Dan awoke on the couch but still felt physically and mentally drained of all energy. The windows outside were still dark, but he was uncomfortably warm and felt the urge to just move around. He pulled his arm gently from over Laurie's waist and stood up, making sure he didn't wake her. Even though he was naked, he walked silently out of the living room and headed toward his basement.

The air was cold and the concrete stairs even colder, but Dan was refreshed and awakened by the sudden change in temperature. The basement smelled of dust and tarp and metal and…him. Rorschach. Dan could barely pick it up, just a twinge at the back of his throat from the aftershave that Rorschach wore when he hadn't showered. It had never really gone out of the basement, and Dan suspected that his partner had visited the place even when they had arguments, the worst of them being after the Blaire Roche case.

Dan remembered showing up at the fire shortly after it started. He was alarmed to find Rorschach standing nearby with his hands in his pockets, just staring at the burning building as if watching a parade or a fireworks show. What had followed after Dan dragged his violent partner into the Owlship had been their loudest and most painful altercation to date. But somehow, Rorschach hadn't completely snapped, and after spending several days in Dan's home and being practically force-fed, the vigilante had regained most of his composure.

The brown-haired man sighed tiredly and opened the closet where he kept his old costume. He lifted his goggles down and put them on, immediately able to see in the darkness that was not illuminated by the open door at the top of the stairs. Archimedes sat underneath the dusty tarp, untouched for years, and Dan felt guilty for not keeping it up to check. He felt guilty for everything lately.

He felt almost delirious as he looked through the darkness and saw everything in clear detail, just like the good old days. Maybe that guy on the TV wasn't Rorschach. Maybe he was a look-alike who had been foolish enough to get himself caught at Moloch's apartment and arrested. For all Dan knew, Rorschach could have been standing just behind Archie, or even crouching on top of it, laughing silently at the flabby naked man wearing the goggles.

Dan didn't know if his thoughts about Rorschach were humorous questions brought on by his fatigue or if they were wishes he was trying to hide from himself. Either way, he felt empty and alone, even when Laurie called his name and emerged at the top of the stairs.

"You stupid son of a bitch!" Dan roared once he had dragged Rorschach, almost literally kicking and screaming, into the Owlship. "What the hell did you do?!"

"Justice, Daniel!" Rorschach bellowed in return.

Dan slammed Archie's hatch shut and rounded on his partner. "That's not justice! That's fucking murder! You never kill people, Rorschach, you leave them beaten and humiliated out on the sidewalk, handcuffed to streetlamps, for the police to find!"

Rorschach tore his fedora off and threw it to the floor in a rage, screaming, "You think those traitors would punish him?! They didn't do a thing to find that little girl when she went missing, because her parents had no money to offer for rewards! I was the one who had to find her! I was the one!!"

Dan had never felt such hot, solid, pulsing fury beating through his body before in his life. He tore the cowl back from his head and pulled his goggles up, allowing himself to breathe lest he suffocate under his hood. "So you burn the fucking house down?! You're just like him, Rorschach!"

Something that was part animal and part demon came tearing out of Rorschach's mouth and he flew at Dan like a thing possessed. Luckily, Nite Owl's reflexes were still as tightly wound as wire and he sidestepped the smaller man in the cramped quarters and slammed his elbow in between Rorschach's shoulder blades. The blow didn't seem to cause him any pain, only pushed him forward further than he had intended, and then the masked man lunged again.

The air was crushed out of Dan's lungs when his back hit Archie's metal floor and Rorschach tumbled down on top of him. Gloved hands grabbed his neck and attempted to smash his head into the metal, but Dan pulled every muscle and tendon in his neck taut and managed to reduce it to a mild blow. He blocked Rorschach's punch and twisted the man's arm painfully so that he cried out and paused for a fraction of a second. In that brief window of opportunity, Dan hurled his body upward and used all of his weight to throw Rorschach to the ground.

"Rorschach!" Daniel roared, blocking the frenzied fists as best he could while doing his best not to get bucked off by the shorter man. "Rorschach, for the love of God, stop!!"

