The Gilded Cage Part 1
Title: The Gilded Cage Part 1
Author: quietprofanity
Fandom: Watchmen
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine and are used for non-profit purposes.
Pairings: Um, slash/het/saffic connotations and mindfuckery in general? It’s not really about any one pairing or a traditional porn fic. But if you insist, check beneath the cut:
Nite Owl II/Silk Spectre II, Twilight Lady/Nite Owl II, Rorschach/Nite Owl II, Ozymandias/Nite Owl II, Twilight Lady/Silk Spectre II (future part)
Warnings: Sexual situations (potentially triggering). Torture. Violence. BDSM. Character Death. Anti-Fixit Fic.
Summary: Adrian Veidt won’t let Dan leave Karnak.
~*~*~
“Conquest is not the victory itself; but
the acquisition, by victory, of a right over
the persons of men. He therefore that is slain
is overcome, but not conquered: he that is taken
and put into prison or chains is not conquered,
though overcome; for he is still an enemy, and
may save himself if he can: but he that upon
promise of obedience hath his life and liberty
allowed him, is then conquered and a subject;
and not before.”
-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
“Suicide kills two people. That’s what
it’s for.”
-- Arthur Miller, After the Fall
~*~*~
Dan wakes up, and Laurie feels cold.
At first this doesn’t bother him. He assumes it must be the Antarctic chill. He reaches up to her hand, the one draped over his body, to warm it. His eyes shoot open. It’s stiff.
Dan wrenches himself from her grasp, his heart thundering, the blood rushing through his ears. He tries to hold on to the hope that his senses were wrong when her arm - the arm that held him so close as he drifted off to sleep - drops to the ground. He shakes her. She doesn’t move.
She’s not breathing.
“Laurie! No, no, no. Laurie!”
He pushes her on her back and takes it all in: her brown hair spread out around her, the long streaks of makeup smudged along her face even though the tears have long dried, her painted pink lips covered in foam. The image burns into his brain, and then he can’t see anything through the tears.
He wipes his eyes. “Rorschach!” he calls out, before he realizes his friend is probably long gone. “Jon! Jon, are you here? Jon!”
There is no answer.
Dan grasps Laurie close, cries into her shoulder. His sobs echo in the opulent, empty pool room. He inhales, taking in her scent - her hair, her skin, her perfume - laced with the almond smell of cyanide. He remembers something Adrian said.
Dan gropes about the floor for his clothes, fights to steady his hands as he pulls them on. Before he puts on his goggles he looks down at Laurie, and the light reflects off one of her earrings like a tiny star. In an impulse he isn’t sure he understands, he bends down and takes it off. At first Dan opens a compartment of his belt, but then worries it may be taken from him at the end. So instead he slips it inside his left glove until it reaches the palm. The earring grinds into it as he makes a fist.
Nite Owl has no weapons, at least none that will kill. That’s okay, he thinks as he delicately covers Laurie beneath the pelt of his snowsuit. When he meets Adrian, he won’t need them.
He feels every word of his swear. They carry him up the stairs of Karnak, lead him to its owner’s sanctum, guide his fists and his feet as he attacks. They make him strong. They make him ferocious. They make him feel like he’s on fire.
And, as Adrian picks up a statuette on the wall, knocks it against Dan’s head and Dan feels the world spin around him, Dan realizes they are utterly, utterly useless.
~*~*~
The pain throbs through Dan’s head like lightning bolts, jars him awake. At first he can’t focus, tries to get his bearings and vomits on himself. Then he feels the cuffs around his wrists, around his ankles, holding him spread-eagled on a bed. It wakes him up. He thrashes.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” says a familiar voice above him.
He opens his eyes to see Adrian standing over him, a syringe in hand. Adrian jabs the needle into Dan’s neck, and the pain is gone.
~*~*~
It’s better when he wakes up again, when he’s had a chance to fully assess his surroundings.
His head has been bandaged, and since he can’t smell blood he hopes the wound has closed. His clothes have been changed. Instead of his Nite Owl suit he wears what looks like white cotton pajamas. There’s a large, pinkish stain across the chest. It’s probably where he vomited but it’s now dry, as if were cleaned off him as best as possible already.
Sunlight pours into the room, which is small, sparse and empty. The window where it’s coming from is behind his head, and a door a few feet from the foot of the bed offers hope of an escape. There are some nails in the wall, and in the bright sunlight Dan can see the shapes on the wall where the paint is darker. Furniture outlines, he realizes. Decorations. Whatever was here is now gone. All that’s left is the bed and a wood chair, a black box sitting on top of it.
He tries to pull on his bonds, and his wrists scream in protest. He looks up at his left hand to see blood trickle down from beneath the cuffs. “Shit,” he whispers.
Dan rests his face against the pillow. He can feel slight friction as the beginnings of a beard brush against it. He waits. Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he thinks of Laurie and he cries softly to himself. Then, when he can’t cry anymore, he continues to wait.
Once, when he closes his eyes, he dreams. He’s still tied up, but now he’s in his costume, and she is standing over him. Her black leather glove squeaks against the skin of his cheek, her red lips are an inch from his and her breath smells like perfume.
“Now, Dan,” she whispers as she runs the riding crop along his body, “This is for your own good.”
Dan wakes up, and Adrian is there. He’s wearing one of his purple suits now, smiles at him with a teacher’s amused indulgence. On the bed, Dan edges away from him as much as he can.
“Scared?” Adrian asks, amusement in his voice.
Dan flexes his hands into fists, glares at Adrian. “No.”
Adrian chuckles. “I wouldn’t be offended if you were. A less empathetic person would be far less judicious to someone who tried to take his life. Actually,” his voice goes deep. “I think you have every reason to be afraid.”
Dan is afraid. He’s tied and beaten and feels as defenseless as he’s ever been. But he also feels he has to fight.
“I’m not afraid of you, you monster!”
The slap across his face is hard and quick, rattles his injured head. Adrian grabs his face by the chin, holds it in place so he looks at Adrian.
“You disappoint me, Dan. What did I tell you about the futility of your schoolboy heroics? I’d thought I’d been able to get through to you when you agreed to keep silent, but I was obviously mistaken. You still cling to your games like a child.”
Dan spits in his face. Adrian growls, slaps Dan again. Dan groans against the pillow as Adrian stalks away. From his vantage point on the bed, Dan can hear Adrian murmur.
“Never mind. All children can be made to learn.” Adrian turns around. “Do you feel hungry?”
Dan won’t move.
“No? Thirsty? You’ve been in bed for two days. You will soon.”
Dan closes his eyes, listens to the click of the door closing. Is that what it’s going to come down to? he wonders. Choosing to die of thirst? Or starve? He stares up at the ceiling, tries to be strong.
~*~*~
He’s not.
It’s two days later, or so Adrian tells him. It’s hard for Dan to keep time. Whenever he opens his eyes it’s bright. Adrian will only let Dan have the water if he agrees not to hurt him. The cuffs come off. Dan sits on the bed as he gulps it down.
“So,” Adrian says. He’s sitting across from Dan, but Dan won’t look at him, is staring at his reflection in the glass. “Now that you’ve behaved, there are things we need to discuss about your future.”
“Future?” Dan asks.
“Yes, future. You’re in a rather precar -”
Dan jumps up and smashes the glass against one of the bedposts. He keeps the largest glass shard in his right hand, wraps his left around Adrian’s throat.
“I had a future,” he raises the shard, and in his mind it’s like a sword. “You took her from me.”
Dan swings and Adrian catches his wrist with a hard squeeze. Dan’s fingers instinctively drop the shard. When it hits the ground, Adrian steps on it, obliterating it with a crunch.
“Really, now.”
Adrian slams Dan down and tears spring to Dan’s eyes as his wound knocks against the floor. Then Adrian starts to kick.
When he is done Dan can barely move, can barely breathe. He tastes blood in his mouth. It’s from his lips, he realizes. He bit them trying to work through the pain.
“I see I’ve made a mistake,” Adrian says. He’s standing above Dan. The heel of his perfect suede shoe digs hard into Dan’s chest. “It seems your confinement has taught you the wrong lesson. You haven’t learned from your defeat. Instead, you glory in your suffering.”
Adrian removes his leg off Dan, reaches down to pick up Dan’s left hand. Dan groans as Adrian presses it against the shards of glass on the floor.
“This isn’t glorious, Dan,” Adrian says. “This pain you feel? It’s not defiance. It’s not rebellion. It’s pain.”
Adrian twists Dan’s hand against the shards, and Dan yells again. Then he lets him go, walks toward the door. Dan brings the hand to his face. It’s hard to see the shards without his eyeglasses, but he can feel them sticking in his palm.
