Chapter 148
On Kilgrave's command, Jessica follows him back to the apartment, trailing just slightly behind.
"Now, I'll not have you messing about, do you understand me Jessica? Tell me," Kilgrave commands.
"Yes, I understand," Jessica's responds.
He sighs, as the elevator door opens for them, "Good. Tell me, what were your friends doing here anyway?"
She squeezes her fists as they walk inside, and the door closes in front of them, "They...they were trying to help me escape."
"Escape? I don't know what you're trying to escape from," Kilgrave takes Jessica's cheeks into his hands, "you're right where you need to be. Here, with me."
He holds her close, before kissing her on the forehead, "Now...I can actually get back to what I was working on. Go inside the apartment and stay there, Jessica. And when I come back...I'll have a surprise for you."
Kilgrave kisses her once more, this time on the lips, before the elevator door opens once more. Jessica calmly turns toward the door and walks toward the Vaughn's apartment. Kilgrave watches her, his hands in the pockets of his purple jacket, as she opens the door.
"Oh...and Jessica? Look at me," he asks, his voice soft.
She turns around, her hand stuck to the doorknob.
"Let's see a smile," he commands.
Jessica smiles for him, a crooked, forced smile. The elevator door closes, with Kilgrave's eyes on Jessica until he's obscured from view. Jessica opens the apartment door, and marches into the apartment, closing the door behind her.
With a smile still frozen upon her face, her eyes begin to well up, and a tear starts to drip down her cheek. She falls onto her knees in the middle of the apartment, sniffling and wheezing, but still unable to rid herself of the smile sewn onto her face.
She wipes the tears from her face as she hears a faint whirring sound, accompanied by a light breeze. Jessica looks up, and starts to breathe heavily as she's faced with a bright white portal in the middle of the room. Unaffected by its surroundings, the portal seems to be suspended just above the floor.
Getting on her feet, Jessica reaches for the portal, and as soon as her finger touches it, she's sucked in, blinded by the light.
Jessica blinks open her eyes to find that she's amidst an endless black fog, swirling all around her.
"Wha…?" she murmurs aloud.
Suddenly, Kilgrave's powers start to kick in-
Go to the apartment. Stay in the apartment.
But...where was she? How could she get to the apartment from here?
Find the apartment. Go there. He said stay in the apartment.
Despite her disorientation, Jessica stands, and begins blindly walking through the fog. The black fog obscures most of her vision, and she can only really see about ten feet in front of her.
Where's the apartment? Gotta find the apartment.
She stops, and looks all around her. Nothing but endless fog in every direction. But just then, she turns to her right and spots a tall, lanky man in an old-fashioned gray coat. His back is turned to her, but he's seemingly the only other person around.
"H-...hello? Hello?" Jessica starts to stumble towards him.
The man turns around in a very robotic, and direct manner, revealing nearly combed black hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
"Natalie-..." he pauses for a moment, tilting his head to the left.
"You're not Natalie."
A flash of light blinds Jessica, and she stumbles back. Rubbing her eyes, she opens them again to find that she's in an unfamiliar room. Books, and drawings of birds surround an old, beaten bed. It's nighttime, and the quiet bustle of the city could be heard from just outside.
Jessica glances out a window overlooking an old fire escape. It's...New York? No, it feels like New York, but something about the atmosphere of this place is off. Gargoyles hang from art-deco buildings, and an endless stream of smoke pipes from old chimneys.
She tries to open the window, but her hand goes right through the glass, as if she were a ghost.
Jessica holds her head. Kilgrave's power is disappearing fast, she no longer hears his voice. Do his powers not work here? But...where is "here"?
"You know I wasn't expecting you to turn up so soon. I'm rather...pleasantly surprised," an unfamiliar voice echoes from very close by.
Jessica whips around, assuming a fighting stance. But there's no one else in the room. She then hears shuffling coming from the other side of the room. Jessica slowly starts walking over to the other side, as the wall rattles slightly, moving the bird sketches along with it.
