Requests Denied
“And then they called me unfunny,” Rose finished, downing her second drink of the evening. “Really, though. I’m not calling that a drink, Karen. This is poison.”
Josie turned to the woman and pointed at the door. “You can call that a door and take it.”
There was something very wrong with Hell’s Kitchen if the authorities left this place alone. Even worse if they knew what Josie was serving here. The tears of the people who dared telling her she was the owner of a health hazard, probably.
Karen turned the card Rose gave her to look at the kind of things she was being insulted for and frowned. “But why mimosa ?”
“‘Cause I’m gonna sell mimosa.”
“Well, they didn’t have to talk to you like that either way,” Karen said, not really understanding the joke. She also didn’t want to make Rose sad since that print shop she went to did that pretty well. “Do you want me to get some dirt on them ? I can do that.”
“I’d rather not,” Rose scoffed. She tried to picture the look on Marianne’s face if Karen ever tried to do some digging, as well as her reaction. Somehow, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t end well for anyone. She didn’t even tell Karen about any of it in the first place. She just saw that something was wrong, and after her first sip of poison, Rose told her what she deemed safe to be told. Which wasn’t much.
Rose should’ve felt bad about Karen being so nice to her when she wasn’t being exactly honest with her. She should’ve had second thoughts, at least. She wasn’t feeling any of it. Yes, Karen was a nice individual, always looking after seemingly everyone. Yes, she also managed to make Rose feel better when she came back from her awful talk with William. Rose had also decided as she was driving back to Hell’s Kitchen that she hated him now. But Karen wasn’t an innocent dove. She put herself in that situation, and now she’d have to talk. The only problem was that she seemed immune to the alcohol they were serving here. At the rate it was going, Rose would be in a coma before Karen started to be happier than usual.
“I didn’t know you were famous,” Rose said, nudging at Karen.
“Oh, so you looked me up ?”
“I looked Hell’s Kitchen up,” Rose laughed. “Your name came up quite a lot. Yours, and the neighborhood’s very own superhero.”
Karen scoffed. “You didn’t know about Daredevil before ?” Rose shook her head and took another sip from her drink. She tried to remember if she’d written her will yet. “Don’t believe everything you’ve read online.”
“You wrote most of what I’ve read online.”
“You can believe that,” Karen said with a smile. “But it’s been hard lately. With everything that happened, the truth can be hard to find.”
Rose leaned forward and arched a brow at her. “Do you know, then ?”
“Know what ?”
“Who he is,” she whispered. “I mean, someone has to know, right ?”
Karen finished her drink and shook her head. “I’ll tell you if I find out.”
That was a very ugly lie, Rose thought. She didn’t say anything and kept smiling at her new friend. “Come on,” she insisted. “I’ll get another drink if you tell me.”
“I suggest you don’t,” Karen replied. “People usually get sick after the third drink. You should stick to beer.”
“Or water.”
“Beer’s safer here.”
The water too ? Was that place some kind of undercover torture chamber ? Josie wasn’t even nice. When Rose had her first glass of whatever concoction she’d been served and had barely been able to contain her tears, she called her a crybaby. No one had ever called Rose Parsons a crybaby. It felt funny.
She decided to let go of the subject since Karen wasn’t inclined to tell her the truth yet, and decided to work on getting their relationship to the point where she’d tell her what she wanted to know. Marianne asked for results, and Rose wasn’t one to disappoint. She’d never disappointed the bosses, and she didn’t want it to start today, when she personally asked for the file no one else wanted.
“Foggy’s already working on your license,” Karen said before Rose could find something better. “He said he’d be your lawyer from now on.”
“That’s great, but I don’t think I need a personal lawyer,” Rose scoffed. “I’ll just show up whenever I need advice. I’ll get you all plenty of coffee, by the way. I wanted to do it earlier but with everything… I didn’t have time. You know, Matt was really thorough with his advice.”
Karen really wanted to tell that woman to just stick to Foggy if she ever needed help, that Matt didn’t deserve any of the coffee she’d get him, but she just smiled. If he knew how nice Rose really was, he wouldn’t be thinking of her like a criminal. She could, in a way, understand where he was coming from. It didn’t change that, in her opinion, Rose didn’t deserve to be treated that way. Which was wrong, of course, but Rose wasn’t a disappointment. She knew what she was doing, and she was usually doing it very well.
