Author's Note: If there was any fandom I thought I'd never write for, it's probably this one... And yet I ended up with this. Oh ficmuse, you are a strange one.
Someone is shuffling around in the kitchen.
No time for the full costume; Daniel grabs the goggles and the utility knife off the belt and ghosts down the hall, spine tingling and nerves lit up and every sense on a hair-trigger. At the kitchen door he pulls the goggles on, takes a silent breath, peeks around the doorframe and sees a familiar hat at the stove...
"Rorschach?"
"Hey," says Rorschach in his dark, gravelly voice. "Thought you'd still be up."
"What on earth are you doing here?" Nite Owl asks, though the smell of bacon makes it rather obvious.
"Got nothing at my place," Rorschach says. "Found a lead in the Rourke case. Thought you ought to know."
Dan takes the goggles off and turns on the kitchen light; he's never getting back to sleep, he knows that much already. "And it couldn't wait till tomorrow?"
A pause, while Rorschach pokes at the bacon. "Maybe. Needed something to eat. Thanks for the food." And casually, "You ought to get some new locks in here."
"What, for my refrigerator?" asks Dan. He's lived in New York for a while now, but he hasn't heard of anyone going that far yet...
"Druggies," Rorschach explains. "Break in for alcohol and food."
"Ah."
After the fourth time Rorschach broke in Dan did get new locks, but not the right kind. So Rorschach said, eating the leftover anchovy pizza.
"What are the right kind, then?" Dan asks, and sadly watches the last slice disappear beneath Rorschach's mask.
"I know a man," says Rorschach. "He'll give you a discount."
"And give you an extra key?"
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Hurm. Good pizza," Rorschach says, "except for the anchovies."
For all their little quirks they make a halfway decent team; sometimes Nite Owl thinks of himself as the brains and Rorschach as the brawn, which is a little unfair to Rorschach, and thus remains a private observation. Rorschach is an odd bird, with the late-night visits and all ("I think it's his way of trying to be friends," Daniel explains earnestly to Dr. Manhattan, who only looks blue at him and then turns his attention back to Ozymandias), but the two of them aren't that different at heart, just wanting to make the world a better place in their own ways.
So Nite Owl thinks.
Then comes the case with the little girl and the dogs, and it would be hard on anyone but it breaks something in Rorschach, who was already cracked in ways Nite Owl is only beginning to suspect. They argue - at least, Nite Owl shouts a lot; Rorschach doesn't say much of anything, except "Too soft," and then he leaves.
When he's gone Daniel throws his mask at the ship and swears.
He gets on the subway and rides it half the night, and he can finally admit to himself that this case has broken him too, a little bit. He watches the walls slide by, the subway's light a thin veil against rushing darkness, and thinks over and over again, What good are we? What are we doing? Chasing after purse-snatchers and the mob, and we can't even rescue one little girl and take her home...
It's not right, nothing is right, not the world and not what happens to little kids and not Rorschach, either, whatever he thinks. Dan can't even look at the other people in the car; eventually he gets off and walks around Manhattan kicking at trash. He looks up and there are no stars, no birds but rustling pigeons, no signs from the heavens.
But then, Daniel wasn't really expecting any.
"Is it that awful, that we make our own right?" he asks the pigeons. "Can't it be enough that we're trying?"
On the way home he picks up pizza and only gets anchovies on half.
The sex is absolutely dreadful, but how do you say that to a man like Rorschach? And at least it's an excuse to throw him in the shower.
Dan comes to consider it an act of public charity; without Dan's bathroom, Rorschach would undoubtedly become the next Typhoid Mary, and costumed heroes have a bad enough reputation already.
Rorschach cleans up fairly well, too; beneath the coat there's a good set of wiry muscle that Daniel envies. Dan's been letting himself go since he quit. He thinks occasionally of going to a gym, but a single ornithologist looks silly trying for a six-pack.
The idea of being gym-buddies with Rorschach is one of the most terrifying Dan's ever come up with, but he ends up asking once, at random and desperately, "Do you work out anywhere? At a gym, that is."
"Hn. Don't go to gyms," Rorschach says. "Homosexual meeting-places."
"Ah. Right. Mhm - could you just move a little bit more - ahh, yes, that's better..."
Sex is supposed to be great exercise, but if so one of them must be doing it wrong and Daniel doesn't think it's him.
"God, I can't believe you still talk to him," Laurie says - she and Dan meet for coffee every so often, with an artificial casualness not unlike Rorschach's pantry-raids. "He gives me the heebie-jeebies - he has the most medieval views about women, it's creepy, I don't even feel comfortable being in the same city."
"Er, well," Daniel says, uncomfortably aware of how right she is. "I suppose it's habit - we were partners, after all..."
"But you quit," says Laurie pointedly. "And good thing, too. Dan, you're too nice, you shouldn't be dealing with Rorschach's shit anymore. He's just going to drag you down with him -"
Lord, but Laurie has grown up beautiful: her mother's features strengthened and refined, passionate, expressive, not about to put up with Daniel's waffling bullshit. Sometimes he thinks he could fall in love with her.
He hopes that Jon treats her well, but Jon is as unreachable as Rorschach in his own way.
"- and he's infectious," Laurie is saying. "You spend too much time around him and you start thinking like him, looking at everyone the way he does - paranoid, violent - he's like a disease. Look," she says, her coffee cold and forgotten, "I understand if you don't want to turn him in, but you should be avoiding him like the plague, and I mean that literally."
Dan thinks he could fall in love with her, but she can be terribly annoying at times. In a lovable way. "I don't really see him that often," he hedges, "I would hardly say he's a friend - more of a comrade, if I may use the term without seeming too red..."
"I promise I won't tell Jon on you," she says, smiling, and they let the matter drop to talk politics instead.
After that he really doesn't see Rorschach for a long time.
They have to return to New York anyway to get their new identities. Laurie goes out to see if there's anything she can do for the half-ruined city; Dan goes to his house and finds it still together and lies down on his bed.
He's cold and tired and hopelessly in love with Laurie, and he doesn't feel right with himself, and he hopes that if he falls asleep he'll dream about old days, good days, simple days that were never simple but have nothing on the last twenty-four hours.
Instead he opens his eyes to darkness and sees ink on white, smells beans out of a can barely warmed up.
Daniel really hates canned beans, but he has four or five cans in the pantry anyway. One less now.
"You took the locks in the kitchen off," Rorschach says.
"Yes, well," Dan says, "I suppose that anyone desperate enough to break in here for food is welcome to it."
"Hn. Too soft," Rorschach says, but his voice could be disappointed or amused. Dan could never tell. "Not safe. Anyone could get in."
"So far, only you," says Nite Owl.