Blue energy suddenly rocketed through the room and Rorschach was promptly thrown on his face. He stood and spun without grace, the air tingling sharply. Laurie, the usual one, brunette and crudely dressed, was hacking and running for the kitchen. Daniel was sitting on the floor, hunting for his glasses with a disgruntled mumbling.
His hands kept skating over the rims. Rorschach shifted uncomfortably remembering when Daniel had lost his goggles on the viscous floor of a slaughterhouse. Slaking his dark gloves in blood and gore. He hadn't helped him then either. Veidt is standing bemused beside Manhattan, cast in his glow but for all the world untouched by envy or wind. He lowered a hand to Daniel who took it gratefully. Rorschach grated his teeth at the way Veidt's other hand lingered over his neck.
Daniel doesn't notice, smiling in that shy way of his whenever he is the object of the mogul's attention. Dr. Manhattan simply looked around the room with that thousand yard stare. A hand smacked the center of his back and Rorschach jerks his hands up defensively. The Comedian laughs like the grate of metal he should have been listening for.
"That was a pretty fucking funny, Inky," he laughed and steadied a cigar in order to light it.
"I'm glad you're all here," Daniel said even though he looked embarrassed to be the only one out of uniform. He fingered his sweater awkwardly, shifting his glasses by tipping his nose. Rorschach knew he would be more comfortable with a guard at his side but he doesn't move. Why comfort someone who left the streets. He won't allow himself to think that he had been left. Rorschach isn't hurt by emotions. It is Rorschach who matters now.
Laurie came back into the room blowing hair out of her eyes at the same time that the Others emerge at the bottom of the stairs. They moved in tandem like soldiers but with the frantic edge of fugitive.
Face to face with her blond twin, Laurie stared for a long moment and then made a noise of appreciation.
" I knew I'd look good with blond hair."
The Comedian laughed with unusual warmth and Dan started to do that awkward hand motion when the world violates his ability to be a good host.
"You're all here", said blond Laurel. The goggles remain on. The Other Rorschach fixed his glasses ruefully.
"I think," the doppelganger murmured ( and his voice was gruff with obvious exhaustion, an easy and humiliating tell) " that we should discuss the issue of names."
"Call me J and call him W," says blond Laurel gesturing between herself and the Other.
Rorschach feels a sick weight at the implication of that letter.
Laurie snorted. " Ok, I get the J for our last name. But W? If you're supposed to be one of us, I can just guess who you are if we're going by height." She glanced over at Rorschach smugly
The Other looked up at her through his glasses.
"I'm asking for the respect of privacy. I've come to expect that from you."
She looked floored, turning to look at Manhattan with her eyebrows making jagged confused marks on her suddenly knitted forehead. She gave W a hard look but managed to soldier through obvious curiosity.
"Ok…Well… J? You ready to explain what the fuck is going on? Like why you're wearing Dan's goggles?"
J lifted the goggles off. Her eyes were blank, like worn marbles. Laurie jerked back toward Manhattan.
"Without them, I can't see well enough to fight. These give me a mathematical readout. And as for what happened to Dan that's why we're here."
As one they turned to Veidt. W took a defensive position edged at J's side. She settled her shoulders aggressively. He could see it now. They were partners. A shock of nausea roiled through him. Had he replaced Daniel so quickly? With this crippled valkyrie ?
"We've come to stop you." Said W without passion.
Veidt stiffened minutely but his eyes were calm with a false appearance of openness. " I don't know what youre talking about," he said genially in his best politician's voice. The prime prophet of this feeble and phallic new world. A handsome aesthetic filled with glass. Rorschach watched a mirrored revulsion appear on W's strangely human face.
"There's no use defending or deflecting," J said with sudden distaste. "Your plan works for about a month before it all goes to hell. We aren't here to debate it with you. Just to warn you. The only people left were us and our men for a few months and now it's just us. "
Veidt smiled smugly to cover the sudden steel in his eyes. "You have to be mistaken. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm trying to save the world with renewable energy."
