Fic: Temperature°

Title: Temperature°
Author: sidhefaer
Fandom: Watchmen
Pairing: Rorschach, or Dan/Rorschach, if you squint.
Rating: R.
Length: 4320 words.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: A few times Rorschach has been cold.
Notes: Written over a period of a week during my school free periods. I don't know what more I can add to this, even though it seems like I could do better. Unbeta'd. Enjoy.



The door slams, a thick wooden clap that's met only with the sounds of New York at night (barking, shouting; cars blaring and thrumming down the next block, taxis probably). The boy sits down heavily on the sculpted square cement and waits until the sounds of his mother’s cursing fades from the opposite side of the door.

Nights like these it's easier to figure out why he's not welcome. It’s November, and the city is beginning to frost over, so the cool air is better for it. Logically he comes up with reasons why he's been thrown out and knows, somehow, like all children know somehow, that it must be his fault.

Even if he doesn't know what he's done wrong, he's still done wrong by her, and she's his mother, after all. He might be fooling himself but all he wants is for things to be all right in the end. It doesn't matter that somewhere where he can't see, he feels, knows that nothing ever ends; but it's cool outside, and it clears his head so well that all he feels is cold.


-----


Doctor Manhattan's face is a cut-out of the sky. As he shakes hands with President Kennedy, Walter takes a popsicle stick and glues it to the back of the figure he'd cut out of blue construction paper. The paper would have been expensive if it was payed for, but Walter doesn't bother his mother with things he wants. He gets them himself and it saves them both a lot of trouble.

Paper Manhattan annihilates an action figure. Walter's fingers don't shake as they rip away the toy's arms and legs, and finally, the head.


-----


When he is transferred to the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children in New Jersey, the agency makes very sure not to tell any of the other children's parents about the boy's destructive-slash-self-destructive tendencies. They have a strict don't ask, don't tell policy.

He goes to school (forced attendance, but he can't do much to avoid it) to -- as they say -- learn, but it's a bit different for messed up kids like him. Vaguely he wonders if unimportance is a virus just like the colds all of his classmates got one winter, when they learned about it in class the following week. Then he wonders if he'll ever need the information they're teaching him. But he'll have to make it in that place somehow.

The agency doesn't regulate or disapprove like they normally would when he takes up boxing; he's so small and skinny that they figure it'll help him along inside and outside of class. They know how he'd put two boys in the hospital with his bare hands three years ago, but he's been rehabilitated, so for the agency the interest in boxing isn't an issue. Isn't the issue.

What they know is that he's had it rough. It's in his files. On paper (and they always like it better when it's down cold). They know about his past, but not his present; they don't know much about him, but they know something's wrong, at least.

"I think you oughta look at this," says one, handling a sheaf of papers like it's hot to the touch, "Little shit stared at me for a whole minute before handing it in. Gives me the goddamn creeps, that kid. Just look at the drawing. "

"This is-" a pause, "Kovacs, right?" replies the other. Reads it. "Jesus."

"Fucked up, ain't he?"

"Sure is."


-----


Walter remembers: a glued-together picture of human flesh and short, curly hair in mirror places. Shedding clothing like skin just to melt into each other's bodies. It makes him confused. It makes him angry. It makes him-

He rationalizes. He knows (knew) when he gives (gave) things to his mother they make (made) her smile.

Walter dreams: that she likes gifts. She buys many for herself and asks frequently for others, and sometimes takes them without asking, but all that’s fine because when she does, she stops being angry.

He can cut perfectly symmetrically. He makes people out of popsicle sticks. He folds paper, he sews fabric. He makes 'feel better' cards. Maybe he'll make one card extra for the man she brought in with her.


-----


Things happen.

(He's fourteen.)

It torments him that he cannot control the things and he tells himself it's filthy and takes it out on the punching bags in the nearest boxing club, where a seasoned professional has graciously agreed to teach him how to knock out a man in five seconds flat.

He goes for walks that sometimes last the day. Lillian Charlton doesn't care so long as their children get back by nightfall. Lately, he's noticed they've been more lenient, and he knows it's because they've got other (better) children to attend to. They've already done all their tests and treatments on him. He'll be sixteen soon, out of the home, fit to live in a world that doesn't want him. He doesn't want it either, but nobody's ever listened to him anyway and it's stupid to think society would willingly accomodate him just because it's the nice thing to do.

