Kilgrave's orders burned in Jessica's body, passing through her mind to some point deep in her belly. Her womb, maybe. Some horrible child growing inside, an antichrist of a fetus, carried inside her like a bomb inside a plane, Jesus.
In her mind, she tried to put up walls between her hijacked body and Trish, her Trish—she set goals for herself, things to deny Kilgrave. She would sit in the taxi, but she wouldn't get out at Trish's building. She would get out, but she wouldn't go through the door. She would go into the lobby, but she wouldn't go into the elevator, wouldn't hit the button, wouldn't step off on her floor. At some point, she'd succeed in making herself a statue, something that couldn't hurt Trish. She would defuse the bomb.
But, like a machine shaking off rust, she ran through the motions, gears grinding but stubbornly moving forward. Her boots tapped tile, then carpet. They whispered up to her as she walked to the juggernaut of Trish's door. Her finger went malignant, metastasized, pressed the call button. She felt the vibration of Trish's call through the soundproof door—something like "One sec!" even though she knew the only way to speak through that bulkhead was the intercom. Then, seconds later, the little red light went on to show her that she was addressing Trish's Star Trek viewscreen.
The fetus gave birth to itself, a single word that bubbled out of her like everything was fine. An imprint of red lipstick drawn on the duct tape over her mouth. "Hey."
"Jess," Trish sounded relieved, pleased. She was still nervous about people coming to her door, but didn't think to be nervous of Jessica. Even knowing Kilgrave was out there, she still thought of her as someone who'd never hurt her. "Get in here."
Suddenly all her agonized frustration had a deadline. The affirmation was sounding, the door swinging open. Jessica had that long to stop herself. She forced all the momentum deep down inside her body, buckled in down at her center, refused to let herself do anything. Trish opened the door to find Jessica with her head slumped down like a puppet with her strings cut.
"Shit!" Trish huffed out, unthinking of how her best friend had gone from the normalcy of their greeting to suddenly being wrecked with paralysis. All she knew was that she couldn't let Jessica stay outside, unsafe.
She leapt forward, wrapping her arms around Jessica and dragged her back, and the warmth of her body, the smell of her was like a hammer blow against the shell Jessica was trying to erect, the quarantine to keep everything safe inside and out. Like they were starving creatures taking bait, her hands felt out, catching on Trish's body, holding to her as Trish dragged her inside.
Jessica managed to make herself let go once Trish had laid her down on a couch, the blonde having dismissed the touch as Jess steadying herself. She was intoxicated—overwhelmed with the nearness of Trish. She was hypersensitive to her, her senses attuned to everything that was Trish, and having Trish leaning over her, full of such concern that Jessica could feel it like a sixth sense, was overloading her circuitry. She'd been plugged into a livewire, overdosed on Chemical Trish.
"Jess, are you okay? Jess, c'mon—" Trish was all over her, checking her pulse, dragging her eyelids wide open to check something, fuck, opening her mouth to check Jessica's tongue. "Was it Kilgrave? Was it Kilgrave?"
"Kilgrave," Jessica mewled. She felt the baby kick, the bomb count down. His orders were burning so hot, she could barely stand to hold them. She wanted to put out the fire. Douse the molten metal of them in Trish's cool waters, it'd be so easy. Instead, she rasped out more speech that had to squeeze through Kilgrave's words like water passing through a dam. "Told me—wanted me to be happy."
"Yeah, well, that's bullshit," Trish said matter-of-factly. "I'm gonna keep you here, Jess. Twelve hours, starting now, I won't let you hurt anyone, I won't let you do anything. You're safe."
"Wanted me happy… with someone else… like some fucking Ryan Gosling movie…"
Trish checked her temperature and Jessica felt ridiculously fussed over, like some sickly English boy in a Dickens book, Masterpiece Theatre shit. Couldn't Trish see what was wrong with her? Wasn't the radiation of it glowing through her skin, her bones, painting everything a sickly green?
Trish was saying things, trying to reassure her, comforting herself with the notion that they were under siege and Trish could protect her erstwhile sister.
"Trish," Jessica said, and Kilgrave's words were fucking fire, a brand on the inside of her body, raising welts in her soul. "He told me to kiss you."
For a split-second, Trish looked hurt. Still caught in sticky real-world logic, not able to shift to Kilgrave logic with Jessica's ease. "And that's so bad?" Then she hated herself for saying it and Jessica forgave her, knew she didn't understand, couldn't understand, should never have to understand.
"I won't let him—" Jessica gritted out, though her lips were diseased and the only balm was Trish's skin, God, she thought she could feel them decaying, feel them rotting away on her face with every second she wasn't just kissing Trish, why wasn't she kissing Trish?
"It's okay," Trish said, "it's okay, I wouldn't—I wouldn't either—I would never…" She bent low and it was worse, so much worse when she was closer, when the oasis was so close that Jessica could feel how cool the water was, still knowing it was poisoned.
"No…" Jessica moaned desperately, but Trish's hands were on her shoulder, not restraining her but going through the motions of holding her down, the firm pressure of them doing something to make Jessica's body relax, fool her into thinking she wasn't tied up into a million billion knots that wrapped around the sharp edges of Kilgrave's order so they couldn't cut Trish.
"I want to," Trish said simply, reassuringly. "It's me making the call." And so gently that she seemed delicate, a crystalline thing that would break apart when she touched Jessica's twitching, shaking body, she kissed Jessica's forehead.