Once Rose switched back to beer, she stopped thinking about her impending death. She asked Karen how she ended up in New York, Karen lied again, she then asked her how long it took her to consider this place home. From the answer she got, it was pretty obvious that Rose would be gone long before she’d even consider this city to be a viable living option.
It wasn’t that she hated New York, but the dangers far outweighed the good sides. It was already hard for people like Rose to feel safe, she couldn’t understand how regular people who couldn’t protect themselves were going about their days. In her defense, no one had ever conducted proper research on the link between the many incidents that happened in the city and the anxiety levels of the local population. If they had, then Rose would’ve known that no one here just went on with their day feeling perfectly fine. For now, she was simply convinced that new yorkers didn’t have any consideration for their own lives.
“Who knows,” Karen said with a smile. “Maybe you’ll find a reason to stay after reflowering Hell’s Kitchen.”
Rose smiled. Many years ago, her father had found a reason to stay. That didn’t end well for them. She wasn’t blaming her mother for leaving anymore, but staying for someone else seemed to be something completely insane.
She could however see herself staying for her shop. Not in New York, but she could open one anywhere. She could stay in one place, take a quieter file, and live out her days selling flowers and occasionally lying to people. She didn’t even need people that much, her flowers were more than enough.
“What’s your favorite flower ?” she asked. Karen looked at her, at a loss of words. “Okay,” Rose laughed. “Do you even like flowers ?”
“Your shop smells great.”
Rose thought about the ones she had in her apartment. She wouldn’t mind getting one of those for Karen, but someone who didn’t know what her favorite flower was wouldn’t do a great job at keeping any of those alive. “How busy are you ?”
“Is that some psychological test where you tell me what kind of flower I am ?” Karen asked with a light chuckle.
“No, that’s a question to know what I can give you as a thanks for being my friend,” Rose replied, rolling her eyes at her. “But I don’t like you enough to give you something you’ll let die.”
“I could take care of a plastic one.”
That was, in Rose’s mind, the worst kind of insult. She kept smiling and calmly nodded. “I’ll get you a low maintenance one.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I will. Should I get one for the men at your office too ? They don’t look like flower people.”
“I’m sure Marci would like something. Fancy, if you can,” she quickly added. “We’ll pay ourselves if we want something for the office, we owe you that.”
Rose didn’t exactly know what they might’ve owed her, but she was fine with paying customers. She was fine with the idea of getting customers very soon. More than that, she was excited. She couldn’t wait. Two more days, and then she’d be a shop owner. That was real, to her at least.
Which, to the law, wasn’t the definition of real. She did register everything in her name, but the name wasn’t hers to begin with. Her money didn’t buy the shop either. It all was real, until Rose Parsons ceased to exist.
After another round of drinks, the two women called it a night. As they were paying for their drinks, Josie grabbed the card Rose had left on the counter and huffed. “Good one,” she mumbled.
Rose’s jaw dropped. Someone found it funny. And it didn’t matter to her that Josie tried to poison her all night anymore. She forgot all about it and promised herself that she’d bring a plant to this place. On second thought, she’d bring them a plastic one. She wasn’t sure that a living thing could actually survive here. Maybe that was why Hell’s Kitchen was lacking flowers that much.
“Do you want to share a cab ?” Rose asked when they were back to the fresh air of the night. “I don’t even know where you live,” she lied.
“Oh, I’m right in front of Matt’s apartment now.”
“So you work together, and you live together ?”
Karen laughed. “Not together,” she corrected. “His old neighbor had a heart attack.”
“Oh.”
“But her children are renting at a good price.”
“Oh, that’s good then,” Rose said, not knowing if she had to smile at that or not. One person’s misery was another’s opportunity. “Well, I’ll get my own, then.”
She waited for Karen to get the first cab and for it to be out of sight, and walked away from the bar. It had been a good night, even if she didn’t get anything from Karen. That woman was a great friend, a very good person. And if Rose wasn’t feeling any guilt about lying to her, she was still on the verge about another kind of problem.
