"We lost him!" Jessica Jones exclaimed, heaving as she rested her body back against the brick wall. "This is ridiculous. The guy could barely walk without falling over and somehow we lost him."
"He must have ducked into one of these buildings. Maybe a secret door we can't see," Matt Murdock offered as his body slammed against the wall next to her own.
"Well, can you hear a middle aged man wheezing heavily, because if so we have a winner?" she asked him sarcastically.
Matt inhaled deeply trying to calm his frazzled nerves. The tequila had done a number on him. He couldn't focus. A woman laughing. Two men arguing over the sputtering start and stop of their car. A siren wailing in the distance. The moans of late night sex and the jingle of an after hours television infomercial. The noises pressed against one another for dominance in his ear as Matt tried to hone in on one particular sound after another, but it wasn't working.
He couldn't hear the scientist. He shook his head in defeat.
"Okay. Plan B."
Jessica pushed herself off the wall and walked heavy footed back onto the street. Matt followed. He didn't know her next play, but he knew the rest of his evening lay firmly in her grasp.
"I give it less than an hour before Fisk's men clear out the scientist's apartment like they did the warehouse."
"So if we get there first..."
"Maybe we can find something to help us put an end to this."
Matt found himself taking larger strides to keep up with her, to match her determination.
"And when we do, you promise not to go all kung fu fighter on Fisk?" Jessica questioned.
"I thought we wanted to bring him down, put him back in prison."
"Sure, but that's only half the case. You kick his ass and he'll never tell us how he's using Kilgrave's abilities."
"I kick his ass and he never can again."
Jessica chuckled. "You're mighty confident for someone who smells like a distillery."
She was right, of course. It was almost all he could smell. Silver Patron hung in the air, an umbrella swaying above them, shielding him from the aromas of Hell's Kitchen.
"Besides we don't know who else knows about Fisk's plan. Taking him out without getting all the information leaves the potential of too many players out there who could do the same thing."
Jessica could feel that they were close. The I told you so sat at the very edge of her tongue ready to spring forth.
She was done placating the team, done pretending their opinions mattered, done playing nice… well, as nice as she could.
This wasn't about Fisk. Jessica could care less if Matt punched his face flat. This was about Kilgrave. This was about finishing what she started that night on the pier with the crack of his pale, skinny neck. She was prepared to break more bones of it meant stopping what happened to her, Hope Shlottman, and countless others from happening again. Matt, Luke, and Danny couldn't understand that. Having your mind taken over was one thing. Having it taken over as you lay beneath a man thrusting inside you was another. Kilgrave had thrust into her life for the last time.
Jessica kicked the scientist's door with such force it broke free from it's hinges and crashed back into his apartment. The echo of splintering wood made Matt wince. Ignoring his discomfort, his obvious hangover, she began searching the main room. She didn't have Matt's radar sense, but she knew they were alone. And she knew the neighbours wouldn't call the cops. The years' old bullet holes in the hallway and graffiti stained stairs featuring phrases like "Stay Away" and "Fuck the Police" told her as much. These people lived on the fringes and the fringes did it on their own.
"Check the other rooms," Jessica told Matt as she sifted through a pile of loose paper. The scientist's coffee table was covered with it, along with books and pens and empty Red Bull cans. It appeared he was working on a series of mathematical equations or formulas from the foreign numbers littering the pages in her hand, but Jessica couldn't make sense of it. Scanning the room she noticed the couch, set up as a bed with a worn in pillow and dirty blanket.
If he sleeps here then…
"Jessica," Matt said from what should have been the bedroom.
Jessica turned down the narrow hall and into the first room on her right. Matt was standing just inside the doorway, his back to her. The light from a nearby billboard partially shone through the window. It caught on all the glass in the room, reflecting against the walls and ceiling and floor. Even though the overhead light remained off, the room was lit. Jessica wondered what it must look like to Matt. The mad scientist's lab awash in yellow and red.
As Matt moved further into the room, his hand brushing along the long edge of the workstation, Jessica followed. On the far left wall stood a bookshelf lined top to bottom with beakers and various broken and dust covered microscopes. The desk, like the coffee table in the front room, was littered with paper, each featuring a kaleidoscope of multi-coloured doodles and nonsensical ramblings.
The clanking of instruments broke Jessica's concentration and she turned to see Matt fiddling with a decades old centrifuge. He pulled from it's grimy depth a vial filled with blood.
"Yours?" he asked.
Jessica shrugged her shoulders in reply.
"What do you think he was doing in here?"
She sighed. "I hate to say this, but I think Danny was right." The words cut against her tongue like a dull razor. "If I'm immune to Kilgrave and now to Fisk, then they need to find out why."
"And weaponize it," Matt said sadly. He picked up several vials from the table, each empty, but coated lightly in their former contents. He held them up to the artificial light that continued to stream though the window. "This wasn't blood," he told her assuredly, his heightened scenes slowly returning to him.
