Consciousness was a broken thing.
Rorschach drifted through fragments of awareness like debris scattered across dark water. Sound came in pieces—the grinding collapse of reality, distant and distorted. Light pulsed in broken intervals, too bright then gone entirely, leaving afterimages burned into failing vision.
Pain should have been overwhelming. The spider-limbs had torn through vital tissue, shattered bone, severed things meant to stay connected. But the pain was distant now, separated from him by layers of shock and blood loss. What remained was cold—a numbness spreading from his extremities inward, claiming territory his body could no longer defend.
He was falling. Had been falling since the Child withdrew the limbs and let him crumple. But there was no sense of motion anymore, no up or down, just the sensation of existence sliding away like sand through fingers too weak to close.
His thoughts fragmented.
Miles reaching for him across the sealing breach, fingers extended, face desperate behind the cracked mask. The image flickered, replaced by the Child's calm eyes studying him like a completed experiment. Then Gwen turning away in the command center, her expression carefully neutral, refusing to engage with someone who'd chosen isolation over alliance.
The journal's words tried to surface—decades of observations, conclusions, principles carved into reality through sheer repetitive force. But there was no strength left to reach for them. The certainty that had sustained him, that had become indistinguishable from identity, felt distant. Still present but untethered, floating somewhere just beyond the failing architecture of his mind.
The void continued collapsing around his body. What remained of the memory-alley was dust now, brick and Web-thread dissolving into nothing. The Child's domain was retracting, pulling back from this discarded space like a tide abandoning a corpse on the shore.
Rorschach's breathing had stopped entirely. Heart stuttering irregularly, too damaged to maintain rhythm. Biology asserting its final authority over will.
Dying.
Acceptable. Expected. The logical conclusion to walking alone into something designed to kill him.
The void settled into its terminal collapse, reality folding inward to erase the space where he'd—
A disruption.
Sharp. Discordant. A vibration that cut through the silence like a blade, frequency completely out of sync with the void's natural dissolution. The fall slowed—not stopped, but resisted. Something external was forcing reality to notice him again, to acknowledge his presence despite the void's attempt to erase it.
Rorschach's remaining consciousness couldn't process what was happening. Couldn't understand why the collapse had stuttered, why existence was suddenly fighting over his failing body instead of letting it dissolve into constituent atoms.
Then the Web-space tore open.
Not the gentle unfolding of a stable portal. This was violence—reality ripped apart with brutal efficiency, a jagged wound in space held open through sheer force of will and technical precision. Light flooded through, harsh and immediate, burning into his fading vision.
A figure swung through on a web-line tuned to the disruption's frequency, entrance fast and controlled. Boots hit the dissolving ground, posture already shifting to absorb the unstable space's attempts to reject the intrusion.
Gwen Stacy.
Even through the gray haze of dying, Rorschach recognized her. The way she moved—economical, precise, every motion serving a purpose. She took in the scene with a single sweep of her masked gaze: his broken body, the shattered mask, blood pooling beneath him in quantities that suggested seconds rather than minutes remaining.
Her jaw tightened behind the mask. That was the only reaction she showed.
No words. No accusations about him walking away, abandoning the team, choosing to die alone rather than fight together. No apologies for the things said in the command center, the alliance broken before it could form. No forgiveness, explicit or implied.
She just acted.
Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, web-cutters appearing from her belt to slice through the remaining spider-limbs still embedded in his torso. Each cut was precise—severing the corrupted tissue without causing additional damage, removing the foreign material that was keeping him pinned and preventing what little healing his body might still manage.
The limbs fell away, dissolving into black ichor. Rorschach's body tried to collapse further, muscles no longer capable of maintaining even the suggestion of structure. Gwen caught him before he hit the ground, one arm supporting his weight while her other hand moved to assess the wounds.
Bad. Worse than bad. The spider-limbs had torn through his side, punctured a lung, shattered ribs into fragments that had probably already done internal damage she couldn't see. His leg was destroyed—bone visible through the tear, tendons severed. The shoulder was gone, joint pulverized beyond any field repair.
She worked anyway.
Web-foam from specialized cartridges, designed for emergency medical applications. She packed the worst wounds with it, sealing them against further blood loss even as the void around them continued its collapse. The space was actively trying to tear her apart now, gravity folding in impossible directions, Web-threads snapping with sounds like breaking cables.
Gwen ignored it all. Her focus remained absolute, hands moving through the medical protocol with the kind of speed that came from having done this too many times before. Save the dying teammate. Worry about philosophy later.
She didn't do this because she agreed with him. Didn't save him because she'd forgiven his choices, his abandonment, his cold certainty that everyone else's methods were wrong. Didn't even do it because she believed he deserved to live.
She did it because letting him die here—abandoned in the Child's domain, discarded as unnecessary data—would mean the Child was right.
Right that isolation was evolution. Right that connection was weakness. Right that people who refused to compromise should be left to die alone in the dark, forgotten and irrelevant.
Gwen refused to give the Child that victory.
Rorschach's eyes had closed. His breathing—what little remained—was imperceptible. She checked his pulse, found it threadbare and irregular, barely present. Seconds left. Maybe less.
She hooked her arm under his shoulders and lifted.
