Part 1: Origin

Everything returns to the origin.

There is no such thing as success. There is only failure: failure that comes immediately or failure that comes later. All we can do is strive to hold off failure until the quantum mechanics of the issue change enough to invalidate the problem, replacing it with with another challenge to be met. Another problem to be solved. Another chance to delay failure for another day.

In 1967, Feynman said there was a time when newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. He also said that no one understands quantum mechanics.

I understand. But perhaps that is because I also understand the mechanic.

Feynman didn't.

Laurie didn't look up from the TV as Dan walked back into the living room. "Who was it?" she asked absently.

Dan could still hear that smooth voice on the phone, soft and firm and confident, but somehow a little darker, changed from how it had been before. "Oz — Adrian," he corrected himself.

Short-cropped dark hair slid over Laurie's shoulders as her head whipped around, her blue eyes staring at him. "What?" she gasped, kicking her feet down from where they'd been propped on the coffee table. She rose, a little less fluidly than she might have five years ago, and slid into a turn like an ice skater, her socks giving her little traction on the hardwood floor. "That asshole called here?"

Obviously, Dan thought, though he bit back the response. He pulled off his glasses, found the cloth in his pocket, and started polishing the lenses. There was a new surgical process that could have fixed his need for glasses, but he'd refused to entertain the notion. Soon, he'd have no choice. Soon, glasses would be a thing of the past.

The surgery had been pioneered by Veidt Medical Technologies.

"He wants to take us to dinner. He's back in the country," he said, hearing the sharper German edge in his memory. Adrian Veidt was American through-and-through. Ozymandias, though, was the product of his German heritage. The German accent had come through clearly during the brief, courteous phone call.

Laurie's temper exploded. She twisted with a hiss of wool socks on wood and paced as though the brownstone couldn't contain her sudden energy flare. Dan watched, and not just because he was watching for danger signs. She truly was beautiful, even ten pounds heavier, her hair cut in a short bob. She was wearing one of Dan's button-down shirts and leggings, not dressed to go out, but he could see inside her the shadow of the Silk Spectre.

Her energy wasn't infinite, though — not like the energy that powered their cars and televisions and ovens and even Archie, now that Dan had refitted the engines and weapons systems. As it wound down, she turned, silhouetted beautifully against the window, midday blue sky bringing with it a shiver of memory: Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue skin.

"Well?" she demanded. "You told him to fuck off, right?"

"I told him I'd ask you."

Her eyes flashed. "You what?" she demanded, gaping at him.

He took a deep breath, trying to feel anything but sadness and the weight of years and nightmares. His hands should have been dripping with blood — his blood, Rorschach's blood, the blood of fifteen million people who died for a secret that burned inside him — but they were dry. "I want to go."

That silenced her. She lifted a hand slowly, covering her mouth in an unconscious gesture. She was like that. Over the last five years, he'd watched her slowly learn to come to terms with her own feelings. She had lived her whole life for others: first for her mother, and then for Jon Osterman. She'd tried doing that for Dan, but he hadn't allowed it — there were still dents in the walls from her throwing plates and punches — but eventually, she'd come into her own.

"Fine," she finally said, and threw down the TV remote. It bounced on the sofa cushion and clattered onto the floor under the coffee table. She turned and headed for their bedroom, stopping only when she reached the doorway to throw back, "Fuck you, too."

The door slammed, echoing in the spacious living room, and Dan wondered why it didn't hurt as much as it should have.

Ozymandias. Visionary. Self-sacrificing hero. The charismatic force behind the independent, contentious group of crime fighting vigilantes. The leader who held them together, at times through sheer willpower. Nothing less than Ozymandias himself could have leashed Rorschach and the Comedian. Nothing less than Ozymandias could have understood and communicated with the towering intellect that was Dr. Manhattan. Nothing less than Ozymandias could have inspired Silk Spectre and Nite Owl to reach farther and higher than their predecessors had ever dreamed.

Ozymandias was an unreachable ideal. If Dr. Manhattan was likened to a god, Ozymandias was a god — at least, to them.

And Ozymandias' mirror? Adrian Veidt. Philanthropist and humanitarian. Entrepreneur and marketing genius. Athlete and gymnast. Secular savior of the world, a scientist without parallel. Only Adrian Veidt could have built up a fortune most people couldn't even imagine, and then dedicated every last dime to developing the power that had freed the world from fossil fuels. Only Adrian Veidt could have given that power away for free, and then rebuilt his fortune on an even more staggering scale.

Adrian Veidt was the worst mass murderer in history.

Dan saw them both as he approached the table. The white tablecloth glowed as it fluttered in the breeze that whipped across the top of the skyscraper. Infinity pools lapped against the horizon to either side of the balcony, reflecting only starlight. This was the highest building in the city. Dan knew that the sprawl of city lights below would look like a sea of stars, as though they were dining in space.

