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It's March, 1975. Nite Owl and Rorschach are celebrating ten years of partnership by interrupting a territorial pissing match between rival streetgangs. Knot Tops favor improvised weaponry: pipes; bicycle chains; crowbars. Crude, but good enough for the small-time skirmishing they usually engage in.
The Black Skulls are more serious. They brandish long knives and the occasional handgun, eager to rip a staccato of bullets into either mask. That made things touch and go for a while, but after a hasty tactical regroup, Nite Owl feels like they're clawing back the advantage.
Nite Owl breaks a guy's wrist when he lunges at him with a length of steel, and the give of bone and accompanying tear of sinew is unpleasant under his grip. There are more painless ways to get him to drop his weapon, but if there's anything he's learned from Rorschach, it's that the direct approach is often the most effective.
He's long since grown tired of the constant antagonism from kids in gang colors. While he still holds a certain amount of sympathy for the disenfranchised youth of New York's streets, it dwindles in the face of resentment, and sometimes an abrupt and blindsiding anger.
He doesn't enjoy being angry at them any more than he enjoys being angry at all, and maybe if he could summon the indignation to be righteous about it, it would help. As it is, he just clings to the small consolation that it's borne from disappointment and not something crueler. Sometimes he wishes he could understand what compels their behavior; it's an incredible waste of drive and passion when the ultimate result is jail time, or worse.
There's a part of him that nags, a cynical insistence that they don't deserve his help. The part of him that is a hero—that's most of him—continues to try, regardless.
He knows could be doing better work, helping people who really need it, would welcome it, even. Instead, the simple fact of his existence—and to a greater degree, Rorschach's—seems to encourage these hooligans, and they find themselves stepping in to forcefully quell their violent disorder time after time. It's a mindless, vicious circle.
It never occurs to him to quit.
Nite Owl takes out his assailant with a kick to the side of the head. The kid sprays fine droplets of blood across the asphalt when he coughs and groans. Sometimes Nite Owl feels like he's lost by virtue of winning, because in the end it means he was the more ruthless one. When it comes down to blood and screaming, he can never quite feel the victor.
He sees Rorschach in his periphery, laying into a gutterpunk he's got propped against the wall of a building. He's as calculatedly vicious as he always is, rattling the punk's bones off the brickwork and catching him with a knee to the groin as he rebounds.
Nite Owl winces, considers reining him in; his brutality always seems needless and disproportionate. Rorschach always calls him soft when he tries, though, and there's only so many times he can smile mildly and shrug the accusation off.
Rorschach was always the more astute half of this partnership, but sometimes he forgets that one of them has to be the good cop.
–
It's April, and the young lady ringing up Dan's groceries is complaining about her working hours. Dan grins and commiserates, quietly thrilling when she smiles back, a little too brightly to be simple indulgence. Annie, her name tag says.
The kid on the next till over looks up from packing tins into a bag and butts in to the conversation. They chatter on, and Dan figures anyone else would make a snippy remark about customer service, but hey, he's an easygoing guy and it's not like he's in a hurry to get anywhere. He concentrates on keeping up a cheery smile whenever Annie glances back at him.
There is a party she wants to go to, but she's been given a shift that evening and she's sure it was on purpose. The kid grins and offers to take the manager out, for a price. Revenge is sweet.
Dan's attention immediately snaps from Annie to the kid, their banter swamped when a sudden crest of adrenaline sets his ears roaring like the ocean. He quickly estimates the kid's capacity for violence, sizing him up and assessing his capability in a fight; he is athletic, solid, looks able to take a blow. Maybe he plays football or practices martial arts. Like gears clicking into place, he knows that Nite Owl would restrain him with a knee in the middle of his back, would try to talk some sense into him because he's a good kid, appeal to his sense of—
Then Annie laughs and the boy laughs with her, and the blood pounding in Dan's ears slowly abates. He uncurls his fists as Annie asks him, "Cash or check?"
Dan smiles, and pays with sweat-cold hands.
