Author's Note: I received a Private Message from someone a couple weeks ago reminding me about this story – you know who you are. It's been over a year since I've written.

I owe this person a huge thanks because s/he gave me the little kick of inspiration that I needed to sit down and start writing again.

And I had a lot of fun writing this chapter, although I'm not entirely happy with some of the dialogue... but at least I'm writing something. Damn.

As always, feedback appreciated! (I actually realized there's a handy-dandy reply button on reviews now! FanFiction member for years and I never knew... *slaps self and feels incredibly stupid*)

Chapter 6 – Broken

Rorschach could remember very clearly the night that her body broke.

It was late, cold, and dark. 1974, January 25th. The team of three costumed heroes had been hawking the streets on the edge of the New York industrial district, and they had paused in front of an abandoned movie theatre.

"Hey, I remember this movie," Narcysia said, pointing to a faded poster outside the ticket booths. The poster screamed low-budget science fiction; it sported a man and woman dressed in bedraggled wedding clothes stained with blood, fleeing from some dark looming shape in the distance and a saucer-UFO shining a beam of light down from overhead. The couple was holding hands with exasperated expressions on their faces. "I thought it came out two years ago. This theatre must be really old."

"I don't recognize any of these movies. None of them look main-stream," Nite Owl said, looking up and down the wall of posters. Some of them had torn or fallen down. "Guess that's why the place went out of business."

"I saw this one when it came out," Narcysia said, pointing at an adjacent bloody-handprint covered horror poster. Her breath came like fog in the cold air as she spoke. She looked back at Nite Owl with a conversational smile to see him eyeing the poster with a distant, uninterested expression. "Not a horror fan, huh?"

"No, not really," he answered. "Not that kind of movie."

"What kind of movies do you like?"

Nite Owl looked back towards the first poster with the ominous UFO. He grimaced at the wedding-clad couple. "Some science-fiction ones are alright."

Narcysia looked past Nite Owl to see Rorschach lurking by a large, waterless fountain in front of the ticket booths. He had his hands in his pockets and was looking down at the rusted pennies and dirty chewing gum on the bottom of the fountain.

"I bet Rorschach likes horror movies," Narcysia said. The figure by the fountain looked up at the sound of his name, but he still faced the street. "You ever see this one, Rorschach?" she asked, gesturing to the poster.

"No," Rorschach answered without turning around.

"Well, what kind of movies do you like?"

No answer came. He took a few slow steps around the circular fountain and pulled his hand out of his pocket to pick up a penny from the fountain's ledge.

"You do watch movies, don't you?"

He slipped the penny into his pocket. He looked up at her from across the fountain. "Not really."

Narcysia let out a sharp, quiet gasp and half-grinned that lopsided smile. "You don't watch movies? Why not?"

"Not interested."

"What do you do for fun?"

Rorschach sent an unimpressed glare at Nite Owl. The mask hid any facial expression but it was a look that Nite Owl was too familiar with. Nite Owl's mouth twitched into an apologetic frown and he shrugged his shoulders lightly.

"We should probably move on," Nite Owl urged submissively after receiving Rorschach's glare. He took a few steps towards Narcysia in a gentle push for her to walk away from the posters. She didn't budge.

"No, wait," she said, but Rorschach was already off towards the sidewalk at Nite Owl's invitation, and Narcysia was forced to trot after him to keep up. "Come on, I wanna know. You must do something for fun."

"Keep out of my business."

"Do you go to restaurants?"

No answer. Rorschach kept walking.

"Listen to music? Read books?"

Still no answer.

"Go drinking?"

Suddenly, Rorschach planted his feet and whirled around, stopping abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk to face her. His hands were balled into fists at his sides, back arched, perched on the balls of his feet – and his mask a glowering, shadowed gaze that expressed his impatience as well as any real face could.

Narcysia halted and flinched reflexively, almost bumping into him.

