Summary: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Notes: Haunted house fic for the kinkmeme, but it's gen. Pre-Roche by quite a while.
Rating/Warnings: R for imagery.
Characters/Pairings: Rorschach, Dan
Disclaimer: Not mine.
the widening gyre
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I. the way in
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"God," Dan says, an oath spun half in frustration and half in relief. He scrabbles at his goggles, jacking up the sensitivity as high as it will go; the place is clearly abandoned, dark as any sewer, the smell of wood rot and mustiness floating lazily through the air, but the sky outside is turning quickly and right now a roof, any roof, will suffice. "I can't believe we managed to get this lost."
"Will be able to find the highway in the morning," Rorschach grumbles from somewhere near his shoulder, and Dan can hear the soft leathery thwup of his collar turning up. "The commute will be loud. Easy enough to pinpoint."
It'd started out as such a simple bust – a drug ring on the Hudson waterfront, the man with the money, the biggest gun, all the answers, and that's who they'd taken off after when the crowd had scattered, rats to bolt holes. One street to another had given way to a footbridge over the water to the Jersey side and more highway than either thought they could cover without stopping to rest. Then the man had ducked into a stretch of field and they'd followed, lost him in the shifting shadows.
Dan doesn't know for sure – there's no place on his uniform for a watch – but it feels like they've been running for an hour or two at least, and wandering aimlessly for a while after that, just looking for shelter from the storm they could see starting to gather against the stars. Now that they've found it, neither has moved from their place in the entryway, the creaking walls around them uninviting in a way that makes Dan think of the furtive eyes of rapists and murderers interrupted mid-atrocity: terrified and hostile at the same time, baring jagged teeth in the streetlight, faces like punched-out windows…
It's entirely possible he's been around Rorschach for too long.
"Come on," he says, stepping carefully into the gloom, feeling for rotting floorboards with each step. It's only after a particularly violent lash of lightning splits the sky, thunder fast on its heels, that Rorschach hesitantly follows, hands in his pockets wrapped into tense and weary fists.
.
"You know," Daniel says, and there's an irritating smile in his voice as they navigate, looking for the safest and cleanest place to set up for a long night of vigilance. Rorschach's right hand is twined around a fistful of Daniel's cape, an indignity he'd finally accepted after losing his way in the darkness three times already. "If this were a book or a movie, this place would be haunte–"
Rorschach grunts in a tone that is clear chastisement, cuts Daniel off before he can finish the sentence.
Daniel stops walking, glances back at him – there's just enough light to see that, the motion, the swing of metal lenses toward him – and seems to just stare for a long while. There's a question in the silence.
"…don't want to tempt fate, Daniel," he finally mutters, and he won't be cowed, won't be made to feel uneducated or stupid over this, not this. Not after all those nights in the Charlton east dormitory, annexed from a neighboring complex, repainted and refloored but some stains just don't ever come out and no one else had ever seemed to notice or care but–
And it feels like Daniel might be about to say something, to hide the half-smirk in the concealing darkness, plaster over the laughter with the back of his hand like he always does when he cannot hold it back but fears retribution. Then a freezing dampness runs up Rorschach's spine, like the fingers of a drowned man picking their way intimately over every ridge of bone, slipping deep in between, a grotesque violation too much like–
And Daniel stiffens too, and whatever he'd been about to say dies on his lips, leaves him still and attentive in the silence. "…yeah, okay," comes out finally, voice suddenly three shades weaker. "You're right. Best not to…"
"That was–"
"That wasn't anything," Daniel interrupts, and he at least sounds like he believes it. A second or two passes, Dan's gauntleted hand searching out where Rorschach's is curled into the fabric, moving on as soon as he's sure it's still there. "But I'll keep my damn mouth shut anyway."
.
In the end, the center of the house seems most stable, with neither caving floor nor ceiling, with walls not bowed in under the weight of a slipping roof and if the outer rooms' windows are all shattered and letting the worst of the storm in, they can at least shut doors against most of them.
"Wind from the storm," Dan's muttering, surveying the room for anything that will make the stay more comfortable: blankets, cushions from old furniture no longer present, cloth of any sort to layer onto the rough, splintery wood of the floor. There's really nothing, but it isn't surprising. They haven't even bothered with the kitchen, because even canned goods this old would likely have burst and botulized by now. "You know how gales always whip up right before one rolls in. Lot of humidity. Can feel like…"
Rorschach rolls his shoulders under the coat, standing by the far door. "Like what, Daniel? Fingers twisting between ribs?"
Dan goes still again, caught off-guard. This superstitious bent isn't one he was expecting from Rorschach; as a kid, he'd always been the one that needed talking down from the far, huddled corner of his bed, convinced that there were things in the shadows, behind doors, frozen screaming in the panes of his windows. "It didn't… it wasn't really like that, was it? More like just air, I thought."
His nightvision is struggling, dark red smeared over darker red, shapes shifting indistinctly. There's just too little light to work with, but he can still see the broken up patches of dark and light and the way they animate a face otherwise stone-still, looking at him carefully from across the room.
"No," the mouth says under the mask, and Dan can see that shift of motion, too, and the voice isn't something he's heard from Rorschach very often. It's raw. "Not like air."
…and Dan isn't honestly sure how to reply, because it had certainly seemed like a sudden gust of wind, cutting through the cape and the fabric of his costume in a way wind usually didn't, maybe, but nothing as visceral as the sense-image Rorschach's just conjured. No wonder he was…
"Will take first watch," Rorschach insists, straightening under Dan's scrutiny.
Dan's mouth twists below his goggles, one hand lifting to push back his cowl, to run through flattened hair.
The most valid argument – that it's black as pitch in here, and Rorschach has no nightvision, and the goggles won't work over his mask even if he were willing to accept them which of course he never would – just sort of sits there between them on the floor, too obvious to justify remarking on. Around them, the house creaks and wails, the roof threatening to peel under the violence of the wind and suddenly driving rain.
"There's… it's abandoned, I don't think there's anything to keep watch for."
"Will determine that," Rorschach says stiffly, hands fisting deep into his pockets, and there's no room for argument in his tone. "During watch."
.
The ache starts somewhere deep in his calves, but it's just the machine running down and Rorschach ignores it; knows that he ran further tonight than he's used to at a stretch and over a lot of uneven terrain, knows the way his body complains when he spends three days awake and eats only what he can scrape up for free or nearly so. Knows its limitations. They're irrelevant.
The pain behind his eyes is different, though. It seethes and itches, like a primitive memory of fire or lightning or something else that blinds and burns, throbbing with his pulse, and he's just going to close them behind the mask for a minute or two, just for thirty seconds, just for–
He isn't even certain at first that he's drifted off. The awareness of it comes in soft, rolling waves: Daniel's quiet snoring across the room is even quieter, more muffled, and he feels the hard heels of his shoes biting into his thighs where he's slid down onto them – then doesn't feel them so much, and he can see more clearly than he should be able to in what he knows intellectually to be near-total darkness.
The air is faintly blue, and there's wind lifting the drapes from the window near the couch where Daniel's sleeping, but there hadn't been a couch – just bare stretches of flooring – and no windows. That was why they'd picked this room, because it had no windows–
The blue is pulsing lightly, and he rises back to his feet with a smooth effortlessness that feels like being on wires. His feet carry him to the center of the room without need for conscious thought, then stop, and will not move again. The air feels clammy, damp, and the fingers are back, rippling over his bones as if leather and fabric and skin and muscle were no more material than smoke.
There's a sudden, flashing impression of another figure in the room – small, childlike, but no more an actual child than Daniel is an actual owl, the haphazard disguise doing nothing to hide the purple bruising of old rot and skin sloughing off in folds, like some mournful beast with a child's face – and then it's gone, burned into his brain like an afterimage of staring into the sun.
The sun–
Fingers, dark and swollen with moisture, threading through his bones and over his scalp and across the sun and it almost feels like a caress. He still cannot move.
