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Kilgrave had left again. Jessica was trapped in the apartment. The usual compulsions held her. She couldn’t set the place on fire, couldn’t leave, couldn’t call for help, couldn’t leave a message in case they left the apartment and someone might find it. He’d thought of everything. Or, and this was the one that fucked her, he hadn’t thought of everything, but whatever was left, Jessica was just too stupid, too fucking worthless, to figure out.

She had one way out. The VR.

As soon as she finished her beauty regiment—God/Kilgrave forbid she forget that—she sat down at the computer and jacked in. In the virtual world, she didn’t have a sunny smile or a flowery dress or long, bouncy hair. Her hair was cropped short, her clothing leather armor, gloves and fuck-you boots that weighted a ton. No beauty, no pleasantness, just that barbed wire core Kilgrave kept dressing up in Barbie clothes.

She wasn’t interested in any of the usual virtual venues either. Not Old Hollywood or Venice or the Garden of Eden. She headed for Sin City—Las Vegas in its prime, with a pre-Giuliani Times Square parked at the end of the Strip. It was nasty, grimy, sleazy, but at least it suited her. If she had to force a smile, pretend she was as beautiful or as fancy or as good as some pre-rendered surroundings, she’d spend the day pretending to shoot herself.

The streets were dank and damp, dark, either sucking up the light of flagging streetlamps or getting puked on by the garish neon signs. There was no Caesar’s Palace here, no Siegfried & Roy gloss. It was the underbelly, the place that fit her mood—Reno, almost. She looked around the place, her virtual self’s attention causing one neon sign’s light to dwarf the others. There were casinos, shooter games, and a recreation of an old grindhouse theater, for real cinema buffs. Jessica walked toward that, the selected neon drowning her in its red. Why not? Why the hell not?

A whiskey-strained woman in her sixties was in the ticket window, charging three bucks for a ticket, giving her spiel in a tobacco-filtered voice. Jessica went inside, got her ticket torn by a seedy Puerto Rican, then followed the half-burnt-out track lighting toward a velvety maroon curtain at the other end of the lobby.

The films on display were all vintage. Slasher movies, Blaxploitation, rape-revenge, hicksploitation, nunsploitation… the endless selection sorta defeated the realism of the simulation, but fuck it. For all she know, a real grindhouse would’ve been full of cheerleaders and dancing cats.

Jessica decided to watch Chainsaw Sisters—the title at least gave it a chance of passing the Bechdel Test—and pushed through the curtain. She could hear poorly recorded rock music, with frequent flicks on the soundtrack, as a fight scene played out. You could see a better one waiting around the average bar on a Friday night.

The theater itself interested her more. She could see the interior of the projection area, the large screen at the far end of the room, some of the flickering shaft of light between. She looked around in search of a seat. The theater was so sparsely attended that she wondered whether the inhabitants were real or NPCs added for flavor. There was an old man, asleep, two young black men conversing in front, and a smattering of others who kept themselves, shrugging down nearly invisibly in the dark auditorium.

She wondered why she’d bothered showing up. Maybe she was just making it worse, nursing her sourness like this, gorging herself on it. Maybe she could find some measure of happiness if she just… let go of the bitterness, somehow. It wasn’t like she was the only person in the world who got a raw deal. Was being Kilgrave’s bitch really worse than being an orphan in the fucking Sudan?

It worried Jessica how much she thought like that. Made her wonder if Kilgrave had ordered her to think that. Not often, not so often that she’d notice the intrusive thoughts, like those violent feelings of love and lust that hit her like mood swings, filling her up with a narcotic need for the purple asshole. Like this whole virtual environment, she couldn’t tell the difference between real and faked. She decided, fuck it, she would do the opposite of her Kilgrave-appeasing thoughts. Just on principle.

She didn’t have anything better to do, after all. If she logged off, she would just sit around feeling sorry for herself. Here, at least something could happen. The movie might even be good.

