11
Peter smelled like salami.
It was the only thing holding Matt’s attention, even over the stench of blood and sickness and medical-grade antiseptic. The lunchmeat-esq aroma wafting from the baby overpowered it all.
According to Karen, Jessica had passed her Peter before the church fight and told her to run. Take him anywhere she wouldn’t think to go, some place Benjamin Poindexter and his affiliates wouldn’t bother to look. Finding a person in New York was a needle in a haystack, but Fisk and his men had a big, big, magnet. If you didn’t want to be found, you had to get clever.
Clever, apparently, meant taking Peter to Nelson’s Meats, the finest family-owned butcher shop in Hell’s Kitchen. Foggy wasn’t there, still at the office dealing with whatever catastrophe Hogarth was trying to mitigate, but Foggy’s brother recognized Karen and didn’t ask questions when she said her, Luke and the baby needed a place to lie low.
“He’s a good guy,” Karen had said, back when they were in the hospital waiting room and Matt was so antsy he almost got into a fight with a janitor that rolled his trash bin too close. “Luke, I mean. We literally sat in a broom closet and he used himself as a human barricade.”
“He is a human barricade,” Matt pointed out. “He’s got impenetrable skin and super strength. He was the logical choice.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean. You can tell he cares.”
Matt could. They all cared, all of the Defenders, in their own way. Each one had a kernel of goodness within them, however misguided or poorly expressed or hidden behind sloppy layers of emotional defensiveness. They’d fought, bled, and almost died for their city, their neighborhoods, more than once.
He picked that thought apart as Peter dozed in his arms, worn out enough by their long day to sleep soundly. Karen had scrounged up real clothes for Pete somewhere, a onesie, probably a hand-me-down from one of Foggy’s nieces or nephews. It was too long in the sleeves and Peter’s chubby fists were clenched beneath the cuffs. Matt ran the soft threads of it between his fingers. It was much more pleasant than the scratchy white sheet draped over Jessica’s lower body.
If not for the beeping heart monitor, the brush of air on her top lip as she exhaled, the thready but present pulse, Matt could have believed she was dead.
She hadn’t moved an inch since they wheeled her into the room post-op. They said it was normal, that anesthesia had that effect on people sometimes. She was under for a long time — its effects may have been exaggerated.
The doctors and nurses hadn’t acted like it would be easy, saving Jessica‘s ife. They weren’t much of anything other than determined, moving her from ambulance to ER to operating room with a brutal efficiency only capable of people used to having every odd stacked against them. Matt tried not to interfere, staying out of the way as much as he could in the back of a cramped ambulance. He even let the driver call him an escort, someone to guide him through the automatic Emergency Room doors and into a stiff seat in the waiting area, seeing as he’d forgotten his cane back at Clinton church and was, apparently, considered useless without it.
He could have gone after Jessica’s gurney, could hear her sputtering heart and the cart’s squeaking wheels as the staff rushed her right past triage and into one of the trauma bays. He could have kept pace, doors and security guards and ID scanners nothing but a suggestion.
But he didn’t. For all of his faults, he was realistic, and he knew causing a fuss would only delay or hinder Jessica’s care.
So he played the part of the blind man out of his element — he sat in place, and he fretted, and he asked all of the questions a sightless person might ask. Was there a lot of blood? Yes, he could smell it, pennies and iron and Jessica. Was she awake? No. She passed out from blood loss. Matt heard all of it rushing to her abdomen and then out, out, out to the floor. Her breathing wasn’t even, chest hitching, but it wasn’t through sobs. It was a subconscious reaction to the pain and lack of oxygenated blood making it to her lungs
His final question to his escort, to the paramedics, the grand slam— Is she going to be okay?
Nobody lied. They were quiet, or stuttering, or spouting hopeful but unsure half-statements they were probably trained to give grieving family members. But they didn’t lie. Their heart rates stayed steady, if not a bit fast. He appreciated that, because so few people told the truth these days, especially to those they thought couldn’t handle it.
So there he was, full of truth, sitting vigil with his son in his arms.
He would wait until she woke. There was no where else to be. Nowhere more important, at least.
“We let this man into the precinct,” the Detective said. “Showed him the report. The crime scenes photos. It was his crime. He Trojan Horsed us.”
