It was a cold night. The cold hung over your head, followed you closely, and when you stopped, you felt it sway through you, settle, like a curtain. Brygida tried to make sure that her feet didn't stop that night as she walked back to her apartment. And even though she wasn't stopping, she still felt the cool fingers of the night slipping through her muscles, freezing her tendons, making her slower, less agile, more vulnerable...

She quickened her pace. The night would not make her a victim. Too many of her friends had been stupid enough to be caught in a dark alley behind a trashcan. She refused to be that person. Her boots clacked on the sidewalk, giving her some comfort in that strangely silent, cold, creeping night. Their steady rhythm synced up with her heartbeat, and as she moved faster, the drum in her chest fluttereding to keep up. She was frightening herself, but that fear would drive her home safely...

She hoped.

She heard a crash and jumped, her feet stopping, her heart as well as she held her breath...

A small cat walked out from an alley and she sighed, the beat in her chest returning to normal. She smiled and picked the small thing up, cooing to it and petting it's ears. The poor thing only had three paws...

"G-Give me your money..."

She turned, clutching the kitten to her chest. A man stood behind her, slightly crouched, shaking, a knife in his hand and a shine in his eyes. Tears...

He jabbed the knife at her and yelled with a cracked voice, "I said give me your money!"

Brygida set the cat down, and it sauntered off. She put one hand in her pocket, slowly, and the other in front of her, not like that would help her if he went for her with the knife...

"I don't have much money..." She said slowly, "But you can have it..."

"Good." He spat, and she could see his whole body convulse; he was trying to hold back the tears that she saw in his eyes...

"Are you alright...?" She asked, taking the few bills that she had with her and putting them on the sidewalk in front of her.

"... My wife just left me..." The man said, scrambling to pick up the bills.

"I'm so sorry... How about we take that money... And I'll go get a coffee with you, and we can talk about this..."

The man looked up at her, surprised and slightly in shock. Even she could see that he had never mugged anyone before. She was lucky, if he were any more experienced or any less distraught, she would be either dead or raped by now... or both...

"I..."

But he didn't get a chance to finish his sentence. From out of nowhere, a knee smashed into the man's face, and Brygida could see in slow motion his face cracking under the pressure, his right eye bulging out, a couple of teeth breaking. He spun to the floor, crashing into the sidewalk, skidding blood.

Brygida couldn't stop staring at the man... An utter mess one second later. What had done such a terrible thing...?

"Mugging girl. Not good."

She looked up as the voice finally reached her ears and made sense to her. She looked at the new comer... And instantly recoiled. The only things that she saw were those shifting black images on a pure white canvas; a terror; a mask...

The man – she assumed he was a man from the voice – walked over the mugger, kicked him in the ribs when he tried to stand up. The poor guy doubled over in pain, hacking up blood. He pointed his knife at the person towering above him as he stood up, "P-Please... I wasn't trying-"

"Shut up, scum. Tried to hurt girl. Bad."

"No, he wasn't trying to hurt me, really..." Brygida said in a small voice.

But the man didn't hear her. As her mugger slowly backed away, the man drove his fist into his face, and Brygida heard a crack.

He was down.

The man was on top of him, driving his gloved hand further and further into the man's skull. What a sight... What a horror...

"Stop it! Please!" Brygida cried, but again, the man didn't hear her. She finally took the initiative and ran over to them, grabbing the masked man's arm and trying to hold him back from ultimately killing the poor man, who was so hurt, so lost, that he turned to mugging the poorest side of town...

Rorschach felt someone take hold of his arm, and thinking that the man had an accomplice perhaps placed in the shadows, he lashed out... But only after the girl was sprawled on the ground, a bruise on her collarbone, completely knocked out, did he realize that it was her...

Rorschach was in a dilemma. There was the mugger, a wrong doer, still breathing on the sidewalk, bleeding and still alive.

And there was the girl that he had attacked. Knocked out. Glasses cracked. Because of Rorschach.

He stood there and thought for a moment.

"Kill man, leave girl. No. Not good. Leave man, take girl. Man will attack someone else. Not good. Kill man, take girl. Take girl where?

... Daniel. Daniel will know.

Kill man. Take girl to Daniel.

Save day.

... Good deal."

Rorschach took the man's knife. He gurgled in fear, since that was all he could do. Rorschach paid it no mind as he lined up the knife perpendicular with the man's heart... And stabbed.

One less piece of scum for the good people of the world to be afraid of.

He then looked at the girl. Why would she try and help the person who was trying to hurt her...? The only answer that Rorschach could think of was quick acting Stockholm Syndrome. He didn't bother to think of any other possibilities. He walked over to her, picking up the glasses that had been cracked when he hit her... Or maybe when they hit the floor. He tucked them into his jacket pocket. He wrapped his hand around the girl's wrist and pulled her up by her arm, holding her up like a boy with a rag-doll to get a better look at her.

Her head hung limply onto her shoulder, her toes barely brushing the ground. Rorschach "hurm"ed, brushing her hair away from her face to make sure she didn't have any major head injuries.

