If anyone thought that the Keene Act would stop him, they needed to think again. It would take a lot more than words, a meaningless law to stop him from doing anything, much less something so important. Rorschach was doing the right thing, and a backwards senator who didn't know what the real world was like wasn't enough to convince him to stop.
Just because the law was passed, that didn't change anything. Just because there were people out there who agreed with it, that didn't change anything. Those people didn't know either, hadn't seen all he had seen. There were few who really understood and the fact that he was the only one of the group he had once belonged to not to quit only proved that.
His partnership with Nite Owl had once been a great thing, had been the closest he had come to companionship, but that had fallen apart because the other man did not understand things like he did. He had been foolish to think that people with such different experiences and views of the world could really be friends, and it was weakness that made him lonely when Nite Owl began spending less and less time patrolling with him and confiding in him when they were a part of the Crimebusters together.
Joining the group was supposed to help the two of them get more done, have more resources, but soon they were being assigned different patrol shifts and not long after that, Daniel did not seek him out as often until it felt like their partnership had been completely forgotten. Whatever the cause of the distance was remained a mystery, but Rorschach did not bother asking and did not bother trying to find out. There were more important things to worry about than one man.
And then came that case, that final case that cemented everything. The day his old self died to be replaced by someone new, someone better, someone who knew more than anyone what had to be done. He never would have been able to share that transformation with anyone, so it was for the better that he was already alone. People noticed the change in him but he did not care what they thought or what they said.
When the Keene Act was passed, there was never a question of whether or not he would listen to it. He had hoped that at least some of his comrades would feel the same way, but every last one of them gave it up. Only the Comedian, a man he had never met but always admired, remained, working in government service, but Rorschach could not do something like that.
As much as he admired the Comedian, there was a flaw in working with a government that would ban their work otherwise, and applying to be one of their agents was the last thing he wanted to do. Working on the streets, answering only to himself and what he knew needed to be done- these were the only methods that would work, and he knew every trick in the book. Evading capture was nothing.
The real blow came when Adrian Veidt was elected president. He had never been one of Rorschach's favorite people, but he had been good at what he did and it was a surprise when he retired from being Ozymandias. With him in office, there should have been changes and the Keene Act should have been repealed. If anyone in politics would understand, it should have been him.
Instead, things only got worse under him. He went public, saying that he didn't agree with a law banning masked adventurers while one was kept in government employee, and that there would no longer be any need for that. The Comedian was retired and the statement given in the papers, about how pleased he was to have some time for himself and how he realized now how foolish it had all been, sounded so little like him that Rorschach was sure it had been fabricated. Wherever the man was now, it was doubtful that he was happy about his situation, but he did not continue operating on his own, and some of Rorschach's admiration for him dwindled.
Was there really no one in the world who shared his convictions? Was he always meant to be alone in everything? He knew that it was a small price to pay for what he was accomplishing, but he was still so weak sometimes that he felt lonely. That weakness was pushed aside as often as he could manage.
They had all been next to worthless for the cause. Ozymandias had proved himself as such with retirement, and even more so with his poor presidential decisions. Always clinging to his arm, the Silk Spectre was no better and had never been interested in the right thing. Just like her mother before her, it was all about appearance. Hollis Mason had already quit, and his successor had abandoned Rorschach for reasons unknown. Captain Metropolis was not so bad, having kept going even after people said he'd be better off retired, but everyone knew the rumors about his character.
Now the Comedian had been retired and had not fought it publicly, and had abandoned the practice altogether. If even he could give up so easily, what hope could Rorschach have for anyone? The world was moving toward peace, so the news reports said, but his city felt far from peaceful. While Adrian concerned himself with foreign affairs, his own home was falling apart piece by piece, and nobody else seemed to notice.
If the world was becoming a better place, as so many claimed it was, then he had yet to see that and doubted this "better place" was a place he wanted to live in. They had no reason to be proud of their better place, anyway, when there were so few actually working to improve. It was all so pathetic, but he supposed that that laziness was a part of human nature that many never overcame, and those who did almost always succumbed to it again.
But he had fought the urges to succumb to it until they had disappeared entirely, and he would not be one of the ones that fell. He would be the only one left picking up the pieces of the world, but that was a job that he had accepted long ago and it was a job he would never walk out on.