[fic] Watchmen; Resistance; Dan/Laurie/Ror
Title: Resistance
Fandom: Watchmen
Pairing/Characters: Very light Dan/Laurie/Rorschach. Dan-centric.
Rating/Warnings: No porn, but potentially disturbing descriptions of the NY destruction.
Summary: Post-squid. Written for this prompt: After having to give up their pasts, Dan tries to reconnect to it through religion--he wants to celebrate Hanukkah.
One month. He finds it impossible to believe, but the date is there. It's staring up at him through the grimy window of a little newspaper vending machine: December 2, 1985.
How awful, he thinks, for it to have a one-month anniversary.
Drab, unassuming Sam Hollis stands with one fist clenching against his thigh as if he is a different person entirely than a meek car repairman who arrived in town two weeks ago with his wife and friend of the family.
How terrible to think that it'll have a one-year anniversary, that people will gather together with flags and ceremony and give TV interviews while anchors look appropriately serious. That it will have a five-year anniversary with Adrian Veidt himself leading fundraising efforts for the rebuilding process and the memorial statuary. Ten years, twenty years and fading from living memory. How insulting. How degrading-
Gravel crunches under tires behind him, a car parking at the little diner where Sandra works, the one Sam walks her to every morning. His mind snaps safely shut at the sound, his body already turning to deliver an automatic wave and smile. These things matter in small towns: loyalty runs heavy toward people who can act kind and blend in. They'll need all the help they can get.
His rage has been shut off like a water faucet, abrupt and complete. Looking down again at the newspaper again, he feels nothing but the coins in his hand, remembers nothing but the fact that Walter always wants his newspaper and will be waiting with what would faintly approach eagerness in another person. Those thoughts he was just having belong to someone else.
The rusty door clangs shut behind him as he turns to walk home through December winds.
//
Sam only halfway remembers the first two weeks, and usually makes it a point not to. Sometimes he can't help it.
On the first three days, there had been endless sirens: police, ambulance, fire rescue, emergency. ("The dead wail," Walter had muttered, the last full sentence he would speak for a long time.) On the fourth day, someone apparently decided there was no point to sirens if they were the norm rather than the exception, and a horrible silence settled instead.
What no one anticipated was the fog, thick every morning to the point of white blindness and halting most transportation. Days after the last fires had been contained and the sky looked normal again, morning humidity condensed around the remaining smoke in the air, blanketing the city with a stinging stench that seemed to work its way into everything. Walking through the fog made them look and feel like ghosts at the end of the world.
Rescue efforts mercifully drained their minds. He and Sandra worked in tandem to distribute supplies, work through never-ending heaps of rubble and grime, and hack apart the rotting creature at the heart of everything. They never strayed more than five feet from each other as if by losing sight they would be lost themselves and would break whatever gift of luck it was that had kept them alive so far.
Walter was the opposite; he ranged far from where they worked as if the sight of them was too much. He followed his old memory-worn patrol tracks by the light of day, gone before they woke up and back to them again after they slipped into boneless, exhausted sleep. Sam would never have known he was still with them at all if it wasn't for the nightmares that woke them all up, gasping for breath and looking at each other's faces in the dim light. Walter stunk of worse than sewers and garbage now, carrying on his tradition of wallowing in the worst horrors of New York by recovering the dead: a grim guardian to the end.
When Sam and Sandra came back one night to find their temporary living space unlocked-not kicked in, not robbed, just unlocked with the door left a deliberate inch open-they understood both the meaning and the message. Accept the intrusion of privacy, or leave. Thanks for the help, but leave. They had to admit to each other, crouching on their mattress with their faces close together, that the main rescue efforts were drawing to a close. Even the National Guard was beginning to withdraw. Nothing left to do but let the city heal its own grisly wound.
Sam had seen new graffiti that morning, painted over by the time they took their lunch break. One in three go mad.
They left.
