A/N: I was rewatching episode 1 today, and I love getting inside Jessica's head.
Trish hates you, probably.
You hate you, certainly.
And sometimes you hate this city, in all its savage humanity—you hate what you did to it, and you hate what it did to you.
And yet you belong to each other. Its cold impersonal concrete and metal are yours—barren and strong and not quite as inexorable as they seem. It's filthy, but when you wander out in the darkness the cold air stings your face almost soothingly, and if you let yourself love things, you would love how this city lets you get lost.
Past tense, let you. Until now. Until he's back, and nothing's safe, and 'does this look like hiding?' yesyesyes that's all it ever, ever is—
The taxi smells like stale fast food with an underlayer of dust and vomit. You retched last night on the sidewalk, after Luke's, and you knew you'd never been clean, never will be clean.
(Never will be free).
You hate this city, even though you'd love it, too, if you let yourself—but it's failed you. Hong Kong and money (crisp, because it's from Trish) in an envelope—it's your way away.
It can't be a way out, but you've almost given up trying for that. A way out would demand dealing with what's inside.
You're crying in the taxi, or something close to it. Hope's parents voices knock in your head like so many cudgels. And somewhere backwards in memory there's an old adage running over and around and screw it, how did it go?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
You think of Hope, and hope, and it's all too much. The taxi smells like vomit and your heart is pounding in your throat. You want the city air and you want to forget; you have to fight and you hate yourself so much, so much, so much, but never as much as you hate him.
"I need to make a stop uptown," you say, and the words tear out of your throat almost painfully. "Fifty-ninth and fifth."
The needs of the many.
The taxi takes a turn, careening like the world's thrown out of orbit. It makes your stomach lurch.
You don't care. You can't care. You won't care.
You will fight, bloody and dirty and whatever the hell it takes—
The needs of the many.
But goddamn it, goddamn it all, when will you be allowed to only save the few?