FIC: Linework
Title: Linework
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: Imagined Dan/Multiple, Dan/Rorschach
Date Written: 2013
Summary: The Twilight Lady takes an interest in expanding Dan's reading selections; it goes about like you'd expect.
Rating/Warnings: NC-17, mostly but not entirely due to Dan's overactive imagination.
Notes: Prompted on the KM, something along the lines of 'TL starts sending Dan Tiuana bibles of himself' or of the other heroes, or that he just encounters them somehow? I DON'T REMEMBER EXACTLY, SORRY. Also, the Before Watchmen books were coming out at the time so there's some meta about that in here too. BUT MOSTLY DAN BEING A PERV.
*
The first of the little booklets that finds its way into his hands-Leslie’s sent it, sure as anything, the floral-and-musk smell of her perfume clinging to the pages, though god knows how she got his address and really that’s what he should be worrying about-is one featuring himself. There’s something non-intuitively distancing about that, and about the disarming typicality of the first half’s ‘there must be some way to repay you’ nonsense, that makes it easier to laugh it off as the lark it is.
Sure, the second half hits a little closer to the mark, maybe. It’s probably why she sent it, a smirking smiley face scrawled next to her own cartoonishly naked likeness, just as inaccurate as Nite Owl’s himself. He’d say he could only dream of being that well endowed, but he’s not actually sure he’d want to be. Practical concerns, after all.
Still, it’s just a silly little porn rag, nothing to get bothered over.
Of course he still tries getting off to it, tries a few times, an idle experiment. But there’s something at once narcissistic and humbling about it, and eventually it ends up shoved between Bartleby’s Book of Sub-Continental Passerines and Home Robotics for the Enthusiast, where he knows no one will ever find it.
*
When a second packet arrives in the mail, Dan isn’t sure what to expect. Is his underground-fan-with-a-printing-press really this prolific? How many more issues of Adventures of the Giant Owl Cock should he be looking forward to, here?
But this one isn’t about him. Cockzamandius, says the cover’s bubble print, as he slides it free from the envelope, with Enjoy, dearie under it in a distinctive scrawl.
Dan frowns, flips the first few pages. He isn’t immediately sure what to think; he’d have to be blind to not recognize how objectively attractive the other man is, but he’s just never thought of Adrian like that. Still, the scenario the trashy little book presents-a threesome with a young couple he’d rescued from a mugging-is at least a little more interesting than the usual teenage straight boy insertion fantasy. Dan finds himself at a reluctant, vaguely interested half-mast around the point where ‘Cockzamandius’ and the husband start really going at it, the curvaceous and perky-breasted wife squealing with delight at the spectacle.
It’s not because it’s Adrian, Dan tells himself, palming idly at himself through his khakis, coaxing the hardness there to something more useful. It could be anyone on the page; is anyone in his head, a blurry, shifting, indistinct male figure, all violent angles and momentum. It’s just been a while since he- he hasn’t had the chance in years to- well, not since college anyway, and it’s very easy to imagine himself in that position again, imagine the pressure and the sudden give, the slickness, everything taut and stretched and filled. The relentless rhythm of it all, rocking him across the sheets-
Dan bites his lip, fingers going a little too tight around the pages.
And it’s been too long but he remembers: the sharp, good way it feels to have someone inside, the closeness and the way it’s so clear when they’re about to come, the intensity and the desperation for more, closer, harder, deeper, always deeper-
He’s so close, hand working himself raw. But then he tries to turn the page one handed, hoping for some image on the next page to push him over, and there’s nothing there-just bouncing tits and both of them going at her comically dripping pussy at once, and it’s not even like that’s not hot but it’s not what he needed, not where his head was-
-and his orgasm fizzles out, dribbled release landing on the floor between his feet in a lackluster splatter.
He takes a breath, lets it out. His hand is shaking when he peels it away from his own flesh.
And as simply as that, he’s just an ornithology nerd sitting on his living room sofa with his pants around his ankles, jerking off to a comic book like a sixteen-year-old. He tries to let the shame shake off in a long shudder, hunches his shoulders in. Tries to get on about his day.
There are a few more attempts, but after a while, Adrian’s smug face on the cover starts pissing him off, and the book’s in the trashcan by the time the week’s out.