After another half minute of inspecting, he slung her over his shoulder and began his trek to Daniel's house...
He couldn't help but notice that she smelled like tea...

Brygida's head swam with images in her knocked out state... The face of her 'savior', or, the mask of him, anyway... The poor man with the beaten in face, hopefully he was all right... And she saw what she thought she must've looked like: a crumpled mess on the dirty New York streets.
In her head, she was hating herself for letting the man with the mask get in the way of her helping someone... But at the same time, she couldn't see how she could've stopped him. He came out of nowhere, and put his knee in a 6-foot man's head, while the guy was standing, and then proceeded to beat him lifeless...
She just hoped that no one did anything to her while she was out...

Rorschach arrived at Daniel's house about 10 minutes later. He opened the window and crawled in, throwing the girl's body carelessly onto the couch. He heard footsteps on the stairs and saw the light in the kitchen turn on before seeing the body of his old friend Daniel appear in the living room.

"Hello Daniel." He said.

The man Daniel was unable to speak for a moment. There was a girl. A good-looking girl. On his couch. And Rorschach had brought her. Or so he assumed.

Adjusting his glasses, Daniel said, "... Rorschach... What in the world..."

"Girl was being mugged. Killed man. Girl was knocked out." He replied matter of factly. But he didn't add in that he had knocked her out, nor that he had no idea what to do with her...

Daniel took a deep breath, turning on the light to the living room as he walked over to the two of them. Kneeling in front of the couch, he looked the girl over. There was a dark bruise on her collarbone. It didn't seem to be broken, she was breathing normally. He saw some small indents on the bridge of her nose and frowned.

"Where are her glasses...?" He asked, looking at Rorschach. The vigilante reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of black-framed glasses. The right lens was cracked, and needed to be replaced.

Daniel sighed, rubbing his temples, "And, why did you bring her to me instead of the hospital..?"

Rorschach was silent for a moment... And continued to be silent. The retired Nite Owl decided not to pry as he looked over the girl. He lifted her head up to check for head injuries, checked her vitals, the whole deal. Standing up, he put his hands on his hips, "Well, all in all, she looks alright..."

"Good. Going now. Farewell, Daniel." Rorschach turned to leave.

But Daniel put a hand on his shoulder, "You are not leaving me alone with her. You're the one who saved her, shouldn't you be the first one she sees when she wakes up?"

"Hurm..." Rorschach grunted. He knew Daniel was right, but he did not want to have to deal with her screaming at him when she woke up.

But...

"Fine. Will stay." Rorschach's stubbornness gave way, and he walked into the kitchen to raid Daniel's fridge.

The brown haired man sat down at the end of his couch that wasn't taken up by the unconscious girl and pinched the bridge of his nose. The first time that Rorschach visits him in months, and it's to house a victim of street violence...

Brygida awoke that morning, with the biggest headache that she had had in her life. It hurt so much, that she didn't seem to notice that she was in someone else's house...

Nor that she walked passed that person as she made her way into the kitchen. She finally seemed to notice that something was different, when she heard someone in the kitchen...

It was the masked man.

Completely dumbfounded and convinced that she was out of her mind, Brygida decided to sit on the floor of the kitchen in a fetal position and hold herself until her hallucination was over...

She felt a hand on her back and cried out in fear and surprise, kicking the person in the shin before quickly standing up and facing her alleged attacker...

"Ow..." The man was bent over, holding his leg, "I'm sorry, I must have startled you."

"Who are you...? Where am I...?" She asked, feeling like a cliché damsel in distress, so she decided to add, "If you're kidnapping me I'll kick your ass."

The brown haired man chuckled to himself before standing to his full height and shaking his head, "No. We're not kidnapping you, don't worry. My dear friend Rorschach said that you were knocked out by a mugger and he brought you here instead of leaving you on the street..."

"Rorschach...?" She turned around, the man with the black undulating spots on his mask standing behind her, eating away everything in the refrigerator. She didn't say anything about who specifically had knocked her out. She knew that this Rorschach person was the one who did it, but, he did bring her to...

"I'm sorry," She said, turning back to the brown haired man, "What's your name again...?"

"Daniel. Daniel Dreiberg. And you are?" He replied, extending his hand to her.

She smiled, taking his hand and shaking it, "Brygida Katarzyna. But you can call me Bridget." She felt her face for a moment before looking back up at the blurry face of Daniel, "You wouldn't happen to have seen my glasses anywhere...?"

Daniel gave a side-glance to Rorschach, who seemed to have forgotten that he still had the girl's glasses. He was going to say something to him, but before he could, Rorschach walked out the door.

"Aah..." Daniel put his hand on the small of her back, "I must have misplaced them. Sorry... I promise that I will find them for you, though. But for now," he sat her down in a chair at the table in the middle of the kitchen, "I'll get you something to eat."

She smiled down at the table, feeling completely blind, "Thank you Mr. Dreiberg... I'm sorry that your friend imposed me on you..."