One freezing January day, he goes outside without a coat, or a scarf, or gloves, and almost doesn't ever come back.

It's easy to mistake relief for happiness, but he doesn't feel either.

He just feels cold.


-----


He works as a tailor because it's a job he can afford to dislike. He feels uncomfortable somehow, surrounded by fabric that will soon be touching and rubbing across the bodies of men and women in this thankless city; it chafes him especially when he handles the fabrics meant to be for women. Wrong somehow, he thinks, but bearable.

He gets an order one day from a woman who wants Manhattan's fabric recipe made into a dress. He makes it himself, and pricks his fingers over twenty times because he cannot stop watching all of the shifting black patterns on the white, white cloth. By the time he is done, the dress is sprinkled in little red spots. He washes it by hand.

The fabric is heat sensitive. Pleasant. It's the only thing Walter has ever considered something he enjoys touching.

He doesn't particularly care when the woman tells him she doesn't want it and won't pay for it. He doesn't stop to think it might be because he designs women's clothing atrociously. Walter just wants it all to himself so he can keep looking at it. And he sneaks a piece of it with him into his grubby pocket wherever he goes, just so he can stare at it whenever the mood strikes him.

He gets the paper one day and reads through it once, like he always does. Only this time, he reads that the woman who had ordered the dress has been murdered. Stabbed, raped, and left for dead in the hallway of her apartment, while her neighbors all listened to her screaming and did nothing.

Walter takes out Manhattan's fabric. Stares at it. It shifts into something he might call a butterfly, or a flecked stab wound.

He cuts into it with a pair of heated tailor's scissors.

That night, it's pitch, what little moonlight glances in the gutters and greasy sidewalks, and Walter puts on the mask, and rummages through the trunk of disused clothing that customers had all refused to buy. He finds stale purple slacks and a trench, and long strip of white cloth that could act as a sort of scarf; there's a fedora roughly the same shade as the coat and he fits it around his clothed head, the eyelid to his perusal of the city. It's not much of a costume, he reflects. But he never wanted, or understood, or felt comfortable with how the male vigilantes he saw in the paper wore their clothing so tight, and he wants his to hide his shape and face and intentions just as much as they all show theirs.

It's only a matter of time before he finds out who did it. The sketches in The New Frontiersmen, two other related murders; it takes two nights of searching to secure the information, and Walter takes to calling himself Rorschach. He never tells them the name, though, the people he interrogates. His name is the name of a vigilante and should be kept just as secret as the rest of him.

Eventually, Walter finds Winston Moseley outside of an underground sex club in Manhattan. Moseley sees him coming only because the club's patrons had made noises, terrified noises, and he's turned to see that Walter's on him already.

They all scatter. Walter lands a solid punch on Moseley's face and hears a satisfying crack-gush of bone splitting blood. He is angry, angrier still when Moseley snaps back, his nose a mashed pulp, and gets a kick to his thigh. It buckles but it doesn't stop him from tearing at the man's face with a gloved hand. Not even when Moseley pulls a knife and slices him in the forearm.

Walter backs off.

"What the fuck is your problem, man?" Moseley holds his nose as it drip, drips.

"Kitty Genovese is dead," Walter growls.

Twenty horrified faces surround them both, but nobody moves to help. Walter knows they won't, not until they see more. Sit and watch. It's what happened with Genovese, what will happen with others.

Moseley laughs, stutters, "Man, I don't know what the fuck it is you're talking about-"

Walter shuts him up with an uppercut and twists the man's wrist so that a knife falls out of his hand and clatters near the frothing gutter. He yelps and doubles over. Walter raises his gloved hands above his head as he brings his knee up, catching Moseley between his thigh and balled fists with a sickening crack. The man's face is broken.

Moseley falls over, still breathing shallowly. Several faces turn between Walter and the lump of a man, shocked that something should happen to them, just like that; Walter could see their dirty minds grinding along, and he has a burning desire to punish them all for leading such disgusting lives.

"Call the police," Rorschach snarls, and leaves instead.


-----


He doesn't wash his hands often. In fact it's the only part of him he doesn't, specifically, wash. Rorschach knows that once you get your hands dirty it's impossible to clean them, no matter how many times you run them under the faucet.

He wears gloves.

-----


"Hey!"

Rorschach turns a fraction of an inch towards the voice, then decides it's not worth it to stick around.

