Part 2

Jessica Jones had a knack for finding more than what she was paid to find. Sure 90% of the work was just catching nasty cheats hooking up with their equally nasty side-chicks, but the rest of her work ended with her wading so far into wierd she couldn't touch the bottom with both feet.

Maybe that was why she drank. That and Kilgrave. Kilgrave had left his own set of scars.

The kid who had become her new client was definitely onto something, though. Florence Romanova-Barnes was a strange kid to start with, but looking over this data with an irish coffee - okay, more irish than coffee if she were honest with herself - this stuff was "wading into wierd" territory. How did she even find this sort of stuff? Was she actively looking for it?

The signals were scanning children. Kids. Then sending the data somewhere underground. For what reason, Jessica couldn't tell, the information had been scrambled and encoded. It was only thanks to a conspiracy theory nut ex-client she'd been able to glean as much as she had. While she scanned the gibberish pages that had been spat out, Jessica had to wonder what Romanova-Barnes' interest in this was. The kid didn't strike Jessica as someone who normally asked for help. Come to that - she didn't look like the sort of kid to get involved in this kind of stuff. She looked like the kind of preppy little jerk that had bullied Jessica her whole childhood.

She hip-checked the door to her office - currently covered by a black bin bag and a piece of plywood and had staggered into the office to slap the papers down on the desk before she'd even noticed the figure leant on the windowsill.

For a second she was terrified it was Kilgrave.

He was bulky - too bulky to be Kilgrave, thank god - wearing a ratty hoodie and cap and eating an apple, seemingly ignorant to her presence. The only inkling she had that he'd seen her was the slight head tilt in her direction.

The door which was still thrown wide behind her, slammed shut. She turned sharply - despite the amount of irish in her coffee - and was confronted by a woman with the brightest shade of red hair Jessica had ever seen. The colour was too rich for Jessica to guess it had been dyed like that. It was either her natural hair or she was wearing a wig.

It was the same hair as her client. The Mysterious Ms Romanova-Barnes.

'Alias Investigations?'

Her bullshit meter was pinging. 'I'm not taking on any new clients.' She lied.

'It's about a client.' The man by the windowsill growled.

Jessica's hands bunched by themselves. They come into her home and do the good cop- bad cop routine on her?

'I'm not discussing clients.' She replied, hard.

'You want to discuss why our daughter's paying you?' The windowsill man asked, aloof.

Jessica swore inwardly. She knew ms "Part- time job" was trouble, but she'd still taken on the case because hey! The beer fund could always use some more cash. 'No refunds.' She replied.

'That's not what this is about.' The woman at the door drawled. 'You're going to stop looking into whatever it is that she's got you looking into.'

Oh. That was what this was. Well, Jessica was never one to take "friendly advice" before and she certainly wasn't about to start now.

The gorrilla by the window reached out to take the papers off her desk and she reacted. She'd worked hard for that gibberish and she definitely intended - if not to give it to the recipient - to keep hold of it. There was client confidentiality to consider.

What she wasn't expecting was to be clotheslined by what felt like a steel bar masquerading as the gorrilla's arm and slammed into the drywall of her home. She left an impressive hole as she crashed into her kitchen.

When she finally pulled herself up, out of the debris of her kitchen table, coffee mugs, and bits of thin plaster that used to be her wall, she launched into the office ; ready this time for a scrap, the redhead and her thug were gone. So were the papers.

Jessica stared at the mostly irish coffee soaking into the floorboards and murmured 'Sonova-'


The phonecall came as she was topping up her whiskey. 'Alias Investigations.' Jessica slurred.

'You had some unexpected visitors.' The caller stated.

Great. It was her client. The very oddball Ms Romanova-Barnes. She didn't sound surprised in the slightest. She must've known there was a chance of them meeting. 'You could have warned me.' Jessica replied and tossed back the whiskey.

It was pleasantly burning it's way down her throat when the client said 'I...don't know how they tracked me. I thought I'd jammed them.'

Jessica groaned into her whiskey glass. Honestly, when she heard that, she realised how young and completely naive her client was. 'Probably because not many people are looking into this scanning thing. Me asking questions and all, it was an easy figure.'

'Oh.' The girl replied. In the silence, she could hear the sounds of the badly maintained metro. 'I'm sorry for whatever they might've done.' She wasn't, Jessica realised. The tone was all wrong. This girl hadn't mastered the art of faking sincerity just yet.

'It wasn't that bad.' Jessica replied and turned to look at the hole in her wall where she could see her fridge. It did - at least - make getting beer from the kitchen a little easier.

'Do you have my files?'

Jessica opened up her desk drawer and found the folder marked F. R-B (Cur.). The file wasn't thick - and it had taken some persuasion for her Conspiracy Theorist friend to re-print the results, including death threats. Both protection from and deliverance thereof - but she had the results. 'It's all in gibberish.' She frowned.

'It's encoded.' Her client replied in a tone that clearly said she was an idiot. 'I need you to post it.'

'You're not coming to collect?' Jessica frowned. 'After all I went through to get these?!'

'Do you want another visit from those two?' Florence replied.

No, she did not. She did not need more ventilation in her apartment - or irish coffee gone to waste. To be honest, she was more angry about the coffee. Another quick drawer search produced a slightly stained but still useable notepad and pen. 'Where am I posting them to?'

'St John Baptiste in Manhattan.'

'Seems a little public to be sending these ultra-important files.' Jessica noted as she scribbled down an address.

Florence Romanova-Barnes snorted on the other end of the line. 'The history teacher there seems to think I'm working on world war 2 code-breaking. I finished that days ago, this will not look out of place.'

Jessica raised an eyebrow. After being mugged for these files, she was kind of curious about what they were. 'What are you hoping to find with these files, exactly?'

The line was silent for some time. 'Have you ever heard of the organisation HYDRA?'

Jessica recognised an almost unwillingness to say the name. 'Vaguely.' She replied. 'Weren't they some super-secret society-'

'They were.' The girl replied. 'Lets just say they take an interest in ….special genetics.'

'Is that why they're scanning children?' Jessica asked.

'Mmm, no. They're scanning for something specific, I think, but they haven't narrowed it down any further than Manhattan so they're doing broad sweeps of everywhere that children congregate.'

'What are they looking for?' Jessica flipped through page upon page of letters, numbers, decimal points and complete garbage. Every page had that creepy tentacle skull on it.

'That is classified,' Florence Romanova-Barnes replied. 'Send the files immediately.'

Jessica's phone beeped and the call ended. She stared at her phone for some time before she looked down at the file. What the hell did she have here? What kind of fourteen year old uses the term "classified"?

Jessica Jones quickly did a search for HYDRA. The more she read, the more worried she became about what she'd just gotten involved in. World War 2 nazis, senators, moles, ghoulish experiments and a guy with a red skull. It was supposed to be dismantled - twice - but Florence Romanova-Barnes spoke as though they very much weren't.

She sat back and stared at the file as though it could explode at any given time. Slowly, she topped up her whiskey glass and found an envelope. She scribbled the address on the packaging hurriedly and stuffed the papers in as fast as she could.

The envelope sat on her desk like a bomb waiting to go off. Jessica cursed and hefted herself out of her desk chair.

That thing was not staying in her office.

She made a mental note to look up Florence Romanova Barnes at a later date. She had a feeling that sometime in the near future - she was going to see her face again.


A/N: Have part 2 of Jones! Poor Jessica. This is why she drinks. A lot. Hello readers, reviewers, WinterWidow fans et al!