Officer Brett Mahoney stood at the end of Benjamin Poindexter’s hospital bed. Every few seconds he visually checked the guardrails, ensuring the handcuffs starting on their metal bars and ending on Poindexter’s wrists were still firmly in place. The guy’s prognosis wasn’t great — head trauma, some broken bones, and as far as the Doc could tell from x-rays, probable paralysis from the neck down. They wouldn’t know for sure until he was concious. But he seemed sure the handcuffs would be plenty of restraint.
“The man took a two-story fall, landed directly on his back, and smacked his dome against the side of a church pew,” the doctor said. “I’d be surprised if he woke up at all.”
The man assaulted a train car, slaughtered a family and orphaned a child. He almost created another orphan; if Jessica Jones weren’t who she was, Peter would have been in the same boat. Jones was a pain, and Murdock was his own brand of jackass, but neither of them deserved what Poindexter was trying to do.
So the handcuffs weren’t enough. He wasn’t mobile, he wasn’t going to get up and kick and punch or break any necks or throw any sharp objects with scary accuracy. But a handcuff seemed too easy. Brett didn’t consider himself a violent or loathsome man, but there was a special sort of rage he reserved for people like Agent Poindexter. Were he a bit rougher around the edges, he may have wished something worse than quadriplegia came to him.
“Seems to be a trend,” Brett said. “Letting any basket case in a suit into our neighborhood.”
The Detective stayed silent, lips flat and tight. “It’ll be an easy case for the state prosecutor. We’ve got Poindexter on tape.”
Brett frowned. “How? I thought the church didn’t have cameras.” Neither did the subway, and the only Ulrich murder witness was his traumatized kid. It baffled Brett that someone could cause such a mess and not leave behind physical evidence.
“The main chapel doesn’t. Something about God’s eye being security enough. Whatever. But there’s a few in the storage rooms. It’s where they keep the more valuable shit, apparently, cash donation boxes and stuff. No audio, but there’s visual. Clear picture of Poindexter in the overcroft throwing knives at the lady and the blind guy. If no murder charge, we’ve definitely got him for Assault With a Deadly Weapon.”
“So he gets a max of 25 years. He’ll be back on the streets one day.” That wasn’t enough for Brett. Poindexter needed to be tossed into a dark, dark hole. Maybe they could stuff him on the Raft with the other dangerous assholes who’d been terrorizing the city for years.
The detective pressed hard against his own forehead with the heel of his hand, as if warding off a sudden headache. “Maybe so. But hopefully we’re retired by then.” He knocked his elbow against Brett’s. “But hey. gotta show you those clips, though. Of the three of them fighting in the church, I mean. I know it’s fucked up, but that blind dude can move.”
Luke ran into Claire as she was making a mad dash for the elevator.
Literally ran into her — she was shoving her way in as he tried to step out, and they ended up in a tangled heap when they tripped over each other’s toes and tumbled to the floor. The elevator doors tried to close on Luke’s legs and beeped angrily when they sensed that something was in the way.
“Jessica,” Claire said breathlessly, unfazed as Luke lifted them both up and away from the elevator. He escorted her to a nearby bench and tried not to look too closely at the generic hospital art hanging above it — a stock photo of a mother hand-in-hand with a chubby toddler on a patch of abnormally green grass. “Is Jessica okay? Foggy called me. He said Poindexter crashed the baptism, but he didn’t have all the details because—“
“She’s stable.”
“Stable? Implying that at one point she wasn’t stable? Who’s got Peter?”
“It was…touch and go, for a second. She’s okay now. Stable. They think she’s gonna be alright.” It was a game of telephone, getting the news from the doctors, but eventually the med staff told Matt and Matt told Karen and Karen told Luke that Jessica was going to come out of this, though not with all of her organs intact.
“And Peter?”
“He’s with his dad. He’s fine.”
Fine for the moment, at least. Peter was young, but stress like he’d gone through always did something to kids, even if they couldn’t remember the event itself. The mind was fickle but the body remembered. The adrenaline, the speed of the heart beating in your chest — a trauma response. Panic. Luke hoped Pete was young enough to come back from it, though he feared it was too little too late. Even while Claire and Luke hid in that closet at the deli, Peter was stiff and quiet, as if he knew something bad was on the horizon and the frightened cries typical of a baby his age would put them all at risk.