His weight was dead, unresponsive. Blood soaked through her costume where his wounds pressed against her. The void fought her, space folding inward to prevent the escape, gravity pulling in directions that made movement feel like swimming through concrete.
Gwen's muscles strained. Her web-line, still anchored to the tear she'd made, pulled taut as she dragged him across the unraveling Web-threads beneath their feet. Each step felt like miles. The space beneath them dissolved, revealing nothing—not darkness, just absence. Void in its purest form.
A Web-strand snapped. Then another. The path behind them ceased to exist, erased as thoroughly as if it had never been real. The void was imploding, accelerating its collapse now that it understood something was trying to steal back what had been abandoned.
Gwen's teeth clenched behind her mask. She fired another web-line, creating a secondary anchor point, and used the momentum to swing them both forward. Rorschach's body hung limp in her grip, bleeding, broken, indistinguishable from a corpse except for the faintest flutter of a pulse beneath her fingers.
The tear she'd created was closing. Reality knitting itself back together, rejecting the intrusion. She had seconds.
Her free hand went to her belt, fingers finding the frequency modulator she'd jury-rigged from Nexus equipment. One chance. She keyed in the resonance pattern for stable space, praying the Nexus was still broadcasting, still intact enough to provide a anchor point.
The modulator shrieked. A portal ripped open ahead of them—jagged, unstable, barely large enough for two bodies. Beyond it, she could see the Nexus's familiar architecture, distorted and flickering but present.
The void folded completely. The ground beneath them vanished. They fell into nothing—
Gwen fired her last web-line through the portal, caught something on the other side, and used her remaining strength to yank them through as the void imploded behind them.
The sensation of transition was violent. Reality compressed, expanded, compressed again. Temperature spiked, then plummeted. Sound inverted, became pressure, resolved back into recognizable frequencies.
They hit solid ground on the Nexus side, momentum carrying them into a roll that Gwen barely controlled. She wrapped her body around Rorschach's, taking the impact against her own ribs and shoulders, protecting the worst of his injuries from additional trauma.
They skidded to a stop against a support pillar. The portal sealed behind them with a sound like tearing metal, space knitting itself closed, erasing the path back to the collapsing void.
Silence followed.
Not the oppressive, malevolent silence of the Child's domain. Just quiet.
Gwen lay there for a moment, breathing hard, ribs aching where she'd taken the impact. Her costume was soaked with blood—his blood, most of it. She could feel his weight against her, completely motionless.
For a second, she thought she'd been too late. That she'd dragged a corpse through collapsing reality for nothing, that he'd died in transit and she'd just refused to acknowledge it.
Then she felt it. The faintest rise and fall of his chest. Breathing. Barely. Impossibly. But present.
Gwen pushed herself up carefully, easing Rorschach's body onto his back. His mask was shattered, ink patterns struggling to maintain coherence over the broken fabric. His face beneath—what she could see through the damage—was gray, lips blue, skin cold to the touch.
She checked the web-foam seals. Holding. The bleeding had slowed to a seep rather than a torrent. His pulse was thread-thin but steady, no longer stuttering. The lung was still collapsed, the shoulder destroyed, the leg barely attached.
But he was alive.
Not whole. Not functional. Not anything resembling recovered.
Just alive.
Gwen sat back on her heels, staring at the broken man she'd pulled from the void. The man who'd walked away from everyone, chosen isolation over alliance, fought the Child alone because he'd been so certain that his way was the only way that mattered.
The man who'd been proven wrong so completely that the Child had simply discarded him as unnecessary.
She should feel something. Vindication maybe. Or satisfaction that his methods had failed, that his certainty had crumbled against something that understood him better than he understood himself.
She felt nothing. Just tired. Bone-deep exhaustion from holding together a defense while he'd been gone, from watching other Totems die because the team was fractured, from having to make the choice to save someone she'd specifically said she wouldn't fight beside again.
Behind her, footsteps approached. Multiple sets. The other Totems responding to the portal's activation, to the frequency spike of her emergency extraction.
Miles arrived first, already asking questions she didn't want to answer. Peter followed, medical kit in hand, taking over the triage before Gwen could explain what she'd found. Others gathered at a distance, whispering, trying to understand what had happened.
Gwen stood up slowly, her legs threatening to give out. She looked at Rorschach one last time—broken, unconscious, covered in blood and web-foam, barely clinging to existence.
A ghost denied his ending.
Not redeemed. The Child had proven his philosophy led inevitably to isolation and failure.
Not forgiven. He'd still chosen to abandon everyone, still walked away believing he was the only one who understood what needed to be done.
Just pulled back from the edge. Saved not because he deserved it, but because letting him die alone would have meant accepting the Child's verdict.
Miles was talking to her, asking how she'd found him, what had happened. Gwen didn't answer. She turned away, pushing through the gathering crowd, needing distance from the weight of the choice she'd made.
She'd saved him because someone had to.
Because refusing to let people die alone—even people who chose isolation, even people whose certainty had nearly destroyed everything—was what separated them from the thing they were fighting.
Behind her, Peter worked to stabilize Rorschach's failing body. The other Totems murmured among themselves, trying to process what they were seeing.
And in the medical bay where they would eventually move him, Rorschach remained unconscious, hovering in the space between death and recovery, unaware that someone had refused to let him disappear into the dark.
The ghost lived.
For now.