Daniel is shifting on the couch. Not just moving restlessly, but actually shifting, arms and hands moving in sharp blurred bursts of motion, grey and brown and flesh underneath twisting together and becoming something else, changing–
Becoming–
When the figure on the couch opens its mouth, to moan in pain or to scream or just to try to breathe, all that comes out is bloody water, thinned but deep, deep red, more coming up than human lungs can even hold, and that quickly the wires are gone and he's free to move and he's stumbling back and when he opens his own mouth he can feel/taste/see the same endless stream begin to flow, blocking air, choking and drowning him, pulling something out of him and emptying it onto the floor and across the room Daniel's eyes are panicked for a moment before they glaze over into something new–
.
Somewhere, the sound of laughter.
.
Rorschach wakes up with a sharp grunt, smacking his head hard against the wall behind him as the dream carries into reality, jumping back, backing away, back back back run and why isn't he moving forward, why isn't going to Daniel, to his side, to help him–
Dream, he thinks darkly, even as he fights against admitting he'd fallen asleep on the very watch he'd insisted on. He lifts one gloved hand to the back of his head, rubbing the knot in a slow circle until reality has had a chance to settle back into place in fractured, bloody pieces. His hat is on the floor beside him, and he scoops it up, presses it into place.
It seems lighter in here, somehow, and that makes some sense even as Rorschach questions whether he's truly awake again; his eyes have dark-adjusted behind closed lids, and this is probably as good as it's going to get. He casts around, and he isn't even sure what he's looking for, pushing back to his feet – maybe furniture or hollow-eyed child-decoys or curtains lifting on a rainless breeze…
…but he knows there's at least one thing he should be seeing that he isn't, and he freezes, one hand on his knee, the other on the wall, hunched.
Daniel is gone.
.
Feet fall, one after the other, spiraling out through the adjoining rooms. It's not fair to say that they move on their own; he is aware of himself and what he's doing, though he's not entirely clear on the reason. He doesn't think his goggles are working anymore, but it's possible he may have left them behind in the room he woke in, lenses glittering, glittering. He doesn't need them. The sounds are enough, a tingling breadcrumb trail of skittering steps and fingers pressing into wall joists just hard enough to make them creak and something that sounds like a tinny old wax cylinder recording of a child's laughter, circling round and round, always cutting off in the burbling beginnings of a scream, the moment that breath catches and swells in place and starts tasting like bile–
He has to follow the sounds.
Has to.
The storm is still raging and in these outer rooms, tracing a careful path along the outer wall, the noise of it should be deafening. Water is pouring in by bucketloads, should be soaking him through to the point of distraction, but there, there – a creak, in the next doorway. A tiny sound, cutting through everything else, and it's all that seems to matter.
Another sound echoes, so very far away, and it could be his name – but it's too quiet, too garbled. Distant. Unimportant.
.
He calls for Daniel once, twice – then stands stock still, hesitant to even draw breath lest it blanket over the smallest sound of a response. There's nothing. It's still too dark.
Crouching to the floor, Rorschach runs a finger through the dust, stirred up where Daniel had been lying. The wood is not unnaturally darkened to indicate bleeding or injury, and no moisture clots the dust into clumps. There is no trail away from the wall to indicate which of the closed doors he'd left through or, for that matter, to show which they'd come in through to begin with.
Which. Should be impossible, technically. A low sound starts crawling up his throat by degrees.
Daniel's cowl and goggles and gauntlets are haphazardly piled against the wall's trim, amongst scraps of old, peeling wallpaper and wood shavings, just below a bare expanse that his eyes keep wanting to see a window in, when he narrows them in just the right way.
.
The sound comes again and maybe it really is his name, because it sounds familiar somehow and it feels like something dark and betraying stirring in his gut and in the back of his brain when he considers that it might actually be important. It sounds urgent, sounds–
Sounds–
He blinks in the dark, hand coming to rest against a doorframe. This time he can feel the joy transmute into terror, the scream bubbling up his throat like a lungful of water. The sensation is crushing, paralyzing, claustrophobic in as much as it makes him want to explode out of his skin, such a painful, constricting thing, holding him back holding him back pulling him down and if he'd only just follow…
By the time the sound fails to repeat a third time, he no longer remembers having heard it.
.
Fingers pick and peel at the wallpaper, finding its seams and pulling it away with a dry crackling tear. It feels something like skinning someone alive, because everything has its points of vulnerability, places fingers can dig in and grip on and tug
(Cold, damp fingers between bones, slithering into joints, wriggling there like worms, like some unheard-of new perversion)
and pull everything back until only the wet, glistening entrails remain, ready to share their secrets. Rorschach has never skinned an animal, much less a person, much less alive. He's not sure where the imagery is coming from.
Under the layers of flaking paper, though, the wooden outline of a window sits square in the wall, bricked over carefully, plaster smoothing all the uneven edges. Scraps of thin blue fabric, ancient enough that they disintegrate when he touches them, are wedged in the gap between bricks. Translucent, the type that would color the light coming through it. Nothing exotic, just fine, thin cotton, weave going to pieces under the weight of a lifetime's concealment.
The breeze coming through it had fallen across his face, so relaxed in sleep, just before–
Blue dust falling from his fingers, Rorschach knows – with the same certainty he feels crouching over a dark stain in an alley, knowing the spot on his glove will be blood before he even lifts it into the light – that he needs to find Daniel, immediately.
.
Follow, the clattering sounds are saying, sounding more like words and less like the dissonant pattern of limping and struggling footfalls the further along the winding path he gets.
Follow.
If he only follows he can help, he can help set her free, and he doesn't even know who 'she' is, or what she needs freeing from, but he keeps seeing things from the corner of his eye – shadows that look like human figures, all tall and imposing and frightening, like abstracted demons from a child's fractured memory, filling in the gaps between what was and what it felt like with an inflation of terror. They move – god, they're moving, and again his mind starts to actively protest his course because this is ridiculous and more dangerous than he can even understand and maybe Rorschach was right after all and they're reaching hands out toward him–
Rorschach.
The sound. The voice, calling his name.
Hands, hands, hands – and that building scream, cut off, always cut off just before it bursts free, winding its way into the shriek of the storm and hands settling on him and something smells like lakewater, like a bog, like soot and ash and the sounds are louder now, catching at his ankles and wrists, trying to lead him away. He wants to be away – away from the hulking shadows, their fingers, their shapeless faces. So he follows.
He's not even aware that the scream has finally loosed itself, through the fibrous resonator of his own vocal cords – is echoing, along walls and wind-cluttered hallways, spiraling in, in and in and in.
.
He can't see but it doesn't matter, not now, not now, and Rorschach just keeps one hand on the wall as he runs, through doorways and narrow halls and there's debris everywhere, fallen beams and broken furniture and long, jagged shards of glass and torn up tile but the sound is coming from everywhere and it's horrible and he knows these things cannot hit or kick or pick up butchers' knives, he knows, but there are other ways to make a man scream. Many other ways.
He's screaming. He's screaming and Rorschach isn't there, isn't at his back, can't get there fast enough, and he can't see clearly so he doesn't even realize it when he starts moving through the same room twice, dodging the same obstacles, gloved fingertips burning where they touch the flaking paint of the walls, circling, turning and turning–
He shouts again, Daniel's name or something very much like it, but he doesn't expect a response – he just needs to do something to drown out the noise, the numb, fuzzy way it's cutting into his brain and sticking like barbs under the palms of his hands and–
It stops.
.
The last room feels like the last room, like the last, wildly shaking car on a long train, like a terminus. It's empty and bare. There's nothing in it worthy of any note.
There's a window on one wall, bricked in sloppily from the other side.
Pool of old blood, black-rust in the dim light, spreading from the center of the floor.
Footprints in the dust, small and clumsy.
Nothing worthy of any note. Nothing worthy of any–
Nothing–
There's a girl then, standing in the middle of the stain, strobe-lit by the intermittent lightning, and there's more blood there than one body can shed.
When she smiles, it's a shallow and empty curve, and it is shaped like the end of every story.
.
The screaming's stopped.
No, no, it hasn't stopped, it's been cut off, and after years of striking terror into the city's stinking black heart and sending its noisemakers into sudden and sharp unconsciousness, Rorschach knows the difference. He almost wishes he didn't, standing suddenly directionless in a room like every other room, listening to the accusing silence filling in all the gaps between the rain and the wind and the floor creaking under his feet.
(Not fast enough, not a good enough tracker.)
