A/N: THANKYOU SILVERFOX! The second you pointed that out my brain clicked. This thing had been bugging me so much, you have no idea! You're a life saver. I couldn't put my finger on it until you came along! /gives you a million cookies
EDITTED AND IMPROVED
For the first day, Daniel sits at the top of the stairs. She won't come any further. Says she can't. Just hovers in the basement doorway. Sometimes she leaves. Comes back with coffee. Places it at the foot of the steps. Rorschach replaces the cup when it is empty.
The blood that had smeared the walls and stained the floors above, keeps him locked here. Lost in the recesses of his guilty conscience and festering sense of horror. The darkness, the shadows of Archimedes and Nite Owl are safe. Are detached from the world upstairs. A world stealing his mind away. Unable to comprehend, still, that Daniel survived this.
They do this for days. In their separate, but equally frightening worlds. His filled with the scent of fear and rot, Kevlar and oil. Hers, by the second day, drips with bleach and brushes. She scrubs so frantically. Sometimes it's louder than the machines he's torturing back into life.
He learns to keep making noise. Extended bouts of silence have her calling into the dark with an edge of panic in her voice. It makes his whole body quake with misery and guilt. No words will convince her he won't leave again, so these bangs and clangs are all he has to offer.
She never says a word otherwise. When standing in the doorway. It seems impossible for her to articulate a thought. It is for both of them. It makes him wonder if Daniel really pulled through at all. Whether the thing scraping about atop his head is anything like the man he knew. He recognises nothing, but then recognises everything. But perhaps it is his self he sees now, what made her Daniel lost with all the red tarnishing the walls.
"Rorschach?" She calls, sometime during the third day, and he shivers at the sound as he scrapes against the workbench, emerging at the base of the stairs.
Hands stained, pliers twisting metal pieces. The role reversal feels strange when he stares up at her from under his mask; the black and white filter could never hide her purple, bruised eyes. Her raw fingers. Her scabbing knees. Her sunken cheeks and sallow skin.
He can barely looks at her. Seeing her bones and sinew wasted on heartbreak. He can't look at her. It's too much. Too much for his conscience to bear as Daniel looks to him for comfort that never comes. Just like they always did.
She carries every one of the fears. Walter ever had for Daniel right there on her skin. Of dying. Of pain. Of broken spirit. But in his worst dreams he never imagined this. Starved and stinking. Not even in a nightmare.
"Can- I mean- I nee-want..." She falls silent again, and Rorschach waits, hating how she doesn't know what to say, "Will you let me see Walter, just for a second?"
She is so broken, so different, so silent. Waiting for him. Waiting for him to strop reeling with excuses. He was not ready. He was still hiding behind the mask because he was not ready. He was not ready to confront his failures. He was not ready to be weak and fearful. Not in front of Daniel. Not when she needed him.
Being behind the mask was the only way he knew how to be strong for her. Even though, he was cowering in a basement.
But as Daniel's eyes shimmer with something like fear. Fear of the rejection riding on his tongue, he finds himself pushing up one side of the mask. Stretching the latex. An eye blinking into the overbearingly colourful light.
Gazing up at her half himself and half not. He does not know what she sees. He never dares to ask as she looks back. Trapped in more silence. Studying each other's reactions. Until she walks away. Leaving him staring at an empty doorway.
This simple exchanging of glances breaks three days of calm. Her silence breathes reality into this terrible dream. He is hiding in plain sight. Hiding from Daniel. When she has spent weeks alone and broken.
"Coward." He hisses, everything in his hands finding the floor in a series of clangs.
He is not ready to face this. To truly face the truth of what his partner is. What she is going to have to be. He is not ready to accept that part of his life is over. Nor is he ready to give Daniel what he knows she needs. He is not ready to be her lover, he is not ready to be her partner. But he knows he never will be. So he goes anyway.
Not because he needs to, even though he does, he needs to go up. He needs to face her or he will lose what is left of the person still waiting. He needs to face the blood and tears. Washed away but still there. He needs to make this real. No, he goes because he wants to. Because he wants to stop being frightened. He wants to be as strong as he wishes he was. He wants to finally repay all the times Daniel has saved his life. He wants to stop burying his head in the sand.
He has had enough of hiding. They've spent too much time alone. Here, avoidance is disastrous.
He finds her in the kitchen. The scent of chemicals and rotting food turning his stomach. It takes her so long to register his presence, as though she's locked in another place. Seeing things he can't. Like she's going mad, after three more days of chasing a shadow that doesn't want to be found. He swallows down the bile when she smiles at him; it's disconcerting and half-there.
Rorschach knew there were things worse than death. Had lived through many of them. But seeing Daniel now, half-starved, half-conscious and half- alive, he considers he's never really suffered at all.
She stumbles to her feet has him rushing forward to take her hands. Touching her makes his skin crawl. Makes him want to run as far from this solid, overwhelming reality. But the thought of her falling, of collapsing with no one here, has him gripping her wrists until she can stand on her own.
"You hungry buddy?" She asks, slurring her words on the fatigue and pain running deeper than he can see.
His self loathing knows no bounds as he just watches her slide around the room. Dropping everything she picks up. Babbling about nothing and everything all at once. Trying to behave normally. Trying to make him at ease. He hates it.
Hates how Daniel is always trying to take care of him. Even now. Even after- Always trying to take care of him. It was stupid and it was foolish and it was so very... Daniel. She makes it harder and harder for him to keep believing she isn't real. That she is his or what is left of something that was his.
