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He’d chased down two murderers tonight, a pair working in a tandem that left a swath of dead, eyeless clergy in their wake. They’d gone to ground in the tunnels under the city, but Rorschach knows the tunnels as well as any. He’s caught them crossing a sewer line that had them all smelling bad enough that even his eyes had watered.
Kotsya answers the door, exhaustion written in every line of her body. There are dark smudges under bloodshot, haunted eyes. Blood on her lip from where she’d chewed through it. There’s a bandage wrapped around her hand, keeping pads of gauze pressed to the palm.
“You’d better be here to use the shower.” When she speaks, it’s overlaid with a guttural Russian accent, nasal because she’s pinching her nose closed against the stench. The shower is hot against his skin as he watches month’s worth of dirt swirl away down the drain. His back, and side, and thigh ache, still healing despite him. When the water finally carries the last of the grime coating him down the drain, he steps out to find a towel waiting for him, draped across the sink. He wraps it around himself, high around his waist, and stares at his clothes.
“Wash them in the tub,” comes Kotsya’s voice from behind him. He whirls toward her, startled. She’s very quiet, very fast, and leaning against the doorframe like she’s been there all along.
“Wash them in the tub, the soap flakes are there,” she says, pointing at the box sitting on the toilet tank. Her eyes follow him as he fills the tub and reaches for the box. “They’re healing nicely.” She makes no move to touch the stitches like they would at the clinic. “You want me to pull the ones that’re ready?”
Rorschach shrugs and she vanishes, coming back with a small pair of scissors. She’s fast, almost painless as she pulls stitches from his skin. Then she’s leaving him a change of clothes and saying she’ll make dinner while he washes his clothes. She says that they’ll be dry enough by the time he wakes and he doesn’t argue about it. He washes the threadbare suit and scarf that’s been cleaned of bloodstains, hangs them over the shower curtain rod.
Dinner isn’t much, baked beans and jalapenos on two pieces of toast, but it’s the most he’s had in a few days. Dogmeat stares up at him, hoping for food. He gives the dog half of his toast and the mutt trots off to devour it, tail wagging madly.
“Dog’s off in the head,” Kotsya says without looking up from her typewriter. She’s writing again, wads of paper crumpled at their feet. Rorschach can hear the smile in her voice as easily as he can read what she’s just written on a fresh sheet of paper. These are the good times, the violent times. The times when even evil protects innocence and both sides punish those who break the laws. The words are dark against the crisp white paper. He likes it, the idea tattooed on the page.
“Suits its master.” He says.
Kotsya snorts out a laugh, pulling the sheet from the typewriter and crumpling it into a ball. When she throws it, Dogmeat brings it back to drop on top of the growing pile. She growls and the dog growls back, tail wagging because it’s all a game. Kotsya kicks up a flurry of crumpled paper and the mutt leaps about, snapping at the balls falling out of the air.
“Off in the head, all right.” She says, her head falling back to rest on the couch’s back. Her eyes slide closed and she relaxes so suddenly he thinks that she’s fallen asleep, until her foot kicks out and the record player starts turning. Crackly, slow piano notes fill the apartment.
“I’ve always hated this song,” she says, eyes still closed.
“Then why listen to it?”
“Because it reminds me of the beauty to come.” There’s a soft smile on Kotsya’s lips, fading when she opens her eyes and shrugs. “Or I’m just insane. People’ve been threatening me with institutions for years.”
Ordinarily, Rorschach would have been one of them, would have dragged her to the doors of the nearest sanitarium, but Walter holds him back. She wouldn’t survive in a place like that. She barely survives in a place like this, living in a near constant haze, a dog sprawled at her feet.
When I was a child my mother’s husband sold me to this country, for I was not his child.
She’s back to the typewriter, the clicking of the keys blending with the music to make something new, something no one had intended.
He ends up staying the night and most of the next day, leaving only when it’s dark enough for the dregs of the city to rise. His hand is reaching for the door when Kotsya stops him, grabbing the hand reaching to pull his face down. She leans in so fast Rorschach doesn’t have time to avoid her. It’s barely a kiss, a simple whisper of her lips against his before she pulls the cloth of his face back down, but it warms him. Then she hands him his coat and tells him to be careful, and Rorschach closes the door behind himself.