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The first time Rorschach meets Kotsya it’s late at night and he’s attracted by the sound of a dog screaming and men laughing. He finds the dog, dirty fur matted with blood and one eye swollen shut, standing at the mouth of an alleyway, looking in at two men. One of them is holding something down on the filth of the alley pavement. The other is scrabbling at something that Rorschach can’t see. There’s a dirty sneaker lying next to the dog, a pale foot barely visible in the darkness between the men.
“Yeah, fuck her!” The man has a deep voice, like Rorschach’s might’ve been like without the damaged vocal chords. He remedies that, kicking a booted foot into the speaker’s throat. The man lets out a strangled gherk and flies back. The other man, the one with his pants shoved down around his knees and dick limp between his legs like some kind of alien worm, stumbles back. The woman’s shirt is torn open, half-exposing a black bra that looks like a hole in her chest. Her lower half is completely exposed and whatever she’d been wearing lies in shreds around her. He can see dark lines from where a knife had broken through the skin. She doesn’t move and Rorschach thinks she might be dead.
The rapist, pants pulled back up around his waist, charges him. A knife flashes in one meaty fist. Rorschach dodges the first wild thrust, parries the second, and ducks under the punch thrown by the man who’d been holding the woman down. He spins and kicks the wheezing man’s legs out from under him. Fire arcs down his back as the rapist cuts through his trench coat and into his flesh. The fucker moves fast, but not fast enough to avoid the strike that breaks his neck. As he turns back to the second man, there’s a fleshy thudding sound and the second man crumples to the ground. The woman is standing behind him, a brick in her hand. There’s enough light filtering in from the street for Rorschach to see the bits of the man’s skull and brains clinging to the rough surface. She wobbles a bit and drops the brick, narrowly avoiding her bare foot. It’s starting to rain, the night turning cold, but she barely seems to notice as she limps past Rorschach to stomp on the rapist’s face. Her own face is as blank as a doll’s, features painted on bone china.
The woman turns to him, but looks at the dog instead. She’s keeping her bare foot, bloody now, off the ground, balancing on the foot that still has a shoe on it. She’s wearing glasses that broke in the struggle, one lens shattered but somehow still in the frame, and she takes them off before she looks at him. The way her eyes narrow and widen as she tries to focus on him makes her look very young.
“I-I-I was a n-nurse.” Her voice is so quiet he barely hears it over the noise of the sleeping city. Rorschach wonders where she’s going with that statement. What does she want? A fucking congratulations?
“Y-y-your back?”
Oh. He’d forgotten about it, but now he feels the sting tracing between his shoulder blades and down his spine, can feel his blood gluing the shirt to his back. She’s shoving her foot back into the fallen shoe, crouching down to scoop up the wounded dog before turning to walk down the sidewalk. It’s a big dog, but she handles the extra weight like she doesn’t even notice it.
Rorschach shrugs off his trench coat as he catches up to her, and when he tries to drape it across her shoulders she whirls towards him. She almost falls backward into the street, teetering on the curb with her arms still locked around the mutt. Rorschach catches hold of her upper arm, holds it until she rebalances herself. She stares at his chest, the closest she’s come to looking at his face, but even so he can read the fear in the lines of her body, see it in the way her lips are pressed into a tight white line.
Walter’d seen that look before, on the faces of bruised little girls that some of his mother’s men had brought with them. He remembers one girl, about nine or ten, his age at the time, and scrawny like she hasn’t been fed in a long time, leaning toward him as the bedroom door clicks closed and whispering, “He’s not my father.” She’d told him her name too, but it’s been too long and he’s forgotten the name, as Russian as her thick accent. Then she’d nodded and shoved herself back into the corner made by the sofa’s back and arm, folding in on herself until she barely resembled anything other than a pile of dirty laundry. He’d known it as the small rebellion it had been, known it again when the man came out and said, “Come on, Cynthia. Let’s go home.” There’s a bruise on the girl’s right wrist and when the man grabs her, un-ringed fingers fitting along blue-black skin, she winces but lets herself be dragged along. Walter remembers how tired she’d looked.
The man had come back several more times, each visit months apart, dragging the girl along with him each time. Sometimes she’d have bruises purpling the side of her face, or her neck, or her twig-thin arms, and sometimes she’d move wrong and wince. He never asked, she’d never hinted that she’d wanted him to. The last time the man had come to see Walter’s mother the girl had had track marks in the crooks of her elbows, one starting to blacken with infection. She was older then, maybe fourteen, and that time she hadn’t been left with Walter when the bedroom door clicked shut.
