AN: Trigger warning for those sensitive to scenes of a suicidal nature or sexual assault. If you're anxious about reading a chapter with those elements just shoot me a message and I'll give you a clean summary :)
"Put it on," he whispered, his voice as smooth as velvet. "You'll love it."
"I will love it," her mouth repeated languidly while the tiny voice in the back of her head screamed and fought against the pressure that kept it there. She took the lingerie into the other room. He liked getting the full effect.
Her hands would not obey her, her legs refused to run for the door. She was trapped, undressing herself as though in a dream – or a nightmare – while every pore of her being burned with hate and fear and a rage not strong enough to break through his control.
The most she could do was slow herself. Draw out the precious moments alone. Knowing what would follow. Wishing for it to end. Begging anyone and anything that was listening to please, please, make it end. Make him miscalculate. Give her thirty seconds of control. That's all she'd need. Just half a minute.
"Hurry up, Jessica!"
Her face could not express the despair that was choking her. Her muscles moved without her consent, pulling the disgusting leather into place as everything inside her wanted to scream, to run, to throw up, to STOP!
Kilgrave was waiting on the couch, his waist jacket unbuttoned, his shirt untucked. The deep purple tie ran through his fingers, waiting to be tied painfully around her throat. He sat up straighter as her traitor body walked her out of the rare privacy. His lips pulled back, revealing teeth she would soon feel on her skin.
"Well now," he cooed, shifting his weight eagerly. "I do have good taste. What do you think, Jessica?"
"I love it," she lied, unable to speak the truth.
"I knew you would." His gaze darkened as it raked over her half-naked figure. The smile, that sent unfelt shivers up her spine, faded into a look of hunger, of base yearning. It was terrifying. "Get over here, Jessica Jones," he said, each word spoken with the careful control of a man expecting to soon abandon all restraints. "Show me how much you love it. How much you love me."
Jessica bolted upright, gasping for breath. As always, it took her one horrible moment to realise it was a dream. A nightmare. She put a hand to her forehead and focused on slowing her breathing.
Get it together, Jones, she snapped. He's dead already. It's done. It's over.
Maybe for everyone else.
She reached down for the bottle nestled between her boots.
"Goddamn it." Empty. With a groan she grabbed her phone. 3.42am. Great. Rubbing her eyes into working she swung her legs over the edge of the couch and stood up, stumbling slightly as she plodded to the kitchen. Trish should have another bottle. She better have another bottle.
She didn't register the odd smell at first. Or the rhythm of fat droplets smacking into something liquid. It was the shallow panting that rose the little hairs on the back of her neck, though her brain was not yet awake enough to identify the source.
As soon as she past the island in Trish's kitchen, all traces of weariness were shocked from her as ice froze her every muscle, along with her breath.
Matt was sitting against the cupboards in a pool that glistened darkly with a steak knife in one blood-soaked hand and a long, ruby cut along his right forearm, from wrist to elbow. The empty bottle of whiskey still in Jessica's hand fell to smash against the floor, the sound far too beautiful for the scene in front of her. Matt flinched, dropping the knife and looking for the source of the chiming clatter.
"J-Jessica?" The fragility of his tone broke through her paralysis, the hitching stammer of the single word cutting right through her.
"What the fuck are you doing, Murdock!" she hissed as she unfroze, powering forward and skidding to his side, snatching a hopefully clean tea towel from the counter on the way. She wrapped it tightly around his bleeding arm, ignoring his feeble attempts to stop her.
"Jess, n-no, stop – yo-you don't understand, I –"
"I understand just fine," she spat back, careful to keep her voice low. The last thing she needed was Trish seeing this. That would not end well. "Why not just OD you asshole? Why not –"
"Jessica." For some reason the exhaustion in his tone stopped her burgeoning tirade. She looked up into his useless eyes, his shaggy hair half-obscuring them.
"What the hell are you doing?" she asked again, calmer now, her voice far steadier than she felt with the towel covering the gut-wrenching wound. The self-inflicted wound.
"I'm not t-trying to kill myself," he whispered, his eyes blinking slowly. "I n-need to get it out."
"Get what out?"
"Tracker."
Shit. "What tracker?"
He raised his bleeding arm, still tightly bound between her hands. Which were shaking. Hm.
"I can feel it," he breathed, his head falling back to lean against the cupboard with a faint thump. Tears were painting his cheeks in the silvery glow of the reflected half-light. "They're coming. They're coming." The last words were barely audible as his eyes slid shut.
"Oh hell no," she snapped, releasing one hand and flat out slapping him. "Wake up, Murdock!"
He frowned, flinching away from her. "I am awake, Jones."
