So This Is Home
Chapter One
Part 1
Living in the house with her has been a new way of life. So many memories live here, breathe here, and I know nothing about them. Jessica says very little but sometimes I can see things, her mind working the way it does. She'll feel my eyes and I'll pull her right out of that past without meaning to. She gets upset when I study her. She gets worried. I'm not sure if I should be here in this place, not sure if I should disturb these memories of hers that are so significant, but I want to become a part of it somehow, that's all I know. I want to be a part of everything that involves her in anyway because time and time again she's been the one person in my life who has actually loved and saved me, without her I feel like I'm missing a part of my heart. My life gets torn in two. The part with Jess in it and the part without. Without her I'm no more than a half-self, a shadow, why live?
"The wonder twins coming over today?" She can't stand our little meetings for Trish Talk. She lives to make fun of me.
"I'm going to them," I tease. We work better at my apartment anyway. We work better when I'm not thinking about Jess, constantly wondering how she's feeling and what she thinks of me being near her again like old times. Often I feel strange like maybe I should quit my job. The hardest fight is wondering what she really wants. I don't think I can ever know.
When she moved out, before, it was after Kilgrave, the first time. She was scared he'd find me.
When she got the papers about her old house, the house that Kilgrave had bought to give her, it was sort of surprising. I never thought in a million years that Jess would want to keep this house but she obviously did.
Though he's gone, it still hurts to think that maybe Kilgrave knew more about her mind than I ever could, or can...
"You okay?" I was slipping into my thoughts again. This place was new to me but old to her. I still felt outside of it somehow. I hated feeling outside, separate. No matter how I tried I always felt divided from her. We had been family so long but still things like this place could show me that still we weren't part of the same anything, we were separate, even now.
"Yeah," I said, shaking it off. She could always see through me. But then she always lets things slide. She hopes for them to slide. Talking about our real feelings has never been a thing she's been good at. I try but she pushes me out. Always.
But she loves me.
Kilgrave was right about that.
I might be the only person really tying her to this place.
At least now she has Malcom too. Sweet Malcolm.
He's moved in as soon as Jess did. He makes us tea and bakes muffins and sweet cakes. He runs the office that Jess has set up in the common room. He takes messages. He keeps files and does research. He's become essential to her I think. A new person she can lean on. A new person who helps.
Half the time I stay here and half in my apartment in the city. I think it helps too but there are times she can't look at me full on, when she's either in her darkest places or thinking about me. Sometimes I can't tell which is which.
"Want me to drive you?"
"No. Thanks," I smiled. It's better I do things on my own. I need alone time just like Jessica does. The only company I really crave is hers. Sometimes without her it feels like I'm not even breathing but I know that I am.
"We've got this new case. Something to do with a missing girl."
Jess is so prone to these ones. The missing girl cases really get her. They're the cases she takes over others. The cases that trouble her most. The cases that trouble me most because of what they do to her and how she can feel them.
I shoot her a look.
"She's been gone for ten days."
"That's a lot," I say. What else can you say? Why are you doing this? It's too soon? Please don't?
"Her roommate said she was snatched by something, taken straight out of her dorm. Too quick. Unhuman."
"Oh," I sigh. My heart's racing. I want to scream. Sometimes I want to be a hero too. Other times, I just wish we were normal, for once, both of us normal.
I stand up and put my bag over my shoulder. "Be careful," I say. But I know that's never been Jessica's way.
"You too," she says, hardly looking as I walk from her and out the front door. All the way to my car I'm wishing I had something to hit.
Part 2
I sit through the session but all I can think about is what trouble Jess could get into without me there. Always one to go her own way, she had a bad track record for including me in anything that I would argue was a bad idea. It was easier for her that way. She didn't have to consider the guilt connected to me worrying about her.
What she didn't seem to get was that it was going to happen regardless of me knowing about her activities or not. Not knowing made it worse. Telling me about the new case was a step in the right direction though.
Now, that I was over at the house so much it was hard for her to avoid telling me things. Before the second coming of Kilgrave it was easy for her to distance herself. Now, we were tighter, less able to separate.
Still, I knew that someday there a circumstance would arise that required me to be kept out of the loop in her mind. I dreaded it. People change and Kilgrave had severely altered Jessica in ways that she didn't even realize. I saw it all and felt helpless to be there for her at times.
"Um, Trish?"
"Yeah?" I looked up, coming out of the blank stare I'd been stuck in for the past who knew how long. "Sorry, I'm not all here today." I laughed it off, praying that I wouldn't have to come up with a lame excuse. Jessica could tell me not to have feelings all she wanted but that didn't stop them from coming unbidden from the dark corners of my heart.
Part 3
I called Jessica from the road.
"Any requests?"
"Jesus, that was fast… We're still at the college," Jess mumbled. "Apparently this guy was only a kid. We have a few witnesses calling him freakishly strong."
I couldn't help but let a small laugh escape me. Thinking back on my very own teenage Jess was always a fun time. "Sounds familiar."
"Ha. You're funny," she teased. "Why are you calling me anyway, miss me?"
"Always." I wasn't so good with the teasing. Rather the truth. It was part of our problem I think. Jess could never take my love. She understood it but it definitely scared her just like losing me did.
"Right…" She said it in that way she did that portrayed little to nothing about her thoughts. I hated that I couldn't get inside her mind. But thoughts of the mind would always remind us both of Kilgrave so it was hard to speak them. "Look, I'll be home soon. Food's good. Food and booze. You know what I like."
"K," I tried to be short like her, less in love like her. Okay, poor choice of words. She loved me too much for her own good but that has always been one of my favorite things about her, she's always loved me more than I've been able to love myself. I'd been better before this past year but then she left and practically tore me in two with her absence.
I hung up the phone and sped my car out of the city towards the empty house that Kilgrave bought, the house that I was still amazed to be living in on most nights when the dark and the silence finally set in.