bakerstreet | (no subject)

She'd been zipping the bag up, getting up to put it in the kitchen when she heard the first catch in his breath. Looking over, she saw him in the bedroom, looking for all the world like some lost, broken man. Something twisted in her chest, her eyes going over to the bottle in a kneejerk reaction to want to numb any and all pain, but this wasn't her pain. This was his.

Managing to keep the urge to say 'shit' to herself, she came into the room, walking slowly over to the bed and standing there to look down at him, not entirely sure where to start. Comforting wasn't her thing. She sucked at it. Sitting down beside him, her hand hovered over his shoulder before she lowered it, squeezing it carefully before rubbing down his arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. But she could be there, if he wanted her to be.

God, what a mess. What a shitshow. What was he doing here? He seemed to withdraw when he felt the weight of her hand on his shoulder, but he relaxed soon enough and tried to just breathe, rubbing most of the pain away from his eyes. Only the confusion remained, giving life to irises that darted left and right as if they were searching for the answers to questions he couldn't put words to.

He wasn't ready to reach out to anybody else. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not even next week. He seemed agitated as one hand grasped at the silk and curled into a fist in his lap.

Half turning his head towards Jessica, his lips moved but nothing came out. Any words he could grasp at turned to bitterness that withered on the tip of his tongue. Torn between pushing her away and pulling her closer, Matt wasn't even a fraction of the eloquent lawyer he used to be right now.

Seeing him like this hurt. Not that she expected him to be made of stone, and god knows she'd seen him be actually emotional before, but this was... god. This was close to broken and it made her physically hurt to see him like this. She bent down and unzipped her boots, kicking them off as she climbed up onto the bed, crawling over him and moving to lay down behind him. She was over the covers, half trapping him under the sheets with the weight of her body, her arm draping over him as she tucked in behind him. They were about the same height, so lying with him had them even, her head tucking over his shoulder as her arm wrapped around him.

She didn't say 'shh', didn't try to get him to be quiet if he didn't want to. Sometimes you needed to cry. Sometimes it just had to come out. If he wanted her to go, she would, but it'd be a struggle for her. He had 'vulnerable' written all over him right then, and while she understood the need to not want to be that, to put those walls up and be anything but, she also knew that Matt wasn't her. He had more friends than she did. He cared more than she did. So maybe he hurt more than she could.

He didn't realise how much he needed her company until he felt her holding him. He was still visibly upset, but he tried to hold his shit together even as everything felt like it was unravelling. Not sensing her being judgemental helped. They didn't have to talk about tonight. No one else had to know the extent to which she was capable of being nice, just as they didn't have to know how much anguish Matt was in.

Difficult as it was to face her, he pursed his lips and took in a deep, shaky breath before rolling around. More for her benefit really. It wasn't like his senses couldn't sketch her out just because she was behind him.

With half his face buried in his pillow, he sidled in a little closer, close enough to feel her breath graze the back of his knuckles. Blinking a few times, he seemed to be staring off into the distance before his expressive eyebrows moved, and his hand twitched into action. Reaching out towards her forehead, he tucked some of the stray strands of her hair behind her ear.

This felt like what they were destined to be right now. Together and alone, simultaneously.

"I'm glad it was you." It could have been Luke or Danny, neither of whom would know how to deal with his fragile state of mind or be willing to stick around to catch him at the bottom of the cliff. Or Foggy or Karen, both of whom he would have rather pushed away than let them see him like this.

His head inched in a little closer to hers, and he hesitated, just for two heartbeats until he could bring himself to close his eyes and press his lips to her forehead.

It was right there on the tip of her tongue to say something sarcastic. Something to pop this bubble that was wrapping around them, this quiet, intense, intimate bubble. Looking at him from so close, at the reddening of his eyes, at the warmth they had even when he was like this... she couldn't do it. She wriggled a little closer, her hand splayed out on his back, eyes closed for a moment because for just a second, Jessica Jones let herself realize that intimacy was a little terrifying.

She felt that press of his lips to her forehead, the corner of her lips quirking up into a grin as she waited for him to draw back. "Me too." She was glad it was her for all those selfish reasons that she could think of. So she could sleep better at night knowing he was alive. So she could be able to look at eyes that didn't see her. So she stopped feeling that weird, hollow ache in her chest when she thought about him. He'd crawled into her life and under her skin relatively quickly, and she hadn't been prepared to lose him.