The man never came back after that.
Back in the present, the woman’s hands shake when she touches him, but she does it anyway, gripping his hand and pulling as she walks away. It’s the shock of someone actually touching him that has Rorschach following, some dumb animal instinct that happens when your brain shuts down. By the time they reach a crumbling five-story walk up with a front door half off its hinges she’s let go of him, wrapping both her arms around the bloodied mutt again. There’s a man in the shadow of the stairs, swaying drunkenly as he pisses on the wall. The woman doesn't even flinch. Rorschach follows her up three flights of stairs, knowing that there’s a crack den up the next one. He’ll be back soon enough to clean it out. Her apartment smells like marijuana and under Rorschach’s mask, his lip curls in disgust. He should have known, just another junkie whore. He turns to go.
“W-wait! Y-y-your back…” Her voice is soft, a child afraid of waking a sleeping parent, and she doesn’t look up at him. He can see her arms tighten around the dog before she continues, “P-please, you helped me and…” Her voice fades out again and she looks up at him from under a fringe of wet hair. She’s got eyes that pale bluish grey of storm clouds working up the energy to rain, and they dart around the room like she’s looking for escape routes as she pushes hair the color of blood seeped into thirsty earth out of her face. Her fingers are suddenly nervous, picking at hangnails, picking at the scabs where some of them had bled earlier. She’s missing the nail of her left index finger. She has a cut on her upper lip, and her tongue flicks out to wet it reflexively. Her nose looks like it’s been broken once, maybe twice, and it had healed crooked. There’s smear of blood across her cheek from where she’d swiped at blood running from her nose.
When he doesn’t leave, she points a shaking hand at the broken-down old couch where she’d set the dog, and disappears into another room. Rorschach doesn’t sit, but he doesn’t leave either. He stands there, looking down at the mutt sprawling on the couch and staining the blanket over the cushions with blood. It’s cold out, and still raining, but most of all there’s a knife wound down his back where he can’t reach it. He has no money for a doctor and if he goes to the free clinic down by the church one more time he’s pretty sure they’re going to call the cops. At least this way it’ll be cleaned of whatever filth a rapist’s blade collected. Rorschach shudders at the thought.
The apartment is a shit hole, but both the rooms he can see look clean despite the water-stained walls and the overall dinginess that lingers in every shitty five-story walk up he’s ever been inside of. The linoleum of the kitchen is cracked and stained and an ugly yellow color, but it looks like it had been cleaned recently. There’s a thick rug taking up almost half of it, the couch and a battered record player on a crate the only furniture. It’s all there’s room for, unless she got rid of the dented mini-refrigerator, the equally small counter it’s under, the camp stove, or the tiny sink. The other room looks like her bedroom, the corner of an unmade bed visible through the door. There’s a wardrobe against the wall opposite the door, an overloaded bookshelf pushed up against the inside of the doorframe where the woman is just reappearing with a white box in her hands. She’s changed into different clothes, a baggy black T-shirt and equally baggy sweatpants, and his coat is draped in the crook of her left arm. She’s dug up a new pair of glasses, small lenses and wire frames. Her face is starting to bruise and he can see damp patches where blood has soaked into cloth. The smear of blood is still across her cheek. As she draws nearer Rorschach can see she’s not shaking anymore, her movements easy and relaxed. He can smell smoke on her breath, can see how vacant her eyes are behind her glasses. Disgust flares hot in his throat again and those glassy eyes flick up to his face and away.
“I-I know you don’t…This is the only way I can help you.”
Her voice is warm, hoarsened slightly by smoke. Easy to listen to, now that she’s speaking at a normal volume, almost soothing. The dog seems to like it at least, ears pricking up as she speaks.
“I need steady hands… because that looks like it’s going to need stitches. You can leave me for the cops or…or lynch me in the town square after if you want, but please let me…” There’s some lag to her words now, like her brain keeps forgetting to tell her mouth what to say. Not exactly promising from someone who’s saying that they’ll be taking a needle to your back. They stand there for a long time, neither moving or speaking, until the dog shifts on the couch and the woman seemingly forgets about Rorschach.
He watches her tend to the dog, hands steady as she treats torn cartilage and flesh. When she’s done, and the dog has curled up to sleep, the woman turns back to look at him.