He'd had a traceable source for how long? Thirty seconds at least, and he'd never gotten any nearer, and thirty seconds is a long, long time to scream.
(Fell asleep. Left him unguarded. Whatever's happened to him, it's your fault.)
A half-breath of silence, swelling up around him. Images come unasked, and it is not the bloodied and mangled bodies that send a shock of ice through his veins so much as the eyes, Daniel's eyes, looking up at him out of some cold distant vacuum and not Daniel's eyes at all. Lost.
His fault.
(– oh but you tried don't be too hard on yourself– )
And Rorschach freezes; the storm is still raging and the door in front of him hangs invitingly open and he needs to keep moving but he freezes like startled prey because that – oh, that isn't his own thought-voice and it isn't the internal Daniel that occasionally gets noisy when he's taking particularly poor care of himself, doing something especially stupid or dangerous. It is also not a child's voice, not the tinny false tones that'd filled out the laughter he'd heard, halfway in and halfway out of a dream.
(– he won't be the first– ) comes yet another timbre, sad and faraway, and the shadows are starting to detach from the walls like bloodstains and he remembers this, he remembers this–
He's taken two rushed steps for the door when a body barrels through it, all disorganized limbs and adrenaline-fueled flight,
(– or the last– )
and Daniel takes his presence in hurriedly, eyes tracking with more ease than they should in the dark, then collapses boneless against him.
.
"I don't know," Daniel's saying, an easy answer to every question. He seems dazed, and they're against the wall farthest from the shadows because that seems like the safest place in the room and the last thing Rorschach wants right now is go wandering and risk losing him again. "I don't… I don't remember."
"You woke up. Left the room."
Daniel's got his hands curled into the trenchcoat's lapels in a way that suggests he's not aware of it. Rorschach lets them stay there. He doesn't bother pretending it's for purely practical reasons.
"Yeah, yeah… I did." Daniel's face is pinched and his head ducked, as if remembering were causing him physical pain. His voice is rough, almost more so than Rorschach's. "Yeah. There were sounds. I…"
He starts to turn away, towards the far side of the room, motion distracted and slow. Rorschach grabs him by the shoulders, hard; forces him back to facing. "Sounds?"
He's still looking over there, head twisted back towards something Rorschach can't see. "Mm. Yeah."
Rorschach's reaching for his chin to turn him forcibly away from whatever it is he thinks he's seeing, when a brilliant bolt of lightning finds ground nearby, flooding the room in a blast of illumination – and all along the pale expanse of Daniel's throat there are marks, dark, soft-edged, like bruises.
Like fingers. Like strangul–
They can't. He doesn't think they – he doesn't know but he doesn't think they can–
"Daniel, " he hisses, violence in the sound. "Your throat. What happened."
When Daniel doesn't answer for a long moment, still looking across the room – the shadows, the ones that were moving, he's looking at the shadows and you never look, you never look – Rorschach reaches up with one thumb, passing it over the distal edge of one of the bruises, only to have it disappear under the leather of his glove.
He rubs his finger and thumb together, getting a feel for the grit between them – fine, black and powdery. Soot, or fresh ash. Grabs at Daniel's hands where they're latched to his lapels, turns them over, and even in the poor light he can see how the fingers of one are darker than the other, coated in the same clinging soot.
"You did this," he says, disbelieving, and under his thumbs he can feel a pulse, fast and growing faster, stumbling over itself, and there's a sound of breath hitching close by. Rorschach refuses to look back over his shoulder.
Daniel looks past him, and his expression is unreadable, locked into terror. The words tumble out in a rush. "I don't… I don't remember, why would I…"
"Probably don't remember screaming, either," and he's edging them towards the far door, opposite the one Daniel had come through, away from where he knows the shadows are clinging. He's got his hands on Daniel's shoulders now, and the soot stained fingers are back in his coat, and that's good, that's fine, just keep the contact, don't let it slip.
"I don't," Daniel says, and his voice is starting to come apart at the seams. The rough handprint on his throat is more visible now than it was, which means that shock is setting in, sending him paler, and all Rorschach can think about is the commotion there'd been two days before the dormitory was shut down and the sound crawling out of the boy's throat the second before he'd– and he'd moved like this, like a puppet on jerking strings. He'd been quiet and smart and gentle, too.
Rorschach's wondering how much real bruising there is under the theatrical smears when they reach the door. He scrambles for the knob, one hand still clamped tightly onto Daniel's shoulder, Daniel who's starting to go shaky to match the white, whose breath is roughening, whose eyes are still locked somewhere over Rorschach's shoulder.
The knob turns, and he pulls, and twists, and rattles it hard against the frame. The door doesn't open.
.
He feels like he's dreaming but he knows without knowing: in this place there is no just dreaming. Awake, asleep, the distinction means nothing – he's no more really standing in a room with Rorschach as the doorknob rattles and rattles than he is standing out over a vast an open pit, rope chafing his ankles. No more than he's smelling these things, cloying and ancient like rot all mixed up with mothballs, or hearing all the tiny, tiny sounds that speak straight to the base fears of the animal sleeping inside him.
Every breath feels a little like dying, like bleeding out in an alley or sinking to the bottom of the harbor or just feeling things break and break inside until he's sure there's nothing left. He's been there. It's familiar. There's always been hands on those nights, curling into his sides or his shoulders, pulling him up and away, shaking him shaking him Daniel shaking Daniel snap out of it–
Up and–
Hands are on his throat and he feels like he's spinning and spinning and burning all up into ash, peeling apart, splitting right down the middle so that something can crawl through him. He can see it covered in blood and bone but maybe it's not that gruesome, maybe there is no terrible violence here, maybe it just needs something he has and maybe it needs something Rorsc–
Be free, be free, the hands around his throat are singing, set yourself free, set him free, caged in flesh, tied to the ground like creatures of mud, can be so much more (less) can be so much less alone (together) (apart) can be forever (never) (sometimes) (now now now)
He's upside-down and his ankles feel wrenched and he feels the steel bite in and he feels the fade, vision graying at the edges and he is no more really here than he is standing in a room while a doorknob rattles and a man grouses and growls and takes him by the shoulders and–
His hands are so small around the handle of the knife, so terribly small and fragile and the pattern of tiny black-red droplets starting to collect on the skin is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, spiraling out and out and it's like a map, a path to follow, a code.
A drop. Another. Coming faster now, sluicing down through hair and–
He's shaking, he's being shaken, and the red is pattering fast onto his hands and arms, starting to form a solid sheen and it's sticky and bright and he's being shaken harder and harder and he needs to snap out of this, right now, he needs to open his eyes and focus, Daniel, focus.
He needs to wake up.
He isn't asleep.
A thick drop lands on his wrist and he turns it over to look at it, at the darkness marring over the fine lines and delicate strings of tendon and it tries to seep in, tries to join back with him because it's part of him and it should but it can't, spreading and pooling over the surface. When he looks up the bodies are like abstractions, with none of the visceral shock of a murder victim found on patrol, lit in harsh and honest streetlight – but still corpses, still strung up by their ankles and draining their lives away, necks gaping open in ugly wide smiles and they all look like–
The voice again, insistent, and all he can do is stare and stare because they all look like–
.
Free, the hands say as they turn the knife inward. You can both be free.
.
"Daniel, " Rorschach tries one last time, shoving him by his shoulders into the wall, hard. Hard enough to bruise ribs, to possibly dislocate shoulders, but he's about to just kick the door down and he needs Daniel here and aware and ready to run, not glazing over further every second, clenching his hands like he's holding something that isn't there, breathing in a gurgle like his throat's been cut. Needs him–
Needs him awake. And just like that, the shock of the impact still running through the plaster, he is – blinking fast and spasmodically in the dim light, eyes focused and clear. His voice is rough, and faint, but solid. "Rorschach? Where…"
"No time to explain. About to commit act of vandalism." Rorschach hooks his hand into Daniel's cape again, twisting it into his fist. "Need to run as soon as path is clear. Back with me now?"
Daniel nods after a moment, shaky and a little uncertain but there, present, under the fear. "Yeah. Yeah, I am."
.
