Two weeks, four days, three hours and 27 minutes. Rorschach would never admit to knowing that. Knowing how many seconds had passed since he fled. He remembered reading once 'conscience is cowardice'; it made him wonder what just plain cowardice was. Whatever it was, he had been the perfect example for two weeks, four days, three hours and 32 minutes.
Two weeks, four days, three hours and 43 minutes of sleeping in half full skips and eating rotten food. Avoiding what was left of home. Was it even home now? With Daniel—With him—With a woman. Wearing Daniel's clothes. Saying Daniel's words. Feeling Daniel's hurt. Sleeping in Daniel's—in their bed.
Two weeks, four days, three hours, 45 minutes, and the door at Rorschach's fingers finally pops open. The office before him stretches out like a morgue, morbid and dark, with a thousand ended lives staining its pristine vision. And now the horror is forgotten, the sight of bare breasts, of absent pieces, of softened lines and too high voices. Now is not the time.
The cupboards and filing cabinets flounder under his scrutiny. Every item tossed aside, rendered useless on the fake-wood floor. Folders discarded faster and faster as it becomes abundantly clear that nothing here is of use. Nothing here relates to the monstrosity claiming innocent lives, his life, Daniel's.
Two weeks, four days, four hours, 26 minutes and the desk is bare but for one drawer. Locked. The only one that is. That has been. And it takes ten minutes to pry the thing open with a name tag that reads 'Dr. Balcombe' in the poor light from the street below.
Held within are all the words to answer the screams that had not left his ears for two weeks, four days, four hours and 39 minutes. All the words to answer, and all the words to damn as the mess of science-fiction jumbles together, to create one horrifying truth, someone had made the fantasy a reality.
Picking out important things like 'Nanotechnology' and 'gender reassignment programming', even 'aggressive territorial reaction', Rorschach could barely comprehend the disastrous meaning in the endless charts and scribbled notes. Of corrected formulas and omissions of failure, of subject descriptions, of symptom developments (only one he recognised), the gradually rising frustration in the aggravatingly obscure annotations. Deaths numbered but no one named.
Everything damning for the man who would return to his ransacked office and meet unforgiving fists as a letter falls to the ground. Unobtrusive and silent, but not unnoticed. It slides between his fingers and reads like a judges sentence; statement of purpose, of crime committed. Funding retracted. Permission receded. Further experiments forbidden. License threatened. Hypothesis ridiculed, 'Gender Dysphoria' discredited as unfounded conjecture upon un-agreeable subjects.
Reads like radio instructions. Barely makes sense, but two weeks, four days, five hours, and 17 minutes has brought him to a Doctor denied his dreams and mocked for his brilliant insight, who has turned to prey on desires of others. No matter how noble the first intentions, things were different now. Very different now.
Once there might have been empathy for such a plight. With Nite Owl lingering over his shoulder, playing the conscience in the whole person they almost seemed to make. Pointing out the desperate plight of the people listed in the extensive psychiatric notes. Seeing the ignorance of claiming one thing is the same as another, just a symptom of a greater 'disease'. He would have told Rorschach that they were not diseased, and that people just did not understand or accept the difference. He would not have judged with hypocritical indignant anger.
Now, however, it is just Rorschach, and he does not want to understand or empathise, he feels no sympathy for a fool. A fool with permission to use scalpels and pills is no better than a fool on the street with a loaded gun. This fool chose to use his tricks on Daniel; he would see not see mercy tonight.
So two weeks, four days, five hours, and 41 minutes have brought Rorschach here, waiting. Waiting for a Doctor to come and answer for his crimes. For what he has done to Daniel. Rorschach waits for the time when he can face his partner with an answer, a cure, because that is their only hope now. Isn't it?
They couldn't be the same ever again. Not like this. They made sense because they were men. Only another man could understand this. What it is to be what they are. Monsters in the night screaming for vengeance in the black. A woman could not understand that. They were only thieves and harlots. Tempting the monsters in to make them weak. Rorschach could not go on without Daniel. Fighting alone. Not now. Yes, this was the only hope for the both of them.
Two Weeks, four days, seven hours, 32 minutes, and the early morning sun peaks through. A key edges into the door, turning to find it was not needed. In shuffles a Doctor, doughy-eyed from such an early rise or, perhaps, a late turn in. It doesn't really matter as his eyes find the form pulsating at his desk.
Rorschach expects warbled apologies and fearful buckling, a scrabbled escape attempt. He gets an awestruck stare, and dumb silence. It drags, and Rorschach's own surprise keeps him from moving. Keeps him from attacking. It keeps him rooted in his seat until the last word's he'd ever expect to hear tumble forth into the air.
"Is it true? Is she alive?" The Doctor's voice reeks with excitement and when he gets no reply but biting silence he can't seem to hold in his words, "One of the patients said it worked! That your partner's conversion had worked! I never... the first-"
"Very proud moment for you." Rorschach barely manages to hiss, and from any other man it would have been dripping with sarcasm. He had no room for sarcasm two weeks, four days, seven hours and 38 minutes after his partner has been torn apart.
"Well... yes!" The Doctor laughs smugly, but comes to an abrupt stop when Rorschach surges forward over the desk.
"Change him back." He growls, advancing without even the courtesy of pretending to stalk his prey.
The Doctor's face is more than he can stand as it falls into a state of, wisely fearful, incredulity. Mocking the agony he had wrought upon their lives.
"Back? But... why? She's better now."
"Was nothing wrong with him before. Change him back."
"Wh... no. It's impossible." The Doctor tries to rouse some firmness in his voice, it's pathetic, every bit of him is shaking in horror as fingers grind into his shoulder and make him cringe, "She's better now, can't you see?"
"Better?" Rorschach feels like he could scream, for the first time in two weeks, four days, seven hours and forty minutes, he wants to scream for Daniel and he's twitching so badly he can barely force out the words, "Was good. Fine. Decent... Perfect. Didn't need this. Change him back."
The look on the Doctor's face is infuriating as it sneers towards him, challenging his words, daring his fingers to break those bones.
"I made her right. Now she is perfect, now she is good, now she is decent." He pauses to hear the hitching growl, "She's better, the nanites will keep her that way. It's what they were made for. There's no going back."
Rorschach's silence hangs in the air like a cloud, as the truth sifts through. Pieces of paper sliding into place, forming an order of proof to the words spat at his mask. The Doctor babbles about the future of people like him, like others, like Daniel. Of breakthroughs for science, of changing social barriers, of saving lives. But all Rorschach hears is the misplaced comment about his partner, the one person who mattered in this insane and selfish mess. Of how he'd been used and abused, then discarded, in more ways than one.
And the last bit of hope Rorschach had, that he could fix this his way, that he could prove his worth and make it all better fades away with that one passing comment. He can't find a cure. He can't change him back. He's never going to see his Daniel again.
Now Rorschach's fingers tighten and the Doctor goes silent.
"Can't change him back?" He hisses, pulling the man close, "Then what good are you?"
The window shatters under the weight of a half conscious body, sending glass out into the light of dawn in a rainbow of crystallised lies. No one waits to see him die, but a man vomits in an alleyway for two weeks, four days, eight hours and 17 minutes worth of wasted time. And for the first life that laid truly across his hands. There may be no blood, but he smells it under his pores like sulphur in the dirt. Now there really was no hope.
Will link info for Gender Dysphoria at the bottom of my profile page