A/N: Welcome back! Just a quick reminder, if there's any levels you want to see included in the future, let me know and I'll be sure to work them in. I'll include any level as long as it's not one designated a "joke" level on the Backrooms Wiki – I don't plan on including any of them. Regular levels, sub-levels, and anomalous levels are all fine.
Anyway, read, review, and enjoy!
I do not own Marvel or the Backrooms.
"Jessica!" Matt called. He ran in the direction of her voice. She was still pretty far away, but hopefully she'd be able to hear him.
The sound of her footsteps stopped, but her heart rate accelerated. "No. No, stop it, you're dead. I killed you!"
Whoever she was talking about, Matt knew it wasn't him. "Jess, it's me, Matt. Daredevil. From…from Midland Circle. I stayed down there with Elektra while the rest of you got out and…." She thought he'd died down there, Matt realized. She and Luke and Danny. Granted, at some point they might have heard about Nelson, Murdock & Page and realized he had survived, but this was his first time meeting any of them since that day over nine years ago. It didn't feel like nearly that long; then again, for him, over half of that time had passed in a fraction of a second.
"Took you long enough to reach out," she finally said.
"Stay where you are; I'm almost there. How did you get here? Do you know where we are?"
"Great, so I'm assuming you don't know either. I thought maybe your non-drunk mind would remember."
"All I know is I've got the suit on, so I must've been…at my nighttime job."
"Look at you, you're a regular PI."
Matt entered another nearly identical room; Jessica was through the next doorway. "What about you? Do you have anything with you that indicates where you were before?"
"Well, my clothes smell faintly like alcohol, but that's nothing new." Matt had smelled that almost immediately after first hearing her. "Nothing else, really. I'll check my…Jesus Christ, what are you wearing?"
Matt stopped in the doorway. "What? You don't like my new suit?"
"You look like that shitty Iron Man knockoff on those bootleg T-shirts I keep hearing about."
"Right. Avongers." Nelson, Murdock & Page had recently had an influx of clients trying to sue whoever was making those things for false advertising. "I guess there's some benefits to not being as high-profile as the Avengers."
"Well, it didn't stop that evil copycat of you from running amok around Hell's Kitchen."
Poindexter. He still didn't know what had happened to him after his back was broken by Fisk. Matt knew he'd been taken to Metro-General Hospital, but after that he'd completely vanished. Granted, being snapped into dust for five years didn't make tracking people down any easier.
"Why didn't you ever let me know you were alive?" Jessica asked. "I don't know about Luke and Danny, but I only realized you weren't dead when I saw an ad for your law firm on TV."
"I'm sorry," Matt replied. "After Midland Circle, I was recovering for a…a long time. I did try to track down you and the others, but Colleen said Danny's off in Asia, Luke seems to have dropped off the grid entirely, and I guess I just kept hitting Alias at the wrong times. No one was ever home when I came by. I figured, 'Hey, I'm alive, surprise!' wasn't the sort of thing you tell someone over the phone."
"Well, you're right about that. If I'd still thought you were dead at that point, I would've thought you were just some asshole messing with me. I probably would've told you to fuck off and then hung up."
That certainly sounded like something she would do, based on the short time he'd known her.
"The last time I stopped by, Malcolm was there. Told me you'd given Alias to him, found a note you'd left saying you were headed to Mexico. And right after I left was when that-"
"Spaceship appeared in the sky," Jessica finished. "And after that you weren't in your law firm's ads anymore, so I figured you were one of the three-and-a-half billion unlucky ones."
"Yeah," Matt said. "Although I'd contest the term 'unlucky,' given what Foggy and Karen told me the world was like for those five years."
"It was bad at first, but after a few years, you stop noticing the urban decay and new inter-country wars starting every week over one natural resource or another."
Matt nodded. "You'd be surprised how many Blip-related cases we're still getting. People complaining that they weren't technically dead, and so-and-so had no right to sell their property or demolish some part of their house, stuff like that."
"And in all that, you found enough time to get a new suit made, but couldn't reconnect with an old friend?"
"Is that what we are?" Had he ever heard her use the word "friend" before? Certainly not this willingly. Everyone he'd met who hadn't been blipped had been changed by those five years. Maybe, against all odds, not all of them had been changed for the worse.
"Maybe."
It took Matt a second to realize she'd been replying to the question he vocalized, not the one in his mind. "Well, Mexico's a big country. I wouldn't even know where to start looking five years later."
"Never even got there. Made it as far as the bus station and then…turned back."
That pause clearly meant something, but he wasn't going to press the topic.
"Well, I guess I could've looked for you too, so I guess we're even," Jessica continued. She extended her hand. "How about we stay in touch this time once we get out of…here?"
Matt smiled. "Deal." He shook her hand.
"Now are we gonna stand around talking all day or find our way out?"
They headed down a hallway perpendicular to the direction Jessica had been coming from. Beyond the sounds she and Matt made, and the buzzing lighting, there were no other sounds to be heard – no one else around. But the fact that he'd found Jessica meant there was a chance for them to find others in this place too.
"How long have you been here?" Matt asked.
"No idea," Jessica said. "A while. Half a day, half a week, can't tell. It's all the same."
"It's probably been half a day at most for me."
"How can you tell?"
"I've gotten used to being able to tell time without seeing."
"Oh, right. Makes sense."
"So what did you end up doing if not heading to Mexico?" Matt asked. "Did you head back to Alias or do something else?"
"No. I spent a couple nights at Trish's old place while I thought about where to go next…I'm sure you've heard where she is now."
"The Raft."
"After the spaceship attacked, Detective Costa – we'd worked together a few times – tracked me down and asked for my help, said he wanted me ready to help them fight back if there was another attack. I guess there were some rumors that another spaceship had appeared up by Lake Ontario, and then a third one over Scotland, and with half the other Avengers missing or off the grid, he wanted all the help he could get in case more showed up.
"Then after Thanos did his thing, Costa asked me to stick around for a while…unofficially, of course. The NYPD was hit pretty bad by the Blip, and no one gave a shit about the Sokovia Accords anymore at that point. And that's where I've been since then."
"Even with everyone back now?"
"Clearly I've been a valuable asset. Not like I'm taking up an actual job position. Unofficially, remember? I've run into…."
Something was coming. Its sound was barely audible in the background of Jessica's voice, but it was there.
"Shh," Matt said. He tilted his head towards the noise. It was definitely there, coming from far behind them, but approaching. And he couldn't be sure, but it sounded like it was following the exact same path he and Jessica had taken.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"Something's coming. It's…."
"What?"
"It's not human."
Normally, even from a distance away, Matt could tell someone's general physique by the sound waves from their footsteps ricocheting back to them. But now he could barely detect anything…anything below the head, that it. Whatever was following them, its head was large and boxy, with some sort of cylindrical protrusion on the front. The sound waves themselves were strange, as they had a clunky sound to them, like when someone was walking around on crutches, on something that couldn't bend. But whatever this was, it was moving far faster than a person with crutches could. The resulting sound was akin to a rapid scuttling.
"It's following us," he said.
"What's 'it'?"
He couldn't definitively answer her question. So he settled for telling her something else he knew for certain.
"Run."