–
It's June, and Nite Owl's hands are braced on his knees and he's gasping, hiccuping in breath between spikes of high, bubbling laughter. It's not funny, it really, really isn't.
Not even remotely.
Rorschach stands stoic a few paces ahead, mask giving away as much as ever. He doesn't seem offended; if anything his stance indicates bemusement and slight impatience.
If Nite Owl didn't laugh, he's not sure what he would do. His smile is more like a grimace, painful symmetry to the dripping Chelsea grin of the corpse he had almost tripped over. This case is a gruesome one and their perp likes to bait them, likes to leave them presents. He doesn't find it funny at all.
His gauntlet is filmed with grime when he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The taste lingers on his tongue and is gritty between his teeth, but it's nothing a good end-of-patrol coffee can't fix.
–
It's tough to get the blood out of the zippers and the ridges of his armor. It tends to congeal in the grooves of the feather texture, and it takes a toothbrush and a lot of elbow-grease to get it clean. Dan scrubs it under the basement sink with increasing vigor, making soap bubbles froth and swirl down the plug hole. Bleach would make things easier, but it dulls the luster and Dan is not really okay with that.
He glances over his shoulder at Rorschach, feeling a touch sheepish at his exertions. He figures he's probably red-faced; he can feel his hair clinging to his forehead.
"Out, damned spot," he says, with a marked lack of dramatic flair. He shakes water droplets from a gauntlet. "Out, I say!"
Obviously not black enough for Rorschach's taste in humor; he remains unmoved. Dan shrugs, goes back to scrubbing.
–
It's July, and a little girl has gone missing on her way home from a friend's house.
–
In a startling demonstration of self-awareness, Rorschach thinks it would be better if Nite Owl talks to the family.
The Roches live in a cold water apartment on the outskirts of Harlem. The kitchen smells like roasting dust from the space heater, running despite the clement evening. Nite Owl is sweating under his layers of armor, but he tamps down his discomfort for the Roches' sake, and offers them a smile; sympathetic, if a little nervous.
They don't ask him to sit or offer him coffee; they huddle close together with their fingers laced while he stands at the opposite end of the kitchen table and asks them questions. They are very afraid. It's evident in their faces, in the way Mrs. Roche doesn't seem to realize she's crying. Nite Owl supposes he would be scared too, if he had an only daughter and she had been kidnapped.
She was playing with her friends just the next street over, they tell him. She was wearing a green dress with her initials and some flowers embroidered on a pocket, and black shoes. Her hair was in neat braids. She was told to never ever talk to anyone she doesn't know, never, oh Blair.
The police have the letter, so Mr Roche recites to Nite Owl what they were told. It sounds like something memorized by rote, eerily detached: the letter was written in non-dominant handwriting on folded foolscap. They have to leave the money in a trashcan in Morningside park a week tomorrow.
The perp is expecting a considerable ransom from a family who can barely afford their rent. Nite Owl wonders if he realizes he has the wrong Roche yet. He fervently hopes not, because then he'd know he has nothing to gain by keeping her. Too many kidnappings end in homicide.
He keeps that thought to himself. Something coils in him, a mainspring winding tight, a ticking timer. He knows more than ever that he must solve this case; he must find Blair, must bring her home. These are good people, and they deserve to be spared this tragedy.
Mr. Roche doesn't shake Nite Owl's hand when he offers it, and he hears the jingle of chain and the deadbolt scrape into place as he leaves. It's only much later that he realizes they were afraid of him.
–
Rorschach crouches until he's at eye-level with the gaggle of children, and holds out hard candies in the palm of his hand. They flock to him curiously, though they glance sidelong at Nite Owl as they edge around. All the cautionary tales Dan has ever heard about taking candy from strangers are rattling through his head, and he wonders if any of the kids are going to take the bait.
A boy with scuffed knees holds out his arms, mimes a slouching figure with a bulging stomach. "He hangs around the street corner sometimes," the boy says. "He's creepy and smells. Blair talked to him once because he brought his dogs." She likes to pet dogs, even though he told her she's not allowed to pet strange ones. He told her so.
