Watchmen fic: Last Days of an Unreal City, chapter 10 - Jus in Bello
Title: Last Days of an Unreal City - Chapter 10 - Jus in Bello
Characters: Rorschach/Nite Owl II
Rating: PG-13
Word count (this section): 5406
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Summary: AU. The Cold War reaches its ultimate conclusion, and Rorschach and Daniel are among the survivors when the East Coast is attacked.
Many thanks to runriggers for the beta.
Chapter Index.
===
They made excuses to loiter inside the owlship while they tried to put themselves back together.
Inevitably, they had to go back outside.
Morbid curiosity drew them back to the remains of Daniel's home. Daniel told himself that he wanted to look for salvageable items, although Rorschach did not require a justification for the visit. Rorschach watched Daniel very carefully. Daniel pretended that he didn't notice.
Daniel's street was only a short distance away, just two blocks south, although the seconds seemed to drag their heels; when they finally arrived at Daniel's house, it came as no relief.
The front of the building still appeared to be in one piece, albeit with broken windows. Daniel kicked the door open so that he could look inside. The stairway to the upper floor was blocked by debris, and the kitchen ceiling had collapsed, rendering it inaccessible. The living room was still vaguely recognisable, but seemed precarious. Everything was damp and dirty. There was little worth saving. Daniel searched the living room in the hope that he might have left a spare pair of glasses in there, but found nothing. He reminded himself that he was lucky just to have the goggles.
He was lucky, and he had no right, absolutely no right at all, to be so upset about the loss of his home. He stood in the living room for a minute or so, arms hanging uselessly by his sides, then went back outside.
Rorschach was waiting by the front door, watching the deserted street. Daniel stood next to him, and tried to think of something to say - he made a focused effort to avoid sounding miserable. "We ought to check your place, too."
"No point. Doubt that building would still be standing," said Rorschach, as detached and disinterested as always. "Was much closer to Governors Island hypocenter than this."
"Where were you living?"
Rorschach paused before answering. Secrecy was a difficult habit to break. "Red Hook."
"That's not too far."
"At least two and a half miles away, to walk."
"We should go there," Daniel said, absently.
Rorschach shook his head. "More important things to do. Should visit the home of Roth. Address is in Canarsie. Building would have likely survived the attack, even if he hasn't."
Daniel didn't follow. "Roth?"
"Doug Roth," Rorschach said, slowly. "Nova Express journalist. Remember?"
"Okay. Yeah." Daniel felt irritated without really knowing why. "Of course. Right."
Rorschach regarded him cautiously.
"Don't look at me like that," Daniel said. The constant smell of smoke was making him feel sick.
Rorschach glanced away. "Done here?"
"I guess," Daniel said, started walking. Rorschach followed.
"This," Daniel said, mostly to himself, "has been a spectacularly shitty week."
Rorschach frowned, and seemed to consider this deeply. "Could have been worse," he concluded.
Daniel could have laughed, but didn't.
The silence weighed on him. He tried to start a conversation. "You lived in Brooklyn all your life, or...?"
"No," Rorschach answered.
"Oh. Just wondering," Daniel said. "You have a, uh, slight accent. Sometimes."
Rorschach canted his head to one side. "Do not."
"It's not obvious. It only really shows when you're angry. You'd have to listen really closely in order to hear it, though."
Rorschach grunted, dismissing the topic.
Out the corner of his eye, Daniel thought he saw a human hand, growing from the rubble of a fallen building like some strange plant. It was both utterly banal and somehow fake-looking. (The first time Daniel had seen a human corpse, he had mistaken it for an abandoned shop mannequin.)
He didn't look at it.
"Talk to me," he told Rorschach.
"About what?"
"Hell, I don't care." He didn't want the silence to somehow find its way inside his mind.
Rorschach looked over at him; his expression was one of incomprehension.
Daniel met his gaze. "Who was the greatest boxer?"
Rorschach gave Daniel another cautious look, then decided to go along with it. "Carmen Basilio."
"Most people would've said Sugar Ray."
"Most people are wrong," Rorschach said.
"C'mon, man, you can't objectively say that Basilio was the greatest," Daniel said, because arguing with Rorschach over petty shit was probably as close as things would ever get to normal. "You could say that he was your favorite, but that's different."
Rorschach fixed him with a hard stare.
Okay then, Daniel thought. "Favorite film?"
"Don't watch films."
"What, never?"
"No."
"Not even as a kid?"
"No."
"Oh, come on, everyone's seen at least one film they've liked. What was the last film you remember watching, at least?"
Rorschach relented, and tiredly rubbed the back of his neck. "Sands of Iwo Jima," he said, and gave Daniel a look as if to say, 'happy now?'
Daniel hadn't seen it. He just nodded. "War movie, right?"
"Yes."
"Figured."
They kept walking. Daniel's gaze strayed to the broken body of a dog, half-visible beneath the debris of a ruined house. He blandly noted the collar around its neck.
"You're sure you don't want to check on your place?" Daniel asked.
"Positive. Kept a spare uniform there, but nothing else of importance. Doubt there will be anything left."
"You don't have another outfit hidden anywhere else in the city?"
Rorschach shook his head. Daniel tried to imagine how many masks the guy must have gone through in his lifetime; costumes, like their owners, were inevitably damaged. (A decade ago, during the nadir of the seventies, Rorschach had told him where the mask's fabric had come from. It had made Daniel uncomfortable. But there was little point in thinking about that now.)
"So, the mask you've got is your last one," Daniel said. It felt cruel to ask, but he asked anyway: "What are you going to do?"
Rorschach didn't answer.
In the end, the silence won.
===
At some point, Daniel was aware of them boarding the owlship, and he was lucid enough to pilot a brief, uneventful course to Canarsie. They landed in Fresh Creek Park, hidden by the trees, then trudged back to civilisation. (Rorschach scowled slightly more than usual at the leaves and grass, as if he found the greenery deeply unnatural.)
Daniel felt slightly better.
As expected, the distance between Canarsie and the hypocenters meant that the area still looked relatively normal. Daniel and Rorschach both kept an eye out for the National Guard, but they saw very few signs of law enforcement. The shops were either boarded up or were conspicuously occupied by their owners, although the streets were fairly empty - either people were staying indoors to avoid the worst of the air pollution, or they had abandoned their homes in fear of further attacks.
They wandered for a while, getting lost occasionally, although Rorschach claimed to remember the area well from the days when they had fought against the mob. It took them slightly over two hours to locate Roth's address, and by the time they found it, the sun was beginning to set.
Roth's house was a simple, two-story affair; from the outside, there were no obvious signs of occupation, although it was prudent to assume that the neighbouring homes were still inhabited. Fortunately, the building was on a corner, and it was possible to climb over the fence into the back yard.
Daniel gave Rorschach a boost, then clumsily scrambled after him. Some asshole had planted a rosebush on the other side of the fence. They endured it stoically.
Rorschach used a screwdriver to jimmy the lock on the house's back door, and then they stepped inside, into a spartan kitchen. Every available surface was covered with bottles of water.