*
He feels a little skeevy, paging through the thin volume dedicated to the youngest of their ranks, partly because she’d been underage so very recently but mostly because technically an adult now or not, she’s still too young.
It’s also just lines on a page, photocopied to death and stapled together. No actual teenage crimefighters were harmed in the production...
Anyway, he’s spent enough time thinking about this sort of thing that if it’s really as wrong as it feels, he’s already going to hell.
In the book, Silk Spectre is tired of her perfect, godlike boyfriend-wants someone ordinary and human, and Dan can work with that. He pictures it: Laurie on his doorstep, an emotional mess, invited in, coffee and a warm blanket and-
No, that’s not working; all that’s doing is making him feel is protective, because there’s no way he would ever make a move on her like that, not while she’s falling apart. His erection starts to subside between his fingers, and he thinks quickly: A month later, after all of the issues are worked through, when Jon is a fading memory and she’s sure this is what she wants.
The comic’s on the floor now, forgotten. He’s got his own ideas about this one, doesn’t need the visual aid.
He pictures her on the street with him, beautiful in her brutality; pictures her in the owlship’s copilot chair, light from the city shining off of her perfect body, the taste of her heady and sweet when he buries his face between her legs. The velvety heat of her, when he pushes two fingers inside and then slides himself into her, the perfect push-pull of their fit, the way she would arch away from him on the chair and-
It isn’t her chair.
The realization is sharp and sudden like an accusation, and it sits in his gut like a growling, spitting creature. It isn’t her chair and it isn’t her place by his side on the street, against his back in a fight. That position is occupied, and the sudden jarring juxtaposition of figures in the fantasy throws off his stride completely, brings the experiment to a gasping, shuddering halt.
There’s something almost painful about his ruined climax this time, like a fist around his cock at exactly the wrong moment, the imagined stink of old leather like a spike to the back of his throat.
*
There’s a gap then, a month or so when nothing comes in the mail, and Dan feels almost cheated.
*
It’s early September already when Dan finds himself standing barefoot on the sidewalk, rifling through bills, magazine offers, grocery circulars. It’s a cool morning and maybe he should have put shoes on, but then it’s moot because the brown paper envelope slides free from the rest and there’s a pooling of heat in his toes, his fingers.
This is it, he thinks, this is the punchline.
And then: Oh thank god, finally.
He manages his composition well, he thinks, just squares the pile of mail together and treads back up to the front door, slips inside, sets the mail on the counter. Putters in the kitchen for a few minutes, making vague motions at lunch, before he reaches over and teases the envelope out of the stack. Sets it on top, where he can see it.
He doesn’t know for sure that this is what he thinks it is. The lull, the buildup, both make it seem likely, but it could just be a cruel joke. Could be a Manhattan book, or something. Could be a bathroom faucet installation manual.
Eating lunch is difficult, one eye on the counter, one hand pressed into the front of his pants. Not grinding, not rubbing, just... there, letting the heat and pressure do their slow work.
He isn’t sure why he’s waiting, except that he knows that this will work better at night, when the shadows are all sharper and the air cooler, when this slow burn of arousal will have enough space to unravel itself.
When he can pretend that maybe, maybe-
He clears the single plate away, heads upstairs for a shower.
*
It’s a letdown, in the end.
It’s not that the book isn’t what he thinks it is-he’d recognize that mask and hat anywhere-but it’s just so badly rendered that he can’t get past it. He knows Rorschach’s rough physique, from nights spent in terrified, blood-slick silence stitching up one injury or another; he knows how Rorschach barely comes to Nite Owl’s own shoulder without his hat, and that wiry, tiny, impossibly strong body is the one Dan wants to see in these black-on-white lines. Not this cartoony, absurdly well-built, towering terror.
It’s how the world sees him, Dan thinks, frowning at the book as he works at his cock with the other hand, hunched over himself on the floor. The shades are thrown open, to let the night in; the hard floor is helping, a little. It’s that intimidation factor, he thinks; only he has seen Rorschach crumpled and small, has seen him almost broken.
