Disclaimer - Jon would say that owning something is an unquantifiable abstract, so, really, it doesn't matter whether or not I say I 'own' Watchmen, because nothing can be owned or disowned in the grand scheme of things.

…but I'm not Jon, so I'll say I don't own them for the record. I also don't own "Hallelujah", as much as I would love to. I do have three versions of it in my iTunes, though…

Rating - M for sexuality.

A/N- Well, after a day of contemplation, here I am - sitting at my desk for something which is doubly a first: my first Watchmen fic and my first rated M fic. Here goes nothing, I guess! I had to write this because a) there simply isn't enough of the good doctor around these parts b) we all know that we were staring down there whenever he was onscreen c) because discussing his attitudes towards sex was just too much fun not to put it down in a story.

This straddles both comicverse and movieverse - I borrow lines somewhat directly from both and make reference to one movieverse sex scene between Dan and Laurie and one comicverse sex scene. I was just trying to have the best of both worlds, I suppose.

For Darling and Xtina, my fellow Watchmen devotees. Especially to Darling for saying he didn't want to meet Dr. Manhattan because he'd make him feel small, and never realizing what a Freudian slip he'd just made.

Unquantifiable Abstracts

It is 1929. He has been born. He is male. Everyone seems very pleased at this coincidental genetic occurrence. Later, he will wonder how everything would've been different if he was female. It had been just as possible once. In thirty years, he will die.

It is 1939. His father is shifting nervously before him, trying to explain in strained German-English where babies come from. He finds it strange now that so many parents find it so difficult to simply explain it. A man becomes aroused and inserts his penis into the woman's vagina. He pushes it in and out of her until he reaches orgasm and releases his semen into her. This is how he would tell his children. He has none. Instead, he listens to his father admonishing him that sex is for the marriage bed only, for creating children only. He makes it sound sacred, heavy, hollow. Jon - because he is still Jon then - is intimidated.

It is 1945. The cogs have not been scattered yet, and there is still a chance that he may become a watchmaker. As much of a chance as of him being born female. He is going on his first date with a girl from his high school. She is very pretty, and he is very nervous. He drops his car keys twice when he goes to pick her up and take her to the drive-through movie. He doesn't dare to touch her until the movie becomes frightening, and when he drapes his arm over her shoulder he feels as if he's conquered the world. This is a false feeling - this will not happen for another fourteen years.

Not long after he puts his arm on her shoulder, she pulls it further down, so that his hand rests on her small breast, and smiles shyly up at him, as if asking whether or not this is what he wants. He's hard in instants, and pulls away suddenly out of shock at the feeling. They drive home in silence. He does not speak to her again. He finds it strange that he was ever so intimidated by women, for now he knows that the external differences are insignificant anomalies in the grand scheme of the human genome. There is little difference between a man's skeleton and a woman's, once death has come for them. Once he has realized this, he is no longer intimidated - only confused, that when the clock is rewound and flesh returns to the bones and they move and breathe and laugh, they are so different from their male counterparts. This is illogical to him.

It is 1949. Ten years until the accident. He is at Princeton, and he has discovered the latest centerfold sitting carelessly on his roommate's desk. Minutes later he is lying on his narrow bed with his pants around his knees and his hand pumping up and down over his length feverishly, the centerfold clutched in the other hand. He wants this to be over as quickly as possible, wants the burning need within him to evaporate, but when he finally comes with a choked gasp, he feels more empty than he did before. Now, he could make this happen to himself spontaneously, whenever he wants. It serves even less point than before.

It is 1951. He is graduating early from Princeton. He is still a virgin - something he tells no one. He doesn't want them to think he's homosexual. He himself has wondered if he is - but he knows that while he might notice an attractive male, it is only for beautiful women that his throat gets tight and his skin clammy. That night, he becomes very drunk. The memories are strange, blurred, surreal, to wade through, even thirty-four years later. He approaches a girl - he wonders if she's this pretty without so many shots in his system - and asks her if she'll sleep with him. She says yes.

