A/N: Hello, my darlings. I've been busy as of late, but I churned this sucker out for ya'll in the wee small hours of the morning. I hope you like it. And to all those reviewing, thank you for indulging my ego! (No, but seriously, I really appreciate reviews. Much love.)
Darkness, Within as Without
I
The empty bottom of the bottle made a hollow, curt chime as it collided with Josie's sticky bar top. Matthew focused on the sound. He did his best to remain impassive, his face a careful mask. Give nothing away.
"…Maybe I'm paranoid, but at this point we have a right to be! You don't have the best track record for telling us when shit's going down. I'm worried about you, man. So is Karen. Right, Kare?"
Karen nodded to Matt's left. "If anything happened to you—if you ended up somewhere hurt and alone, without help…" The sentence trailed off, unfinished. Her face was one of concern, but also disappointment. Judgement. She was only there because Foggy had convinced her to come, Matt knew. He wished Foggy had left well enough alone. She never had understood. Part of Matt wanted to hate her for that but another, deeper part hated himself for what she despised in him. And she did despise it; she hated the Devil in him as much as she had nearly loved the man. That made things tough for both of them. She wanted him to be someone he couldn't be and he wished she could understand something she wasn't programmed to comprehend—or simply chose not to.
Matt smiled genially, betraying none of his torrential thoughts. He knew his smile was charming, convincing. But he also knew these two individuals, of all the people in his life, had learned the hard way how to see through his thin disguises.
"Guys, you're overreacting. I just had a bad night. Nothing happened. I just drank a bit too much." God, he hoped his face looked as convincing as his voice sounded.
"What, suddenly you can't hold your liquor?" Foggy asked incredulously. "C'mon, Matt, I went to college with you. I know how much your Irish blood can take."
Matt chuckled. "First of all…that's a little racist, Foggy. Second…," Matt hesitated. If he didn't want them to conclude that he was, in fact, in the suit again, he could at least compromise with a half-truth. He sighed. "I got drunk because I was feeling…a little down."
Karen was startled. "You're telling us you got drunk on your own because you were depressed?"
"Shocking, isn't it?" Matt quipped dryly. He gratefully reached out his hand to a second bottle of beer as it landed on the counter in front of him.
"'We'll take him to Josie's' you said. 'It'll be good for him!'" Karen mimicked Foggy under her breath.
"I didn't know he'd turned to alcohol!" Foggy hissed back from Matt's right side.
"You guys do know I'm sitting in-between you, right? I can hear you," he grinned good-naturedly. "Besides, it was one time. It's not like I'm getting drunk every night and waking up with a horrendous hangover as a rule." Unbidden, the thought of a mysterious woman and the scent of whisky floated through his mind. He mentally shook it off and continued with the lie. "Foggy just caught me on a bad night. No need for you guys to stage a half-assed intervention."
Foggy gasped, seemingly appalled. "Half-assed?!"
"We did do it at Josie's, Fog," Karen conceded.
Foggy pretended to think a moment. The room was a dimly-lit, cliché of a dive. Clacks of collisions and rolling balls sounded from the nearby pool table. Amber lighting, the faint stench of bleach masking vomit, and the hiss of a barely-functioning heater in the far corner set the mood. Foggy glanced around and then, with a sigh, nodded in reluctant agreement. Yeah, they could've picked a better place.
"Why did you pick Josie's?" Matt asked.
"Public," Foggy replied, but didn't elaborate. Matt could read between the lines—or, in this case, the lack thereof. They wanted it to be somewhere that the three of them wouldn't get into a shouting match over Matt's lies. A public place kept them from making a scene but allowed for enough interaction to give Karen and Foggy their soapbox from which to preach to him. Matt tried not to resent them for metaphorically tying his hands behind his back, tried not to resent them for setting up a situation where they could freely lecture him with their concerns but he could give no solid rebuttal without exposing his secrets to prying ears. He tried not to resent them for this. He failed.
It was hard not to resent Foggy when he smelled like hair gel, when Matt knew his hair was cut like a Lawyer—as if his position at a corporate firm now required spelling with a capital L—when he could smell the cologne that was once above his paycheck, could hear the scratch of his new, expensive cufflinks drag across the counter like a Lamborghini might drag on cracked asphalt. It was hard not to feel like a brushed-aside ex who was left with all the bruising memories while the other person moved on with his newer, shinier life. It wasn't that Matt was jealous of Foggy for having success; he was jealous of success for having Foggy.