“But that’s not truly important,” Adrian says. Dan twists around to look at him, and every movement feels like another kick. “What you need to realize is it’s in your best interest that I’m alive, that you do what I say. If confinement doesn’t teach you that, perhaps freedom will.”
The door closes again. Dan tries to get up, to chase after him, but the action never gets beyond a thought.
~*~*~
Hours later - Dan doesn’t know how many hours - he wakes up. It hurts to raise his head, to use his left hand, even to sit. But he’s out of the cuffs, and even if it means playing into Adrian’s hand the change of the situation gives him a renewed sense of purpose, lets him forget the pain.
It’s still daylight when he wakes up. The door to the room is open, and it leads to a hallway. The hallway’s not much bigger than the room, and that only surprises him because he knows he must still be at Karnak, and the enormous rooms where he fought Adrian and made love to Laurie (oh God, Laurie …) don’t match his surroundings. Like the room, the hallway also has no decorations, just bare nails and wire on the wall, although with no windows there is no faded paint. The hallway leads to five other doors.
“The Lady or the Tiger?” Dan asks.
The door adjacent to his own is the bathroom, and he’s surprised at his overwhelming relief, his gratefulness, when he sees it. It’s a normal American bathroom: full toilet, standing shower, sink, mirror on a medicine cabinet mounted to the wall. That interests him the most. He looks inside: new soap, half-used toothpaste, a quarter-filled bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a mostly-empty bottle of alcohol, adhesive strips, bandages. There’s a notable absence of any pills, scissors or razors.
Dan turns on the tap, puts his hand under when the water. When he’s done, he dumps the hydrogen peroxide over it. With no tweezers or eyeglasses it feels like a useless gesture, but he can remove the few glass pieces he can see with his fingernails, which have grown a bit longer. It’ll hurt for awhile. It may scar, but infection is unlikely. It’s a small favor.
It’s a tricky task, but he rips a swath of the bandage off the roll using his teeth and the right leverage. He’s about to wrap it around his hand, but he realizes taking a shower might be better first.
First the head wound. Dan finds the bandage’s knot, unties it and unravels the bandages. There’s blood along his hairline, and he touches his scalp with careful fingers. The pain is there, but it’s like a bruise. He’ll know better after he showers. Dan removes the clothes he’s wearing, trying not to look at them and the patterns of human waste he’s left on them. He reaches for the soap in the cabinet and steps inside.
It’s a natural routine, one he might take if he were in a hotel, ready to go downstairs to the ornithological conference. Yet he doesn’t feel like he’s at a hotel, or a colleague’s guest room, or even where he actually is - a makeshift dungeon. It’s the toothpaste that creeps him out, he thinks as he lets the water run over his body. The bottles of peroxide and alcohol could have been emptied before, a measure - like the missing razors and scissors - intended to prevent him from killing himself or others. There would have been no reason to do that to the toothpaste. It means people lived here. People hung things on the walls and made this prison a home. Where are they now?
~*~*~
There were three of them, he realizes. Maybe more - maybe they could have bunked up. No, probably not, he decides. Three. One for each of the empty bedrooms.
The other room is a kitchen. There’s food in the fridge, in the cabinets, but since there’s no silverware and the oven has been broken he won’t be making any fine dining anytime soon. He rifles through the cabinets, finds boxes and cans of food with writing he doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s Chinese. Or not. He can’t tell.
He finds some eggs in the refrigerator. He needs to conserve, he tells himself. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be alone, how long this will last. He breaks an egg on the counter, leans his head back as he drops the yolk down his throat. It’s borderline disgusting but he’s ravenous, and despite his chiding to himself, he eats six.
Dan feels slightly sick when he’s done. He sits on the floor of the empty kitchen with his head in his hands. The tile on the floor is a light purple and black, and like the bedrooms, decorations have been removed. Right now, though, he doesn’t care about the three. He thinks about Rorschach raiding his kitchen. Not recently, when Rorschach came to warn Dan about Blake, but years ago, when he’d come into his penthouse smelling of blood and rambling about retribution and the lack of God, the meaninglessness of life. He wonders why that memory comes to mind now.
The room is so, so quiet. And now, showered and fed, he feels almost normal. He feels almost like he’s just been through an especially vivid nightmare. He wants to believe it, for these routines are so seductive, so ordinary.
Then Dan tries the last door, the one he’d been avoiding. It’s locked. When he slams against it there’s no give, and he realizes behind the wood door there’s something much harder, something he can’t break.
When he came here, when he was out in the snow, he doesn’t remember shivering as hard as he is now.
~*~*~
A clock. He understands the razors, the scissors, the broken oven, the rooms emptied of all life except one bed, one chair and a change of clothes (black pants and a purple shirt with an eastern-style collar). But why the fuck on God’s white waste of an earth couldn’t he have had a clock? Something on the wall. Or a wristwatch. Why not? What did Adrian think he would do, use his non-existent tools to rig it into a bomb?
Nice idea, but he knows his own limits.
He has no way of keeping track of time. He can’t trust his body to keep him abreast of the cycle of the day. Bereft of stimulation, hunger and exhaustion are ever-present. He plays tricks with himself, trying to stave off his urges to eat, his urges to sleep, for just a little longer. Name all the states and capitals. Who were your childhood teachers? What happened on each of your birthdays? Sometimes he closes his eyes and tries to reconstruct his favorite movies, letting his memory linger over every absorbed detail, every line of dialogue.
It would be better if it weren’t for the sun. For a long time, Dan would spend time looking out the shatterproof window in “his” room, hoping for a glimpse of a bird, trying to connect this empty expanse to the nights when he and his parents would go on winter trips to upstate New York or Vermont. His favorite part was always dusk, when the snow would glow blue in the fading light.
But it’s summer in Antarctica. There is no dusk here. There is no night. While clouds occasionally cover the sun, inducing in him a feeling of a gloomy Sunday morning (“Gloooooomy Sundaaaaay,” he sings to himself), most days are brutally bright, and the few shadows in the room barely move. He tries to fool himself into thinking it’s night sometimes. He hides under the bed, covers his face in the stained pajamas, but the red light always seeps through his eyelids, reminds him it is day. Always, always day.
~*~*~
He misses Laurie the most, so he tries to think about her the least. Whenever he does, the experience is wrenching. In his grief-stricken mind, the memory of their short time has no flaw. Even his embarrassments are superseded by their glorious night together. Yet he can’t think about that either. Whenever he does, whenever he closes his eyes to try to remember the texture of her hair, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, he smells cyanide.
He thinks of Hollis a little more. Sometimes Dan can smile thinking of their evenings together, just talking. It’s best to think only of the surface of these things: the taste of the beer, the smell of Hollis’ cigarettes, the feel of Phantom II’s fur against his hand. It’s when he tries to remember the things Hollis told him, all the stories of his time alone and with the Minutemen, that Dan can’t bear it. Dan has failed him by so much.
When he’s at his worst, his most pathetic and needy, he thinks of Twilight Lady. He remembers their nights together. The cuffs and the ties. The leather and the whip.
“You know,” she would whisper, pausing to let her tongue trace his ear, “it’s totally legal so long as we don’t fuck. I could play with you forever.” Her hands would drop to his stomach, to his groin. “No one could say a thing.”
Sometimes he remembers those nights with joy and aching, longs to be back in that dark, blissful embrace of sex and surrender. Other times it makes him angry and sick. He was young and he deluded himself into thinking he was dangerous, into thinking capture was a game.
When he can muster up the strength to be hopeful, he thinks about Rorschach.
There’s a possibility, slim as it is, that Rorschach will come back for him. He’s sure Rorschach could have reached Archie and started it. He maybe could have been able to get it back to America. When he thinks about what might have happened to Rorschach when he got back - the reception that would greet an escaped felon with a crazy story about how the world’s smartest, most beloved peacemaker dropped a monster in New York - he’s less sure. Yet Dan saved Rorschach, didn’t he? Doesn’t Rorschach owe him the same if he can? Won’t Rorschach eventually notice that he hasn’t come home? That Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre haven’t been seen?
Although maybe Rorschach will think they’re hiding from him and … no, no. If Rorschach wanted to find Dan, he would. Dan knows this.
In his most ridiculous moments, he thinks of what it’ll be like when Rorschach rescues him. He’ll burst down the door, run to his side. Dan will be so, so grateful. He’ll cling to Rorschach and tell him … tell him … oh God, Dan doesn’t know. He only knows that the idea of it is the only thing that makes him feel in this blinding white hell.
There has to be a chance this will happen, he tells himself. There has to.
~*~*~
He talks to God. He hasn’t in years but now he’s trying to dig up every scrap of Hebrew he remembers. Prayers from the siddur and bits of song. They’re probably useless. Just praises to God for welcoming the Sabbath, and how can you have the Sabbath in a land where the sun doesn’t set?
