Actions

Work Header

MAN OF HIS WORD

Chapter 4: SCUM

Summary:

      Hands, reaching.

      Cloth, binding.

      Rorschach, snapping finger-bones.

Chapter Text

      “Now? Are we leaving now?”

      Rorschach sits pants-up on the toilet seat, fingering through a Reader’s Digest, warming his last few candies in the palm of the other hand. He’d made a small bag stretch several days – tactic from childhood, Freddy thinks. Used to do the same thing himself with a handful of saltine crackers, when Underwood would get too twitchy on the belt.

      Outside, footfalls. Heavy. Multiple. A man drives a pen into another man’s throat and the blood comes thin and fast into the air. Body’s hauled over the railing. Sound of impact. Screaming. Sirens.

      The silhouette of Big Figure stalking down the dusty corridor, narrowly avoiding the violence with the help of his loyal meathead patrol.

      Silence.

      “No.” Rorschach says. “Wait.”

      Leakage and livewires twist over the concrete like jungle vines and Freddy again remembers the tigers, Kathryn tucked under his arm, watching in wide-eyed fascination as the cat moved through the underbrush and into the river: unheard, unseen, unbroken. Tall vegetation blending stripes like illusory magic.

      Freddy watches Rorschach stalk up to the cell door, swallowing the last of the M&M’s like pills, and feels his guts coil in.

      Rorschach undoes the top half of his coveralls; pools the fabric over a pair of arms Freddy’s only ever seen in old movies and dirty dreams. The muscles strain as Rorschach rips into it, taut, tight, twitch lax again. He throws the shredded remnant over his nape like a towel, says something to Big Figure that Fred’s too numb to understand.

      His fingers go gnarled in the paper sheets.

      “Should I do that too?”

      “Stay where you are.”

      Freddy fidgets, but he stays.

      Big Figure and his goons circle like a pack of wild dogs. It isn’t long before they’ve attracted an audience, all calling out for a piece of the turkey. Flash of conversation, mottled in the mess of it, until something is said that makes them disperse. Man with a circular saw comes from God knows where, separating out any stragglers. Rorschach undeterred. Rorschach steady, immovable, dangerous. The curve of his chest, and the delicate freckling of his shoulder-blades under the low, low cut of his undershirt. He says something else, something shittier; fury pulls hard on the goons like a bowstring until someone roars out and the tension finally snaps.

      Hands, reaching.

      Cloth, binding.

      Rorschach, snapping finger-bones.

      It happens fast. He blinks, nearly misses it. Red skin and slobber flying, then blood, then fat, then marrow, thick. Rorschach takes half of it on his face without flinching, and the hands dangle limp, bodyless, trapped still between the bars.

      (Freddy thinks he’s falling in love.)

      No time to sit on it, though – maybe for the best. Similarly violent lives have led them to similar patterns of thinking, and the way they have to think is fast. Krueger huddles in the bed, hands off the frame, alight with intrigue or morbid adoration. Both. With the breadth of his smile, you could just about count every one of his teeth. Something’s coming. Sparks bite the air like the first dredge of a midday forest fire. Blade shrieking on metal, pop of a lock, chin in hand, green vulture eyes waiting for a pass at the meat.

      The cell door swings open on protesting hinges and the pigs rush in to be slaughtered, lined up real neat, one at a time.

      Rorschach’s vision rolls to find a wire snaking under the bars. He directs the first man’s head clean into the ceramic bowl and leaves a perfectly head-shaped imprint in its wake. Water pools from the artificial wound, grows outwards towards the fray, swallowing first the shape of the body, then the second man's shoes, then the severed end of the wire-piece.

      Jump, palpate, convulsion, brain-fry, history.

      Big Figure turns at a whispered “Two-Nothing” and takes off alone into the dark.

     “Leaving now,” Rorschach says, half to remind Freddy of their motive, half because he doesn’t know when they’ll get the luxury of an empty hall again.

      For once in his life, Krueger’s happy to listen, laughing so hard he almost pukes.