October 19rd. Nexus. Air tastes like ozone and stale coffee. The hum of a thousand dying universes is a constant noise in the bones. It never stops.
The central monitors in the command hub flickered, scrubbing through multiversal static until they locked onto a feed from Earth-218. The aftermath of the Cocoon Incident was still being calculated, the damage reports a scrolling litany of broken worlds. We were supposed to be watching for structural decay, for the bleeding edges of reality. Instead, we found something worse.
We found a symptom.
Miles Morales stood closest to the screen, his shoulders tight. Gwen Stacy leaned against a console, arms crossed, her usual kinetic energy replaced by a heavy stillness. Jessica Drew, ever the professional, zoomed in on the footage, her expression a mask of grim analysis. And then there was Ham. The cartoon pig watched with wide, unblinking eyes, a funhouse mirror reflecting the gravity of the room.
The footage was garbage. Shaky, low-resolution, filmed on some local device. But the subject was clear. A humanoid figure, walking through the rubble of what looked like a city square. It moved with a disjointed grace, too fluid to be natural. It wore dark, practical clothing. And its face… its face was a void. A shifting, boiling pattern of black and white ink, contained within the rough shape of a mask. An imitation.
"Magnify," Jessica commanded, her voice cutting through the hum.
The image sharpened. The ink-blots on the creature's faceplate roiled, coalescing and dissolving in random, asymmetrical patterns. It was a perfect, horrifying echo of my own.
Silence descended. It was a heavy, suffocating thing. Even Gwen, who could always be counted on to fill a void with a sharp remark or a nervous drum solo on a tabletop, said nothing. Her eyes weren't on the screen anymore. They were on me. They all were.
Miles finally broke the quiet. His voice was low, stripped of its usual warmth. "Quarantine it. Now. Earth-218 and the five adjacent sectors. Full lockdown. Nothing in, nothing out. Send probes, but no personnel."
He turned to me then. I hadn't moved from my spot by the viewport, watching the infinite tapestry of the Web of Life and Destiny. My reflection was a faint ghost on the reinforced trans-reality glass, and beyond it, on the monitor, the creature's face stared back. For a moment, our masks overlaid. Two voids, staring out from the same space.
"...It's wearing your face," Miles said. It wasn't an accusation. It was a statement of fact, troubled and confused.
I looked from my reflection to the thing on the screen. The patterns were similar. The medium was the same. But the meaning was absent. "No," I replied, my voice flat. Gravelly. The sound of a man who talks more to himself than to others. "It's wearing an imitation of purpose. Difference is subtle. But fatal."
The creature on the screen cocked its head, as if it could hear me through the layers of reality. The ink on its mask swirled into a shape that was almost a question mark, before dissolving back into chaos.
October 20th. The rot spreads. Not from the quarantined sectors, but from within. Fear is a contagion. More potent than any dimensional plague.
The whispers started within hours. I could hear them in the mess hall, in the training rooms, in the corridors that twisted through the Nexus like veins. They followed me—a susurrus of doubt and suspicion.
"He was there when the Cocoon broke…" "…like attracts like, right?" "…his methods, they're just as monstrous. Maybe it… called it into being."
The Spider-Army, this collection of impossibly optimistic children and battle-weary veterans, began to fracture along a new fault line. Me. Some defended my presence. They'd seen what I could do, what I was willing to do. They argued my brutal pragmatism was the only reason the Weaver's children hadn't consumed us all during the initial breach. They were the minority.
The others looked at me and saw the monster on the screen. Gwen avoided my gaze entirely now. If we passed in a hallway, her eyes would find a sudden, intense interest in a wall panel or a patch of floor. Jessica kept her distance, her hand often resting near the bio-electric emitters on her suit. A warning. A precaution. They saw a problem, and I was holding the same shape.
It didn't matter. Their opinions are wind. Their fear is a tool. But the isolation was a tactical disadvantage. Harder to gather information when the rats scurry from your shadow.
Only one of them approached me without hostility. It was, predictably, the one who made the least sense.
I was in my designated alcove—a bare room with a cot, a footlocker, and a desk. Eating. A can of cold beans. Food is fuel. Flavor is a distraction. I heard the soft thump-thump of his cartoonish feet stopping at my doorway.
"Knock knock," said Spider-Ham.
I didn't look up. "Door's open."
He waddled in, hands behind his back. "Whatcha eatin', pal? Looks… grim."
"It's beans."
"Yeah, I can see that," he said, leaning against the doorframe. "You know, you eat like your personality—burnt and flavorless."
His attempt at humor was clumsy. A child's tool. I finished the beans and set the can down with a metallic clink. "Did you need something?"
"Just checkin' in. The others, they're spooked. Walking on eggshells around you. Me, I figure if you were gonna snap and turn into an ink monster, you'd have done it already. Too much paperwork." He grinned, a wide, disarming expression that did not belong in this place of grim realities.