Daniel walked through into the main hall, and searched for signs of a family; a woman's coat hanging by the door, small shoes in the hallway, children's toys, anything like that. There were none, and he felt a shred of relief. He continued into the living room so that he could peer through the window and watch the street while Rorschach searched the building. Their escape routes were pretty poor, but they had worked with far worse.
Keeping lookout was tedious and demanding. There was a clock on the mantelpiece of Roth's living room, but it had stopped, and it wasn't long before Daniel felt his mind threatening to wander. He listened closely, although he was unable to hear Rorschach moving around the house; his gaze strayed from the window and focused on the framed pictures on the shelves; photos of smiling people, somebody's friends. He wondered what they would have done if it had transpired that Roth was living with a wife and kids. Relatives always made things difficult.
Interestingly, Roth did have a pretty nice house for a bachelor, although it was so bare-looking that it was doubtful he spent much time in it. Daniel wondered what his income was.
Time passed - and, in spite of everything, the boredom made him hungry. He was considering the merits of a pastrami sandwich when he saw a vaguely-familiar figure walking along the street; Daniel pulled his goggles down over his eyes, focused, and immediately recognised Roth's blond hair and moustache.
Daniel whistled to alert Rorschach, then left the living room to make sure that his partner had heard. Rorschach was already descending the stairs. By Daniel's reckoning, they had about a minute to get out of the house.
"It's Roth," Daniel said, simply, and began to walk to the back door.
Rorschach grabbed his arm. "Where are you going?"
Daniel gestured towards street, and stupidly repeated, "Roth..."
"Exactly."
"Oh no, we never accounted for this," Daniel said - it was piss-poor planning really, but he wasn't in the mood to be thinking like Nite Owl. "What're you thinking of doing? We've got no evidence that he's guilty of anything yet."
Rorschach shoved him into the kitchen and gestured at him to shut up. The two of them waited.
Daniel heard the front door opening, followed by a brief silence as Roth presumably removed his coat. The carpeting in the hall floor made it difficult to hear footsteps, but Roth gave his position away by coughing. He was approaching the kitchen.
Rorschach waited with infinite patience.
Roth opened the kitchen door. Rorschach punched him in the solar plexus.
Roth folded up, too winded to yell, while Rorschach blandly grabbed one of his arms and caught him in a wristlock. (Kote mawashi, said Daniel's inner nerd.) Daniel stood back and felt like a bit of a third wheel.
"Have a few questions," Rorschach said. "Answer them and we'll leave you alone."
Unsurprisingly, the first words out of Roth's mouth were, "What the hell..."
Rorschach twisted Roth's arm. It was just a matter of convincing the subject that it was in his interest to comply. Some subjects realised it faster than others. Roth yelped and swore, predictably.
Daniel decided that, as he was present, he might as well take an interest in the proceedings. He felt vulnerable in civilian clothes, but at least the dust masks helped to hide their faces. "Why do you think we're here?" he asked.
"I don't know, I haven't done anything," Roth said, which told Daniel that this was going to be fairly easy. "Look, Jesus, just take my wallet, or hell, I don't know, I've got food and water stored in the kitchen, who the fuck are you people..."
"Who was behind the attempt to discredit Manhattan?" Rorschach asked.
"I don't know what..."
"Lying," Rorschach said.
Roth floundered. "Look, Slater just came to us, alright; she was really upset, god, I can't think properly, if you let me go..."
Rorschach made Roth's wrist bend in a way that it really wasn't designed to. Roth yowled.
Daniel took the opportunity to get a better look at the other man: Roth was dishevelled and unshaven, and he smelled as if he'd been wearing the same clothes for the past few days. Pretty normal, all things given.
Rorschach kept firing questions. "Who gave you the names of Manhattan's other victims?"
"Slater, she knew those guys..."
Rorschach looked up. He and Daniel exchanged glances.
"Bullshit," Daniel said.
Roth shook his head. "They'd worked at the same place together. Dimensional Developments. They hired a bunch of ex-Gila Flats scientists there."
"What about Edward Jacobi?" Rorschach asked. "Read about him. Magazine article. Another alleged victim. How was he involved?"
"Jacobi worked for Dimensional Developments as well."
Rorschach snorted.
"So, let me get this straight," said Daniel. "The victims were ex-Gila Flats people... Who, coincidentally, worked at the same place together. Right. And Dimensional Developments just so happened to also hire Jacobi, a.k.a. Moloch, an ex-con with no background in science."
"That's the truth," Roth said. "Jacobi worked there as a temp when he got out of prison, fuck, I don't know."
Daniel shook his head. He'd lost any sympathy that he might have had for Roth. "Small world, huh?"
"Lying," Rorschach said, blandly, and pushed down on Roth's arm to force him onto his knees. He addressed Daniel, without looking up, "Find me a kitchen knife and something to gag him with."
Daniel went to look for something, ideally duct tape. He thought to himself, here we are, on a Thursday night, about to torture a guy. This is why we can't have nice things. Granted, when Rorschach really wanted to hurt somebody, he hardly needed a kitchen knife to do so, but asking for a sharp object always worked as a cheap intimidation tactic.
It should have bothered Daniel far more than it did.
Behind him, he heard Roth renew his attempts to struggle free. Eventually, Roth yielded. "Alright. It wasn't Slater who came to us. We went to her. We were given an anonymous tip..."
"Still lying," Rorschach said.
Daniel's patience expired. He stopped searching, and looked up. "Jesus, Roth, you're not stupid. Don't be an idiot. Who are you covering for?"
Roth sagged. His tone was sardonic. "It doesn't matter what I say. You're not going to believe me."
"Whatever you say, it can't be any less believable than the shit you've been trying to sell to us so far," Daniel replied. He decided that, while he wouldn't enjoy watching Rorschach torture Roth, he wouldn't mind it that much either.
"Pyramid Deliveries," said Roth. "Pyramid Deliveries told us to investigate Slater."
Rorschach twisted Roth's arm, apparently for the sheer hell of it. "Why didn't you just say that from the start?"
Roth grimaced. "I... We... They pay my wages, but... They're not... You know. They're not tolerant of mistakes."
"What, do they put horse heads in people's beds?" Daniel asked.
"They always know where to, uh, apply leverage to people. We don't... We don't talk about it at the office."
Daniel sighed. "C'mon, Roth - if you give us information, no-one's going to know it was you. Everyone has more important things to worry about right now. Did they make threats against you?"
"I didn't want to lose my job," Roth said.
"You didn't want to lose your job," Rorschach said, flatly. "Suppose that makes your participation understandable, then." He bent Roth's wrist so badly that Daniel was sure that something must have torn. Roth's scream was loud enough to possibly alert the neighbours.
When Roth recovered somewhat, his expression was one of miserable resignation. "There's a personal organizer under the couch in the living room. It's got all my contacts in it. Just take it, please."
Daniel went to retrieve the organizer. Behind him, he heard Rorschach growl, "Give us names."