It would seem anticlimactic when the doorframe splinters under the force of the blow, door swinging out wide on screaming hinges, if it weren't for the fact that the shades are still moving, still crowding in around the edges of perception, and Rorschach has hauled Daniel through the door ahead of him and into the hallway beyond before he has time to process the implications. If they have enough physical influence to lock a door they ought to have been able to hold it against a kick and–
Which means they don't. Which means that he locked it, on the way in. And he doesn't remember doing it, because–
He doesn't stop moving; just shoves Daniel along down the hall, and tries not to think about the fact that he has not been this way before.
.
"Talk," Rorschach is suddenly demanding of him, not letting up on the rough jostling that his sluggish feet can barely keep up with, that he cannot mistake the almost-panicked urgency in. "Everything you remember. Now."
It's a long hallway they're in, and light seems to bend and collect at the far end, reeling it in away from them even as they approach it. "I remember… waking up, I guess? It sounded like there was someone else moving around in the next room."
"Went alone," Rorschach growls, and the anger is there, audible through all the fine cracks in the illusion of control. He hasn't let go of Dan's cape. "Why."
"You were asleep and – and I guess I didn't want to wake you up?" Dan shakes his head, trying to pin down the feeling he'd had, waking up into that grey space and watching Rorschach shaking against the wall like a seizure victim as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Why hadn't he…? "I don't know. It doesn't make any sense now."
"Didn't make sense then, either. Just thought it did. They're good at that."
Dan shakes his head against a sudden wave of dizziness. The door at the end of the hall isn't getting any closer. "So I tried to track the noises down, but everything got sort of foggy. Disconnected. I think I remember you shouting, and then running into you back there, but… argh. God. There was something in between, but I can't see it."
Their pace picks up suddenly, Rorschach hurrying them both along with more insistence, their footsteps dull against the dusty wooden floor. He's obviously noticed the problem with the hall too, the way it's refracting in on itself like a Mobiüs strip. "Did you see anything?"
See. Visions, he means, or dreams, but he won't say it.
"No, I…" Dan starts, trailing off because there is something muddy and hazy and fierce lurking in the far corners of memory, like a creature sculpted of bloodied sand and shaped by endless winds, and it doesn't want to be seen. The more he tries to pin it down…
A smile. A mouth like a dark scar, blood on the floor, blood patterning over his hands like ink but they weren't his hands–
And under all of it, something lurching, heavy and strange.
"There was a girl," Dan says suddenly, stopping short no matter that he's being all but dragged, forcing Rorschach to stop with him.
Rorschach looks between him and the distant door a few times – lifts his mask for a moment, to clear something dark from his mouth with the back of his hand. "Ten or eleven. Indistinct features, visibly decaying." He pauses, pulling the mask back down, and the description is not a question. "Smiles too much."
"I thought she looked normal, I mean… not rotting or anything, but it's like trying to piece a dream together, you know? Just… impressions. The smile though–" Dan looks to him sharply, focus suddenly very clear. "Wait, when did you see–"
"Nnk. Dream. When I was." A grumble, defensive and recalcitrant. "Resting."
Dan just nods, and though Rorschach's grip on him hasn't faltered, he still clamps a hand on his partner's shoulder. Isn't sure who he's doing it for, really, and is alarmed to feel it shaking, under the thick, worn leather.
"Apologies, Daniel," and it's barely a whisper, but whispers carry in this place. Regrets too, hanging about long past their due, like bloodstains. "Should never have let that happen."
It suddenly seems less urgent that they keep moving, that they run. There is nothing chasing anymore. So they stay where they are for a moment, and Dan just looks steadily into the dark ink splatters; wonders if it's a trick of the light, turning them burnt red. "Look, it probably wasn't your fault, I don't think either of us knew what we were getting into here–"
"Knew," Rorschach interrupts, looking away to again regard the end of the hall. "Still walked into it. Let you walk into it." He gestures vaguely at Dan's neck, but the motion is tense, jerky. "Marked now."
Dan fingers the bruises under the ash with his free hand; sees a brief image of his own hand, dragging through the remains of an old, old fire. He winces. "Marked? What do you mean by–"
A long silence, feeling like eternity turning on its axis.
"Christ. You've dealt with this kind of thing before."
Rorschach turns back to him abruptly, his own fingers reaching to trace the lines of mottled black and blue rising on Dan's throat, touch hard and indelicate. He makes a short sound of disgust, all the sharpness of it turned inward. "…won't matter if we can get you out of here. That has to be the goal."
"You have, though. Seen this before, I mean."
"Not. Not exactly the same. But similar enough that I should have – Daniel," he says, voice taking on a sudden, alien note of fear. "We have to find a way out."
The passage looms, grey and endless.
"This hallway is sort of a problem, isn't it?" Dan finally asks, putting to voice what he knows they're both thinking.
"…yes."
"How does the door keep moving?"
"Don't think it is." There must be something wrong with the mask, because he's scratching at it now, over his mouth; the latex must be leaking–
(Hanging from their feet and most of the blood wasn't running down from their throats, was it, it was coming from–)
"Don't think we are, either. They're holding us in place."
He can still see the blood pooling over his hands, feel the warmth of it on his skin, and where did that memory even come from? Dan shakes his head, hard. "Can they do that?"
A sharp exhale, almost like laughter, but it's jagged and dangerous. "Seen this once, Daniel. Not an expert. Best guess is they can do what they like." Rorschach lays one hand on the wall next to them, palm sliding over the rough, time-worn wallpaper, fingers picking for a seam. "Can keep us and kill us and they don't need their own hands to do it. Four perfectly good ones right here already."
Dan feels dizzy, all at once, and his throat aches. "…oh god."
A loud ripping noise as the wallpaper flays away, and the plaster underneath is as rotted and caving as they could hope for. A hand passes over it, digging for the weakest spot; one of four, and Dan has seen the violence it is capable of, the bloody scrawl it's writ across the hearts and minds and broken bodies of the criminal fraternity. Turned to other uses… "Finally appreciate the seriousness of the situation, then."
…it's obviously serious enough to make an actual go of busting through a wall rather than stay on this looping tread, and serious enough that Dan is relieved to a shameful degree when Rorschach doesn't pull out a knife to hack through the crumbling sheetrock; just starts hitting it, closed fist, hard enough to bruise or bloody him under the gloves.
Serious enough to make him do an inventory of his own belongings, and if Rorschach hears it over the storm and the havoc he's wreaking on the wall when Dan's throwing crescents hit the floor, he doesn't acknowledge it.
"…yeah. God." His voice is shaky, like it wants to laugh. "We're really in trouble here."
Rorschach halts in his assault on the wall – takes a deep, shaky breath. His hands are shaking, and it's unclear how much is fatigue; the blots on his mask swim like memory. "Yes. We are." A pause. "Would appreciate if you helped with this."
Dan does, and after a few hits, he stops feeling the pain altogether.
.
.
II. the way out
.
Dan is hit by a wave of dizziness as soon as they finally manage to break through to air on the other side, and they have no idea what's there but he's grabbing at the ragged lip of the hole with both hands, trying to steady himself on it. It can't just be the pain in abused bones and joints sending him spinning down because he can see Rorschach swaying too, right on the edge of vision, being eaten up by swarming grey smoke. He doesn't know what's–
"Trying to stop us," a voice growls and of course Rorschach is right and damn it, Dan's getting tired of being the liability here – he can feel that much through the fade, that certainty that he has become so much dead weight to be dragged around out of some sense of loyalty or obligation or hell, maybe Rorschach actually cares about him, doesn't want to lose him to this thing, but this isn't how it's supposed to work.
Partners. They're supposed to be partners, watching each other's backs, working together.
"Partners," he mutters over a tongue gone thick, and he knows he's said it out loud because Rorschach looks to him sharply, still trying to steady himself against the assault. Dan doesn't have the spare energy or attention required to decode the swimming blots, find out if they spell out confusion or frustration or anger. Right now they all look like bloodstains, heavy and dark. Any other time he'd call it imagination; here, in this place, it's a very bad sign.
The next room could be worse. He doesn't care. Rorschach's being hit harder than he is this time, reeling in against the wall, fingers scrabbling at the hole for purchase, and they're out of options.
Dan squints through the haze, settles hands solidly on the crumbling edges of the hole – there's a sudden blast of heat and pressure, threatening him with an unconsciousness he knows with chilling certainty that he won't ever get back up from – and pushes, the weight of his entire body behind his arms.
