Top Notes: These are all small ficlets set in my Watchmen Zombie!AU that are written off-the-cuff at various points. They are standalone for the most part and come in a few varieties: Captcha prompts (written based on a randomly generated set of two words), commentfics, and misc prompts. Basically, anything that stands alone and is small enough to fit in one LJ-comment block (4300 character limit, usually about 800 words or less), I'm sticking here.
Extra Note: Unlike 'Neither Right Nor Wrong', this series is rated M. There will be swearing, violence(it's zombies, come on) and implied sex at various points. There will also be introspection, fluff, and detectiving. Never know what'll turn up.
Disclaimer: Don't own Watchmen. Seriously.

Summary: Rorschach pays his debts.
Type: Captcha fic: 'january repays'
Rating/Warnings: K+.
Characters/Pairings: Dan/Rorschach.

superstition

.

It's a new year, the calendars say.

In the summer of the year, cold from bloodloss and head filled with the lurching horror of what this was, what this meant, what exactly was spinning through his bloodstream with every panicked step, he hadn't expected to live to see 1976. Part of him had hoped he would die in the street before he ever reached the brownstone, but he knew it was more likely he'd face his end staring down a shaking barrel, the face beyond it twisted in grief, his own mind too far gone to care.

He stops, leans against a lamppost, hunches his coat tighter around him. Old habits.

This is technically a patrol, but the streets are empty. Everyone's at the Garden, he knows, waiting for the festivities to swell and crescendo and finally give under their own weight. Daniel's ill tonight, bundled into the sofa, temperature too high to risk soldiering through it on a night this cold. Probably watching it all on television.

He can feel heat on the breeze; there's an oildrum fire nearby, and it's sending out tendrils through the crisp, still air, the night so motionless it could shatter like ice all around him. It's technically a patrol but he's mostly putting one foot in front of the other, wherever they lead him, and he's always been one to trust instinct even before instinct came to ride blisteringly close to the front of his brain. Under a bridge, past the streetwalkers and dealers all huddled together against the cold and uselessness of the night, through alleys and sunken doorways and into places only cats can map and understand.

In the end, he ends up deep in the Park, in front of the Bethesda Fountain. It must be heated somehow, kept just above the frostpoint; the water is clear and dark and with no light reflecting off of its surface, a thousand copper pinpricks glint up at him from its bottom. He pushes one hand through the water – it's freezing cold, will dry off of him colder – and runs gloved fingertips over the rough concrete, through the pile of coins like some heavier, thicker liquid, sunk to the bottom.

Wishes, he thinks, and he scowls under his mask. Children's wishes; a puppy for Christmas, Mommy and Daddy to stop fighting, the stork to come and take the new baby back to where it came from. Grandmothers and grandfathers, dying in sterile hospital rooms, a little more time bought for them here in pennies and gullibility.

[Blood on his fingers and on the doorframe and slicking the tools in his hands, thoughts running wild and jumbled and settling onto a core of hope that the door will just open – not because he's afraid for himself, howling starting to echo up the street from the next neighborhood over, but because the house staying dark and quiet would be the worst sort of prophesy and he has to be here, has to be safe, has to be–]

He pulls his hand from the water; lets the moisture drip back to its glassy surface in uneven and heavy drops.

[And could that be called a wish, uttered wordlessly into siren-strobing darkness, clambering at a door that won't open and desperate just to see a living face framed in the entryway's light before he succumbs?]

His dry hand is fishing in his pocket before he even knows why, sorting through loose change until he comes up with a new penny, brilliant in the soft light from the city, a full moon in miniature resting weightless in his palm.

He settles it to the surface of the water and only then lets it go, soundless, twisting in its descent to the depths. After a moment, the ripples still, and in the breezeless night, the water is again like glass, motionless, impenetrable, trapping its hopes and dreams and winking brassy eyes in what could as well be another world.

Debt paid, Rorschach shoves both hands into his pockets and walks back the way he came, one foot before the other, through the dark spaces and doorways and alleys and bridges, towards home. It's past midnight, and 1976 is settling into his bones like so much history in reverse, waiting to unfold in all of its horror and splendor and grotesque humanity; he knows Daniel will have waited up.

It's a new year, the crowd noise lifting over the skyline says – and against all odds, they've met it on its own terms, struck the old year's demons, and survived.

.

(c) ricebol 2009