Karen, on the other hand, just smelled of Karen. It was her, just as she was, with just a hint of ink added to the usual mélange of cherry blossom shampoo, jasmine lotion, and vanilla lip balm. Her fragrance was that of a floral arrangement with a rolled newspaper stuck in the center. Matt let himself meditate on the scent. He missed it, but now it was changed just enough to remind him that it wasn't quite Karen anymore, not His Karen, not the Old Karen. This was a new, standoffish Karen who carefully navigated her surroundings when he was in the room so as not to so much as brush against his hand when reaching for her drink. This New Karen spoke less, didn't openly study his face the way she had when she believed he wouldn't be able to tell. This New Karen exemplified all the numerous ways in which Matt Murdock had royally fucked up.
For a moment, each barfly drank her or his poison of choice. Then Foggy set his glass down. It made a sound that reminded Matt strongly of a judge's gavel.
"Listen…if you are back at it…," he took a deep breath, "you can tell us, Matt." (No, I can't.) "We just don't want you getting hurt," he murmured, studying Matt's profile.
Matt only paused with the bottle to his lips and cracked a smirk—a smirk he didn't feel in the slightest, that felt like a scar on his numb and lying lips—as if he found it funny that his friends worried too much for his well-being. Then, he drank deep and gave no reply.
Behind them in the darkened corner of the bar, a shadow watched.
II
Jessica's cynicism was as close to sympathy as she was capable of showing Malcolm. She knew it hit hard for him, a former addict (though initially by force), knowing an addicted friend's death meant nothing to the police. And she had tried her best to convey—well, the closest thing to compassion she could manage. Maybe Malcolm knew that or maybe he didn't. He was the kind who only seemed to understand emotions; a person who shunned feelings was a bit harder for him to grasp. He got that she suppressed emotion, but he never quite got the why nor was he all that great at respecting her corresponding boundaries. He always wanted to know how she was feeling or how something shitty was affecting her. Fuck that, she thought. Finally, he'd given her something she could use. Sympathy and concern didn't do much in the way of help in Jessica's line of work. But a lead? She'd take that any day of the week.
The mission that Malcolm worked at doubled as a rehab center for junkies. Jessica would never admit it to him, but she knew everything about this place. Whatever one might call her relationship with Malcolm was an unusual (and unusually persuasive) bond. She supposed it had something to do with the fact that they'd both experienced the hell of Kilgrave's mind prison. Or maybe it was because Malcolm had a heart for strays. Or because she had a heart for strays (not that she'd ever admit that to herself.) But, as much as she liked to give him the opposite impression, she cared about what happened to him. And, call it paranoia, but she liked to know where he was when he wasn't haunting her office/apartment like an all-too-talkative ghost.
"Can I help you?" The desk clerk looked up, his head in a case file. He was trying to get the copy of a birth certificate of a vagrant from an uncooperative hospital in Illinois. Hands still poised on the keyboard mid-sentence in an email tirade, he did a quick once-over of the woman in front of him. She was in her leather jacket and blue plaid, the dark shades of her unofficial uniform contrasting sharply with the ugly drunk-tank pink of the mission office. Her eyes were tired and bloodshot. The clerk's eye's drifted to the clock over her shoulder: it was nearly 6p.m. Then: "The AA meetings are down the hall to the right."
She pulled a face. "I'm not here for the AA meetings." She seemed to reassess her approach, her face adjusting into a parody of politeness. "I'd—like to volunteer."
It made for an odd night.
She went home with a mission T-shirt ("Help the Helples!" it declared on the front, typo and all) covered in chili and soup. But by the end, she'd asked (or grilled) just about everyone at the mission about John Clover.
One conversation in particular had been of help.
Around 7p.m., she'd claimed she was taking a "smoke break", which the shift director said was off-limits on the mission grounds, sending her out back into an alley. As she suspected, nearly a dozen homeless men and women hung outside, nursing cigarettes.
A few eyed her cautiously, but when she made no move to rat them out, they relaxed. Jessica's eyes fell to a man standing several yards away. One of his hands was tucked into his coat, the worse for wear. He was clearly hiding something stronger than tobacco, but who was Jessica to fault any man for his vices? Hell, she'd practically let Malcolm burn himself alive with that shit and did nothing until he got in her way… Isn't this shelter supposed to help people get clean? I wonder if he's selling to the other patients…
She set that thought aside for the moment, and sidled up to a guy dressed in a loud yellow shirt and, inexplicably, overalls. It matched the description some lady named Hera (Was that her real name?) gave her of Lucky's best friend.
"Hey, you Juan?"
"Who's asking?" he said, grinning. He had the face of a jokester, thinly covered by a patchy greying beard.
Jessica snorted. "I'll buy you another pack of Marlboros if you can help me out." He looked interested, but wary.
"I'm clean, so if you're trying to find a dealer…" He shook his head.
She interrupted. "I'm not looking for drugs, man. I'm trying to find out anything you know about John Clover."
He perked up. "Lucky?"
"Yeah. I heard about what happened to him and…," she hesitated.
"It's shitty, lady," he nodded, taking another drag. The dude had to be six-foot-five. The smoke went straight over her head. "The cops didn't even care."