The wall crumples, and everything relying on it for support against invisible, relentless assailants crumples with it, hands and feet and bodies down among plaster and wood, scraps of wallpaper, dust and age and time and the crush of memory–
And just like that, the pressure is gone.
.
"We have to keep moving," Daniel says, hauling him up out of the structural detritus with one hand, brushing the sawdust and plaster from them both with a gesture that's laughably domestic, absurdly out of place. Who cares if they're clean? They're likely not going to outlive the night. "Stairs, there. Maybe there'll be an upstairs window we can–"
It's quiet here. No, not quiet – the storm can always be heard, raging through the walls – but still in a way no other place in this godforsaken house has been, an epicenter of sanity amidst deathless lunacy.
"Rorschach? Come on, we have to–"
"You can't feel it," Rorschach says, tone low and even, and it should be a question but it isn't.
Daniel doesn't respond – just shifts from one foot to another, uncertain. The motion draws Rorschach's eyes, refocuses them on those dark bruises and soot-streaks and then down, down to the bare hands still stained.
They've both taken damage, of more than one kind. Rorschach coughs against a thickness in his throat. "Not in here with us. Maybe they can't be."
Already one hand on the banister, testing the lowest step, Daniel doesn't seem convinced. His boot taps hollowly on the planking, then comes down; it holds his weight. Good sign. "They weren't in the hallway either. Saw where that got us."
"They were there. Chose to pursue us in a different way, but they were still there."
Daniel pauses. Takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, as if feeling out the pressure there or checking for onset of the bends. Out of the depths they–
"You're sure?"
Rorschach nods, sitting down in a heavy, uncoordinated motion on that first step, running one gloved hand up over his mask, under the fedora. He's had moments of greater vulnerability, of greater terror, and of greater pure human relief, but he could count them one-handed and this is the first time he can honestly say he doesn't begrudge himself it.
A shuffling sound, and Daniel is settling down next to him on the just-slightly too narrow stair, arms slung over his knees. He takes another too-deep breath – lets his head fall forward to rest in the scaffolding they form, hair falling over his armored sleeves in haphazard whorls. Something wet patters as it drips to the dusty wood floor.
"Your hands," Rorschach grumbles, not bothering to beg permission before he takes hold of one of them, turns it knuckles-up.
"Yeah," and Daniel's seemingly not inclined to lift his head from his arms; his voice is muffled. "They're bleeding, I know. Beating through sheetrock will do that."
Rorschach lets the hand go, considers. Digs an old, rust-spattered cloth handkerchief out of an inner suit pocket, puts it between his teeth and tears it into two roughly similar sized pieces, irregular but serviceable. "Blood makes them stronger," he says, binding one hand sloppily, then the other. Daniel doesn't stir, and Rorschach would be concerned if he couldn't read absolute and utter exhaustion in his partner's posture, in his frame. "…I think. Better to be on the safe side, regardless."
"Still haven't explained how you know about all of this," comes the muzzy, quiet reply.
And under normal circumstances Daniel wouldn't even have asked, would know better than to push about personal information, about other lives and other years, lost to time.
Under normal circumstances, Rorschach wouldn't even consider telling him.
There's a long silence, but that's fine; time spent in this haven is not time that counts against them, is not another second, another minute, another hour closer to never seeing daylight again. They can afford to let it spool out, let it build a buffer against the things that must be said.
Far away, the clatter of a screen door battering open and shut in the wind.
The wind sounds like–
"Spent time in a state-run institution," Rorschach says, and even he can feel the way truth has of splitting the air like lightning.
Nothing at first, then a slow lifting, hair falling around Daniel's unfocused eyes. "…what?"
"Heard fine the first time."
"Yeah, I did, I just didn't…" Dan shakes himself visibly, pulling himself up to sit straight. Attentive, even through the body's obvious desire to shut down. "I didn't really expect you to answer, you know?"
Rorschach sits for a moment, unmoving. A hand, fast, pulling his mask down into place, and he's not sure what he's hiding from. "It's relevant information. Important. Could decide whether we get out or don't."
Daniel rubs the dust from his eyes. It looks like he's trying to fake nonchalance, but he's doing a poor job of it. "Okay then, I'm listening. Shoot."
.
For a long moment they sit in companionable quiet, and Dan is beginning to worry that maybe Rorschach's changed his mind about disclosing any of this, whatever it turns out to be – and he doesn't know, but he can feel the shape of it, lurking ugly and fractured somewhere off in the shadows.
Then Rorschach makes a noise all twisted around in razorwire. "Dormitory building was old. Predated rest of the structures. Last century was just as violent as ours, they…"
He trails off, the words breaking up into sound, and there's a fine shake in it. Dan waits it out, unmoving.
"Looked it up, years later. Seventeen ritualistic murders over the course of two months, spring of 1887. Don't know how many of them stayed around, after." A short exhale that could almost be a laugh. "Hard to count what you can barely see."
"You could see them, though."
The mask turns to regard him, and Dan may know most of the patterns well enough through sheer familiarity to take a guess at their meanings, but this one is new. "Only two of us could. Hrm. Patterns, repeating." He swipes at the latex with the back of his hand again. "He was only just aware enough to be influenced without feeling the puppetstrings. Without knowing what he was seeing. Easier target."
Dan winces, tries not to look the parallels in the face or think too hard about the implications. "What did you see?"
"Unimportant. Daniel," he says, voice suddenly lower, less inflected. "They convinced him to kill himself. That's how they do it. Like they almost convinced you to."
It hangs between them, this most violent truth of all, all its sharp edges bared to the light. Again, the visual memory with no context: his own hand shadowed against a suffusing glow, soot-smeared and starting to curl closed. Blood, pattering onto it from somewhere higher. The distant swinging door is still battering its frame, the sound closer now, and that shouldn't be possible.
Close one door, open–
"Was he a friend?"
A snort, an attempt at dismissiveness. "Barely knew him. Only his temperament – quiet, goodhearted. Intelligent." A pause, perhaps a second too long, and pointed; he's waiting for it to sink in. "Still tried to save him."
A tired smile is all Dan can muster. He turns one hand over, flexes fingers against the binding. "That is what you tend to do."
"Failed."
"How old were you?" Dan asks, leaning sideways against the banister, oblivious in his exhaustion to how intrusive the question really is.
"…eleven." A pause, and he must be tired too, to be answering. "And a half."
Eleven and a... Dan blinks, then sits up straight again, eyes focusing clearly for the first time in several minutes at least. "Rorschach, that's… that's ridiculous. You were a kid, there's no way you could have done anything."
An uncommitted noise, rough around something thick Rorschach's got catching in his throat.
"You tried your best," Dan says, and god but he must be far gone, because this feels like a pep talk and really Rorschach's the last person he should ever be– but the words keep spilling out, beyond his ability to curb or control. "That's all anyone can ask for."
"You don't know that."
"I know you. You don't do anything by half-measures."
No response, and it isn't a thought-gathering sort of pause. It's deliberate.
"I mean, if you couldn't do anything, I doubt anyone could hav–"
"Not a therapy session, Daniel," Rorschach cuts in abruptly. "My… feelings on the subject don't materially affect our situation."
Quiet and noise and quiet and noise, looping with the heave and heft of the storm outside. There's a wailing that could be wind, could be cat, could be human, if it's turned on its edge just so.
"...I was just trying to make you feel better–"
"He cut his wrists."
Dan stops midstream, mouth still open around the last syllable. Scrubs his hands over his face, and in the dark the shadows pool like old bloodstains. "Oh. Oh goddamn."
"Seven years old. Didn't... nnk. Didn't think a body that small could hold that much blood. Have learned otherwise since. Do appreciate the effort, but."
"…but nothing I say is going to make that better. Jesus."
"No. Old anyway. Only mentioned it to demonstrate our odds."
"...yeah."
Conversation effectively killed, Dan shifts on the step, leans back with his elbows on the next one up. Closes his eyes to savor, if nothing else, a few calm moments that could well be bunching up together here at the end of his life. He's just contemplating the fact that he's at least not facing it alone when the laughter bubbles up, inexplicable and inappropriate. It's a breathless thing, nerves and skepticism and his own two eyes and old books and new books and all the childlike credulity that had slipped into the cracks between them. "God. This is all so hard to believe. I mean, I used to be terrified of this stuff when I was a kid, but it was never real."