Would he be that small, if this ever happened? Would he curl in on himself, leaving Dan to prise him back apart, to spread him out and open him and lay him bare? Or would he be the terror, pinning Dan back by the shoulders, flipping him onto his stomach maybe, pressing his face into the floor so that he can’t even cry out when Rorschach pushes into him-leave him loose-limbed and shaking and ravaged?
He would still be small, even if that’s how it went; that’s what makes it such a turn-on, for god’s sake. The thought of that compact body pressing him down, capturing him... and the book has it completely wrong, he doesn’t have to be huge and tall and hung like a horse and that’s honestly making it worse, seeing that, and Dan grits his teeth and screws his eyes shut in frustration, why can’t anyone ever get it right why doesn’t anyone get it-
When he opens them again a few seconds later, he’s not alone in the room anymore. Time just about stops; his hand certainly stops, all the blood in his groin draining out to other, more useful locations as his brain drops into fight or flight like a rock through a clear, clear pond.
Late for patrol, he thinks, inanely.
Rorschach crouches down silently, masked eyes on Dan the whole way down. They don’t leave him even as Rorschach reaches for and snatches the pamphlet out of his grip, then rises, turning the book over in his hands. Only once he’s fully upright does he look down at what he’s holding.
Dan closes his eyes, sets his teeth. Waits for the explosion. He’s guessing it’ll be something like a hydrogen bomb, fueled by the power of sixty dying suns, each spinning bitter and coldly furious into the void of space. Only the heat of their anger will remain.
Maybe they’d go on to form new...
Wait. He shouldn’t have had this much time to monologue in his head about anthropomorphized celestial bodies, should he have?
Dan cracks his eyes open. He’s otherwise frozen in place, one hand still on his softening cock, the other splayed in front of him for balance, bareassed on the kitchen floor. He feels ridiculous, and yet, the ridicule isn’t coming.
Rorschach is still in front of him. Is paging through the booklet with increasing agitation, fingers jerky, the occasional little shake of his head in annoyance or disapproval.
He goes through the entire comic, one page at a time. Is he actually reading it?
“Anatomy is terrible,” Rorschach finally says, shaking his head. “Look, ehn. Look nothing like this.” He looks up, fixes Dan squarely in that inscrutable gaze. “Really find this trash to be sufficient?”
And christ, it’s really like he’s upset about the art, and Dan has to swallow past a lump in his throat that feels the size of a grapefruit. “Uh, well. I mean. Not really?” He scratches the back of his neck; feels the shame already rising up into his face, a red heat that creeps and crawls. “It hasn’t really been, I mean. It’s not working very well?”
Silence, except for the heartbeat pounding in Dan’s head.
“Because I know that it’s not very... I mean...”
Rorschach makes some sort of strangled chuffing noise, turns away. Sits down at the kitchen table-his usual chair, like nothing’s out of the ordinary-and produces a chewed-up pen from one coat pocket. Sets the book in front of him, paged all the way back to the beginning, and... starts writing in it?
Dan shifts; not sure whether he has permission to go get some pants on or what.
The pen stills and Rorschach turns to glare at him; Dan can feel it right through the mask. Okay. No pants, or at least no getting up and going anywhere. Dan subsides; the pen goes back to work.
He’s not writing, Dan realizes, after a small eternity in which his ass and one thigh have become thoroughly glued to the linoleum. The strokes are too long and fluid; he’s drawing, or at least editing, and not just scribbling things out either. Meticulously, carefully, he is applying corrections.
He occasionally hesitates before making a stroke, pen hand in the air like it’s terrified to land. When it does, it’s always a tiny thing, from what Dan can see-a short little curve and a bit of scribbling-and something about that is making him harder with every heartbeat, sitting here naked on the floor while Rorschach works.
It’s two hours before he’s done, and Rorschach gathers his dignity up as best as he can, pulling the trenchcoat suspiciously tight around his middle as he rises. Keeps himself in oblique one-quarter view to Dan as he tosses the book back to him, facing the basement door. Ready to escape. “Hopefully less... perversely inaccurate, now.” The tone is scandalized, disapproving. “Enjoy your evening.”
Dan swallows tightly, picks the booklet up with two fingers. The words come out before he can stop them: “Why are you...” Not okay with this, he’s obviously not really okay, but. “...why aren’t you more upset about this?”