" You depopulate the entire planet. We know this intimately," said W, with a forced void of emotion.
" I'd think if I were responsible for something like that, you'd be attacking me now." Veidt said with his damnable arrogance. But there was a swift change in him. There was recognition on his face. He had the look of an unearthed liar. A normal man would be ringing his hands.
" We would," J said lightly, " but you've been punished enough in our world. We wouldn't be able to compete."
That statement shifted the smile right off Veidt's face.
" I think youd better explain." Daniel said softly. They both jump visibly at his voice. " Also if you could tag on why you keep being shocked to see me, that'd be great."
J and W looked at each other and then back at Daniel.
" Do you have a VHS player?" asked J and W glared at her.
" He does. I already told you."
" Well I wasn't going to just assume, I haven't seen this house in a long time," she threw back, taking a tape out of W's offering hand.
" You two seem pretty relaxed," Laurie pointed out quizzically, voicing Rorschach's thoughts.
" You go through an apocalypse together, kind of makes former arguments pretty meaningless." J said as Daniel dug through tapes covered in his own scrawled penmanship to find the machine.
" What are you showing us?" asked Veidt, his curiosity clearly piqued. Next to him the Comedian has been shifting uncomfortably. He had seemed well prepared for an apocalypse. He was looking at Laurie and J. Back and forth like a man possessed. Rorschach should have noticed sooner.
But he was shifting too. He didn't like this. This acute absence of Daniel. Wearing his goggles. Forgetting the details of his house. And the way they looked at him. Like an image submitted to legend, no longer a person expected. Was he dead? He closed his eyes, fiercely safe behind his face. It wouldn't do to grieve. Not when Daniel stood across the room- or rather kneeled awkwardly foraging through hoarded media.
" Security footage from our eastern bunker. See you implemented your 'brilliant'," she quirks her fingers sarcastically at Veidt, " plan on January 1st. Theres peace until Febaruary 3rd when one of your labs explodes. On February 5th , America's nuclear missiles are unleashed all at once, obliterating China. The Russians retaliate. At the same time, our power plants blow. The majority of the East Coast is consumed by the ocean. All the survivors of New York die."
Veidt's eyes flared minutely. " How does it happen? Military intervention? A terrorist strike?"
" You want to say, 'how did I lose control of the situation?'" J sneered, her long ponytail jogging with her shaking head. " Just listen, we have time to play this all out." She continued, interrupting his attempt to speak. He quaked with barely restrained frustration. He had always commanded constant attention. And these two strangers looked down on him.
"The fallout makes the opposite of nuclear winter. It's hotter than hell, the atmosphere erodes. Nothing grows. Then when the population tries to move to the Northern areas, viruses start spreading. Everyone fucking dies. Or if they don't die, they wander around rabid, eating each other. By the time its over, its June and the population of earth is down to about 2,000. Only a third of them with us. The others are slaves to the cities. We live underground, shooting satellites and making raids. At least we were. And now on to you."
She looked at Daniel and her voice shifted from subdued rage to misery.
" It all came down to you."
" Me?!" Daniel's eyes were enormous behind his glasses. "What did I do?"
" In our world, you aren't you anymore. And you're directly responsible for a good deal of that destruction. Right behind this asshole." She gestured at Veidt again. The angles of his face shifted. He looked murderous. At least Rorschach can appreciate that kind of honesty.
Daniel sat heavily in an armchair. W stared at him, he knows the look, it's one he has felt crest his features before. Grief. It must be. That unmentionable thing. No.
" He took you." J said with bile, pointing at Veidt like a stab. "A year and a half before he started mobilizing, he said he wanted to use you to immunize people against cancer or some bullshit. You apparently have really malleable genes. Which I wouldn't buy if I hadn't seen it for myself."
" Super," Daniel snapped, working to avoid everyone's eyes. Veidt was looking at him curiosity. It hadn't occurred to him. How far in the future was this macabre ending?