Sometimes he says the Mourner’s Kaddish. When he does this he thinks about Laurie and Hollis. It probably doesn’t work that way, probably is something only meant for Jews. But what else can he do for them?
Some Jews must have died from Adrian’s monster, Dan thinks. He imagines their rabbis - old and black-robed and long-bearded, young in gray suits and skullcaps, maybe even a few women, although he’s never met one and can’t picture them - standing on the bimahs in New York City, reading long lists of names. Maybe they’ve missed one. Maybe Dan is helping them.
He makes bargains. I’ll keep the Sabbath. I’ll keep kosher. I won’t even eat corn syrup during Passover. I’ll never complain about Yom Kippur, I’ll stay in the synagogue all day and listen to every word of every prayer. No, I’ll do that for everything. Every word a person says to me. Every song I hear. I’ll tune none of it out. I’ll treasure every second I get with another human being on this planet.
He makes the promises even though he knows if he gets out he’ll be a fugitive. He’ll manage it, somehow. He has to, he will, just as long as someone lets him out of these rooms.
God never answers, although he does get the next best thing.
~*~*~
“Jon!”
He just appears in the room, his body turned toward the window, when Dan is trying to sleep. Dan pulls himself out from under the bed, and Jon looks at him with shock.
“Dreiberg? What happened to you?”
An image of himself, taken from the last time he looked in the mirror (he doesn’t know how long ago that was, some things he’s stopped caring about), comes to Dan’s mind: the thick beard, the long nails, the suit that’s become looser on his body.
“Adrian’s been holding me here. I don’t know how long,” he stumbles toward Jon, grasps onto his shoulders. “How’d you find me? Is Rorschach here? Oh God! Have you found Adrian? We need to find him. He killed Laurie!”
Dan watches as the surprise on Jon’s face fades into sadness. Jon’s mouth drops a bit, and then he speaks. “I apologize for any misunderstanding. I did not know you were here, and I have not come to rescue you.”
Dan looks up at Jon, looks for any hint that Jon could be lying, but it’s Jon and if everything Laurie told him about Jon was true, then he wouldn’t lie. “But … but you’re here. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
Jon blinks, and then sighs. “So often I have tried to be only a watcher of life. I create life now. I have watched generations of life in it’s smallest, most fragile form - things scientists have not yet discovered - live, grow and die since last I saw you, trying to be distant, trying to watch life in all its natural processes. Yet it seems even the act of watching has an influence. It imposes meaning. Sometimes I cannot see clearly because of this. Perhaps that is one of the fallacies of science. Perhaps you can understand when you watch your birds.”
Dan can only stare back in response. What?
“Jon, what the fuck are you talking about? Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Haven’t you heard Laurie is dead?”
“Yes, yes, and that does upset me. I’m sorry. I’ve seen much death these days. Feelings tend to get confused. You should sit. I have more to do here, and we will talk while I work.”
Dan sits on the bed, rubbing his eyes. He feels the mattress bounce slightly as Jon sits next to him.
“I came here out of curiosity,” Jon says. “I’m in many places in Karnak at this moment, checking the rooms for Adrian, and I cannot find him. I’m watching his televisions. I will eventually see him there, see that a problem is arising in New York, and he is fixing it.”
“He’s … he’s not even here?” Dan twists his body to look at Jon. “He’s left me here to die?”
“I do not know that,” Jon says. “I thought I would see him, but I will not. Our conversation will convince me not to get involved.”
Dan moans. “Oh God. Why is he doing this? What does he want? Why didn’t he kill me along with Laurie if he wants me to die here?”
“It is strange,” Jon admits. “It’s the sort of sadism I would expect from Blake, were he alive. I suspect Adrian has other motives at work, although I cannot guess what they are. His desires are fully unlike most human beings I have met.”
Dan snorts. “As if he’s human at all …”
“I cannot expect you to be objective about this, given your situation, but we must remember …” Jon stops, stares as if he’s noticed something. Dan looks around and sees nothing.
“What? What is it?”
“I am sorry. Elsewhere I’m looking through the old tapes of the security cameras. I see … oh dear.”
“Who? What? Is it Rorschach? Is he here?”
Jon lowers his head. “Dreiberg, Rorschach won’t be coming for you. I am not watching new tapes, anyway. I am watching old ones, and at the time I am watching, he is already dead.”
Dan can’t speak. Dead? he asks himself. Rorschach’s dead? He knew it could happen. The rational part of his mind, the part that he hated to listen to, told him Rorschach’s death was very likely. It’s not the same as hearing it, though. It’s not the same at all.
“I’m watching the video,” Jon says. “I’m watching you and Laurie, sleeping in the pool room.”
He was dead before then? Dan can’t believe any of this.
“I see her waking up beside you. She looks like she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. I’ve never seen her like this before. I’ve seen her sad so many times but … she’s moving her hand over you, like she’s ready to shake you awake. She pauses. She doesn’t do it.”
“Laurie?” Dan whispers, as if she’s alive, as if she can hear. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jon says. “She’s walking away from you. She’s naked. I can’t see anymore. She’s out of the camera frame. I’m searching through tapes of the other rooms, watching on the multiple screens. Ah, I’ve found her. She’s in the display room. She’s looking through the weapons. Her finger runs along the edge of a sword. She doesn’t bleed. I suppose it’s dull.”
“Are you saying that Laurie …?”
“She’s found an urn, is looking at it like she doesn’t know why it’s there. She’s opened it There are pills inside. She breaks one. She smells what’s inside. She takes out another and grasps it to her chest. She’s crying again.”
The image comes together for Dan before Jon can describe it. Her coming back to him, nestling up against him, maybe giving a gesture of good-bye before …. His fingers claw at the bed sheets. He trembles.
“Jon.” He squeezes the name past the lump in his throat. “How did Rorschach die?”
Jon returns Dan’s desperate, pleading stare with a look of sadness. “Dreiberg, I don’t think you want to …”
“Tell me!” Dan knows it’s bad, knows he won’t like what he hears, but if his heart needs to break, let it all break now. Hearing about Laurie makes him want to howl, and he can’t go through this pain again.
Jon closes the small, shining stars of his eyes, opens them when he speaks. “You must understand. Adrian had done so much to create the peace, ruined so many lives. I am not without feeling, despite what you may think. I take what Adrian said about the greater tragedy of undoing the peace millions died for to heart. It strikes me on a personal level, thinking of Wally, of what will surely happen to Janey. As you know, Rorschach didn’t understand that. I tried to stop him, but he insisted on going back. I … I couldn’t allow that to happen.”
Jon turns away from Dan. “He allowed me no other solution. Dreiberg, he begged me to do it …”
“I keep wanting to cry,” Dan hears Laurie say, “but my throat. It’s not big enough.”
“How …,” Dan’s voice cracks. “How could you?”
“Life is precious. If I were to allow their sacrifice to come undone …”
“‘Life is precious?’” Dan yells. “What about his life? Didn’t his matter? For that matter, what about Laurie’s life? You keep saying you’re upset but it’s like she didn’t even mean anything to you. Is the woman you loved less than some microbe?”
Jon glares at him. “You do not know what I feel, Dreiberg. You accuse me of a lack of feeling? Think of what you’ve done to me and ask yourself how a man of more ‘feeling’ would deal with you!”
Dan shakes with rage. His first instinct is to spit back at Jon every ugly thing Laurie ever said about him. Then he wants to scream things that are unhelpful and unfair. Do you know how much you hurt her? Why’d you keep her from me if you couldn’t love her the way she needed? Who gave you the authority to decide you could kill him? If you’re so fucking powerful, why couldn’t you have just stopped this?
Yet his anger ultimately can’t outlast his grief. He’s lost Rorschach. He’s lost Laurie a second time.
Jon stands up, turns his back as Dan starts to cry.
“As I wanted to say before, I see even the act of observation, of watching, hurts human beings. How much more would interference?”
“You … you’re not going to help me out? You won’t set me free?”
Jon says nothing for a moment. “I apologize.”
“No!” Dan chokes, stands up. “No, please. Don’t leave me here. I can’t stay here. I’m running out of food. I can’t stand this light and my thoughts and … please, I can’t be alone!”
But then, in a flash of blue light, he is.
It starts with a scream that turns into a screech. Then screaming isn’t enough. The doors crack in half, splinter under his kicks. He rips the remnants off the hinges. The chair is next, then the bed. He uses the debris to smash the ceramic sink, the toilet. Then he tries the mirror, but it won’t shatter, shows him back his haggard, overgrown complexion.