Roth spoke hurriedly. "Look, the Pyramid Deliveries guy who contacted me was called Jonathan Zuckerman, alright? Tall guy, probably in his late thirties. All I have is his telephone number, which is already written down in the organizer. It was always a case of 'don't call us, we'll call you'. Obviously, they didn't like it when I asked too many questions. My understanding of things is almost limited to everything that's already in the Slater article. But I wasn't lying when I said that most of the cancer victims had worked at the same place."
"Find that difficult to believe," Rorschach said.
"It's true. I spoke to a lot of them for the article. They were scattered all over the place ever since Dimensional Developments got shut down, but they all knew each other."
"And you didn't think that was... odd?" Daniel asked, returning to the hallway. "You participated in a smear campaign against an important Extranormal Operative, and you must've known that it was going to have some pretty ugly political consequences; didn't you ever stop and wonder what the hell was going on?"
"Like I said, I was discouraged from asking questions. Everything was done on a need to know basis. I was given Slater's background, her contact details, the names and contact details of the other victims. Look. Look. I wrote a load of notes on the article. I think they're still in my office upstairs, in a manila folder, probably buried under a pile of insurance paperwork by the window, I don't fucking know. Just take it and leave me the fuck alone."
Daniel rubbed at his temples and tried to think of anything else. He didn't have the correct mindset for interrogation. Rorschach seemed capable, but he was probably in worse physical condition than Daniel was, and neither of them were really in their right minds. "Fine," he said, and went upstairs to fetch the folder. He wondered if it was wise to turn his back on Rorschach and Roth for even a minute, but decided that he didn't really care.
Roth's office was a mess of paperwork, but the folder was where he said it would be. The room would likely have been searched by Rorschach already, but it was easy to miss things, especially when the place was already a dump. Christ, there was even a coffee mug on the desk with some sort of mold growing inside it. Daniel noted that the mug was purple and had a distinctive golden logo on it. It really was a small world.
He descended the stairs, and held up the folder to show Rorschach. "Are you done here?"
Rorschach nodded.
Roth looked up, almost pleadingly, just before Rorschach grabbed him by the collar and cracked his head against the wall, knocking him out cold.
"Was that really necessary?" Daniel asked.
Rorschach shrugged. "He's fine."
"How can you tell?"
"Practice."
They left the house, careful to make sure that they weren't noticed, and headed back to Fresh Creek Park.
===
The park was serene; quiet, but naturally so. It wasn't the same as the silence of Brooklyn. Daniel sat inside the owlship and tried to eat a can of cold spaghetti, while Rorschach flipped through Roth's personal organizer. It was dark outside, and the cabin lights were barely bright enough to read by.
"There's a D. Santos listed among Roth's contacts," Rorschach said, without looking up.
"So?"
"David Santos at the Veidt Building. Remember?"
"There are probably thousands of people called 'D. Santos' in New York, Rorschach," Daniel said, and didn't care if he sounded condescending. The spaghetti didn't taste right, so he set the can down on a console, and took a deep breath. "I'll tell you what bothers me more: the idea that most of the victims worked at the same place together after they left Gila Flats. I mean, if Roth was telling the truth, and most of them were hired by... What was the name of the place again?"
"Dimensional Developments."
"Right. If Roth was telling the truth and most of the cancer victims were hired by Dimensional Developments, then that looks so obviously fishy... Well, there's no way in hell anyone could pass it off as just a coincidence."
Rorschach shrugged, and rubbed at his eyes. "Perhaps whoever instigated the Manhattan scandal did so with the direct intention of triggering nuclear war, and didn't believe that anyone would investigate in the wake of the attack. Can afford to be sloppy when you know that evidence will be destroyed."
"I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, the military, the CIA... They wouldn't just let something like this slide, right? As soon as Jon left Earth, they must've suspected that something was up, and the employees at Nova Express probably would've been the first people they'd investigate. But Roth didn't look like a guy who was wanted by the government on suspicion of conspiracy, did he? It doesn't add up."
Daniel paused, and looked over at Rorschach when he realized that no reply was forthcoming. "Well?" he prompted.
"I'm thinking," Rorschach muttered. Without the dust mask over his face, the sticky rawness of his burns contrasted with the pallor of his skin.
"You don't look that great," Daniel told him.
Rorschach fixed him with a blank stare, as if he was already sick of hearing that. "Neither do you."
Daniel ignored him; he walked over to where Rorschach sat on the floor, and crouched next to him so that he could slowly, carefully put his hand on Rorschach's forehead. Rorschach gave him a slightly indignant look in return.
"You feel like you're running a fever," Daniel said.
"Can still function."
"Yes, I know," Daniel said, to humor him. "But the doctor said..."
Rorschach took Daniel's wrist so that he could curtly remove his hand from his forehead. "If you're going to put your hands near my face," he said, quietly, "ask first."
The words caught Daniel off-guard. "You were okay with me touching your face before..."
"That was then," said Rorschach, "This is now."
Daniel's initial reaction was to feel defensive, as if he'd just been accused of an offense that he wasn't aware of committing. "Sorry," he said, at a loss. He was left with the distinct impression that Rorschach was studying his reaction very carefully, and he felt compelled to add, "I won't do it again."
Rorschach grunted, dismissing the subject. "Worry about yourself," he said, irritably.
"Where's the fun in that?" Daniel sat back down on the floor. He felt too tired to eat, but too uneasy to sleep. As always, he resorted to the usual coping mechanism of trying to plan ahead, although the future wasn't something that he was particularly interested in thinking about. "We might as well go back to the Veidt Building."
Rorschach sat up slightly. "What?"
"I'm not helping anyone by wandering around Brooklyn like an asshole, and there's nothing left that's worth staying for. At least the Veidt Building has food, electricity, and running water, for Christ's sake. Besides, do you have any better ideas? You've got to figure out what you're going to do about Pyramid Deliveries, right? So you might as well stay somewhere in relative comfort, in the meantime."
"Government will set up relief housing..."
"Yeah, Adrian's people told me about that. They're going to put people in tents, trailers, and commercial buildings, but it's still going to be a clusterfuck with no water or electricity."
"So," said Rorschach. "Standard relief accommodations not good enough for you."
Daniel didn't have the energy for a pissing match. "Don't be ridiculous. If other people had the same options as us, don't you think they'd take them?"
"Do you really trust Veidt?" Rorschach asked.
"Yes. Well. I don't know. Yeah, I guess. But that's beside the point. I just want to stay somewhere that's clean and dry and doesn't stink of smoke until... Things get fixed."
"Want to isolate yourself from reality," Rorschach said, as if he was quite unsurprised.
Daniel didn't lose his temper, not really; instead, he laughed. "Jesus, don't talk to me about reality. You've been hiding behind a mask since the day I met you, you sanctimonious asshole."
It took him a moment to appreciate the contempt in his own voice, and his first thought was, that's not me, I didn't just say that to him.
To his surprise, Rorschach didn't attack him for it. Rorschach just sat there and stared.
"I'm... Not really sure where that came from," Daniel said, and felt lost. "Sorry."
Rorschach said nothing. Daniel went to the opposite end of the cabin, tried to get comfortable, and closed his eyes, but didn't sleep.
