Overtone

"An additional, usually subsidiary and implicit meaning or quality."

Part of him had forgotten everything, long ago. Of course, some vague memories remained that haunted him in the early hours of the morning, after he'd crawled into his decrepit apartment and just before he fell asleep. His sleep was usually dreamless, too, a blank emptiness that passed by without remark, but sometimes, that changed. Sometimes, he would wake up again with the unfamiliar feeling of unease. His rational mind had no problem squaring that away as indigestion from whatever swill he had forced down his throat the last time he ate, or complaints from a protesting body he had worked beyond its capacity, but it was still there. Logic couldn't get rid of it. All he could do was wait for nightfall, when everything buried underneath his true face was washed away in justice and blood.

Still, he had to do something with himself during the day, so after a few wasted months of aimlessly wandering the city in his disguise, he made his first sign. After all, he saw what was coming – he knew that before long, the city would drown in its filth and there would be no one left to save it. Why not let everyone know now, give fair warning to the few people still good enough to be worthy of rescue? Of course, with the sign came the obligation to display it. At first, he spent less than an hour a day parading the street with his decree, convincing himself he had better things to do with his time. As weeks passed, however, whatever money he salvaged from dead scum's pockets stopped being enough to pay his exorbitant rent, and the less time spent within those constricting four walls, the better. At least on the streets, sin was masked by a thin layer of smog and the noise of traffic. In his apartment, there was no escape from screaming woman, crying children, and noisy thumps as bodies hit the floor.

Yes… he tended to prefer being outside.

He usually stuck to the same streets while out in his disguise. They were routine, familiar, something he could move to the back of his mind while he entertained much more valuable thoughts. Despite his disinterest, after a few days he found himself recognizing some faces: the same crowd of Knot Tops every day (he never found them after night fell, and he couldn't leap on them in broad daylight, best to bide his time), two men and three women who ate at the Gunga Diner every day, a young girl making the perilous walk home from school by herself. Something in that little girl stirred up that unpleasant feeling, tightened his throat, and to ease the pounding in his head, some days he followed her home. She never took this well, looked over her shoulder at him as if she expected him to attack her at any minute. He didn't mind. It made her walk faster.

All this became standard procedure – he spent afternoons displaying his message across the same areas of the city, and his nights cleaning up the murderers and whores who hadn't believed him.

One afternoon, he stood at the edge of a street corner, his knuckles white from throttling his sign. At the end of the night, he'd stood on a rooftop and watched the sun rise, shaking from head to toe with the adrenaline that came with smashing someone's head against a wall and watching him bleed out into the dirt. Too keyed up to even try sleeping, he had slipped into his apartment long enough to put on his disguise, grab the sign, and head out again. By now, his body was doing its best to feel exhausted, but he refused to let something so trivial as comfort win out over doing his duty.

People passed by and stared at him openly, frowning at his tattered clothes, his smell, the bags he could feel hanging under his eyes. He didn't care. It was all part of the disguise. He would shed it again within a few hours.

The crosswalk sign across the street changed to flash the little white man, and around him, a sea of people began to come and go. He looked straight ahead, staring blindly at the oncoming traffic and letting his mind go blank. Just a few more hours until twilight, when he could sneak off to the alley, retrieve his second-best suit, and become what he was meant to be.

He did not realize he had been staring at someone until he was ten feet away. He did that often, locked onto someone's face subconsciously, only coming to when they eyed him suspiciously as they walked by. The man already looked uncomfortable, glanced away and pushed his glasses further up his hooked nose. Hunching his shoulders, he readjusted the Gunga take-out bag in the crook of his arm and nibbled on his lip a little, very obviously wishing that he would just turn his gaze away. Usually, he would have gone back to staring at nothing almost immediately, his eyes shifting over each person before settling at a point high above their heads. This person, however, held him captive, more with his discomfort than anything else. Feather strands of brown hair fell in his face, and then, for a brief second, their eyes met.

Brown. Light brown, like empty beer bottles sitting on the table next to cereal bowls, or a flying metal bean. Warm like handshakes at sunup, congratulatory and accepting.

Daniel.

It couldn't be Daniel. As soon as he could, he swallowed the horrible memories that flooded up and threatened to choke him, pushing the thought away. It could not be him. For one, he was too fat – his stomach swelled over his pants, and his face was too full, too round. For another, when had he ever seen that look of defeat on Daniel's face, in his posture? Never. The Nite Owl he knew never slouched, never gave up like this flabby failure obviously had…

But it was him. As he got closer, moving as if in slow motion along the crosswalk, he began to pick out specific details in his face. No one could ever mistake that beak-like nose or his chin, his most prominent features… Daniel. This was what happened to him.

Finally, Daniel reached his side of the street, still doing his best to ignore the piercing glare that refused to leave him. Tentatively, he stopped, looking down at his silent accuser, and they stared at each other for a moment, brown searching brown for something he couldn't put a name to. The moment broke when Daniel stuck his free hand into his pocket, pulled out a fistful of bills and change, and held it out between them expectantly, a look of strained goodness on his face.

"Hey, man," he said, in those same tones he would use when he was trying to be comforting and hadn't known what to say. Automatically, refusing to look away from Daniel's face, he stuck out his hand and let him drop the money, closing his fist tight against it. It had to be at least twenty dollars – a lot of money to have lying around in anyone's pocket. "Tough economy. I hope things, you know, get better."

With a weak smile and a last spineless shrug, Daniel sidestepped around him and moved off down the street. Before long, he was alone again, standing on a street corner, holding his sign in one hand and Daniel's money in the other.

Daniel.

Fat Daniel, with broken shoulders and a slumping spine, reduced to handing out money to strangers in a desperate effort to pretend he was still helping someone, still affecting New York in some small way.

Not Daniel.

He ignored how his head throbbed, how his chest hurt as if it were going to burst – he really needed to watch what he ate, couldn't eradicate sin if he was doubled over in pain – and shoved all of it back into whatever hidden place it had come from. All the smiles, the echoing laughter, all the protestations of partnership and two men believing they could change a city together. He put it back where he belonged.

Opening his fist, he let the wadded clump of money, given to him by someone who did not exist anymore, fall to the ground. It sat there, quivering in the breeze, as Rorschach walked away.

Well. It's been right around a year – a year and three or four days. Can't say I don't owe you guys something, for waiting so long… and I guess "sorry" doesn't cut it? Still, I am sorry, I didn't intend to stay away for so long. This is going to be finished, though. I have all the words picked out, the ideas laid down. This will be finished.

I've set up a chronology for "Words" in terms of where everything fits in the Watchmen timeline – needless to say, this is after the Keene Act was passed, and the only chapter that will be. I promised myself I wasn't going to touch the Keene Act beyond a certain chapter, but a prompt from my writing exercise book just stuck with me… and this is what happened. It has been a year, so I'm a bit out of practice, and I loaned my copy of Watchmen to a friend – please forgive me for any mistakes I make with our boys. Correct them gently if you find any!