There is a game.
You need two people and one stone. Only one. And then you wait until they kill each other.
Jessica Jones hates herself most of all. She hates her strength. Of course, she does, because it`s useless. Instead of saving fucking New York, which deserves to drown in its own shit, she throws all the trash from the living room, peels off old flowered wallpapers and turns one of her rooms into an office. Old chair survived thousands of battles, a couple of breakings, is still alive, the same as she is - it creaks, but can still hold on.
She wants to send this fucking city straight to hell, but she needs money.
In the evening she gets drunk to death with cheap booze from the convenience store in front of her home, and then arranges the bottles in a row, to bring down the last one. Maybe she can get that fucking strike.
But mostly often she falls asleep with a bottle in her hand on the dusty floor. She curles up and hides in the corner of the room in case of his returning, - she is still learning to live without somebody`s eyes on her.
Killgrave is not his real name. Only some fucking moron would take this surname. He was born to be Kevin Thompson, but then he realized that his parents are bastards that will allow their only child die after the next intake of cerebrospinal fluid. So he becomes much smarter than they are in six months or so. And much more dangerous.
When they escape with no money or fucking clothes like some refugees from under fire, he cannot understand it. How does it feel to be alone in an empty house without any food?
At first he enjoys it like any ten year old child could do. It`s like a vacation during school, he never went to. Kevin understands vaguely what a vacation is, but if TV assures him that it's fucking, then he thinks it is.
So he hangs about the house alone, going from one room into another. He is so happy that even vague memories of injections and tests fade from his memory, but when he wants to eat, no one can make him a sandwich.
And Kevin stays alone there for a day or two, listening to the rumbling in his stomach, first softly, then loudly that he cannot even sleep, and he is terribly hungry. He is just scared. Because he is only ten years old, and he does not know how to live.
Fucking vacation. Life long.
Jessica hates himself. She fills a full bath of hot, scalding water and sits as long as she can stand it, until the heat changes into coolness. She could sleep there, with her head resting on the ledge. She knows if she dies here and now – no one will be sorry about it.
Cold wakes her up. She awakens when her skin begins to wrinkle and heavy hair pulls to the bottom of the bathtub, and Jessica starts scratching and scratching and scraping skin with the washcloth. Maybe she could tear the skin apart completely, revealing a new one beneath a dirty cover. And there will be another Jessica, and she will be called Jones, but the memories will be new too.
Fuck. She only skins hands to blood. The water in the bathroom is painted in pale pink and disappears in stock. And she still feels dirty.
Killgrave cannot understand the power of words at once. It is an immaterial substance. His power ... it cannot be touched or measured, although later he succeeds - direct contact only, eye to eye, and a limited distance, if he wants to be convincing. And he can be that much convincing.
-I hate you! - He cries to the photos standing at a fireplace. They shine with happiness of their faces. Parents are happy and smiling, like it`s an average family where the child is not tormented daily by cutting the skin and taking blood tests for the experiments. And no one attaches thin wires to his head and lets the current through the wires to stop his heart. So a candent iron to the face is a very little retribution for everything that happened.
But the pictures remain silent, and nothing happens. He cannot control them.
-I hate you! - He pokes his finger in some fucking passerby, because Killgrave wants to destroy everything on his way. Isn`t it a good explanation to everything he does? – I want you dead!
And an asshole in an expensive coat obeys, running directly on the road. Right under the wheels of some truck.
When Killgrave looks at a puddle of blood spreading out near the head of that unknown man, he begins to understand what his power is for.
It helps him to survive.
And he lives, because he wants it more than anything else in his life.
Being under the influence of his power - it's like trying to stand up to a hurricane, faced with him face to face. You can only stand and hope that your feet won`t fail at the most inappropriate moment. Oh, and think. One second turns into eternity.
Jessica can` resist, she can`t do anything but bite her lower lip to blood when Killgrave orders her to undress. Slowly. To please him. Everything she wears, it`s all his, bought with his money, taken without permission with his powers. Even her body - it no longer belongs to her.
The lip is raw and crusted - she bit it so many times that these bloody lips he loves so much could already fall off.
-Come here, Jessica. Sit down near me. Bend. Unbutton my belt. - He throws words like stones, and each of them is like a disgusting loop tightened on her neck. It strangles her and she desperately wants to thrust her hands into the throat, right to the elbows, and puke, because even her body betrays her.
Jessica looks at her hands. Her fingers touch the belt of his pants and unbutton them. Bloody fingers, she would love to break them one by one, just to stop this torture.
Hope. That word stays at the tip of his tongue when he first meets Jessica. Hope, fucking hope. That he shall no longer be alone. People obey his every word, but they are useless things. No more than trash on the roadside. And Jessica is a diamond thrown into shit and forgotten in it.
He carefully gets rid of her ugly human clothes, he will burn them later. She no longer needs it.
He takes her to the bathtub, washes her hair, rubs expensive shampoo into the scalp, and wipes her wet shoulders with new white towel. Jessica looks so thin and skinny, but it doesn`t even annoy him. And then he orders her to put on expensive silk underwear of violet color. He likes this color and he wants to please her and make her happy. At any cost. After all, she has her powers too, so one day she will definitely understand everything. And appreciate his efforts.
I love you, Jessica. - He doesn`t know how to say it, to make her understand that it's not a request or an order. This is what he offers her, together with the whole world at their feet.
I love you. – It stays at the tip of his tongue, when he looks at her. Jessica is sitting in front of him at one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. No, he doesn`t have the ring, and it is not a wedding proposal. But she was with him for such a long time that Killgrave decides. Tomorrow he will free her will and let her be herself. Take off the last shackles. Because he has been removing them little by little since the beginning of their relationship and giving her more and more freedom.
He is excited and happy. And he doesn`t know that she will be gone from his life in an hour.
Jessica learns to live. She is afraid to go out, she is afraid of people. She locks in her cramped bedroom - small room, three x three - and sits staring at the ceiling and walls. These walls is everything she got. They are the only barrier between her and Killgrave because he can be anywhere. Only Trish comes to save her.
Jessica learns to live without jumping up at night from the endless cries still feeling the touch of Killgrave's hands. She starts leaving her home for a minute of two, then more and more.
For the first time she goes out to buy herself a drink. She returns home with cheap booze in paper bag. She still can feel like someone is behind her, and when she takes a step, he takes a step too. Her feet break into a run, and Jessica runs into shabby staircase rushing through the hall and slams the door behind her. She falls to the floor exhausted and keeps listening to the noises behind thin wooden door, but then understands – no one is coming after her. That's when she gets drunk, swallowing bitter whiskey, mixed with tears in her throat.
-I hate you! - She howls, choking with despair, and hits the floor. Her bloodied knuckles almost break through it.
But she doesn`t know whom she hates most. Him or herself.
It is not a miracle that they meet again. They are doomed. Predestination is an ugly bitch even more than death.
He wears purple, and Jessica realizes that until her last breath she will hate this color. Her hands are stained with blood, but all she can think about is his jacket, what an irony.
-I Love you, Jessica, - finally he says it, and the madness in his eyes changes into sincerity. He says truth, absolute truth, and Jessica knows only one thing.
If there happened to be a stone in her hand, even for a second, she would have smashed her own head. Because he really loves her. And that`s why she had nowhere to run.
-Come to me, - he says, and she is horrified to feel stiff knees trembling. She understands.
She wants to do it.