//
They can't help but call him Walter now even though they've become Sam and Sandra and he has his own fake new identity just like them. His coarse hair wouldn't take dye very well, only dulled to a dark orange he keeps shoved under one hat or another any time he has to venture outside. He isn't mentally capable of holding down a job, something Sam suspects has been happening for much longer than just a month. He's become nearly catatonic in behavior and weirdly obedient, and what little Sam catches of his scrawled writing looks like jumbled, senseless poetry.
Sandra is the backbone of them all, snapping into a role of responsibility that was never allowed or expected of her before in her life. Living arrangements are procured. Their money is handled in such a way that there is always food on the table. They all sleep, two of them work. She miraculously gets Walter to bathe. There's something different about her that he can't pinpoint, maybe in the way she holds herself. Her quick and seamless return to normalcy frightens, encourages, and bewitches him into doing the same.
As for Sam, he feels as blank as Walter looks these days. It's easy to be no one. It's better to forget that there is a man thousands of miles away holding their blame and anger hostage with one simple truth: "you, too, are accomplices through your silence."
//
Walter reads the paper methodically, all the way from front to back, then folds it neatly and looks at nothing. Sam goes to his shift and won't remember anything he did by the time he's home. Sandra massages her sore feet and talks about when it might be safe to move again. It would be good to be in California by Christmas, she says. Sam feels vaguely surprised that Christmas is still happening this year, as if they hadn't seen makeshift churches springing up before their eyes back amongst all the fog.
//
While shaving at the mirror, Sam suddenly realizes he can't recognize himself. It shouldn't be a surprise. He's looked in the mirror dozens of times, every single day, never clutched the sink and leaned forward like this with a comical half-beard of shaving cream dripping off his face.
He's lost a lot of weight. His hair's an unflattering but unrecognizable shade of blond. There are lines on his face he doesn't remember. Or maybe lines that should be there aren't.
He and Sandra have not made love since before all of this, not through any diminishment of feeling but because sex seems so unimportant and distant, and somehow a betrayal of Walter sleeping fitfully across the room. Suddenly he wants to again, and even the shame and disappointment that comes from awful sex would mean feeling something under his skin again as opposed to all this nothingness. (Is this how Jon always feels? Does he just blink impassively at the thought of millions dead the same way he blinked at Walter screaming at him in the snow? Would it feel better to be like him after all? Should he have screamed too?)
This man he is has no past. Fake driver's license, fake birth certificate, fake marriage license for a wife who didn't exist before November, sharing a hotel room with a man who hasn't existed since '75. Sam Hollis has no family, no enemies, no childhood memories, no inside jokes, no nicknames, no hometown, no religion.
He scrapes blunt fingernails down across his chest and belly, pain welling up behind his fingers and red marks rising up after that until the look of them embarrasses him. He finishes shaving, pulls on a sweater, and turns away.
//
Sometimes Sam feels like everyone knows somehow, like they're carrying the same dark secret of sacrifice as he is. They're so eager to pull joy and love and Peace on Earth from the aftermath of this, as if letting it be a complete loss is too much to contemplate. There's a story on the news about a boy and his dog being found miraculously alive in New York after all this time and reunited with his mother. The marathon of reporting has gone on for days now, smiling family and happy dog footage in endless repeating loops. Sam can't pinpoint why his stomach is doing queasy flops until Walter takes one bland look at the screen and says, "Today's opium."
Sandra nettles Walter for it even after he rolls over because that's what she does, just to see his back stiffen in a way Jon's never would have, because somewhere down underneath his terrifying imperiousness he's still human. Maybe they all still are.
Sam's already outside. Snow whirls into his face and he didn't even realize it was snowing at all but here it is, falling in quiet waves to whirl into the yellow gaze of security lights. Why should something be so beautiful, why now? It settles on his outstretched hands as though nothing has ever happened in the world but snow, and he watches it melt on his palms. There's a glow past the jagged outline of trees: the sunset throwing light onto the undersides of thick clouds.