The roof was paved with sandstone brick. Palm trees lined the path from the glass elevator to the balcony on the east side of the building. The sacred east. The rising sun.

Adrian Veidt was a scientist. Ozymandias had the soul of a pagan.

Adrian was standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the balcony, blond hair still straight and free of any hint of the grey that showed at Dan's own temples. His blue eyes were so clear, Dan could see them even in the darkness, as though they glowed from within. That's how it always had been.

He was still tall and slender, unbent by the years that Dan was feeling heavily in his own joints, legacy of too many fights and falls. And Dan couldn't quite hide the smile that touched his lips — a smile that brought with it the acid burn of betrayal deep in his gut. The words just slipped out, unbidden. "You're still wearing purple."

Adrian's own lips curved up as he looked down, lashes lowering for a moment. He spread his hands enough that the purple sleeves of his blazer tugged up, showing the white cuffs of his dress shirt at his wrists. His cufflinks gleamed gold in the faint light.

Instead of addressing Dan's observation, he said, "Thank you for coming. I'm so sorry Laurie couldn't make it."

It was a polite fiction, and they both knew it, but Dan had been the one to initiate the lie. Compared to some of the lies that hung heavy between them, it was practically truth. So he just said, "Some other time," and closed the last five yards between them. "She goes by Sandra now. Sandra Hollis. Technically, I'm Sam Hollis."

"Sam and Sandra Hollis," Adrian said with a gentle smile, extending his hand. "Forgive me, but I'll always think of you as Daniel."

"That's... that's fine."

The last time they'd touched, Dan had ripped off his mask. Adrian had been masked as Ozymandias, but it was Adrian — the flawed man — who had looked out from under that perfect fall of blond hair. It was Adrian's blood that had stained Dan's hands. It was Adrian's eyes that had met Dan's gaze so calmly, accepting whatever justice Dan wished to impose, watching as Dan finally turned away and brought Laurie out of the place where the old world had died. The power in that encounter had belonged to Dan, who had never before been able to defeat Ozymandias or Adrian Veidt.

This time, without their masks, the power was Adrian's. Dan felt it as soon as their hands clasped. Adrian didn't try to make anything more of it — didn't try to pull Dan into an embrace, like he had the other times they'd met unmasked. He just looked into Dan's eyes, his smile serene on the outside, but troubled somewhere below. Dan could see a shadow on him, and a chill ran up his spine as he realized it was the shadow of the past, but not a shadow of years.

"God, Adrian," he said softly as they both let their joined hands fall. Dan blinked a couple of times and wanted to clean his glasses, because what he was seeing couldn't be real. Adrian had always been beautiful. Once, Dan had joked that if they were going to make bare-faced action figures of any of them, it had damned well better be Ozymandias, because he was the pretty one. But time didn't stop for anyone, except maybe for Jon.

And now, Adrian.

Adrian looked down again, lifting his hand, spreading his fingers. They were the hands of a twenty-year-old. Maybe twenty-five. "Oh, yes. That," he said softly, and favored Dan with another smile. "Science progresses, my friend. I've made some breakthroughs in genetic engineering. But let's leave that for after dinner. How is Sandra?" he asked, touching Dan's arm to lead him up the stairs.

The balcony was cantilevered off the building, and the table was close to the edge, but Dan found the height exhilarating. The view was every bit as spectacular as he'd expected. It engaged his attention as a white-clad servant cleared away the third place-setting, opposite Dan, leaving Adrian sitting to Dan's right.

Always the optimist, Dan thought, looking at the now-empty tablecloth. It was natural that Adrian would have ordered a third place set, despite Dan telling him Laurie wasn't available tonight.

Other servants came forward, one carrying their first course, another to pour the wine, making Dan a little uncomfortable with the ostentation. Though he wasn't exactly poor, his only real concession to wealth — other than his whole life as Nite Owl — was the maid that came by twice a week to clean. Laurie had talked about hiring someone full-time to handle cooking and cleaning — a nanny, she'd said, back when they talked about having kids. But the kids had never happened and Dan had become something of a decent cook for those nights when they didn't want to go out to dinner or bring in take-out.

Dan took a deep breath and a fortifying sip of his wine as he gathered his thoughts. "She's good," he finally said. "You know, keeping busy."

"Oh? What's she doing, these days?" Adrian asked politely, his sibilants coming out a bit clipped. German accent. Ozymandias' accent.

The question was innocent, even expected, but Dan didn't have an answer. Laurie didn't really do much of anything. Dan did a little day trading with a discretionary fund he kept separate from his professionally managed investments. He worked in his own lab — nothing like Adrian's, of course, but not too shabby — on new tools and modifications to his gear and to Archimedes. And, of course, sometimes, he went out late at night, and relived those past glories.

