things that one can find here, in Hub city. None of them are remarkable or unique. Not on a Monday morning in winter. Not when everyone is trying to get somewhere. It's beginning to seem more and more likely that Vic was experiencing the telltale symptoms of a double life. His back giving out after long nights spent wrestling lowlife thugs to the ground. His head pounding after too many hours without sleep. An exhausted mind listening to the sights and the sounds of the city around him and filling in the blanks by way of an overactive imagination.
Hallucination. For sure.
But maybe that’s what makes it feel so real. The fact that all of those things are mundane, and that Vic felt them anyway. He didn’t open his eyes to a land of floating purple unicorns or flashing colors. He opened his eyes into another world. A world so very much like his own. Darker only in increments. Colder by just a few notches. A slightly more twisted world. A world filled with that many more cruel and broken people.
He doesn’t want to imagine what eyes might have been hiding behind that mask of blacks and whites. And at the same time, it’s the only place his mind will go. Would they be brown eyes, perhaps? Or green? A contrast to the concrete jungle. Blue maybe?
It’s irrelevant. He’s never going back.
That's what he tells himself, but this time, he doesn't need Tot Rodor's mischievous smile to tell him that he's lying. Vic turns over in bed and buries his face into the mattress. Grabs his pillow and uses it to cover the back of his head and entrench him in darkness. All he can see is that scathing face on a backdrop of black sky.
[2 - Sylvia by The Antlers]
“Sage? Are you with me?”
A voice, foreign to his ears. Angry about something. Sounds forge their way into the void. Surreal without the hum of machinery to go with them. The lights of the studio. The crew of two dozen or so behind-the-scenes employees that pull all the ropes and connect all the wires and breathe life into Hub city's mornings.
Victor snaps out of… Wherever he just was. Looks up. Meets eyes with the business end of a camera, red signal light flashing irreverently in his face. He squints and shields his eyes. His supervisor is the one doing the talking.
“What the hell is up with you, Sage? You hungover or something? Ten seconds until we go live! Stop looking at me like you don't speak English."
He reluctantly forces on a smile. One that feels like stiff plastic. Hard to manipulate. Uncomfortable to wear. He moves his mouth, saying all the right words. Making all the right motions.
No one has reported anything in reference to the fire or the gang activity last week. Three died in the wreckage of the building that was so carelessly lit up in flames: a testament to the corrupted innards of this city. He's reluctant to say as much to the camera and, by extension, to his live audience watching him from the comfort of their homes. He's always wanted to be a positive influence on the world and he isn't looking forward to admitting to defeat. To the fact that no matter how earnestly he speaks about the atrocities going on behind closed doors and within unlit alleyways, nobody seems to do anything about it. The violence never seems to end.
Vic itches to be on the streets, in the beating heart of it all. To be the Question, where words turn into fists and victory is clear and instantly gratifying.
Midnight finds the Question skulking down an alleyway and scanning the occasional pedestrian. Looking for his suspect in the sparse pickings of the witching hour.
He finds a careful rhythm in the left-right-left-right of his formal wear. The alternating light and darkness provided by surrounding lights. The streets are almost empty, as they should be at this time of night. But something is missing. The Question feels it, a strange hollow feeling in his gut, as though something that he is normally a part of just isn't there. As though a dimension has been removed from the city and it is left in unimpressive 2D. Almost boring. But that can't be the case. Hub city is as it's always been. Nothing is missing. Nothing is gone. Nothing has changed. Except for, perhaps, the Question.
A plastic back, filled with night air, blows down the sidewalk. A modern day tumbleweed. Insulting the fruitlessness of his labors.
Frustration begins to seep into the marrow of his bones. It distracts him, perhaps, because a sudden shift in the quality of the air takes him by surprise. He almost chokes on a cloud of smoke that encircles his head. Hears the unpleasant roar of a muscle car speeding down the street in his direction. The night erupts into an orchestra of sonic vibrations that he's not at all ready for. But when he looks, there’s nothing there. The road is empty. Not so much as a bicycle. Question blinks the dust out of his eyes (what dust seeped through the mask, anyway), only to find that none is there. Breath comes easily to him--the air clear (minus the usual taint of pollution). He feels his face through the pseudoderm mask disguising his features.