He doesn't know why he remembers it right then but he does; Hanukkah starts in three days.
It seems, somehow, like even more of an alien concept than Christmas. A foreign thought belonging to a foreign life, like the time he stopped in the middle of lifting a concrete slab to wonder if his electric bill was late before remembering that Sam Hollis doesn't even have an electric bill. Or a house.
Ever since he reached adulthood he's been sliding a little further away from tradition each year, with no one to remind and prod him into it. Something like a relieved guilt used to come over him every year he forgot about Hanukkah completely.
He'd always considered it his father's religion, and maybe that explains why he always felt that it was about as bulky and forced and ill-suited to him as a wool sweater. But in that moment what comes to him is not the memory of his father making him recite verse, or chocolate gelt, or his aunt's cooking; it's the older memory of his mother's round face by candlelight. This is what comes to him, despite all the other people he's lost, despite the people he hasn't lost. It hits him so powerfully he leans back against the door of an anonymous hotel suite meant for anonymous people and wonders if he's about to weep.
That night, Sandra doesn't ask why he's been outside for so long, and only rubs slow circles against his back.
//
He doesn't see the commercial until the next day, when he and Sandra are seated on the edge of their bed spooning soup into their mouths. It has inspiring, bombastic trumpet music vaguely reminiscent of a military march, but much more cultured. A young, female voice croons, "This is the time. These are the feelings. Millennium." A tall, broad-shouldered blond man grasps a slender blonde woman as they sprint toward an oasis in perfect Aryan strides. The hair is standing up at the back of his neck even before the logo shows.
Oh. Oh, fuck. Oh goddamnit, no, he's either making fun of them or including them in this sick plan, and in the past he would have considered himself paranoid and egotistical for even considering the thought but that was before the massacre and before his door was left an inch open. He's shoving it all in their faces, these perfect blond people with no flaws and no thoughts and no pasts, who cease to exist at the end of the commercial and serve one purpose only.
It's Walter he looks at then, and Walter who looks back with unreadable, dark eyes.
//
It occurs to him that there's no one he can really talk to about this. He doesn't know if Sandra ever had a religion, or even wants to have one now. They've seen enough between them that he wouldn't be able to blame her for refusing to think about it at all. Walter once had religion, a faith he carefully revealed and competently defended in their many theological discussions. Judging by Rorschach's stark swing into nihilism after '75, his belief apparently had been shattered by the case that later proved to have shattered his mind along with it. There were no further indications that he'd ever budged in opinion after that.
Sam's not even sure himself why it's so important to him. His own belief was something that quietly faltered until he barely remembered what it felt like at all. It's hard to even get his head around the past month, much less begin to think of what this means for his worldview. But suddenly, letting another Hanukkah go by unnoticed seems like a grave insult to himself and his religion-he has a religion, maybe it's battered and tarnished but it's his-and he finds himself scouring the town's grocery store after his shift ends. It wasn't like he expected to find a menorah sitting there waiting for him, but it's a little disheartening nonetheless when there's only a halfhearted aisle filled with Christmas lights and dusty boxes of ornaments. The only candles he can find are decorative room candles, the only cheese they have is a wedge of sharp cheddar, and he has to put back the potatoes when he remembers that he doesn't even know how to cook latkes by himself. But he buys the candles anyway with the regular groceries and doesn't catch the cashier's questioning eye.
"Um," he says while Sandra gets Walter to put away the groceries, "I think I want to celebrate Hanukkah."
It feels stupid the moment he says it, one likely agnostic and one definite atheist swiveling around in dual surprise to look at him. He doesn't even know what he's doing with this and they're about to inform him as to just how misguided it is to think he can reclaim anything about his life with some clumsy half-remembered ritual. Shifting his feet in their tiny kitchenette, he feels pretty much like a kid again, about to be berated for over-eagerness.
Instead, Sandra and Walter just trade a look-wait a minute, how long have they been doing that, looking at each other as if they both have him figured out?-and Sandra smiles.
