Consciousness returned in fragments, unwelcome and sharp.
Sterile light first—too bright, clinical, the kind designed to keep people awake during medical emergencies. Then sound: the hum of machinery working to stabilize failing systems, urgent voices coordinating treatment, distant alarms cycling through warnings about perimeter breaches and structural compromise. The tremors came next—rhythmic impacts transmitted through the Nexus's architecture as husks threw themselves against the outer defenses.
Pain followed. Omnipresent. A landscape of damage his mind couldn't fully catalog: ribs grinding against each other, lung struggling to inflate, shoulder reduced to neural static, leg broadcasting agony with every pulse. His body was broken in ways that should have killed him, held together by web-foam, emergency surgery, and Peter Parker's desperate competence.
But Rorschach's mind didn't latch onto the pain first.
It latched onto pattern.
His eyes opened to slits, vision blurred but functional. The medical bay. Spider-Ham working frantically at a monitoring station, adjusting medications Rorschach couldn't identify. Peter hunched over his torso, hands steady despite obvious exhaustion, repairing tissue damage with precision that suggested he'd done this before. Too many times before.
Beyond them, Miles paced near the entrance, mask pulled back, speaking rapidly with Silk about defensive positioning and resource allocation. His voice carried the weight of someone who'd been making impossible decisions for hours, maybe days, without rest.
The conversation was tactical. Immediate. Focused on the invasion pressing closer with every passing moment.
But Rorschach wasn't listening to the words.
He was watching the pauses. The moments where certainty faltered. The instants where Miles would stop mid-sentence, hand going to his temple as if processing information that didn't quite align with expectation.
The same thing had happened during the fight.
The memory played through his fragmenting consciousness with disturbing clarity—not the pain of the blows, not the sensation of being impaled and discarded, but something else. Something his mind had cataloged even while dying.
The Child's behavior. Its pattern.
It had moved with perfect efficiency, countering his every attack before completion, cycling stolen abilities with mathematical precision. But there had been pauses. Fractional hesitations where it seemed to wait for something.
Not strategizing. Not calculating the next move.
Waiting for confirmation.
Rorschach's damaged body tried to shift position. Pain exploded through his side. Peter's hands pressed down gently but firmly, keeping him still.
"Don't move," Peter said, voice strained. "You're barely holding together. Half your organs are—"
"Resonance," Rorschach rasped. The word came out wrong, damaged vocal cords struggling with the syllables. He tried again. "Child... waits... for resonance."
Peter exchanged a glance with Ham, both uncertain whether they were hearing delirium or something important. Miles stopped mid-sentence, turned toward the medical bay.
"What did he say?"
Rorschach forced his eyes to focus, pulled breath into his damaged lung despite the agony it caused. His mind was assembling the pattern, connecting observations made during combat with understanding that only came from survival.
"The Child," he said, each word deliberate and costly, "does not generate belief."
Silence fell across the medical bay. Even the monitoring equipment seemed to quiet, as if reality itself was leaning in to hear what came next.
"It echoes it."
Miles moved closer, his expression shifting from exhausted leadership to sharp attention. "Explain."
Rorschach's hand twitched, trying to gesture but lacking the strength. Peter caught it gently, eased it back down.
"Its perfection..." Rorschach's breathing hitched, pain spiking as his lung fought for air. "Not original. Mimicked. Logic, conviction, inevitability—all routed through the Web's resonance."
Understanding dawned on Miles' face, followed immediately by something darker. "It's reading the Web. Using it like a predictive database."
"More than reading." Rorschach coughed, tasted blood. Peter adjusted something in the IV line, probably painkillers, but Rorschach forced his mind to stay sharp through the pharmaceutical haze. "Requires it. Every certainty it projected... paused first. Waiting for the Web to confirm the outcome."
Silk had entered during the explanation, standing just behind Miles, her expression intense. "That's how it knew which realities to target. Which Totems to consume first. It wasn't just predicting—it was listening to destiny itself."
"And believing what it heard," Rorschach said. "Without that resonance... its certainty stutters."
The implications spread through the room like a shockwave. Ham stopped working on the monitors. Peter's hands stilled over Rorschach's wounds. Miles' entire posture changed, shifting from defensive coordinator to strategist recognizing an opening.
"The frequency," Miles said slowly. "The one Gwen used to track you through the void. She said it interfered with Totem synchronization."
Rorschach managed something that might have been a nod. "Disruptive. Not destructive. Weakens... destiny's coherence."
"And if destiny becomes incoherent," Silk finished, her voice carrying a mixture of horror and hope, "the Child can't hear it anymore. Can't use it to predict outcomes."
