Daniel trudged dejectedly through the rain. Whereas he might once have fussed over trying to stay as dry as possible; huddling up inside the shelter of his coat's upturned collar, he now just let it happen. He just let the rain beat down on his unprotected nape and trickle uncomfortably under his collar to soak his shoulders. He might once have darted from the shelter of one shop awning to another, ducking under the lottery of fat droplets wrung from their eaves. Now he just numbly shuffled home, wading through the gutters without any attempt to step around or over the filthy lakes spawning on the streets. He was making no effort to evade the inevitable.
He cared less these days. Who could care for a lie? There was nothing real left in this world anymore, not since Adrian neutered it, fixing the world by cutting chunks away with surgical coldness. It was a house of cards, and he was, frustratingly, not a part of the grand master plan. He was only allowed to carry the weight of his memories by Adrian's 'benevolence', no doubt some self-justifying 'charity' that helped the snake convince himself he wasn't some neo-Hitler arch-villain. Dan's academic peers, colleagues and the students all talked so emphatically about how the world had changed for the better, how much more unified the world was and how brightly the future shone. Knowing sickened Dan to the pit of his stomach, and he envied ignorant bliss. It was all a mass-marketed conspiracy, placating the masses with pre-processed 'information' and spin. This wasn't real. This wasn't America anymore. It infuriated him and made his thoughts all the more bitter, muttered in his mind's ear with a low, gravelly tone.
He had taken his partner's death hard, and in the end, Laurie was young and had no time for the regrets of a man past his prime. She was full of the energy of youth and she wanted to move forwards in her brave, new world, but Dan dwelt heavily on the past, unwilling or unable to finally let go. She had moved on and he had been left behind to think about how little he had accomplished in his life. He had done good things, upheld justice and fought for the weak, but he had quit and what did that count for now anyway? Adrian was running for President and the world had fallen under the yoke of his lies. The sum result of Daniel Dreiberg's existence lined a few bookshelves with essays and articles on raptors, and a volume on the environmental resource partitioning between African owl species.
Now that he was alone and jaded, his waistline was growing along with his helpless sense of despair. His doctor had given him the new anti-depressant drug that most of New York was swallowing to cope with the loss of millions, but when Dan had seen the purple 'V' in the corner of the label he had flushed the pills in paranoid disgust. Later that day he had been overcome with thoughts about Adrian putting pacifying chemicals in the water supply to make sure everyone complied, hooking his claws into every facet of life. Dan had cried for hours.
He wiped at the rain clouding his glasses. The symmetrical red butterfly of blood sprayed across the fresh Antarctic snow and the fedora discarded in the midst of it all would stay in his mind's eye forever. It was certainly a wound which remained fresh in his dreams.
Dan reached the set of rain-slicked, stone steps which led up to his front door and fished clumsily with numbed hands for his keys. He looked at it, knowing that this key would lurk in his pocket for years with no hungry ex-partner necessitating new locks, and entered his house. He hung his coat up and sighed, watching it drip dark spots on the carpet without caring about mildew. Then he heard a noise.
The threat of persons unknown lurking in his home brought him back to the here and now, dormant instincts honed years ago reawakening in a time of need. He grabbed a steel piling offcut from beside the door, essentially junk moved from the dusty basement to the front door when the post-Squid looters were rife. He hefted its reassuring weight and crept deeper into his home, following the sounds to the kitchen.
A hollow grating sound. A spoon being scraped up a tin can's corrugated inner. The rustling of an unruly newspaper page being turned. A man is sitting at his kitchen table. The face is instantly recognisable, impossible, and is trained on the sprawled pages of the infamous issues of the New Frontiersman that went to press in the weeks after the Squid.
"If I'd have known it would correct your liberal taste in newspapers, I'd have died sooner." That gravelly tone. A sense of humour drier than Death Valley.
It wasn't funny.
It wasn't possible.
The steel bar thudded to the floor. Dan hadn't felt it slip from his hand.
His late partner stood, and was talking, but the words were falling on deafened ears. Dan was frozen, shocked and deadened. This wasn't possible.
The scream echoed as fresh as if it had happened yesterday, vehemently begging for death as that powerful little frame quaked with rage. 'Do it!' Then in a horrifying flash of red, it had been over. Completely and finally over after that long slide into the darkness. Rorschach had been circling the drain ever since that night in 1975 when everything changed, and finally, someone stronger than Dan had intervened. Only they'd pushed him over the precipice, rather than pulling him back.