Nite Owl catches up to him from the end of the alley and pulls up just as Rorschach turns his head to look at him out of the shifting blots in his mask. He recognizes Nite Owl only by proxy (brown, bronze -- too flashy, hard to miss, even in the grey paper). He's seen him around on his same patrol routes, but they've never talked. The New Frontiersmen often comments on his liberal take to vigilantism, so Rorschach knows for sure that they're nothing alike.

He starts to lope into the shadows with his hands in his pockets. "Not interested."

"Now, hold on," Nite Owl reaches out a hand that lands heavily on his shoulder. "Can't you wait for jus-"

Rorschach lashes out instinctively and catches the side of Nite Owl's face with his gloved knuckles. Nite Owl stumbles backwards in surprise, clutching his cheekbone that Rorschach knows will be dark yellow an hour from now. Rorschach can see his open mouth, but Nite Owl’s dead black goggles tell nothing of how much of an impact he's made.

"What was that for?" the man snaps.

Rorschach grunts. "You deserved it."

Nite Owl seems to glare at him. He straightens up and works his jaw for a moment, as if he's about to yell, but eventually he just looks off to the side and lets out a discomfited sigh. As if he's embarrassed. "Sorry. I didn't realize."

"Your mistake." Rorschach says, and then he leaves. Nite Owl shrugs helplessly and turns around, too.


-----


Nite Owl talks at him, when he sees him, which is often. Rorschach doesn't listen, or at least, he tries not to. Some part of him understands what Nite Owl's trying to say, even if he's in a place where he doesn't want to hear it. Rorschach already knows what Nite Owl's all about. He knows, he knows how he works, how the others work. He hates when he runs across other costumed heroes because he knows he's all too different from them. He doesn't associate with them for a reason. Their petty objectives are too childish and too clouded. They fail to see the true underbelly of the city and suffer from blind, juvenile optimism. Rorschach knows, personally, the true face of crime. It's ugly.

The only thing he has in common with it.

Nite Owl often stumbles over his parting words. He fiddles with his gloves. Rorschach usually grunts noncommittally and turns his back, but this time he melds in with the alley wall, where he can see a fire escape he can use to get himself away from the uncomfortable situation.

"I'll see you around?" Nite Owl calls after him.

As Rorschach scales the wall ladder, he froths a little inside. There's something about Nite Owl that's so sightlessly fumbling and infantile that he can't even bring himself to even consider his help, even if it might be beneficial to his own agenda. But he wasn't one to ignore practicality in a situation where needed.

And Nite Owl isn't afraid of him. That's something.

He runs into Nite Owl again, two nights into his investigation of a small gang that had been making waves in the local drug trade, stuffing packets of cocaine in teddy bears and selling them via mail orders so mass production wouldn't be an issue. Nite Owl is eager to help and Rorschach lets him, because of practicality. He ignores the vicious notion telling him Nite Owl’s going to hold him back.

They tie up the manufacturers and Nite Owl calls the police. Rorschach breaks their ankles so they can't run, just in case. It gets done twice as fast then if Rorschach had done it alone, but he doesn't voice the difference in effectiveness to Nite Owl, who's obviously smart enough to figure it out for himself.

It's unspoken that they check up with their various findings at the end of their patrols. Ever since Nite Owl had caught him that first time around, they had been running into each other during the pitch early morning. Rorschach had tried to find a reason why it would be a waste of his time, but Nite Owl supplies good information, and that's fine.


-----


It's a little different when Doctor Manhattan looks all blue at him, just five feet away, and it's somehow all wrong since he's wearing next to nothing but at least it gives Rorschach an excuse to hang back and avoid shaking his hand. Nite Owl doesn't push Rorschach forward at all, instead brings all of them over to him to meet, probably tells them all beforehand just to stand there and talk instead of offering Rorschach a friendly handshake.

The second Silk Spectre smiles at him nervously and he tries not to notice how much she looks like her mother -- he wants to think, say whore; but he can't. She walks away and Nite Owl whistles low, gives him a boyish grin like he's supposed to agree. She's all black and yellow and cream, nothing like a wasp except for the sting in her eyes when she looks at Manhattan with a completely different smile than the one she'd given him.

Ozymandias, though, he's a little different. He gives Rorschach a look he can't decipher and it sort of burns on the way down, a lot like the whiskey Rorschach's never tasted.

He avoids Ozymandias as much as he does Doctor Manhattan.