===
Some time around sunrise, Rorschach carefully shook Daniel's shoulder to wake him from semi-consciousness.
Daniel waited for his mind to clear and paced around to warm himself up. It hurt to move, but the discomfort was tolerable. He stepped out of the owlship. By daylight, Fresh Creek Park was almost pleasant; its salt marsh was just visible through the trees, and the water reflected the grey sky.
He loitered outside in the hope that the cold air would help him to focus, then sheepishly stepped back through the hatch to check on Rorschach. "You okay?" he asked, and was answered with a simple nod. Rorschach didn't look as if he'd slept much, if at all.
They didn't have much to say to each other during the flight back to Manhattan.
They didn't have much to say to each other during the walk from the owlship to the Veidt Building, either.
Once they were indoors, Rorschach went to their room, and finally fell asleep. Daniel left him in peace.
Daniel chose to sit in the Veidt Building's basement cafeteria. He tried to make a coffee ration last as long as humanly possible. Now that he no longer saw the point in searching for Hollis, he knew that he could dedicate himself to the relief effort, but felt strangely indifferent. It was still early morning, and the room was mostly empty. It was easy to just zone out. Daniel regarded the coffee cup on the table, and allowed his eyes to lose focus.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there when a familiar voice said, "Daniel?"
The voice certainly wasn't Rorschach's. It had a perfect transatlantic accent, for one thing.
Daniel looked up, and saw Adrian. A very distracted, rather miserable-looking Adrian, but Adrian all the same. He was carrying a cup of water, but no food.
"Oh," Daniel said. He felt no surprise. Adrian did own the building, after all. "You're back in New York."
"Better late than never, I'm afraid," said Adrian. "I didn't expect to find you here - my people said that you left the building yesterday morning."
"Yeah, we just got back a short while ago," Daniel said. He still felt too mixed up to manage genuine amiability, so he settled for polite formality instead; "It's good to see you."
Adrian sat down at the table, across from him. "I would've come sooner, but travel is rather difficult, as you can imagine. Most of the surviving runways are either unmanned or under strict military control, and there's a lot of red tape involved." His voice really was perfectly modulated, as if he was making a great effort to enunciate well. There were shadows under his eyes, but Daniel expected that; if Adrian had looked happy and healthy, it would have been strange. "Are you getting enough food and rest?"
"Is anyone?" Daniel said.
"No, I suppose not. But we're doing what we can."
Daniel met Adrian's gaze. "What's happening?"
Adrian leaned forward, and kept his voice quiet. "My resources are stretched at this time, but I'll tell you what I already know. The US government - well, what's left of it - is working on a ceasefire. We were hit by a decapitation strike, so negotiations are going to be difficult. I'm afraid that the USSR have rather shot themselves in the foot, in that regard - their attempt at a first strike wasn't as successful as they probably would have hoped. Our casualties are worse than theirs, but they still want to avoid a second exchange. No-one likes a Pyrrhic victory."
"So, you're saying that Nixon...?"
"...Is deceased, unfortunately," Adrian said. "He's being succeeded by the Secretary of the Commerce, who was serving as the designated survivor. It's possible that other, higher-ranking cabinet members are still alive, but they're unaccounted for. A lot of the communication networks are still down."
"Any news about Doctor Manhattan?"
Adrian smiled slightly, as if to say, oh, him. "We've actually managed to contact Jon. We caught his attention by activating a particle accelerator at one of our laboratories, and he came to see what was generating the resultant synchrotron radiation, just as we'd hoped - he's extremely sensitive, in some respects. I can confirm that Laurie Juspeczyk is with him; as far as I know, she's still at my Antarctic retreat, quite safe and unharmed. We're trying to work something out. Jon's co-operation would be invaluable, but his priorities are quite alien to ours."
Daniel wondered if Veidt's Antarctic retreat had a good supply of cigarettes. He doubted it. He thought of Laurie, alone and without nicotine, and he felt a quiet need to protect her, whether she needed it or not. "How's Laurie handling things?"
"She's holding up well, considering the circumstances. She's the only person who Jon seems to listen to. And even then, he doesn't always listen."
"Don't you think that the circumstances surrounding Jon's disappearance seem suspicious? Y'know, the whole cancer thing."
Adrian pursed his lips. "It does. It will have to be investigated in due time; obviously, I'm very busy, and I'd rather worry about the survivors right now. Any luck finding Hollis?"
Daniel shook his head.
"Sorry to hear that," said Adrian. "You don't have any relatives in New York?"
"No." It wasn't a topic that Daniel wanted to dwell on.
"How did you get a black eye?" Adrian asked, off-handedly.
Oh, I walked into a door. "Disagreement with a friend."
"Ah," said Adrian, unsurprised. "Where is he?"
"Asleep." Daniel looked down at his coffee cup, and turned it in his hands. "How did you find out his name?"
Adrian gave him a slightly apologetic look. "Easy. I ran a background check on him in seventy-five, just as a precaution after the incident with Grice. I know that he's been nosing around my business ever since I retired, so I can't say that I feel too guilty about the invasion of privacy. I don't like having to intimidate people, and I'm not going to hold a grudge over the fact that he injured my employees, but I still want to discourage repeat behavior on his part."
"Have you ever ran a background check on me?" Daniel asked.
Veidt smiled. "I'd never need to. I trust you." The words were just sardonic enough to avoid sounding uncomfortably sentimental. "It's a rare commodity, trust, but you seem to inspire it in people."
Daniel forced himself to smile in return. Occupational hazard of being a Nice Jewish Boy. "How much do you know about him?"
"Hardly as much as you do, I'll bet," Adrian said, with a tone that was conspicuously free of insinuation.
Daniel was about to reply when he noticed that one of Adrian's employees, a sour-faced man in a creased suit, had approached the table and was standing a polite distance away, waiting patiently. Daniel nodded in the man's direction, so that Adrian saw him.
"Looks like I'm wanted again," Adrian muttered, then gave Daniel a rather concerned look. "Will you be alright?"
"Yeah, I guess. Thanks Adrian."
"Don't thank me," Adrian said. He gave Daniel a tired smile, and walked away.
The employee, presumably an aide of some kind, leaned in so that he could murmur something to Adrian, and Adrian simply nodded in return. The two of them left the cafeteria, leaving Daniel with his half-cold coffee.
Daniel realized, belatedly, that he had forgotten to ask if Adrian knew anything about Pyramid Deliveries.
===
Rorschach was still asleep when Daniel returned to the room.
Daniel placed a cup of water on the floor next to Rorschach's bed. He would have covered Rorschach with a blanket, but was afraid of waking him up. (Daniel was aware that strictly platonic male friends probably didn't cover each other with blankets. He didn't care. He was past the point of trying to fool anyone.)
He sat down on his own bed, opposite, and busied himself with reading through Roth's notes on Janey Slater. On the off chance that Rorschach would not be able to continue his investigations, Daniel was prepared to continue them in his stead.
Rorschach snored occasionally.
Snoreschach, Daniel thought. Ha.
