Title: It might have been
Author: akisawana
Genre: Watchmen Rule 63
Disclaimer: It's not my fault Alan Moore wrote an strong, flawed, interesting woman and then gave her a penis.
Warnings: Well, it's Watchmen. I think that covers it.
Summary: Five ways it could have happened.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these; It might have been.
Wanda is born, and is given the name Kovacs, even though that is neither her mother's or her father's to give. She grows up on the streets of New York where no-one drives on Saturday and everyone else is home by dark on Friday. She is bullied for five years about her hair and her freckles and her mother, until one day she is saved by a man with butterfly wings.
Mothman takes her out for ice cream, because she can't go home yet, and she tells him all about her life, about the butter sandwiches she has for lunch and the hotdog she buys for a dime for dinner, about the men that pass through her apartment and her Salvation Army dresses and how her mother can't wait for her to go to school next fall. Mothman sees her home safely, and the next day two well-dressed young men come to Sylvia Kovacs' door with a suitcase of money, and Wanda loses a mother but gains two fathers.
Two years later, Wanda has the measles, and a dangerously high fever, and Daddy Bill stays home to take care of her. The bank he works for is robbed. It is the last straw; they could tolerate his bastard daughter, but not when she interferes with his job. Daddy Bill is fired, but Daddy Byron has more than enough money to take care of them all.
When Wanda is sixteen, she wants to take to the streets with her fathers. They insist she finish high school and go to college first. She goes to Radcliffe, majors in Shakespeare, and meets a boy from Harvard whose hero is Nite Owl. She brings Daniel home for Christmas her sophomore year, and the wedding is set for the June after she graduates.
At the wedding, Daddy Byron has a little too much to drink, which everyone expected and hoped wouldn't happen. He punches Daniel's grandfather for saying something obscene in German about Wanda, and Captain Metropolis for saying something unrepeatable about letting his daughter marry a Jew. Both are not unexpected, and any other girl would have thought the ensuing brawl ruined her wedding, but Wanda just rolled up her sleeves, kicked off her shoes, and joined in. Daniel sits with his new father-in-law, the one who hasn't started drinking until now, and Hollis, and the three of them have the first of many silent commiserations over beer.
They honeymoon in Greece, and when they come back they take to the streets in what they jokingly call "the family business." Sally Jupiter's daughter joins them, and Ozymandias, Eddie Blake and Dr. Manhattan. Wanda takes a year off twice, once for their son, and once for their twin daughters. Her fathers take care of the children when they're too old to go out themselves, and everyone lives happily ever after, save the criminals.
Except that's not what happens.
When Wanda Kovacs is ten, she partially blinds one boy and permanently scars another. She doesn't have to tell her mother why; her ripped skirt is explanation enough. Still, keeping Wanda costs her all her savings and then some; when she has to borrow money from a loan shark because she's run out of jewelry to pawn, Wanda has to start earning her keep.
Wanda sticks to hand jobs and blow jobs until she's thirteen and is big enough that intercourse won't hurt her too bad. Sylvia finds that with the two of them working, she can afford a bigger apartment with three bedrooms, two for working and one divided in two by a curtain for sleeping. She tries to do right by Wanda, but the girl is always silently angry, and Sylvia can't slap any sense into her no matter how hard she tries.
When Wanda is fifteen, one of the cheap condoms break. She's still in high school, and her mother knows if she graduates, maybe she can escape this life, but she can't do that with a child. So Sylvia finds the money, pawns her grandmother's jewelry for Wanda again; she won't let Wanda make the same mistake she did. Sylvia practically has to carry her to the abortionist, and Wanda mutters about murder all the way there. Wanda will thank her later, when she's grown up and away. The doctor has whiskey on his breath that Sylvia can smell, and tools in water she does not know is dirty. He's cheap and he's willing to do this, which is all she cares about.
It takes Wanda two and a half days to die.
Except that's not what happens.