Relief! It cut through Jessica and she could breathe again, her blood was flowing hot and fast, her muscles were winding down from the tightly compressed springs they'd been. Kilgrave's words were still inside her, sharp like she'd swallowed a dozen syringes, but they were rearranging themselves, becoming more comfortable where they were jammed inside Jessica's psyche.
"Better?" Trish asked, pleading, hoping against hope that this would satisfy the curse that'd been placed on Jessica.
Jessica nodded wordlessly, her eyes conveying that she was still tormented, still needing a hit of the drug she was suddenly addicted to.
Trish offered her hand with understudy-in-Phantom-of-the-Opera poise, and Jessica kissed it desperately, relieving the heat of her lips on that cool skin, those wonderfully bruised knuckles, those incongruously callused fingertips, each of the chic rings.
She was cut loose of her suffering, diseased body for a moment—back in the sleepover party of life with Patsy when her mother was flying high, cold feet under shared sheets, teasing her sister mercilessly by tangling them with Trish's. She kissed the ball of Trish's thumb like she was in love with it, like it was the most wonderful lover she had ever known. And, distantly, she felt Trish's other hand petting her hair as she kept kissing, downing pill after pill of this wonder drug that was making her well again.
Until she drifted to sleep, feeling whole.
When she woke up, the operation had been a success. Kilgrave's sick fuck command had been excised so skillfully, there wasn't even a scar where she'd swallowed the Not For Ages Five And Under parts of the toy. She could close her eyes and not see herself kissing Trish like a snuff film, like it was something to give him satisfaction, like it was his idea.
When she opened her eyes, though, Trish was at her bedside.
"Thought this was a gym now," Jessica said, because she might not've had a bedroom at Casa del Trish anymore, but this sure as hell felt like her bed.
"I was pissed," Trish said, sounding that half-apologetic that suited her so well. Sorry she'd gotten mad, but totally justified in it because—it was Jessica. "But we've always had a guest room and as far as I'm concerned, that's yours. Whenever you want it."
"What if Mother Theresa's staying with you? Would you kick her out?"
"Mother Theresa's dead, F-Y-I."
"You'd kick out Zombie Theresa?"
Trish had set up a TV tray nearby, with some fruit and a carafe of water atop it—ready to serve Jessica refreshments after a Kilgrave-induced collapse. It made Jessica feel a sort of awed inadequacy, which tended to be her primacy reaction to Trish's preparedness.
"You need liquids," Trish said, "and electrolytes. Resisting Kilgrave, carrying out his orders, it's emotional labor, it burns through your reserves even if you're not doing anything—"
"We didn't not do anything," Jessica said sharply. "Did we? I mean, didn't we? Fucking grammar."
Trish smiled indulgently before remembering to think better of it. "It was just a sick fuck being a sick fuck. We're good. Same as always."
"Not same as always," Jessica insisted. "We should talk—"
Trish actually barked a laugh which, yeah, Jessica figured she was entitled to. "You want to talk?"
Jessica's head listed to the side. "So you don't get the wrong idea. Like a dummkopf."
"I don't have the wrong idea," Trish said firmly. "You weren't yourself. It wasn't your fault."
"It's not that I didn't want to kiss you—"
"What?"
Jessica hoped Trish never got plastic surgery, like Dorothy Walker had been suggesting before Jessica went Berlin Wall between them. The things her eyebrows could do, under the right circumstances, really should be preserved for posterity.
Not that Jessica could at all enjoy shocking her best friend, under the circumstances.
"It's not that I wanted to kiss you either! Genius!" Jessica added in pure teenage sarcasm. She felt like a baby bat again. "It's… not like that. Never like that."
Trish's face softened, a lazy and effortlessly sincere smile balanced on her lips as precariously as an Olympic gymnast on a high beam, yet just as controlled as the same. The kind of uninhibited, unabashed grin Jessica could only dream of having. She felt acutely unworthy of Trish in that moment. A fuck-up magpie stowing away in the nest of some eagle of magnificent plumage. Cain and Abel. Goofus and fucking Gallant.
And at the same time, having Trish smile at her like that, she felt like it didn't matter.
"Two things," Trish said, radio host of the year on the late shift, singing Jessica to sleep. "One, anyone would be lucky to kiss you. And two, when someone is lucky enough to kiss you—whoever it is—it'll be because you chose them and you want them and they want you just as much. I promise."
Jessica laughed.
"Oh, what?" Trish demanded.
"Nothing. Just if someone would have to be lucky to kiss me, they'd have to get a wish from a goddamn genie to kiss you."
"Should've made you kiss my foot, cheesehead."
"Ooh, and she's kinky too…"
Trish beat a retreat, satisfied that the ship wasn't sinking anymore, wasn't taking on water. There were still holes in the hull, ocean on the deck, but some of the compartments were watertight and she had a bucket for bailing.
Jessica didn't give herself permission to cry until she left. It was a permission she rarely granted herself, but this time the hurt felt new, different. This time she felt cheated—that there'd been something between her and Trish, something buried deep in the archaeology of their sisterhood that she should've had time to excavate, dust off, catalog, but instead had been doing time as Kilgrave's bitch. And now the wind was ripping the sand off it, damaging the find, and she didn't know if she'd ever find out what it had once been or could've been. All she could do was bury it again and hope that at some point—right around the Rapture, maybe, when she got her shit in order—she could back and see if those artifacts were still there, see if she could clean them off and maybe rediscover how beautiful they were.
And of course Trish wouldn't wait. And she shouldn't. If there was even anything to wait for.
It'd been twelve hours and Jessica still wanted to kiss Trish's hand.