"No, it couldn't be. I didn't sit for a long enough needle season."
"So that means these were, what? The prototypes of whatever it is this madman was making?"
"I guess," Jessica said. She wasn't good at science or math or really any of the classes in high school that put her to sleep. But she was smart enough to know that if those vials were empty it meant experimentation had begun… maybe even finished.
"Okay, let me get my head around this," Matt said, as he rested against the only clean surface available. "Whatever was in these was a… potion," he continued, his voice dripping with incredulity. "And if they're empty that means Fisk has already taken them. So if this experiment worked then he's already figured out how to control you. He's already stronger than before."
"I don't know. Were those all questions, Murdock?" Jessica asked.
"Well, I-"
Jessica groaned before he could finish. "Can we just be done this part? The part where you doubt that this is happening, because it is."
Matt nodded in response. She was right, again. This was happening. Fisk wouldn't have funded someone to play scientist without reason. It began to sink in and settle in the deepest places of his mind. It's happening. It's been happening. What have we done?
Those men who followed Fisk unquestioningly, the men they had unceremoniously fought - and killed - in the warehouse could have been good. They could have been workers and fathers and productive New Yorkers. They could have been screaming on the inside, begging for him to listen, but all Matt could hear was the sound of their bones breaking against his fist.
As Matt slumped forward, the vial in his hand fell to the floor and shattered into tiny pieces.
"What is it?" Jessica asked, rushing to his side. He was holding his head and she assumed he could hear or smell or sense someone coming. Were they about to be under attack? But as Matt looked up, she could see the sorrow behind his sunglasses.
"We killed those men," he told her and she knew instantly what was happening. She could read guilt the way he could read people. It was her nighttime companion and something she wouldn't wish on her worst enemy, let alone someone she was close to considering a friend.
"I killed those men," Jessica reminded him. She had thrown a car at them and she didn't need Matt's super hearing to know their bodies crumpled like paper beneath it. In the two nights that had passed since, Jessica had replayed the scene in her mind again and again. Watching Fisk's men jump to their deaths that first night, the night they fled Matt's loft, had been painful enough. But Jessica knew she couldn't have prevented that. She could barely have predicted it.
Yet, that night in the warehouse she knew those men were no different than she had once been. Sure, odds are they weren't society's best. Fisk probably found them on the fringes. Maybe they were thieves or drunks or deadbeat dads. Maybe they had taken a wrong turn on a moonless night in Hell's Kitchen and found themselves face-to-face with Wilson Fisk - an already scary sight, but even more terrifying when they discovered his command to stay, follow, and fight was one they literally could not ignore.
She had tried to convince herself early on that the men in his charge were leftover henchmen from before he went to prison. Even if they were under his control, they had once willingly followed him and therefore they were asking to be casualties in this brewing war. But Jessica understood the street, and no thug would wait patiently for their leader to spring himself from jail. She knew Fisk would have had to amass a new army. She knew she had been killing potentially innocent men the minute the car left her hands.
But it was Trish - they had hurt Trish - and there was no coming back from the rage that elicited.
Matt, oblivious to Jessica's own inner turmoil, thrust himself angrily against the table next to him, forcing most of the contents to fly to the floor.
"Whoa," Jessica cried out in response. She wasn't used to seeing Matt so tormented. She was usually the one playing that hand. "Just calm down."
The sound of Matt's quickened breathing, in and out, in and out, began to fill the room. To Jessica it appeared he was hyperventilating. She quickly scanned the area for a paper bag, but there was nothing useful to be found in the mess that surrounded them. Tentatively she placed her hand on his back and began rubbing it gently in circles, round and round, as Matt clung to his own knees, hunched over and wheezing.
Guilt was a monster she had yet to slay herself, and she had been battling it for years. Matt was Catholic and recently dead. Something told her his own fight with it was far from over.
But she hated to see him this way, hearing the sadness in his voice and smelling the tequila that burst from his pores as he began to sweat. She hated knowing she was partially responsible. She was the reason Fisk was after them - fuck his feud with Matt, it was her own immunity he wanted. And she was the reason he had these powers in the first place. At least she was telling herself so.
Why didn't I bury him? Or burn him? Or drown him? Jessica thought. Why had she assumed death was the answer to her troubles with Kilgrave? She should have known evil always rises.
She was the reason those men were dead. She was the reason their team was down one member. She was the reason Matt was reeling through the waking stages of a hangover.
"I'm sorry," she told him, her hand still lightly caressing his back. She could feel his breathing steady under her touch. "I wish you weren't involved in any of this. I really do. But this is what Kilgrave does. He makes you doubt everything you know. He makes you hate yourself."
"But I haven't been mind controlled," Matt reminded her.
"Not yet," said a voice from the doorway.