It is brief, messy, and little more satisfying than his failed experiment with the pin-up two years before. He doesn't see her again. For a long while he feels guilty about this, wonders if his father would be ashamed of him.

It is 1959, and he is in love. It doesn't take the ability to see the future to know where their trip back to his hotel room will end - although a month from now the future will unfold before him in all of its terrible beauty. He has never felt the present more acutely than when Janey stands before him, her head tipped back, her eyes wide with innocence, than when he leans down and presses his lips softly to hers. He thinks that he will never want to kiss another woman. He is wrong.

They are good for each other, as people say, whatever that means. They play footsie under the table in the lunchroom and go to the movies every Friday. They grow more adventurous in bed together - he makes her scream for the first time when he makes her come with his mouth and he thinks again that he's conquered the world. He tells her he loves her every day, twice a day. He grins like a fool when he's standing at chalkboards and thinks more of her smile than of the formulas he's copying out.

It is still 1959, and the woman he loves is walking away from him as he comes unglued at the seams, skin dissolving, organs vanishing, bones crumbling. But something essential - scientists call it an intrinsic field, psychologists consciousness, priests a soul - remains. This does not stop him, or anyone else, from thinking that he is dead. For two weeks, he believes this, believes that this is heaven, and that heaven is a kaleidoscope, a microscope, a telescope. He sees the whole spectrum of light without eyes, hears the tiny joyful buzz of electrons without ears, smells chemicals combining without a nose. But he cannot feel.

This is when he realizes he's not in heaven.

He rebuilds himself one piece at a time, from the anatomy textbook in his mind, and it is through this that he realizes he can see every detail of his past. He sees the first glimpses of his future, too. At first, he doesn't know that the blue glow playing across the faces of presidents is his. Then he sees in a mirror in 1960 what he has become. He will never know whether he made himself the way he was because of what he saw, or if he only saw what he had already made.

When he has rebuilt himself, he has accounted for every aspect of every system, including his reproductive system - every gland, every tissue, every blood vessel. This is because he still cherishes illusions of being human, of marrying Janey, of having children with her. He is wrong again.

It is 1963. Janey is sitting naked on the bed beside him. She glances contemptuously at his penis and asks why he even bothered to remake it in the first place if he didn't seem to understand what it's for anymore. He sleeps with her to prove her wrong, but seems to fail. You don't know how to make love anymore, she tells him, and he wants to try again, thinking of the variables he can adjust to get closer to this lovemaking she seems to desire. She tells him no. She's never done this before. The next day she asks him if he wants to stop bothering with sex after all, if it means so little to him. He tells her no, and this is not a lie. He still enjoys it, and though the enjoyment decreases every day the science of it remains, and this still fascinates him. And he knows it makes her happy.

He begins to spend more time in the future and the past alike. It is 1960 and he is standing before the mirror marveling himself, his fingers against his cheek to reassure himself that he's real. In 1959 he's cradling Janey's face - in 1985, he's cradling Laurie's. And although in each memory the same touch receptors are stimulated, each touch is different, and he can't fathom why. This puzzles him - irks him.

It is 1985. He tells Laurie that he doesn't know what stimulates her anymore - she says he knows how everything in this world fits together but people. But he does know. He knows just what angle to lift her hips to, how quickly to slide in, just when to reach out and stroke her clitoris. But he also knows that this isn't what she means. But it is meaning that escapes him, not neutrinos or reactors or the time-space continuum, meaning that was lost that day in the chamber. So he calls it an unquantifiable abstract and so dismisses it as an unworthy pursuit. In 1961 when he makes love to Janey he doesn't focus on her hands on his shoulders or the look in her eyes or the way she says his name, but on the precise changes in her internal temperature that indicate her impending orgasm, and the thermal patterns they make on her skin.