Of course, he thinks. He could use the pieces to kill himself, and wouldn’t that be a shame?
He lies on the bathroom floor, surrounded by the ceramic pieces. He’s all out of screaming, and mostly out of tears. Eventually, he sleeps.
~*~*~
The straps are tight around his wrists, so tight that when he pulls on them he bleeds. Yet they don’t hurt. Not really. Twilight Lady stands in front of him, and when she’s with him, here in the dark, nothing ever really hurts.
Her boot wraps about his leg. She clings to him and her breasts press hard against his chest as she runs her fingers through his hair. Dan opens his mouth and they’re kissing. There’s a sick feeling in his stomach. She’s so beautiful, so sexy, but …
“I … I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t …”
“It’s okay. We don’t have to rush things.”
Dan’s eyes open. Oh God, he thinks, that’s not her voice.
Laurie pulls away from him. As she looks into his eyes she’s smiling, but the makeup is running down her cheeks.
“We’ve got as long as it takes,” she says, her mouth filling up with foam.
“No!”
She falls, lying in a heap at his feet. Dan pulls against his bonds, but even though she’s so close, he can’t reach her.
“Pathetic,” a voice rasps.
Dan looks up, his heart pounding. Rorschach walks toward him, a white light behind him. He pulls open his trenchcoat, lets it slide off his body.
“Thousands dead, Daniel.” His jacket comes off. He pulls loose his scarf, rips open his shirt to reveal a blood-stained undershirt. Behind him the light is getting bigger. “Thousands dead and this is where I find you.”
Dan inhales sharply. With a swift motion Rorschach pulls off his mask and hat, revealing his face. Black streaks, like makeup, like ink, run down from his eyes. The light behind him is so bright, so close.
“This is how you help me?” he asks.
Dan tries to scream, but nothing comes out as the light engulfs Rorschach, blinds Dan.
He wakes, but the relief he feels only lasts a moment before he remembers they’re gone, remembers the pain. It’s always like this now. It probably always will be.
~*~*~
It isn’t too much longer.
Dan sits in the hall, his legs pulled to his chest, his head buried in his knees. He looks up as there’s a rattling behind the door: the impenetrable one, the one that won’t break. It opens and Adrian is there, dressed immaculately in a tight purple sweater and black pants, handcuffs in his hands. His eyes look over Dan like he’s a ledger, like Adrian’s calculating some sort of work done.
“Fucker,” a high pitched voice inside Dan whispers. “Asshole.”
A small smile tugs at the end of Adrian’s lips. He holds up the cuffs. “Come, Dan.”
“Don’t,” says another voice, gruff and raspy now. “You can’t.”
“Dan?” Adrian asks, a harder edge to his voice now.
Dan stands up, holds out his wrists. He doesn’t even wince as the cuffs click around them.
~*~*~
“You may not believe me, but I meant to come back earlier,” Adrian walks along the table in the dining hall, his finger tracing the edge. He pulls it up and checks for dust. “Seems your friend had what he thought was a trump card. No matter. It’s been taken care of before too much damage was done.”
Dan sits at the head of the table, his hands cuffed in front of him. He’s in the same seat where he and Rorschach attacked Adrian. He feels small here, wants to slump down in the chair. He isn’t used to being in a place with this much space anymore.
“Means to intimidate you. Letting him win.”
“What did he do?” Dan asks.
“That’s not your concern.” Adrian slams his hand down on the table, making Dan flinch. “We have much to discuss, and while I appreciate your new cooperation, I’m smart enough to know that you’re capable of another outburst. And I will not abide that.”
“Outburst? What are you, a child?”
“Let me tell you a bit about of your situation. I’m a hands-on type of businessman. I don’t leave things to contractors. I know every inch of Karnak: its steel doors, its impenetrable walls. With a push of a button I can see anywhere I want. And if I’m not looking, I have a myriad amount of security systems. Now, you’re a smart man. I found out you were the one who connected this all to me. That’s impressive. I’d like to think you’d have had a harder time if I hadn’t made my password so easy to guess, but still, impressive.”
“As if he respects you …”
“So, perhaps you could escape. It’s a reasonable possibility. I’m as fallible as any other human being.”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe that for a fucking second, Dan.”
“If you get out, we’re thousands of miles from the nearest scientific outpost. Now, I haven’t been able to find your ship. Maybe you could reach that, but the Antarctic winds are far from the best conditions for a little craft. And it’s been over a month.
“Still,” Adrian moves so that he’s sitting on the table, his arms crossed in front of him, “maybe I’ve underestimated you. Maybe you can get out, can fly your ship home. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘why?’ ‘Why would I do that?’ You’re a fugitive and a criminal. In addition to illegal vigilantism, you’ve aided a dangerous killer in escaping prison, burglarized my office and attempted to murder me. How do you think the police would deal with you? Even if you were to hide, do you think I wouldn’t do everything in my power to find you?”
“Nothing is so hopeless, Daniel. Nothing.”
“You may think you have a trump card in what you know, in your connections. You have quite a bit of money. Enough to afford a very, very good lawyer, certainly. I don’t know what sort of lawyer would argue that it was right for you to kill one of the world’s most respected philanthropists because you were under the bizarre delusion that he was going to kill half New York with a fake space alien, but I suppose ‘temporary insanity’ is as good an explanation as any. You were grieving over your lover’s suicide, after all. It’s reasonable.”
Adrian leans forward. His face is almost an inch from Dan’s. Dan stares straight ahead, won’t look into his eyes.
“Do you know how much money I make, Dan?”
Dan shrugs.
“Oh come on, guess.”
“More than me,” Dan drones.
“Even with the recent economic crash, I’m going to make multiple times your worth in one year.”
“That’s great. I’m happy for you.”
The backhand slap cracks across his face. Dan bites his lip through the pain, and then looks back at Adrian.
“What are you doing? Fight! Hit him back!”
“If you can put aside the sarcasm, answer the real question. You can afford a very good lawyer. Do you think I can’t afford a better one? Or buy yours out? Do you really think you could win?”
Dan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
“So,” Adrian says, drawing the word out like it’s a piece of candy he’s trying to savor. “What’s next for our little hero? Prison. Not a nice prison, either. Not a prison where you get a kitchen and a private working bathroom - if you hadn’t broken it, anyway. A prison full of the people you put away. Your friend was able to survive it for a little while,” he grabs Dan’s collar, holds him still. “Will you be?”
“Don’t need to do this. Don’t need to compromise. Can find a way.”
“No,” Dan says. “I guess not.”
Adrian stands up, lets his fingers run through Dan’s hair as walks behind the chair, pets Dan’s head.
“Don’t let him treat you like this!”
“Here are your real options.” Adrian paces the length of the table, his back to Dan. “You are not leaving Karnak. Ever. This is not negotiable,” he reaches the opposite end, stops and looks back. “You can, however, choose how to spend your time. If you feel the need for more tantrums, you can go back to the servants’ quarters. I’ll bring you more food - I’m not a monster, but otherwise it’ll be much like it was before.”
Dan imagines the prospect, can’t stop himself from shaking.
“Are you a man? Don’t show him weakness. Don’t show him you’re soft.”
“Or, you could stay with me.”
Dan blinks. “What?”
“When I’m at Karnak, anyway.” Adrian folds his hands behind his back. “I don’t know where I’ll put you when I’m off to business in America. Wherever it is, you’ll have luxuries. More food, books, films, music … whatever else you want within reason. I can’t allow you to make any more toys, but you don’t really need them anymore. You’ll be comfortable, have most of what you need.”
“Like he knows what you need? Like he knows what you want?”
“And what do I do? Am I going to be your servant?”
“Servant?” Adrian asks, genuine surprise in his voice. “There’s nothing you can do for me I can’t provide for myself, Dan. No, you are my prisoner. If you behave, you get the better cage. That’s all.”
Dan’s heart pounds as Adrian circles the other end of the table. The weight of the prospect in front of him feels closer, more ominous, as Adrian advances.
“Don’t do it.”
“You can’t accept this, Dan. It isn’t right.”
“Wants to make you his pet.”
“He’s a murderer! You want to spend the rest of your life living with a murderer? Pretending what he did was okay?”
“Can’t eat out of his hand. Even in the face of madness, have to defy him.”
“It’s not right, Dan.”
“It’s not right.”
Adrian is at his side, has his hand on Dan’s shoulder. In his mind’s eye, though, Adrian doesn’t matter. They do. They stare at him from their seats at the table, and for a moment his heart swells with grief under the blank, reflective plane of black on white, under the sadness and desperation in her eyes. Then, in another moment, his grief shatters into anger and they are gone.
They’ve abandoned him.
“What do you say?” Adrian asks, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “Are you willing to be good? Are you willing to behave?”
