Watchmen: untitled
Aug. 5th, 2010 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: Untitled
Series: Watchmen
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Notes: This is UNFINISHED and will remain so. Movie!verse fix-it AU.
Summary: After the end, Nite Owl and Rorschach still have to get home.
Snow is falling through the shattered pyramid walls, drifting down in feather-soft flakes.
It settles in Daniel’s dark hair and it glints there as he sits bent-backed on sandstone steps quarried thousands of miles away in the hot Egyptian sun, his cowl pushed back to rest in a soft roll on his back, his goggles hanging over his collarbones.
Across the room it is collecting on the slanting brim of Rorschach’s fedora, on the shoulders of his stained trench coat as he slouches against Ramses II’s legs, the stone monument seeing snow for the first time.
Near the bank of televisions it is landing on the already-frosting pool of crimson, tiny wisps of ice spreading outwards from each flake; mirrors of the pattern are being etched out on the shards of glass scattered like puzzle pieces over the marble floor. And, higher, on the single arm-length shard whose tip is buried deep in the back of Adrian Veidt’s neck.
The heat in the towering chamber has long since poured out of the ruined ceiling above, the Antarctic winds whistling as they sheer past the razor-sharp edges of glass and steel reaching up to the white sky. This second white Karnak, only a handful of months old, has not come close to outlasting the original. The gargantuan reactor building lies crumbling in the frozen sea, torn from the cliff-side by giant fingers which left have left deep trench-sized gouges in the ice, the destruction leaving the ruined palace cold and dim. With the winds sweeping the permanent dusting of snow into the air, the poor light filtering in through the grey skies struggles even to cast definite shadows in the pyramid’s interior.
There is no silence with the wind tearing itself to streamers above them and the occasional crack and rumble of wreckage tumbling into the sea from the darkness beyond the stairs. But, in the quickly-freezing tomb, there is a stillness to compete with its sand-filled Egyptian counterparts.
The red pool is crystallizing into a dark, lace-covered stain by the time the stillness is broken. Rorschach’s coat scrapes like sandpaper over the stone as he straightens, glass crunching underfoot as he walks.
“Should go.” His rasping voice is out of place in the frozen crypt, a live voice in the dead air. Daniel raises his head, slow as rusty clockwork, watches the man move across the floor without moving himself.
Rorschach pauses at the foot of the stairs, hands in his pockets, mask hardly shifting at all in the cold air, head tilted at an inquisitive angle. “She may return,” he says at last, tossing the words out into the stillness like smooth stones into a pond. Daniel sighs, pushes off his thighs to stand.
“No,” he says, glancing across the room at Adrian, then at a portion of floor cleared of glass in several long sweeps. “She won’t.” Another pause; Rorschach shifts, impatience beginning to show. Daniel looks back to Adrian, eyes open and staring sightlessly across the polished floor at one of the two giant statues. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! He shakes his head, voice broken and bleak. “What’s happened to us?”
“We failed.” Simple and direct, a knife to the heart.
Daniel goes on as if the man hadn’t spoken, “We were just ordinary guys, trying to make a difference. Not kings, not gods. How did we come to this? How did we become this?” He stares down at the ruined chamber, at the snow falling softly in, at the corpse of the world’s smartest man. At the empty space where Laurie should be.
“Didn’t. Simply failed to perceive megalomania in others.”
“I just… I can’t believe it.” His voice is lost, hollow.
Rorschach shrugs, blasé. “Takes time.”
“And you, Rorschach? You saw this coming? You really believed any of us could fall to this?” Daniel swivels to stare at his partner, tone sharp and bitter as cyanide.
Rorschach answers evenly, words rolling out without apparent thought or effort. “At base, human means nothing but violent, debased, power-hungry animal.”
Daniel passes a hand over his bare face, slurs his words past it. “Don’t start, not now.” He drops the hand away, looks up to face his former partner. “Just … just tell me.”
Rorschach stands still for a long minute before growling. “Should have. Veidt always paternalistic, possessed bloated sense of self-importance. Not surprising he would take matters into his own hands.” He shifts in irritation and begins mounting the stairs regardless of Daniel’s presence, shoes silent now that there is no glass beneath them. Daniel stops him by shifting gently into his path.
“It’s not shameful to trust people, Rorschach,” he says quietly.