"...you have no idea how much I've missed that," the male voice is definitely coming from behind the wall, and as Jessica comes closer, she can also hear someone else, panting and scrambling. Jessica puts her hand on the wall, and her hand sinks right through. Taking a deep breath, Jessica pushes her arm, and then her entire body through the wall.
She's hit with a rack of black, old-fashioned suits and colorful neckties. She stops, as if she's about to run into them, but remembers that she could walk right through them. The voices are louder now, and as Jessica turns to her right, she finds that the closet stretches out a little farther, past the rack of clothes.
"So, I take it you want my tracking device? Hmm? Don't worry, your secret's safe with me," the man asks, his tone almost playful.
Jessica looks up at the walls of the hidden corner of the closet, as the single-bulbed light illuminates disturbing drawings of muscular men inflicting pain, or having pain inflicted onto them.
She finally reaches the end of the closet, where a man with black hair in a suit has a woman pinned to the back wall. Jessica can't see the woman's face, obscured by the man who's holding her down. Jessica walks around them, and once her sight passes the man's arm, she recognizes Natalie as the woman being pinned to the wall. She has a tense look of anger as she stares him right in the eye. Even as she pulls herself closer towards him, Natalie maintains that expression of hate, of defiance.
"Oh really? Well Oswald...in that case, I guess the trip was wasted," her words come out like silk, coaxing and calm.
From Jessica's point of view, she can easily spot Natalie reach into the man's jacket pocket and pull out what Jessica can only assume is the tracking device, with a large radar insignia and red buttons on the bottom. But clearly the man is clueless to what's going on, as he smiles at her, laughing.
"Mhm...nonsense," he chuckles, before leaning in to kiss her.
Natalie wraps one arm around Oswald's shoulder as she pockets the tracking device with her other hand. He moves her to the floor, using both arms to keep her locked in place.
"Don't ever be angry at me again," he scolds, before kissing her on the forehead.
Natalie raises an eyebrow, "You...you do realize that there are reasons why I'm angry at-"
"No!" Oswald presses his hand into her elbow, further keeping her down as he places a grimy finger on her lips, "...you were upset with me, but not anymore."
His tone's quickly changed from charming and playful to forceful and angry, as he moves his hand away from her lips to stroke her cheek.
"Shh...sh...my love, now's not the time for petty quarrels. Right now, we appreciate each other's company, even if it's in a small, dark closet."
Even if she'd never seen this man before in her life, Jessica felt like she knows him, knows him very well in fact. As this man smiles at Natalie, kissing and licking her neck, Jessica recognizes the way his hands grab her with no regard as to whether or not she wants him to. How she fakes affection in her response to his kisses simply because doing otherwise would displease him. How the look of confusion in her eyes signals that his thoughts, his desires, his commands, are beginning to muddle with her own.
The scene around Jessica starts to fade away back into the black fog. She tries to reach out to Natalie, but Jessica starts to grow further away from her, as the scene in enveloped by the fog. Just as Natalie and Oswald are about to disappear, he licks her on the neck one more time, he looks up at Jessica, to reveal that he has Kilgrave's face.
"No!" Jessica shouts, reaching out to Natalie, but before she can do anything, she disappears into the fog.
"My apologies, it appears I have mistaken you for someone else," the voice of Oswald with the glasses returns, and Jessica whips around to find him stepping out from the fog.
"You...you're looking for Natalie, aren't you?" Jessica realizes aloud, looking at Oswald.
He nods, adjusting his glasses, "Correct, but, because your time signatures are so similar, I managed to pull you through the time vortex instead. Although, I should have suspected that something was amiss, you were being affected by some sort of manufactured virus that was cancelled out by the temporal shift in dimensions."
"This place...this place cancels Kilgrave's powers?" Jessica glances around the shifting fog.
"We don't know much about the possibilities of these...transition spaces between dimensions, or the effects of traveling between them," the man confesses, "what I can do is send you back to your own dimension. If...you happen to run into Natalie, uhm, tell her that I'm on my way. Edward Nygma, that is."
Jessica stares at him for a couple of seconds, "Sure...Ed."
He gives her a peculiar, wayward smile, before disappearing into the fog. Jessica's blinded with a flash of light.