Claire seemed less frantic, if not totally relieved. News was news, good or bad. Sometimes the unknown was worse than a poor outcome. “She’s Jessica. And he’s Matt,” Claire said, like this explained why those two were constantly fighting for the lives of themselves and their loved ones. In a way, Luke thought that did explain it. They were who they were, faults and all. Sometimes the hardships that befell them were their fault; a result of poorly regulated impulse or a proclivity for finding seedier scenarios when day to day life got too uncomfortably calm. But sometimes, on occasion, the hardships were fate. Or, usually, cruel circumstance. The pain wasn’t always their fault. Nobody’s ever was. “They’ll be fine, right?”
“Right,” Luke said, slowly, calmly, sure of his own affirmation despite having no facts to back it up. He just knew somewhere deep down that after all of this, after everything, there was no way it didn’t turn out okay. If not okay, at least somehow better than it’s been. “Right.”
The death certificate would have been damning, were it evidence in anyone else’s case other than Wilson Fisk.
Even the most oblivious cops would put the same pieces together that Foggy had — Miss James Wesley, U.S. citizen but holder of an English visa, flew to America under the guise of legally avenging her deceased son, nevermind the fact that he’d already been dead for over a year. She publicly claimed to have gotten this info from Wilson Fisk but swore no criminal involvement. She waited around for a few months as the lawyers on her case drug their feet, obviously lacking the knowledge and desire to pursue a case against an unidentified vigilante that most of the city thought was dead anyways. In the end, after much fuss, she dropped the case. Her son was left unavenged, Fisk’s pleas for identification of his assistant’s killer not silenced, but left unacknowledged.
According to her credit card statements, Miss James Wesley bought a one-way, first class return ticket to London Heathrow. She never boarded her flight, and a couple of days later, her body washed up beneath the Brooklynn side of the Manhattan Bridge.
Foggy, like the cops, assumed Fisk involvement considering Wesley’s recent contact with him and her proceeding civil case against Daredevil. Brett Mahoney, the useful bastard, told Foggy as much. But Ben Poindexter wasn’t in any condition to talk, and Fisk was still behind bars. As far as the prison guards could tell he’d had no contact with anyone from the outside world apart from his attorney and James Wesley herself. They weren’t naive enough to assume he didn’t have resources, but none were traceable.
Because there was no physical evidence. No phone recordings, no emails, no snail mail. As far as Miss James Wesley’s case went, the NYPD’s evidence file was a joke. They had no DNA samples, no weapon remnants to trace. She drowned, but there were no physical injuries to prove she was forcibly held underwater. Just a soggy body found on an odd side of town.
The Feds were in shambles. Their lead man on Fisk was in a coma after being found in Clinton Church, post-brawl with a blind man and superhuman Jessica Jones, dressed as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Not to mention he was very likely a murderer working for the man he was meant to investigate. None of the staff that flowed into the NYPD precincts to assist him could be trusted. The FBI had to put together a new task force composed entirely of people who’d never worked on or around the original Fisk case.
The Wilson Fisk case was at a crash-and-burn standstill. Which, for a lawyer, meant it was time to get your shit together so when the Feds came knocking or the defendant threw out some ridiculous new piece of information, the legal team was prepared to handle it.
“Ridiculous,” Hogarth said through clenched teeth, stomping around her office in her stilettos. Foggy was surprised she wasn’t putting holes in the rug. “Should have known not to get anywhere near Fisk. Or his goons. Now our client is dead.”
“I’m sure cases like this are difficult—“
“I’m not mourning, Mr. Nelson, I’m dreading. Dreading being pulled into this mess.”
She rifled through a drawer in her filing cabinet. Backed up, turned, and went to attack a file sitting atop her desk. Tossed that one aside, then launched herself at a small cabinet near her offices’s wall of windows. She unlocked it with a key pulled straight from her bra.
“Can I ask what you’re looking for?” Foggy asked. It was Hogarth’s name on the Wesley civil suit, but Foggy did most of the grunt work for the case overall. If she was looking for the documents, they were stored away at his own desk.
