Try to realize it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small,
And life flows on within you and without you.
--The Beatles
There is a cat in Daniel's apartment. It is sitting on his kitchen table when he comes in, and startles him when he turns on the light. It is a scarred, rangy orange tabby cat, and it stares at him with wide gray eyes as he sets down his groceries and approaches cautiously. It's agitated, but doesn't seem trapped or hostile. The cat's tail lashes back and forth, and it rises to all fours, leaning forwards.
"Uh, hey," Dan says, "where'd you come from, fella?"
"Mmmrolll," the cat says, then, "Maowllrrr. Rrk." Its ears go back and it looks briefly angry-- it paces from one end of the table to the other, sits down, licks its tail. It looks back up sharply, grey eyes piercing. "Rrrrarrshk."
"Chatty, aren't you?" Dan looks around the kitchen, searching for some tell-tale sign. Cats don't just drop out of nowhere. There-- the kitchen window is open. He goes over and checks outside: the trash bins are conceivably close enough that a cat might have been able to jump it.
There is a tug on his pants leg. He looks down, surprised, to see the tabby with its claws sunk into the fabric. Once it has made eye contact it lets go.
"Rrrarsh," The cat says again, high and almost... plaintive? "Rrrarshh ngk rrrshhhrrsh." Could cats even sound plaintive? Dan finds himself wishing he had ever picked up a book on housecats. Or even an issue of Cat Fancy.
"Someone wants dinner, huh?" Dan says. "You are the gutsiest cat I have ever met."
"Rrrrr." The cat says.
Over dinner ( a tuna melt toast for him, straight tuna for the cat), Dan tries to remember everything he has ever learned about cats. The sum total of his knowledge is that they eat birds, are sharp at most ends, and other people can make them purr.
"I don't get along with cats, you know." He says to the cat, who gives him an inscrutable cat-look. "It's nothing personal." Dan says hastily, and extends a hand. The cat then looks at the hand, and Dan withdraws it, feeling sheepish. Only dogs shook hands. Paws.
Whatever.
"You'll have to go." Dan says. "I can't take care of you. I don't have any cat food. Or a litter box. Or... or whatever else cats need. You're probably better off on your own."
The cat appears to be less than convinced. It gives the tuna bowl a last few licks, then walks over to Dan and presses its head against his chest.
"If you pee on anything, I'm taking you right to the humane society." Dan tells it. Its tail lashes once, like an agreement, and that is that. Cats are supposed to be smart, Dan figures. Otherwise who would put up with them?
*
A sort of routine develops. During the daytime the cat hangs around Dan's house and amuses itself with Dan's things and occasionally Dan himself. At twilight Dan lets the cat out through the front door, locks up, then goes downstairs to begin his evening. When he comes back in around dawn he comes upstairs to get the newspaper, which is always on the mat, and the cat, who is usually on the newspaper. It sits on his lap when he reads it, and paws the pages occasionally. He lets it, because it bites him when he doesn't.
There is an entertaining afternoon where the cat becomes fascinated with the subject of Dan's pens. It spends a good part of an hour chasing them across the floor and carrying them to and fro, before abandoning the game to rifle through Dan's paperclips. The cat is beginning to move them one by one to the floor when Dan feels a twinge of misgiving –it might choke on them-- and intervenes. He makes sure to pile them in a drawer before he pats the cat on the head and goes back to his book.
*
"I didn't know you had a cat," Brian from the Central Park Birdwatchers' Club remarks one night.
"Oh," Dan says, still preoccupied with inspecting Brian's new binoculars, "He's new. "
"Not a very handsome specimen," Brian says, reaching down to ruffle the cat's rough, patchy fur. "I hope you didn't pay much?"
"Fsst," The cat says scathingly, and wanders off. Dan thinks that maybe he never liked Brian much anyway.
*
The cat is a good mouser, but a lousy diplomat. It quickly develops a bitter feud with Mrs. Cullen's big black persian, and begins turning up in the mornings with scratches on its face and blood in its fur. On the few nights that Dan stays in, he can hear them screaming and chasing eachother all over the rooftops.
"Can't you just get along?" He asks the cat, cleaning blood out of a chewed-up ear.
"Nnr."
"You're going to get yourself killed." Dan bats at the cat's face playfully. The cat hooks a claw into Dan's washcloth and looks up at him seriously. Dan is spellbound for a moment, caught up in an intense feeling of resonance. Where had he...?
"Nnnr," the cat says, and its wide eyes flick over Dan's face, searching for something. Dan strokes its head gently, trying to think, and the doorbell rings. The cat hisses and bites him, drawing blood, and the moment is broken. He throws the cat across the room --he has learned that cats are surprisingly sturdy-- and goes to answer the door.
It was just a Girl Scout, and by the time he has purchased a box of cookies the cat has gone off to sulk somewhere.