Daniel listened to the sound of his partner's breathing and the hum of the electric lights, and almost felt safe.
Characters: Rorschach/Nite Owl II
Rating: PG-13
Word count (this section): 5406
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Summary: AU. The Cold War reaches its ultimate conclusion, and Rorschach and Daniel are among the survivors when the East Coast is attacked.
Many thanks to runriggers for the beta.
Chapter Index.
===
They made excuses to loiter inside the owlship while they tried to put themselves back together.
Inevitably, they had to go back outside.
Morbid curiosity drew them back to the remains of Daniel's home. Daniel told himself that he wanted to look for salvageable items, although Rorschach did not require a justification for the visit. Rorschach watched Daniel very carefully. Daniel pretended that he didn't notice.
Daniel's street was only a short distance away, just two blocks south, although the seconds seemed to drag their heels; when they finally arrived at Daniel's house, it came as no relief.
The front of the building still appeared to be in one piece, albeit with broken windows. Daniel kicked the door open so that he could look inside. The stairway to the upper floor was blocked by debris, and the kitchen ceiling had collapsed, rendering it inaccessible. The living room was still vaguely recognisable, but seemed precarious. Everything was damp and dirty. There was little worth saving. Daniel searched the living room in the hope that he might have left a spare pair of glasses in there, but found nothing. He reminded himself that he was lucky just to have the goggles.
He was lucky, and he had no right, absolutely no right at all, to be so upset about the loss of his home. He stood in the living room for a minute or so, arms hanging uselessly by his sides, then went back outside.
Rorschach was waiting by the front door, watching the deserted street. Daniel stood next to him, and tried to think of something to say - he made a focused effort to avoid sounding miserable. "We ought to check your place, too."
"No point. Doubt that building would still be standing," said Rorschach, as detached and disinterested as always. "Was much closer to Governors Island hypocenter than this."
"Where were you living?"
Rorschach paused before answering. Secrecy was a difficult habit to break. "Red Hook."
"That's not too far."
"At least two and a half miles away, to walk."
"We should go there," Daniel said, absently.
Rorschach shook his head. "More important things to do. Should visit the home of Roth. Address is in Canarsie. Building would have likely survived the attack, even if he hasn't."
Daniel didn't follow. "Roth?"
"Doug Roth," Rorschach said, slowly. "Nova Express journalist. Remember?"
"Okay. Yeah." Daniel felt irritated without really knowing why. "Of course. Right."
Rorschach regarded him cautiously.
"Don't look at me like that," Daniel said. The constant smell of smoke was making him feel sick.
Rorschach glanced away. "Done here?"
"I guess," Daniel said, started walking. Rorschach followed.
"This," Daniel said, mostly to himself, "has been a spectacularly shitty week."
Rorschach frowned, and seemed to consider this deeply. "Could have been worse," he concluded.
Daniel could have laughed, but didn't.
The silence weighed on him. He tried to start a conversation. "You lived in Brooklyn all your life, or...?"
"No," Rorschach answered.
"Oh. Just wondering," Daniel said. "You have a, uh, slight accent. Sometimes."
Rorschach canted his head to one side. "Do not."
"It's not obvious. It only really shows when you're angry. You'd have to listen really closely in order to hear it, though."
Rorschach grunted, dismissing the topic.
Out the corner of his eye, Daniel thought he saw a human hand, growing from the rubble of a fallen building like some strange plant. It was both utterly banal and somehow fake-looking. (The first time Daniel had seen a human corpse, he had mistaken it for an abandoned shop mannequin.)
He didn't look at it.
"Talk to me," he told Rorschach.
"About what?"
"Hell, I don't care." He didn't want the silence to somehow find its way inside his mind.
Rorschach looked over at him; his expression was one of incomprehension.
Daniel met his gaze. "Who was the greatest boxer?"
Rorschach gave Daniel another cautious look, then decided to go along with it. "Carmen Basilio."
"Most people would've said Sugar Ray."
"Most people are wrong," Rorschach said.
"C'mon, man, you can't objectively say that Basilio was the greatest," Daniel said, because arguing with Rorschach over petty shit was probably as close as things would ever get to normal. "You could say that he was your favorite, but that's different."
Rorschach fixed him with a hard stare.
Okay then, Daniel thought. "Favorite film?"
"Don't watch films."
"What, never?"
"No."
"Not even as a kid?"
"No."
"Oh, come on, everyone's seen at least one film they've liked. What was the last film you remember watching, at least?"
Rorschach relented, and tiredly rubbed the back of his neck. "Sands of Iwo Jima," he said, and gave Daniel a look as if to say, 'happy now?'
Daniel hadn't seen it. He just nodded. "War movie, right?"
"Yes."
"Figured."
They kept walking. Daniel's gaze strayed to the broken body of a dog, half-visible beneath the debris of a ruined house. He blandly noted the collar around its neck.
"You're sure you don't want to check on your place?" Daniel asked.
"Positive. Kept a spare uniform there, but nothing else of importance. Doubt there will be anything left."
"You don't have another outfit hidden anywhere else in the city?"
Rorschach shook his head. Daniel tried to imagine how many masks the guy must have gone through in his lifetime; costumes, like their owners, were inevitably damaged. (A decade ago, during the nadir of the seventies, Rorschach had told him where the mask's fabric had come from. It had made Daniel uncomfortable. But there was little point in thinking about that now.)
"So, the mask you've got is your last one," Daniel said. It felt cruel to ask, but he asked anyway: "What are you going to do?"
Rorschach didn't answer.
In the end, the silence won.
===
At some point, Daniel was aware of them boarding the owlship, and he was lucid enough to pilot a brief, uneventful course to Canarsie. They landed in Fresh Creek Park, hidden by the trees, then trudged back to civilisation. (Rorschach scowled slightly more than usual at the leaves and grass, as if he found the greenery deeply unnatural.)
Daniel felt slightly better.
As expected, the distance between Canarsie and the hypocenters meant that the area still looked relatively normal. Daniel and Rorschach both kept an eye out for the National Guard, but they saw very few signs of law enforcement. The shops were either boarded up or were conspicuously occupied by their owners, although the streets were fairly empty - either people were staying indoors to avoid the worst of the air pollution, or they had abandoned their homes in fear of further attacks.
They wandered for a while, getting lost occasionally, although Rorschach claimed to remember the area well from the days when they had fought against the mob. It took them slightly over two hours to locate Roth's address, and by the time they found it, the sun was beginning to set.
Roth's house was a simple, two-story affair; from the outside, there were no obvious signs of occupation, although it was prudent to assume that the neighbouring homes were still inhabited. Fortunately, the building was on a corner, and it was possible to climb over the fence into the back yard.
Daniel gave Rorschach a boost, then clumsily scrambled after him. Some asshole had planted a rosebush on the other side of the fence. They endured it stoically.
Rorschach used a screwdriver to jimmy the lock on the house's back door, and then they stepped inside, into a spartan kitchen. Every available surface was covered with bottles of water.