“The retainer agreement. From Wesley.”
“It’s stached in Records. I could have Becca grab it for you? I’ve also got a copy at my desk.”
“Yes. Good. Either.”
Hogarth didn’t calm, just continued digging.
Foggy cleared his throat, scooted forward a bit in his chair. He was still in his formal clothes, clean cut and ready to attend a Sunday sermon. Despite looking overall nice, he felt weak without his usual workplace suit and tie. His hair wasn’t slicked, he didn’t have an overpriced watch ticking away on his wrist, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. He hoped he didn’t miss Peter’s baptism because Hogarth couldn’t remember where she stored her own documents. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Wesley paid up front, as is required, for the retainer agreement.”
“Sure. An absurdly large amount paid by a trust fund, owned by a shell company, and on and on it goes. What about it?”
“I need you to make sure we haven’t spent that money.”
All Foggy heard — his hearing was often selective — was that she wanted him to do something that wasn’t his job. “Isn’t that a task for the Finance guys? Respectfully, Hogarth, how am I supposed to track that?”
Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz was not a cash business. They didn’t exchange physical traceable bills. They funneled money through Accounts Receivable, it was dispersed to one of the company’s many accounts, and eventually cycled back through for payroll or whatever other expenses HC&B may have had, and that was the extent of Foggy’s knowledge. Once the original wire transaction hit any of the larger money pools, it became one digital dollar in a veritable sea of digital dollars, and woohoo! Money for the company. Nothing differentiated Fisk’s dirty money from the rest of Hogarth’s profit bucket except for the original wire, which was from a legitimate bank and used legitimate funds.
“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know! But do it, before we’ve got the real Feds on our asses. I’m not getting drug into anything else.” Hogarth’s slender hand swiped a folder off of her desk, an exuded lack of poise and professionalism Foggy wasn’t used to seeing from her. It bent upon impact with the floor, its edges askew, and the papers within fluttered to the ground in a snow of sensitive documents, now dirtied by whatever lived on the bottom of Hogarth’s heels and got tracked into her office every day.
“Anything else?” Foggy had to make a split second decision — whatever this was, Hogarth drug him into it. But did he incriminate himself more by asking questions?
“Is everything alright?”
Of course, he chose to incriminate himself. Befriending Matt Murdock all those years ago — Vigilante, bleeding heart, self sacrificial asshole — had ruined him in that way.
“It’s none of your concern.”
There was an anger in Foggy, then, bubbling up in response to Hogarth’s complete and utter lack of consideration for him or his time. “Is it not? Respectfully, why am I here, Hogarth?”
Hogarth doesn’t calm, shoulders tense as concrete. She won’t make eye contact. It’s not out of deference — Foggy knew that in that moment, he was barely a spectre in comparison to the corporeal forms taking up space in her brain. “Just talk to Finance. Tell them to set aside an amount equivalent to Wesley’s retainer fee.”
“Won’t that just make us look worse? Like we knew the cash was Fisk’s dirty money and we took it anyways? She paid us months ago. For a firm our size, it would make no sense for us to have singled out one retainer’s cash.” What Foggy wanted to ask, but knew he couldn’t without putting his job on the line, was why Hogarth didn’t think of any of that before asking him. She was smart, scarily so – where was her common sense? It didn’t take a lawyer to know her plan would look suspicious, especially to the Feds.
But Jeri Hogarth didn’t appear in her right mind, either. The pacing, the twitching, the anxious twisting back and fourth of her sparkly wedding band, it was all abnormal. Something was amiss, and Foggy was starting to think it truly had nothing to do with him. He was just the unlucky schmuck on Hogarth’s payroll who came up first in the phone contacts when she decided she needed somewhere to dump her panic.
“How about this, okay? How about we reach out, offer to cover the funeral services. She’s got no next of kin, if we don’t step in she’ll be cremated by the state and the tabloids will run with the tragedy of it all.”
Hogarth’s hand shook as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, no, it’s…None of it works. In every scenario we either sound stupid, soulless or sleazy. I thought she was lying about talking to Fisk. Thought she was off her rocker. Another delusional, traumatized New Yorker with money to throw around.
