Authors Note: Kinkmeme prompt...Daniel gets turned into a woman, thing is he's already 'with' Rorschach. Freak outs ensue.

Or in my case, horror and angst galore.

Enjoy.

It is not their usual kind of job. There are no thugs, no gang members trailing with pipes, knives or guns. There is no alleyway or warehouse filled to the rafters with despicable things. There are no drug dealers or pimps. Just silence and bleach-clean floors. This is not their kind of job at all.

And that's all Daniel Dreiberg can focus on as his body snaps and breaks around him. As his bones compress under the skin and his face feels like it's being burnt off with acid. Slipping through the cracks in his skull to pool in what's left of his writhing stomach. As a mechanical whine screeches through his ears and into his very soul. No, this was not their usual kind of job. So, perhaps they should have stayed away.

xxx

It had taken them far longer than usual to find a trail. No one was reported missing. There was no surplus in gang-activity, at least none that they could see. There were no mentions in the papers of medical experiments claiming lives either. Of course, they had not expected the latter. No medical facility dumped their lab-rats down back alleys or in the docks.

["No medical experiments this side of the millennium would leave anyone looking like that."]

They had found themselves here entirely by dumb-luck (if you could call trudging by leaky pipes lucky). Daniel had accidentally overheard a conversation on the local street corner. A prostitute and a callboy hissing into the shadows. The source was questionable at best, but it was better than the nothing they had been working with.

["... are you crazy, B.J?"

"Yeah, yeah Mon', but it's the only shot we got--."

"You could just stick to being a fag and not get yourself killed!"

"What's the worst that could happen? He's a doctor, Mon', if he can help—."]

xxx

And God, this hurts.

xxx

"Do you think God gives a damn about the people here?"

The laugh peels through the room like an out of tune violin. Scratches at Nite Owl's ears like knives. Makes him recoil in horror at the sudden animation of a man he had thought was a corpse.

"God hates people like us. People like you, people like me, like your partner who—who I know is crawling around somewhere near here right?"

Eyebrows raised in mockery, in an understanding only another man of questionable ethics can have.

"Watching your back, keeping you safe, like a good boyfriend. What you think we can't spot our own?"

Nite Owl forces himself to focus on the face, to see the eyes and not the body. The body covered in burns and blisters, in slashes and growths. A body that should have been dead, not talking to him like it knew his inner-most secrets.

"But God tells us we're wrong for that, you know. Tells us we're wrong, when He—He made us this way. We're given the wrong bodies and the wrong minds, then left to deal with it. Abandoned because God can't love people like us."

"What-?"

"The Doctor wants to fix us. He understands. He knows we're just in—in the wrong bodies. So... so he's trying to give us different ones. The right ones."

"You don't--."

"We're God's unwanted children, Owl-boy. We'll do anything..."

xxx

Nite Owl thought he'd felt his share of pain. Knife wounds, bullet holes, broken bones, even chemical burns. But none of them ever felt like this. Like blisters on his blood cells burning him from the inside out. Like his eyes were popping inside the orbital bone. Like his spine was being torn from its socket.

Screaming did nothing. Gave no momentary relief. No satisfying ache to the lungs that distracted. Just the entirely unpleasant sensation of swallowing your own blood and vomit back down the wrong way. Made his throat tear into shreds and fall into his gut.

He thought he knew what it felt like to be torn apart. He was wrong.

xxx

"Come to watch the show, baby?"

This voice Nite Owl knew. He'd heard it, for what seemed, a thousand times. On street corners and down seedy back alleys. Always the same obnoxious pride, the same naive blatancy. Only this time the visual did not match.

There was no exaggerated feminine hair here. No makeup. No skirts. No knee-high red boots. Just a lost little boy, swaying in a cell, drunk with something like desperate hope. Lopsided watery grin as eyes stare helplessly at a solitary vent in the ceiling. Hands held wide, welcoming some metaphorical messiah.

"We'll all be better soon."

xxx

The air drummed in a way he had never felt. Pulsed with the anticipation of something that was meant to be wonderful but, only Nite Owl could see, was actually murder. Staining the walls. How was this making them better?

The body beneath his fingers barely weighed a thing. But the fight in it rivalled the ferocity of a caged animal. It screamed and it roared and it begged to be left alone. To be given this chance at freedom. But death was not freedom. It was just another cage.

This was what Nite Owl told himself as he threw the bundle of bones out into the dark. Away from the roaring vents as they snapped open and churned like a dying machine. Cried with the rising bile of whatever had been used to destroy these men. And Nite Owl was now right in the firing line. Too slow to escape the blast. He was engulfed by smoke and acid. Consumed by his own screams.

xxx

They should never have taken this job. They were in over their heads. Should have known from the moment they were led underneath a damn hospital. Should have known from the state of the bodies that this was not something they could handle alone.

They should have gone with Rorschach's plan. To find the source and cut it off. Not try to find the victims. Not try to be the all-encompassing heroes Nite Owl wanted them to be.

Now Nite Owl was going to die. Torn apart and crushed. Mutated and burned. Would there even be anything left? It didn't feel like it as his chest exploded and his fingers snapped where they drove into his palms.

Rorschach would come to find the only thing he had in a pool of fat and sinew on the floor. He was going to be alone and broken. All because Daniel wanted to be the goddamn hero.

God, if he survived this, Rorschach was going to kill him.

There. Done. Yay.

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