"That sounds great, Dan." She doesn't even notice the slip, but he does, and he never thought that hearing his own name would sound so good.
"Get started soon," Walter murmurs as he rustles through the last bag and throws a meaningful glance at the fading evening light.
Sandra's already climbing up to scoop the batteries out of the smoke detector and Walter's already solemnly lining up the candles in a mismatched but regimentally even row on their tiny, rickety table before Dan realizes they're doing this with him. It's probably wrong on some kind of cosmic level to let them help with this, but this is already completely imperfect anyway, and flawed, and his, and they're the only people he has.
"Is this the one with," Sandra twirls her hand as she and Walter sit down on either side of him, obviously searching for the right word. "You know. Matzoh?"
There are certain aftereffects to living a secluded life with a guy who doesn't even qualify for human anymore, but the fact that she's at least trying to dredge up knowledge of Jewish culture makes him smile so genuinely it even surprises him. "Not exactly."
Walter stiffly hands her the designated shamash candle, not even bothering to pretend that she doesn't have a lighter. "Laurel."
"All right. Let's see." She's serious and endearingly careful as she clicks on her lighter, like it's at all possible to ruin a religious ceremony held in a hotel room. It's a small crack in her confident armor and he adores her for it.
Laurie passes the candle back to Dan and he tips it to the first candle by Walter, as if he's done this every year without fail. The flame catches, bright and defiant and perfect even though it's housed in a glass container with a cheap blue ribbon. He mentally scrabbles for the blessing but it's gone from his memory. Walter recites the first line for him before his own memory gives out, his voice gravelly and eyes trained on the wavering flame: a light which will not be quieted.
He has no prayer. He has religion, and memory, and a past, and a line of ancestors who survived and overcame, and he has flaws, a name, a woman with her hand resting on his thigh and a man who lets their knees touch. All he has is a profound and humbled gratefulness for these two people who have been beside him through the worst of the world. He offers it up to whatever may be listening; then he leans back, closes his eyes, and lets the light fall against his face.
Fandom: Watchmen
Pairing/Characters: Very light Dan/Laurie/Rorschach. Dan-centric.
Rating/Warnings: No porn, but potentially disturbing descriptions of the NY destruction.
Summary: Post-squid. Written for this prompt: After having to give up their pasts, Dan tries to reconnect to it through religion--he wants to celebrate Hanukkah.
One month. He finds it impossible to believe, but the date is there. It's staring up at him through the grimy window of a little newspaper vending machine: December 2, 1985.
How awful, he thinks, for it to have a one-month anniversary.
Drab, unassuming Sam Hollis stands with one fist clenching against his thigh as if he is a different person entirely than a meek car repairman who arrived in town two weeks ago with his wife and friend of the family.
How terrible to think that it'll have a one-year anniversary, that people will gather together with flags and ceremony and give TV interviews while anchors look appropriately serious. That it will have a five-year anniversary with Adrian Veidt himself leading fundraising efforts for the rebuilding process and the memorial statuary. Ten years, twenty years and fading from living memory. How insulting. How degrading-
Gravel crunches under tires behind him, a car parking at the little diner where Sandra works, the one Sam walks her to every morning. His mind snaps safely shut at the sound, his body already turning to deliver an automatic wave and smile. These things matter in small towns: loyalty runs heavy toward people who can act kind and blend in. They'll need all the help they can get.
His rage has been shut off like a water faucet, abrupt and complete. Looking down again at the newspaper again, he feels nothing but the coins in his hand, remembers nothing but the fact that Walter always wants his newspaper and will be waiting with what would faintly approach eagerness in another person. Those thoughts he was just having belong to someone else.
The rusty door clangs shut behind him as he turns to walk home through December winds.
//
Sam only halfway remembers the first two weeks, and usually makes it a point not to. Sometimes he can't help it.
