Had a bit of a writing bug, comes from having this story in my head since season one of "Jessica Jones".
Really hope to have gotten the characters' voices down, Jessica is fun to write for when she's sarcastic, but shit will get cynical and depressing.
Which reminds me, if anyone believes this story should bump to an 'M' Rating for the language, let me know. And a special shout-out will be given to the first reviewer who can point out a Spider-Gwen character getting name-dropped.
Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel's "Jessica Jones" and affiliated comics or television series.
More and more often lately, Jessica found herself retreating to daydreams, scrounging as desperately as a starved tomcat through the garbage for pleasant, happy thoughts to get her through the day. If she ever ran out of distracting happy thoughts, she might end up doing something she'd regret.
Couldn't let that happen now, not with a gun on her hip.
Yes, much to her surprise (but frustratingly not to Trish) she was accepted into the NYPD. Training was a bitch, a lot of studying, she didn't think she'd ever get some of that bike safety protocol out of her head. But with some all-nighters studying and cutting back on the drinks, the written tests weren't that much different from high school or community college. Turns out she proved what she already knew, and was pretty damn smarter than the average bitch. Suck it, Dorothy Walker, and swallow all those predictions that her adopted daughter would be a drain on society.
And the physical tests? Ha, please. Honestly it was harder for her to do average enough not to get people suspicious of any of her abilities. But it was worth breaking the facade just to win a bet with a blowhard; over two-hundred and fifty pounds benchpress in the gym got everyone talking, and handily outstripped the gym-rat champ of their precinct by almost thirty pounds.
Thinking back to the look on his face when she shattered his record was one happy thought. So was the look on Trish's face the first time she got a look at her in the dress blues. Honestly Jessica had a hard time keeping the smile off her face then too, even if she hated to admit it.
Jessica was running out of happy thoughts now though.
Kittens, puppies, kittens and puppies playing together. A long hot shower like she didn't have to worry about the water bill. Fit guys in tank tops. The crack of a cold can of beer getting top popped.
"Hey," snapped the current bane of her existence, the curse for all her past misdeeds, her GI Joe punishment; Simpson. "Would you focus?"
"I'm not the one driving." Another in a long list of problems actually, he never let her drive. She wasn't sure if the precise reason but overall she figured it had to do with sexism and maybe a bit of homophobia. Not that Jessica was a lesbian but plenty of people had been making assumptions about her sexuality before she put on the uniform. Now that she was a cop she had been called every variation of 'dyke' and 'lesbo' and 'rug-muncher' a multi-ethnic cultural hub like New York City could provide.
Wouldn't put it past Simpson to be a homophobe. Everything about him screamed "right-wing nutjob". He served overseas, was very proud of his time spent with the Special Forces, but clammed up whenever she (or anyone else) asked about what his actual role in the war effort really was. She pegged him as a wannabe action hero who probably went off-the-rails and open-fired on a school bus of brown children, or burned down a whole village.
Last she heard, she was his third partner since he made sergeant. Apparently they both were deemed 'problem officers'.
That made sense in Simpson's case, he rubbed her the wrong way (not literally though, she'd have broken his arm) almost immediately. He was sanctimonious, controlling, and aggressively gung-ho about everything. For God's sake, just the other day he had spent an entire patrol ranting about how he would have handled the situation with the two mean green giants tearing apart Harlem, like uniformed cops could've done anything worth a damn where the Hulk was concerned. And when he talked about responding during the Incident, all wistful-like, Jessica got the disturbing impression that war-zones got him hard.
She really didn't think she deserved to be saddled with him as a partner though, and clearly he didn't either. First week on the job he had the balls to treat her like she was his mentee or something, like she needed a fucking babysitter or something. When she proved she wasn't a damsel in distress or any of that bullshit, and totally showed him up catching the self-professed 'Bodega Bandit' in a surprisingly intense footchase, then he stuck to just ignoring her until she made a mistake for him to correct.
Between passive-aggressive put-downs and obnoxious mansplaining, they kept talking on patrol to a minimum. Simpson could pout like a sixteen year old girl jilted on prom night, and the sad thing was that was when he was the most bearable.