Was he trying to sass her? Oh. Hell. No.
"Do you even know how much blood you've lost? Shit, it's everywhere! What the hell were you thinking? What, we haven't done enough for you, is that it? Thought you'd just check out and not deal with all your shit? Jesus, how do I stop this bleeding?!" The towel was already staining, a dark patch of burgundy slowly inching its way through the fibres.
Matt placed his other hand over her forearm, his fingers slicked with a glove of cool blood. He turned his face to hers, his gaze aimed at her chin.
"Jessica. I'm not trying to die. Look."
She followed his nod to a surgical sewing kit by his thigh, a roll of bandages waiting on its end beside it. She looked stupidly from it to his shaking arm to his haggard face and back.
"You have three seconds to explain yourself or I swear to god I'm knocking you out and taking you to the ER. Fuck laying low."
The breath shivered through him as he inhaled. "They put something in there." He sounded even worse than he looked. "A tracker. I forgot. Someone else almost got away." Another tear escaped his lashes. "They found her. Brought her back. I h-heard her die. Heard them kill her."
She studied his expression for a long moment.
"You're serious?"
He nodded weakly.
"There's a GPS device in your arm?
Nod.
"And you tried to cut it out yourself? Alone? At 4am?"
Nod and a half-shrug.
"The fuck, Murdock, I thought you were smart!"
"Need to get it out," he sighed, looking down to the arm she still held captive as though he could see it. "Need to ... keep them safe."
"Keep who safe?"
He didn't answer, just slumped against the cupboards, his other hand curling around the jagged scar raked across his middle.
"Please, Jess," he almost whimpered. Then, barely more than a sigh, "Help me."
Swallowing a whole lot of shit she'd have to drink away later, Jess looked down at the widening stain resting over her thighs. God, she must be insane.
"Where do you think it is?"
"N-not sure. Think h-here." He pointed through the towel with a shaking finger.
"Shit. Okay. But I swear to god, Matt, if you die now I'm going to fucking kill you."
"Seems fair." Was that a smirk?
What an asshole.
"Hold this here a sec," she ordered, pressing his free hand over the towel. "I need to google how to stitch up stupid lawyers with death wishes."
He just nodded, the ghost of the smirk fading from his lips.
She reached to her back pocket, then remembered her phone was by the couch. Along with her jeans.
This was not a good night.
"Do you know how to stich?" she asked, adding more pressure to the towel.
"Yeah."
"My phone's not here. Can you talk me through it?"
"Yeah."
"Alright." She swallowed hard. "You are going to owe me so big for this."
"I already owe you e-everything," he mumbled dazedly.
Ignoring that and taking a deep breath that stank of blood she whipped the towel away and dug her fingers into the place he had indicated.
Oh god oh god oh god this was so, so wrong, this was –
"Holy shit!" She could feel it. Holding the towel to the rest of the gash with her other hand she twisted her arm, ignoring the tight moans slipping through Matt's clenched teeth. There was something there, like giant grain of rice. Weirdly hot, hotter than Matt's flesh. She pinched it between her fingers, careful of the slick blood pooling around her delicate grip. With a horrible squelching sound she would soon be drinking very hard to forget, she pulled the thing free.
"Got it!" She held it up triumphantly. Then a wave of hot blood poured over Matt's arm. "Oh, shit!"
She dropped the tracker on the floor and turned her attention back to the guy bleeding to death beside her.
"What do I do, Matt?" His eyes were half closed. "Matt! What the hell do I do?"
His eyelids fluttered open. "Needle. Pick an end."
Thankfully a needle was already threaded, a scissor-like clamp locked securely around it. She picked it up in her bloody fingers and tried to figure out which end of the cut was bleeding more.
Which she quickly realised was a really stupid question.
Binding the towel tightly around all but the inch of severed flesh nearest his elbow, Jessica clamped the ends of the towel between her legs, keeping a firm, steady pressure over the rest.
"Okay, now what?"
His head thumped back into the cupboards. Shit, he was pale.
"Pinch. Needle through. Not too deep."
Letting out a steady stream of curses, Jessica followed his truncated instructions. A metallic clatter and a low grunt from Matt and he held out a scissors to her. Feeling like she was ten seconds from puking all over his open wound, she tied the thread together as he described and pulled it tight. Snip the end, then done.
"Great. Only about a million more to go."
"I can do it," he offered, his voice still frighteningly weak.
"Yeah right."
"Done it before, Jess."
"Claire stitches you up," she countered automatically, her gaze focused entirely on the next stitch. The cut was actually pretty neat. Straight and not as deep as all the blood made her think.