The vigilante didn't seem to hear him, but kept thrashing as dangerously as ever. Something came over Dan and in one swift movement, he grasped Rorschach's wrists in both of his hands as tightly as he could hold and slammed them to the floor on either side of the masked head. Rorschach bellowed out of pure animalistic rage and Dan knew that if his mouth had been uncovered, he would have spit at him.

"Rorschach, you're not like him!" A pause in the thrashing, and then electric silence buzzed around them. Dan gasped for air and used his chance to stammer, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. You just--you scared the fucking shit out of me, man. I even put my costume on and took Archie out to look for you. Then I saw the fire. Rorschach, what happened?"

The mask shifted slightly where Rorschach's mouth was and the inkblots warped angrily under the white latex. "Monster, Daniel. He was a monster. I couldn't let him live."

Dan threw his head back and loosened his grip on Rorschach's wrists. "A monster, but you could have turned him in. Retribution isn't what we're about."

Not surprisingly to Dan, Rorschach took advantage of the loosened grip and tore his wrists free. "This is beyond anything we're about, Daniel. Junkies don't slaughter children and feed them to dogs!"

There was a THUD, and then Dan found himself staring at Archie's ceiling and then into the swirling mass of black and white that was Rorschach's face. He expected the man to knock him out, maybe even to even kill him, and he closed his eyes and waited. But there was nothing. The weight on his torso lifted and he heard Rorschach scuffle away, and then he opened his eyes. His head swam from the meeting with the floor, but he pushed himself up and looked through blurry vision at the huddled mass that was his ex-partner.

Dan felt a terrible, ice cold crevice open up between his shoulders and continue down his spine when he heard the whimpers. At first he couldn't move, but when he heard sniffling as well, he floated up because his body was not his anymore. His hands rested on Rorschach's shoulders and forcefully turned him around.

The mask was pushed up to the bridge of his nose, and tears were streaming from beneath the fabric to mingle with the sweat that was already there. He bit into his gloved finger and held back a choked cry, and it was then that Dan reached out and pulled the mask all the way back. His heart stopped.

The last thing in the world he expected was a shock of red hair and bloodshot brown eyes underneath that mask. Rorschach screwed his face up and turned away. "Don't look at me," he growled.

Dan grabbed the man's thin face a little too forcefully, digging his thumbs into the sharp cheekbones just beneath his eyes. "You fucking look at me, Rorschach."

He thought he was going to receive a headbutt straight to the nose, but Rorschach sat still, maybe even a little shocked, and stared at Dan through eyes that were still flooded with angry tears, tears that had been held in for decades until he thought his ducts had withered completely. Dan took in his appearance and was astounded at how average he looked, how utterly uninteresting. True, his hair was vibrant copper against his pale forehead and freckled cheekbones, but there were not blazing green eyes or violent scars like Dan had imagined. Rorschach was, for all he knew, the quiet guy who lived down the street.

"Don't you do this to me, man. Don't you pull this shit. Not now. You are not going to start killing every single person who robs a bank or shoots up heroin because you think it's your civic duty. I'm not going to have you go bat-shit crazy on me." Dan was intimidated by his own voice, but he couldn't hold it back anymore. Rorschach had been deteriorating ever since the Keene Act was passed, and now he had to be the one to keep the dam from breaking completely.

"I need you."

Rorschach froze in his subdued sniffling and stared at Dan upon hearing the words. There was something in his eyes, something buried deep, deep under his pupils and coiled around the optic nerve, that sparked to life. And suddenly Dan was cradling the shaking, sobbing mess that had become Rorschach, the most feared being to walk the nighttime streets of New York. The redhead bellowed incomprehensible things into Dan's shoulder, squeezing his forearms until knuckles were white and Dan's skin cried out in agony. And Dan let him cry until he was all used up, not saying a word as Rorschach poured out everything that had been plaguing his lonely mind for decades. It was an epiphany, and he could feel in the air that something tremendous had occurred in Archie's modest quarters.

Before Rorschach fainted from exhaustion, he met Dan's eyes, face all blotchy and wet, and whispered three words: "Don't leave me."

Dan squeezed his hand and nodded at his partner, his brother, his best friend. "I won't."