When she didn't immediately push him away, the tension that he didn't know was building in his shoulders slipped away, leaving him feeling pleasantly tired. It wasn't healthy, letting everything well up and simmer inside before having cathartic outbursts alone or in a confession booth. But this - this was more than just catharsis.

Clutching onto the sheets in that small space between them, Matt leaned in again and brushed his lips against hers, trying out an almost-kiss, idly wondering if not wanting to do anything about how he felt about her had been a mistake.

She didn't move away, but she smiled against that soft, tentative kiss. Her lips clung to his, making it into a kiss and not just a press of lips, but she couldn't help saying something about it. It's what she did -- tried to ruin things before they became things. "What, you can't bounce around on the roofs, so you're trying to see if I can break you instead?"

He scoffed. "You couldn't break me if you tried." He was doing a damned good job of breaking himself, to be fair. But he didn't want her pity. Before they knew it they'd be having an arms race of pity, tripping over themselves trying to compete feeling sorry for each other.

"I spent this whole time since Midland trying to hold on to something I should have let go of. I just- just want to feel stupid for a while, for missing out on doing this instead."

"Missing out on what?" They were speaking quietly, whispering back and forth to each other over the barely there expanse between them. She could feel the puff of his breath against her lips, her hand sliding down carefully on his side, feeling him through a layer of silk. Trust Matt Murdock to have silk sheets, pro bono or not.

"You," he said simply, shaking his head a bit as if he was surprised she had to ask. "You and... everyone else who's still alive." He hated that Elektra coming back from the dead had done that to him. A part of him held out hope that the lie was what had happened on that rooftop and not the fact that she'd come back to life. He was searching in all the wrong places for redemption, and so caught up in that search that he couldn't see the things - the people - that actually mattered.

"I've been so blind. I feel-..." He bit his lip and buried more of his face into the pillow. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Guilty. Stupid. Lost. "Let's go with stupid," he muttered to himself.

"Welcome to the club. I pretty much feel that every morning when I open my eyes." Watching him try to squirm into the covers was... dammit. It was cute as all hell, and she tucked herself a little closer, knowing he wouldn't be able to come too much closer with her pinning down the sheet like she was. "Contrary to whatever deluded sense of martyrdom you have, we're only human, Matt. You. Me. Luke. We're all just people who've had some fucked up shit happen to them. And we have to muddle through that. Sometimes people die."

She saw Hope's face looking up at her, blood pouring from her neck. Reuben's lifeless body on her bed. So many corpses all because of some sick fuck's fascination with her. Her hand came up and ran through his hair, fingers tickled by the rasp of stubble as she ran them over his cheek. "At least you admit it. That makes you not as stupid as you could be."

He half-heard her voice dissipating in the air between them, half-heard it through the mattress mixed in with her rustling his sheets.

"I haven't died yet," he said. He didn't sound like he believed himself when he said it, but the reality of it would hit him in waves, the way the emotions came and went.

Struggling to free himself from the covers, he shuffled up a bit and freed one arm.

"I think I'll stay for a while this time. Someone's going to have to nag you to stop drinking."

"By some weird Irish luck," she huffed at him, watching him move to try to get an arm free, drawing her own back as he did.

That last bit had her rolling her eyes. She hoped he heard it. "Just what I need, a goddamn intervention. I swear, you and Trish are never getting in the same room."

Luck was one way of putting it. Matt was more inclined to think the Man Upstairs wasn't done with him yet. Or maybe he hadn't suffered enough yet.

"I do believe step one is admitting you have a problem." He turned his head towards hers then, a playful smile touching his lips.

"I mean I'd have a problem if you'd rather spend the night with Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker or Jim Beam than Matthew Murdock. Is it- is it the blindness? Or maybe he's too boring for you..."

"He talks too much. The J-boys are quiet. Just how I like them." Yet she wasn't moving away, watching him as he smiled at her, wondering, for just a moment, what it would be like to wake up to that. To have him smiling at her and for her to believe it was for her. "You and Trish are like a broken record. 'Try going on more than a liquid diet, Jessica', 'You look like a drunk hobo, Jessica', 'You just walked through your door. Again. Jessica...'."