*
One morning the cat does not return until well after dawn, and when he lets it in it is limping. It entirely skips the good-morning shoe-chew and storms-- that's the only word for it-- right into the kitchen. Dan stares after it, bemused, until there is a sound of shattering glass and a thump.
He rushes in to find that the cat has knocked a bottle of ketchup off the counter and is standing in the middle of a spreading mess of red goop and glass shards.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He shouts at the cat. It arches at him, its tail going like a snake, and yowls. He kicks at it furiously.
"Rrrrarsh!" The cat yowls, pawing a long trail of red out of the puddle. "Gnnnnnrrsh!"
Dan, fed up, picks the cat up by the scruff of its neck and drops it out the kitchen window, then slams and locks the window. He can still hear its angry yowling even through the glass as he goes to get a rag.
When he lets it back inside the next morning it stalks inside and spends the whole day following him around and chewing on everything he tries to do. He gives it a slice of his steak that night and they call a truce.
*
"Big night tonight, cat," Dan tells the cat. "Gonna take down Moloch tonight. Found his base of operations-- Eleventh and Main. Took some doing."
The cat cocks its head. "Mmmlll," it announces, then trots into the kitchen.
"Where are you going?" He says. The cat paws at the basement door and gives him an expectant look.
"Mmlll!"
"You're a crime-fighting cat now, are you?"
"Mmmll!"
"You're not a crime-fighting cat," Dan says firmly, and picks the cat up. It squirms and bites his sleeve. "Only big tough dogs get to fight crime with their masters. You'd get creamed."
It hisses and gives him a more serious bite to the arm. He walks to the front door and deposits the cat outside, closing the door quickly to keep it from rushing right back in.
"MMMAOWLLLK!" The cat protests through the door, and there is scratching. Dan shakes his head, and goes downstairs.
*
The raid goes well until Dan reaches the lowest level of the base and finds that Moloch has created some kind of rod that amplifies and disrupts electrical signals. Dan does his best to hold out, but it's difficult-- he has weight and reach on the older man, but Moloch has his tricks and the home-ground advantage. His cane twists like a snake and knocks Dan off his feet, tangling between his legs and then returning to Moloch's hand.
"They don't make anything like they used to," Moloch says, sounding almost sad, and raises his cane for a final strike. The end glows blue, the same color as the old man's clear, icy gaze, and sparkles like an aurora. Dan thinks that if there was ever a time for his life to flash before his eyes, this would probably be it.
Then there is a blur of orange, and the cane's downward arc is interrupted by the small thin body of a cat. There is a flash and a sharp, electrical smell-- Dan shouts, and shields his eyes. Is that-- is that his cat? It drops to the ground, limp and twitching, and the cane falls after it. Moloch stares at it in disgust.
"Why did you do that?" He demands of the little body, rubbing his hands as if they hurt. "You stubborn fool!"
The bundle of orange fur claws vaguely at the ground, twitches, and goes still. Moloch is bending down to pick up his cane when Dan takes advantage of the distraction to lunge to his feet and attack with his throwing crescent.
When Moloch is finally defeated and handed off to the police, Dan goes back to the room. He was positive it was his cat, somehow, but all that is left is a smear of blood and the cane, which is charred black at the end.
When he goes home, his mail is on the front steps, and his cat is nowhere. He spends the day napping fitfully, patching his wounds, and checking the door every hour.
The cat does not return.
*
He sees Rorschach later that week. It's been a while, though he can't say exactly how long. They patrol along the waterfront in comfortable silence.
"You've been taking care of yourself?" Dan asks after an hour or so.
Rorschach glances over at him. "You could say that."
Dan frowns. "I could say anything, couldn't I?"
Rorschach huffs a quiet laugh. "I was ...indisposed. Stayed with a friend."
"Oh. Well, that's....I'm glad." Dan is, too, but he also feels surprisingly jealous. Rorschach had vanished out of his life for maybe months and gone to inhabit someone else's. He could at least have said something, or left a note.
There is more silence. Then, "It's good to be back," Rorschach says, his face turned towards the water.
"Yeah," Dan says.
Even more silence. Then, Dan stops and turns to Rorschach, a hand on his arm. "Look," he says, then lets go, embarrassed, "I mean, Rorschach. If you were-- if you're ever, uh, indisposed again, I want you to know that you can always..."
He trails off, and looks out at the water as well. "I'm your partner. If you-- if you ever need anything. You should. You could come to me."
"Nite Owl," Rorschach says in a tone Dan has never heard before.
"I'd take care of you," Dan mumbles, and subsides into silent, miserable embarrassment.
Rorschach places a hand on Dan's shoulder. "I know," he says firmly. Dan looks back at Rorschach, and smiles.
When he goes home that morning Mrs Cullen is putting up lost posters of her cat. Dan sits on the front steps of his house until the sun breaks over the rooftops across the street, and then goes inside, closes the door, and buries his head in his hands.