Also, he never let her drive. Hardly top of the list of things she hated about him, but it added to her ongoing theory of him being a chauvinistic piece of crap.
She really, really didn't think that she deserved this. Chalk that up to the NYPD being run by a bunch of a-holes.
"Don't know if I can trust you to have my back if you keep up the daydreaming," said Simpson. "Your head is in this, isn't it?"
"Get your head out of your ass and you'll see exactly where my head is," she muttered.
He spared her a suspicious glance. "What?"
"Nothing," she lied. "Too early for this shit."
"Maybe you had a late night," he reasoned, with all the concern of a coiled cobra. "You miss breakfast? We could stop for something quick."
Jessica, to what she thought was her credit, considered his phony concern seriously for a brief moment. "I'm fine."
"You sure?" A beat. Jessica was ready for a crack about her watching her figure or more sexist bullshit. What Simpson did end up saying instead was, "carbs might help you sober up."
She gave the Captain America knock-off a basilisk glare, with extra ice.
He offered no apology, but neither did he press the issue.
Of all the rumors Jessica had to deal with now that she was a cop, ranging from her honesty to her sexuality, her sobriety was challenged the most, far more regularly than she'd like. If she was feeling generous, fat chance, maybe she'd admit it didn't help her case how she could drink the old-school, wife-beating, suck-on-a-potato veteran coppers under the table. Wasn't her fault her metabolism and her tolerance was built up that six beers felt like a single tall-boy, and a six-shooter of whiskey felt like two fingers, heavy on ice. And it wasn't her fault every day she felt the aches and pains of a regular human body pushed to making high-jumps like she was playing hopscotch or working the heavy-bag at the gym like she was kneading a loaf of dough.
Sonofabitch Simpson, of course he'd think the worse. She suspected he also was the guy who started the rumor that she had been using steroids to keep up with the boys. Jessica only had been a cop for three months and twice she had been 'randomly' picked for drug tests.
Worse, she just had to take it, resigned to a foreseeable future of peeing in cup after cup instead of risking someone thinking she was a 'gifted' cop. Every variable in every scenario she went through sucked tailpipe, from being labeled a menace, a cheat, or a freak and having her shield taken away, or being stuck on the 'freak-beat' until some alien invader or evil-as-shit perp with Avengers-level superpowers blew her up.
They probably wouldn't even give her a posthumous medal if that went down.
"I'm not hungry," she repeated, as calm and coldly as she could manage.
"Suit yourself," he replied back, nonchalant to the point of being dismissive.
Jessica retreated back to happy thoughts; to a girl she saved when she was dressed like a hoagie, waiting for her paperwork to come through at the academy, a humiliating, shitty part-time job that managed to put her in the right place at the right time when a little girl nearly got hit by a car. Pulling that girl aside, bracing herself against that car, saving a life... she knocked Trish's talk about making her into a career superhero but no lie, it felt good to help someone.
The radio crackled to life. "Got a 10-52 in progress."
Simpson answered, because of course he did; he didn't let her answer their squad radio either.
'Suit yourself' she thought bitterly, 'see if you expect me to learn the jargon if you don't let me talk, you douchebag.'
And now Jessica got a sour taste in her mouth thinking about how she helped more people dressed as a sandwich than she did three months in police uniform.
"-copy."
Oh great, what did she miss?
"Barfight at this hole in the wall in Hell's Kitchen," Simpson repeated, with a grimace. He was one of the cops who would keep trying call the neighborhood 'Clinton' even after the Incident put it back to '80's grit and grime. Clearly bothered him to give up.
That gave Jessica some small measure of happiness. "Are we doing this or do you need time to put on your riot gear?"
"Yeah figured you like this one," said Simpson, eyes on the road. Then, casually, "it's a bar at 2PM on a weekday after all."
And now Jessica's new happy place officially included putting Simpson in a headlock and taking an electric razor to his godawful, Hitler Youth haircut.
"Would you stop smiling like that?" He said, annoyed. "It's creepy."
This week couldn't go by fast enough.