Taking her face in his hands. Sickened by how it brings her to a complete stop. Almost passing out over his fingers. Holding her up by the jaw, it is terrifying. He's never known Daniel so weak and senseless. So wretched and torn. Daniel would never be this broken.
Yet she is. And it hurts like a burn to see what his absence has helped to do. Falling apart above him and never once complaining. He has never felt so ignorant. So disgraceful. So vile. Letting her die whilst he buried his guilt in the Owl's Nest. He was a terrible person, and he wished Daniel could see that. Tell him to leave and never come back. She would do better without him.
And he wanted to believe that. With every fibre of his being. He wanted to run away, and know she would survive. Thrive without him. But looking at her now, he couldn't. He couldn't believe. She needed him more than words could say. He knows she does.
"Last time you ate, Daniel?" He chokes, failing entirely to hide the pain in his voice.
"Food makes me sick." Turning a whiter shade of pale almost as proof.
"Last time you slept?" He feels the tears welling and is glad he pulled his mask back down.
Her confused look is all the answer he needs, as though she has no concept of what sleep is. He takes her into his arms and carries her out into the hall. She stinks. Under all the bleach. She stinks.
"Stomach hurts too much- Can't get comfy... Bad dreams."
Rorschach barely hears it as his fingers find her protruding ribs. They make him shudder. Daniel was a walking corpse, and he'd been hiding in a basement letting it happen. He was such a fool.
At the bathroom door he pauses. Blood and glass and bile. A black dress shredded on the floor. The grotesque evidence of Walter's crimes of cowardice. Daniel couldn't come in here either. Explained why she still stank.
The bedroom has stillness. A long-empty bed. Untouched and untainted by their terrible troubles. A bed they used to share. He can't see them ever doing so again. The thought feels like a rock in his throat.
"Sleep." He tells her, placing her in the mound of cotton and clean, "Please?"
Leaving her to the still and silence. Dropping his layers by the bathroom door. The tiles are bare an hour later. The horror hidden but not forgotten. Highlighted by the tossing and turning just down the hall. The feeling of accomplishment and atonement lost in those shuffling sounds. As his fingers close around the neck of a hot water bottle. She isn't sleeping. He thanks his mother for being useful at least once.
He stands in the bedroom ten minutes later, cast in shadow. Watching her rock back and forth.
"Daniel?" He mumbles, some part of him wishing she would fake sleep.
She gives him no such mercy. Rolling to face him, eyes still open. Always open. She scrutinises his sheepish shape, no energy left to open her mouth and ask why. Clutches her stomach and groans instead. And Rorschach remembers the warmed rubber in his hands.
Pushing the sack of water against her skin she gasps and clutches his wrist. Rising goose bumps, and almost a whine.
"Sorry. Too warm?" He mutters as her eyes scrunch together in what he recognises as pain.
"No, no it's good." She chokes pulling him in tighter, pressing the hot water bottle in closer.
It takes him some time to realise she has no intention of letting go as her legs curl up to capture his hand and the warmth all at once.
"Daniel..." Panic evident, though he can't place why it is there.
"Just... stay, please?" She whispers, her eyes finally closing as she rubs her fingers against his skin, again trying to comfort him.
And he does. Standing by her side long after she has lost consciousness. A silent vigil on her tormented attempts at sleep. A pillar of silence, considering her face and her wanting fingers. For hours. Absorbing the truth in quiet and calm. A calm that eats at him like acid. Calm he did not deserve.
He deserved screams. He deserved fists. He deserved hate and anger. He deserved abandonment.
Watching her body melt against the mattress, all blood sweat and tears ignored with the absence of consciousness, he cannot word how thankful he is that he has not been on the receiving end of any. That she has blamed him for nothing. That she was gripping his arm like it was her lifeline.
Her face is pale and sickly, her eyes almost as black as the ink rolling over Rorschach's mask. But as she sleeps she almost seems human. Not some hideous thing tearing apart his world. Burning Daniel into oblivion. Like this, sleeping and stinking, she is almost beautiful.
Resting his knees upon the carpet, Rorschach leans his chin against the mattress. The proximity to her smell is overwhelming, or would be to anyone but him. A mix of pain, anger and fear tangible on her skin. Staining her pores like perfume. The smell of truth, of brutal honesty. She reeks of revenge, and it comforts him. In some sick and twisted way. It comforts him.
They were like two pieces, part of the same messy puzzle. Always close, but never fitting together. Even with all her different shapes, and sizes, hidden under cotton and filth, Daniel was still there, beating against the bones, trying to place herself in the jigsaw of their chaotic life.
It gives Rorschach cause to hope. Strange hopes. Of belief for future. Of Daniel still being inside this slumbering frame, waiting for him to see it. And he was trying, God, he was trying so hard to see past the body. To the person inside.
He hopes most of all that, in the end, Daniel still wants him, still holds his hand, screaming for justice, still wants Walter close. He hopes because he still can't believe, not yet, that anyone would.
"Daniel?" It's a whisper against her fingers, but it brings her out of her dose.
"Yeah?" She breathes into the dark as she tightens her grip around his arm, it still sends ripples of something wrong down his arm, but he finds it easier to ignore.
"Just checking." He mumbles; just checking it's still you. Just checking you're still alive. Just checking you're mine. Just checking... "Have something to show you. In the nest, when you're ready. Sleep now though. Won't go anywhere. I promise."
He sleeps where he sits. He doesn't break his promise.