Daniel walked through into the main hall, and searched for signs of a family; a woman's coat hanging by the door, small shoes in the hallway, children's toys, anything like that. There were none, and he felt a shred of relief. He continued into the living room so that he could peer through the window and watch the street while Rorschach searched the building. Their escape routes were pretty poor, but they had worked with far worse.
Keeping lookout was tedious and demanding. There was a clock on the mantelpiece of Roth's living room, but it had stopped, and it wasn't long before Daniel felt his mind threatening to wander. He listened closely, although he was unable to hear Rorschach moving around the house; his gaze strayed from the window and focused on the framed pictures on the shelves; photos of smiling people, somebody's friends. He wondered what they would have done if it had transpired that Roth was living with a wife and kids. Relatives always made things difficult.
Interestingly, Roth did have a pretty nice house for a bachelor, although it was so bare-looking that it was doubtful he spent much time in it. Daniel wondered what his income was.
Time passed - and, in spite of everything, the boredom made him hungry. He was considering the merits of a pastrami sandwich when he saw a vaguely-familiar figure walking along the street; Daniel pulled his goggles down over his eyes, focused, and immediately recognised Roth's blond hair and moustache.
Daniel whistled to alert Rorschach, then left the living room to make sure that his partner had heard. Rorschach was already descending the stairs. By Daniel's reckoning, they had about a minute to get out of the house.
"It's Roth," Daniel said, simply, and began to walk to the back door.
Rorschach grabbed his arm. "Where are you going?"
Daniel gestured towards street, and stupidly repeated, "Roth..."
"Exactly."
"Oh no, we never accounted for this," Daniel said - it was piss-poor planning really, but he wasn't in the mood to be thinking like Nite Owl. "What're you thinking of doing? We've got no evidence that he's guilty of anything yet."
Rorschach shoved him into the kitchen and gestured at him to shut up. The two of them waited.
Daniel heard the front door opening, followed by a brief silence as Roth presumably removed his coat. The carpeting in the hall floor made it difficult to hear footsteps, but Roth gave his position away by coughing. He was approaching the kitchen.
Rorschach waited with infinite patience.
Roth opened the kitchen door. Rorschach punched him in the solar plexus.
Roth folded up, too winded to yell, while Rorschach blandly grabbed one of his arms and caught him in a wristlock. (Kote mawashi, said Daniel's inner nerd.) Daniel stood back and felt like a bit of a third wheel.
"Have a few questions," Rorschach said. "Answer them and we'll leave you alone."
Unsurprisingly, the first words out of Roth's mouth were, "What the hell..."
Rorschach twisted Roth's arm. It was just a matter of convincing the subject that it was in his interest to comply. Some subjects realised it faster than others. Roth yelped and swore, predictably.
Daniel decided that, as he was present, he might as well take an interest in the proceedings. He felt vulnerable in civilian clothes, but at least the dust masks helped to hide their faces. "Why do you think we're here?" he asked.
"I don't know, I haven't done anything," Roth said, which told Daniel that this was going to be fairly easy. "Look, Jesus, just take my wallet, or hell, I don't know, I've got food and water stored in the kitchen, who the fuck are you people..."
"Who was behind the attempt to discredit Manhattan?" Rorschach asked.
"I don't know what..."
"Lying," Rorschach said.
Roth floundered. "Look, Slater just came to us, alright; she was really upset, god, I can't think properly, if you let me go..."
Rorschach made Roth's wrist bend in a way that it really wasn't designed to. Roth yowled.
Daniel took the opportunity to get a better look at the other man: Roth was dishevelled and unshaven, and he smelled as if he'd been wearing the same clothes for the past few days. Pretty normal, all things given.
Rorschach kept firing questions. "Who gave you the names of Manhattan's other victims?"
"Slater, she knew those guys..."
Rorschach looked up. He and Daniel exchanged glances.
"Bullshit," Daniel said.
Roth shook his head. "They'd worked at the same place together. Dimensional Developments. They hired a bunch of ex-Gila Flats scientists there."
"What about Edward Jacobi?" Rorschach asked. "Read about him. Magazine article. Another alleged victim. How was he involved?"
"Jacobi worked for Dimensional Developments as well."
Rorschach snorted.
"So, let me get this straight," said Daniel. "The victims were ex-Gila Flats people... Who, coincidentally, worked at the same place together. Right. And Dimensional Developments just so happened to also hire Jacobi, a.k.a. Moloch, an ex-con with no background in science."
"That's the truth," Roth said. "Jacobi worked there as a temp when he got out of prison, fuck, I don't know."
Daniel shook his head. He'd lost any sympathy that he might have had for Roth. "Small world, huh?"
"Lying," Rorschach said, blandly, and pushed down on Roth's arm to force him onto his knees. He addressed Daniel, without looking up, "Find me a kitchen knife and something to gag him with."
Daniel went to look for something, ideally duct tape. He thought to himself, here we are, on a Thursday night, about to torture a guy. This is why we can't have nice things. Granted, when Rorschach really wanted to hurt somebody, he hardly needed a kitchen knife to do so, but asking for a sharp object always worked as a cheap intimidation tactic.
It should have bothered Daniel far more than it did.
Behind him, he heard Roth renew his attempts to struggle free. Eventually, Roth yielded. "Alright. It wasn't Slater who came to us. We went to her. We were given an anonymous tip..."
"Still lying," Rorschach said.
Daniel's patience expired. He stopped searching, and looked up. "Jesus, Roth, you're not stupid. Don't be an idiot. Who are you covering for?"
Roth sagged. His tone was sardonic. "It doesn't matter what I say. You're not going to believe me."
"Whatever you say, it can't be any less believable than the shit you've been trying to sell to us so far," Daniel replied. He decided that, while he wouldn't enjoy watching Rorschach torture Roth, he wouldn't mind it that much either.
"Pyramid Deliveries," said Roth. "Pyramid Deliveries told us to investigate Slater."
Rorschach twisted Roth's arm, apparently for the sheer hell of it. "Why didn't you just say that from the start?"
Roth grimaced. "I... We... They pay my wages, but... They're not... You know. They're not tolerant of mistakes."
"What, do they put horse heads in people's beds?" Daniel asked.
"They always know where to, uh, apply leverage to people. We don't... We don't talk about it at the office."
Daniel sighed. "C'mon, Roth - if you give us information, no-one's going to know it was you. Everyone has more important things to worry about right now. Did they make threats against you?"
"I didn't want to lose my job," Roth said.
"You didn't want to lose your job," Rorschach said, flatly. "Suppose that makes your participation understandable, then." He bent Roth's wrist so badly that Daniel was sure that something must have torn. Roth's scream was loud enough to possibly alert the neighbours.
When Roth recovered somewhat, his expression was one of miserable resignation. "There's a personal organizer under the couch in the living room. It's got all my contacts in it. Just take it, please."
Daniel went to retrieve the organizer. Behind him, he heard Rorschach growl, "Give us names."
