Watchmen Kink Meme 3. Weeeeeeee.
Rules of the meme:
1. Anonymously post a pairing and prompt you would like to see written. Since this is a kink meme, there is supposted to be a kink involved, but normal well-written prompts should work just as well.
2. Anonymous will respond to your post and write it for you! Art and such is also acceptable/awesome. Multiple people may respond to ( Read more... )
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Dan took a few weeks to think it over. He had never really asked himself what he felt for Rorschach, aside from camaraderie and lust, because he had always assumed that nothing but the first of those was viable. When he had believed his partner was a man, given Rorschach's hidebound notions, he had resigned himself to unrequited lust and tried not to think about it too hard. There hadn't been any other possible course of action.
Now that he knew Rorschach was a woman and that making his interest known wouldn't automatically get him dropped down an elevator shaft, he had to figure out if he wanted to make it known.
With any other woman Dan had ever been interested in, the course would have been simple. Ask her to dinner, let them see if they still liked each other by the time dessert came, then suggest a nightcap back at his place. Which would probably get him dropped down an elevator shaft.
That was the problem. Rorschach had very rigid notions. With her, everything was all or nothing. If Dan expressed interest, he was pretty much going to have to marry her.
After weeks of thinking it over, Dan hit on what he hoped was a workable compromise, not unmindful of the fact that Rorschach disapproved of compromises. One Friday night as they were finishing up their patrol, Dan said, “Hey, why don't we get some takeout before you go home? You don't have to work tomorrow, do you?”
“No. But should go home.”
“Just stay for a little while. I'd like to hear more about your father.”
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Still, when they were at his kitchen table with their burgers and fries (American food, not Chinese communist sympathizing cuisine), and Dan had coaxed Wanda to remove her mask, Dan started by saying, “It seems you and your father share all the same values.” At the brief nod, he continued, “That's good. But what would you have done if you'd found him and he had been more like, say, me?”
Wanda took a minute to think that over. “You are a good man, Daniel.”
“Even though we disagree about a lot of things?”
“Just innocent. Think other people are good like you. Don't know what scum they really are.”
“I see.” At least that explained how she had been able to team up with him despite his soft liberal values. She thought they were the product of naivete, not... whatever it was that she thought motivated those she designated as “scum”.
“Is there anything you and your father disagree about?”
“Thinks I should quit job. Says he owes me. Won't. Pull own weight.”
“What do you do, anyway?”
“Work in garment factory.”
The words made Dan glance at her uniform. Before, when Rorschach's clothes had gotten bloodstains or anything else on them, they had stayed for weeks. Now her trenchcoat and suit were clean, obviously washed on a regular basis. Speaking of which, she was smelling better all the time. Dan suspected it wasn't only that her father was either making her wash or making it possible for her to do so. She was also probably eating better, now that she wasn't scraping to make rent. The cheap stuff she'd doubtless been living on before couldn't have had a good effect on her body.
“What?” she demanded, gruff.
Startled out of his thoughts, Dan said, “Hmm?”
“Twisted your mouth. Looked sad.” She glared at him suspiciously. “Why?”
“Ah.” He hesitated. “I was wishing you had let me do more for you.”
She looked down at her remaining fries. “Not necessary.” She paused, then continued. “You are a good man, Daniel.”
“I hope your father agrees.”
“Does!” was the emphatic response. Wanda then related everything her father had said about the heroism of masked vigilantes. Dan watched her surprisingly engaging homely face and made attentive noises at the appropriate times, but his mind was on other things. He was asking himself, Could we live with each other? Or would we strangle each other within a month?
He wanted it to work. He was lonely, had been for years. But a superhero couldn't marry just anyone. Some women might find the idea of marrying a masked avenger romantic, but presented with the reality, of nights alone at home while he patrolled the streets, of having him stumble in hours after midnight with flesh wounds needing bandaging....
He wanted to believe that Rorschach was his solution. She would understand his life. And he was attracted to her. Her face hadn't changed that. He was glad he hadn't seen it for so long; he might never have been able to see past it to the beauty in her fighting, the grace of a perfectly oiled machine. And they had a bond, built from countless nights of watching each other's backs and risking their lives together. Wanda should be the perfect woman for him.