"Claire's not always been there," he answered tiredly.
Jessica threw him a questioning scowl he didn't see, then finished off the second stitch. They weren't exactly neat. Or parallel. Who cares, they kept the guy's arm together.
Concentrating on the stitches and controlling the pain respectively, Jessica and Matt didn't talk as she worked her way slowly along his arm as the towel grew heaver and darker. Whenever Matt got too quiet Jessica would stab the needle through his skin with a little more force than was necessary, making him grunt or at least hiss in pain. Which meant he was still awake-slash-alive. Good.
"Done," she croaked at long last, dumping the ruined towel aside and taking in the jagged line of irregular stitches. God, she felt like shit.
Without moving his head Matt groped with his left hand for something that scraped lightly against the floor. Raising the slim packet to his teeth he tore it open, fumbling the antiseptic wipe that fell out and snatching it lethargically from his lap. As Jessica watched he rubbed it all over the long line of ugly stitches, pressing hard enough to make her wince in sympathy. Tossing the now-pink wipe aside he reached for the roll of bandages.
"Here," she offered quietly, taking it from his trembling grasp. She wrapped it tightly along his arm, looping it around his elbow and palm for good luck. Tying it off she slumped back against the kitchen island, her knees groaning silently as they finally stretched out of their cramped position.
"You got it?" he rasped, cradling his arm against his chest.
"Yeah." She picked it up. There was no little blinking light or tiny antennae, but it was unmistakably a tracker. She'd had enough jealous spouses slip them into wallets and purses to recognise a high-end model.
Reaching forward for Matt's other hand, she let him feel the tiny capsule held between her forefinger and thumb. She didn't miss the obvious relief sweeping across his face. His hand was still around hers when she crushed the tracker to dust.
"Thank you," he breathed, slumping back.
"You are an asshole," she sighed. She scrambled to her feet, trying not to touch anything with her blood-soaked hands. She slapped the faucet and rinsed the worst of it off, shaking the water free when she realised there was no other towel out. Then she reached up on her toes and found a full bottle of Jack Daniels behind a cereal she knew Trish didn't eat. Sagging back to the floor opposite the idiot she cracked the bottle open and took a long, long pull.
Then she offered it to Matt. He drank it even more desperately than she had.
"So are you going to tell me what's up?" she said when he'd handed the bottle back.
"Told you. Needed to get the tr- the tracker out."
"Bullshit. You were trying to kill yourself. The tracker was just an excuse. I told you, Murdock. I can read people. Don't lie to me."
"That's not –"
"Save it."
"That's not what I was doing, Jess. I promise."
"I said save it."
They drank in silence for a few minutes, sharing the bottle between them. The blood was starting to dry and congeal on the floor.
"Talk, Murdock."
A shaking sigh fluttered from his lips. "I could feel it in there. I remembered them putting it in." He turned his pale face in her direction. "What if they come for me? What if they get you? And Trish? Danny, Claire, Luke – what if –"
"They're not," she cut across him. "They're not coming, Matt. If they were they'd be here already. It's been a week." She pressed her leg into his under the pretence of shifting her weight saying, more softly now, "It's only been a week."
He screwed his eyes shut and banged his head against the cupboard a few times. When he finally stopped and opened his eyes, they were as lost as she had ever seen them and brimming with helpless tears.
"I thought I killed you," he whispered. "All of you. I told her we could still leave, we had time. And sh-she threw her sword into the winch. I felt the elevator fall. It wasn't even halfway up." The tears were falling freely, silently. "I th-thought you were all dead."
"The lines did snap," Jessica said slowly, staring at the half-empty bottle. "But we got out. Climbed the girder." She hesitated, trying to find her courage. Another swig of whiskey helped. "I held the cable long enough for Luke and Danny to get out. But it was too heavy to tie off or climb with. So I let it drop." She swallowed another burning amber mouthful. "I cut off your only way out. I trapped you down there. I'm the reason IGH got you in the first place."
She weathered the crushing silence that met her words by scowling at the bottle held tightly in her lap. If she looked up now she'd lose it.
"Jessica ..."
Damnit. That tone wasn't fair. Why wasn't he angry? Why wasn't he throwing punches?
His bandaged hand found hers. Both were still shuddering with every breath.
"Jessica, that was not your fault," he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I was never going to get out of there. She – E-Elektra, wanted me down there. With her. You didn't do this to me."
Tears stung her eyes. How dare he sound so earnest, so sure, so ... kind. She did not deserve kind. She deserved to be put through everything he had had to endure in that hellhole.
"Jess, listen to me," he continued, his voice stronger now. "Believe me. Elevator or no, I was trapped down there. But not by you."