Rorschach shrugs, a weirdly dismissive gesture. There’s a tension in it, and a silence that follows, becoming ever more profound as the seconds tick away.
“Human condition afflicts us all,” he finally says, and something struggling in his tone says me too, me too; Dan wonders, for a crazy second, what he might find stuffed under his partner’s mattress, should he ever gain access to that secret place. “Better drawings than the alternative.”
“I... guess.”
“Filthy impulses are not a surprise, Daniel. Not good at keeping secrets. Keep them in check with... literature. Don’t speak of them again.”
And like that, the audience is terminated, the basement door swinging closed with an anticlimactic click.
Dan frowns, sighs. Lifts the book again, to see how badly it’s been vandalized; groans aloud as he feels himself start to swell, because there they are, in front of him: all the lines he’s been chasing, the sharp, gritty, angular reality that he wants to touch and take and sink his teeth into, that the softness of fantasy just hasn’t been enough to replace.
*
Around the sixth or seventh time he avails himself of that particular booklet-he’s been sort of stuck on it, and it’s at least as much the memory of lean ungloved fingers moving in careful strokes as it is the content itself that’s got him hooked-he gets a sudden, vague sensation of eyes on him, of being watched. From a window maybe, or from a dark corner of the hallway where he’s left his bedroom door thrown open, shadows pooling.
He realizes that the sensation is not new, that he’s had eyes on him for a long time. Realizes he’s been leaving the door open on purpose. Realizes a lot of things, in that moment.
It doesn’t stay his hand, or make him stifle himself when he whimpers Rorschach’s name into the dim room, jerking himself to a shuddery release. It does make him sprawl backwards on the bed afterward, though; makes him pull himself back into a luxuriant arc that he hopes will be as memorable as all of Rorschach’s lines are to him, curves and sharp angles both, as crisp and defined in life as they are on any page.
*
When he goes downstairs later and finds the Nite Owl booklet pulled out of its hiding spot and obviously thumbed through, he smiles-pulls a ballpoint pen out of the kitchen drawer, and gets to work.
*
Fandom: Watchmen
Characters/Pairings: Imagined Dan/Multiple, Dan/Rorschach
Date Written: 2013
Summary: The Twilight Lady takes an interest in expanding Dan's reading selections; it goes about like you'd expect.
Rating/Warnings: NC-17, mostly but not entirely due to Dan's overactive imagination.
Notes: Prompted on the KM, something along the lines of 'TL starts sending Dan Tiuana bibles of himself' or of the other heroes, or that he just encounters them somehow? I DON'T REMEMBER EXACTLY, SORRY. Also, the Before Watchmen books were coming out at the time so there's some meta about that in here too. BUT MOSTLY DAN BEING A PERV.
*
The first of the little booklets that finds its way into his hands-Leslie’s sent it, sure as anything, the floral-and-musk smell of her perfume clinging to the pages, though god knows how she got his address and really that’s what he should be worrying about-is one featuring himself. There’s something non-intuitively distancing about that, and about the disarming typicality of the first half’s ‘there must be some way to repay you’ nonsense, that makes it easier to laugh it off as the lark it is.
Sure, the second half hits a little closer to the mark, maybe. It’s probably why she sent it, a smirking smiley face scrawled next to her own cartoonishly naked likeness, just as inaccurate as Nite Owl’s himself. He’d say he could only dream of being that well endowed, but he’s not actually sure he’d want to be. Practical concerns, after all.
Still, it’s just a silly little porn rag, nothing to get bothered over.
Of course he still tries getting off to it, tries a few times, an idle experiment. But there’s something at once narcissistic and humbling about it, and eventually it ends up shoved between Bartleby’s Book of Sub-Continental Passerines and Home Robotics for the Enthusiast, where he knows no one will ever find it.
*
When a second packet arrives in the mail, Dan isn’t sure what to expect. Is his underground-fan-with-a-printing-press really this prolific? How many more issues of Adventures of the Giant Owl Cock should he be looking forward to, here?
But this one isn’t about him. Cockzamandius, says the cover’s bubble print, as he slides it free from the envelope, with Enjoy, dearie under it in a distinctive scrawl.