"Hrm." Rorschach shifts, pulling his fedora free, turning and turning it in his hands, an idle motion. "Probably thought covering up with a blanket would save you."
Dan's getting a little hysterical, a little desperate, but some remaining vestige of tact prevents him from calling out the gentle familiarity in Rorschach's tone. Dan's obviously not the only one who threw himself into the darkness after a childhood spent afraid of it. "Yeah, but only if every crack was sealed, you know? Can't leave any breaches in the infallible ghost defense of cotton bedsheets."
Rorschach nods, severely, as if they're discussing something real, something important. Dan wonders for a moment if the ghosts' goal had been to drive them both mad.
Then the act drops away and the swirling blots are regarding him as steadily as any human face – and they're bunching under thumbs, rolling up and lifting away, peeling back like skin to reveal pale eyes and red hair and a face he doesn't think he'll get the chance to commit to memory, all at once and unexpected, and god but this is important, this means something–
Power in names, his books had said, smelling of old paper and older leather, the stories his father always took away when he caught him with them. Power in names and power in faces, in knowing someone deeper than the shell they present to the world, in having seen them bleed. But it's all just nonsense, a kid's fantasy, and all he finds himself wishing for is more time. "…we're really not getting out of this, are we?"
The mask twists between restless hands, and there's something dark running from the corner of his mouth. Something dark running along the edges of his eyes, but it might be the light, or it might be that this is what he's been hiding all this time, something that cuts too deeply to ever see daylight. "Good chance we won't," he says, and his voice is different, sounds less like it's been dragged bleeding through broken glass. "Uncertain. Hmpf. If we do, may have to kill you."
A pause, brain trying to catch up with his ears. "What?"
"To preserve secret, Daniel."
A longer pause, and then Dan's leaning his head against the banister again. The laughter sounds like drowning, now. "God, you really need to work on your delivery."
Rorschach exhales sharply, almost a laugh, almost relief. Pressure valve. "Am aware."
Dan snorts. "Bad enough we've got ghosts trying to kill us…"
Now the noise sounds indignant, and it's still all he has to go on, this new face all unfamiliar lines and angles, impossible to interpret. "Wasn't that bad."
"It was pretty bad." Dan tries to pull himself back under control, twining one bandaged hand through the banister's spire.
"Notice you still laughed."
"Yeah, in self-defense. God, man." He's wiping the backs of his hands over his eyes, clearing moisture away. "Thanks. I needed that."
"Self-defense... boy at the home understood that too," Rorschach mutters, and Dan's struck by the completely absurd image of this face, twenty years younger, venturing terrible jokes into the darkness to keep an assailed companion's nerves at ease. He doesn't dare suggest it aloud, because it will be denied whether it's true or not and right now, he needs that, too. He needs everything he can get. "Didn't help him in the end, but..."
The stairs creak under their weight; a stray piece of plaster comes loose from the broken wall, hits the ground, raises dust. On the other side of that gap–
"That stupid goddamned dealer," Dan's saying, voice broken by something caught between hysterics and despair. He shifts, and his weight's on Rorschach instead of the railing, and the contact feels like something vital, like breath. "If he'd just given himself up..." A sharp, high noise. "I swear, if we don't make it out of this, that's the bastard I'm haunting first."
"Hrm. Together, would be... unnerving."
"We'd be terrifying, is what we'd be," and Dan can see a twitch at the corner of that flat, inexpressive mouth that could almost be a smile.
"If we do get out, will have to go after him regardless. Good hunting either way."
Dan studies him for a long moment, only realizing after a time has passed that he's burning something into memory though he isn't sure what – it isn't the face like he'd expect, but something less tangible instead, and more precious for it. He puts one bandaged hand out into the air. "Yeah. Good hunting."
And they shake on it as if they've said something more important, as if those two words are many more, are all the words they've never spoken in one dark, hopeless place or another, out of options and out of time. Beyond these sanctuary walls, the clock's still running, and they can't stay here forever. Dan would give anything in this moment for the simplicity of a knife wound in a back alley, their greatest challenge to survival being to keep Rorschach's stitching fingers nimble through the slippery red running over them.
"They'll come after you as soon as we leave," Rorschach's saying, sliding his mask back down into place, squaring his fedora. "Try to separate us."
Dan nods, pulling himself up by the banister and one tired arm. The bindings are coming loose, and he fiddles with them, tightens the knots one-handed. "I know. Good luck, man."
A stretching silence, blots drifting in and out of death's heads and sunsets and rotting old trees, bare branches spreading under a yellowed sky.
"Keep it," Rorschach says finally. "Need it more than I do."
A tight swallow, and one foot on the landing. "The door up there?"
"...Yes. I'll go first. Stay close."
.
When Rorschach puts his hand on the doorknob, he feels bare fingers dig into his sleeve, hold on tight, and he thinks of the over-the-shoulder glances he's had at Daniel's books, all medieval nonsense and woodcut snapshots – tame raptors, talons clutching an arm hard in a bid against gravity, against their own urge to slip their leads and fly. His hands tighten to fists and he imagines he's gripping some invisible cord, wound round and round, and that he's not letting go.
The doorknob turns, easy and soft, and the door swings out under the pressure of one spread hand as if its hinges are coated in oil. Beyond, another long hallway, disarming with its curling, delicate strips of wallpaper and its framed family photographs, greasy fingerprints and pencil scrawl in a child's fat, clumsy hand. 'Kitty', one of the legends says, but there's no matching illustration. 'My house' says another, with a handprint traced out in lead. The handprints are a repeating theme, all different sizes, scattered down the walls. All left hands, and Daniel's already lifting his toward one that they both know will fit it perfectly when Rorschach catches him by the wrist.
Daniel looks back, questioning. A shake of the head; the time for conversation has passed, as well as that for idle curiosity. For all they know those ciphers could be locks, triggers, waiting for their keys. Nothing is outlandish, anymore; nothing can be allowed to surprise them.
"Nice family," Daniel whispers instead, freeing his hand and gesturing to the pictures hanging crooked behind cracked glass. The splintered frame's occupants seem to have been young and old all at once, and their world was blurry with silver nitrate and memory, all worn-out greys and colorless – was gone and is gone. A faint wailing breaks up the storm noise, an echo of something familiar; there's a little girl in some of the pictures, and no one is smiling because no one smiled for pictures in those times but there's something in her particular grimace that is...
"On the surface," Rorschach concedes, then gestures for silence. He stalks carefully, one hand flat to the wall. The sounds are coming from far away, he thinks, ringing like gulls in the surf heard too far inland, each cry feathery light on a warm upslope breeze. They're circling, dipping and wheeling towards him – towards him, not Daniel – and there's nothing outwardly malicious in them. He's still not stupid enough to take anything for granted, not this time.
Circling and circling, they don't make contact – no fingertips press to the buttons of his spine or slide between ribs, and the chunks of broken glass don't make his fingers itch for their delicate heft, for the whistle of their descent. The voices just skim and whisper, voices overlapping in their urgency, blurring into one another though they are different; this one even, this one tinny and afraid, this one low and rich and resonant.
(–so sorry–) they murmur as one, and they're not howling. They're keening like wounded birds, and not hunting birds, not even carrion-eaters; just searching like blind things cut adrift, looking for a ground that's been lost to them, for rest. (–so, so sorry–)
(–hurts–) says a small one, on the verge of tears. (–unforgivable–) says another. (–cannot be stopped, must be stopped–)
It's an idea that bubbles slowly into consciousness, reluctantly breaks the surface: These ones, whoever they are and whoever they were, they're not looking to cause harm. They're confused, they're hurting, they're afraid or lonely or rebuked, but they're not malicious. Don't be too hard on yourself, they'd soothed in the kitchen, and he'd assumed they'd spoken in teasing cruelty, but...
The hand tightens on his shoulder and there's a more human sound behind him, a shuffling, but it feels like background noise because he's remembering the shades sliding up the walls and how easily they could have closed in but they hadn't; is remembering a child's laughter meandering corrupted and strange – and he understands, all at once. Comprehension feels like a wall of freezing water, crashing in, for its weight and shock and numbing penetration. "They're her victims," he mutters, and his voice is barely there.