Rorschach touches the brim of his fedora in an incongruously polite, old-fashioned gesture, and as he straightens up he drops some of the candies into the boy's cupped hands. A chorus wells up from the other children: sing-song threats to go tell mom.
The boy pops a candy into his mouth and boldly proclaims that he's seen pictures of Raw-Shark in the newspaper, so he's not really a stranger.
–
They move from bar to bar, and he lets Rorschach work. He's ruthless about it, but the snap of broken fingers or crunch of metacarpals stop registering not long after Nite Owl stops keeping count of the hospitalizations. This is how we do things, he reminds himself. He glances at the bar's shabby denizens and makes a calming gesture with his hands. "Nothing to see here, folks. Just doing our job."
He understands Rorschach's frustration when interrogation after interrogation turns up nothing new. Time is running out, winding down, and finding Blair is the most important thing. It's an imperative.
It's become a mantra; his heartbeat: Find Blair Roche. Find Blair Roche. It's become the words to the half-heard songs on his radio; the headline of a half-glimpsed newspaper. It ticks through his head when he tries to sleep.
He can tell that Rorschach is similarly gripped. It's in the way he growls out his questions and the way his mask shapes itself wildly.
Find Blair Roche. She needs your help. You need to help her.
In the sixth bar, it's Nite Owl who dislocates a man's arm to get a tip.
Nite Owl twists the man's hand up between this shoulder blades and reassures him that he doesn't want to hurt him. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he really doesn't. The man screams for mercy, and Nite Owl extracts the lead from him with blunt force.
It's messy and imprecise. Barbaric, like medieval surgery.
He's never done this before, not premeditated and not for information, but it feels necessary—and goddamn, it pays dividends. He wonders what else he's capable of in the name of justice. It makes him feel twitchy to dwell on it, makes him tighten his grip without realizing.
"Oh fuck...I told you...Grice!" the man gibbers, "Gerald Grice. He's got two dogs and likes little girls, oh Jesus, please, let go, please!"
–
There is a pair of German Shepherds tussling over a bone in the back yard; they're too big to be pups but still rangy with youth. They pay Nite Owl and Rorschach no heed as they slip around the front of the building, nor when Rorschach crouches to pick the door's lock.
It's a disused dressmaker's shop, and the mannequins haunting the boarded-up window give Rorschach pause. Nite Owl think it's probably all that bare, pink felt. He has no patience for his partner's issues right now though, so he clicks his goggles to night vision and pushes past him, into the dust-rimed depths of the shop.
There's a rusted old furnace in a side room, flanked by more dressmaker's dummies. The door keens as he tugs it open and fine flakes of ash swirl into the half-dark, backlit by the dingy street lighting that seeps through the boarded window. Nite Owl could almost fool himself into believing that it's nothing more than dust, but there is the residual smell of charred fabric. The furnace has been recently used. He reaches a hand inside, sifts through the cinders.
He sit there for what feels like a long time.
Eventually he senses Rorschach at his shoulder. "The place is empty," Rorschach says. "Nobody here but the dogs. Found something upstairs, in the kitchen. There's—"
He was going to say more. It's bitten off into a guttural noise when he sees what Dan holds in his hands. The noise becomes low and rough like a gear slipping, teeth grinding.
–
He didn't think it could get worse.
He didn't think it could get worse than the charred underwear or the deeply-scored butcher's block or the rusty, bloody cleaver. He never thinks it can get any worse but it always does. Human beings are forever inventive; they can always find new and vicious ways to horrify him and his smile can slip only so many times before it becomes a rictus grin. Dan has given them every chance to be better, and every time they have betrayed him.
The cleaver comes down; it has killed again. Distantly, he hears Rorschach call for his mother. Dan can't bear to imagine what his own mother would think of him.