Dan nods. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
End Part One.
Author: quietprofanity
Fandom: Watchmen
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine and are used for non-profit purposes.
Pairings: Um, slash/het/saffic connotations and mindfuckery in general? It’s not really about any one pairing or a traditional porn fic. But if you insist, check beneath the cut:
Nite Owl II/Silk Spectre II, Twilight Lady/Nite Owl II, Rorschach/Nite Owl II, Ozymandias/Nite Owl II, Twilight Lady/Silk Spectre II (future part)
Warnings: Sexual situations (potentially triggering). Torture. Violence. BDSM. Character Death. Anti-Fixit Fic.
Summary: Adrian Veidt won’t let Dan leave Karnak.
~*~*~
“Conquest is not the victory itself; but
the acquisition, by victory, of a right over
the persons of men. He therefore that is slain
is overcome, but not conquered: he that is taken
and put into prison or chains is not conquered,
though overcome; for he is still an enemy, and
may save himself if he can: but he that upon
promise of obedience hath his life and liberty
allowed him, is then conquered and a subject;
and not before.”
-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
“Suicide kills two people. That’s what
it’s for.”
-- Arthur Miller, After the Fall
~*~*~
Dan wakes up, and Laurie feels cold.
At first this doesn’t bother him. He assumes it must be the Antarctic chill. He reaches up to her hand, the one draped over his body, to warm it. His eyes shoot open. It’s stiff.
Dan wrenches himself from her grasp, his heart thundering, the blood rushing through his ears. He tries to hold on to the hope that his senses were wrong when her arm - the arm that held him so close as he drifted off to sleep - drops to the ground. He shakes her. She doesn’t move.
She’s not breathing.
“Laurie! No, no, no. Laurie!”
He pushes her on her back and takes it all in: her brown hair spread out around her, the long streaks of makeup smudged along her face even though the tears have long dried, her painted pink lips covered in foam. The image burns into his brain, and then he can’t see anything through the tears.
He wipes his eyes. “Rorschach!” he calls out, before he realizes his friend is probably long gone. “Jon! Jon, are you here? Jon!”
There is no answer.
Dan grasps Laurie close, cries into her shoulder. His sobs echo in the opulent, empty pool room. He inhales, taking in her scent - her hair, her skin, her perfume - laced with the almond smell of cyanide. He remembers something Adrian said.
Dan gropes about the floor for his clothes, fights to steady his hands as he pulls them on. Before he puts on his goggles he looks down at Laurie, and the light reflects off one of her earrings like a tiny star. In an impulse he isn’t sure he understands, he bends down and takes it off. At first Dan opens a compartment of his belt, but then worries it may be taken from him at the end. So instead he slips it inside his left glove until it reaches the palm. The earring grinds into it as he makes a fist.
Nite Owl has no weapons, at least none that will kill. That’s okay, he thinks as he delicately covers Laurie beneath the pelt of his snowsuit. When he meets Adrian, he won’t need them.
He feels every word of his swear. They carry him up the stairs of Karnak, lead him to its owner’s sanctum, guide his fists and his feet as he attacks. They make him strong. They make him ferocious. They make him feel like he’s on fire.
And, as Adrian picks up a statuette on the wall, knocks it against Dan’s head and Dan feels the world spin around him, Dan realizes they are utterly, utterly useless.
~*~*~
The pain throbs through Dan’s head like lightning bolts, jars him awake. At first he can’t focus, tries to get his bearings and vomits on himself. Then he feels the cuffs around his wrists, around his ankles, holding him spread-eagled on a bed. It wakes him up. He thrashes.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” says a familiar voice above him.
He opens his eyes to see Adrian standing over him, a syringe in hand. Adrian jabs the needle into Dan’s neck, and the pain is gone.
~*~*~
It’s better when he wakes up again, when he’s had a chance to fully assess his surroundings.
His head has been bandaged, and since he can’t smell blood he hopes the wound has closed. His clothes have been changed. Instead of his Nite Owl suit he wears what looks like white cotton pajamas. There’s a large, pinkish stain across the chest. It’s probably where he vomited but it’s now dry, as if were cleaned off him as best as possible already.
Sunlight pours into the room, which is small, sparse and empty. The window where it’s coming from is behind his head, and a door a few feet from the foot of the bed offers hope of an escape. There are some nails in the wall, and in the bright sunlight Dan can see the shapes on the wall where the paint is darker. Furniture outlines, he realizes. Decorations. Whatever was here is now gone. All that’s left is the bed and a wood chair, a black box sitting on top of it.
He tries to pull on his bonds, and his wrists scream in protest. He looks up at his left hand to see blood trickle down from beneath the cuffs. “Shit,” he whispers.
Dan rests his face against the pillow. He can feel slight friction as the beginnings of a beard brush against it. He waits. Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he thinks of Laurie and he cries softly to himself. Then, when he can’t cry anymore, he continues to wait.
Once, when he closes his eyes, he dreams. He’s still tied up, but now he’s in his costume, and she is standing over him. Her black leather glove squeaks against the skin of his cheek, her red lips are an inch from his and her breath smells like perfume.
“Now, Dan,” she whispers as she runs the riding crop along his body, “This is for your own good.”
Dan wakes up, and Adrian is there. He’s wearing one of his purple suits now, smiles at him with a teacher’s amused indulgence. On the bed, Dan edges away from him as much as he can.
“Scared?” Adrian asks, amusement in his voice.
Dan flexes his hands into fists, glares at Adrian. “No.”
Adrian chuckles. “I wouldn’t be offended if you were. A less empathetic person would be far less judicious to someone who tried to take his life. Actually,” his voice goes deep. “I think you have every reason to be afraid.”
Dan is afraid. He’s tied and beaten and feels as defenseless as he’s ever been. But he also feels he has to fight.
“I’m not afraid of you, you monster!”
The slap across his face is hard and quick, rattles his injured head. Adrian grabs his face by the chin, holds it in place so he looks at Adrian.
“You disappoint me, Dan. What did I tell you about the futility of your schoolboy heroics? I’d thought I’d been able to get through to you when you agreed to keep silent, but I was obviously mistaken. You still cling to your games like a child.”
Dan spits in his face. Adrian growls, slaps Dan again. Dan groans against the pillow as Adrian stalks away. From his vantage point on the bed, Dan can hear Adrian murmur.
“Never mind. All children can be made to learn.” Adrian turns around. “Do you feel hungry?”
Dan won’t move.
“No? Thirsty? You’ve been in bed for two days. You will soon.”
Dan closes his eyes, listens to the click of the door closing. Is that what it’s going to come down to? he wonders. Choosing to die of thirst? Or starve? He stares up at the ceiling, tries to be strong.
~*~*~
He’s not.
It’s two days later, or so Adrian tells him. It’s hard for Dan to keep time. Whenever he opens his eyes it’s bright. Adrian will only let Dan have the water if he agrees not to hurt him. The cuffs come off. Dan sits on the bed as he gulps it down.
“So,” Adrian says. He’s sitting across from Dan, but Dan won’t look at him, is staring at his reflection in the glass. “Now that you’ve behaved, there are things we need to discuss about your future.”
“Future?” Dan asks.
“Yes, future. You’re in a rather precar -”
Dan jumps up and smashes the glass against one of the bedposts. He keeps the largest glass shard in his right hand, wraps his left around Adrian’s throat.
“I had a future,” he raises the shard, and in his mind it’s like a sword. “You took her from me.”
Dan swings and Adrian catches his wrist with a hard squeeze. Dan’s fingers instinctively drop the shard. When it hits the ground, Adrian steps on it, obliterating it with a crunch.
“Really, now.”
Adrian slams Dan down and tears spring to Dan’s eyes as his wound knocks against the floor. Then Adrian starts to kick.
When he is done Dan can barely move, can barely breathe. He tastes blood in his mouth. It’s from his lips, he realizes. He bit them trying to work through the pain.
“I see I’ve made a mistake,” Adrian says. He’s standing above Dan. The heel of his perfect suede shoe digs hard into Dan’s chest. “It seems your confinement has taught you the wrong lesson. You haven’t learned from your defeat. Instead, you glory in your suffering.”
Adrian removes his leg off Dan, reaches down to pick up Dan’s left hand. Dan groans as Adrian presses it against the shards of glass on the floor.
“This isn’t glorious, Dan,” Adrian says. “This pain you feel? It’s not defiance. It’s not rebellion. It’s pain.”
Adrian twists Dan’s hand against the shards, and Dan yells again. Then he lets him go, walks toward the door. Dan brings the hand to his face. It’s hard to see the shards without his eyeglasses, but he can feel them sticking in his palm.