Sylvia Kovacs does not even put up a token fight when they take her daughter away. Whether this is because she loves her too much or not enough is not a question anyone asks. Wanda grows up in the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children, and when she is sixteen they find her a job as a seamstress in the city, an affordable apartment, and invite her back for Christmas dinner. She even goes, once. Then a woman is killed, alone in the crowd of New York, and that's when Wanda puts on a costume (dressing as a man, so safe from discovery!) and resolves that will never happen again.
She meets a boy from Harvard whose hero is Nite Owl. They partner, and make actual progress in the darker side of New York. She lets him think she is a man, which makes him question his sexuality after a while, but he is a good man, too good for her.
A midget is arrested. A girl is kidnapped. Two dogs die. The Keene Act is passed. A comedian dies. Rorschach is arrested. There is an awkward flight to Antarctica. Ozymandias saves the world by killing it. Wanda dies in the snow, not as alone and unmourned as she wanted.
Except that's not what happened.
Rorschach can't keep her secret forever, not with the amount of times she gets punched and stabbed and shot. Nite Owl doesn't treat her any different, except to complain that she needs to start wearing something a little more bulletproof than four or five layers of cloth. Whenever he gets too annoying, Rorschach brings up the Great Cape Debate. (Dollar Bill's death had touched her, in a way she doesn't quite understand. It had been the last time she cried.)
Daniel treats her differently. Daniel takes her out to lunch and afternoon movies, gives her a house key she never uses, doesn't swear around her.
Wanda doesn't really mean for it to happen, but she doesn't do anything to stop it. Daniel is a good man, and he asks her to stay every time. Every time, Wanda acts like he means just until the morning, no matter how heavy his hints get.
She learned from her mother that men don't like condoms, so even though it isn't the first time her period's been late and she's thrown up on the same day she buys a home pregnancy test. A real one, not just a cup of Drano and she goes all the way to Staten Island to buy it.
It is positive.
Wanda cries, because she doesn't know what to do. She can't bring a baby into this world of corruption and filth, can't afford diapers, can't take the time off of either of her jobs. She can't kill an innocent baby simply because his mother is a whore, can't face Daniel with their shame.
Rorschach knows what to do. Rorschach knows that the baby is better off never knowing this world of pain and sorrow, and Rorschach knows how to atone for Wanda's sins. There is rat poison under the sink, arsenic. It takes Wanda only a handful to die.
It takes Rorschach two and a half days.
Except that's not what happens.
It is 1969, and Wanda Dreiberg cradles her infant daughter against her shoulder, and smiles when Charlie smiles back. It hadn't been easy, not even after she faced Daniel with their sin, not even when Daniel was at her side, but looking into her baby's eyes she can't help but think it was all worth it.
The worst of it wasn't when Daniel insist she quit her job, though it stung her pride, or when they stood in the courthouse with the first Nite Owl and Sister Mary Hildegard as witnesses, though the sister's eyes and Wanda's never quite met. It was when, four months before Charlie was born, some knot-top caught Rorschach across the stomach with a crowbar.
Rorschach kicked him in the teeth, threw up, and then staggered over behind a dumpster to collapse on the ground. Wanda pressed her hands against her belly, and for the first time in her life prayed. She sat there for two hours, not moving even to answer Nite Owl's calls, barely breathing.
Then, miracle of miracles, she felt something move inside her, a slippery sleepy swirl, newly familiar. She sighed the breath she wasn't aware she was holding, and stood up to find Nite Owl. The baby was okay. She would have a wicked bruise tomorrow, and God alone knew what had happened to Nite Owl while she was behind the dumpster, but the baby was okay, and that was what was most important.
Only the dumpster had kept her from falling to the ground again. The baby, the baby, everything was now for the baby. The small, helpless creature that would depend on her for everything, everything. Suddenly, she could no longer be Rorschach, black and white and uncompromising about doing what was right. She had to do what was best for the baby. The choice had been made, nearly a year ago, when she had lain with Daniel and he had asked are you sure? And she had thought she was.