The mask shifts, the vigilante tensing minutely, defensively. “Didn’t trust. Just didn’t suspect enough.”
Daniel nods, doesn’t say anything. Steps aside to let Rorschach up ahead of him, then turns to follow.
Beside the marble dais lined with televisions, snow slowly covers Adrian Veidt in a pale blanket.
END PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
Walking back to Archie takes them considerably longer than the original trip. They are tired and battered, muscles stiffened by the cold and wounds aching. The wind is tearing across the ice from right to left, whipping the snow up with it and throwing it in walls of tiny razors into their faces. Even mostly protected by his cold-climate cloak and gloves, Daniel can’t help but be struck the absolute inhospitableness of this place, the vast emptiness. This is a frontier people have no place being in, cannot survive in, should not try. This entire continent is a tomb, and they are trespassers.
It’s an unscientific line of thought, but the last few hours have torn his heart out and shredded it, and the pain is quite simply blinding. He can’t disengage from it, can’t return to the detachment Nite Owl almost always allowed him to command.
Can’t think of anything except those millions and millions of lives, ended under Adrian’s fingertips.
Of Hollis, lying dead in his apartment, another indirect victim of this insanity, and of his mistakes.
Of Laurie, shivering against him, face too pale, eyes too wide. Her voice, still so steady if a pitch too high while her words hammered a thousand icicles into his heart: I stood on the edge of the pit – the city, it was just… just black and heat and – and the fucking thing had just gone off. The air must have been filled with – with fall-out, with radiation, with –
Of her choice, death from cancer within weeks, or resorting to Jon’s way of life. If it could be called that.
Daniel rubs at the goggles, and realises the moisture is inside, not out. He doesn’t feel the cold as he trudges across the white plain; just a heavy, embracing numbness.
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Archie is where they left him, half buried in the snow, still trying to redirect heat to the engines. Daniel clambers up onto the top and opens the hatch for Rorschach behind him; the man drops stiffly down into the sheltered interior without a word. Daniel unplugs the bypass, sealing up the engine access carefully and packing away the tubing with a mechanical precision that requires no thought.
The inside of the ship hasn’t maintained its warmth. Archie is extremely well-insulated, and even in the late fall or early spring in New York can maintain an indoor temperature without heaters for hours if the doors aren’t opened. He wasn’t built for these kinds of temperatures, though, and has already been exposed to the outside for several minutes. The thermostat reads -8; Daniel ignores it – once the engines are on he can worry about heating, and in his numbness he hardly notices the cold.
He shuffles over to the instrument panels, flips through preflight and begins to try to start up the engines. The immediate reaction, a green light indicating fuel intake and ignition, is promising. The subsequent rumbling, coughing and then flickering red light, is not. Daniel sighs, switches off the starter motor and listens to the engines roll to a halt. He runs a hand through his hair, and turns to Rorschach.
“Looks like it might be – Rorschach?”
The still-masked vigilante has crammed himself tight into a back corner, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, chin tucked in low. He looks up stiffly at Daniel’s words, mask mostly white with just a few small spots of black.
The sight of him slingshots Daniel from the numbness of his grief to the present so fast he feels dizzy. His dull perception of the world – millions dead by his indirect actions, Hollis bludgeoned to death, Laurie cancer-ridden – cracks and falls away, and he recognizes that it is freezing in the ship. That his breath is clouding, that his hands and feet feel like they’ve been coated in ice. Daniel stands to cross the space between them.
“God, you must be freezing.”
The man shakes his head, the movement a good deal too spasmodic for Daniel’s liking. “Fine.”
Daniel comes to stop right in front of him, Rorschach unfolding himself tersely to stand slowly. He totters and catches himself on the wall, avoiding Daniel’s outstretched arm.
“Give me your hand,” says Daniel curtly, own hand held out as if for money.
Rorschach looks at him, ink blots penny-sized and hardly moving at all, and Daniel doesn’t know whether that’s because the cold is affecting them from the outside or because Rorschach’s face has lost most of its heat. The man slowly puts out his hand, ready to pull it back or strike out with the other one. What seems like years ago in his basement, the man’s reluctance to be touched felt like trauma. Now it just feels like the actions of a rabid dog, too sick or confused to act rationally. Daniel hopes that’s the cold.