----


As Rorschach gets acclimated to the fact that he might have been wrong about Nite Owl, he begins to look forward to their daily information exchange. He gets past the point of discourtesy only because Nite Owl’s been around for longer than anyone else has, even if Nite Owl’s too different to stay on the same wavelength. But as it goes on and on, Rorschach begins to wonder why he had expected it to end in the first place.

"Hey Rorschach," Nite Owl says to him, one night after they've effectively stopped two jewelry store robberies without so much as a single gunshot, "don't you think it would be easier if we patrolled together? Instead of separately, I mean?"

Rorschach stops in a shallow puddle and considers the proposition. "It would be easier. But not as efficient."

Nite Owl shrugs. “We’ve taken down an entire gang together. What if we get in trouble and there’s only one of us there?”

“I can take care of myself.” Rorschach makes a throaty noise that sounds not unlike gravel under tire treads. “So can you.”


-----


The next time Nite Owl heads off on his patrol, Rorschach follows him.

Nite Owl doesn’t ask why, but details his usual routine to Rorschach in a way that suggests that he is in the sort of mood that involves smiling often. Rorschach listens pensively until they stumble upon a mugger attacking some poor woman in a side-alley, who has his knees broken with a piece of pipe as Nite Owl makes sure the girl’s all right.

It turns out that she’s a (dirty whore) prostitute and the mugger just (corrupt filth) an enthusiastic customer, and Rorschach thinks acidly how much better it would have been if he could have broken the girl’s knees too.

Nite Owl keeps quiet about it, and when Rorschach turns his head to him, he shrugs helplessly.

"Filthy occupation," Rorschach grunts.


-----


It's been maybe two weeks since his last shower, but after he half-drowned a lead Rorschach hasn't gone near water.

Gone bobbing like a squirming fish.

He recalls images of black tar and slippery snot mixed with bay water. They stop him cold even after he's smelled his own stench clouding him from head to toe and realizes that he hadn't taken personal hygiene into consideration. But he doesn't need to smell like Nite Owl to do his job, which is why he refuses when Nite Owl asks abruptly, with a crinkled nose, whether or not Rorschach would like to borrow his cologne.


-----


Rorschach is picking through cupboards. Nite Owl is staring at him as if he expects Rorschach to speak, but all he does is take out a few rusty cans from his pantry and set them down on the counter.

"You want a spoon?" Dan asks stupidly, still in costume.

Rorschach knows his full name now. It's on his magazine subscriptions on the coffee table.

"That's not necessary," he says, still removing cans.

"You want some tea?" Dan tries. "Coffee? A shower?"

There's a box of sugar cubes that's unopened, hidden behind rows of beans, baked beans, lima beans, and some canned spaghetti. He takes them out and line them neatly up before removing the box of crystalline cubes and opening it with crooked fingers, gloves stuck deep in his pockets. Dan wordlessly takes out a glass bowl from across his kitchen and hands it to him, but Rorschach declines with a stiff shake of the head. Dan puts it off to the side quietly as Rorschach rolls up his mask up.

Dan looks away, snapping his goggles up onto his forehead and busying himself with something so as not to stare to openly at Rorschach's copper-brown five o'clock shadow.

"Uh," he suggests flimsily.

Rorschach makes a noise; the sugar gives his teeth something to gnash on, rather than acknowledge Dan's nervous bumbling. He is not uncomfortable standing in silence. He wonders if Dan is.

"Look-" Dan sounds like he's crossing from awkward to desperate, and Rorschach turns his head halfway to see, "is there a reason you followed me home? Maybe -- if you're hungry, you can just ask next time. I can cook."

"Hurm." Rorschach says, beginning to replace the cans in their proper shelves with the sugar box in the back of them all. Dan's mouth sort of twitches up as Rorschach clicks the pantry door shut and turns to leave.

"Wait," Dan says quickly, as Rorschach's fingers get to the doorknob. There's a silly grin on his face. "Have you seen Archie?"

Rorschach has, on dark nights when the owlship's lights are painfully obvious, but he follows Dan downstairs anyway.


-----


The next time Rorschach visits, in the dead of night, the sugar cubes are in a bowl under the kitchen cupboards.

When Dan wakes up, stumbles into the kitchen, and looks over at the sugar bowl, he makes a very groggy mental note to refill it. Moments later, he makes a tired phone call to fix the broken lock on the door.