Daniel laughed, "Oh no, not at all. I've been a bit lonely lately, I'm glad to have company." He poured some coffee and stirred it nervously, "You're welcome to stay as long as you want... Since you probably feel kind of weak, and confused... and since you can't seem to see much..."

Brygida laughed, "You don't need to convince me. I would love to stay for a while, really I would. And I take my coffee black, thank you."

Daniel smiled, placing the cup of coffee in front of the girl...

A couple hours passed. Neither of the two seemed to run out of things to say to each other as they sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating three-day-old bread rolls. Brygida thought Daniel Dreiberg a nice person, but he was quite reserved. She could tell by the way he tensed when she talked about one of her ex boyfriends that he was preparing for a sex story. He seemed to be anxious about such things. So she decided to lie off sexual things and instead decided to listen to him.

And after a while, she found the question that she really wanted to ask.

"What makes you so special that Rorschach would decide to bring me to your house instead of the hospital, where they would know what to do to help me?" She asked, stirring her spoon around an empty coffee cup.

He paused for a moment, seemingly thinking about what to say. She could faintly see him move his hand up to fiddle with his glasses as he replied, "Well... Before the Keene Act was passed, let's just say that he and I worked together. I was like..." He tapped his temple; it looked like a nervous habit, "his liaison to the outside world, I guess you could say..."

"You weren't a superhero?" Brygida chewed on the end of the spoon.

"God no..." Daniel replied, looking away, "I could never do something so obviously dangerous... And stupid... And humiliating..."

"You talk as if you've experienced it."

"Rorschach describes things well." Daniel replied matter of factly, looking her in the eye as he gave a smile.

"I believe that..." She licked the coagulated coffee from the dip of the spoon and stood up, "Thank you for the wonderful time, Mr. Dreiberg... I really needed it."

"You're welcome to come back, if you want." He said quickly, standing up as well, "I wouldn't mind more of your company, if you have time..."

"I have all the time in the world." She took a pen from her pocket, took Daniel's hand, and wrote her home phone number down on the back of it, "Call me some time. We should have dinner or something."

Daniel nodded, smiling, "I'd love to."

It was noon. The volatile sun sat high in the sky, laughing at the carnage as solar winds blew its surface into activity, making it even brighter than usual that day. And this did not help Brygida on her way home. Some of the time she even had to close her eyes and grope along the walls for help. A couple of kind people lead her in the direction that she wanted to go, and she finally made it home. She would call Bernard later, tell him what happened. He would understand.

She really wanted her eyes back....

A couple days later, Brygida was still without her glasses. She had visited Daniel again, and he admitted that Rorschach still had her glasses. And due to the violent lifestyle he led, Daniel wasn't sure if they were still more than just a mass of broken glass and banged up metal. Brygida had thanked him and left without another word. Her mother decided that it was finally time to be motherly, and came over to her tiny apartment every morning with something that you may or may not call breakfast.

Because she was so eager to be a mother to her half blind little daughter, Brygida took it as a blessing and choked down what she thought was some kind of mix of fried jelly and raw egg... Her mother was overjoyed that she enjoyed her all-natural cooking. She had always thought that her daughter should be a vegan like she was, but she could never get her into tofu.

Nor did Brygida want to be into tofu. It was decent when the Japanese made it, but her mother made it so badly, that it was even more bland and tasteless than how it came. Equivalent to her mother's cooking: rotten tomatoes. If you left a sliced open tomato out for a day and a half and then ate it, you would swear that Brygida's mother had cooked it just a second ago.

"Why don't you come back and stay with me and your father, my love?" Her mother, Rasia, cooed, stroking her hair.

"You know that I'd rather be alone then with that loaf of a father..." Brygida would say something a lot worse, but she didn't want to upset her mother, who was stressed as it was.

"I'd much rather have you stay with us than alone though, darling..." She sighed, "You know how I worry about you and your... Well, you were always such a sensitive child."

"I'm not a child anymore, mother." She replied with spite, "And even though I am still a little bit afraid of the dark, I'm very happy here... The people are kind and the land lady gave me a break in paying the rent early."

"Than at least let me loan you some money. You look half starved to death."

"Really mother? In case you haven't noticed I'm actually still a little fatty."

She gasped, "Don't you ever talk about yourself like that! You are not fat! You are a beautiful young woman with aspiration and a wonderful mind!"

Brygida let her head fall into her arms on the table she sat at and groaned, "I never said that I was or wasn't any of that..."

Rasia stood up from the table and kissed her daughter's forehead, "Remember that you can call me for anything that you need, peach. Have a good time at work today."

"I will. Bye momma."

"Bye sweetheart!" She blew a last kiss and closed the door.

Brygida quickly ran to her ratty couch and threw herself onto it, snuggling into it and soon falling asleep. She didn't want to tell her mom that she had taken a couple of days off of work. Rasia would insist that she gave her daughter money, but money was never the issue. She didn't want her mother's money; it made her feel like a child.

She just thanked God that Bernard was a nice person...