Jessica looked down the rows of seats. Now she saw a man, halfway down, suitably close to the screen, but not so close that the colors blended together into blurry strains on the eyes. She moved into the row and settled on the second seat from the aisle, a fair distance from him, but closer than most. The theater was an ocean of islands, each in solitary isolation to the others.

She eased back in her seat, crossed her legs, and gave the screen a chance to win her over. The images washed over her, but made little impact. She didn’t follow the plot, the characters—she noticed the focus swimming in and out, the sound buzzing or spurting, all the little fidgets of pre-millennial technology. Cigarette burns and running reels. She wondered if maybe the virtual world hadn’t put too much effort into recreating this.

She wondered, too, if she wasn’t a movie. Kilgrave did all the thinking for her, all the acting. He wrote the script and directed her scenes and from her cozy little skull, she watched it all happen. It was all him. She was just the audience.

She wondered if she couldn’t kill herself. There had to be a way. She’d heard that people who died in VR—really died, beyond the safety settings—were lost in cyberspace. Bodies empty, minds erased. That didn’t sound so bad. She’d be one of those phantom people, like the arguing black men or the sleeping old fart—her memory recycled and used again for some part of this immense false world. Would it really be so different, being a door or a wall? It seemed less stressful, in a lot of ways.

“Jessica? Jessica Jones?”

Jessica looked over at the man she’d seated herself near. “Peter Parker?”

He was much the way she remembered him from high school—boyish, not having grown into manhood, but merely had years and weariness and pain added on. Still, there was a confidence to him now, however modest or self-effacing, and it marked him as more mature than the last time she’d seen him, even if he was still baby-faced, his raw stubble doing nothing to dispel the youthful appearance that clung to him.

“What are you doing here?” she continued, suddenly embarrassed, frightened at the prospect of being seen for how far she’d fallen.

Peter got up, moved over, sat down close to her but not too close. A seat between them provided room for his elbow as he leaned over the armrest. “I’m having something of a sick day. Thought I’d try VR, but my deck’s old and glitch. I’m kinda stuck here.”

“Oh. I was just in a bad mood.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Peter said. “Anything I can do to help or do you just wanna wallow?”

“I’ve… maybe wallowed enough.” The niceness of him almost overwhelmed her. It wasn’t just him, it was being reminded of high school. Maybe her life hadn’t been perfect then, but it had at least made sense. It was at least hers.

He brought that sense of control back to her. Peter didn’t know what she was. She could talk to him, and he would still see her—almost—as that girl she had been. The girl who made sense.

“So how have you been?” she asked Peter. Not easy to come out of her shell, but she wanted to beat him to the punch, talk about him before they could talk about her. “You and Mary Jane ever…”

“No, I’ve… I’m not really doing relationships, at the moment. Work, you know.”

“Right. Have to support your aunt.”

“Uh-huh.” Peter could pick up on her roiling emotions, somewhere below the surface. Even back in high school, he’d been sensitive, and Jessica couldn’t hide it. There was so much of it. And she was so damn tired. “You look good,” he said, trying to be nice.

“Don’t be nice. It doesn’t impress me.” Jessica’s words were blunt, her voice a croak, and she could see the surprise on Peter’s face. Good. Let him see the wreckage. Let him realize he was walking into a warzone.

“I mean it,” Peter said, his earnest face reflected a thousand times in the studs in her leather. “You always looked good. You had this… don’t fuck with me attitude. Never put up with anyone’s shit. I wished I could’ve just told people to eat shit the way you did.”

Jessica smiled mirthlessly. It felt horribly real, smiling that way, fiercely, without any joy in it, any faking. Yeah. She’d told people to eat shit, right up until she couldn’t. She supposed she was like any other sell-out that way. “They say in VR, you look like who you really are.”

“I don’t believe that,” Peter said, and the curveball had Jessica leaning in, bending her head over the empty seat between them as if the two of them were praying to something in-between.