Feels air shift behind him. Fails to notice the shift in his surroundings (characteristic drop in temperature, increase in filth, increase in road activity, the muddy streets, the howling strangers). Hairs on the back of his neck bristle and he spins around with reflexes that he didn’t know he had. Blue trench coat becomes brown. Black gloves become purple.
What happens next is instinctual and unfamiliar at the same time. A feral need to destroy whatever creature thinks that it can defeat him. Something that the Question simply didn't have. (But then, where else could it have come from?)
The entirety of his weight is thrown upon the assailant, shoving him to the wall. Question holds his forearm to the neck of the man, restricting his air intake. An animalistic force prods him along, ending the fight before it's begun. The man Question is attacking is nowhere near ready to fight someone so physically blunt, or so thorough in his "work". He's no match for the Question (or rather, the unseen force that has taken over the Question's body). He wraps fingers around the folds of the man’s shirt and throws him to the ground with a sickening thwack. Puts a cold, wet boot to his back. The assailant takes in a large gulp of air, face first in a puddle full of all kinds of foul liquids, then begins to cough and sputter on the resulting mouthful of water (among other things). He does his best to lift his head and obtain precious oxygen.
Vic shifts his boot forwards until his heel is resting on the space between the man’s shoulder blades, the length of his foot is pinning the criminal’s neck, and his toes resting on his head, keep him face first in the water. He wriggles, not unlike a maggot. Crying out into the bleary night. Begging for mercy. Any desires in him to fight have long since died off in a desperate attempt to remain alive.
City life goes on. The life of this man begins to drain from him like so much processed carbon dioxide.
“Fuck’s sake, Rorschach! We don’t want to drown the guy!”
Question doesn’t recognize the voice that forces its way into his ears, but his body responds all the same. Shifts his weight backwards and allows the man to pull himself out of the water, shaking in more ways than one. But the reprimand doesn't take the fire out of his bones. Question leans over the criminal, almost snarling. So out of character in comparison to his usual calm and controlled demeanor. “I know who you squeal to," says the Question. "You’re an informant, not a lackey. Talk!” His voice is more gravelly than he remembers, too.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, man! I’m no one’s informant. I’m just a goddamn supplier, okay? Weapons. Tech, sometimes. Not information!” When the man catches sight of Question in the dim half-light of a neon sign, he becomes pale. “W-What happened to your face?”
The Question is used to being asked something along these lines. The meta-humans of the Justice League all go by some alter ego or another. All wear their own masks. However, Question’s is a little unorthodox. It’s not everyday that you see a man without a face. The pseudoderm he wears is pretty convincing--a layer of solidified gas that settles over his features and makes it appear as though his face is flat, without a mouth or a nose or eyes to distract from the crushing weight of justice. At first glance, he looks like a failed experiment. An unfortunate mutation. A monster, perhaps.
But that’s not what this man is seeing, he realizes. “What the… it’s moving. What the hell, man? What are you?”
Question frowns. Looks down at the puddle his suspect has just pulled himself out of. In the rippling water, Vic Sage catches sight of the visage of a man he had thought he was rid of. He can feel two timelines converging and becoming one. Two life forces running into each other. Mixing. Reacting, like chemicals.
Reality becomes an illusion. An alternating space time continuum, running steadily on its tracks, is interrupted and takes a detour through territory not meant for it. A nefarious alternate history becoming one with Vic’s. The world of Watchmen entering his muddled reality and making its home in his clammy corner of Hub city.
In the water, he sees the shifting of inkblots on a white cloth canvas.
“Rorschach? Buddy?”
He swallows underneath the erratic push and pull of ink within latex. His shoulders hunch. Muscles tense. He’s always hated his human face. The face of Walter Kovacs. The one he tried to leave behind when he took on his role as Rorschach. But he’s never hallucinated losing it before (even if he's wanted to).
And yet, when he looks into the water and sees the faceless expression of a man in blue, he can’t accept it as his reality.