"Yeah, that sucks," she said. She meant it, but she thought her voice probably didn't convey that very well. "Was he a good guy?"
"Great guy. I mean, other than hanging with me, he was kind of a loner. But when you got to know him, he was real nice. Would give you the shirt off his back, even if that was all he had. Except," he added as an afterthought, "when he was on the junk, you know. Lucky on heroin was a mean fucker, but just about everyone is wonky on that shit."
"Do you think his dealer did it? The cops thought it had something to do with what happened to him."
Juan shook his head. "Fuck no. He was off by then. And he was done. I mean, when you know you've only got a few months to live anyway, you want to get clean as soon as possible. He had a daughter he wanted to reconnect with, be a dad and shit. Still in high school."
"Wait, hold up," Jessica said, glancing around for the mission director. How long had she been gone? She noticed two individuals hanging around the shifty-looking fellow, but that was it. She chewed her lip, returning her attention to Juan. "What did he have? HIV?"
"Nah, nothing like that. It was some genetic shit, I think. Something hard to pronounce. His ex-wife called it justice for what he'd done to her, abandoning them for the needle. Whatever he had was eating him up pretty bad, especially after using for a decade."
"Sounds bad. What was it doing to him, exactly?" Symptoms would be helpful to figuring out what it was.
"Shutting his organs down. I don't know. It just seemed unfair, you know?" Juan took another drag, his face in a grimace. "You work hard to get clean, hoping to do something with your life, but he was already dying. He was going to get clean then spend the rest of his time with his daughter, Joey. She hadn't seen him in a while."
"Joey?"
"Jocelyn. He'd sometimes head over to her school on 28th just to watch her when her mom picked her up, but he never said hi." Juan grinned again. "I've never seen her in person, but he used to carry around a picture of her from grade school in his wallet." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a leather wallet of his own. With his cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he flashed her a photo. "This one's mine: Alma. She's almost twenty now, but I'm thinking after I get out of this place…," he trailed off as he put the photo away. "Lucky inspired me, I guess."
Jessica felt something constrict in her chest. She couldn't help it; her eyes drifted to the man in the clichéd trench at the back of the alley. She could practically hear Malcolm's voice in her head. It was like a reminder that she should be doing something good for once, overtly and not just because someone knocked on her door and offered to pay her for it. Or because she couldn't sleep knowing someone was out there stabbing random people in the throat. Or because she resented that her favorite scarf was now stained with blood.
She groaned to herself.
"Good luck, Juan. I hope you see your kid soon."
Just as she was making her way back into the building, the director was walking angrily up to her.
"Where have you been? During dinnertime we need all hands on deck."
Jessica tapped her foot. Her hair flooded over her shoulder in black waves as she glanced behind her, to the man in the coat, strolling back inside.
"What?"' he asked. She seemed to chew on a thought, wrestle with it for a moment. Then:
"That guy, the one in the black trench that looks like it hasn't been washed in a month or four."
"What about him?"
Jessica began to walk toward the exit as she threw over her shoulder, "Check his pockets."
III
His hands were sore. He should go home. But, again, again, as had happened to often as of late…he sensed her. In the pitch darkness of Hell's Kitchen, on a lesser-travelled side-street, a woman walked. And the Devil, drawn to the darkness within as without, followed...
IV
Jessica Jones was not afraid to walk home alone, for obvious reasons. She had the superpowers to back her up if she was in a corner. And, as a P.I., she was keen enough to know when she was being followed because she did her own fair share of it for a living. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Something moved in her peripheral vision, high up on a ledge. It was too late for this shit—not because she was afraid of being alone in the darkness, mind, but because she was missing her whisky.
She bunched the bright-orange Help the Helples! shirt in her right hand and slowed down, making a quick turn into an alleyway.
Walking toward the back, she slowed her gait, then came to a full stop.
"Show yourself, asshole." Nothing replied from the darkness.
Jessica turned to the opening of the alleyway, streetlight flooding the brick walls but not reaching where she stood, bathed in black. Then, up above her, she saw something move.
Someone was hiding on the roof. Wait—someone is jumping from roof to roof to follow me? Fuck, it is a gymnast. Jess wasn't sure that was much better than a vampire.
"You gonna stab me with your needle, or what?" She tightened her fist around the shirt. "Come and get me, fucker."
V
The sound of the shirt's threads straining against her fist reached his ears. She was pugnacious, wasn't she? Matt liked it.
He was glad he'd chosen to wear the Devil uniform tonight, if he was going to answer her question. Though, to be fair, he'd had to in order to interrogate John Clover's former drug dealer. And, if the mission T-shirt she had gripped in her hand was anything to go by (it smelled very strongly of cigarettes and soup) then she had done her own investigating earlier tonight. It wasn't surprising they'd crossed paths; they'd been in the same part of town, talking to the same people. But he was at least honest enough to admit to himself that there was almost no reason for him to be following her home. He cleared his throat, high up above her. She deserved to feel safe, to know he wasn't the murderer.