There was a man, here in Hell’s Kitchen, who’d already tried to kill her and that man was back. No matter how Rose was turning it around in her head, there was no unsuspicious way to let Karen know that she had to be careful. No innocent had ever died on Rose’s watch, and she didn’t want the first name on that list to be Karen’s.
As she was walking back to her apartment, Rose stopped multiple times. Maybe it was because of the encounter she’d had in the morning, or maybe it was the poison Josie served her, but she was having a strange feeling. The feeling one would get when they felt like being watched. She’d rarely walked the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at night ever since she got there, but Rose didn’t like that feeling. Was that what all people were feeling here ? She was very glad Karen didn’t mention walking back to her place, but a little more concerned about the fact that she only had a blind man to protect her.
She kept her hand ready in her pocket and walked faster.
***
As soon as Rose locked the door of her apartment behind her, Dex sat on his usual spot well hidden on the steps of the emergency stairs facing her place. He couldn’t see everywhere inside her apartment from there, but that was the only spot where he was hidden from everything. No one could see him. Not Rose inside her apartment, and surely not the masked devil who usually stayed on the roof opposite Dex.
If his last experience with Wilson Fisk and Daredevil had taught Benjamin anything, it was patience. Before, he’d have shot the man in the mask. Not now. Mostly because Matt wasn’t there tonight, but also because Dex now knew how to play the long game. Fisk taught him that, and it wasn’t a lesson he’d ever forget, even if his version of ‘the long game’ was only to wait a few months top.
He watched as Rose undressed and entered her bathroom to take a shower. He used the time to check his surroundings. That night was the first one without Daredevil showing up to watch over the flower girl. Dex found it rather unusual. What Dex also found unusual that night, was that Rose walked back to her place. When he’d met her in the morning, he hadn’t thought of her as someone who was taking risks. And she didn’t look stupid, she surely knew about the place she chose to live in.
She left the bathroom, only covered in a large towel, and walked to the window. Dex watched as she was checking the back of the building, as if she was looking for him. He was safely hidden, but she was still looking for someone. She closed the shutters and blocked everything from his view, forcing Dex to call it a night.
He got up and left, wondering if she’d really suspected that he’d been here the whole time. There was something rather mysterious about the flower girl, Dex thought, and he’d get to the bottom of it, while being very careful not to be seen by any of her new friends who, unlike her, would know who he was.
***
Rose hadn’t been the only one to have had a bad day. Matt’s day had started pretty badly when he’d had to apologize to Foggy at least a dozen times and promise him that he’d stop looking into Rose’s life and wouldn’t be talking to her anymore. He’d miss her coffee, but his friend’s trust was far more important to him now.
After Karen came back from the shop and let them know that everything had been dealt with and that Rose wasn’t suspecting anything and was instead planning on thanking him again for his help, Matt had thought that things would improve. He’d been very wrong to think that.
Fisk’s high security prison called him right after lunch. They let him know that Vanessa had filed a request to see her husband. She hadn’t been asking for anything ever since he’d been put away, and Matt didn’t like that she was starting now. There had to be a reason for it, and he couldn’t stop thinking that there had been too many things happening right when Rose Parsons entered his life. They hadn’t been careful enough about Vanessa, and she could’ve been planning something on her own. Something he’d have to check on his own since he was confident that Foggy wouldn’t want to start a war against Vanessa if the only thing she’d done was to ask to see her husband.
Rose had been gone all night with Karen, leaving Matt to enjoy some peace and quiet. He didn’t enjoy it as much as he’d thought, though. Yes, he was glad that he didn’t have to listen to her go through Queen’s entire repertoire, but he’d missed the calming background noise of her shop. Which was the reason why he’d stayed in his office all evening, and long into the night, alone in the dark. He’d been waiting.
He wasn’t trying to spy on her again, he was only looking for something calm after a very shitty day. He could’ve, if he’d wanted to, listened to Rose and Karen’s night at Josie’s. He was close enough to hear, after all. But he’d respected his promise and stayed out of it.