Foggy coughed. “She was living in London–”
““Whatever. I’m sure they have city-destroying supervillains there too. Regardless, why do you think I put Jones on the case?”
“Because she’s a talented PI?”
“Because she’s good at her job but doesn’t take anyone’s shit. I thought she’d shut Wesley down. Now look where we’ve ended up.”
Talking about Jessica made Foggy think of Peter, and his chubby cheeks and superpowered grabby hands, and how Foggy was missing out on his baptism because his boss was crashing out. It also brought his attention to his cellphone, which had been vibrating violently in his pocket for the last fifteen minutes.
“So what’ll it be, Hogarth? You know we need to beat the Press to the printer. You said it yourself, Wesley wasn’t being secretive. Someone will make the connection to the firm. Might as well make it ourselves, on our terms.”
Whatever Hogarth was thinking about, it wasn’t the press. The stress lines cutting her brow in half weren’t so new. ”Fine. Do it. Get with HR and the Media team, tell them to draft something up. We’ll pay for the funeral services, but we don’t send the press release unless absolutely necessary.”
Foggy had to physically bite his tongue – do you not have an assistant for this express purpose? – but let it slide. The sooner he got out of her office the sooner he could answer his damn phone.
“Karen?” He said, catching her on her next call just as he stepped out of Hogarth’s office and into the deserted hallway. Even a company of assiduous assholes knew being at work on a Sunday was unholy. “I thought my phone was going to explode, you’d be an excellent spam caller..Wait, hold on. What?”
“Brrrrrrrrr.”
“Yes, Pete, excellent race car noise.”
The baby whined, high and loud, and kept making noises. “Brrrrrrr.”
Something small and vaguely moist smacked Jessica’s forearm. She registered the impact, felt it bounce off her cold skin, but did not move. She was rising to the surface of her consciousness but wasn’t yet in control, couldn’t force her way out from behind her own eyelids.
The soft pressure on her arm shifted, moved, grazing the gooseflesh broken out over her skin. “Brrrrrrr,” the baby continued, blowing raspberries into the open air as his tiny hand slid over her arm with more urgency.
“Oh. I get it now, bud. Bumpy. Brrr. You don’t like bumpy.” Something thin and course slid up her torso, its previous pressure on her legs dispersed as it rose. The edge of it grazed her chin, and Jessica put together that it was a sheet. She was being tucked in.
“Mom still looks cold. You think they’ve got blanket warmers in this place?”
“Don’t bother,” she said, mouth dry. Her tongue felt like sandpaper. “This is the American health system. Comfort probably costs extra.”
There was an eardrum bursting squeal, one so familiar and inherently Peter that Jessica wasn’t sure how she hadn’t recognized it before. Jessica managed to Peel her eyes open and despite the blur of recent disuse, could clearly see the shapes of Matt and Peter at her bedside.
Matt’s eyes were hiding behind the dark lenses of his glasses, but after months of coparenting and awkward talks and shared trauma, she could read him like a book. His smile was genuine, but so were the deep, stressed folds that cut from his lashline into the flesh of his temples. He looked worn out. Relieved, but ready to collapse.
“Hiya, bud.”
Jessica lifted the arm not attached to an IV toward Peter — it felt so, so heavy — and saw something on her wrist glint against the room’s oppressive LED lights.
A medical alert bracelet. The linked chain band circled her bony wrist. There was a flat plate in the middle, engraved with a warning to others regarding her newfound affliction. I only have one kidney.
Huh. Only one kidney? Weird. Jessica could have sworn she had two of those.
She couldn’t feel a difference. It was disconcerting that she could lose a whole organ and be none the wiser. Granted, even if it was noticeable, she likely wouldn’t have clocked it through the unmistakable cloud of pain. Fire licked up her right side and nestled somewhere deep in her back. Whatever meds they had her on were good, dulling the pinprick agony to an everlasting ache and setting the hospital room walls ablaze with colorful speckled dots. But it wasn’t enough to not feel the burn of the incision, or whatever internal agitation came with having someone dig around in there and take things out.
