Work Text:
He is gone when the fire department arrives too late. The only thing they will find is a hollow building burned clean. Smoke residue still sears his lungs as he walks, and when he lays a hand over his mask it nearly radiates the same, feverish heat as the fire. If he uncovers his mouth, will his breath blacken the air with ash? For a moment he almost tries. He closes his eyes instead. Afterimages writhe behind them in an old-fashioned dance.
The walk to the enclosed alley behind his apartment drains all heat from him, leaves him hefting with numb fingers onto the fire escape. The metal thuds dully under his boots, empty echoes crawling into empty bones. The night hangs too dark in the sky, presses in too close, until only the afterimages, splayed into each other, alight onto the stage.
Grimacing, he forces himself to move tired legs, tired body, faster, and grunts as he lifts himself onto the roof. City light shines the streets clean like gilded lies. As he walks, readying to lower himself onto the windowsill of his apartment, he pauses at the city stretched beneath.
A streetlight by his building stutters out. Inside, he is roaring, raging, because the city is exactly the same. Police sirens cast themselves into the sky like grasping flames, but instead of cauterization, New York’s festering wounds continue to weep. Rorschach balls his hands into fists, would claw into his palms if not for his creaking leather gloves.
He sees it, layering into the city, filth like Grice and Mosely and every other depraved scum who wake every day to remain filth, until they became a second skin, into a real skin. He has seen the city’s true face, and he wants to peel it away and let this city bleed cleanly at last. If any clean blood remains.
It died a week ago, if it ever existed. It died with a whimper when he saw dogs and bones, when Roche was kidnapped and killed, alone, terrified, before she lived to experience anything else. When smoke filtered through the roof to scratch into starless sky, he knew there are no eyes here. It was just them. Always them.
He is shaking on the edge of the roof, and wills for cold rage to steady him, to inch through his veins and freeze Kovacs away. He will have to go to Roche’s parents. He will have to tell them about her death.
He will close his eyes, and with deadened lips, pray her vengeance was enough.
He stares at the flat tar road until the afterimage at last seeps from his eyes and into the heavy dark, like gangrenous veins. Cacophonous city noises drain away as he sits on the roof, insides twisting and roiling, the street far, far below him, and he, slowly steadying at its edge. Eventually, he stands, still staring in between the motion and the act, and everything is still.
Then he turns, trembling with sick fury, and climbs down the fire escape, the metal ringing as hollow as before. There is work to do.
Before, Walter Kovacs had been too soft. He did not understand what it meant to leave vermin alive in a world with nothing watching. Rorschach knows. And they are trapped here with him.