"Can't be certain," Rorschach corrected. "Can't operate from inevitability. Forces it to... calculate. Guess."
He pulled in another painful breath, assembling the rest of the pattern.
"Destiny requires consensus. The Web requires harmony across realities. The Child's flaw..." He paused, gathering strength. "It needs both. Introduce dissonance... inevitability fractures."
Miles turned away, pacing, mind clearly racing through scenarios. "If we flood the Nexus with that frequency—tune it to interfere with prophetic resonance without destroying the Web-threads themselves—we could strip the Child of its predictive advantage."
"Not strip," Rorschach said. "Degrade. Make uncertain. Force reactive instead of proactive."
"That's still a massive tactical advantage," Silk said. "Right now it's three moves ahead of everything we do. If we could bring it down to even one move ahead—"
"We might actually have a chance," Miles finished.
Peter had stopped working entirely, looking at Rorschach with an expression caught between medical concern and reluctant respect. "The cost," he said quietly. "If we disrupt Totem synchronization, we lose it too. The spider-sense. The instinct. The way we can coordinate without speaking."
"The thing that makes us Spider-Totems instead of just people in masks," Ham added, his usual levity completely absent.
Rorschach met Peter's gaze. "Yes."
The word hung in the sterile air, uncompromising and certain. No apologies. No softening of the implication. Just fact.
Miles stopped pacing. Turned to face Rorschach directly. "You're asking us to deliberately weaken ourselves. To give up the one inherent advantage we have over normal humans. To fight something that's consumed hundreds of Spider-Totems while operating blind."
"Not blind," Rorschach corrected. "Human. Uncertain. Forced to react to reality... instead of destiny's script."
"While it's forced to do the same thing," Miles said slowly. "Level playing field."
"No field is level. But less... predetermined."
Silence fell again. Deeper this time. Miles looked at the others—Peter still hunched over Rorschach's broken body, Ham monitoring vital signs that suggested imminent system failure, Silk standing at the threshold between the medical bay and the command center where other Totems were fighting to hold the perimeter.
Outside, another impact tremor shook the Nexus. Closer this time. The invasion was advancing.
"The technical aspects," Miles said, voice shifting into command mode. "Can we actually generate that frequency at the intensity needed?"
"Gwen's modulator," Silk said immediately. "The one she jury-rigged to track Rorschach. If we amplify it through the Nexus's main Web-array, broadcast it across all connected realities simultaneously—"
"It would work," Ham finished. "Mathematically. The resonance cascade would propagate through every thread connected to this hub. Disruption on a multiversal scale."
"For how long?" Miles asked.
Ham checked something on his monitoring equipment. "Unknown. The frequency would degrade the Web's coherence, but the Web is self-healing. Eventually it would adapt, filter out the noise, restore prophetic function."
"Hours?" Miles pressed. "Minutes?"
"Best guess? Thirty minutes. Maybe less if the Child realizes what we're doing and actively works to counter it."
"Thirty minutes of operating blind," Peter said quietly. "Against something designed to kill us specifically."
Miles looked at each of them in turn, reading expressions, gauging readiness. Then his gaze returned to Rorschach—broken, barely conscious, the man who'd walked away from everyone because he'd been so certain his way was right.
The man whose certainty had been shattered by something that understood him perfectly.
And who had still managed to identify its flaw.
"You're sure about this?" Miles asked. Not seeking validation. Confirming intent.
Rorschach's eyes met his through the haze of pain and medication. "Logic is sound. Timing is right. No better option exists."
The words were clinical. Factual. Stripped of emotion or manipulation. Just observation presented for evaluation.
Miles held his gaze for five long seconds. Then he nodded once, sharp and decisive.
"Do it," he said to Ham and Silk. "Modify Gwen's equipment. Tie it into the main array. I want that frequency ready to broadcast on my command."
They moved immediately, Ham already pulling up schematics while Silk headed toward the command center to coordinate with Gwen. Peter hesitated, looking at Rorschach's vital signs with clear concern.
"He needs at least six more hours of treatment. Maybe twelve. If he moves, if there's any stress on these wounds—"
"Then make sure he doesn't move," Miles said flatly. He turned back to Rorschach. "You stay here. You've given us the strategy. Now let the people who actually know how to work together execute it."
Rorschach said nothing. Just closed his eyes, a gesture that might have been agreement or simply exhaustion.
Miles started to leave, then paused at the threshold. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, meant only for Rorschach to hear.
"This isn't forgiveness," Miles said. "This isn't validation. This isn't me saying you were right about anything—how you operate, how you treat people, how you walked away from everyone who was trying to help."
He paused, making sure Rorschach was listening.