It is 1966. He sees shifting black and white patterns on a black and white mask. They remind him of Janey's body in ecstasy. It has been over a month since they slept together, 35 days of cool sheets and cooler words. He doesn't miss it. She doesn't either, he suspects. It is when he first sleeps with Laurie that he remembers why he used to enjoy it, enjoys it so much that it shocks him out of pastpresentfuture and traps him in the moment. He is startled by this. She finds it endearing. He knows already that he will lose her but loves her all the same, because he wants to understand why making love to her is so much different than making love to Janey, when the molecular reactions are essentially the same.

It is 1964. He has just finished making love to Janey and he is still deep inside of her when she asks him if they could have a baby. He asks her if her question is a matter of probability or desire. She pulls away from him, leaving him exposed to the cold air, and tells him to forget it. He feels a sense of loss now that she is gone and follows her. She cries into his chest for children they will never have and this seems to make everything better. He is happy to see her smile again.

It is Christmas, 1959. Janey has just given him a gold band, and he accepts it, and knows they will never be married. He tells her he will always want her, and she licks her lips and says she wants him right now. She's never spoken so boldly before, and he has not touched her, really touched her, since the accident. So, in one swift motion of his hand he undoes all her clothes, and she gasps to see them disappear but by then he's naked too and kissing her and she makes muffled noises that are not the same as the ones she's making in July 1959.

For a moment he's there again and he groans her name as her hand closes around him, and his mind is reeling because in 1966 he's already kissing Laurie Juspeczyk and four months ago he's already inside Janey for the first time and the whimper that escapes her is the most perfect sound he's ever heard and now, whatever now is, her fingers are brushing the tip of him. He takes her quickly, like he knew he would. Afterwards he is too intent on studying the electricity in the Christmas lights to think about what he says when she asks if it was good. He says no - and what he means is that it still is good, even now he is still in the past and feeling her sleek heat around him, and she doesn't let him say that. She's already gone.

It is 1966. Laurie asks him the same question. He tells her yes. He knows the right answers now.

It is 1985 when the right answers stop working. He tells her that if there's a problem with his attitude he's prepared to discuss it. She doesn't want to. He doesn't understand why the right answers have stopped being right. He hears a song on the radio later and it makes him think of her: "There was a time you let me know/What's real and going on below/But now you never show it to me, do you?" He does not know that mere weeks later she will make love to Dan Dreiburg with this song playing in the background. There are things he doesn't know. He tells himself that he accepts this as he stands on his red planet and makes a clockwork world of glass. He tells himself he is not angry when Laurie admits that she slept with Dan, even though he already told her that she would. He tells himself that sex is meaningless, not sacred, as his father is telling him in 1939. He is above it. It is nothing more animals in heat rutting together, seeking an impermanent release from - from what? What does it release them from?

Then Laurie tells him - rather, he tells her what she doesn't have the courage to say aloud. The Comedian is her father. Then, even as the whirring cogs of his father's watches fit together in 1935, the whirring cogs of human emotion tumble into place within him. They are not as precise, they stop and stutter and start again for no reason at all, rotate clockwise one moment and counterclockwise the next. But as he thinks of Sally Jupiter and Edward Blake and their daughter standing before him, and remembers how many times Laurie forgave him for his negligence through her body, how many times she made him forget pastpresentfuture with one quirk of her muscles, how many times Janey looked up at him and smiled and said she loved him, how his father placed sex on level with the divine, he understands.

It is 1985, and he understands. What is sacred, what endures, is what cannot be quantified. It is not the tightly bound orbits of electrons around a nucleus, but the choice of one human being to love another, that shapes destinies.

It is 1985, and he looks down on Dan and Laurie as they hold each other in the aftermath of Armageddon, and wishes that just once more he could be the one she cradled. But the truth is, she is still holding him - always will be holding him - even as he holds Janey - even as he is alone. Because nothing ends. Nothing ever ends.

It is 1985, and he has been born again.

~ * * * ~

A/N - Well, there it is! Writing from Dr. Manhattan's point of view was certainly quite a trip - I actually wrote most of this completely out of order and assembled it later. Apropos, don't you think? I certainly enjoyed it and I hope you did too. Let me know if that's the case!