"He talked- talks, for a living." He still had a job, presumably. Freelancing supposedly might make it easy to pick his life back up again.

"You could just try shutting him up." Like with the kiss he reached out with his freed hand to pull her into.

"Maybe he'd take better care of you than the spirits," Matt whispered against her lips.

"Seems like he's too busy needing to be taken care of himself." There was no censure in her voice, no biting sarcasm as she flicked her tongue out, licking at his lower lip before she sucked it into her mouth. She tongued it, teasing it before letting it go and giving him a firm, solid kiss instead of just a pretense of one. "Besides, I don't need to be taken care of. I'm a big girl."

"Mmm-" He tugged at his other arm to free it from under the silk and pushed some of the sheet down, shivering as cool air swirling around in his apartment rolled over his warm skin.

"Your drinking, that's- your decision, it's your life," he started as he sat up slowly, nipping gently at her upper lip, cupping the sides of her face in his hands.

"All I'm saying is, they won't love you back. They won't hold you or touch you or kiss you like this."

"I don't need love, Matt. I can't handle..." -losing someone else, she didn't finish, ducking her head down before she opted to change tactics. She was actually pretty good at shutting people up. Sometimes with a fist to the face, or junk, and sometimes, with her mouth crushing down on theirs. She went for the latter option, moving to slide a leg over his trapped lower half, leaning in to press him back to the bed, to still any more questions or professions that likely might be fueled by a knock to the head and weren't real.

She moved to straddle him, one knee on each side of him, but keeping herself up enough that she wasn't putting any weight on him. She was mindful of those injuries she'd dabbed at, but that didn't stop her from leaning in, hair sliding down to brush against his face as she kissed him. "Seems I'm the one doing the kissing, Murdock."

He'd take Jessica Jones on top of him over 30 storeys' worth of rubble any day. Whatever she could or couldn't handle, she couldn't deny the fact that she had her lips on Matt Murdock instead of around the rim of a bottle of whiskey, and this was where she wanted to be.

"You didn't ask Jim for a kiss after dropping a building on him and making him crawl out of a hole in the ground," he pointed out, anticipation straining his voice as the silk between them caressed his thighs.

"I thought you were supposed to be better than Jim." Smirking, she slid her hands up to his arms, grabbing his wrists and pinning them beside his head, using that leverage to let her move herself over him a little. Just a touch of pressure, just a little grind against his lap, her mouth trailing down to his ear, nibbling on the lobe. "Isn't this the part where you convince me of that?"

Even if, by some small miracle, Matt happened to not be nursing some injury one night, she'd still overpower him. He only struggled because it wasn't in his nature to give in without a fight, even as he seemed to lose focus with where her lips were going.

"Jim would make you happy tonight and miserable tomorrow. I could disappoint you everyday, make you miserable every night." If she was looking for some life-affirming bullshit, she was in the wrong man's bed. But if Misery wanted company, she'd come to the right place.

"I'm not seeing the happy part." She slid over him again, making sure that the only points of their bodies that touched were her hands on his, her mouth on him, and her groin pressing over his. "Or is that something you're incapable of, mm? All talk and no... bite?"

It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide the bulge beneath the sheet. It wasn't easy to make a claustrophobic experience the pleasurable kind of frustrating, but Jessica was doing a pretty good job of it.

He gave her hands a light squeeze as he kissed her back with a kind of renewed passion a half-dead man shouldn't be capable of mustering.

She noticed it, and that was what she was looking for. Maybe this desperation wasn't just for her own benefit. He'd almost died, after all. Maybe he had -- or come damn near close to it. Maybe there was something soothing in knowing that he was well enough to be able to do that, and she repaid him that small action with another slow, careful grind against him.

Her mouth was back on his, tongue licking into his mouth as she felt him squeeze her hands. She let go of one, but only so she could trace her fingers down along his arm, tickling over his skin and freeing up one hand for him to fight back with.

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Desperado why don't you come to your senseThese things that're pleasing you would hurt you somehow

Matt speak for 'oh mama'.