Summary: A decade, falling and rising.
Type: Captcha prompt: 'titanic 76-84'
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, Rorschach.

unsinkable

.

It's 1976. Nite Owl convinces himself that he can handle the streets alone, and Dan convinces himself that Rorschach's wandering, drifting withdrawal is his own fault, somehow. Owning it makes it easier to deal with, because if he broke it then he can fix it and if he can fix it then he has a reason to keep trying.

On 57th street, he lays a punk kid out with a punch he can feel, stinging, all the way up to his shoulder. The anger isn't there; has long since been replaced by pity. Duty has ceded to habit and obligation. He's not as young as he used to be, and in this city and this time, disillusionment's easy to come by.

.

It's 1977. Dan stands in front of his bathroom mirror and runs fingertips over the edges of the bruise purpling his eye and cheekbone, making the skin feel taut and foreign. The kitchen is a disaster of torn newspaper and spilled coffee, and stunned silence, he realizes now, is louder and echoes longer than any tirade.

Nite Owl is gone, locked away forever, and this was his best case scenario.

.

It's 1978. Dan passes a man on the street that he swears is familiar in the way the smell of lilacs in the spring brings back whole summers and the way a half-remembered snippet of song can resurrect the dead for thirty seconds at a time. The line of the shoulders, the stance, the pessimism of his prophet's words, something– but then they pass each other by and are each swallowed by different crowds, and Dan loses the melody.

.

It's 1979. The box of newspaper clippings and photographs only comes down from the shelf now and then, in bouts of nostalgia that hit Dan in the lungs like pneumonia. The edges are thumbed off and smooth, and he wonders what monster got its hooks into them that night, had torn them apart and dragged them down to drown like a sea monster or a sinkhole or an iceberg. It'd been something that smelled like ash and rot and old, old regret, that he's sure of.

Nothing is unsinkable; humanity learned that lesson the hard way, and then Dan learned it again even harder, like some idiot on an island who thinks he's invented the wheel.

.

It's 1980. John Lennon's dead and greed is good and the man on the corner stares at him now, long and without shame, the way the insane homeless often do. Dan isn't ignorant to their plight, isn't unsympathetic, but when this one stares it reminds him of the fury of vengeance in motion and it's unnerving, and he wishes the man would either speak to him or go away instead of lingering, maddeningly, in between.

He thinks he might need a break from this place.

.

It's 1981. Dan is in Africa, watching birds. His heart is still in the city, even as he watches the stumbling flight of a juvenile Otus ireneaethrough night-vision field glasses.

He has spent a lot of time, he thinks, watching the untouchable and unobtainable and ultimately incomprehensible. The birds look back at him through the glasses with eyes he can read nothing in, with an alien stare that promises less. They are beautiful and furious and absolute, and he comes no closer to them than this.

.

It's 1982. Rorschach shows up unannounced, clambering up his front steps with a broken arm and a winter's worth of chill rot in his lungs and more age on his cheeks and jawline and in the lines around his mouth than Dan ever thought he'd see. Some idiotic part of him had always figured they were immortal somehow, that their ten years of living in the city's imagination had freed them from concerns like grey hair and brittle bones and an old man's quiet fade from the world.

Another part of him had just decided, resigned, that Rorschach would end up getting himself killed long before age became an issue.

He sets the bone, and in his hands it feels like he's fixing everything, like the pull and give of tendon and muscle and the hard slotting into place can repair years of willful ignorance, like the stoic set of Rorschach's mouth is just bravery in the face of Dan taking them back to a time before everything broke so easily. But Rorschach leaves, and doesn't thank him, and in the mirror that night Dan can only find an older, more tired man than he expects, lurking in the glass.

.

It's 1983. Dan is spring cleaning, and eventually comes to the pantry. There are things in the back that haven't seen the light of day for years. He pretends to not remember why he bought these things he doesn't even like - canned vegetables, canned beans, cheap sugary cereal, instant farina, instant pudding. He still comes up with an excuse (he's tired, been cleaning all day, will leave the pantry for another time) to leave them there, keeping vigil.

.

It's 1984.

Dan has read a lot of books, particularly in the last eight years. He's gotten good at picking out the twist, anticipating the moment everything shifts. A massive change of plot, lifting the characters out of their safe zone and dropping them square into a place that will either teach them who they are or kill them.

Soon, says the wind, as he stands in the winter evening, one hand on his doorframe and the other fingering his key.

Soon, says the itch in the back of his brain, driving him to check the frame around the lock, to sniff the air, to count off days by memory and consider that maybe some things don't end forever, don't sink to the bottom of the sea to never breathe air again. Maybe some things, some habits, some people and places and times, endure.

He looks at the sky, purple and gold in the twilight, run through with bloody ribbons of red, and he thinks it too, quiet:

Soon.

.

(c) ricebol 2010