There's never a rose that grows fairer with time.
Parsley
"Do you ever wonder what you might have done differently?" A reporter asks.
Adrienne looks out the window of Veidt Enterprises, at the city -- the world-- laid out beneath her like a carpet of jewels. "No," She says, and shifts the weight of her son more comfortably on her lap. "No, I never have."
Cameras flash.
Sage
If Laurie was a boy he would be the crimefighter his mother wanted to be, tough and sweet in equal parts, a natural hero. He'd be stronger, taller, happier, prouder, seize his life with two strong, square hands. He would look so much like his father, and he would understand, maybe, the terrible things that men are called upon to do. But there would be this time he and Daniel Dreiberg sit on the couch and pretend to watch a news show, like this: he leans his shoulder against Dan's in the flickering blue light, and Dan gets up and walks away.
Laurent never marries.
Rosemary
Danielle Dreiberg would be cute and sweet and no one would ever let her be Lancelot or King Arthur when she is young. She'd play at being Merlin's owl because she won't be Guinevere, and spoon-feeds the boys epic plots that she ghosts along behind, wings made of towels grasped in her hands. She's never fast enough to follow the boys as they race ahead, engaging in battle the black knights that she invents for them.
There'd be a time later, when she's not quite as young, where she is tough and brave and a man with no face shakes her hand firmly, warrior to warrior. She lies in bed at night, one hand wrapped around the other, and can't shake the feeling that she will never get what she wants. She dreams of children born without faces, without hands, and watches another empty month stain the toilet red.
She sits in her empty house and cries. She will never get what she wants.
Thyme
Kovaks takes a dress and cuts it until it no longer looks like a woman, but there are things that she isn't strong enough to cut away, and the mask, one night, does not protect her. The men hold her down and destroy her in a way they wouldn't have if she'd had a few more inches of height, a few more pounds of flesh.
She holds on to hope –that she's too small, too damaged, too old-- for four months, until relentless nausea convinces her. She curses and she cries and she gets books out from the library. She carries knives now, can't afford long fights. She no longer patrols with Daniel. He's too smart, too kind: too dangerous.
She sees Laurie, the glamorous pampered bitch, cross the street with her atom bomb boyfriend. They glitter like stars, like something brilliant but too far away to give off any warmth. She hates them, the way you hate the places in dreams that you will always wake up from.
She takes more shifts at the factory. She buys an electric heater for her apartment, a subscription to Better Families. She's going to do this right.
She investigates a rash of kidnappings in Harlem. Police won't go, don't care, but someone has to care. She finds an old woman in a basement full of bones, full of tiny skulls, polished pale yellow-white and sealed up tight in pickle jars.
"Don't you understand?" The old woman pleads. She lures the children into her home and then strangles them. Even an old woman is stronger than children. "You have to understand, children grow up." The woman starts to cry, tears and snot shining on her dark, leathery skin. "Children grow up and they turn into us."
Rorschach walks out without a word, and in the darkness she strips the mask off her face like it is choking her. She calls the police from a payphone, and then goes home.
It's Wanda that wraps her hands around her baby boy's neck, and Rorschach that lays the cold body in the trash can.
This world, this empty world, is no place for children.