On the first three days, there had been endless sirens: police, ambulance, fire rescue, emergency. ("The dead wail," Walter had muttered, the last full sentence he would speak for a long time.) On the fourth day, someone apparently decided there was no point to sirens if they were the norm rather than the exception, and a horrible silence settled instead.
What no one anticipated was the fog, thick every morning to the point of white blindness and halting most transportation. Days after the last fires had been contained and the sky looked normal again, morning humidity condensed around the remaining smoke in the air, blanketing the city with a stinging stench that seemed to work its way into everything. Walking through the fog made them look and feel like ghosts at the end of the world.
Rescue efforts mercifully drained their minds. He and Sandra worked in tandem to distribute supplies, work through never-ending heaps of rubble and grime, and hack apart the rotting creature at the heart of everything. They never strayed more than five feet from each other as if by losing sight they would be lost themselves and would break whatever gift of luck it was that had kept them alive so far.
Walter was the opposite; he ranged far from where they worked as if the sight of them was too much. He followed his old memory-worn patrol tracks by the light of day, gone before they woke up and back to them again after they slipped into boneless, exhausted sleep. Sam would never have known he was still with them at all if it wasn't for the nightmares that woke them all up, gasping for breath and looking at each other's faces in the dim light. Walter stunk of worse than sewers and garbage now, carrying on his tradition of wallowing in the worst horrors of New York by recovering the dead: a grim guardian to the end.
When Sam and Sandra came back one night to find their temporary living space unlocked-not kicked in, not robbed, just unlocked with the door left a deliberate inch open-they understood both the meaning and the message. Accept the intrusion of privacy, or leave. Thanks for the help, but leave. They had to admit to each other, crouching on their mattress with their faces close together, that the main rescue efforts were drawing to a close. Even the National Guard was beginning to withdraw. Nothing left to do but let the city heal its own grisly wound.
Sam had seen new graffiti that morning, painted over by the time they took their lunch break. One in three go mad.
They left.
//
They can't help but call him Walter now even though they've become Sam and Sandra and he has his own fake new identity just like them. His coarse hair wouldn't take dye very well, only dulled to a dark orange he keeps shoved under one hat or another any time he has to venture outside. He isn't mentally capable of holding down a job, something Sam suspects has been happening for much longer than just a month. He's become nearly catatonic in behavior and weirdly obedient, and what little Sam catches of his scrawled writing looks like jumbled, senseless poetry.
Sandra is the backbone of them all, snapping into a role of responsibility that was never allowed or expected of her before in her life. Living arrangements are procured. Their money is handled in such a way that there is always food on the table. They all sleep, two of them work. She miraculously gets Walter to bathe. There's something different about her that he can't pinpoint, maybe in the way she holds herself. Her quick and seamless return to normalcy frightens, encourages, and bewitches him into doing the same.
As for Sam, he feels as blank as Walter looks these days. It's easy to be no one. It's better to forget that there is a man thousands of miles away holding their blame and anger hostage with one simple truth: "you, too, are accomplices through your silence."
//
Walter reads the paper methodically, all the way from front to back, then folds it neatly and looks at nothing. Sam goes to his shift and won't remember anything he did by the time he's home. Sandra massages her sore feet and talks about when it might be safe to move again. It would be good to be in California by Christmas, she says. Sam feels vaguely surprised that Christmas is still happening this year, as if they hadn't seen makeshift churches springing up before their eyes back amongst all the fog.
//
While shaving at the mirror, Sam suddenly realizes he can't recognize himself. It shouldn't be a surprise. He's looked in the mirror dozens of times, every single day, never clutched the sink and leaned forward like this with a comical half-beard of shaving cream dripping off his face.
He's lost a lot of weight. His hair's an unflattering but unrecognizable shade of blond. There are lines on his face he doesn't remember. Or maybe lines that should be there aren't.
