Final Laps
Title: Final Laps
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Rorschach/Dan
Warnings: Character death of the Karnak 'splosion kind.
Summary: Tiny ficlet written for comment_fic. Prompt was "time flies like a smashed alarm clock."
Nite Owl estimated it would be a fourteen hour flight. A preposterous duration to consider hovering over familiar New York, but here, with the landscape freezing below them, he doesn’t remember where that time has gone. It’s there only in bright flashes that don’t connect to the rotations of his watch hands (all that time gone, how-); Veidt’s papers combed through and the sight of the ocean opening up below them. Running through the last rations of coffee and Daniel filling him in on the jailbreak planning.
(Daniel wrapping a hand around his and calling him a friend, Daniel offering to heat those up for him, Daniel uttering the word retirement as he shuts the costume locker, Nite Owl introducing himself on a rooftop overlooking his (their) city. All that time, and how did they come to-)
Time flying by like a smashed alarm clock. Appropriate, though. The Comedian is dead and a superman has been taken down. Kovacs exposed for all the world to see. Veidt behind it all. (Daniel leaning in to kiss Silk Specter.) With everything else he’s known coming apart at the seams, why not the passage of time too? There are fourteen hours he barely remembers when he brackets Daniel (Nite Owl, because with everything coming apart at least that has been reformed) against the wall with this arms, silences the questions he knows are coming, and leans into him.
-----
He hadn’t thought it (he) could get any more broken. Proven wrong, and it’s all crushing in on him like shards of glass. A dead city, a dead mask, dead man; thirty-five minutes, eight years, twenty years since-. Here in the Antarctic wind, time whipped away like the pieces of a shattered- but no, because for time to fly it would had to have meant something in the first place.
Daniel is there behind him, he knows (Daniel burning against him and around him) and there’s just enough of him left for it to hurt when the wind rips away the meaning in that too. The man facing him hasn't yet raised his hand, but Rorschach (Walter) is already a web of brittle cracks, shaking fracture lines.
He cannot see Daniel through the veil of snow; the air scours away any warmth that might have been (was) there. He shouts his last command and waits to be taken apart.
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Rorschach/Dan
Warnings: Character death of the Karnak 'splosion kind.
Summary: Tiny ficlet written for comment_fic. Prompt was "time flies like a smashed alarm clock."
Nite Owl estimated it would be a fourteen hour flight. A preposterous duration to consider hovering over familiar New York, but here, with the landscape freezing below them, he doesn’t remember where that time has gone. It’s there only in bright flashes that don’t connect to the rotations of his watch hands (all that time gone, how-); Veidt’s papers combed through and the sight of the ocean opening up below them. Running through the last rations of coffee and Daniel filling him in on the jailbreak planning.
(Daniel wrapping a hand around his and calling him a friend, Daniel offering to heat those up for him, Daniel uttering the word retirement as he shuts the costume locker, Nite Owl introducing himself on a rooftop overlooking his (their) city. All that time, and how did they come to-)
Time flying by like a smashed alarm clock. Appropriate, though. The Comedian is dead and a superman has been taken down. Kovacs exposed for all the world to see. Veidt behind it all. (Daniel leaning in to kiss Silk Specter.) With everything else he’s known coming apart at the seams, why not the passage of time too? There are fourteen hours he barely remembers when he brackets Daniel (Nite Owl, because with everything coming apart at least that has been reformed) against the wall with this arms, silences the questions he knows are coming, and leans into him.
-----
He hadn’t thought it (he) could get any more broken. Proven wrong, and it’s all crushing in on him like shards of glass. A dead city, a dead mask, dead man; thirty-five minutes, eight years, twenty years since-. Here in the Antarctic wind, time whipped away like the pieces of a shattered- but no, because for time to fly it would had to have meant something in the first place.
Daniel is there behind him, he knows (Daniel burning against him and around him) and there’s just enough of him left for it to hurt when the wind rips away the meaning in that too. The man facing him hasn't yet raised his hand, but Rorschach (Walter) is already a web of brittle cracks, shaking fracture lines.
He cannot see Daniel through the veil of snow; the air scours away any warmth that might have been (was) there. He shouts his last command and waits to be taken apart.