(fic) darkness, you are gentler
Darkness, You Are Gentler | radishface
Watchmen → Zombie!AU → Dan/Rorschach
Rorschach travels from New York to California. 1270 words.
A/N, Follow up to Eventually, as Before. Playing in etherati's amazing Z!verse. <3
The water laps over him, colder than he could ever be. Rorschach closes his eyes.
*
After Daniel passed away,
Laurie at the funeral, fat tears rolling down her wrinkled face, Jon to her right and Rorschach to her left, though in this cloudy weather they're all lit blue by Jon's glow, all immortal
he didn't go out onto the streets for months. Sometimes he would turn the heater up, up, and up, and it was weak but he'd do it and shuffle back to bed with the blankets wrapped around him in a cocoon. The cotton was no substitute but sometimes in a half-sleep his mind would let him imagine things where the daylight wouldn't.
Years passed. Laurie brought him food sometimes, but never stayed long. They'd been able to sit with each other for more than hours at a time before, in comfortable (yes, Rorschach could admit that to himself now) and uncomfortable silence, but that was when there was still an intermediary between them. Alone, they were adrift.
Other times, he fed himself, if only so he wouldn't succumb. For one week, life was canned peaches and cereal, his stomach twisting so badly and his blood boiling at the suggestion of heated embraces of teeth and throats, as he looked out the window and saw people walking to and fro. Only when his hunger was overcome by his own self-disgust would he eat again.
*
When he can't stand it anymore, he stuffs a knapsack full of cash and meat and sugar and starts walking.
Westward he goes, if only because he doesn't know how long it will take.
*
His feet start bleeding in Iowa.
*
He's reached Nebraska when he hits a prairie, a field of cows under a black sky, long grasses tickling his feet through the holes in his shoes. The smell of hay and dung rings strong in his nose, dense and sweet-salt. He can see the even blacker silhouettes of teenagers climbing over the fence yonder, booze in paper bags crinkling and their hands stretched out to meet the cows, laughter hushed.
"Hank," one girl titters, when her hand is caught back. "Stop it. I told you not to, in front of the--"
"Cows? Very indecent." Rorschach's grip tightens around her wrist, and her paper-bagged bottle falls to the ground with a muffled thump. Everybody else has turned to look at them now, this pale stranger on the prairie, hair and eyes like rust and smelling of it too, stronger even as the clouds parted to paint him in the startling silver of the moon.
"Unless you all have a hankering for punishment," Rorschach releases the grip on the girl, "suggest you leave bovine animals in peace."
One ratty-haired teenager's mouth stops gaping long enough to form words. "W-- what the hell?"
Rorschach stares wider and furrows his brows, knowing the gold is glinting in them.
"Shit. Shit."
"A goddamn zombie, fuck."
Gasps and the sudden flight of feet. Exit players, cue engines. The wheels of some distant truck squeal off into the night, and then it's just crickets and the warm sounds of bovine breathing.
The cow nearest Rorschach flips her tail and sighs appreciatively through her nostrils, a wet, and steamy noise. Her eyes are glossy and limpid with something like gratitude as they stare at him.
Rorschach reaches out to stroke her hide, combing his fingers through the roughness. His gaze follows the heavy weight of her spots; she's warm and heavy under his touch.
He lingers there for a moment more, remembering things.
*
A few toes come loose in Wyoming. Rorschach throws them in a dumpster and puts his shoe back on. It's going to be a little harder to walk, but it'll be all right.
*
In Utah, from behind the print of a wrinkled newspaper two days old, he watches children scattered through the park. They are taunting and teasing and doing all the things children do.
A little boy is crying, his toy truck stolen by the bigger boys who are laughing at him from the jungle gym. Their legs are wrapped around metal beams and they are hanging by their knees as they tease him with their upside-down alien faces and protruding tongues.
Rorschach feels his limbs shaking with the desire to stand up, to intervene, to stop this, but another little boy marches right past the crying one to hold out his hand in front of the jungle gym tribesmen, commanding. The crowd convenes in upon him, wampum-dancing and leering but the second little boy keeps his ground. His lip quivers because he is afraid and he may be stiff with fear but at least he is not moving, his hand still held out, and he is not running away.
The bigger boys pull his hair, push him down. Rorschach's knees ache as he tried to stand but something keeps him. Daniel's hand on his arm, gripping gently but firmly, saying let's see.
Give them a chance, buddy.
The other boys leave the scene, bored. The second boy is curled over his knees, back hunched and hand scrubbing at his face, no tears here, no tears. The first boy, tentatively at first, then running, picking up his truck from where it was turned over in the sand, then turning back to look at the second boy.
He extends a hand, impossibly small. The other boy takes it, and is pulled up.
Moments pass and then they are laughing together. The truck is now an airplane, the jungle gym a city of empty, in-between spaces and all of the places they can go. They could have been brothers, but they didn't need to be for the blood to run strong between them.
Rorschach can see that now.
*
He can't feel anything in his left foot anymore. Looking at it, he observes that it is a dark shade of burgundy-black with a sheen like marble. Feels like it too, except for where the skin has sloughed off around the creases, the ankles. It will come off soon, like the others. The darkness is deepening up his calves and he can feel empty spaces expanding in his joints, in his knees and elbows, making him into a rambling patchwork of skin and bones.
*
His steps totter unsteadily on the boardwalk; the shoes are too big for him.
They all take him for another drunkard and let him be. Nearby, a group of friends make merry by a bonfire, grey plumes rising furiously upwards into the rainbow-haze of the dusk. Somebody is singing to the stringing of a guitar and all around it smells of barbecued meat and ketchup. People walk by him, holding hands.
Rorschach feels the hunger deep within, a salacious memory of skin and flesh. But it's faint, very faint.
He hobbles until the noise is well behind him. The sand seems to harden as he sits, one solid mass instead of an undulating one he's been walking on. He bends down to examine his shoes. The skin is already tearing at his ankle where the opening of the shoe is, where the leather chafes. With a yank, he pulls his shoe free and a slough of skin rips all the way up to his knee.
It's hard to walk into the water on what's left of his feet. Perhaps they'd find him, if they ever found him, a trail of leftover, scattered fingers and toes and violet-brown footprints spotting the country, leading into the ocean. But that's not the last thing he thinks of.
They say you can hear anything in a conch shell, the roar of the ocean. Perhaps that's why he's here.
The water churns around him, insistent. He is loose-limbed. When the tide comes, Rorschach is already head-deep.
*
My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.
I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,
Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.
It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.
It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is
blank here, for reasons.
walt whitman