Rather than taking hold of Rorschach’s hand he grasps the glove by the finger tips and, before the man can protest, pulls it off to reveal the pale skin beneath. He has, of course, seen Rorschach without his gloves before, seen the fair skin and smattering of freckles along the wrists trailing up his arms. Now the skin isn’t just white but grey. His close-trimmed nails are a deep hypothermic blue from cuticles to whites, and the bloodless colour is bleeding out into the skin around it. Rorschach hisses and takes his glove back, yanks it on.
Daniel stares, shocked, then angry both with himself for not seeing it coming and the man for his insane passive masochism. “Christ, Rorschach, were you just going to freeze to death without saying anything? You’re allowed to need things. You’re allowed to be goddamn human.” He turns and strides over to the closet with the spare supplies for unusual missions; clothing for different situations and climates, equipment, rations.
Daniel digs out a heavy coat which he had bought years ago partially with Rorschach in mind, and as such is slightly too large for the man in order to avoid suspicions of mother-henning. He hands it to Rorschach, who takes it after a minute and a long look, along with a pair of boots a size too big. “If the boots are too big, there are some socks in here,” he says as if he weren’t sure, and taps the shelf. “Put them on, we’re going to be here a while.”
“Engines remain troublesome?” Rorschach pulls the dark coat, knee-length heavy-weave wool which, while not warm enough for this climate is better than nothing, and then stands staring at the boots by his feet.
“I’m not sure, but I think the heat might not have been enough; the fuel won’t have frozen, obviously, but the coolant fluid and any parts that have collected moisture… We could be looking at a serious problem here.”
“How serious?”
Daniel sighs, crosses his arms. “If we can’t get Archie somewhere sheltered, and preferable warm, possibly an insoluble one.”
Rorschach looks around at the ship’s solid bulk. Archie’s extremely buoyant, and in terms of both small aircraft and submarines he’s quite light. In terms of what two men can drag, he might as well be an aircraft carrier.
“Dr. Manhattan destroyed reactors. No electricity, no warmth in Veidt’s complex. Possibly no access for Owlship.”
Daniel glances through the half snow-covered windows at the complex, no longer a beacon of light but just a dark form on the horizon. “Even if there were, the only way we could get Archie there would be by finding some sort of vehicle. I’m sure there must be some, but I didn’t see any.” Just with voicing the thought, he finds himself suddenly, deeply exhausted. It’s been more than 24 hours since he last slept, and the absolute worst day of his life in more ways than he could ever have imagined. The thought of having to walk back to Karnak to search for trucks or tractors in the blinding snow and freezing winds is just too much; he can feel what strength he has bleeding away.
Daniel slumps back against Archie’s side, cold from the outside seeping in through his sides. They still haven’t reached equilibrium temperature, and it will only get colder. Daniel glances at the instrument panel.
“We can maintain a 10 degree temperature in here for maybe eight hours, running the batteries on and off, assuming the insulation is as efficient as I’m calculating it to be. We should get some sleep before we try anything else.” He can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the heavy tiredness that’s fallen over him out of nowhere to smother him in leaden fatigue. He looks at Rorschach, ready to argue but hoping like hell he won’t have to.
Rorschach looks back out the window, then at him and shrugs. Daniel sighs, part of the weight slipping away as sleep appears unlooked for right before him ready for him to grasp. He staggers over to the consoles and switches on the batteries, then the heaters. “There are blankets in the closet,” he says, but Rorschach knows that, has used them before back in the old days when they had shock victims in here practically every second week. He’s already pulling them out, the thin scratchy fabric ridiculously appealing.
The blare of the heaters is shocking in the quiet Daniel hadn’t really noticed, but he’s taken his share of the blankets from Rorschach as well as half the extra clothing in the closet and set up a bed next to the console where he can reach the battery shut off without standing, before he really begins to feel the warmth. Daniel lies down on the pile of spare cloaks and underclothes, rain slicks for civilians and light insulating coats for the worst kind of victims who have nothing when found, and pulls the blankets and his own cloak around him.
“Warm enough?” he asks, turning to look across the small space at Rorschach. The man is lying in his previous corner, buried in an indiscriminate heap of the closet’s contents with his hat pulled low over his mask and the coat’s collar turned up. From the looseness of his shoulders and the angle of his neck, Daniel knows he’s asleep already. He snuggles down into his own uncomfortable bed, and closes his eyes.