Had thought, ridiculously, that it couldn't happen to her. She wasn't very good at being a woman, after all.
When Nite Owl found her, she was still holding onto the filthy handle of the dumpster like a drowning man. "Rorschach," he said, "are you okay?"
Her face. She had forgotten about her face. Shakily, she pulled it up and off with one hand, turned to look at Nite Owl. "I think Rorschach has to…go away for a little while. For the baby."
It hadn't been as easy as that, oh no. It was sheer torture for her to sit home alone nights when she knew there were muggers and murderers roaming her city, and Nite Owl's back was unprotected, and he was wearing that stupid, stupid cape and someone had started cutting their cocaine with salt. It almost killed her. It killed Rorschach, she thought.
But looking at Charlie's precious, toothless smile, it was worth it. Charlie is perfect, and precious, and Rorschach will make the world a safe place for her, a good place, if he has to personally beat into a coma every dealer, thug, and pervert in New York. Rorschach had come back six weeks after Charlie's birth, wild and powerful and angry and uncompromising as ever, twice as driven and twice as fierce. Before, "good people" had always been an abstract concept, seen on street corners at best, and even then they were probably guilty of something. Now, though, there was an actual good person for Rorschach to protect, a tiny helpless innocent that he loves almost as much as Wanda does.
Charlie makes that special worried face and then giggles in that special way, and she is suddenly slightly heavier in Wanda's arms. She will never for the life of her understand how that works –if it comes out of Charlie, it must decrease her weight proportionally, and yet every time she fills another diaper, it's as if the stuff was transported there by Dr. Manhattan. Charlie is full of mysteries, and Wanda is beginning to suspect that her father might be telling her secrets. Sometimes he sings to her in a language Wanda does not understand, and perhaps that is when he teaches her the easiest way to determine what she is holding in her hands is to stick it in her mouth.
Wanda takes their baby to Daniel, who is in the basement tinkering. Dan knows why, but doesn't say anything, just takes his daughter over to the workbench that was press-ganged into being a changing table. Wanda pointedly looks away as Daniel changes her; she knows, logically, that Charlie must be changed, that it is okay for her to see her daughter naked, to wipe her clean in places that will never see daylight, and yet she can't bring herself to do it. Daniel explains, time and time again, that everyone does it, that changing a diaper is no big deal, and there is no trick to keeping it from turning into an unspeakable crime –but Wanda knows there is one, because good mothers change their children and don't damage them for life. Even bad mothers like her own manage to bathe her without hurting them.
Still, Wanda cannot bring herself to touch her daughter's pure flesh with whore's hands any more than Rorschach could touch Charlie with bloodstained gloves.
Except that's not what happens.
Walter Kovacs is born.
So, I promised you notes. I love Wanda to pieces. Harvard didn't admit women until...some time after 1958, so Wanda would have gone to Radcliffe. The wedding scene is my absolute favorite, and I had cut it down. Severely. She spent her whole honeymoon with a broken nose. I do not like Sylvia Kovacs very much. A botched abortion is traditionally the most terrible way to die. For women at least; I'm not quite sure what the equivalent would be for men, though there was an episode of Hell Girl. I don't understand why Nite Owl wears a cape, but I also don't understand Rorschach's lack of armor. Tradition holds that peeing in a cup of Drano will not only tell if a woman is pregnant, but also the gender of the baby. Arsenic is not a pretty way to die; you say "Madam Bovary," I think GREY-FACED WOMAN PUKING UP LIQUIFIED BLACK...STUFF. I firmly believe Rorschach was raised by nuns. Two normal people having unprotected sex twice a week conceive in less than a year, if they don't, something is wrong. Babies do not actually get heavier when they poop, but the movement can make it feel like they do. (This is a vital fact if you're babysitting a child not yet eating solid food, until then, their poop does not actually stink.) Daniel is singing in German. He does not know the words are, in fact, death threats. According to my mother, it's a very traditional lullaby that I mistranslated. I call shenanigans on her. God, these are a lot of notes.