But as they finished up their milkshakes and he listened to her usual reactionary diatribes, different now only because of the recurring prefix: “My father says....” Could he listen to this for the rest of his life? And how long would it be before he violated some tenet of her ironclad code, in a way that she couldn't dismiss as caused by his being “innocent”? He would disappoint her. It was inevitable.
And all that was assuming that she was interested in him. She had never shown any sign. It was still likely that this was completely one-sided.
When she pulled back on her mask and left through the tunnel from the Nest, he watched her go and knew that it would never work.
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He was still wrestling with this days later, on the afternoon when he received a phone call. “Charlie Dean here,” the man barked when Dan picked the phone up. “Be in my office at three.”
“What? Why?”
The older man's voice was impatient. “My daughter trusts you with her life. I think I have a right to know what kind of man you are.” Then came an all too familiar pause, just a fleeting break in barked remarks, before Charlie grudgingly amended, “If you have another appointment, we can discuss things at some other time.”
For one of that clan, it amounted to being considerate. “No, three is fine.”
Dan presented himself at Charlie's office at the appointed time and submitted to nearly an hour of brutal grilling. It was irritating, but he supposed that if his daughter was a masked avenger, he would also want to reassure himself about her partner.
Charlie already knew about his moderate politics, it emerged, and he made the same excuse for them as Wanda. But he interrogated Dan about his fighting skills, his motivations, and then about his background in general. When they came to that, Dan decided to take the bull by the horns.
“You do know that I'm Jewish, Mr. Dean?” he asked, his tone challenging.
Charlie looked at him for a minute, then declared, “You shouldn't feel ashamed of that, son. Jews make good Americans! Levi Strauss, Louis Brandeis, any number of decorated World War II veterans. I've had Jews working with me and under me here at the Bureau, and they were some of the best men I've served with.” He continued with a rant, the point of which seemed to be that all the “bad” Jews, like Marx, were also self-hating antisemites, while Dan tried to decide whether to be offended at the patronization, or relieved that his partner and her father were a little saner than he had thought.
But then, he thought he could see where this exception to their general bigotry had come from. Both of them had personally known Jews who clearly met their rigid definitions of “good men”. Charlie Dean had served with them in the Bureau and the Army, Wanda had partnered with one in vigilantism. With the proof before their very own eyes that the nastier articles in New Frontiersman were clearly in error, they had found a way to make exceptions. Maybe that was all both of them needed to overcome the more unsavory aspects of their ideologies: to personally see evidence to the contrary. Maybe he could even help them with that. He had already helped Wanda with it, more than he had known.
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“What's your business here?” one demanded, with the air of one used to the authority of official sanction.
“Personal,” Dan said briefly, trying to walk around him. The other blocked his path.
“You an informant?” the second one asked, his tone belligerent.
Dan indulged a brief fantasy of beating the stuffing out of the conceited young man. Would do him a world of good. “I'm a friend of Mr. Dean's daughter,” he said, trying again to pass them.
Both men cracked up, and Dan froze. “Another one?” the first one snickered.
“Another what?” Dan was already sure he didn't want to know.
“Don't worry, you're not the only one. Ever since his daughter moved in with him, he's been dragging every bachelor he can find in for evaluation.”
Dan was incredulous. “You mean he's....”
“Trying to find her a husband.” The second Fibbie guffawed. “But just try to find any man's who's desperate enough to marry a dog like her!”
The next thing Dan knew, the second Fibbie was lying on the floor trying to stanch the blood spurting from his nose with his necktie, the other Fibbie was yelling for security, and Charlie Dean was standing in the doorway to his office, and Dan's knuckles were sore.
Dan was preparing himself to apologize and make some kind of excuse when the security guards arrived, but Dean spoke up first. Pointing to the second Fibbie, he said, “Clumsy idiot tripped over his own two feet. Take him to a doctor.” Looking at Dan, he said calmly, “Nice talking to you.”
Dan left, feeling unaccountably embarrassed, and with an awful lot on his mind.
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