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Daniel wakes up several times in a blurry daze to reach up and turn the batteries off or on, but when he next really comes to himself it’s cold and the soft light pouring in through Archie’s windows is exactly as strong as it was when he fell asleep. Enough to provide the ship with a dim, greyish light but not enough to read small print by, or perform complicated rewiring.
Luckily, that’s not a problem. Their problems are significantly more major.
Empty stomach beginning to twist itself in knots, Daniel pulls a couple of energy bars from his store by his chair and peels away the wrapping as quietly as he can, turning to watch the recently escaped prisoner behind him as he munches the unappetizing granola.
Rorschach is still lying in his twisted heap of slicks, coats, shirts and blankets, curled beneath it like an alley cat with his back to Daniel. Daniel stares in surprise at the nearly unprecedented sign of trust from the man; Rorschach has openly committed trusting gestures in the past, but usually only when he was too injured to be unable not to.
Although really, considering the situation, he might as well be. Without Daniel, he will die here in Antarctica.
It’s the single strongest reason Daniel can think of to keep going.
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It turns out that it’s so cold in the ship because the batteries have run dry. While he’s got a spare, the thought of trying to replace it out in the biting wind, a process he’ll have to complete without gloves on, is not a happy one.
Of course, technically he doesn’t have to replace it out here, because even if he does he’s about 90% sure he can’t fix Archie in this environment. They’ll have to tow him to Veidt’s Karnak and hope they can find somewhere sheltered to repair him. With no base generators, warm is almost certainly out of the question.
Daniel is sitting in the pilot’s seat looking out the window when he hears the rustles behind him, Rorschach pulling himself up.
“Hrrm, Daniel? How’s the ship?”
“Not good. The batteries are dead. And I can’t repair Archie out here. We need to get him somewhere without the windchill, preferably somewhere warm.”
“Have to go back to the complex.”
“Yeah.”
He’s known it’s coming, but the thought of making that trip again is crushing. He’s feeling the cold now, feeling the burn from muscles which have seen more activity in the past 24 hours than the past 7 years, feeling the aches from all the cuts and bruises. And, still dragging heavy, is simply the weight. So many lives.
Rorschach, being Rorschach, is already heading for the hatch.
Daniel pulls himself up to follow and smiles, just a little, to see that the man’s replaced his shoes with the boots. Then he pulls his gloves up, raises his cowl, and follows his partner – here and now, Rorschach without a doubt is – out into the snow.
The first time he made most of the journey without feeling the cold simply due to the adrenaline pounding through his veins, the thought of confronting Ozymandias when he knew even with Rorschach he had virtually no chance of beating the man. The second time he made it without feeling the cold due to the deadness inside him – it’s still there, he can feel it pushed away to the back waiting to ambush him when he runs out of immediate concerns, waiting to drop down and smother him, but it’s mostly buried by the jobs of the moment. But now he has nothing to distract himself from it, and it is cold. He can’t imagine how Rorschach made the trip twice in just his suit and coat.
Rorschach’s doing better now, although he showed few signs of distress before, in retrospect just a minor lagging behind and stiffness the second trip. He’s pulled the coat’s collar up around his neck and sunk his jaw low into its protection, but is walking strong and sure against the driving wind.
Overhead, the sky is just as white as it was 10 hours ago, and 4 hours before that. The wind has fangs of ice, and he can feel them now cutting in wherever he’s least protected, slicing against his throat, wrists, ripping through the webbing of his costume when the cloak whips open for an instant and down deep into his torso. The snow underfoot is thin and covers an uneven layer of ice; even his winter boots have trouble finding constant traction on it. And even without the snow and the wind and the ice, it is simply cold. It seeps in like water through his double layers, through the two pairs of gloves and the extra cowl and the cloak and slowly freezes his body from the tips inwards, skin from the outside in. He knows his extremities will be suffering from frostbite soon if they aren’t already, knows Rorschach must have gotten there long ago. They can’t keep trekking back and forth across this open plateau dressed as they are, or they will simply freeze to death. If their stamina doesn’t let them down first.
It’s a very real concern; Daniel isn’t sure he can stand another trek. Can’t, right now, even contemplate it. He just focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, and the distant building growing slowly, slowly closer.
