Matt awoke, groggy and sore. His jaw was on fire. He could taste the embers of bruised skin inside his mouth and groaned. He was sitting upright against a brick wall on a roof somewhere in Hell's Kitchen. For a moment he worried he may be tied down, recalling the time he spent with Frank Castle on a similar rooftop only months before. But Jessica had no interest in restraining him, working against him. She only wanted to protect him.

He could hear her directly across from him. She was out of breath and holding her cramping side. Strength was one thing, stamina was another. She really needed to consider working out.

Matt imagined her hopping from roof to roof, or flying as she had once put it, his unconscious body hanging from her powerful hands. If it had been anyone else he might have been embarrassed. Embarrassed to be laid out by one punch or embarrassed to be dragged across the city. Instead, he was impressed and almost flattered that she cared so much. But it didn't matter. He wouldn't stop. He had to go back.

He rose from slumber and immediately made his way to the roof ledge, scanning the darkened city for a way down, listening to the vibrations around him.

Jessica's hand on the collar of his shirt yanked him back.

"Are you serious?" she barked. "I just got your ass out of there and you want to go back?"

"You shouldn't have done that," Matt told her. She knew he had been angry before, but now she could hear it. His words cut like a knife. "I told you I need to fight."

"And I told you I didn't want to," she replied. "Did you think I was just going to leave you there?"

"You're worried about me. It's radiating off of you. I get it. I worry about you too, but Jessica, that was Wilson Fisk."

"I know who that was," Jessica told him. "And radiating? Come on. Let's try to keep the weirdo factor to a minimum."

"Enough with the snappy comebacks!" he yelled.

It was so shocking Jessica couldn't help herself. She slapped him in the face, right where she had punched him. Matt's jaw shook wildly as he stumbled backward.

"That was like a fifth of my strength. Don't piss me off, Murdock."

The slap was what he had needed and he resigned with a sigh. "I'm sorry," he said slowly. "But I know now that this isn't about Kilgrave. It's about Fisk. He knows who I am and he's after me."

"As much I love a little self aggrandizing, didn't you hear him? He said 'kill the devil'."

Matt had almost forgotten. Fisk had said that, hollered it, in fact. He was so loud Jessica heard him from the roof. Everyone heard him.

"Capture the girl and kill the devil," Matt restated.

"Exactly," Jessica said. "So this is about me, counselor. And Kilgrave. And I don't want to see you die for any of that."

Matt smiled, but immediately regretted it as his cheek strained against a newly forming bruise.

"Okay, I'll play," he said slyly. "This can be about both of us. But not Kilgrave."

Jessica shook her head from side to side. "I don't think that was really Fisk," she told him. "At least not the version you know and hate."

"What? Why not?"

"Because I think he was using Kilgrave's mind control… powers."

Matt scoffed. He knew a Kilgrave had… powers. So did Jessica and Luke and, depending on who you asked, even Danny with his glowing fist. But in most instances those powers were non-transferable.

Hell, his own gifts had come from a horrific accident.

Matt knew that even if those circumstances were reproduced - the delivery truck, the chemical waste, the old man crossing the street, the boy who wanted to do good - there was no guarantee the next recipient of forced blindness would go on to do more than any seeing man could imagine.

Fisk was no Kilgrave.

"It sounds crazy, I know," Jessica said before he could. "And it's not something I even remotely want to be true, but I saw what I saw."

"Which was what?" Matt asked.

"Those assholes jumping to their deaths. Or at the very least into a series of elaborate injuries, maybe a coma or two."

Matt didn't reply. He had been unconscious during Jessica's apparent epiphany regarding a Fisk/Kilgrave connection.

She sighed loudly, her breathing finally returning to normal after her flight through Hell's Kitchen. "Fisk yelled attack or some bullshit. He ordered those men to capture me and kill you."

"Yeah…"

"And when I jumped off the roof, they followed."

"And missed," Matt said.

Jessica sighed again. He could feel her frustration rising, the air surrounding them heating up.

"No, not missed. They didn't care. They didn't weigh the pros and cons or wonder who would scrape them off the pavement if they didn't make it. They just did what they were told."

Matt remembered reading Hogarth's files and he knew Kilgrave's instructions were often taken literally - sometimes with deadly consequences. But Fisk wasn't capable of that. His power was money laundering and walloping men in the chest with the strength of a gorilla, not mind control.

Matt began to pace the roof, using the rhythm of each step to help him think.

Jessica, on the other hand, found a spot on the ground and sat down. She knew she was right. There was no more thinking required.