(–wants to come back can't allow it can't allow it–) the words tumble, (–needs blood needs fear and pain and death but needs a body too, to stumble from the depths, to crawl out of the desert–)
Daniel hasn't responded but his hand is still heavy on Rorschach's shoulder and he still moves with him down the hall, has not left or been lured away or taken and that's important because she needs a body, and he wishes suddenly that they hadn't wasted their handcuffs and binding rope on all of those petty crooks.
(–took us all–) the voices chorus, some indignant and some betrayed, old family and new strangers, stumbled into the house in the middle of one endless night or another. (–took us in the second spiral, one way in and one way out, everything changes, changes, changes beware the second spiral it does not look like the first–)
"Why couldn't she use any of you?" Rorschach asks, and he's still not sure his voice is really working but he can feel the words against the back of his throat. "Was she not strong enough then?"
(–too young, too weak, not enough blood, but now, now–) and the voices rise up together and dissipate into incomprehensibility, words tripping over words, too much to sort out or process. It sounds like a flock of pigeons stirred up by a cat amongst them, burbling in sheer stupefied panic, and he claps his hands over his ears, trying in vain to shut it out, to quiet it to a manageable din, anything, just make it–
(–turning and turning–) they sing, the only words making it out of the cacophony, wet voices like air rushing over a wound. (–turning and turning turning and turning–) and he knows this, he knows those words, god, he knows how this story ends – turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear–
"Where's your birdie?" asks a voice, a real voice, saccharine sweet and cutting like a razor. When he spins to face her, violence buzzing in his fingers no matter how futile it'd be, there's no one there–
–and Daniel's hand is gone from his shoulder.
He doesn't move for a long moment – the voices have subsided to whispers, and they're still telling him things that will probably resurface later, if there is a later, but he's not listening – just exhales one hard, shaky breath against the drumskin of his mask. Two feet back down the hall, a door is swinging closed.
"No, no no no," he growls, each syllable falling like an oath. He catches the door one-handed before it can hit its frame, shoves it back inward, is through it before he can even think about it because he said this, he said they would separate them and he still let it happen and why hadn't he noticed them passing the door, had it been there before? Why did it change?
[A wall in the main room, gaping like a window when he'd let it drift to the corner of his eye, and under the paper, under all the years of forgetfulness and deceit, the shape of the thing had been there. Nothing is accidental. –It does not look like the first–]
Rorschach skids to a stop, worn-slick soles of his shoes finding little traction on the bare wood of the floor where it leads to a tremendous gaping hole. Beams run across it, old and termite-ridden and one is creaking, splintering, under the weight of a full-grown man. Beneath the beams, through floor and ceiling, he can see a room glowing with more light than should be visible this far into the house. The distant floor is thick with something the color of rust.
"Daniel," he says, quiet and firm. The other man is staring at nothing, is wavering back and forth on the beam – is fingering a rope between his bare fingers, and the torn pieces of cloth that'd served as bandages are discarded near Rorschach's feet. He gives no sign that he even hears his name, humming something wordless and looping in a tone that's too high.
Behind him, so close and so patient, the child stands in defiance. Her form isn't stable; tries to stay pristine and innocent but keeps breaking down into rot, sloughing skin and empty eyesockets, shifting and morphing in stop-frame fast motion but she never stops smiling.
"Daniel," Rorschach tries again, edging closer to the lip of the hole. A fall from one floor – only eight feet – wouldn't kill anyone unless they landed on their neck. There's got to be some other scheme here, and not knowing it doesn't keep him from understanding that getting Daniel back to solid ground is imperative. "Shouldn't have wandered off. Come back over here."
Laughter, unhinged and confident. "He can't hear you," she says, petulant, and her hands are rimed in soot. "Only me."
"Daniel…"
"I told you, he can't–"
"You," Rorschach says, forceful, pointing directly at her, because he can see the print and smell the old books and newspapers and the final piece has just fallen into place. "Elisa Josephine Tiller. Died in a fall, 1924. Entire family found murdered a month later. You killed them. Killed all of them."
"It wasn't fair," she says, and the voice isn't really a voice; just an echo, a remembrance of sound. "I was too young to die, I had to find a way back."
"I don't care," he growls, and when he looks down, the bloodstain below looks fresher, wetter. Shining refractions of light glint in the space below them, glare off the edges of blades that aren't there, and the soiled boards seem so far away, like there are two floors between them instead of only one. How many stairs had they climbed, or– "He's not yours to use like this."
She hums, the same tuneless thing still coming from Daniel, and his teetering's becoming more pronounced. "He is now," she says, sing-song and light.
A fist clenches, and Rorschach can feel something hot rising up inside of himself, caught paralyzingly somewhere between love and fear – and it cannot turn blades on the street, cannot stop bullets, but it has power here, in this place. He reaches up to pull his mask free for the second time tonight, to strip away the hiding places and face this creature down with eyes that don't flinch, that aren't afraid.
"No," he says, and the words carry the weight of every truth. "He's not yours. "
At first, nothing – then she takes one wobbling step backward, and her disguise slips for good, leaving her exposed, gruesome. The smile falters; the humming stops, from both of them, and Daniel is blinking, looking around in a daze. "What's... what am I..."
"Daniel," Rorschach says, and the pointing, accusing hand opens, offers itself palm-up. This is it, this is their last chance. "Don't look down. Just look at me, and walk towards me. One foot straight in front of the other."
A puzzled frown, lines pinching his face. "Why can't I–"
The girl is pulling herself up, regathering her strength, and in the hall outside he can hear the lost bird noises of grief and loneliness and he will not let it end that way, not this time, not for– "Now, Daniel. Don't argue."
A hesitant step toward him, and the beam is creaking; another step, and there's a hand in his, solid and warm and alive and–
A sound like wind, filling the room, resolving into a scream of such fury and loss that it hits like a physical blow, and Daniel wavers on the beam, loses his footing. Starts to fall, the bloody rope uncoiling and Rorschach's stepping out on the beam too fast too fast, arms around him to catch and steady but he's falling too fast–
And then they are both falling
and falling
and
falling.
.
Somewhere, as before, laughter.
.
At first, he can sense only the utter quiet of freefall, of life existing in the space between heartbeats, stretched and surreal. Then the world spins out- upside down and end over end, and he can swear he feels something cool and solid in his hand and sees the blades flashing in light that shouldn't be there and up, up someone is saying and he can feel all the blood rush to his head and fill his mouth and run down his chin, over his chest, hot and thick and not all of it is his and up, the voice says, now, Daniel, up–
–and the rope must have been around his ankle, stringing him up alongside all the others to spill into the room below because it wrenches and all the small bones there grind and start to give–
–bare hands on his face suddenly, and the connection is electric, feels like watching a television degauss - the picture snaps clear and into focus with an audible spark, all the fuzzy illusions and visual tricks of static and white noise evaporating. His skin is dry where it's touched; the blood is gone. His throat hurts but he isn't drowning in fluid, he can breathe, and he's being pushed and pulled towards his feet all at once and is this real, did they really– "Now, Daniel. Get up, right now. "
He's on his back in a fresh, oozing pool of blood, as if the floor itself were bleeding, rendering up all of its old secrets and rage and there's no time to think about it because he's up now, shoved hard toward a square window set low in the nearest wall and he remembers this room, remembers being here and wasn't the window bricked over then–
"Through there, out," and Rorschach's as telegraphic as he ever gets, language stripped down to the barest essentials of run go get out get away survive. Behind them, something is still screaming and laughing and howling, hasn't stopped, and it's ripping through him like broken glass, like the agonizing silence that follows every breath–
In the back of his mind: two floors of freefall, and how had they survived uninjured? Where did all the blood come from?