Series: Watchmen
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Notes: This is UNFINISHED and will remain so. Movie!verse fix-it AU.
Summary: After the end, Nite Owl and Rorschach still have to get home.
Snow is falling through the shattered pyramid walls, drifting down in feather-soft flakes.
It settles in Daniel’s dark hair and it glints there as he sits bent-backed on sandstone steps quarried thousands of miles away in the hot Egyptian sun, his cowl pushed back to rest in a soft roll on his back, his goggles hanging over his collarbones.
Across the room it is collecting on the slanting brim of Rorschach’s fedora, on the shoulders of his stained trench coat as he slouches against Ramses II’s legs, the stone monument seeing snow for the first time.
Near the bank of televisions it is landing on the already-frosting pool of crimson, tiny wisps of ice spreading outwards from each flake; mirrors of the pattern are being etched out on the shards of glass scattered like puzzle pieces over the marble floor. And, higher, on the single arm-length shard whose tip is buried deep in the back of Adrian Veidt’s neck.
The heat in the towering chamber has long since poured out of the ruined ceiling above, the Antarctic winds whistling as they sheer past the razor-sharp edges of glass and steel reaching up to the white sky. This second white Karnak, only a handful of months old, has not come close to outlasting the original. The gargantuan reactor building lies crumbling in the frozen sea, torn from the cliff-side by giant fingers which left have left deep trench-sized gouges in the ice, the destruction leaving the ruined palace cold and dim. With the winds sweeping the permanent dusting of snow into the air, the poor light filtering in through the grey skies struggles even to cast definite shadows in the pyramid’s interior.
There is no silence with the wind tearing itself to streamers above them and the occasional crack and rumble of wreckage tumbling into the sea from the darkness beyond the stairs. But, in the quickly-freezing tomb, there is a stillness to compete with its sand-filled Egyptian counterparts.
The red pool is crystallizing into a dark, lace-covered stain by the time the stillness is broken. Rorschach’s coat scrapes like sandpaper over the stone as he straightens, glass crunching underfoot as he walks.
“Should go.” His rasping voice is out of place in the frozen crypt, a live voice in the dead air. Daniel raises his head, slow as rusty clockwork, watches the man move across the floor without moving himself.
Rorschach pauses at the foot of the stairs, hands in his pockets, mask hardly shifting at all in the cold air, head tilted at an inquisitive angle. “She may return,” he says at last, tossing the words out into the stillness like smooth stones into a pond. Daniel sighs, pushes off his thighs to stand.
“No,” he says, glancing across the room at Adrian, then at a portion of floor cleared of glass in several long sweeps. “She won’t.” Another pause; Rorschach shifts, impatience beginning to show. Daniel looks back to Adrian, eyes open and staring sightlessly across the polished floor at one of the two giant statues. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! He shakes his head, voice broken and bleak. “What’s happened to us?”
“We failed.” Simple and direct, a knife to the heart.
Daniel goes on as if the man hadn’t spoken, “We were just ordinary guys, trying to make a difference. Not kings, not gods. How did we come to this? How did we become this?” He stares down at the ruined chamber, at the snow falling softly in, at the corpse of the world’s smartest man. At the empty space where Laurie should be.
“Didn’t. Simply failed to perceive megalomania in others.”
“I just… I can’t believe it.” His voice is lost, hollow.
Rorschach shrugs, blasé. “Takes time.”
“And you, Rorschach? You saw this coming? You really believed any of us could fall to this?” Daniel swivels to stare at his partner, tone sharp and bitter as cyanide.
Rorschach answers evenly, words rolling out without apparent thought or effort. “At base, human means nothing but violent, debased, power-hungry animal.”
Daniel passes a hand over his bare face, slurs his words past it. “Don’t start, not now.” He drops the hand away, looks up to face his former partner. “Just … just tell me.”
Rorschach stands still for a long minute before growling. “Should have. Veidt always paternalistic, possessed bloated sense of self-importance. Not surprising he would take matters into his own hands.” He shifts in irritation and begins mounting the stairs regardless of Daniel’s presence, shoes silent now that there is no glass beneath them. Daniel stops him by shifting gently into his path.
“It’s not shameful to trust people, Rorschach,” he says quietly.