"This is trust as a tool. Not an endorsement. You identified a weakness in the enemy. That's tactically valuable. So we'll use it. Once. Carefully."
Rorschach's eyes opened slightly. Met Miles' gaze. No gratitude. No acknowledgment of the distinction being drawn. Just understanding.
"But after this," Miles continued, "after we either win or die trying—we're going to have a conversation about what happens next. About whether someone who only knows how to operate alone has any place in a team that survives by protecting each other."
"Understood," Rorschach rasped.
Miles studied him for another moment, then turned away. His footsteps echoed across the medical bay, joining the general controlled chaos of a defensive position preparing for a strategy that might kill them all.
Peter returned to his work, hands moving with renewed focus. "That went better than expected," he muttered.
Rorschach didn't respond. His mind was already elsewhere, replaying the Child's behavior, examining the pattern he'd identified. The moments of hesitation where it waited for the Web to confirm what came next.
Perfection that required validation wasn't perfection. It was dependency.
And dependency was weakness.
The monitoring equipment beeped steadily, tracking his damaged body's slow climb back toward basic functionality. Outside the medical bay, voices coordinated modifications to Gwen's frequency generator. Footsteps rushed past as Totems repositioned for whatever came next.
The Nexus trembled under another impact. The invasion was close now. Hours away at most. Maybe less.
But for the first time since the Child had discarded him as unnecessary, Rorschach felt something other than pain.
Not hope—he'd burned that out decades ago. Not satisfaction—the cost of this strategy was too high for simple gratification.
Certainty.
Cold, clinical, utterly uncompromising certainty.
The Child was perfect. It had proven that by dismantling him piece by piece, demonstrating that his philosophy taken to its logical extreme was apocalypse.
But perfection that depended on destiny could still be broken.
Because destiny was a pattern. And patterns could be disrupted.
Rorschach's eyes closed again, this time genuinely surrendering to unconsciousness. The painkillers Peter had administered were winning, dragging him down into darkness despite his resistance.
His last thought before the void claimed him was simple:
The enemy is no longer inevitable.
---
Miles stood in the command center, watching Silk and Ham work on the frequency generator, their hands moving with synchronized precision despite the modifications being completely unprecedented. Gwen had joined them, contributing her understanding of the resonance patterns she'd used to track Rorschach through collapsing space.
Around them, other Totems prepared for the final defense. Web-barricades reinforced. Weapons checked. Positions assigned based on capability rather than sentiment.
The alarms cycled again. Another breach in the outer perimeter. The Child's forces were adapting faster than they could compensate.
But now they had something the Child didn't expect.
Not a weapon. Not a miracle.
A flaw.
Miles looked back toward the medical bay where Rorschach lay unconscious, broken body held together by Peter's skill and sheer stubborn refusal to die.
The man had walked away from everyone, chosen isolation over alliance, fought alone because he'd been convinced that his certainty was the only thing that mattered.
And he'd been destroyed for it. Proven wrong so completely that the thing he'd inadvertently taught had simply discarded him as irrelevant.
But in that destruction, in that moment of being dismantled by something that understood him perfectly, he'd identified what no one else had seen.
The Child's flaw wasn't in its power. It was in its perfection.
It had become so synchronized with the Web, so dependent on destiny's confirmation, that it couldn't operate without that validation. Every certainty it projected was routed through the Web's prophetic resonance.
Strip that away, and its inevitability fractured.
The frequency generator hummed to life, Gwen making final adjustments to the broadcast parameters. Ham checked the calculations one last time, nodded to Silk, who relayed the readiness status to Miles.
"We're ready," Silk said. "On your command, we can flood every Web-thread connected to this Nexus with disruptive resonance. It'll last maybe thirty minutes before the Web adapts. After that..."
"After that we're either dead or we've won," Miles finished. He looked at the gathered Totems—exhausted, injured, holding together through pure determination. "And we'll be doing it without the spider-sense. Without the coordination. Without the thing that makes us what we are."
No one spoke. They all understood the cost.
"But so will the Child," Gwen said quietly. "For the first time since it learned to think, it won't know what comes next."
Miles nodded slowly. He could feel it—the Web's presence at the edge of his consciousness, that subtle awareness of destiny's threads pulling events toward predetermined outcomes. The sense that certain things were meant to happen, that the universe itself had opinions about how stories should end.
Soon that would be gone. Replaced by uncertainty. By the need to react to reality instead of following script.
And for the first time since the Child had been born in a forgotten alley, since it had learned to think and judge and hunt—
The Web did not feel certain of the outcome.
Miles took a breath, steadied himself, and gave the order.
"Activate it."
The frequency generator screamed to life, broadcasting dissonance across every reality connected to the Nexus.
And destiny itself began to fracture.