I remained silent. He took that as an invitation to continue. The pig's honesty was his primary weapon—a blunt, absurd instrument that logic couldn't parry.
He gestured a white-gloved hand toward my face. "Y'know, you and it… you're both hiding behind ink."
The statement was simplistic. Wrong. "Mask isn't hiding," I said, the words worn smooth from repetition in the confines of my own skull. "It's revealing. Shows what's underneath—the real face. The rot."
Ham tilted his head. The cartoonish levity in his eyes receded, replaced by something sharper, more profound than I would have thought possible. "Maybe," he said, his voice losing its high-pitched comedic edge. "But what if the rot's looking back? All that ink… it's just a mirror, right? Masks can't tell who's wearing who. Maybe it's not copying you."
"Maybe you're both… the same kind of thing," he finished, his tone gentle. "You just write it down. It just eats it."
He left then. He didn't wait for a reply. The silence he left behind was heavier than the one before he arrived. The taste of cold beans turned to ash in my mouth. A simple thought from a simple creature. A cartoon pig. And it had found a crack in the foundation I had built for thirty years.
Masks can't tell who's wearing who.
Later. The Nexus cycles to its designated night period, the ambient light dimming to a low thrum. Sleep is a luxury. Clarity is a necessity. I stood before a reflective web-panel in the deserted observation deck. The Nexus equivalent of a mirror. It was a sheet of captured light, shimmering and unstable.
My reflection stared back. The familiar trench coat, the hat. The blank face. But tonight, it wasn't blank. The web-panel warped the image slightly, ripples disturbing the surface like water. And in those ripples, the ink-blots on my mask seemed to… move. A faint, almost imperceptible distortion. The same nauseating fluidity I'd seen in the footage from Earth-218.
I reached up to remove my hat, then went to pull off the mask. It was a nightly ritual. A moment to breathe air that didn't taste of cloth and stale sweat. But my hand stopped. It hovered, inches from my face, trembling slightly. A tremor of hesitation. I had not hesitated in decades.
What was I afraid of? Seeing my face? Walter Kovacs is the mask I wear during the day. A pathetic, forgotten man. Rorschach is the reality. This face is the truth.
But what if the pig was right?
What if the rot's looking back?
With a deep breath, I pulled the mask off. The face beneath was pale, lined with exhaustion. Unremarkable. I stared at it for a long moment, then prepared to put my true face back on.
I pulled the fabric over my head. For a split second, as the two layers of latex and embedded viscogel settled, the ink pattern did not stabilize. It swirled. Violently. A chaotic vortex of black on white, a maelstrom of nothingness that mirrored the Child's fluid faceplate perfectly. It was a storm contained on my face, and for one sickening, terrifying moment, I felt a presence in it. Something looking out from my own eyes that was not me.
Then, it settled. The familiar, symmetrical blot. Stable. Unmoving. My face.
A whisper, so faint I thought it was the hum of the Nexus, slithered into the silence of the room. It sounded like dry leaves skittering across pavement. It came from my belt, from the sealed pouch where I kept my journal.
"Masks… reveal."
It was my own philosophy, my own words, whispered back at me from the dark.
My quarters. The room was cold. The containment case sat on my desk, a gleaming poly-alloy box with a quantum-lock display. It was designed to hold items of immense trans-dimensional power. Inside was a simple, leather-bound book filled with my writing.
I stared at it for a long time. The whisper still echoed in my ears. I knew what was in that book. Facts. Observations. The filth of the world, cataloged and condemned. But now… now I felt a presence from it. A pressure against the inside of the case.
My fingers keyed in the release code. The lock hissed open. I didn't open the journal itself. Just the casing.
Inside, the book trembled. A faint, almost imperceptible vibration. The ink on the cover, a simple Rorschach blot I'd made myself, seemed darker. It pulsed. A slow, black heartbeat that synced with the frantic hammering in my own chest.
I would not touch it. Not yet.
I took a separate, clean sheet of paper from my footlocker and a pen. An addendum. A field note on a new kind of decay. My own. My hand was steady as I wrote. It had to be.
Addendum, October 21st: Night. Nexus. The cartoon sees truth. A simple axiom for a simple creature has exposed a flaw in the system. My system. Mask reveals rot. Have always believed this. Unquestioning. But the question has changed. The variable is no longer the world, but the observer. Question no longer what mask hides. Question is—if I remove it, what looks back?
As my pen scratched the last word, I saw it. Faint lines of ink were appearing beneath my own handwriting. Not from my pen. They were bleeding up from the paper itself, a ghostly secretion from the page. They formed letters, words—a perfect, mirrored version of the sentence I had just written.
?kcab skool tahw ,ti evomer I fi—si noitseuQ
The journal in its case pulsed again, faster this time. The mask on my face felt cold, like a stranger's hand. The ink on the page and the ink on my face were one and the same. The rot was looking back.
And it was learning to write.