Roth spoke hurriedly. "Look, the Pyramid Deliveries guy who contacted me was called Jonathan Zuckerman, alright? Tall guy, probably in his late thirties. All I have is his telephone number, which is already written down in the organizer. It was always a case of 'don't call us, we'll call you'. Obviously, they didn't like it when I asked too many questions. My understanding of things is almost limited to everything that's already in the Slater article. But I wasn't lying when I said that most of the cancer victims had worked at the same place."
"Find that difficult to believe," Rorschach said.
"It's true. I spoke to a lot of them for the article. They were scattered all over the place ever since Dimensional Developments got shut down, but they all knew each other."
"And you didn't think that was... odd?" Daniel asked, returning to the hallway. "You participated in a smear campaign against an important Extranormal Operative, and you must've known that it was going to have some pretty ugly political consequences; didn't you ever stop and wonder what the hell was going on?"
"Like I said, I was discouraged from asking questions. Everything was done on a need to know basis. I was given Slater's background, her contact details, the names and contact details of the other victims. Look. Look. I wrote a load of notes on the article. I think they're still in my office upstairs, in a manila folder, probably buried under a pile of insurance paperwork by the window, I don't fucking know. Just take it and leave me the fuck alone."
Daniel rubbed at his temples and tried to think of anything else. He didn't have the correct mindset for interrogation. Rorschach seemed capable, but he was probably in worse physical condition than Daniel was, and neither of them were really in their right minds. "Fine," he said, and went upstairs to fetch the folder. He wondered if it was wise to turn his back on Rorschach and Roth for even a minute, but decided that he didn't really care.
Roth's office was a mess of paperwork, but the folder was where he said it would be. The room would likely have been searched by Rorschach already, but it was easy to miss things, especially when the place was already a dump. Christ, there was even a coffee mug on the desk with some sort of mold growing inside it. Daniel noted that the mug was purple and had a distinctive golden logo on it. It really was a small world.
He descended the stairs, and held up the folder to show Rorschach. "Are you done here?"
Rorschach nodded.
Roth looked up, almost pleadingly, just before Rorschach grabbed him by the collar and cracked his head against the wall, knocking him out cold.
"Was that really necessary?" Daniel asked.
Rorschach shrugged. "He's fine."
"How can you tell?"
"Practice."
They left the house, careful to make sure that they weren't noticed, and headed back to Fresh Creek Park.
===
The park was serene; quiet, but naturally so. It wasn't the same as the silence of Brooklyn. Daniel sat inside the owlship and tried to eat a can of cold spaghetti, while Rorschach flipped through Roth's personal organizer. It was dark outside, and the cabin lights were barely bright enough to read by.
"There's a D. Santos listed among Roth's contacts," Rorschach said, without looking up.
"So?"
"David Santos at the Veidt Building. Remember?"
"There are probably thousands of people called 'D. Santos' in New York, Rorschach," Daniel said, and didn't care if he sounded condescending. The spaghetti didn't taste right, so he set the can down on a console, and took a deep breath. "I'll tell you what bothers me more: the idea that most of the victims worked at the same place together after they left Gila Flats. I mean, if Roth was telling the truth, and most of them were hired by... What was the name of the place again?"
"Dimensional Developments."
"Right. If Roth was telling the truth and most of the cancer victims were hired by Dimensional Developments, then that looks so obviously fishy... Well, there's no way in hell anyone could pass it off as just a coincidence."
Rorschach shrugged, and rubbed at his eyes. "Perhaps whoever instigated the Manhattan scandal did so with the direct intention of triggering nuclear war, and didn't believe that anyone would investigate in the wake of the attack. Can afford to be sloppy when you know that evidence will be destroyed."
"I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, the military, the CIA... They wouldn't just let something like this slide, right? As soon as Jon left Earth, they must've suspected that something was up, and the employees at Nova Express probably would've been the first people they'd investigate. But Roth didn't look like a guy who was wanted by the government on suspicion of conspiracy, did he? It doesn't add up."
Daniel paused, and looked over at Rorschach when he realized that no reply was forthcoming. "Well?" he prompted.
"I'm thinking," Rorschach muttered. Without the dust mask over his face, the sticky rawness of his burns contrasted with the pallor of his skin.
"You don't look that great," Daniel told him.
Rorschach fixed him with a blank stare, as if he was already sick of hearing that. "Neither do you."
Daniel ignored him; he walked over to where Rorschach sat on the floor, and crouched next to him so that he could slowly, carefully put his hand on Rorschach's forehead. Rorschach gave him a slightly indignant look in return.
"You feel like you're running a fever," Daniel said.
"Can still function."
"Yes, I know," Daniel said, to humor him. "But the doctor said..."
Rorschach took Daniel's wrist so that he could curtly remove his hand from his forehead. "If you're going to put your hands near my face," he said, quietly, "ask first."
The words caught Daniel off-guard. "You were okay with me touching your face before..."
"That was then," said Rorschach, "This is now."
Daniel's initial reaction was to feel defensive, as if he'd just been accused of an offense that he wasn't aware of committing. "Sorry," he said, at a loss. He was left with the distinct impression that Rorschach was studying his reaction very carefully, and he felt compelled to add, "I won't do it again."
Rorschach grunted, dismissing the subject. "Worry about yourself," he said, irritably.
"Where's the fun in that?" Daniel sat back down on the floor. He felt too tired to eat, but too uneasy to sleep. As always, he resorted to the usual coping mechanism of trying to plan ahead, although the future wasn't something that he was particularly interested in thinking about. "We might as well go back to the Veidt Building."
Rorschach sat up slightly. "What?"
"I'm not helping anyone by wandering around Brooklyn like an asshole, and there's nothing left that's worth staying for. At least the Veidt Building has food, electricity, and running water, for Christ's sake. Besides, do you have any better ideas? You've got to figure out what you're going to do about Pyramid Deliveries, right? So you might as well stay somewhere in relative comfort, in the meantime."
"Government will set up relief housing..."
"Yeah, Adrian's people told me about that. They're going to put people in tents, trailers, and commercial buildings, but it's still going to be a clusterfuck with no water or electricity."
"So," said Rorschach. "Standard relief accommodations not good enough for you."
Daniel didn't have the energy for a pissing match. "Don't be ridiculous. If other people had the same options as us, don't you think they'd take them?"
"Do you really trust Veidt?" Rorschach asked.
"Yes. Well. I don't know. Yeah, I guess. But that's beside the point. I just want to stay somewhere that's clean and dry and doesn't stink of smoke until... Things get fixed."
"Want to isolate yourself from reality," Rorschach said, as if he was quite unsurprised.
Daniel didn't lose his temper, not really; instead, he laughed. "Jesus, don't talk to me about reality. You've been hiding behind a mask since the day I met you, you sanctimonious asshole."
It took him a moment to appreciate the contempt in his own voice, and his first thought was, that's not me, I didn't just say that to him.
To his surprise, Rorschach didn't attack him for it. Rorschach just sat there and stared.
"I'm... Not really sure where that came from," Daniel said, and felt lost. "Sorry."
Rorschach said nothing. Daniel went to the opposite end of the cabin, tried to get comfortable, and closed his eyes, but didn't sleep.