When Rose got back from her night out however, Matt had started listening. He’d only meant for it to last a minute, but there was something different about her now. She was very quiet, for a start. There was no singing out of tune, no humming. She was quiet, but her heart wasn’t. Matt noticed something he’d heard in so many other people before. A calm and steady heartbeat, that was skipping a beat once or twice each minute. Matt had grown used to that rhythm over the years. Most people in New York sounded like that, and he quickly linked it to their constant levels of stress. Rose had never sounded like that, until that night. She was concerned about something, enough to have it impact her heartbeat. Something that made her close the shutters of her apartment for the first time..
She was getting ready for bed, and Matt decided not to invade her privacy any longer. He left the chair he’d been sitting on all evening.
Rose unlocked the safety of a gun.
Matt froze. She had a gun. She got it ready to shoot, and she then got under her covers. She’d just taken the security off a weapon and acted as if nothing had happened. Her heart wasn’t skipping any more beats. She was back to being the calmest person he’d ever met. That, on top of everything else Matt had been noticing, wasn’t the behavior of someone clean.
***
On the next morning, just as Rose Parsons was getting ready for her first delivery of the day, hoping that no one would die for this one, Vanessa Fisk was meeting with Wilson’s lawyer, hoping that for once things would go her way.
“Sadly,” he started, “our request has been denied. They don’t think Mr Fisk has-”
“Don’t,” Vanessa stopped him. “I don’t care why they refused me that right.”
“We can ask to have a letter delivered to him,” the lawyer suggested.
“Will they read it ?” He nodded. “Can’t we tell someone ? There has to be a journalist somewhere, interested in the way prisoners are being treated there,” she shouted at him. “Ask for a meeting with him again. In your name.”
“Madam, I don’t think this is the right call,” he tried to explain to her, for the third time that week. “Mr Fisk doesn’t want me there, to protect your interests. If I applied for a-”
“You will apply, because I’m the one paying you now. I want my husband’s rights to be respected,” Vanessa commanded. “He’s still an American citizen, you’ll find a way.” She dismissed any comment he tried to make with a single gesture of her hand and pointed at the file he was still holding. “Is that what I asked for ?”
“It is,” he immediately replied, relieved by this change of subject. “There isn’t much to say about her, but I think you’ll find that interesting.” Vanessa leaned forward and arched a brow at him. “Rose Parsons is the most boring individual you’ll ever meet,” he explained. “Never a single step out of the line, never jaywalked, never missed any appointment anywhere, never had a bad call from her bank. She goes to the dentist every 6 months only to have her teeth checked.”
Vanessa frowned. “How does someone like that end up opening a flower shop in Hell’s Kitchen ?”
“Exactly.”
She thanked the lawyer, reminded him to get everything settled with Wilson, and let him go. He was more than happy to do so, and didn’t stop when he met Dex in the hallway. The two men had nothing to tell each other, but they shared a very deep annoyment for the woman who was paying them.
Vanessa grabbed the document she’d been given earlier and stared at the ‘Denied’ stamp on her request to meet her husband. On the bottom of that page, someone had written that Matt Murdock had been contacted, being Karen Page’s counselor and also highly involved in Wilson Fisk’s arrest.
That man would never stop ruining her life, Vanessa thought. In her mind, he was the sole responsible for her situation, and for this request to have been denied. In reality, that call was only a courtesy. They had even waited for the ink of the stamp to be dry before calling Matt. But Vanessa didn’t know that, and she tore the document to pieces right as Dex was entering the room.
He arched a brow at this sudden display of rage and cleared his throat. “You asked to see me.”
“I did.” She’d hoped that his help wouldn’t be needed, but it was. “I’ll need you to do something for me, but I want to show you this first,” she added, pushing the file about Rose Parsons in his direction. “Do you have anything new on her ?”
He nodded. “Nothing tangible yet, but she gave me a lot to think about last night.” He sat in front of Vanessa and crossed his arms. “When we’re in training, in the force, they teach us to always trust our instinct.”
“And ?”
“It’s mostly for field missions,” Dex explained. “They tell us that if we think that we’re being watched, then we’re being watched and we have to act like it.”