Peter’s grabby hands came toward her at what felt like lightening speed compared to the quicksand-resistance tugging at her own muscles. Jessica didn’t flinch, had no reason to flinch away from her son, but Matt calmly reigned Peter in and tipped him back into the cradle of his arms. “Mom’s got an ouchie right now, okay? We have to be gentle.” Matt looked like he didn’t want to heed his own warning — the arm holding Peter was loose and steady, but his free hand grasped the rail of Jessica’s bed with bloodless knuckles.
Peter whined, bottom lip stuck out. He was priming for a total meltdown.
“It’s okay,” Jessica said. To disprove her own point, she coughed around her dry throat, then groaned when the movement pulled at the tender muscle of her back. “H-hand him here.”
“Jess, I really don’t think—“
“Pass the baby, Matt.”
He held still like he might object further. Opened his mouth once, then closed it. Then, he carefully set Peter down on the bed, settled in the gap between Jessica’s torso and arm.
Peter gazed up at Jessica with wide eyes, shades of green and brown separating and speckling the iris under the harsh hospital lighting.
God, he really did look like his dad. Like her, too — she saw herself in Peter in more ways than just looks. But the slant of Peter’s nose, the frustrated frown — all Matt Murdock.
Peter wasn’t big, was a bit small for his age to begin with, but the extra weight against her torso did kick her pain level up from an eight-out-of-ten to a solid eight-point-seven-five. Despite that, she couldn’t bring herself to send him away.
“So,” Jessica said.
Matt nodded. “So.”
Jessica ran a thumb over the sleeve of Peter’s onesie. She didn’t recognize it as one she’d bought for him. “I never know what comes after things like this. What to do with myself.”
“Stay in bed and heal?”
“You know what I mean. This is more than…what happened to me.” A serious injury that almost cost Jessica her life — old news.
“Not to me,” Matt said, and Jessica was so distracted by the haze of her meds that at first she didn’t put together what he meant. “All of this. What happened to you is everything. There’s nothing beyond it.”
“Matt—“
“That makes me selfish, I know. Fisk just proved he can make our lives hell and keep his grip on the city from behind bars. But all I can focus on is what it all did to you.”
“Matt,” Jessica said again, because it’s all she could say.
Suddenly there was a plastic cup of water in front of her. Matt’s callused hand gripped it like it might run away. “Here. I’m sure you’re thirsty.”
She didn’t want to ask him if that was an assumption or a statement of fact, whether or not he could hear the dry plain of her tongue hitting her teeth as she spoke. So she sipped the water carefully, wary of how when she woke up after her crash, the anesthesia made her so nauseous she shouldn’t keep liquids down.
So she sipped, and Peter babbled, and Matt stood beside her bed like he might jump anyone that walked into the room.
“Matt,” Jessica said once again, and this time, she meant it. It wasn’t a plea, or a question, or a statement. It was a demand. “Come here.”
He didn’t make her wait. He gingerly set himself on the side of Jessica’s bed. She held her breath at the impact, the waves of pain it sent through her back despite Matt’s care. He seemed to know she was struggling, he always knew, and didn’t press until she seemed ready to speak again. “Yes, Jessica?”
“You need to get over yourself.”
This, evidently, was not what he expected her to say. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re a thief. This weight you carry? This blame? It’s not yours. You’re stealing it from everyone else.”
“I really—“
“No, stop. You’re going to let me finish.” Jessica was pressing one of her pale, trembling fingers to his lips. If he wouldn’t stop digging his own tunnel to Hell, she’d stop him herself.
He nodded. The scruff on his chin scraped against her hand. When she decided he’d really shut the hell up, she took her hand back.
“There are lots of people involved in this. Fisk, Poindexter, James Wesley, Miss James Wesley, Karen, anyone with their fingers in this particular cookie jar. Hell, us being who we are made all of this possible. But there’s a difference between cause and effect, and fault. Do you get what I’m saying?
“Not really, no.”
“Oh my god. Okay, fine. Think about Karen. Kidnapped, alone in an unknown location with Fisk’s right hand man. She killed James Wesley. How do you feel about that?”
Matt must have thought about this before, because his answer was quick. “I hate that someone died, but I don’t blame Karen for what she did. She was frightened, defending herself.”
“Okay, so there. You answered your own question.”
Matt cocked an eyebrow. “I didn’t ask a question.”