The mask shifts, the vigilante tensing minutely, defensively. “Didn’t trust. Just didn’t suspect enough.”
Daniel nods, doesn’t say anything. Steps aside to let Rorschach up ahead of him, then turns to follow.
Beside the marble dais lined with televisions, snow slowly covers Adrian Veidt in a pale blanket.
END PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
Walking back to Archie takes them considerably longer than the original trip. They are tired and battered, muscles stiffened by the cold and wounds aching. The wind is tearing across the ice from right to left, whipping the snow up with it and throwing it in walls of tiny razors into their faces. Even mostly protected by his cold-climate cloak and gloves, Daniel can’t help but be struck the absolute inhospitableness of this place, the vast emptiness. This is a frontier people have no place being in, cannot survive in, should not try. This entire continent is a tomb, and they are trespassers.
It’s an unscientific line of thought, but the last few hours have torn his heart out and shredded it, and the pain is quite simply blinding. He can’t disengage from it, can’t return to the detachment Nite Owl almost always allowed him to command.
Can’t think of anything except those millions and millions of lives, ended under Adrian’s fingertips.
Of Hollis, lying dead in his apartment, another indirect victim of this insanity, and of his mistakes.
Of Laurie, shivering against him, face too pale, eyes too wide. Her voice, still so steady if a pitch too high while her words hammered a thousand icicles into his heart: I stood on the edge of the pit – the city, it was just… just black and heat and – and the fucking thing had just gone off. The air must have been filled with – with fall-out, with radiation, with –
Of her choice, death from cancer within weeks, or resorting to Jon’s way of life. If it could be called that.
Daniel rubs at the goggles, and realises the moisture is inside, not out. He doesn’t feel the cold as he trudges across the white plain; just a heavy, embracing numbness.
----------------------------------------
Archie is where they left him, half buried in the snow, still trying to redirect heat to the engines. Daniel clambers up onto the top and opens the hatch for Rorschach behind him; the man drops stiffly down into the sheltered interior without a word. Daniel unplugs the bypass, sealing up the engine access carefully and packing away the tubing with a mechanical precision that requires no thought.
The inside of the ship hasn’t maintained its warmth. Archie is extremely well-insulated, and even in the late fall or early spring in New York can maintain an indoor temperature without heaters for hours if the doors aren’t opened. He wasn’t built for these kinds of temperatures, though, and has already been exposed to the outside for several minutes. The thermostat reads -8; Daniel ignores it – once the engines are on he can worry about heating, and in his numbness he hardly notices the cold.
He shuffles over to the instrument panels, flips through preflight and begins to try to start up the engines. The immediate reaction, a green light indicating fuel intake and ignition, is promising. The subsequent rumbling, coughing and then flickering red light, is not. Daniel sighs, switches off the starter motor and listens to the engines roll to a halt. He runs a hand through his hair, and turns to Rorschach.
“Looks like it might be – Rorschach?”
The still-masked vigilante has crammed himself tight into a back corner, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, chin tucked in low. He looks up stiffly at Daniel’s words, mask mostly white with just a few small spots of black.
The sight of him slingshots Daniel from the numbness of his grief to the present so fast he feels dizzy. His dull perception of the world – millions dead by his indirect actions, Hollis bludgeoned to death, Laurie cancer-ridden – cracks and falls away, and he recognizes that it is freezing in the ship. That his breath is clouding, that his hands and feet feel like they’ve been coated in ice. Daniel stands to cross the space between them.
“God, you must be freezing.”
The man shakes his head, the movement a good deal too spasmodic for Daniel’s liking. “Fine.”
Daniel comes to stop right in front of him, Rorschach unfolding himself tersely to stand slowly. He totters and catches himself on the wall, avoiding Daniel’s outstretched arm.
“Give me your hand,” says Daniel curtly, own hand held out as if for money.
Rorschach looks at him, ink blots penny-sized and hardly moving at all, and Daniel doesn’t know whether that’s because the cold is affecting them from the outside or because Rorschach’s face has lost most of its heat. The man slowly puts out his hand, ready to pull it back or strike out with the other one. What seems like years ago in his basement, the man’s reluctance to be touched felt like trauma. Now it just feels like the actions of a rabid dog, too sick or confused to act rationally. Daniel hopes that’s the cold.
