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Written for the Watchmen kinkmeme. Took me forever to figure out what a captcha was, but I finally caught on. The captcha was 'November drywall' and it's set in the GN-verse.

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The lock was fixed for the last time in November. It was never broken again. He was never sure what had happened to Rorschach, and for awhile he expected news to break out about the squid and Adrian, while hoping it wouldn't happen. It never did and then, for awhile, he hoped that Rorschach had seen things their way finally, had realized that nothing could be gained by revealing the truth.

As the long months went by, he wondered more and more where his old partner had gone. How had he gotten home, if in fact, he had come back to this place? He hadn't been worried at the time, too overcome with everything that had happened.

He fixed the lock when he got back, and it stayed fixed, even though now, he found himself wishing he would come home to it kicked in one more time. Rorschach would do that much, surely, just to remind him to stay vigilant and that there was always one of them left, still watching. That never happened either.

November came around again. November 1st, the anniversary of the night they had set off to the bottom of the world together. And come home alone. If Rorschach had come home. It had taken a year for the doubt and worry to sink in, but there, staring at the lock, it finally occurred to Dan what must've happened. The shame and grief and rage caught him by surprise. If he had felt like this then, if he had been able to grasp what was being said to him and around him beyond the mind-numbing awful truth collapsing on his mind the way that thing had been dropped on the city, maybe he could've done something different, should've done something different.

This truth didn't send him reeling, but he felt something break anyway. For a moment, he hated everyone who had been there, Adrian for setting it in motion, Jon for not stopping it, Rorschach for not being patient enough to wait for him to understand, Laurie for being witness to the whole thing, and most of all, himself. He was always too late. Never fast enough. It had taken him a year to realize exactly what he had lost. It had been a year since he had done anything that really mattered.

On November 2nd, he checked himself in to the hospital to get his knuckles stitched and his hand x-rayed. A week later he went to buy drywall to fix the hole he had punched in his wall. By December, his hand had healed completely and the new paint covered up the new drywall. It wasn't really fixed, he thought at his most melancholy. He couldn't fix anything, only cover it up to look normal. And nothing would be fixed or normal again until that damned lock was kicked open.