Dan frowns, flips the first few pages. He isn’t immediately sure what to think; he’d have to be blind to not recognize how objectively attractive the other man is, but he’s just never thought of Adrian like that. Still, the scenario the trashy little book presents-a threesome with a young couple he’d rescued from a mugging-is at least a little more interesting than the usual teenage straight boy insertion fantasy. Dan finds himself at a reluctant, vaguely interested half-mast around the point where ‘Cockzamandius’ and the husband start really going at it, the curvaceous and perky-breasted wife squealing with delight at the spectacle.
It’s not because it’s Adrian, Dan tells himself, palming idly at himself through his khakis, coaxing the hardness there to something more useful. It could be anyone on the page; is anyone in his head, a blurry, shifting, indistinct male figure, all violent angles and momentum. It’s just been a while since he- he hasn’t had the chance in years to- well, not since college anyway, and it’s very easy to imagine himself in that position again, imagine the pressure and the sudden give, the slickness, everything taut and stretched and filled. The relentless rhythm of it all, rocking him across the sheets-
Dan bites his lip, fingers going a little too tight around the pages.
And it’s been too long but he remembers: the sharp, good way it feels to have someone inside, the closeness and the way it’s so clear when they’re about to come, the intensity and the desperation for more, closer, harder, deeper, always deeper-
He’s so close, hand working himself raw. But then he tries to turn the page one handed, hoping for some image on the next page to push him over, and there’s nothing there-just bouncing tits and both of them going at her comically dripping pussy at once, and it’s not even like that’s not hot but it’s not what he needed, not where his head was-
-and his orgasm fizzles out, dribbled release landing on the floor between his feet in a lackluster splatter.
He takes a breath, lets it out. His hand is shaking when he peels it away from his own flesh.
And as simply as that, he’s just an ornithology nerd sitting on his living room sofa with his pants around his ankles, jerking off to a comic book like a sixteen-year-old. He tries to let the shame shake off in a long shudder, hunches his shoulders in. Tries to get on about his day.
There are a few more attempts, but after a while, Adrian’s smug face on the cover starts pissing him off, and the book’s in the trashcan by the time the week’s out.
*
He feels a little skeevy, paging through the thin volume dedicated to the youngest of their ranks, partly because she’d been underage so very recently but mostly because technically an adult now or not, she’s still too young.
It’s also just lines on a page, photocopied to death and stapled together. No actual teenage crimefighters were harmed in the production...
Anyway, he’s spent enough time thinking about this sort of thing that if it’s really as wrong as it feels, he’s already going to hell.
In the book, Silk Spectre is tired of her perfect, godlike boyfriend-wants someone ordinary and human, and Dan can work with that. He pictures it: Laurie on his doorstep, an emotional mess, invited in, coffee and a warm blanket and-
No, that’s not working; all that’s doing is making him feel is protective, because there’s no way he would ever make a move on her like that, not while she’s falling apart. His erection starts to subside between his fingers, and he thinks quickly: A month later, after all of the issues are worked through, when Jon is a fading memory and she’s sure this is what she wants.
The comic’s on the floor now, forgotten. He’s got his own ideas about this one, doesn’t need the visual aid.
He pictures her on the street with him, beautiful in her brutality; pictures her in the owlship’s copilot chair, light from the city shining off of her perfect body, the taste of her heady and sweet when he buries his face between her legs. The velvety heat of her, when he pushes two fingers inside and then slides himself into her, the perfect push-pull of their fit, the way she would arch away from him on the chair and-
It isn’t her chair.
The realization is sharp and sudden like an accusation, and it sits in his gut like a growling, spitting creature. It isn’t her chair and it isn’t her place by his side on the street, against his back in a fight. That position is occupied, and the sudden jarring juxtaposition of figures in the fantasy throws off his stride completely, brings the experiment to a gasping, shuddering halt.
There’s something almost painful about his ruined climax this time, like a fist around his cock at exactly the wrong moment, the imagined stink of old leather like a spike to the back of his throat.
*
There’s a gap then, a month or so when nothing comes in the mail, and Dan feels almost cheated.