Rorschach's gloves are dark and slick with blood. He grasps Dan's arm and leaves smudged prints on Nite Owl's bronze.
Rorschach wants to wait. Dan understands; the girl is—they've failed the girl, failed her family. The least they can do is bring in her killer. Rorschach seems to have a plan, and the plan seems to involve dead dogs. Dan doesn't really want to know, but when they hear Grice come home, he helps Rorschach lift the corpse and send it through the window to greet its master.
–
Grice has the temerity to lie as Dan cuffs him to the furnace. A bald-faced lie, denying everything outright. Dan says nothing, and in the next breath Grice begs for his crimes to be excused. His voice bubbles, thick with the mucus he keeps sniveling down. It's in his best interests to choke on it. Dan doubts he cried for Blair; not in the way he cries for his dogs or for his own worthless life. Not in the way that Dan cries for her.
Rorschach is pouring kerosene. Grice calls him crazy, but he's not, not really. This is retribution in kind, justice in its purest form. Mida keneged mida. It makes Dan feel righteous, or dizzy. It makes him shiver inside.
When Rorschach hands Grice the hacksaw, the man stares stupidly. Rorschach explains it for him in broken sentences, and although Dan knew what he intended to do, he's not sure he wanted to hear it.
Grice calls them both crazy.
They're not, not really. Except, perhaps.
"Daniel." Rorschach rests a hand on Dan's shoulder. Like his voice, it shakes almost imperceptibility. Dan shrugs it off and takes a step back, and another, palm braced flat against the wall and pushing him through the gloom and filth, keeping him moving until he is outside. This is how we—
The sulfur-smell of a struck match still lingers in his nose and the silent world continues to turn under his feet, as cold and mechanical as any orrery, indifferent to dogs and little girls and men, indifferent to men who should have been heroes.
He should have—a hand on Rorschach's shoulder for once, pulled him back when he was pinwheeling because maybe it's not how they should have done things, maybe he should have—
Flames lick at the window of the dressmaker's shop. Rorschach emerges like a phantom, wreathed in glowing motes.
–
He strips off in the guest bathroom; it's going to take more than a quick sluice under the workshop sink to get the stink of smoke out of his uniform. He dismantles it piece by piece and piles it in the bathtub. It lies there like a shed skin, or a boneless corpse.
He doesn't touch it for days, only wiping off the sooty residue when Rorschach comes to haunt his kitchen.
–
It's barely a column inch on the third page; an appeal for any witnesses or information on the arson of what was Modern Modes, Brooklyn, in connected to the murder of Gerald Anthony Grice.
On the mantelpiece, his carriage clock marks the seconds with hollow ticks.
Dan lets his eyes unfocus until the words blur into illegibility. He turns the page, adjusts his glasses and starts reading an article on the economic viability of airships.
–
It's September, and Hollis switches off the old television set and then leans in, earnestly tells Dan that he thinks he needs another focus, some perspective. Dan's not sure what he means by that, and Hollis continues to hedge his words, so Dan just nods and makes agreeable noises and finishes his beer, takes another when it's offered.
Sure, Dan knows he's been a bit distant lately, but he's just tired, kind of finding it hard to get to sleep some nights. It's no big deal, certainly not worth Hollis getting all serious over.
He means well though, even if Dan is no wiser by the time it comes to leave. He wonders why Hollis looks a little older as he raises a hand in farewell.
–
It's October and the early evening sun slants across Dan's face, makes him sweat against leather upholstery. He fell asleep on the sofa again. He tries to be angry at himself for the crick in his neck, but he's just glad to have grabbed a few dreamless hours.
He sits up, and the book propped on his chest slides to the floor with a thump and flutter, knocks over an empty wine glass. His copy of The Red Badge of Courage is already battered enough that a few bent pages are no great tragedy, so he slots the book back into its space on the shelf.
When he shuffles into the kitchen Rorschach is waiting for him, spat from the dark of the basement like a remnant of his night terrors. Dan knows what he is going to ask; he has been increasingly insistent and Dan can't keep up the evasiveness or find any more excuses for himself, never mind anything that will satisfy his partner. The city needs its guardians, and Nite Owl has been dormant for long enough.