Silk Spectre came with him, those nights. But otherwise, she... well, she didn't have much of her own life. She read; she watched TV; she sometimes went out shopping. But except for those nights when she put on her ever-tightening costume and went out late in the night... that was all.

"Oh, you know. This and that," Dan said, stabbing his fork into his salad hard enough to clink the tines against the shallow dish. "Her mother passed two years ago."

"I know," Adrian said, his voice going even softer, and his lashes swept low again. "Please give Sandra my sympathies," he said sincerely, as though one death — the death of the Silk Spectre that he'd never even known, as Ozymandias — affected him.

Fifteen million, Dan thought.

"I will," he lied. But when he met Adrian's eyes and managed to smile and say, "Thank you," that part wasn't a lie at all.

Dinner was fantastic.

Dan expected nothing less. It started with what Adrian said were blue cheese gougères (which translated to some sort of fluffy pastry) followed by some sort of cream soup too subtle for Dan's taste buds to distinguish. He would've called the entrée beef stew, but it was as far from his beef stew — made generally by throwing things in a crock pot and hoping he remembered them the next day — as you could get. Plus, it was tofu... tofu that tasted better than beef, which was, in Dan's opinion, a scientific impossibility. Dessert was some sort of coffee and chocolate pudding with cherries soaked in port.

It was a far cry from his usual Friday night dinner at the Italian place a few blocks from home. He'd felt guilty, right up until the main course; after that, he was too distracted by the food to feel guilty at all. Laurie hadn't wanted to come; it had been her decision, despite Dan's urging.

To make it worse, Adrian was at his most charming, asking questions that never ventured too close to personal — never getting too close to the bloody history that lay between them like a bottomless moat.

One of the everpresent, silent servants cleared away his dessert plate and replaced it with a cup of coffee. The cream on top of the coffee was swirled artfully into a spiral galaxy shape, with a cross in the middle, topped with a loop. He recalled it was an ankh, but couldn't remember what it meant.

Adrian cupped his hands around his own coffee, looking at the surface with his startling blue eyes. The faintest line showed between his brows. "I'm sorry I waited five years."

Dan felt a stab of guilt that was entirely unwarranted. He sipped his coffee, watching the ankh deform as the liquid shifted in the mug. "It's probably for the better," he admitted sheepishly. Five years hadn't been long enough for Laurie. Dan wasn't even sure that it was long enough for himself.

"I have a confession. I didn't only invite you here to catch up on old times," Adrian said, raising his eyes to meet Dan's.

Here it is, Dan thought, bracing himself. Another chill swept down his spine, this one riding a wave of adrenaline, and his senses went into full alert. The windy, high night seemed to fade into the background as he became sharply aware of Adrian, of the servants, of the edge of the balcony and anything at hand that could be a weapon. The sugar bowl. Teaspoons. The furniture. Even the purple cloth napkin.

Most days, Dan Dreiberg felt like... oh, like an electrician, or maybe an accountant or clerk. Most days, Dan Dreiberg was anything but a warrior. A killer.

Adrian watched him, and Dan knew that his thoughts were written across his face, even though he hadn't even blinked. Damn Adrian's perceptiveness. What had Rorschach said about how Adrian had manipulated Jon? Dan couldn't remember, but it seemed immensely important at that moment.

"Daniel," Adrian began, breaking eye contact to look into his coffee mug again. He hadn't sipped it; the ankh, dark coffee and light foam, still floated undisturbed on the surface. "I've broken the code."

Silence fell between them. The servants had left the roof; Dan was entirely focused on Adrian. The sole threat. His friend. "The code?" Dan asked into that silence.

"Life." Adrian looked back up at him, the glow in his eyes even more brilliant now. "Life, Daniel."

"Life," Dan said softly, not even realizing he'd spoken until the word slipped out. He leaned forward, looking at Adrian's eyes. They were clear and perfect, the lashes long and thick, the skin free of any blemish or wrinkle. And his hands... The long fingers were smooth, complexion perfect. "Youth."

"Youth," Adrian agreed, rising. He left behind his coffee as he paced with slow, measured steps to the edge of the balcony. The night wind toyed with his hair and tugged at his jacket, brushing it aside to show the curve of one hip before he tamed the cloth, buttoning the jacket with quick, economical movements. He raised his voice just enough for Dan to hear him over the wind. "But is it truly life, Dan? Or is it a death sentence for us all?"

Dan couldn't help but look down at his hands. Age had made his skin thicker. He was long past the sunny side of forty. He'd been thinking that it was time to pass on his mask, to hand over the keys to Archie, to retire into lonely obscurity. Or maybe he could write his memoirs, like Hollis had. I was there the day genocide secretly destroyed everything I loved, he thought recklessly, picturing the words typed on a page, only they were printed not in ink but in blood.

His laugh, when it came, sounded broken. "You're asking me about life and death? You?"

