1. Mary's Magic

At first, it's magic.

Running through the streets, sailing through the air, delivering justice to those who are deserving of punishment. A birdlike knight in shining armor, swift and avenging like a stroke of lightning.

Slowly, he is disillusioned. One too many missed punches, one too many taken to his face, one too many repairs to his suit, one too many cracks in the lenses of his goggles. The escapades lose their ethereal quality, are suddenly all too real and he isn't sure how to deal with it. He trudges on, but it's not the same.

Then, he appears.

Not a knight, or a prince. No, he was more of a beggar-turned-anonymous benefactor, with a shapeless face of black and white. Short, yet towering over everyone.

He sees magic again in the way the vigilante moves, coiled and viscous and leonine and ruthless and somehow, beneath and within every movement, a strange, wild beauty. Magic.

2. Friend or Foe

He's never quite sure what to make of him.

Rorschach is fiercely, unpredictable, a man of more broken fingers than words. He's afraid of him, at first, scared for his life when he says something that sets the shorter man off, like a tightly coiled spring.

Slowly, after a fiercely fought skirmish in an alleyway and a drug chain brought to its knees by the pair, he stops thinking of himself as an accessory to the ruthless vigilante and sees himself as a partner to the other man, a companion to rely on in battle.

He begins to understand the little nods and tilts of the head, the rough grunts and squaring of the shoulders.

Then, Rorschach goes off on one mission alone, and comes back different. More blood and death than he had ever been. He hopes they can get past this, and they almost do. But there's always something missing afterwards, and it's not just words.

When masks are banned, he finally gives in. Their bond has been taxed, and he's tired of being the one to pick up the pieces, to reign Rorschach like a rabid dog on a leash. He thinks if he keeps going, he'll break down instead of break apart like Rorschach did, and in a way it would be worse.

So he hangs up his cape and wishes the others well as they continue their crusade. He wonders when it all became so hopeless.

3. The Stone Table

He feels tired, as he walks out into the snow with Laurie. Dr. Manhattan has already told them that he's fixed the ship, and they're ready to leave, to get away from Veidt and the destruction and wall of screens that all say the same thing. Peace.

Daniel had assumed that Rorschach had gotten back to New York. Maybe he had convinced Manhattan to teleport him there. Maybe he had swam across the ocean, or ridden on a whale. Any of them seemed possible at the moment.

Whatever Dan had been expecting, it was not a splatter of blood, almost completely covered in a fresh layer of snow. It's a stain on the perfectly white landscape, and his eyes are drawn to it.

When he realizes what it is, what it means, he freezes in place, eyes locked to the remnants of a man who'd once been his partner.

He isn't sure what to do. Going back to New York himself seems so silly now. Go home, and keep quiet like a good little boy.

Not like Rorschach, who gave up his life to stay true to his principles. Daniel wishes, wishes and hopes and wants with all his being to be like that, to be sure and confident. Vindictive.

He's alive, and his partner is dead, and he's not sure if he can live with that.

4. Alice in Wonderland

They've just stumbled into a warehouse, trying to find someplace to sit and bandage themselves, or they won't get back to the Nest alive.

Daniel is too light-headed, dizzy and disoriented and he falters, tripping on his own foot onto what feels like a pillow.

Rorschach growls, and Daniel giggles because, well, Rorschach growled. Growled! He's laughing hysterically and some small part of him says this shouldn't be so funny, but it is, just is, and he can't imagine why but can't summon up the will to care.

Everything is just so bright now, vivid and painted with the colors of a thousand rainbows and sparkling lights and when he looks back at his partner's face, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he sees a kaleidoscope of images and a clown here and a pony there and it eventually dawns on him that he's telling his partner all of this. And that's just so funny!

He's laughing again, and his partner's not, is trying to get him to sit up, and he can't imagine why. It seems so unimportant, sitting up.

He tries to convince Rorschach to join him on the pillows, because it's comfortable and soft and smells so good, but his partner keeps growling, and shaking his head and saying words that seem to run together, and Daniel can't stop laughing.

5. Complicated

Rorschach is frustrating.

There's no way around it; when the shorter vigilante refuses to speak in anything other than growls and grunts and one-word, maybe two-word, sentences, Daniel wants to throw down his hood and stomp on it like a petulant child. For all his patience, spending long sleepless nights with a man who smells like a sugary, greasy sewer and refuses to use pronouns just isn't something Daniel can do on a regular basis without letting some steam off somewhere.

For Rorschach, this would probably mean beating up a pimp in some alley and then simmering quietly. For Daniel, fists only go so far; he has to use words to let it out.

He ends up yelling at Rorschach, letting all his anger out on the worst possible person.

When he realizes what he's done, he tries to make amends, hurrying to form apologies and hold up his hands in a pacifying gesture which, if necessary, could also be used to block a left hook.

He's beyond surprised when his partner just "hurm"s, turns around, and keeps walking.

Later, when they get back to the Nest and Rorschach mutters something that sounds like "sorry", Daniel thinks maybe Rorschach did hit him, and he's really lying unconscious in a dark alleyway.

6. Your Honor

There are more than a few occasions when Daniel wakes up in the middle of the night, recovering from an injury, to find Rorschach stumbling into the kitchen with blood dripping down his coat and forming a trail behind him.

He always wonders who Rorschach has been fighting, who could possibly bust the formidable force that was Rorschach up so badly, but Rorschach never answers.

Rorschach comes stumbling in one night while Daniel is recovering from a bullet wound he'd gotten from their attempted takedown of Big Figure, and when he asks Rorschach the shorter man just shrugs.

"Thug," he grunts. "Filth." And that's as much of an answer as Daniel will ever get from his partner.

The sun is almost rising by the time Rorschach leaves through the tunnels, and Daniel knows he won't be able to get back to sleep anyway, so he stays up, settles his uneasy stomach with a cup of coffee.

The headlines in the newspaper that morning tell him what his partner hadn't: Big Figure is the latest scum of the underworld to be brought to jail.

7. Purpose

Daniel has never fit in. He's the geek, the nerd, the dork who sticks out like a sore thumb in school. When he graduates from college, at long last, he has no idea what to do.

He's on his own for the first time, with his father dead, and with a degree in Ornithology there aren't many jobs he can fill.

His father has left him a small fortune, and he has no idea what to do with that, either. It has paid for his college, and now it pays for his house and food and clothes.

But there's so much of it, so much money that he feels like he should use somehow, for some goal or purpose. The nagging feeling eats away at him, and at first he buys lots of gadgets and gizmos and tinkers with those, and slowly gadgets turn into a flying ship named Archie and weapons that feel right in his hands, somehow. He finally knows what to do.

As he grips the controls of his ship years later, steering it high above the streets of New York, with a psychotic partner whose real face he has never seen as his copilot and the scars of hundreds of battles mapped on his body, he has never felt more at home.