After minutes of silence, Matt wondered aloud, "How did Kilgrave become Kilgrave?"

"What?"

"How did he get his… powers?" Yep, Matt hated that word.

"Um, he got them when he was a kid," she told him, leaning back on her hands.

"Like us?" Matt questioned incredulously, thinking back to his hypothesis about the accident - the accident that led to him becoming Daredevil. Could it really be possible that things of that nature could happen twice?

But Jessica squashed that theory. "No, not like us."

Jessica had never thought of her and Matt Murdock as an us, but she was beginning to realize they had more in common then a fight against The Hand. They were each involved in terrible accidents as children. They each gained heightened abilities. They each lost their parents. They each fought for people who couldn't fight for themselves.

"His parents experimented on him when he was a kid," Jessica continued. "He had some kind of brain disease that couldn't be cured, so his parents started doing tests on him. They were trying to save him, but… I don't know, I guess depending on who you believe they began treating him as a lab rat and turned him into what he was. Or, you know, they were loving parents who wanted to help their son and didn't realize what he was becoming until it was too late."

"What do you believe?" Matt asked. He had stopped pacing.

Jessica shook her head. "I don't know. And I don't think it matters."

After an agonizing minute of reflection on Jessica's indifference, Matt resumed his pace, resumed his hurried thinking.

"Can you stop that?" she asked him. "It's making me sick."

"I just need to put it all together," he told her.

"I've already done it," Jessica replied, a chuckle escaping her throat. "It's not that hard. There are bad guys who want to kill us and we have to stop them. We call Luke and Danny and-"

"No!" Matt snapped.

Jessica deflated at the sound of his refusal. "Look, I know I just said, like an hour or two ago, that I work better alone so this may seem hypocritical. But I'd rather be a hypocrite than dead. We can't face this on our own."

"We can if we know what we're up against." Matt kicked at the loose tar beneath his feet and stomped to the other side of the roof. His frustration was palpable. Jessica could almost taste the tension in the air. She grudgingly picked herself off the ground and staggered to his side, exhausted and confused.

Leaning over the edge, looking down at the ignorant people below, people who could be in danger if she and Matt did not act, Jessica gave into her better judgement and decided to play it Matt's way. Perhaps it was the least she could do for a man so hell bent on saving her life.

"Okay, so let's work this out," she said, her elbows resting on the ledge, her long hair hanging loose, blowing in the night air.

Matt found his place beside her, peering down, seeing shapes rather than people.

"Fisk must have escaped from prison," Matt began. "Help from the the outside maybe."

"And then he used his money and influence to grow a new army," Jessica added.

"To come after me," Matt finished.

"Us," Jessica reminded him and he sighed heavily in remembrance. "And, I guess, the whole being able to control people's minds is just… what? An added bonus," she quipped, sighing along with him.

"You said Kilgrave was experimented on. Could those same experiments give someone else his powers?"

Jessica scoffed. "I don't think that's how it works. Kilgrave was ripe for crazy town. He was already a sociopath and whatever his parents did amplified it."

"But you said you weren't sure whether his parents made him this way or were trying to help him," Matt countered. "It stands to reason that if he was made, not born, then someone else could attain those powers too."

"And if Fisk has it who's to say someone else doesn't too?" Jessica wondered aloud. She was reeling from the thought of there being another two or three or five Kilgrave's walking the streets of New York. Muttering to herself, she pushed back from the ledge angrily and began to pace, taking up the place Matt had left just a moment before.

"Okay, hold on," Matt told her, moving from the ledge and returning to her side. He grabbed her by the arms, holding her tightly. He thought of hugging her - it's what he would do if she were Karen, hug away the tension, let her know he was here - but Jessica didn't need that. She needed a reality check. He shook her.

"Fuck, Murdock," she yelped, prying herself from his grip. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Shaking some sense into you," he told her. He needed Jessica ready for what was to come next.

"I have sense. I'm the one who figured this whole thing out!" Jessica snapped.

Matt chuckled. "Does it feel like anything is figured out?"

Jessica resigned herself to the knowledge that, no, nothing was solved - rather she had figured out that there was something that needed solving. Maybe Fisk was able to dabble in a little experimentation that led to him having Kilgrave-like powers. Maybe there were others. Maybe he and his army were trying to kill them.

Wait…

"Why did he want to capture me and not kill me?" Jessica asked.

The question snapped Matt out of thinking about how to take Fisk down and back to thinking about his motive. Why had he wanted Jessica alive?

Capture the girl. Kill the devil.