He and Sandra have not made love since before all of this, not through any diminishment of feeling but because sex seems so unimportant and distant, and somehow a betrayal of Walter sleeping fitfully across the room. Suddenly he wants to again, and even the shame and disappointment that comes from awful sex would mean feeling something under his skin again as opposed to all this nothingness. (Is this how Jon always feels? Does he just blink impassively at the thought of millions dead the same way he blinked at Walter screaming at him in the snow? Would it feel better to be like him after all? Should he have screamed too?)
This man he is has no past. Fake driver's license, fake birth certificate, fake marriage license for a wife who didn't exist before November, sharing a hotel room with a man who hasn't existed since '75. Sam Hollis has no family, no enemies, no childhood memories, no inside jokes, no nicknames, no hometown, no religion.
He scrapes blunt fingernails down across his chest and belly, pain welling up behind his fingers and red marks rising up after that until the look of them embarrasses him. He finishes shaving, pulls on a sweater, and turns away.
//
Sometimes Sam feels like everyone knows somehow, like they're carrying the same dark secret of sacrifice as he is. They're so eager to pull joy and love and Peace on Earth from the aftermath of this, as if letting it be a complete loss is too much to contemplate. There's a story on the news about a boy and his dog being found miraculously alive in New York after all this time and reunited with his mother. The marathon of reporting has gone on for days now, smiling family and happy dog footage in endless repeating loops. Sam can't pinpoint why his stomach is doing queasy flops until Walter takes one bland look at the screen and says, "Today's opium."
Sandra nettles Walter for it even after he rolls over because that's what she does, just to see his back stiffen in a way Jon's never would have, because somewhere down underneath his terrifying imperiousness he's still human. Maybe they all still are.
Sam's already outside. Snow whirls into his face and he didn't even realize it was snowing at all but here it is, falling in quiet waves to whirl into the yellow gaze of security lights. Why should something be so beautiful, why now? It settles on his outstretched hands as though nothing has ever happened in the world but snow, and he watches it melt on his palms. There's a glow past the jagged outline of trees: the sunset throwing light onto the undersides of thick clouds.
He doesn't know why he remembers it right then but he does; Hanukkah starts in three days.
It seems, somehow, like even more of an alien concept than Christmas. A foreign thought belonging to a foreign life, like the time he stopped in the middle of lifting a concrete slab to wonder if his electric bill was late before remembering that Sam Hollis doesn't even have an electric bill. Or a house.
Ever since he reached adulthood he's been sliding a little further away from tradition each year, with no one to remind and prod him into it. Something like a relieved guilt used to come over him every year he forgot about Hanukkah completely.
He'd always considered it his father's religion, and maybe that explains why he always felt that it was about as bulky and forced and ill-suited to him as a wool sweater. But in that moment what comes to him is not the memory of his father making him recite verse, or chocolate gelt, or his aunt's cooking; it's the older memory of his mother's round face by candlelight. This is what comes to him, despite all the other people he's lost, despite the people he hasn't lost. It hits him so powerfully he leans back against the door of an anonymous hotel suite meant for anonymous people and wonders if he's about to weep.
That night, Sandra doesn't ask why he's been outside for so long, and only rubs slow circles against his back.
//
He doesn't see the commercial until the next day, when he and Sandra are seated on the edge of their bed spooning soup into their mouths. It has inspiring, bombastic trumpet music vaguely reminiscent of a military march, but much more cultured. A young, female voice croons, "This is the time. These are the feelings. Millennium." A tall, broad-shouldered blond man grasps a slender blonde woman as they sprint toward an oasis in perfect Aryan strides. The hair is standing up at the back of his neck even before the logo shows.
Oh. Oh, fuck. Oh goddamnit, no, he's either making fun of them or including them in this sick plan, and in the past he would have considered himself paranoid and egotistical for even considering the thought but that was before the massacre and before his door was left an inch open. He's shoving it all in their faces, these perfect blond people with no flaws and no thoughts and no pasts, who cease to exist at the end of the commercial and serve one purpose only.
It's Walter he looks at then, and Walter who looks back with unreadable, dark eyes.