For one moment, Adrian bowed his head, light playing over his blond hair. Then he turned, first looking over his shoulder, before his body moved in two slow, graceful steps that put his heels against the very edge of the balcony. There was no railing; there wasn't even a lip or curb. "Who else would I ask, Dan?"

When Dan came home, Laurie wasn't in bed. She wasn't even upstairs; he found her downstairs in the lab, tilting a chair back, one foot braced against the edge of Dan's workbench. There was a half-empty bottle of vodka on the bench, and a glass in her hand.

She didn't look back as he came down the stairs. Her gaze was fixed on Archimedes, parked on the support struts, recharge hoses still engaged.

"You're back early," she said, though it wasn't true. It was nearly midnight.

It was a night for lies, apparently.

"We had a lot of catching up," Dan said, finding himself suddenly reluctant to share what he'd learned. He told himself that if Laurie was drunk, she wouldn't remember it anyway, so there was no point in talking to her about it.

"Great. You and your best fucking friend, Hitler's heir," she said bluntly, tossing her head back as she swallowed the contents of her glass without pause. She leaned forward enough to refill it, splashing some onto the workbench.

"That's not fair," he protested.

"Not fair?" she demanded, getting to her feet ungracefully, tipping the chair over. The sound of it falling was loud, echoing in the concrete-floored laboratory. "Not fair is killing fifteen fucking million people, Dan! Not fair is making those poor people suffer with cancer! Not fucking fair is driving Jon out of the galaxy."

Dan took a deep breath and held up his hands, striving to keep his voice calm and even, wondering not for the first time how he'd ended up as the peacemaker of the Watchmen. "He's more than just that man, Laurie —"

"Oh, yeah?" She swallowed her drink, lip curling in distaste not for the alcohol's sharp bite but obviously for the subject of their discussion. "Maybe to you. Not to me. Never to me, Dan."

"Laurie," he began, but he knew it was pointless. When she was in this mood, trying to stop her would be like trying to stop a natural disaster with his bare hands. So he got out of the way and kept his mouth shut as she stomped past him and up the stairs. The slam of the basement door was deafening.

Sighing, he went to go clean up his workbench.

"So, on first glimpse, immortality is great. I mean, eternal youth," Dan corrected himself, pacing the length of the maintenance pit. Archimedes' underbelly hung low overhead, and he had to duck every time he passed the open hatch that covered the flamethrower's refueling port. He still had to use fossil fuels for that, though he'd been considering modifying it for natural gas instead. The petroleum-based mixture he used was hard to come by, these days.

"It's not real immortality," he continued, reaching up to trail his fingers along the lower edge of one engine exhaust port as he turned. "You can still die — it just won't be from old age. Or from any of the diseases that come with old age, which is the problem."

Sighing, he resumed his pacing, heading fore, listening to how the quality of his voice changed as he passed beneath Archimedes again. "The world's already overpopulated. I don't remember the figures he gave, but even if we had a small increase in annual childbirths, we'd be looking at mass starvation inside ten years."

He stopped at the steps that led down into the maintenance pit. He turned and sat down, then lay back against the edge of the steps, elbows propped up, head tilted back. He could just see the gleam of Archie's forward viewports. "Then we're talking sterilization. Licenses to even have kids. Forced abortions. God knows what would happen to 'illegal' kids who were born in secret and then discovered."

As another sigh died out, silence fell in the laboratory. If he concentrated, he could hear the exhaust fans in the ceiling, the flow of water through the pipes overhead, even the faint crackle of power from the energy conduits that replaced the old Romex wiring that once fed household outlets.

No voice answered him.

These days, it seemed he spent more time talking to Archimedes than to Laurie.

He took off his glasses and the world went fuzzy — fuzzier than it had just five years ago. Then, without his optics, he'd still been able to see Adrian's face, up close, bloodied from his punches. Now, he knew that if he went upstairs and kissed Laurie — a prospect fraught with hazard unless she'd passed out from the vodka — she'd be a blur, even from only an inch away.

"He did it to himself," Dan went on as he polished his glasses, looking up at the big, matte curve of Archie's hull. "The first human test subject. Locked himself in his laboratory for eight months. Told his staff he'd found a gifted plastic surgeon."

He breathed on the lenses, fogging them, and wiped the moisture away, before he slipped them back on. He'd always worn glasses. Even if he turned the clock forty years back, he'd still need them.

"He offered me the treatment," he said, his voice going soft and low. "Laurie, too. But..."

He sighed, and looked up at Archimedes, hearing his sigh echo through the high-ceilinged lab. "He told me it's my decision, what he does with this discovery. If he releases it to the world or burns his research, it's up to me."

Closing his eyes, he could see clearly Adrian Veidt's youthful beauty, like it was laser-etched in his memory.

"God help me," he whispered.

There was no answer.