" But it was all to buy our silence. We figured out it was happening and tried to confront him. But we were too fucking late." W shifted in annoyance. It was comforting. With all those changes, swears would always disturb him.
"After 'it' happened, he bartered your return to us. Jon had already left earth and the two of us were ready to go to any paper we could think of. He kept you until he was sure we wouldn't say anything. But he didn't stay to watch over the program. He went over to broker peace with Russia, which would have been great, if he had any ability to assess character."
Veidt starts to speak but W cuts him. " Dr. Lucchesi. He's currently running your biology lab. He decides that Daniel would make an excellent candidate for DNA resequencing. He starts the experiments while you assume that Daniel is in comfort."
Finally some emotion, his eyes flared with hatred and Rorschach finally felt a kinship.
"Most of these involve the removal of his hands and feet." Daniel wrapped a hand around his wrist. He looked up at Veidt. Guilt was creeping onto Veidt's face. He probably cant feel it truly, the idea of responsibility foreign to him.
"They take his eyes. Trying to see how much a relatively gentle person can endure before madness. Take him apart."
His strange doppelganger met his eyes. He had the sudden thought that they are both remembering Grice. The idea of Daniel, suffering while this imposter did nothing made his hands shake.
"So I'm insane and crippled in the future. Well, shit," Daniel said morosely. Manhattan and Veidt have twin looks of confusion on their faces. Neither had apparently seen any of this coming. All that godsight, useless.
"You're more than that…and less" W said softly and J took up at his pause. " The genetic manipulation worked. You aren't human anymore. You're. Jesus. C]I can't describe it. But whatever you are now, it was you who set off the missiles under Lucchesi's orders. The viruses were all your idea after you'd killed him. It gave you plenty of time to dissect someone." She shrugs at Veidt with pure contempt.
Veidt and Daniel locked eyes. They looked mutually betrayed.
J walked past Daniel and plucks the VCR. She moved with a surprising amount of ease. He could see why he might accept her help. It would demand a great deal of warrior to fight blind. Especially a little girl who relied on sarcasm and long stretches of skin, ordered by passionless legacy.
The television flickered to life. It's low budget footage. Clearly a personal security camera. Little better than the black and white static of a bank. It was a skewed angle of a desert. Suddenly people started running past the camera, covered in blood with their mouths are agape in horror. After them people with glazed horrible masks of ruined flesh chased them with hobbling twisted limbs. Following the crowd at a distance was a tall thin man dressed in black leather. He was walking with a strange lilting gait, as if he could hear music. His head was an effigy, some sort of purple cat with a leering mouth and empty unfocused eyes. At his neck was the white bow of a priest, speckled darkly. He walked disjointedly and suddenly stopped. A chill runs up Rorschach's spine. He didn't think he could feel that way anymore.
That slump was familiar. Daniel would let his shoulders bow that way when he was desperately tired.
It craned its horrible enormous head toward the camera and approached. Its long fingered hands slid over the screen and it erupted into the complain of static.
Daniel's face was white with Laurie's rivaling for bloodlessness. At some point during the video, she had sat down next to him. They shared the chair like frightened children.
" That's me?" whispers Daniel. J and W say nothing, watching him soleumnly.
" You called those your walking clothes. We thought you were some drifter until you blew up the Western compound. Left us with only 100 people. Most of the time you look like that."
She gestured at the still rolling tape. The date had shifted. Its obviously Daniel this time.
And yet.
He was dressed in black still but desperately thin, even more skeletal than before. He was somehow taller and his arms were too long. He was staring bare faced at the camera. His eyes were a strange color in the faded film. He had symmetrical thick scars across his handsome face. He lifted both his absurd nightmarish hands and laid them across his face. His gloves were Rorschach's mask. One horrible eye peeked out between them, his face sliced in half with a horrible red ribbon of a smile.
Rorschach jerked violently. W looked at him passively. Rorschach knew the doppelganger could see his panic but he couldn't subdue it. He had never seen that look on Daniel's face. Only on his own, in the shining metal of a butcher's blade. In the eyes of a monster.