Vanessa leaned over. “You think she’s with the FBI ?”
“Hard to say,” he replied. “But she knew she was being followed. She might know about Murdock watching her, too.”
“Then you’re not having any contact with her from now on,” Vanessa firmly said. “We’ll find other ways to know more about her. In the meantime, you’ll work on something else. I need you to deliver this to Wilson,” she said, handing him a small envelope. She kept it tight in her hand for a second and met Dex’s eyes. “By any means necessary.”
Dex nodded, took both the envelope and the file, and walked away. He couldn’t fight the smile growing on his face as he was walking down the hall. Things were going for the best for him, all thanks to his newfound patience.
***
Far from New York, Jessica Jones was waiting for a high school principal to leave on his lunch break with the school’s secretary. It was rather cliché, but Jessica didn’t mind. Both offices would be locked, and she’d have an entire hour to look through everything.
She wanted to say that she’d taken Eva’s case solely because of the amount of money she’d make from it, but it was only half of the truth. Jessica wanted to help reunite a mother and her daughter. Give them the second she didn’t get. That being said, she wasn’t ready to travel the world to find that girl. DC was far enough, and Jessica’s good heart had its limits.
The back door of the principal’s office opened. Jessica made sure to be reading something suddenly very interesting on her phone and only left the bench she’d been sitting on once the secretary’s car left the parking lot.
No one was watching her. All the students were too busy on their own screens, or talking to each other, to even see her. That seemed to be a good thing here, no one knew who Jessica Jones was. She walked all the way around the building, jumped over the fence and went straight to the window she’d stuck open in the morning. Luckily for her, no one had touched it yet and she entered the office without anyone noticing her.
The door between the two offices was unlocked. As Jessica had suspected, that door was actually never locked at all. And as she’d been informed, the secretary had once again forgotten to log out of her account. She’d already had two strikes because of it, and she was lucky that Jessica wasn’t thinking of telling on her. She’d lose her job, and the principal would replace her with the next woman in line for the job. She was already the third one he’d cheated on his wife with, there was no reason for him to stop being a pig yet. At least not until Jessica was done here and left a message for his wife.
Jessica sat on the secretary’s chair and began looking for Fleur Penquist’s record. She hadn’t been able to find anything that Eva didn’t already know, and she was hoping to find something useful in here.
The girl didn’t graduate in DC as her mother had thought. She’d actually moved to New Jersey a few months before graduation. According to Jessica’s notes, it happened right after Eva and Edward’s divorce was made official. He didn’t waste any time to move his daughter even further away from her mother.
As she was reading through the stellar appreciations of Fleur’s former teachers, Jessica felt the vibration of her phone. She intended on ignoring the call, until she saw the name on the screen. “Counselor,” she said, securing the phone between her ear and shoulder. “What did I do again ?”
Matt scoffed. “Nothing, I hope. That’s not why I’m calling, how are you doing ? It’s been a while since the last time we’ve-”
“Okay,” she interrupted. “What do you want ?”
“I need you to look into someone for me,” he admitted.
“Why don’t you do it yourself ?” Jessica asked. “Better yet, why don’t you ask your personal investigator slash journalist slash supermodel ?”
Matt ignored the resentment in her voice, which was understandable since they’d been stealing quite a few of Jessica’s clients lately thanks to Karen’s talents. “Because I promised to leave her alone.”
Jessica laughed, but quickly checked that no one was walking down the hall. “You have way too many girl problems for a blind man in a leotard.”
“Will you help me or not ?”
“Yeah, but not today,” she replied as she was sending Fleur’s file to the printer. “Not tomorrow either, I’m on a case.”
Matt sighed. “I hope it can wait that long.”
“What.” Jessica sat down and rested her elbows on the desk. She was okay with helping Matt, but he had to help himself, she thought. “Did you get yourself another psychopath ? Man, have you tried… I don’t know, not choosing your girlfriends yourself ?”
“Okay, forget I asked.”
“Wait,” she quickly said. “I’ll do it as soon as I’m done with this one. Send me a text with her name tonight. I’ll be on the train.”
Matt was about to thank her, but stopped at the last second. “What train ? Jessica, what did you do again ?”