Rather than taking hold of Rorschach’s hand he grasps the glove by the finger tips and, before the man can protest, pulls it off to reveal the pale skin beneath. He has, of course, seen Rorschach without his gloves before, seen the fair skin and smattering of freckles along the wrists trailing up his arms. Now the skin isn’t just white but grey. His close-trimmed nails are a deep hypothermic blue from cuticles to whites, and the bloodless colour is bleeding out into the skin around it. Rorschach hisses and takes his glove back, yanks it on.
Daniel stares, shocked, then angry both with himself for not seeing it coming and the man for his insane passive masochism. “Christ, Rorschach, were you just going to freeze to death without saying anything? You’re allowed to need things. You’re allowed to be goddamn human.” He turns and strides over to the closet with the spare supplies for unusual missions; clothing for different situations and climates, equipment, rations.
Daniel digs out a heavy coat which he had bought years ago partially with Rorschach in mind, and as such is slightly too large for the man in order to avoid suspicions of mother-henning. He hands it to Rorschach, who takes it after a minute and a long look, along with a pair of boots a size too big. “If the boots are too big, there are some socks in here,” he says as if he weren’t sure, and taps the shelf. “Put them on, we’re going to be here a while.”
“Engines remain troublesome?” Rorschach pulls the dark coat, knee-length heavy-weave wool which, while not warm enough for this climate is better than nothing, and then stands staring at the boots by his feet.
“I’m not sure, but I think the heat might not have been enough; the fuel won’t have frozen, obviously, but the coolant fluid and any parts that have collected moisture… We could be looking at a serious problem here.”
“How serious?”
Daniel sighs, crosses his arms. “If we can’t get Archie somewhere sheltered, and preferable warm, possibly an insoluble one.”
Rorschach looks around at the ship’s solid bulk. Archie’s extremely buoyant, and in terms of both small aircraft and submarines he’s quite light. In terms of what two men can drag, he might as well be an aircraft carrier.
“Dr. Manhattan destroyed reactors. No electricity, no warmth in Veidt’s complex. Possibly no access for Owlship.”
Daniel glances through the half snow-covered windows at the complex, no longer a beacon of light but just a dark form on the horizon. “Even if there were, the only way we could get Archie there would be by finding some sort of vehicle. I’m sure there must be some, but I didn’t see any.” Just with voicing the thought, he finds himself suddenly, deeply exhausted. It’s been more than 24 hours since he last slept, and the absolute worst day of his life in more ways than he could ever have imagined. The thought of having to walk back to Karnak to search for trucks or tractors in the blinding snow and freezing winds is just too much; he can feel what strength he has bleeding away.
Daniel slumps back against Archie’s side, cold from the outside seeping in through his sides. They still haven’t reached equilibrium temperature, and it will only get colder. Daniel glances at the instrument panel.
“We can maintain a 10 degree temperature in here for maybe eight hours, running the batteries on and off, assuming the insulation is as efficient as I’m calculating it to be. We should get some sleep before we try anything else.” He can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the heavy tiredness that’s fallen over him out of nowhere to smother him in leaden fatigue. He looks at Rorschach, ready to argue but hoping like hell he won’t have to.
Rorschach looks back out the window, then at him and shrugs. Daniel sighs, part of the weight slipping away as sleep appears unlooked for right before him ready for him to grasp. He staggers over to the consoles and switches on the batteries, then the heaters. “There are blankets in the closet,” he says, but Rorschach knows that, has used them before back in the old days when they had shock victims in here practically every second week. He’s already pulling them out, the thin scratchy fabric ridiculously appealing.
The blare of the heaters is shocking in the quiet Daniel hadn’t really noticed, but he’s taken his share of the blankets from Rorschach as well as half the extra clothing in the closet and set up a bed next to the console where he can reach the battery shut off without standing, before he really begins to feel the warmth. Daniel lies down on the pile of spare cloaks and underclothes, rain slicks for civilians and light insulating coats for the worst kind of victims who have nothing when found, and pulls the blankets and his own cloak around him.
“Warm enough?” he asks, turning to look across the small space at Rorschach. The man is lying in his previous corner, buried in an indiscriminate heap of the closet’s contents with his hat pulled low over his mask and the coat’s collar turned up. From the looseness of his shoulders and the angle of his neck, Daniel knows he’s asleep already. He snuggles down into his own uncomfortable bed, and closes his eyes.
