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“Just try it, Jessica!” Danny says, pushing a plate of shrimp scampi towards her face. Matt doesn’t have to be able to see to know she’s got her arms crossed and is rolling her eyes at The Immortal Iron Fist.
The Defenders (or so Trish calls them on the radio) are sitting around a table in the Italian dinner, closed but for them due to Danny’s has a nasty habit of paying restaurants to stay open late into the night. Since Matt came back they’ve taken to grabbing meals together after long nights of patrols, PI work, or night shifts for Claire. Not that Jessica ever actually eats anything, preferring to her liquid dinners and making snarky comments at the rest of them. Danny has started to take offense to this, making it his personal mission to get some food in her. Matt’s impressed enough that Jessica joins them at all, but he silently roots for Danny all the same.
“Come on, Jess!” Danny tries again, pushing the plate closer. He drops his voice to a coaxing tone, “I promise you’ll love it.”
Matt swears he feels the air crackle. There’s a hitch in Jess’s breathing and a skip in her heartbeat and then she’s stood with such force that her chair crashes to the ground. Her hand flies out, knocking the plate out of her face to shatter against the far wall.
There’s a beat as Danny stares at her, eyes wide - then she’s out the door, breath coming in terrifying gulps and her heartbeat pounding in tandem to Danny’s nervous one.
“What’d I do?” Danny says, confusion coloring his voice. Luke’s already moving to put a hand on Danny’s shoulder.
“It’s not your fault,” he starts to explain, but Matt is already out the door following the detective and leaving Luke to handle things at the restaurant.
Matt sends up a quick thank you when he steps outside and can hear Jessica on the adjacent roof. He’d been a little worried that in the minute between their departures she’d somehow escaped to the other side of the city.
He makes his way up to the roof slowly, listening intently to her sharp breaths and thundering heart. She’s whispering to herself and Matt can hear the words start to take shape as he pulls himself over the fire escape on the far side of the building from her.
“Birch Street, Higgens Drive, Colbalt Lane, Birch Street,”
She’s repeating them over and over, stumbling through the names like they’re the only things keeping her from flying apart. She’s curled up into a small nook in the low wall around the roof, her knees in front of her face and her hands tangled in her hair. She’s so internally focused that Matt is afraid if he comes near he’ll scare her, so he resolves himself to wait it out and give her the room she needs.
Slowly, crushingly slowly, it begins to settle. Her breathing calms – not completely, but enough for her to let her body unfold slightly.
Matt takes this as his cue to approach. He does so loudly, telegraphing every step.
She hears him coming, but doesn’t react much. Just moves her head to rest on the low wall, her gaze shifting to the yellow haze of a New York City night sky.
Matt slides down on the wall next to her. The nook she’s in is too small for two, but the wall is low, only a foot or so high, so he knows she can still see his face despite his torso being in line with her knees. She’s let them fall farther from her body, so now she’d almost be lounging in the little space were it not for the bone-deep exhaustion that clings to her. Matt stays silent, letting her get used to his presence.
Jessica breaks the quiet first. “You just gonna sit there or are you gonna talk at all?”
“Do you want me to talk?” he asks, his tone level and boarding on disinterested. Gentleness, he knows, will only make her more defensive. Jessica just scoffs at him, crossing her arms over her chest and turning her head away.
But it wasn’t a no, so Matt tries again. “Do you want to talk?”
Jessica scoffs louder. “Do I seem like the talking type to you, Murdock?”
Matt just shrugs his shoulders. That hadn’t been a no either.
Time seems to stretch for a moment and Matt lets himself feel the chill in the air, the hard roof beneath him. There are cracks in it, he realizes, likely from Jessica’s less than graceful landing. He allows himself to study them, careful to keep his face angled away from Jessica. He starts to suspect they’ll be here all night when
“…that was one of his favorites” she says, quietly enough that anyone else might not have heard her. “”You’ll love it”, I mean. He liked to do that. Tell me I’d love things I never would have. Hell,” she snorts, “it was one of the first things he told me. ‘You love Chinese food’ and if I ever did before I sure as shit can’t handle it now.” Her voice gets a little steadier as she talks, but she still doesn’t turn her head to Matt.
“Christ, he told me to love sundresses,” she says the word with such disgust that Matt lets out a small chuckle, letting her have a moment of humor. “Bright fucking yellow ones,” she shakes her head, her mouth forming the shape of an almost smile, but her lip snags on her teeth and it turns into a snarl instead. Matt can’t hear tears in her voice, but the smell of salt pulls at him and he feels his own breath catch at it. He’d never known Jessica Jones to cry.
“And inside, somewhere, I know that I hated it all. But at the same time…that was how he worked, you know? He’d tell you to love it and you just did. You’d love anything he told you too. Food you hate, clothes you’d rather burn, whatever. But it’s not just stupid stuff. He could make you love anything. Drugs, pain, him – “ she cuts herself off as her throat closes around the words, but she grits her teeth and forces them out like they’re poisoning her.
“He’d tell me to love him, to love the things he did to me, and I would.”
The anguish in her voice cuts deep into Matt and he almost flinches at it. Before he can fully stop himself he finds his hand hovering above her knee and quietly asks, “Can I?”
Jessica jerks her head towards him and nods before she can stop herself, forgetting for a moment that he couldn’t see it. He feels the nod anyways, and gingerly lowers his hand to rest solidly on her knee. The warmth of his skin seeping through her ripped jeans.
Jessica’s body is wound like a coiled spring before she lets out a long, tired sigh and it all releases. Her head goes back to resting against the top of the low wall, the tears silently sliding from the corners of her eyes into her thick hair slowing before they stop completely. She makes no move to wipe them away. Matt keeps his hand steady on her knee, as if he can keep her tethered to her own body through its weight. He narrows his focus to her heart beat as it steadies from its erratic jumps into a calm and strong tempo.
They sit like that for a long time. The sun is rising over the buildings before Jess finally shifts her knee and Matt lets his hand fall back to his side. She stands with a popping stretch and looks down at the now-empty restaurant. She sighs again, running her hands over her face and then crossing her arms.
When she speaks, her voice has returned to its normal smoke-over-broken-whisky-bottles sound.
“I am so not apologizing to Danny fucking Rand.”
Matt lets his laughter echo over the quiet dawn and basks in the wry smile he can feel stretching across Jessica’s face.