[A vision: himself, from another's perspective, spasming on a couch that was never there, spilling reddened water up from inside and he feels fear and revulsion and it goes on and on and–]
Where did it–
[Rorschach, rubbing at something dark pooling under his mask like a bruise, livid and violent–]
No, no time, there's no time. He's already over the sill of the window, Rorschach clambering through behind him, and it's the room they began this in, took watch in, tried to make their stand in. But the walls and floor and the space itself are shifting, unstable; furniture and cobweb-strewn emptiness; fine, smooth hardwood and bare subfloor rolling under their feet in rotted, uneven waves – music, laughter, candlelight and darkness and he knows without knowing that it's the house's memory of itself, flickering in and out of existence like its own kind of ghost. It's not allowed to rest because nothing here lies down when it dies, nothing stays still, and that window should have been bricked over but it wasn't. The screen door still slams and bangs in the wind, open and closed and open again, and it's too loud–
Then they're past it, out, into the open air and the fury of the storm and it feels like a benediction, the cold stinging rain battering their faces raw and red as they run and run and run.
.
They've been fleeing blindly for a long time – it's hard to say how long, but they're keeping even pace, neither straying by more than a half step ahead or behind in the near-dark, just overwhelmed with the open space and gut-swell of relief at being out, god, they made it out – when Dan feels a twinge in the ankle he must have landed wrong on when they fell
(Two stories. Two stories and not a scratch on either of you, just a twisted ankle and rope burns and–)
because it's starting to throb under the weight he's putting on it, starting to cant him off balance. When the ground under his next step isn't where he expects it to be – some kind of shallow ditch that he's not paying enough attention to to navigate correctly – and his foot catches in the depression, twists him down to the ground in a gasping, writhing heap, the shock of pain is enough to make him think it might be broken. "Dammit," he hisses, pinching his eyes closed against the rising waves of nausea, against the way he can feel the bones grinding together, sickening in its intensity. He's lost in it - there's nothing beyond the blackness of his own eyelids and the star-cluster bursts of pain – until he senses footsteps approaching from behind. Can't hear them through the wind, but he knows they're there.
"Hurt?" Rorschach asks, crouching down beside him in the grassy culvert. His face is bare again, has been since Dan came back to himself in that high, teetering room, and he's breathing hard and rough like the real person that lives behind the mask – like Dan himself is, as he feels along the length of his boot, looking for a break.
"Yeah, god. Think it's just a sprain, though," he finally says, fingers finding nothing misshapen under the restrictive material, and it's so absurd, worrying over a twisted ankle after they just– "Hurts like hell. Must've landed on it wrong back there."
Rorschach nods; doesn't question, just threads an arm under his, starts to pull him back to his feet. It's an assist they've both given and received countless times on patrol, but once they get there Rorschach doesn't let go – Dan can feel the tight, twisted grip in his cloak, the slight shifting of weight encouraging him to just go ahead and lean if he needs to. It hits him all at once, between the tenacity of Rorschach's grasp on him and a backward glance that shows him nothing but fields and sky and clouds blossoming with the diffuse glow of lightning that won't reach ground: "We made it out."
A nod that he can feel against his shoulder. "Yes," Rorschach says, sounding a little disbelieving, like he's waiting for their luck to run out, for their path to loop around and set the house square in front of them again, for these things to catch up to them. "We did."
Dan laughs, shaky, the sound cut off by a wince as he puts too much weight on the wrong foot. "I told you you could–"
They stop walking suddenly, and fingers are on his throat, as bare as the face, tracing carefully over the ring of ash and bruises. It's hard to breathe under their scrutiny. "Shouldn't have been possible, after she..." Rorschach trails off; he drops his head to the side, working to shake something free. Shoves the free hand back into his pocket. "Hrm. Will fade in a few days."
Marked, he'd said, in the mad panic of the Mobiüs hallway, and it'd sounded so final. Dan narrows his eyes. "You know or you're guessing?"
A shrug. "Just bruises, Daniel. Heal like any others."
(Like a bruise, livid and– and hadn't he wiped something away, dark, thick–)
But there's nothing there when he looks, when he looks for too long – nothing but a haggard face that's seen more that its years should allow, that carries every scar and indignity on the surface; that is as weary as he feels, stumbling through the middle of nowhere in the dark. Unscathed. A practical, inevitable silence settles over them then, battered and limping on three good legs toward the promise of the city glow, smearing the northern sky in dirty orange.
"How did you know who she was?" Dan asks after a long stretch. The highway is visible ahead, slick black asphalt cutting a sharp profile through the overgrown grass and grain.
Rorschach doesn't say a word until they make the shoulder of the road, put something solid and manmade and real under their feet. They stand there for a long moment, in the ozone-stink of nearby lightning and the calm that follows every storm. "...used to tell ghost stories, at the home. Before... nnk. Wasn't appropriate, after. Everyone knew, even if they didn't."
"I can understand that, yeah."
"Most of them were made up. Turns out this one was true, I suppose. Though the story claimed she killed her family out of revenge, for allowing her to die. And for sealing up her room like she never existed."
Dan leans; his ankle is throbbing harder now that they're standing still, and he's trying to get the weight off of it. "That isn't true?"
"No," Rorschach mumbles, and his grip tightens almost imperceptibly. "Was looking for a way back into the world. For a vessel. Her victims were... surprisingly talkative on the subject."
"Ah."
Silence, uncomfortable and shifting.
"So, uh. That's it?"
Another shrug, jarring his balance. "Probably more to it. Not willing to go back and ask for a full explanation with flow-charts and diagrams, Daniel."
Dan huffs a breath of almost-laughter. "Fair enough."
There are no stars out with the cloud ceiling so low; black sky, black tar, black fields. It's not a busy road this late, and Dan's not sure why they're standing and not walking, why this seems like such a boundary...
"Speaking of ghost stories," he says, turning his head to regard the open stretch of highway. The tall grass to either side is wet, is whipping around his knees in the breeze, and the shine of moonlight along its edges picks out every blade against the dark. "Feels like we're in one of those hitchhiker ones."
No reply; Rorschach just looks at him and even without the mask, the assessment is dark and unreadable.
"You know, the ones where someone picks up a hitchhiker on the highway, and then when they get where they're going, the person's vanished, poof, because they were never there?"
Another long silence, and then Rorschach pulls up short, looking down the stretch of asphalt. In the distance, the twin pinpricks of faraway headlights. "...absurd," he mutters.
It's gone eerily silent but for the wind, and Dan turns to look Rorschach in the face, expression incredulous. "What, after what we just went through back there?"
"Can't see ghosts in the open like this," he says, rolling his shoulders, trying to hitch the collar of his coat higher without pulling his hand from his pocket. "Need walls, something to contain them, force them into a shape we can see. Would be invisible on the side of a road." A pause, considering. "Might see its shadow."
"Now you're just making shit up."
"Mn."
The car's closer now, and ridiculously half-costumed or not, Dan's considering flagging it down to save them the walk all the way back to the city; his ankle's killing him, though aside from that, he could probably walk all night, he's really not that tired–
That isn't right though, is it? He should be exhausted; he remembers being exhausted on the stairs, remembers his bones aching for rest and his mind screaming for the vivid oblivion of sleep, but now… nothing. A sudden swell of panic, plain in his voice: "Hey man, are you worn out at all?"
"No," and Rorschach doesn't seem willing to speculate or suggest a reason, because they've been walking for an hour and were running for a good long while before that, and they really should be–
Dan laughs then, and it sounds wrong, too high and too desperate. "Just adrenaline, right? I mean, what happened back there, we've gotta be flying on the stuff."
A tight shrug, noncommittal. "Probably."
Dan shifts his weight – rubs at the back of his neck, feeling the reassuringly physical way his hair curls there, heavy with rainwater. Steps to the side to watch the approaching headlights, the way they grow as they get closer, blinding at this angle, the brilliance building and building until it obliterates sense, subsumes the world in white–
Then it's past, without slowing or stopping, gone in a rush of air that ripples through them like so much dry old winter wheat gone to seed, buffeted and savaged by the winds of the storm.
"Hrm." Rorschach shifts Dan's weight across his shoulders, and there's something approving in his voice. "Smart enough to know better. Good."
"I guess we're walking," Dan says, trying to smile, and when Rorschach just nods and starts them down the highway, he falls into staggering step beside him, their shadows long and insubstantial under the low, waning moon.
And they walk – limping and ragged and propping each other up against too many inevitable thoughts, always toward the city, the hard press of the road familiar under their feet.
They walk for a very long time.
.
(c) ricebol 2009