–
Rorschach is different. He's more than taciturn, highly restive in Dan's company, and Dan finds himself talking and talking to fill in the silence. When Rorschach does interject, he speaks in butchered fragments and has nothing pleasant to say.
Even by his usual standards, he is exceptionally violent.
Dan expresses his concern, at first with a hand on Rorschach's shoulder, and when it's shrugged away, in a halting, frank entreaty.
Rorschach reacts with startling contempt. It's a long time before the sting of his words begins to fade, and not before a grain of resentment forms. Just because Rorschach has abandoned all pretense of concern for his partner, it doesn't mean that Dan has. He was not merely trying to assuage his own conscience.
–
It's an early December morning, and Dan has been drinking since he got back, since he'd clawed himself out of Nite Owl's skin and heaved into his kitchen sink.
Rorschach had tried to kill a man, right in front of him. Right in front of his face, not even pretending that it could be an accident. It wasn't untethered violence, the familiar disconnect that vengeance can bring; it was unmistakeably cold-blooded. It had felt personal, like an insult, because they're not supposed to do that, that makes them no better than the scum they put away, and it's so insensitive of him to be thinking of it like that because god, the guy, but—
And Dan had pulled him back, had said...something—
And Rorschach had said—
Said something, like—
Didn't bother you before.
And Dan had hit him. Cracked him right across his ugly mouth and hauled him against the alley wall and shouted at him. He didn't want to be angry but he'd had to be, because he'd learned long ago that despair gets him nowhere.
He'd drawn a line, then. One he should have drawn when he first realized things were getting off track, slipping out of control, because they are meant to be the good guys, dammit.
Rorschach had let his head loll slightly and huffed out a breath that could have been a laugh, if Rorschach ever laughed. He had slumped heavily against Dan's hands where they fisted in the lapels of his trench, and leaned in to mutter something that made Dan drop him like he was scalding.
Dan tops up his glass. Mostly he drinks to help himself sleep, but now he's hoping it will silence his clamoring thoughts, hopes to drown one particularly accusing voice, gravelly and raw and branding him a hypocrite.
–
It's August, 1977, and Dan is so very tired. It feels like he hasn't slept for an age, just so he could keep one step ahead of the streets and no more than one step behind Rorschach, and now, and now—
He'd never considered standing down, never occurred to him even in his darkest moments, because he always thought there was so much he could still do. Yet here he is, watching the death throes of his dream; a swan song of tear gas and rubber bullets and screaming civilians, and wading through it all, the Comedian, laughing like it's the funniest goddamn thing he's ever seen.
Nite Owl has been vilified, and what is he if he isn't a hero?
–
"Sends message," Rorschach says. "Unambiguous."
The man gurgles, and Dan glances away, down at his feet. It's too much to look at the white pressure of fingertips at his throat, his discoloring face.
"Have to understand. Can't legislate against justice."
Furniss. He remembers now: they tried to put him away months ago. Serial rapist. His skin crawls under his uniform, and for a moment he thinks he can smell smoke.
"Justice is above politics." Rorschach shapes the words like they're profane, or sacred. It makes Dan feel dizzy, nauseous. It makes him feel righteous. The sidewalk spins away beneath him and the alley brickwork stretches into infinity.
"Justice should be in our hands, Nite Owl. Not in hands of politicians. Does not belong to the morally bankrupt."
No. It does not.
It belongs to them.
He stares at Furniss and Furniss stares back, and Dan knows that all of his victims looked as terrified as he does now. This is retribution. This is how it feels, and he has a hundred reasons to do this.
He has only a handful not to.
Nite Owl tightens like a vice, twists sharply, and Furniss crumples at his feet.
–
He keeps on tightening because his armor has buckled, and to stop would mean springing apart like a broken watch, innards scattering everywhere, irreparable.
– — –