“Lawyers, holy shit. You’re infuriating. You being Daredevil—“
Matt tilted his ear toward the ajar hospital room door. “Say that a bit louder, why don’t you—“
“—did not do this. You helped people. Sure, maybe your intentions weren’t always perfect, nobody’s are. But you getting involved with Fisk, or me, for that matter, while fundamentally stupid on both counts, does not mean you deserved what he gave you, or what Poindexter tried to do. At Midland Circle or now.”
“Then how do I quantify it?” Matt asked. “How do I make it make sense? I think everything happens for a reason, and horrible things have happened recently, Jess, to you and our son. The common denominator there is me.”
“And me.”
Matt froze. “Okay, but…”
“But nothing. I’m in the hospital bed, and I don’t think this is your fault. Frankly, trying to convince you otherwise is exhausting and not at all my job. So we’re leaving it alone, okay?”
“It’s all I could think about,” Matt said, oh so quietly. Like he heard her words, was saving his volume for a different fight on a different day, but still had to say his piece. “Before you got out of surgery. How if you didn’t make it out, it would be my doing.”
“Well I did make it out. Sans a kidney, but we’ve got two for a reason.”
“Getting stabbed and losing one is not the reason,” Matt said helpfully.
“Whatever. Regardless, it was not your doing. It was not your doing. Saying otherwise is unfair to you, because you didn’t throw a knife at me, and it’s unfair to me, because you’re basically saying I’m some damsel drug into all of this against my will. I make my own choices, and I chose to stay at that church and be with you.”
Peter started fussing at Jessica’s side, distressed by his parents’ ire, and started swiping his face across the scratchy sleeve of her hospital gown. The rough texture upset him even more, and he made that pinched face he always did when he was about to start wailing.
“Alright, bud, none of that. You did it to yourself.” Matt swooped in to grab Peter before he could start throwing his superpowered baby fists around and accidentally hit something important.
Jessica tried to speak, choked on her dry throat. Took another sip of water. “I’d do it again. I don’t regret it.”
“Helping me in the church?”
“Any of it,” she said sternly, sure of herself for once in her life. “The Defenders, Midland Circle, what happened before Midland Circle. Hell, even the pregnancy ankles and sleepless nights and baby puke. I wouldn’t say it was pleasant, but it led me here.”
“And you’re happy with here.”
“Well, not the hospital bed. This thing is ass.”
Matt’s nostrils flared, but he couldn’t hide the accompanying smile. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do. And yes. I’m happy. Not something I’ve said many times, but it feels right.”
Matt got this sappy look on his face, so creased into his skin Jessica could see the mushed lines of it around his glasses. “I mean this when I say it, Jess. I—“
“No.”
Matt reared back like he’d been slapped. “No?”
“I know what you’re about to say.” She hoped she knew, otherwise she was about to look very stupid. “Don’t say it. Not right now.”
“Why not?”
“I almost died and now you want to say it. It’s like saying it for the first time during sex. Doesn’t count.”
“I definitely think it counts.”
“You would think it counts during sex.”
Matt frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever. You understand me.”
“Jess, if you don’t feel the same way, you can say so.”
“Feel what way? You haven’t said anything yet.”
Matt’s face went deadpan.
“Alright, fine, that was cruel. C’mere.”
Matt shuffled closer and returned to his seat on the bed. Peter giggled, entertained by the swooping of their motion from standing to a soft plop on the crinkly mattress.
Jessica licked her dry lips. “Listen to me very closely.”
“I listen to everything very closely.”
“Asshole.”
“Yes. Continue.”
“I want you to say it,” Jessica said, and she meant it. Deep, deep in the recesses of her chest, of her aching back, her stiff spine, she meant it. “But not now. Not right after all of this. Okay? I don’t want it to be tinged with fear, or angst, or whatever. I just want it to be…It.”
“It,” Matt repeated, unsure.
Jessica nodded. “It.”
The hand he put on her cheek was so, so tender, heart wrenching in a way she couldn’t describe. “Fine. Then I’ll wait however long I need to. Until it’s it. And until then…” He leaned in, just enough to drop a soft kiss on her cheekbone. “I’ll be here.”