Rorschach remained frozen in place, fists still at his sides, glaring at Narcysia with his jaw clenched. It wasn't the first night he had felt such an intense loathing for she, who was nothing but a superfluous chatterbox, and Nite Owl, who caused it all, who brought her to him, who allows for these violations of his solidarity to occur. He felt anger. He was angry because they were selfish and they just didn't understand.

He opened his mouth to speak before he knew what he was going to say – and even eleven years later, in 1985, Rorschach still didn't know what words would have come out of his mouth if he were not interrupted by a sudden shriek from a neighboring alleyway.

All three costumed heroes stiffened and looked up as the scream echoed overhead. Like firemen responding to an alarm, they immediately dropped the exchange and took off sprinting towards the sound of the scream, sloshing through puddles and piles of grime-covered snow on the sidewalk.

When they arrived on the scene, they found a man draped in a heavy brown trench coat and a woman cowering in a pile of wet garbage. Her pants were torn, her coat had been flung to the opposite side of the alley, and her purse lay wide open on the ground with makeup scattered across the ground. She was holding her arms over her head, shaking against the cold brick wall.

The man bolted as soon as the Watchmen rounded the corner. They pursued him down the alley with a chorus of sprinting footfalls, leaving the battered woman cowering in the cold. Rorschach in the lead, they followed the thief a surprising distance, navigating through garbage cans and piles of junk, industrial equipment and old tires. The man was unusually quick on his feet, and he managed to evade them long enough to flee to a roadside construction site, where an unfinished office building sat half-erected in a nest of scattered scrap and metal beams.

The fleeing thief ran inside the skeleton building, and his feet made hollow clanging sounds as he climbed the wooden ramp up two floors.

"Back me," Rorschach said to Narcysia, voice hoarse from the sprint. "Hold the top of the ramp. I'm going up."

None of them realized the man had a gun. None of them realized until it was too late.

It was 1974, January 25th, 11:45 p.m. Rorschach could remember it very clearly. The crack of the gunshot followed by a high-pitched scream had turned his blood to ice for the duration of a heartbeat.

He had turned around just in time to see a small shower of blood fall from Narcysia's body as she stood on the edge of the wood-plank ramp behind him. She teetered precariously for an agonizingly long moment, and then lost her balance and fell limply off the plank. She fell two stories and landed with a heart-wrenching crack onto the unpolished construction floorboards below. A storm of dust exploded around her when she landed, one board cracked, and she didn't move. He watched her for a long moment, and she didn't move.

"Shit!" Nite Owl's voice sounded from the base of the ramp. Meanwhile, above him, the thief pocketed his smoking gun and took off towards the stairs on the other side of the building. He fled into the shadowed construction site, free and unharmed.

Nite Owl quickly leaped from the base of the ramp and kneeled down next to Narcysia's body. She was unconscious. One of her legs was bent at an unnatural angle and he could see blood oozing from the small bullet hole just below her shoulder, on her left collar bone.

"Get her to a hospital," Rorschach's voice called down from the top of the two-story ramp. He took several steps along the edge of the floor, looking down at his teammates as he tucked one hand into his coat pocket.

Nite Owl looked up. "What? Where are you going?"

Rorschach turned and disappeared from view into the second floor. His voice sounded from above. "Have some unfinished business to take care of."

"Damnit," Nite Owl swore under his breath. "God damnit!" He gritted his teeth and scooped Narcysia up from the ground carefully, with pointless attention to being gentle, and carried her back towards the road. A thick smear of blood remained on the wooden floorboard where she had fallen, like a pulpy juice smear where an overripe fruit falls from a tree.

Archie was docked somewhere in the sky overhead. Nite Owl summoned the ship remotely and prayed for the best.

Rorschach strode briskly along the floor of the construction site, tracking the man by the fresh footprints he had left in patches of snow. He made his way quickly through the scattered wooden support beams and metal scrap, like a cat stalking its prey. The thief was close. He couldn't have gotten far.