"We're fighting the same fight," he replied lowly, gruffly. He stood, the red uniform dark as a shadow in the New York night.
VI
The figure that rose to full height on the legdge was hard to see, thanks to the streetlight behind him. He was nothing more than a silhouette standing high above her, a dark shadow. She considered jumping up there to give him a piece of her mind, but then she noticed two horns on the silhouette's forehead.
The fucking Devil of Hell's Kitchen? It made sense. Of course the vigilante would go after the syringe killer; at least that solved part of the mystery. She released the breath she'd been holding and loosened her hold on the shirt, which was probably twisted beyond repair at this point."I'm not fighting any fight. I'm walking home, creep. And aren't you supposed to be retired or something?" She heard him choke on surprise. She watched as he shook his head as if to clear it.
Matt stopped himself from arguing with her. At the very least, this Jessica realized he was the local masked vigilante and not some killer. He backed away from the ledge, taking a final inhale of her whisky aura.
"Have a good night, ma'am."
"I'd have a better night without having to deal with your shit," she called after him. He didn't answer.
Jessica threw the stained, stretched shirt into the dumpster in the alley before she continued home, desperate for a drink.
Matt, on the other hand, found himself charmed. And even his mask couldn't hide his smile.
VII
The door still read "Ben Urich, Reporter." Karen liked it that way. Her editor had offered to get her name put up—in fact, he'd nearly insisted—but Karen had been adamant that Ben's name remain on the door. She said it kept his spirit alive—that so long as his name was on the door, even if her name was on a placard on her desk, she would be reminded every day to fight for the truth the same way he would have. "I haven't earned this office yet," she'd told her editor. "I can put my name up when I have."
So, Ben Urich's name was still on the door as, late at night, a lonely visitor knocked.
Karen woke with a start. Her blonde hair was tangled under her face and had very likely left an interesting imprint on her skin. The computer screen had gone black with sleep mode, her coffee had long cooled. She blinked, the light on her desk too bright for her over-sensitive eyes, and peered over her computer at the door, where a man-shaped shadow was cast through the glass.
She eyed her drawer. It was illegal and she knew it, but she kept a gun on her at all times. Tonight was no exception. Karen carefully, quietly rolled it open and let her hand hover there.
"Come in," she called, voice scratchy.
The knob turned, allowing entrance to a tall man in a cheap suit.
"How did you get in?"
"Ben let me keep a key, just in case."
Karen couldn't hide her surprise. "You knew Ben?"
The man nodded. His eyes were deep-set in his face, making it harder for Karen to read him, but something passed over his expression when he glanced back at the door. "You left his name up."
"It seemed respectful," she replied quietly.
He nodded a second time. "Listen," he said, "I would have given this story to Ben a while ago if he were still around. I don't know you, but…" She waited as he seemed to search for what he was trying to say. "But," he continued, "I heard that you were trying to carry his torch." The man paused, his dark eyes searching hers. "Miss Page, have you been looking into a defunct chemical company by the name of KemmCorps?"
Her eyes widened. "Yes. I—I've been trying to determine if it tested on its employees," she began rifling through her documents, searching for the notes from several interviews with sources, "Several individuals told me…," she trailed off, still half-awake, eyes bleary.
"And the public."
She came to a dead stop, her head down. Her eyes rolled up to meet his. "They polluted the public?" She swallowed, tucking her hair behind her ears. "Who are you?"
The stoic man chose not to answer her question. Instead, he said: "I have a lead for you."
VIII
At the same time as Karen Page was getting an unusual visit, Trish Walker was waking up on an emergency room bed. Again.
"Miss Walker? Miss Walker, can you hear me?"
The light hurt like bitch. She could hear everything. The entire floor was loud (as E.R.s are wont to be) but her hypersensitive state made it seem as if the volume had been kicked up to full-blast. She groaned.
"I'll take that as a yes," the doctor responded, scratching something down on her chart. "I see this is the third time in a week."
"Yes," Trish responded. "I, um," she struggled to sit up, "I was coming home from a kickboxing class when I got another migraine. I had to pull over."
The doctor shot her a look of pity, but Trish missed it. She was still too out-of-it to notice much at all.
"Miss Walker…the results of your blood test came back while you were out."
She perked up a bit at that. "You did? What do the results say?"
The doctor pursed her lips and glanced down at her chart. This was her least favorite part of her job.
"Miss Walker," she began, "I'm sorry." Trish's face deflated. "It seems you have a rare genetic neurological disorder. It's weakened your heart and it's attacking your nerves at large." The doctor broke eye contact as she finished: "It has begun to affect the chemical makeup of your brain."