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Daniel wakes up several times in a blurry daze to reach up and turn the batteries off or on, but when he next really comes to himself it’s cold and the soft light pouring in through Archie’s windows is exactly as strong as it was when he fell asleep. Enough to provide the ship with a dim, greyish light but not enough to read small print by, or perform complicated rewiring.
Luckily, that’s not a problem. Their problems are significantly more major.
Empty stomach beginning to twist itself in knots, Daniel pulls a couple of energy bars from his store by his chair and peels away the wrapping as quietly as he can, turning to watch the recently escaped prisoner behind him as he munches the unappetizing granola.
Rorschach is still lying in his twisted heap of slicks, coats, shirts and blankets, curled beneath it like an alley cat with his back to Daniel. Daniel stares in surprise at the nearly unprecedented sign of trust from the man; Rorschach has openly committed trusting gestures in the past, but usually only when he was too injured to be unable not to.
Although really, considering the situation, he might as well be. Without Daniel, he will die here in Antarctica.
It’s the single strongest reason Daniel can think of to keep going.
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It turns out that it’s so cold in the ship because the batteries have run dry. While he’s got a spare, the thought of trying to replace it out in the biting wind, a process he’ll have to complete without gloves on, is not a happy one.
Of course, technically he doesn’t have to replace it out here, because even if he does he’s about 90% sure he can’t fix Archie in this environment. They’ll have to tow him to Veidt’s Karnak and hope they can find somewhere sheltered to repair him. With no base generators, warm is almost certainly out of the question.
Daniel is sitting in the pilot’s seat looking out the window when he hears the rustles behind him, Rorschach pulling himself up.
“Hrrm, Daniel? How’s the ship?”
“Not good. The batteries are dead. And I can’t repair Archie out here. We need to get him somewhere without the windchill, preferably somewhere warm.”
“Have to go back to the complex.”
“Yeah.”
He’s known it’s coming, but the thought of making that trip again is crushing. He’s feeling the cold now, feeling the burn from muscles which have seen more activity in the past 24 hours than the past 7 years, feeling the aches from all the cuts and bruises. And, still dragging heavy, is simply the weight. So many lives.
Rorschach, being Rorschach, is already heading for the hatch.
Daniel pulls himself up to follow and smiles, just a little, to see that the man’s replaced his shoes with the boots. Then he pulls his gloves up, raises his cowl, and follows his partner – here and now, Rorschach without a doubt is – out into the snow.
The first time he made most of the journey without feeling the cold simply due to the adrenaline pounding through his veins, the thought of confronting Ozymandias when he knew even with Rorschach he had virtually no chance of beating the man. The second time he made it without feeling the cold due to the deadness inside him – it’s still there, he can feel it pushed away to the back waiting to ambush him when he runs out of immediate concerns, waiting to drop down and smother him, but it’s mostly buried by the jobs of the moment. But now he has nothing to distract himself from it, and it is cold. He can’t imagine how Rorschach made the trip twice in just his suit and coat.
Rorschach’s doing better now, although he showed few signs of distress before, in retrospect just a minor lagging behind and stiffness the second trip. He’s pulled the coat’s collar up around his neck and sunk his jaw low into its protection, but is walking strong and sure against the driving wind.
Overhead, the sky is just as white as it was 10 hours ago, and 4 hours before that. The wind has fangs of ice, and he can feel them now cutting in wherever he’s least protected, slicing against his throat, wrists, ripping through the webbing of his costume when the cloak whips open for an instant and down deep into his torso. The snow underfoot is thin and covers an uneven layer of ice; even his winter boots have trouble finding constant traction on it. And even without the snow and the wind and the ice, it is simply cold. It seeps in like water through his double layers, through the two pairs of gloves and the extra cowl and the cloak and slowly freezes his body from the tips inwards, skin from the outside in. He knows his extremities will be suffering from frostbite soon if they aren’t already, knows Rorschach must have gotten there long ago. They can’t keep trekking back and forth across this open plateau dressed as they are, or they will simply freeze to death. If their stamina doesn’t let them down first.
It’s a very real concern; Daniel isn’t sure he can stand another trek. Can’t, right now, even contemplate it. He just focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, and the distant building growing slowly, slowly closer.