A long, green metal box that sat on one of the support beams next to him caught his attention as he walked past it. He stopped and opened the box, which creaked as he nudged it open. Inside, he discovered an array of construction tools, from screwdrivers to hammers and nails. He picked through the tools until he found a pair of slightly rusted wire clippers. Pocketing the wire clippers, Rorschach took off into a jog again.

The man had a gun. He wanted to play with toys. Rorschach could play with toys, too.

The tracks stopped at the doorway of the next building over, an abandoned warehouse. The man was crouched in the shadows, chewing his lip anxiously and trying to soften his breathing as he fumbled with his pistol.

A soft creak near the door made the man immediately point his gun into the shadows. "Who's there?" the man demanded, voice weak and shaking. "Back off. Back off! I'll shoot. For Christ's sake, I'll shoot your damn head off!"

Rorschach had already slipped through the door, concealed by empty warehouse shelves. He snuck up behind the man quietly, and like a snake slashing out from a shadowy perch, suddenly the gun was sent across the floor, clattering over uneven floorboards. Rorschach tackled him and held him against a shelf, holding his throat.

"Oh, God," the man bubbled weakly.

Rorschach punched him once across the jaw, earning a whimper.

Pinning the man against the shelf with his elbow, Rorschach reached for the man's right hand and stretched out his sweaty fingers. Then he curled the man's outstretched fingers forward in such a manner that the tendons on the back of his hand protruded from his skin, pulled taut like guitar strings strung from his knuckles. Then Rorschach reached for the wire clippers.

The man's breathing suddenly became even more ragged. "Jesus, man, you can't do that," he breathed. "Please, I'll – I'll turn myself in! God, just stop, please! Please!"

"Itchy trigger finger," Rorschach growled as he aligned the wire-clippers with the man's index tendon. "Shouldn't be an issue once I'm finished with you."

Snap. Blood spurted from the wound and the man screamed, writhing in pain. Rorschach shoved his elbow harder into the man's shoulder, forcing him to fold into the shelf. He readjusted his grip on the man's hand and held his middle finger into a curl.

Snap. The next tendon broke, falling unstrung from the bones like a broken guitar string.

The screaming man's yells finally slowed, and his head wobbled. Rorschach looked at him and noticed that he'd shut his eyes tightly. "Keep your eyes open," he snarled as he brought the clippers to the man's ring-finger knuckle. Snap. The third tendon quivered in the clipper's metal teeth and a third stream of blood trickled down the man's hand.

When Rorschach finished with the man's right hand, the man's screams had been reduced to a whimper, and he was unable to even hold himself up against the shelf. At some point, Rorschach stopped pinning him and let the man collapse in a heap.

"Hurm," Rorschach huffed contemplatively as he dropped the man's ragged right hand. The man couldn't seem to move it; he just stared at his grotesquely mutilated hand in horror. Rorschach tilted his head. "Could be ambidextrous. Don't want to take any chances."

The man gargled incoherently as Rorschach stepped over him and reached for his left hand. He curled the fingers again, causing the tendons to rise like taut strings under his flesh. The blood-drenched clippers came to the index tendon. Snap.

At some point during the second procedure, the man passed out from the pain. Rorschach continued his work until his left hand looked just like his right: a torn mass of flesh with unstrung tendons hanging loosely from the tattered flesh and bones. He wouldn't be operating any firearms anytime soon.

When he was finished, Rorschach dragged the man into the street and deposited the unconscious body in front of a nearby post office. He placed the wire clippers snugly in the man's right hand.

Rorschach felt good. He felt really good. The man's blood on his gloves was turning dark. His hands smelled like coppertart blood drying on metal, and the night didn't feel so cold anymore.

He felt good until he realized that Nite Owl's ship was nowhere to be found. He watched the sky but there was nothing there except sickly orange clouds. Newspapers fluttered in the breezy streets and the pavement was sticky with city snow; streetlights flickered weakly overhead and suddenly everything around him looked unfamiliar.

It was dark. There was nothing. He was all alone.