“Now can I see your back?”
He ends up shirtless, face down on the couch. The dog had been relocated to the bed, his knee in the damp spot of its blood. She’s perched on his ass, fingers cool and sure as she stitches him shut. He barely feels the stitches, just a weird tugging sensation as the thread pulls through. She’s humming softly as she sews, interrupting herself occasionally to tell him things like Halfway done and sorry if that twinged and eww, reminds me of this time… He closes his eyes.
When Rorschach comes back to himself, she tells him her name is Kotsya. Sounds Russian, even though she doesn’t. She’s going to have trouble with that if the Reds follow through on their threats. Kotsya’s weight moves off him. Her glasses have slipped down the bridge of her nose, but she makes no move to fix them.
“You’re done. Try to keep it clean and don’t twist over much.” She’s turning away, heading to check on the dog.
He’s out the door five seconds later, still buttoning his shirt, coat caught in the corner of his elbow.
~
The first time Walter meets her is a week and a half later and a complete accident. She damn near runs him down as she tries to get away from a pack of three men who are following her, leering and saying how they’d take her loud enough that she can hear them. She looks terrified, on the brink of tears, as she bounces off his shoulder. If she didn’t look so scared the men probably wouldn’t have bothered. Predators feed on fear, seek it out like a shark finding blood in the water. Even Walter, stupid as he is, knows that.
The men push past him a few seconds after Kotsya, one of them shoving Walter down to the sidewalk. He twists to break his fall and feels two of Rorschach’s stitches tear, skin pulling at the others. His sign clatters to the ground beside him and he can see himself picking it up and shoving the pointed end through the man’s eye. Then Walter blinks and the thought is gone. Blood is already drying on his back, tacky where his shirt brushes against it.
Kotsya turns back at the noise, the men circling her. Predators, pathetic ones, but predators nonetheless. Her eyes, wide and frightened, fix on him. For a second, he thinks she knows him, even without his face. Then her eyes drop and her shoulders hunch up, and the men circle tighter around her. Fuck.
“Stupid man, just walk away,” Walter mutters to himself, already walking towards Kotsya. He should be walking away, whatever happens, happens; but he’s still muttering and weaving, like a drunk on a bad bender, towards the three men. He runs straight into one of the men, stumbling back and slurring curses. The men shove him back, aim kicks in his direction like he’s a stray dog. Only when he punches one of them in the throat do they actually start to treat him like a threat. One of them comes at him, a knife appearing out of nowhere and aiming for his chest. He dodges the stab, too slow to stop the blade punching through the meat of his upper arm.
He has to stop saving this woman. Both times he’s helped her, he’s been sliced open. Walter shoves the pain away, saves it for later when he’s alone, and shoves the man away. Hard, hard enough that the man flies back, head cracking open on the brick wall of a building. Walter watches the man slump to the ground, not sure if the man is alive or dead and not really caring either way. Then he turns to snarl at the man’s sidekicks, they scatter like the cockroaches they are.
Kotsya hasn’t moved, her eyes tracking his movements, the blood soaking into his sleeve. Walter just expects her to walk away, right up until she fucking reaches for him with a trembling hand and he starts having flashbacks to when Rorschach had met her, when Rorschach had been pulled down this street, brought to this broken door. He wonders how often she does this, bringing home strange men who help her. She’s a weird mix of paranoia and innocence that clashes and works and confuses the hell out of him.
The white box comes out from under the sofa as she light a joint and Walter’s shirt is half off, gashed arm exposed. Kotsya cleans the wound and the skin around it before dipping a needle in alcohol. She says very little as she sews, aside from telling him her name, mumbling around the joint in her mouth. She doesn’t mention Rorschach, doesn’t even hint that she’s patched someone else up recently. He wonders how many others she treats like this, drugging smoke curling around the frames of her glasses while she tends their wounds.
He watches her hands while she works, studying her neat stitches. Her hand twists and there’s a flash of a scar, pure white on her pale skin, curving up her arm, leading his eyes to the other scars. Old cigarette burns and bruise-purple scars of infected track marks scattered across her skin like constellations.
My name is Kotsya, a little girl whispers, and he is not my father.
She might remember him, she might not, but either way he’s not going to ask. He’s not going to drag her back into the hell their childhood had been, not when she’s still struggling to escape from whatever hell has hold of her now.