-----


The ashes in the oven are cradling the last bits of humanity Rorschach ever considered himself to possess, and when sees the dogs, his own crumbling ashes filter down through a hourglass and into nothing.

When he lights the match, Walter goes up in flames.

Then Dan's staring at him, in a half-open bathrobe, at the blank man standing in his kitchen with a bloodstain slowly browning on his dark coat.

"Rorschach?" he says, slowly.

There's this look on his face that somewhere between horror and concern, but not revulsion or judgment. Dan's so easy to read. And somehow that's why Rorschach continues to stand there, hands deep in pockets, curled until the muscle and fat strained against leather-encased skin. His face -- mask -- face -- it whirls and his shoulders hunch over, like he's waiting for something, but Dan doesn't ever take the initiative.

"Bathroom," he husks.

Dan wordlessly points to a plain door down a plain hall and Rorschach cleans himself up (he can ignore the water if it's hot enough) and leaves his trench hanging on the back of the chair in Dan's living room. He doesn't take it back until Dan throws it in with his stuff to take to the Laundromat and hands it to him on their next patrol.

It takes Dan a while to get to used to the fact that now he has to remind Rorschach to keep their leads alive, and wonders about the times when he's not there to stop him.


-----


Rorschach doesn't have a lot of nice things, but the majority of them that aren't his are Dan's. There's the small ball of Nostalgia that Dan snuck in his trench coat and a few sugar cubes that he'd taken from Dan's sugar bowl; the grappling gun isn't his, either, but Dan was smart enough to leave it lying around instead of pressing it on him as a gift.

Rorschach doesn't take gifts. He's not soft.


----


The spoon scrapes against the bottom of the can, gathering them up, setting them in his mouth where he can get at them with his tongue. The sound frays the ends of his nerves like the edges of a cheese grater. Dan's not home, so he doesn't touch anything but the silverware and the pantry lock.

The beans taste exactly like the can they've been kept in.

Dan's likely out with Hollis Mason. Slowly intoxicating himself over memories lost to dust and politics. Mason's a bad influence -- infects the man with liberal musings. Dan's better off without Mason. Doesn't need alcohol to encourage self-pity. Doesn't need it. Takes it anyway.

The can clunks emptily down on the countertop. Rorschach doesn't make much noise as he gets up to go to the sugar bowl but the soft leather sound of scuffed oxfords on tile. The cubes take away the feeling of cold grease in his mouth, roughly sanding against his teeth, then melting. He pockets a few for later, like he's always done.

Dan's always filled the sugar bowl up for him, even when Rorschach wasn't there. When Dan retired, Rorschach stopped coming over. Didn't have reason to. Didn't want to encourage Dan's lackadaisical lifestyle. Didn't want to see how Dan had let himself go.

He pulls down his face and turns to leave, and in his mind Dan's there, rain-splattered, indignant, sagging.

It was a long time ago that Rorschach remembers him being Nite Owl. Then, they had been partners. Real partners, not some crippled shell of justice that the Keene Act had left to drift across the streets like tumbleweed. Now -- he's fat. He's older. Not Nite Owl anymore.

Just Daniel.

"Rorschach," Dan would say, partly horrified, partly reprimanding. His eyes would flit to the empty cans of beans, then back to Rorschach's slouched figure standing in his kitchen. He would laugh a little bit, but only because he would know the situation is entirely ridiculous. "What are you doing here? The lock --" Then, "Did- did you want to sit down?" he, tentatively, would ask.

"Was leaving," Rorschach grunts aloud, but Dan's not there to hear it. His gloved fingers scrape across the sugar cubes in his pocket, but he doesn't eat them until he's well out of the house.

Years pass; he's still waiting for the time when Dan sees him. Stops him. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe never will.


-----


(There's a part of him that goes blank, and it takes him almost the entire time on the owlship to realize that it's because he hasn't got his journal with him.

He might be as blinded as the rest of them to think he can make the world listen, but nobody else has done anything.)


-----


Rorschach hasn't ever cried before -- the tears are so foreign he thinks there's something more wrong about it than all the blue -- and as his eyes burn he can see his face on the sugar-snow. It doesn't change shapes. It's so cold that the heat-sensitive fabric is completely unresponsive, and the fact that it doesn't work in the presence of its creator is maybe a little ironic, but Rorschach knows why. It's because it's dead. Dying.

Then he's Walter Kovacs again, for a sad, wasted moment, but Doctor Manhattan sees only atoms.