"Why am I doing that?" whispered Daniel, his eyes enormous. His beloved human eyes with their sensitive wet light and sweet aversion to horror. Rorschach wished suddenly that he weren't so proud. He would like to feel like that unbowed shoulder under his hand right now.
" To fuck with us. " J said with barely concealed contempt. " You preferred to pick us off one at a time rather than just send in a battalion to kill us all. A lot of people went crazy and killed themselves seeing you standing down there."
Daniel covered his mouth, looking ill.
"Know it wasn't really you, Daniel." W said softly and J's head swung around. They locked stares for a second, before W shrugged in apparent surrender.
"That's why we need your help."
"Sure." Daniel said looking like a kicked dog.
" We need you to look-" J elbowed him sharply and W knocks her off balance in response. These small tusslings seemed normal for them.
" I don't agree, " snapped J. " It'll be too easy for him to track. We should ask Jon."
" Prejudices are well founded but there's no one here that is both resourceful and trustworthy."
" I think your own prejudices are well founded."
" I don't want to mention Mars."
The two stared at each other before J rolled her head back with a heavy sigh. She then leaned forward and poked him in the center of his chest.
" You better be ready to shoot when you have to. No more hesitating. I don't care what you think. We can't manage a rescue like that again."
Rorschach felt a distinct unease at both their strange camaraderie and the obvious masked disagreement hanging between them. It felt as old as the schism between Laurie and himself. Complete and uncompromising poles.
Moving as one once again, they turned to the now loosely united group.
" We need you to watch our daughter." Beside him the Comedian rocked in surprise. But not with laughter. Strange.
"He's going to follow us and we can't have him finding her."
" What the fuck? We did not- no fucking way!?" broke in Laurie staring at the pair. Jon blinked, clearly enjoying a very human befuddlement.
J laughed throatily.
" Um. No. This might answer your questions though." J whistled sharply and a little girl raced up from underneath Rorschach's cocked elbow. His instincts were clearly off. He hadn't gauged either stranger in the tunnels. He blamed Daniel. It was as easy as usual.
About nine, she was dressed in old ripped jeans and leather, like her guardians. She had brown skin and enormous dark eyes. An American flag was sewn in her coat and her hat was actually an old helmet layered with stickers and bright bottle caps. Rorschach recognized it from Daniel's ship. He had seen it once tucked behind the first aid kit. It had been dusty and plain then. She immediately squeezed herself between the two doppelgangers nervously and cringed when she saw Daniel.
Daniel looked like he'd been punched in the stomach.
" That isn't the bad man, Gracie. That's our friend. Be kind." W said with authority and she reached out a hand tentatively from the safety of their legs. Daniel shook it very gently and her face softened a little. Gracie looked at Laurie and smiled widely. She was missing a front tooth. Laurie smiled back bashfully. She was clearly not as at ease with children as Daniel was. He could only imagine a child's upbringing between himself and that foolish girl.
Daniel looks up at J.
" Is there a reason you disagreed on letting me meet her? You know…besides the obvious." He smiled disarmingly.
" His decisions involving you often aren't rational," she says ruefully in a low voice. " He thinks you're still in there. I don't. I know you have to die. We haven't agreed on that yet. I'm sorry. When you meet him, youll understand. "
"He's coming?" asked the Comedian, startling Rorschach again from over his shoulder. J looked at him and smiled with surprising tenderness. Rorschach could feel the surprise radiating off him. Laurie's interactions with the Comedian had been hostile after the first and final Watchmen meeting. This affection was out of character. Rorchach again wished for Daniel's shoulder. W met his eyes and inclined his head slightly. Rorschach sheared his eyes away from him. He didn't like that stare. It knew him, it knew her, it knew Grice, it lost their partner. And it still smiled.
" You better fucking believe it," J said as W covered the little girl's ears with what looked like a well used chagrin.