This couldn't be happening. He'd seen Rorschach die, turned into nothing more than a bloody smear in an Antarctic blizzard. Rorschach couldn't be in his kitchen, eating his beans, criticising his taste in newspapers and passing judgement on his political leanings, as if nothing had happened. It just wasn't possible.
Unless he really shouldn't have flushed those pills. Or there really was something in the water. He was going mad, he must be. Rorschach was dead. Rorschach was dead, but his guilt-ridden, failing mind had resurrected him. He was seeing Rorschach in his kitchen because he couldn't face the fact that in all those years after the Roche case, he had never reached out, or said something, or done anything to help the man who had been his partner. He had done nothing, impotently letting it all happen. Not until after Rorschach had been de-atomised and completely destroyed had he cried out against it, screaming 'No' only when it was far, far too late.
"Daniel?" The tone was demanding and impatient, as though his speechlessness was unwarranted and offensive. How dare Dan not listen to the dead man talk?
He could barely breathe, let alone form a coherent sentence. In the confines of his kitchen it only took a few clumsy steps forwards before his outstretched hand alighted on Rorschach's shoulder. There was no stained trench coat, purple pinstripes or pale silk scarf; the shorter man was lost in the expanse of one of Dan's own sweaters. However, under that thin layer of brown wool the shoulder was as solid as he'd always remember it being.
The blue eyes that replaced the familiar swirls of black and white threw him an aggressive, scowling warning about personal boundaries. Just as Rorschach always would, when Dan would get carried away and overstep that invisible line in the sand between the amicable handshake or pat on the back after a job well done, and everything beyond. Dan couldn't find it in himself to be sorry this time. Not when Rorschach's narrow, sinewy shoulder was firm and real under his hand again, after he'd seen him turned inside-out in a spray of red gore against the bleached backdrop of snow that hid no agonizing detail. He could feel the lump in his throat growing, choking his breaths short, and his eyes welling up.
Dan grabbed his shorter partner by both shoulders and pulled him into a bear-hug, consequences like broken bones be damned. Rorschach was stunned into rigidity just long enough for Dan to wrap both arms around him, using his great size advantage to the full. His pinned partner started to thrash and Dan broke, sobbing uncontrollably into the bright red mess of hair.
"Daniel! Let me go!" Rorschach roared.
"Shut up! I watched you die!"
"Daniel. Let me go, you're hurting me!"
He dropped him and they both staggered back, Dan's horrified mind burned by the thought of crushing his partner back out of existence. Rorschach caught himself against the counter, cringing in agony, and as Dan watched him try to pace away the pain, he could tell by the way he held his spine that it was an upper back or shoulder wound.
"I'm, I'm sorry. I didn't realise. I didn't think." Dan wiped his tear-streaked face and drew in to examine his injury. "What is it? Knifewound?" His voice wavered.
"No." Rorschach skirted away, keeping his back to the wall. "Not a wound. Needs your… expertise, but not a wound."
"My expertise?" Dan stared in confusion, hoping for more information than that, but Rorschach had never been forthcoming.
The redhead took a deep breath and carefully lifted the sweater over his head. Before Dan could register seeing so much of his secretive partner's skin as he stood topless in his kitchen, Rorschach turned around.
Dan knew what they were instantly. Even if anyone else would have had difficulty reconciling the twisted, fingered appendages with what they most resembled, an ornithologist, or possibly a poultry chef, wouldn't. It was like looking at a thanksgiving turkey, plucked featherless and anatomical, or a baby pigeon on the verge of growing its down. As Dan got closer and started to look at the impossible limbs sprouting from Rorschach's shoulders as an ornithologist, he could see that the freckles which spread from the man's back onto the flesh of the wings weren't all freckles. Some were arranged in pterylae-like rows, and sure enough, those 'freckles' were actually feather follicles. Tufts of gingery down, still wrapped in their protective keratinous sheaths, pushed against the skin from within like a hundred needles and puckered it like gooseflesh.
They were wings. They were small, but they were wings. Dan reached out and touched them, eager to know if they contained the correct bones and muscles for a working wing, or if they were vestigial lumps of skin. Rorschach hissed in obvious discomfort, and the wing stretched and pivoted in his fingers as the limb tried to twist out of his touch.
"How do you make them grow?"
"What?"
"Wings. How do you make wings grow? What do birds eat to grow wings?"
"It depends on the species, but all young birds have high energy requirements when they are growing. What the hell is going on, Rorschach?"
He winced again. "Not Rorschach, Daniel… Walter."
"What do you mean 'not Rorschach'?"
"Different now. Have a different task now. New case. New purpose."
"And that would be…?"
"Adrian."