“But that’s not truly important,” Adrian says. Dan twists around to look at him, and every movement feels like another kick. “What you need to realize is it’s in your best interest that I’m alive, that you do what I say. If confinement doesn’t teach you that, perhaps freedom will.”
The door closes again. Dan tries to get up, to chase after him, but the action never gets beyond a thought.
~*~*~
Hours later - Dan doesn’t know how many hours - he wakes up. It hurts to raise his head, to use his left hand, even to sit. But he’s out of the cuffs, and even if it means playing into Adrian’s hand the change of the situation gives him a renewed sense of purpose, lets him forget the pain.
It’s still daylight when he wakes up. The door to the room is open, and it leads to a hallway. The hallway’s not much bigger than the room, and that only surprises him because he knows he must still be at Karnak, and the enormous rooms where he fought Adrian and made love to Laurie (oh God, Laurie …) don’t match his surroundings. Like the room, the hallway also has no decorations, just bare nails and wire on the wall, although with no windows there is no faded paint. The hallway leads to five other doors.
“The Lady or the Tiger?” Dan asks.
The door adjacent to his own is the bathroom, and he’s surprised at his overwhelming relief, his gratefulness, when he sees it. It’s a normal American bathroom: full toilet, standing shower, sink, mirror on a medicine cabinet mounted to the wall. That interests him the most. He looks inside: new soap, half-used toothpaste, a quarter-filled bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a mostly-empty bottle of alcohol, adhesive strips, bandages. There’s a notable absence of any pills, scissors or razors.
Dan turns on the tap, puts his hand under when the water. When he’s done, he dumps the hydrogen peroxide over it. With no tweezers or eyeglasses it feels like a useless gesture, but he can remove the few glass pieces he can see with his fingernails, which have grown a bit longer. It’ll hurt for awhile. It may scar, but infection is unlikely. It’s a small favor.
It’s a tricky task, but he rips a swath of the bandage off the roll using his teeth and the right leverage. He’s about to wrap it around his hand, but he realizes taking a shower might be better first.
First the head wound. Dan finds the bandage’s knot, unties it and unravels the bandages. There’s blood along his hairline, and he touches his scalp with careful fingers. The pain is there, but it’s like a bruise. He’ll know better after he showers. Dan removes the clothes he’s wearing, trying not to look at them and the patterns of human waste he’s left on them. He reaches for the soap in the cabinet and steps inside.
It’s a natural routine, one he might take if he were in a hotel, ready to go downstairs to the ornithological conference. Yet he doesn’t feel like he’s at a hotel, or a colleague’s guest room, or even where he actually is - a makeshift dungeon. It’s the toothpaste that creeps him out, he thinks as he lets the water run over his body. The bottles of peroxide and alcohol could have been emptied before, a measure - like the missing razors and scissors - intended to prevent him from killing himself or others. There would have been no reason to do that to the toothpaste. It means people lived here. People hung things on the walls and made this prison a home. Where are they now?
~*~*~
There were three of them, he realizes. Maybe more - maybe they could have bunked up. No, probably not, he decides. Three. One for each of the empty bedrooms.
The other room is a kitchen. There’s food in the fridge, in the cabinets, but since there’s no silverware and the oven has been broken he won’t be making any fine dining anytime soon. He rifles through the cabinets, finds boxes and cans of food with writing he doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s Chinese. Or not. He can’t tell.
He finds some eggs in the refrigerator. He needs to conserve, he tells himself. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be alone, how long this will last. He breaks an egg on the counter, leans his head back as he drops the yolk down his throat. It’s borderline disgusting but he’s ravenous, and despite his chiding to himself, he eats six.
Dan feels slightly sick when he’s done. He sits on the floor of the empty kitchen with his head in his hands. The tile on the floor is a light purple and black, and like the bedrooms, decorations have been removed. Right now, though, he doesn’t care about the three. He thinks about Rorschach raiding his kitchen. Not recently, when Rorschach came to warn Dan about Blake, but years ago, when he’d come into his penthouse smelling of blood and rambling about retribution and the lack of God, the meaninglessness of life. He wonders why that memory comes to mind now.
The room is so, so quiet. And now, showered and fed, he feels almost normal. He feels almost like he’s just been through an especially vivid nightmare. He wants to believe it, for these routines are so seductive, so ordinary.
Then Dan tries the last door, the one he’d been avoiding. It’s locked. When he slams against it there’s no give, and he realizes behind the wood door there’s something much harder, something he can’t break.
When he came here, when he was out in the snow, he doesn’t remember shivering as hard as he is now.
~*~*~
A clock. He understands the razors, the scissors, the broken oven, the rooms emptied of all life except one bed, one chair and a change of clothes (black pants and a purple shirt with an eastern-style collar). But why the fuck on God’s white waste of an earth couldn’t he have had a clock? Something on the wall. Or a wristwatch. Why not? What did Adrian think he would do, use his non-existent tools to rig it into a bomb?
Nice idea, but he knows his own limits.
He has no way of keeping track of time. He can’t trust his body to keep him abreast of the cycle of the day. Bereft of stimulation, hunger and exhaustion are ever-present. He plays tricks with himself, trying to stave off his urges to eat, his urges to sleep, for just a little longer. Name all the states and capitals. Who were your childhood teachers? What happened on each of your birthdays? Sometimes he closes his eyes and tries to reconstruct his favorite movies, letting his memory linger over every absorbed detail, every line of dialogue.
It would be better if it weren’t for the sun. For a long time, Dan would spend time looking out the shatterproof window in “his” room, hoping for a glimpse of a bird, trying to connect this empty expanse to the nights when he and his parents would go on winter trips to upstate New York or Vermont. His favorite part was always dusk, when the snow would glow blue in the fading light.
But it’s summer in Antarctica. There is no dusk here. There is no night. While clouds occasionally cover the sun, inducing in him a feeling of a gloomy Sunday morning (“Gloooooomy Sundaaaaay,” he sings to himself), most days are brutally bright, and the few shadows in the room barely move. He tries to fool himself into thinking it’s night sometimes. He hides under the bed, covers his face in the stained pajamas, but the red light always seeps through his eyelids, reminds him it is day. Always, always day.
~*~*~
He misses Laurie the most, so he tries to think about her the least. Whenever he does, the experience is wrenching. In his grief-stricken mind, the memory of their short time has no flaw. Even his embarrassments are superseded by their glorious night together. Yet he can’t think about that either. Whenever he does, whenever he closes his eyes to try to remember the texture of her hair, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, he smells cyanide.
He thinks of Hollis a little more. Sometimes Dan can smile thinking of their evenings together, just talking. It’s best to think only of the surface of these things: the taste of the beer, the smell of Hollis’ cigarettes, the feel of Phantom II’s fur against his hand. It’s when he tries to remember the things Hollis told him, all the stories of his time alone and with the Minutemen, that Dan can’t bear it. Dan has failed him by so much.
When he’s at his worst, his most pathetic and needy, he thinks of Twilight Lady. He remembers their nights together. The cuffs and the ties. The leather and the whip.
“You know,” she would whisper, pausing to let her tongue trace his ear, “it’s totally legal so long as we don’t fuck. I could play with you forever.” Her hands would drop to his stomach, to his groin. “No one could say a thing.”
Sometimes he remembers those nights with joy and aching, longs to be back in that dark, blissful embrace of sex and surrender. Other times it makes him angry and sick. He was young and he deluded himself into thinking he was dangerous, into thinking capture was a game.
When he can muster up the strength to be hopeful, he thinks about Rorschach.
There’s a possibility, slim as it is, that Rorschach will come back for him. He’s sure Rorschach could have reached Archie and started it. He maybe could have been able to get it back to America. When he thinks about what might have happened to Rorschach when he got back - the reception that would greet an escaped felon with a crazy story about how the world’s smartest, most beloved peacemaker dropped a monster in New York - he’s less sure. Yet Dan saved Rorschach, didn’t he? Doesn’t Rorschach owe him the same if he can? Won’t Rorschach eventually notice that he hasn’t come home? That Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre haven’t been seen?
Although maybe Rorschach will think they’re hiding from him and … no, no. If Rorschach wanted to find Dan, he would. Dan knows this.
In his most ridiculous moments, he thinks of what it’ll be like when Rorschach rescues him. He’ll burst down the door, run to his side. Dan will be so, so grateful. He’ll cling to Rorschach and tell him … tell him … oh God, Dan doesn’t know. He only knows that the idea of it is the only thing that makes him feel in this blinding white hell.
There has to be a chance this will happen, he tells himself. There has to.
~*~*~
He talks to God. He hasn’t in years but now he’s trying to dig up every scrap of Hebrew he remembers. Prayers from the siddur and bits of song. They’re probably useless. Just praises to God for welcoming the Sabbath, and how can you have the Sabbath in a land where the sun doesn’t set?