*
It’s early September already when Dan finds himself standing barefoot on the sidewalk, rifling through bills, magazine offers, grocery circulars. It’s a cool morning and maybe he should have put shoes on, but then it’s moot because the brown paper envelope slides free from the rest and there’s a pooling of heat in his toes, his fingers.
This is it, he thinks, this is the punchline.
And then: Oh thank god, finally.
He manages his composition well, he thinks, just squares the pile of mail together and treads back up to the front door, slips inside, sets the mail on the counter. Putters in the kitchen for a few minutes, making vague motions at lunch, before he reaches over and teases the envelope out of the stack. Sets it on top, where he can see it.
He doesn’t know for sure that this is what he thinks it is. The lull, the buildup, both make it seem likely, but it could just be a cruel joke. Could be a Manhattan book, or something. Could be a bathroom faucet installation manual.
Eating lunch is difficult, one eye on the counter, one hand pressed into the front of his pants. Not grinding, not rubbing, just... there, letting the heat and pressure do their slow work.
He isn’t sure why he’s waiting, except that he knows that this will work better at night, when the shadows are all sharper and the air cooler, when this slow burn of arousal will have enough space to unravel itself.
When he can pretend that maybe, maybe-
He clears the single plate away, heads upstairs for a shower.
*
It’s a letdown, in the end.
It’s not that the book isn’t what he thinks it is-he’d recognize that mask and hat anywhere-but it’s just so badly rendered that he can’t get past it. He knows Rorschach’s rough physique, from nights spent in terrified, blood-slick silence stitching up one injury or another; he knows how Rorschach barely comes to Nite Owl’s own shoulder without his hat, and that wiry, tiny, impossibly strong body is the one Dan wants to see in these black-on-white lines. Not this cartoony, absurdly well-built, towering terror.
It’s how the world sees him, Dan thinks, frowning at the book as he works at his cock with the other hand, hunched over himself on the floor. The shades are thrown open, to let the night in; the hard floor is helping, a little. It’s that intimidation factor, he thinks; only he has seen Rorschach crumpled and small, has seen him almost broken.
Would he be that small, if this ever happened? Would he curl in on himself, leaving Dan to prise him back apart, to spread him out and open him and lay him bare? Or would he be the terror, pinning Dan back by the shoulders, flipping him onto his stomach maybe, pressing his face into the floor so that he can’t even cry out when Rorschach pushes into him-leave him loose-limbed and shaking and ravaged?
He would still be small, even if that’s how it went; that’s what makes it such a turn-on, for god’s sake. The thought of that compact body pressing him down, capturing him... and the book has it completely wrong, he doesn’t have to be huge and tall and hung like a horse and that’s honestly making it worse, seeing that, and Dan grits his teeth and screws his eyes shut in frustration, why can’t anyone ever get it right why doesn’t anyone get it-
When he opens them again a few seconds later, he’s not alone in the room anymore. Time just about stops; his hand certainly stops, all the blood in his groin draining out to other, more useful locations as his brain drops into fight or flight like a rock through a clear, clear pond.
Late for patrol, he thinks, inanely.
Rorschach crouches down silently, masked eyes on Dan the whole way down. They don’t leave him even as Rorschach reaches for and snatches the pamphlet out of his grip, then rises, turning the book over in his hands. Only once he’s fully upright does he look down at what he’s holding.
Dan closes his eyes, sets his teeth. Waits for the explosion. He’s guessing it’ll be something like a hydrogen bomb, fueled by the power of sixty dying suns, each spinning bitter and coldly furious into the void of space. Only the heat of their anger will remain.
Maybe they’d go on to form new...
Wait. He shouldn’t have had this much time to monologue in his head about anthropomorphized celestial bodies, should he have?
Dan cracks his eyes open. He’s otherwise frozen in place, one hand still on his softening cock, the other splayed in front of him for balance, bareassed on the kitchen floor. He feels ridiculous, and yet, the ridicule isn’t coming.
Rorschach is still in front of him. Is paging through the booklet with increasing agitation, fingers jerky, the occasional little shake of his head in annoyance or disapproval.
He goes through the entire comic, one page at a time. Is he actually reading it?
“Anatomy is terrible,” Rorschach finally says, shaking his head. “Look, ehn. Look nothing like this.” He looks up, fixes Dan squarely in that inscrutable gaze. “Really find this trash to be sufficient?”