“You know, the usual.” She gathered the file she’d printed. “Breaking into a high school in DC to steal a record from people who already know I’ve stolen the file.”
“That’s illegal.”
“That’s why I’m working the case,” Jessica casually replied. “Something’s not right here.”
Matt cleared his throat. “Breaking in and stealing the records is illegal, Jessica.”
“So is stalking, Matt, and you don’t hear me lecturing you,” she snapped back. “So, is she a ninja too ? The new girl.”
“She owns a flower shop.”
“Right,” she scoffed. “That’s highly suspicious. Gotta go before they send their professional killers after me. Always great talking to you, loverboy.”
She hung up before Matt could properly thank her. She wondered if flowers were the new it thing lately, since the girl she was looking for had been last seen at a botanics conference, but quickly thought about how happy she was to have found Matt. That man had even worse trust issues than her.
She grabbed Fleur Penquist’s report, hid it under her leather jacket, and logged the secretary out of her computer. She briefly checked that the path was clear and left the building as easily as she got in.
On her way back to the station, she was torn away from her current read by her phone. This time, her official lawyers were calling, for what she hoped was something more important than Matt’s girlfriends.
“So ?” she asked as soon as she picked up.
“Hello to you too, Miss Jones,” the man said, already regretting calling her. Faced with her silence, he went straight to the point. “Your request has been denied. We’ll apply again next-”
Jessica crushed her phone inside her fist. She changed path and walked to the nearest bar.
***
Some people had a real talent to attract shit, Edward thought, going over the last police reports regarding the case he was supervising. Now that he’d left the field, his job consisted in deciding which reports were the most urgent to be dealt with. That wasn’t his favorite part since he’d been promoted, but it had to be done. Once again, he’d have to send someone to take care of some of these problems, and probably have a serious talk with the target and their way of dealing with things.
His personal phone rang. He thought for a second that it was his daughter. But it was only Marianne, which would pretty much be the same for another few weeks.
“Ed,” she said as soon as he picked up, “do you have any idea of the amount of shit you and your daughter are currently drowning in ?”
He turned away from his screen and frowned. “What is it ?”
“Shit’s piling up by the minute, that’s what it is,” she angrily replied. “William spent all of last night covering for Rose Parsons’ life, and someone just accessed Fleur’s school record. The one you called me about last time.” She paused, giving Edward a second to process that his daughter was being looked at under all kinds of microscopes. “You haven’t told Eva about any of this, right ? ‘Cause that would’ve been very stupid of you.”
“Of course not,” he only managed to say. There was no way Eva would have known about Rose Parsons. That was someone else, and Edward had never been so worried about his daughter’s safety. “Does she know ?”
“I blocked all transfers from the online supervisor to her accounts,” Marianne replied. “I saw her yesterday.”
“Why ?”
She sighed, making him even more nervous, if that was possible. “Are you familiar with Benjamin Poindexter ?”
“Yes.”
“He’s back, and he’s made contact with her. Mark’s sending his people to deal with him,” she quickly added before giving him a cardiac arrest. “Ed,” she kept saying, a little softer. “We think the access on Rose Parsons comes from New York, but you have to deal with your wife. She’s in New York, but Fleur’s file has been seen from DC.”
“She’s sent someone there ?” he asked, running a hand through his hair. “She won’t listen, M. She’s gone too far.”
“She better do,” Marianne replied. “Because I also have bosses, and they’re 5 minutes away from dealing with all this themselves. Take a few days, go to New York, talk her out of this. For fuck’s sake, tell her to wait for a month, Ed !”
She hung up, but Edward kept his phone glued to his ear for a minute. If he’d known the shit Fleur would’ve been in, he would’ve talked her out of asking for the job. She would’ve listened to his advice. Instead, she was the most unsafe she’d ever been, and she was too stubborn to ask for extraction even if she needed it. She inherited that from both of her parents.
He quickly put everything away from his desk and sent an email to one of his collaborators, putting them in charge of his own job, pretending to be on an unexpected vacation. Vacations were supposed to be relaxing, and Edward had never felt so tense before, but it was time for him to join the fun in New York.