"You're such an asshole," she growled, her voice shaking with the tears escaping her day-old mascara. "You should've told us it was the bomb. You should've come with us."
"I'm sorry." He squeezed her hand tighter.
"I'm sorry for what they did to you," she gasped, forcing herself to meet his sightless gaze. "I'm sorry you're so messed up, but you can't do this, Matt." She tapped his bandaged arm. "You can't. People need you, okay? You can't just gamble like that."
"No one needs me, Jess," he said softly, a sad smile twisting his expression. "I was dead for six months and nothing changed."
"Fuck that," she said, anger colouring her tone. "Nothing changed? Have you not heard Danny? He's been out on the streets trying to live up to your legacy! Claire opened her own clinic, did you know that? She calls it Night Nurse and it's for anyone who can't afford to go to hospital, whether because they don't have insurance or would be arrested. Know where she got that idea?" Her voice was stronger now, a tense whisper with fury dripping from every syllable. "And Luke – you wanna know why he started up Heroes for Hire? Because he saw how important it was to be able to work outside the law. How much New York needs assholes in stupid horny outfits stopping muggings and taking down the shitheads the police can't. Misty Knight got her arm cut off and she's already doing rehab with Colleen, already fighting back."
Tears were skipping down her cheeks now but rage kept her voice steady.
"You know your lawyer friend? Did you know he's still working pro bono suits as well as all the shit Hogarth gives him? He's still working for Nelson and Murdock, even though his partner's dead and you fucked that firm up months ago. And Page, god, did you hear about her and that psycho? Some nut with a bomb targeted her and she got out of there and the Punisher fucking comes out of nowhere and you know what she does? She writes a column about what it means to fight for good. For truth. What it means to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. Nothing's changed? Fucking everything's changed, you selfish son of a bitch!
"None of us walked away from that day whole, none of us were the same. You died trying to save some maniac because you still believed in her. Loved her. And we know – we know – we wouldn't have had time to get out of there if she'd come after us. You're the reason we're all alive, Matt. Fuck knows how you survived that explosion but it was a miracle, you asshole. We somehow get you back, and I know you're fucked up, but this is a miracle. And I've never believed in those 'cause they're for idiots who can't explain when something good happens, but I'm calling this a miracle, Matt. An actual miracle. And you don't get to throw that kind of thing away. You don't get to give up. You don't get to quit. None of us get to quit."
She took another pull on the bottle and chipped the glass on her teeth. She barely noticed the jagged speck scratching down her throat. She was too busy drowning her aching heart.
There was a long silence as she drank and he stared at her elbow. Rogue tears were still trickling into his stubble. Hers had had the good sense to stop.
"After she found out she was the Black Sky," Matt said quietly, his voice hoarse but steady. "Elektra stood on the roof of my building, ready to jump. She wanted to kill herself rather than be what they told her she was. An-and I told her, 'this feeling passes'. And I meant it. She came inside with me that night and we fought together to free her. To free the city. I-it didn't work, but ... Then she was back. I couldn't understand it. I was scared to question it. I couldn't lose her again."
He took a shuddering breath. "And then we died together. I really thought we did. But ... I was somewhere before IGH found me."
"Mission centre."
He nodded, eyebrows raised. "Yeah, that fits. But I didn't get there myself. And the only thing I can think is Elektra somehow got me there. That she's alive too. But she left me there. And then IGH got me. And now ... I'm not ... whole, I-I'm ... broken. Worse than before. A-and I c-can't –" he gasped, the sound sharp and painful – "I can't see how, how I could go back to ... My friends, I can't ... I can't cause them more pain. But as long as I'm br-breathing I will." His head flopped back onto the cupboard, eyes closed as tears snaked their way to his neck. He looked haggard. Drained. Hopeless.
God, she knew the feeling.
Jessica let out a whistling breath. "I think you might be even more fucked up than me."
He snorted at that, tilting his face towards her. Seriousness replaced levity almost at once as his eyes flicked between two points on her cheek.
"I'm sorry, Jess. You're right. I just ..." He shook his head. "I've been lost. Not being able to see, at all, it's just ..."
"Scary as shit?" she offered.
"Yeah. But you're right. Murdocks never quit. We get up. We always get back up." These last words were little more than an exhausted sigh.
"So next time you think there's a tracking device in your shin or some shit, you'll tell us first?"
That got her a chuckle. "Yeah. Yeah, I promise."
She held out the bottle.
"Good. Asshole."
Wishing he had a less expressive face, she took his other hand in hers and squeezed, hoping he'd understand what she couldn't bring herself to say.
He squeezed back.