Before Jessica could turn and react, she was being pushed, hard. Her hand left Matt's back, her feet left the floor, and her body lunged toward the window. Without really understanding what was happening, she felt her body smash into the glass and she was suddenly hurling down four storeys to the asphalt road below.
Jessica landed with a thud so heavy it demolished the street beneath her.
Her body had rocked the desk just in front of the window, and as she lay there on the ground, she could see and hear the remnants crash alongside her. Paper, glass beakers, and the loud smash of something unknown just near her head.
Through a fog of confusion, Jessica looked up to where she had once been and saw Wilson Fisk standing at the glassless window.
She tried to move, but pain shot through her right arm. Looking down she noticed a huge piece of glass sticking out of her skin. Blood began to pool around her, filling the cracks in the street. Ignoring it, swallowing the agony, Jessica pulled it out and pulled herself up. But it was too late.
Fisk and Matt were already exiting the building. The walked right past her and Matt made no attempt to flee.
Sadly, Jessica knew exactly what that meant.
"Matt!" she screamed, but again, he gave no hint of recognition.
"Get in the car," Fisk told him, and Matt obeyed, sliding into the backseat of the black SUV that was parked just before her.
"Fisk! Hey, Fisk," Jessica cried out. "Why don't we play a little game?"
She was trying to walk toward them, but something told her she had broken an ankle or maybe even her leg. She felt crooked, her whole body leaning to the right, forcing more blood from her wound to drip down her limp arm.
"Why don't we see if all that hard work up there really paid off?"
Jessica was taunting him. She assumed the scientist's tests hadn't worked or she would have been ordered out nicely, rather than body checked through a window. But she couldn't be sure. He hadn't really said anything to her, at least not yet.
Suddenly, the sound of flames crackling caught her attention and looking up Jessica realized the scientist's apartment was on fire.
"Come on, Fisk," she baited, still looking up into the flames. Then she turned to him, the reflection of fire dancing in her already rage filled eyes. "Or are you afraid?"
"Stay here," Fisk commanded Matt, before exiting the car and stomping towards Jessica. He was smiling. That smile always unnerved her, but she stood her ground.
"I don't know why, Miss Jones, but I like you. Even when you're destroying my plans, I like you," he told her, as he took the last step to cross their divide.
"I have that effect on people," she replied with a sly smile.
"So I see," Fisk said, motioning back towards Matt. He was still sitting in the SUV staring straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the drama unfolding around him.
Fisk leaned closer to Jessica. She struggled to balance herself on her one good leg. "You may have thought you tamed him, Miss Jones, but the Devil of Hell's Kitchen was always a weapon and I plan to unleash him on this city."
"I thought you wanted to kill him."
"Who's to say I can't do both?"
The fire above them spilled out of the window, as flames licked the side of the building and crawled to the roof. The few souls who were inside had already stumbled to the street and were watching not only their home burn, but the standoff between Jessica Jones and Wilson Fisk in the orange glow castoff by the flames.
"Matt's stronger than you think. You won't be able to control him for long," Jessica told him. "Your powers are weak and you've just destroyed all the shit you were using to make them better."
Fisk chuckled. The sound was so low Jessica strained to hear it even though they were face-to-face.
"If you think that was my lab, Miss Jones, you haven't been doing your homework. Running across the city, asking questions about me, beating people for the answers and this is all you were able to find. I'm disappointed. Your reputation once preceded you, but maybe this case is too much."
Fisk looked down to the street, to the contents of the lab that found themselves strewn around them. Jessica followed his gaze. There, right next to where her head had been, was a large glass jar. The glass had long since shattered and the amber liquid inside spilled onto the asphalt. But in the debris they could both clearly see a severed hand.
"I have the rest of him, Miss Jones. Trust me when I tell you, this lab was only the beginning."
Jessica turned back to face him.
"Now get in the car," he told her. Jessica didn't move. Fisk sighed. "It was worth a try."
Swiftly and with more force than she was expecting, Fisk grabbed her throat and in one motion picked her up and slammed her body to the ground. She felt the broken bits of road stab her in the back as he came down on her again and again like a gorilla. One hand wrapped around her neck, the other crashing repeatedly into her face and chest.
Jessica didn't stop him. Even in her dilapidated state, she was sure she could press through the pain and break him like a twig. After all, he was only a man. But something held her to the ground, something more powerful than his clammy hand.
Luke was gone. Trish was gone. Matt was gone to a place she wasn't sure she could bring him back from. Her investigative leads were burning just four storeys above and there on the ground next to her lay what was once a tiny sliver of the key to all this - Kilgrave's hand, now cold, dead, and useless.
Jessica was losing hope… and it wasn't something she usually had in large supply. It drained from her along with her blood, and for a moment she wondered what it would be like to close her eyes, to truly rest.
As Fisk's hand crushed her throat, she almost welcomed the strained breathing and dance with unconsciousness. Maybe when she woke up, this would all be over.