And christ, it’s really like he’s upset about the art, and Dan has to swallow past a lump in his throat that feels the size of a grapefruit. “Uh, well. I mean. Not really?” He scratches the back of his neck; feels the shame already rising up into his face, a red heat that creeps and crawls. “It hasn’t really been, I mean. It’s not working very well?”
Silence, except for the heartbeat pounding in Dan’s head.
“Because I know that it’s not very... I mean...”
Rorschach makes some sort of strangled chuffing noise, turns away. Sits down at the kitchen table-his usual chair, like nothing’s out of the ordinary-and produces a chewed-up pen from one coat pocket. Sets the book in front of him, paged all the way back to the beginning, and... starts writing in it?
Dan shifts; not sure whether he has permission to go get some pants on or what.
The pen stills and Rorschach turns to glare at him; Dan can feel it right through the mask. Okay. No pants, or at least no getting up and going anywhere. Dan subsides; the pen goes back to work.
He’s not writing, Dan realizes, after a small eternity in which his ass and one thigh have become thoroughly glued to the linoleum. The strokes are too long and fluid; he’s drawing, or at least editing, and not just scribbling things out either. Meticulously, carefully, he is applying corrections.
He occasionally hesitates before making a stroke, pen hand in the air like it’s terrified to land. When it does, it’s always a tiny thing, from what Dan can see-a short little curve and a bit of scribbling-and something about that is making him harder with every heartbeat, sitting here naked on the floor while Rorschach works.
It’s two hours before he’s done, and Rorschach gathers his dignity up as best as he can, pulling the trenchcoat suspiciously tight around his middle as he rises. Keeps himself in oblique one-quarter view to Dan as he tosses the book back to him, facing the basement door. Ready to escape. “Hopefully less... perversely inaccurate, now.” The tone is scandalized, disapproving. “Enjoy your evening.”
Dan swallows tightly, picks the booklet up with two fingers. The words come out before he can stop them: “Why are you...” Not okay with this, he’s obviously not really okay, but. “...why aren’t you more upset about this?”
Rorschach shrugs, a weirdly dismissive gesture. There’s a tension in it, and a silence that follows, becoming ever more profound as the seconds tick away.
“Human condition afflicts us all,” he finally says, and something struggling in his tone says me too, me too; Dan wonders, for a crazy second, what he might find stuffed under his partner’s mattress, should he ever gain access to that secret place. “Better drawings than the alternative.”
“I... guess.”
“Filthy impulses are not a surprise, Daniel. Not good at keeping secrets. Keep them in check with... literature. Don’t speak of them again.”
And like that, the audience is terminated, the basement door swinging closed with an anticlimactic click.
Dan frowns, sighs. Lifts the book again, to see how badly it’s been vandalized; groans aloud as he feels himself start to swell, because there they are, in front of him: all the lines he’s been chasing, the sharp, gritty, angular reality that he wants to touch and take and sink his teeth into, that the softness of fantasy just hasn’t been enough to replace.
*
Around the sixth or seventh time he avails himself of that particular booklet-he’s been sort of stuck on it, and it’s at least as much the memory of lean ungloved fingers moving in careful strokes as it is the content itself that’s got him hooked-he gets a sudden, vague sensation of eyes on him, of being watched. From a window maybe, or from a dark corner of the hallway where he’s left his bedroom door thrown open, shadows pooling.
He realizes that the sensation is not new, that he’s had eyes on him for a long time. Realizes he’s been leaving the door open on purpose. Realizes a lot of things, in that moment.
It doesn’t stay his hand, or make him stifle himself when he whimpers Rorschach’s name into the dim room, jerking himself to a shuddery release. It does make him sprawl backwards on the bed afterward, though; makes him pull himself back into a luxuriant arc that he hopes will be as memorable as all of Rorschach’s lines are to him, curves and sharp angles both, as crisp and defined in life as they are on any page.
*
When he goes downstairs later and finds the Nite Owl booklet pulled out of its hiding spot and obviously thumbed through, he smiles-pulls a ballpoint pen out of the kitchen drawer, and gets to work.
*