Three Men Walter Kovacs Lost
And One He Almost Didn't

When Walter can't sleep (and his mother is in pain), he tries to imagine his father's face. It's more difficult than imagining conversations they might have had, or memories they may have made together. He doesn't think his father was as ugly as him. His ugliness comes from his mother, whose face is always contorted, and Walter doesn't understand why men want to be near her. Why they want to meld their bodies with hers - he wonders if they come away hideous because of her or because of what they've done (he knows his pillow isn't enough but he covers his ears with it regardless).

His father.

There's a butcher who leans against the frame of his shop at evenings and smokes. He taps ash with his forefinger and his hair is bright and his arms are thick. His father probably looks a little like him, but without the bulge of lazy decadence around his middle. His father probably doesn't smoke, either, but if he did it would be with the same care that the butcher has. There are never cigarette butts left scattering his sidewalk. He never talks to Walter, but he touches his forehead and tips his head sometimes, and Walter almost thinks it's a secret signal, still, even after he tried delivering a message back in Morse code under the butcher's door and never received a reply.

(It had simply said: I'm ready when you are. -Walter)

But he's seen the way he looks at his mother, and the way he looks at him. Walter has learned to translate the difference between pity and love. Adults are easy to read. It's just the sequence of their actions that makes no sense. They always contradict themselves.

So his father must look similar to the butcher, but different, too. He's probably tall, and lean. He probably smiles like the soldiers in war posters. And he's probably dead; the war probably killed him and Walter wonders if it was Japs or Germans and figures it was probably Japs, because men important to President Truman went there before they bombed Hiroshima.

Walter thinks his father probably got caught by the enemy when he was undercover. He wonders (as he lays in bed and muffles his mother's voice with his hands hard enough to hurt) if maybe his father's still alive and still hasn't betrayed America's secrets to the Japs, and hasn't given up hope for freedom, and he thinks that maybe some troops will catch wind of the struggling P.O.W. and go looking, and save him, and the first thing he'll do after he gets a Purple Heart will be to find Walter and take him away.

Maybe he's not dead. But if he is, Walter knows he didn't make a single noise (even when the iron of their knives touched down).

-

There is something incredibly soothing about training. Walter won't realize he's tense until he straps on his gloves and lands his first blow to the punching bag, but then everything flows out of him like water draining. Other boys get riled up after a long workout, snapping towels at each other and knocking shoulders and laughing, but Walter feels more at ease than at any other time. He sleeps best the days he trains the hardest, and he would blame it on exhaustion if he didn't know how exhaustion really feels, if he didn't know the pull on his heart and eyes that makes the world foggy.

Simply put, fighting is cathartic.

The first boxing coach Walter has is a hard, stocky man, and it's very easy to imagine the muscles under his wife beaters the way they were in their prime. His name is Harrel Ackers, but he asks that Walter just call him Coach. He has thick hair and a thick mustache and thick eyebrows, and it's all black and unruly. He stands a head taller than Walter but Walter remembers him most clearly at eye-level, neutral and calm and always quiet but firm.

"Don't let him take you out, boy," he says, and Walter hears the praise that isn't spoken and doesn't need to be. His arms burn and nothing else matters because he's a whirlwind and the disappointment Coach will have if he loses is not acceptable.

Everything builds from his stomach up, and Walter learns how to concentrate it and lash until his opponent can't move, until he is empty and he can focus again on the shadows under Coach's eyebrows and the small nod he offers. Just a nod, unless Walter blinds himself and the words reel him back. Coach always knows when he's breaking.

"You know how to make a mess of things," his coach says when he teeters away, and sometimes Walter is afraid that he will put in a request to have Walter transferred to another sport. But every day his coach sits him on a bench and coaxes his hands out of fists and wraps them. He tells him what they're going to do today, and Walter doesn't move until he feels the final press of the last clip.

The other boys don't say anything because words could put him on edge and if he's too far they know it's only Coach who can save them. Only Coach, because Coach understands him and never judges more than his technique.

Walter finds out that Coach died on a Tuesday. It takes until no one stops him from breaking an opponent's cheek two weeks later to accept it as fact.

-

He doesn't have a favorite color. He's not in love, and he's confident that he never has been, because he knows better than to indulge in a sickness of the heart. Sometimes, he thinks, cruelty is simply something to expect and to ignore or forgive. When nights are long and every creak of the tenement housing jars him to focus, he sits by his window and writes by the streetlight.

He learns how to use his ability to take note of everything to his advantage. With a pen he learns how to organize his thoughts and conquer evil, piece by piece. It's relaxing, casting his eyes over pages of data and constructing a coherent story connecting it all.

He's always been good with his hands, but now he has the luxury of putting them to real use. Stitches run neatly up his suit and it always slides on pristine; his face is never damaged. Underneath, his body blooms with the flowers of ruptured vessels and scabs black, but his surface is always composed. His surface becomes the representation of his ideals, and his ideals become his drive. He knows what he is becoming, and he is not afraid.

Yes, his hands know what they're doing. Sometimes, they move as if of their own accord, and one night one rises, and he can hear his mother's voice through his hands, and the streetlights flicker.

He doesn't make a sound, even as the axe touches down.

-

When Daniel Dreiburg reveals his identity, Walter decides not to tell him that he has already seen his face. It was an accident, before he'd learned to enter Nite Owl's home with as much commotion as he can muster, and it had left him nauseous; bringing it up had seemed pointless then, and seems pointless now. He's shy and smiling and blinking blearily at him, and when he fishes glasses out of a carrying case on his belt he is self-conscious. "You can call me Dan, if you want," he says, and his face is flush with adrenaline. "So - hi." He peels off a glove and sticks his hand out.

This changes everything, but when Walter takes his hand he pretends it doesn't and staves away the feeling that he doesn't understand. It's making his entire body feel heavy as lead and coiled in on itself. He doesn't remember to call Daniel by his proper name, and for a long time he misses the way Daniel's face falls when he forgets. After he realizes his mistake, he drills the name into his vocabulary until he begins to forget to refer to him as Nite Owl on patrols. Somewhere, Nite Owl is lost, and there is only a self-conscious man left behind.

Rorschach knows Daniel wants to learn more about Walter, and a part of him wants to let him see. But then he catches his face in glass and his body clenches with his revulsion and he only has his fists for a pain that encompasses and it's not enough. It's not enough.

When he takes his pen to paper he tries to write mundane, but the longer he trusts the man behind Nite Owl the less he trusts the words that come to life. They're like poison, and some nights he dons his mask and stalks through alleyways long after their patrol has ended. He learns his limit for contact and when Daniel forces him to break it, Walter takes it out on his locks and cabinets and refuses to feel regret.

When Daniel retires it cuts even though that is exactly what he expects, and for the first time in his life he can't stand being right. He is silent, silent, silent, and one day breaks and he just can't stop screaming until it's all poured out and he thinks he's healed. (Years later he still dreams hazy fights and Daniel's glasses crystal clear in the kitchen light and the heavy heat of his palms gliding over Walter's wrapped hands and the slice of his cabinet on his lower back.)

He wakes on fire and seethes.

In the tundra, he knows how things will end, because Daniel is pliant and only has a shallow stake in the face Rorschach has shown him. When he leaves he does not look back and his ears echo with emptiness; for the first time in his life, he wants sound shattering his daze to pieces.

But when he steps outside, he is alone.