Sometimes he says the Mourner’s Kaddish. When he does this he thinks about Laurie and Hollis. It probably doesn’t work that way, probably is something only meant for Jews. But what else can he do for them?
Some Jews must have died from Adrian’s monster, Dan thinks. He imagines their rabbis - old and black-robed and long-bearded, young in gray suits and skullcaps, maybe even a few women, although he’s never met one and can’t picture them - standing on the bimahs in New York City, reading long lists of names. Maybe they’ve missed one. Maybe Dan is helping them.
He makes bargains. I’ll keep the Sabbath. I’ll keep kosher. I won’t even eat corn syrup during Passover. I’ll never complain about Yom Kippur, I’ll stay in the synagogue all day and listen to every word of every prayer. No, I’ll do that for everything. Every word a person says to me. Every song I hear. I’ll tune none of it out. I’ll treasure every second I get with another human being on this planet.
He makes the promises even though he knows if he gets out he’ll be a fugitive. He’ll manage it, somehow. He has to, he will, just as long as someone lets him out of these rooms.
God never answers, although he does get the next best thing.
~*~*~
“Jon!”
He just appears in the room, his body turned toward the window, when Dan is trying to sleep. Dan pulls himself out from under the bed, and Jon looks at him with shock.
“Dreiberg? What happened to you?”
An image of himself, taken from the last time he looked in the mirror (he doesn’t know how long ago that was, some things he’s stopped caring about), comes to Dan’s mind: the thick beard, the long nails, the suit that’s become looser on his body.
“Adrian’s been holding me here. I don’t know how long,” he stumbles toward Jon, grasps onto his shoulders. “How’d you find me? Is Rorschach here? Oh God! Have you found Adrian? We need to find him. He killed Laurie!”
Dan watches as the surprise on Jon’s face fades into sadness. Jon’s mouth drops a bit, and then he speaks. “I apologize for any misunderstanding. I did not know you were here, and I have not come to rescue you.”
Dan looks up at Jon, looks for any hint that Jon could be lying, but it’s Jon and if everything Laurie told him about Jon was true, then he wouldn’t lie. “But … but you’re here. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
Jon blinks, and then sighs. “So often I have tried to be only a watcher of life. I create life now. I have watched generations of life in it’s smallest, most fragile form - things scientists have not yet discovered - live, grow and die since last I saw you, trying to be distant, trying to watch life in all its natural processes. Yet it seems even the act of watching has an influence. It imposes meaning. Sometimes I cannot see clearly because of this. Perhaps that is one of the fallacies of science. Perhaps you can understand when you watch your birds.”
Dan can only stare back in response. What?
“Jon, what the fuck are you talking about? Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Haven’t you heard Laurie is dead?”
“Yes, yes, and that does upset me. I’m sorry. I’ve seen much death these days. Feelings tend to get confused. You should sit. I have more to do here, and we will talk while I work.”
Dan sits on the bed, rubbing his eyes. He feels the mattress bounce slightly as Jon sits next to him.
“I came here out of curiosity,” Jon says. “I’m in many places in Karnak at this moment, checking the rooms for Adrian, and I cannot find him. I’m watching his televisions. I will eventually see him there, see that a problem is arising in New York, and he is fixing it.”
“He’s … he’s not even here?” Dan twists his body to look at Jon. “He’s left me here to die?”
“I do not know that,” Jon says. “I thought I would see him, but I will not. Our conversation will convince me not to get involved.”
Dan moans. “Oh God. Why is he doing this? What does he want? Why didn’t he kill me along with Laurie if he wants me to die here?”
“It is strange,” Jon admits. “It’s the sort of sadism I would expect from Blake, were he alive. I suspect Adrian has other motives at work, although I cannot guess what they are. His desires are fully unlike most human beings I have met.”
Dan snorts. “As if he’s human at all …”
“I cannot expect you to be objective about this, given your situation, but we must remember …” Jon stops, stares as if he’s noticed something. Dan looks around and sees nothing.
“What? What is it?”
“I am sorry. Elsewhere I’m looking through the old tapes of the security cameras. I see … oh dear.”
“Who? What? Is it Rorschach? Is he here?”
Jon lowers his head. “Dreiberg, Rorschach won’t be coming for you. I am not watching new tapes, anyway. I am watching old ones, and at the time I am watching, he is already dead.”
Dan can’t speak. Dead? he asks himself. Rorschach’s dead? He knew it could happen. The rational part of his mind, the part that he hated to listen to, told him Rorschach’s death was very likely. It’s not the same as hearing it, though. It’s not the same at all.
“I’m watching the video,” Jon says. “I’m watching you and Laurie, sleeping in the pool room.”
He was dead before then? Dan can’t believe any of this.
“I see her waking up beside you. She looks like she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. I’ve never seen her like this before. I’ve seen her sad so many times but … she’s moving her hand over you, like she’s ready to shake you awake. She pauses. She doesn’t do it.”
“Laurie?” Dan whispers, as if she’s alive, as if she can hear. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jon says. “She’s walking away from you. She’s naked. I can’t see anymore. She’s out of the camera frame. I’m searching through tapes of the other rooms, watching on the multiple screens. Ah, I’ve found her. She’s in the display room. She’s looking through the weapons. Her finger runs along the edge of a sword. She doesn’t bleed. I suppose it’s dull.”
“Are you saying that Laurie …?”
“She’s found an urn, is looking at it like she doesn’t know why it’s there. She’s opened it There are pills inside. She breaks one. She smells what’s inside. She takes out another and grasps it to her chest. She’s crying again.”
The image comes together for Dan before Jon can describe it. Her coming back to him, nestling up against him, maybe giving a gesture of good-bye before …. His fingers claw at the bed sheets. He trembles.
“Jon.” He squeezes the name past the lump in his throat. “How did Rorschach die?”
Jon returns Dan’s desperate, pleading stare with a look of sadness. “Dreiberg, I don’t think you want to …”
“Tell me!” Dan knows it’s bad, knows he won’t like what he hears, but if his heart needs to break, let it all break now. Hearing about Laurie makes him want to howl, and he can’t go through this pain again.
Jon closes the small, shining stars of his eyes, opens them when he speaks. “You must understand. Adrian had done so much to create the peace, ruined so many lives. I am not without feeling, despite what you may think. I take what Adrian said about the greater tragedy of undoing the peace millions died for to heart. It strikes me on a personal level, thinking of Wally, of what will surely happen to Janey. As you know, Rorschach didn’t understand that. I tried to stop him, but he insisted on going back. I … I couldn’t allow that to happen.”
Jon turns away from Dan. “He allowed me no other solution. Dreiberg, he begged me to do it …”
“I keep wanting to cry,” Dan hears Laurie say, “but my throat. It’s not big enough.”
“How …,” Dan’s voice cracks. “How could you?”
“Life is precious. If I were to allow their sacrifice to come undone …”
“‘Life is precious?’” Dan yells. “What about his life? Didn’t his matter? For that matter, what about Laurie’s life? You keep saying you’re upset but it’s like she didn’t even mean anything to you. Is the woman you loved less than some microbe?”
Jon glares at him. “You do not know what I feel, Dreiberg. You accuse me of a lack of feeling? Think of what you’ve done to me and ask yourself how a man of more ‘feeling’ would deal with you!”
Dan shakes with rage. His first instinct is to spit back at Jon every ugly thing Laurie ever said about him. Then he wants to scream things that are unhelpful and unfair. Do you know how much you hurt her? Why’d you keep her from me if you couldn’t love her the way she needed? Who gave you the authority to decide you could kill him? If you’re so fucking powerful, why couldn’t you have just stopped this?
Yet his anger ultimately can’t outlast his grief. He’s lost Rorschach. He’s lost Laurie a second time.
Jon stands up, turns his back as Dan starts to cry.
“As I wanted to say before, I see even the act of observation, of watching, hurts human beings. How much more would interference?”
“You … you’re not going to help me out? You won’t set me free?”
Jon says nothing for a moment. “I apologize.”
“No!” Dan chokes, stands up. “No, please. Don’t leave me here. I can’t stay here. I’m running out of food. I can’t stand this light and my thoughts and … please, I can’t be alone!”
But then, in a flash of blue light, he is.
It starts with a scream that turns into a screech. Then screaming isn’t enough. The doors crack in half, splinter under his kicks. He rips the remnants off the hinges. The chair is next, then the bed. He uses the debris to smash the ceramic sink, the toilet. Then he tries the mirror, but it won’t shatter, shows him back his haggard, overgrown complexion.
Of course, he thinks. He could use the pieces to kill himself, and wouldn’t that be a shame?