//
It occurs to him that there's no one he can really talk to about this. He doesn't know if Sandra ever had a religion, or even wants to have one now. They've seen enough between them that he wouldn't be able to blame her for refusing to think about it at all. Walter once had religion, a faith he carefully revealed and competently defended in their many theological discussions. Judging by Rorschach's stark swing into nihilism after '75, his belief apparently had been shattered by the case that later proved to have shattered his mind along with it. There were no further indications that he'd ever budged in opinion after that.
Sam's not even sure himself why it's so important to him. His own belief was something that quietly faltered until he barely remembered what it felt like at all. It's hard to even get his head around the past month, much less begin to think of what this means for his worldview. But suddenly, letting another Hanukkah go by unnoticed seems like a grave insult to himself and his religion-he has a religion, maybe it's battered and tarnished but it's his-and he finds himself scouring the town's grocery store after his shift ends. It wasn't like he expected to find a menorah sitting there waiting for him, but it's a little disheartening nonetheless when there's only a halfhearted aisle filled with Christmas lights and dusty boxes of ornaments. The only candles he can find are decorative room candles, the only cheese they have is a wedge of sharp cheddar, and he has to put back the potatoes when he remembers that he doesn't even know how to cook latkes by himself. But he buys the candles anyway with the regular groceries and doesn't catch the cashier's questioning eye.
"Um," he says while Sandra gets Walter to put away the groceries, "I think I want to celebrate Hanukkah."
It feels stupid the moment he says it, one likely agnostic and one definite atheist swiveling around in dual surprise to look at him. He doesn't even know what he's doing with this and they're about to inform him as to just how misguided it is to think he can reclaim anything about his life with some clumsy half-remembered ritual. Shifting his feet in their tiny kitchenette, he feels pretty much like a kid again, about to be berated for over-eagerness.
Instead, Sandra and Walter just trade a look-wait a minute, how long have they been doing that, looking at each other as if they both have him figured out?-and Sandra smiles.
"That sounds great, Dan." She doesn't even notice the slip, but he does, and he never thought that hearing his own name would sound so good.
"Get started soon," Walter murmurs as he rustles through the last bag and throws a meaningful glance at the fading evening light.
Sandra's already climbing up to scoop the batteries out of the smoke detector and Walter's already solemnly lining up the candles in a mismatched but regimentally even row on their tiny, rickety table before Dan realizes they're doing this with him. It's probably wrong on some kind of cosmic level to let them help with this, but this is already completely imperfect anyway, and flawed, and his, and they're the only people he has.
"Is this the one with," Sandra twirls her hand as she and Walter sit down on either side of him, obviously searching for the right word. "You know. Matzoh?"
There are certain aftereffects to living a secluded life with a guy who doesn't even qualify for human anymore, but the fact that she's at least trying to dredge up knowledge of Jewish culture makes him smile so genuinely it even surprises him. "Not exactly."
Walter stiffly hands her the designated shamash candle, not even bothering to pretend that she doesn't have a lighter. "Laurel."
"All right. Let's see." She's serious and endearingly careful as she clicks on her lighter, like it's at all possible to ruin a religious ceremony held in a hotel room. It's a small crack in her confident armor and he adores her for it.
Laurie passes the candle back to Dan and he tips it to the first candle by Walter, as if he's done this every year without fail. The flame catches, bright and defiant and perfect even though it's housed in a glass container with a cheap blue ribbon. He mentally scrabbles for the blessing but it's gone from his memory. Walter recites the first line for him before his own memory gives out, his voice gravelly and eyes trained on the wavering flame: a light which will not be quieted.
He has no prayer. He has religion, and memory, and a past, and a line of ancestors who survived and overcame, and he has flaws, a name, a woman with her hand resting on his thigh and a man who lets their knees touch. All he has is a profound and humbled gratefulness for these two people who have been beside him through the worst of the world. He offers it up to whatever may be listening; then he leans back, closes his eyes, and lets the light fall against his face.