————————————————————————————————————
The wind whipped across the rooftop, a cold and lonely sound that scraped against the neon-scarred canyons of the city. Below them, holographic ghosts flickered and died on the sides of decaying skyscrapers. It was a city holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
On the precipice, the silence between Miles and Gwen was heavier than the smog-choked air. Gwen paced, her movements tight and angry, the white of her suit a stark slash against the bruised twilight.
"He's a disease, Miles," she said, her voice cutting through the wind. "The team is fracturing, can't you see it? Peter's barely speaking, Jessica is second-guessing every move. Rorschach brings rot wherever he goes."
Miles didn't turn from his vigil over the glittering, sick metropolis. He felt the truth of her words like a stone in his gut. The easy camaraderie they once shared had been replaced by suspicion. Their war room felt less like a sanctuary and more like a cage, the shadows in the corners growing longer every time Rorschach spoke in his guttural monotone.
"The rot was already here, Gwen," Miles said, his voice low and weary. He was so, so tired. "He's just the first one to call it by its name." He finally turned to face her, his mask retracted. The doubt was plain on his young face, a deep-seated exhaustion that had nothing to do with a lack of sleep. "What's worse," he admitted, the words tasting like ash, "is that he might be right."
Gwen stopped pacing, her own masked eyes widening in disbelief. "Right about what? That we need to break people to fix them? That the only answer to this… this infection… is to become just as monstrous? He sees the world in black and white, Miles. No mercy. No hope."
"And what has our hope gotten us?" Miles shot back, gesturing to the sprawling darkness below. "We're losing. This thing isn't just in their blood anymore; it's in their heads. It's a plague of whispers, of paranoia. Rorschach's methods are ugly, they're cruel… but they're working. He gets answers. He stops the spread."
Gwen stepped closer, her voice dropping to a fierce, terrified whisper. "And what happens when we can't tell the difference between his methods and our mission? If you start thinking like him, you'll end up like him."
The accusation hung between them, more chilling than the rooftop wind. He was the leader. The responsibility for their souls, not just their lives, rested on his shoulders. This was the fear that kept him awake—not the biological horror creeping through the city's veins, but the ideological one seeping into their own. The idea that to fight a monster that corrupts everything it touches, you had to let it corrupt you first.
Miles looked down at his gloved hands, half-expecting to see them stained. He'd invited Rorschach in, hoping for an edge. Now he feared he had opened the door to a cure that was indistinguishable from the disease.
————————————————————————————————————
The rain fell on the city like a punishment. Each drop struck the grimy window of Rorschach's apartment with the finality of a gavel, washing nothing clean. Inside, the air was stale, thick with the cloying scent of wet wool and cold beans. The city's decay seeped through the walls, a sickness of the soul made manifest in concrete and rust.
He sat at a scarred wooden desk, the ink-blot face of his mask pulled up just enough to expose a grim, determined mouth. Before him lay the journal, its pages filled with a cramped, unforgiving script. His pen had been charting a new kind of filth, a pattern that defied the simple depravity of man. It wasn't a conspiracy of criminals, but a whisper in the city's architecture, a wrongness in the geometry of the alleyways. It spread like a cancer through the power lines and sewers, a creeping madness he could not punch or break. He had followed its threads, tracing them back to a nexus of silent, unnerving energy. The pattern was an entity. An infection. And it had to be isolated.
Deep beneath the city's cracked pavement, in a place untouched by rain or light, another being held a similar vigil. The Weaver's Child, in its newly-adopted humanoid form, knelt on a floor of pulsing, organic resin. Its lair was a womb of shadow and chitin, walls woven from solidified darkness that seemed to breathe in rhythm with the city's troubled heart. It had felt the pattern too, not as a sickness, but as a glorious, blossoming truth. For eons, it had waited for reality's thin veil to fray, and now, the threads were finally coming loose. This city was the unraveling point.
Its new form, a sleek, obsidian parody of the creatures scrabbling above, was an efficient tool. It dipped long, elegant fingers into a sac of viscous, black fluid. The floor was its journal, and with silent, deliberate strokes, it mimicked the act of writing, documenting not a threat to be stopped, but a birth to be heralded. It traced the same lines Rorschach had drawn on his map, but saw them not as vectors of disease, but as the veins of a new world struggling to be born from the corpse of the old.
A sudden stillness fell over both loci of obsession. Above, the pen in Rorschach's hand froze mid-sentence. Below, the fluid-slick fingers of the Child paused on the cavern floor. The city's ceaseless hum seemed to hold its breath.
A shared, impossible instinct passed between the hunter and the harbinger.
In his cramped apartment, Rorschach tilted his head, the shifting patterns on his mask seeming to question the silence.
In its living, breathing darkness, the Weaver's Child tilted its smooth, featureless head in perfect, unnerving synchronicity.
A whisper of cold air and conviction escaped Rorschach's lips.
"Containment."
And from the abyss below, an echo that was also an answer, a voice of rustling silk and ancient starlight, spoke in perfect unison.
"Revelation."