He lies on the bathroom floor, surrounded by the ceramic pieces. He’s all out of screaming, and mostly out of tears. Eventually, he sleeps.
~*~*~
The straps are tight around his wrists, so tight that when he pulls on them he bleeds. Yet they don’t hurt. Not really. Twilight Lady stands in front of him, and when she’s with him, here in the dark, nothing ever really hurts.
Her boot wraps about his leg. She clings to him and her breasts press hard against his chest as she runs her fingers through his hair. Dan opens his mouth and they’re kissing. There’s a sick feeling in his stomach. She’s so beautiful, so sexy, but …
“I … I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t …”
“It’s okay. We don’t have to rush things.”
Dan’s eyes open. Oh God, he thinks, that’s not her voice.
Laurie pulls away from him. As she looks into his eyes she’s smiling, but the makeup is running down her cheeks.
“We’ve got as long as it takes,” she says, her mouth filling up with foam.
“No!”
She falls, lying in a heap at his feet. Dan pulls against his bonds, but even though she’s so close, he can’t reach her.
“Pathetic,” a voice rasps.
Dan looks up, his heart pounding. Rorschach walks toward him, a white light behind him. He pulls open his trenchcoat, lets it slide off his body.
“Thousands dead, Daniel.” His jacket comes off. He pulls loose his scarf, rips open his shirt to reveal a blood-stained undershirt. Behind him the light is getting bigger. “Thousands dead and this is where I find you.”
Dan inhales sharply. With a swift motion Rorschach pulls off his mask and hat, revealing his face. Black streaks, like makeup, like ink, run down from his eyes. The light behind him is so bright, so close.
“This is how you help me?” he asks.
Dan tries to scream, but nothing comes out as the light engulfs Rorschach, blinds Dan.
He wakes, but the relief he feels only lasts a moment before he remembers they’re gone, remembers the pain. It’s always like this now. It probably always will be.
~*~*~
It isn’t too much longer.
Dan sits in the hall, his legs pulled to his chest, his head buried in his knees. He looks up as there’s a rattling behind the door: the impenetrable one, the one that won’t break. It opens and Adrian is there, dressed immaculately in a tight purple sweater and black pants, handcuffs in his hands. His eyes look over Dan like he’s a ledger, like Adrian’s calculating some sort of work done.
“Fucker,” a high pitched voice inside Dan whispers. “Asshole.”
A small smile tugs at the end of Adrian’s lips. He holds up the cuffs. “Come, Dan.”
“Don’t,” says another voice, gruff and raspy now. “You can’t.”
“Dan?” Adrian asks, a harder edge to his voice now.
Dan stands up, holds out his wrists. He doesn’t even wince as the cuffs click around them.
~*~*~
“You may not believe me, but I meant to come back earlier,” Adrian walks along the table in the dining hall, his finger tracing the edge. He pulls it up and checks for dust. “Seems your friend had what he thought was a trump card. No matter. It’s been taken care of before too much damage was done.”
Dan sits at the head of the table, his hands cuffed in front of him. He’s in the same seat where he and Rorschach attacked Adrian. He feels small here, wants to slump down in the chair. He isn’t used to being in a place with this much space anymore.
“Means to intimidate you. Letting him win.”
“What did he do?” Dan asks.
“That’s not your concern.” Adrian slams his hand down on the table, making Dan flinch. “We have much to discuss, and while I appreciate your new cooperation, I’m smart enough to know that you’re capable of another outburst. And I will not abide that.”
“Outburst? What are you, a child?”
“Let me tell you a bit about of your situation. I’m a hands-on type of businessman. I don’t leave things to contractors. I know every inch of Karnak: its steel doors, its impenetrable walls. With a push of a button I can see anywhere I want. And if I’m not looking, I have a myriad amount of security systems. Now, you’re a smart man. I found out you were the one who connected this all to me. That’s impressive. I’d like to think you’d have had a harder time if I hadn’t made my password so easy to guess, but still, impressive.”
“As if he respects you …”
“So, perhaps you could escape. It’s a reasonable possibility. I’m as fallible as any other human being.”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe that for a fucking second, Dan.”
“If you get out, we’re thousands of miles from the nearest scientific outpost. Now, I haven’t been able to find your ship. Maybe you could reach that, but the Antarctic winds are far from the best conditions for a little craft. And it’s been over a month.
“Still,” Adrian moves so that he’s sitting on the table, his arms crossed in front of him, “maybe I’ve underestimated you. Maybe you can get out, can fly your ship home. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘why?’ ‘Why would I do that?’ You’re a fugitive and a criminal. In addition to illegal vigilantism, you’ve aided a dangerous killer in escaping prison, burglarized my office and attempted to murder me. How do you think the police would deal with you? Even if you were to hide, do you think I wouldn’t do everything in my power to find you?”
“Nothing is so hopeless, Daniel. Nothing.”
“You may think you have a trump card in what you know, in your connections. You have quite a bit of money. Enough to afford a very, very good lawyer, certainly. I don’t know what sort of lawyer would argue that it was right for you to kill one of the world’s most respected philanthropists because you were under the bizarre delusion that he was going to kill half New York with a fake space alien, but I suppose ‘temporary insanity’ is as good an explanation as any. You were grieving over your lover’s suicide, after all. It’s reasonable.”
Adrian leans forward. His face is almost an inch from Dan’s. Dan stares straight ahead, won’t look into his eyes.
“Do you know how much money I make, Dan?”
Dan shrugs.
“Oh come on, guess.”
“More than me,” Dan drones.
“Even with the recent economic crash, I’m going to make multiple times your worth in one year.”
“That’s great. I’m happy for you.”
The backhand slap cracks across his face. Dan bites his lip through the pain, and then looks back at Adrian.
“What are you doing? Fight! Hit him back!”
“If you can put aside the sarcasm, answer the real question. You can afford a very good lawyer. Do you think I can’t afford a better one? Or buy yours out? Do you really think you could win?”
Dan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
“So,” Adrian says, drawing the word out like it’s a piece of candy he’s trying to savor. “What’s next for our little hero? Prison. Not a nice prison, either. Not a prison where you get a kitchen and a private working bathroom - if you hadn’t broken it, anyway. A prison full of the people you put away. Your friend was able to survive it for a little while,” he grabs Dan’s collar, holds him still. “Will you be?”
“Don’t need to do this. Don’t need to compromise. Can find a way.”
“No,” Dan says. “I guess not.”
Adrian stands up, lets his fingers run through Dan’s hair as walks behind the chair, pets Dan’s head.
“Don’t let him treat you like this!”
“Here are your real options.” Adrian paces the length of the table, his back to Dan. “You are not leaving Karnak. Ever. This is not negotiable,” he reaches the opposite end, stops and looks back. “You can, however, choose how to spend your time. If you feel the need for more tantrums, you can go back to the servants’ quarters. I’ll bring you more food - I’m not a monster, but otherwise it’ll be much like it was before.”
Dan imagines the prospect, can’t stop himself from shaking.
“Are you a man? Don’t show him weakness. Don’t show him you’re soft.”
“Or, you could stay with me.”
Dan blinks. “What?”
“When I’m at Karnak, anyway.” Adrian folds his hands behind his back. “I don’t know where I’ll put you when I’m off to business in America. Wherever it is, you’ll have luxuries. More food, books, films, music … whatever else you want within reason. I can’t allow you to make any more toys, but you don’t really need them anymore. You’ll be comfortable, have most of what you need.”
“Like he knows what you need? Like he knows what you want?”
“And what do I do? Am I going to be your servant?”
“Servant?” Adrian asks, genuine surprise in his voice. “There’s nothing you can do for me I can’t provide for myself, Dan. No, you are my prisoner. If you behave, you get the better cage. That’s all.”
Dan’s heart pounds as Adrian circles the other end of the table. The weight of the prospect in front of him feels closer, more ominous, as Adrian advances.
“Don’t do it.”
“You can’t accept this, Dan. It isn’t right.”
“Wants to make you his pet.”
“He’s a murderer! You want to spend the rest of your life living with a murderer? Pretending what he did was okay?”
“Can’t eat out of his hand. Even in the face of madness, have to defy him.”
“It’s not right, Dan.”
“It’s not right.”
Adrian is at his side, has his hand on Dan’s shoulder. In his mind’s eye, though, Adrian doesn’t matter. They do. They stare at him from their seats at the table, and for a moment his heart swells with grief under the blank, reflective plane of black on white, under the sadness and desperation in her eyes. Then, in another moment, his grief shatters into anger and they are gone.
They’ve abandoned him.
“What do you say?” Adrian asks, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “Are you willing to be good? Are you willing to behave?”
Dan nods. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
End Part One.