===
Some time around sunrise, Rorschach carefully shook Daniel's shoulder to wake him from semi-consciousness.
Daniel waited for his mind to clear and paced around to warm himself up. It hurt to move, but the discomfort was tolerable. He stepped out of the owlship. By daylight, Fresh Creek Park was almost pleasant; its salt marsh was just visible through the trees, and the water reflected the grey sky.
He loitered outside in the hope that the cold air would help him to focus, then sheepishly stepped back through the hatch to check on Rorschach. "You okay?" he asked, and was answered with a simple nod. Rorschach didn't look as if he'd slept much, if at all.
They didn't have much to say to each other during the flight back to Manhattan.
They didn't have much to say to each other during the walk from the owlship to the Veidt Building, either.
Once they were indoors, Rorschach went to their room, and finally fell asleep. Daniel left him in peace.
Daniel chose to sit in the Veidt Building's basement cafeteria. He tried to make a coffee ration last as long as humanly possible. Now that he no longer saw the point in searching for Hollis, he knew that he could dedicate himself to the relief effort, but felt strangely indifferent. It was still early morning, and the room was mostly empty. It was easy to just zone out. Daniel regarded the coffee cup on the table, and allowed his eyes to lose focus.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there when a familiar voice said, "Daniel?"
The voice certainly wasn't Rorschach's. It had a perfect transatlantic accent, for one thing.
Daniel looked up, and saw Adrian. A very distracted, rather miserable-looking Adrian, but Adrian all the same. He was carrying a cup of water, but no food.
"Oh," Daniel said. He felt no surprise. Adrian did own the building, after all. "You're back in New York."
"Better late than never, I'm afraid," said Adrian. "I didn't expect to find you here - my people said that you left the building yesterday morning."
"Yeah, we just got back a short while ago," Daniel said. He still felt too mixed up to manage genuine amiability, so he settled for polite formality instead; "It's good to see you."
Adrian sat down at the table, across from him. "I would've come sooner, but travel is rather difficult, as you can imagine. Most of the surviving runways are either unmanned or under strict military control, and there's a lot of red tape involved." His voice really was perfectly modulated, as if he was making a great effort to enunciate well. There were shadows under his eyes, but Daniel expected that; if Adrian had looked happy and healthy, it would have been strange. "Are you getting enough food and rest?"
"Is anyone?" Daniel said.
"No, I suppose not. But we're doing what we can."
Daniel met Adrian's gaze. "What's happening?"
Adrian leaned forward, and kept his voice quiet. "My resources are stretched at this time, but I'll tell you what I already know. The US government - well, what's left of it - is working on a ceasefire. We were hit by a decapitation strike, so negotiations are going to be difficult. I'm afraid that the USSR have rather shot themselves in the foot, in that regard - their attempt at a first strike wasn't as successful as they probably would have hoped. Our casualties are worse than theirs, but they still want to avoid a second exchange. No-one likes a Pyrrhic victory."
"So, you're saying that Nixon...?"
"...Is deceased, unfortunately," Adrian said. "He's being succeeded by the Secretary of the Commerce, who was serving as the designated survivor. It's possible that other, higher-ranking cabinet members are still alive, but they're unaccounted for. A lot of the communication networks are still down."
"Any news about Doctor Manhattan?"
Adrian smiled slightly, as if to say, oh, him. "We've actually managed to contact Jon. We caught his attention by activating a particle accelerator at one of our laboratories, and he came to see what was generating the resultant synchrotron radiation, just as we'd hoped - he's extremely sensitive, in some respects. I can confirm that Laurie Juspeczyk is with him; as far as I know, she's still at my Antarctic retreat, quite safe and unharmed. We're trying to work something out. Jon's co-operation would be invaluable, but his priorities are quite alien to ours."
Daniel wondered if Veidt's Antarctic retreat had a good supply of cigarettes. He doubted it. He thought of Laurie, alone and without nicotine, and he felt a quiet need to protect her, whether she needed it or not. "How's Laurie handling things?"
"She's holding up well, considering the circumstances. She's the only person who Jon seems to listen to. And even then, he doesn't always listen."
"Don't you think that the circumstances surrounding Jon's disappearance seem suspicious? Y'know, the whole cancer thing."
Adrian pursed his lips. "It does. It will have to be investigated in due time; obviously, I'm very busy, and I'd rather worry about the survivors right now. Any luck finding Hollis?"
Daniel shook his head.
"Sorry to hear that," said Adrian. "You don't have any relatives in New York?"
"No." It wasn't a topic that Daniel wanted to dwell on.
"How did you get a black eye?" Adrian asked, off-handedly.
Oh, I walked into a door. "Disagreement with a friend."
"Ah," said Adrian, unsurprised. "Where is he?"
"Asleep." Daniel looked down at his coffee cup, and turned it in his hands. "How did you find out his name?"
Adrian gave him a slightly apologetic look. "Easy. I ran a background check on him in seventy-five, just as a precaution after the incident with Grice. I know that he's been nosing around my business ever since I retired, so I can't say that I feel too guilty about the invasion of privacy. I don't like having to intimidate people, and I'm not going to hold a grudge over the fact that he injured my employees, but I still want to discourage repeat behavior on his part."
"Have you ever ran a background check on me?" Daniel asked.
Veidt smiled. "I'd never need to. I trust you." The words were just sardonic enough to avoid sounding uncomfortably sentimental. "It's a rare commodity, trust, but you seem to inspire it in people."
Daniel forced himself to smile in return. Occupational hazard of being a Nice Jewish Boy. "How much do you know about him?"
"Hardly as much as you do, I'll bet," Adrian said, with a tone that was conspicuously free of insinuation.
Daniel was about to reply when he noticed that one of Adrian's employees, a sour-faced man in a creased suit, had approached the table and was standing a polite distance away, waiting patiently. Daniel nodded in the man's direction, so that Adrian saw him.
"Looks like I'm wanted again," Adrian muttered, then gave Daniel a rather concerned look. "Will you be alright?"
"Yeah, I guess. Thanks Adrian."
"Don't thank me," Adrian said. He gave Daniel a tired smile, and walked away.
The employee, presumably an aide of some kind, leaned in so that he could murmur something to Adrian, and Adrian simply nodded in return. The two of them left the cafeteria, leaving Daniel with his half-cold coffee.
Daniel realized, belatedly, that he had forgotten to ask if Adrian knew anything about Pyramid Deliveries.
===
Rorschach was still asleep when Daniel returned to the room.
Daniel placed a cup of water on the floor next to Rorschach's bed. He would have covered Rorschach with a blanket, but was afraid of waking him up. (Daniel was aware that strictly platonic male friends probably didn't cover each other with blankets. He didn't care. He was past the point of trying to fool anyone.)
He sat down on his own bed, opposite, and busied himself with reading through Roth's notes on Janey Slater. On the off chance that Rorschach would not be able to continue his investigations, Daniel was prepared to continue them in his stead.
Rorschach snored occasionally.
Snoreschach, Daniel thought. Ha.
Daniel listened to the sound of his partner's breathing and the hum of the electric lights, and almost felt safe.