“No?”

Peter looked slightly embarrassed, like he’d spoken too loud in class and gotten himself singled out. He was the smartest guy in the room, but he hated showing it. Like Jessica’s badass attitude, it ended up getting him slapped down. “I don’t think there’s just one picture of anyone inside a person. One core… thing that everything else comes up. You look inside someone and there’s everything. A coward, a hero, a sinner, a saint… it’s all in there. All mixed up.”

Maybe for him. Maybe he had the luxury of multitudes. A million Peter Parkers, hung up inside him like a closet full of suits, and now he could wear the Peter he was with her. Jessica’s closet was locked shut. “I think there’s only one thing inside me. The beautiful woman in the sundress, who smiles and dances…”

“That doesn’t sound so bad…”

She hung her head. “It’s horrifying.” She locked eyes with him, through the fringe of her shorn hair, and he was looking at her with a horrible understanding. A sympathy. Not false pity, not expected pity, but like he could tell. Like he knew what it was to be between the cracks, hurting, fearful. Or at least he’d seen enough of it to have its scent. “What about you?” she asked, trying to force the conversation away, forget, cover up. “Everyone else likes to look like God or Marilyn Monroe or a knight in shining armor… how come you’re just you?”

Peter subconsciously brushed his shirt off—he wore a simple Oxford shirt, slacks, even his glasses. A professional ensemble, but not an exciting one. Not in a world where everyone could be James Bond. “I don’t know… it’s not so bad, is it? Just being some guy? Normal?”

Jessica could’ve taken the safe road, steered the conversation away, found some nerd shit they had in common—but suddenly, she didn’t want to. Even though it hurt, stung, she didn’t want to pretend with him. She wanted to tell him, even if she couldn’t, not in a million years. Not when Kilgrave had told her not to. “Nothing’s so bad, as long as it’s your choice. I think I could live through anything, so long as I chose it.”

Again, that understanding. Peter did all but come out and say it. She might’ve well have had a black eye for him to see. “The world doesn’t always let you choose.”

Jessica ducked her head, ground the heel of her hand into her eye, rubbed out the tear before it could exist. “Maybe that’s all it is. All those people crammed inside us, and the world just decides what it squeezes out.“

Peter reached out. Laid his hand on top of the folded seat of the empty chair between them. It was so damn comforting that Jessica could’ve screamed. “Maybe. But the world doesn’t squeeze so hard in here. We can at least pretend to be something else.”

Jessica stared at the hand like it was a spider. She’d kept a tarantula as a pet once, before Kilgrave had made her get rid of it. She’d also always known it could bite. “Pretend to be normal?”

“Pretend the world’s normal.”

“A normal world…” Jessica laid her hand on top of Peter’s. Not taking it, not squeezing it, just letting them touch. It was warm. Soft. Hers. Her choice. “I had such a crush on you in high school. What happens in a normal world with that? I ask you out? We go on a few dates? Forget all about each other?”

“Or we get married,” Peter joked. “Have two kids and a white picket fence.”

“I don’t think they make white picket fences anymore.”

“They do here.”

***

The house was idyllic, so pure and so wholesome that it was practically nature, grown out of the ground like an apple tree. There was the mailbox on its post, the screen door, the porch with a gently swaying swing, a tree in the front yard born for a treehouse.

It was hard for Jessica to believe anyone had ever lived in such a place. As crazy as King Arthur’s knights in shining armor, or cowboys with white hats.

“This where you grew up?” she asked, feeling ill at ease in the bright sunlight, atop the green, green grass. It was a little better in the shade of the tree. Better still when she took her jacket off, her muscle tee less overbearing on the pastoral scene.

“Where my grandparents grew up, maybe,” Peter said. “Lot of pictures hanging on the walls.” He hopped the railing on the porch, sat down on the porch and sprawled. He seemed well-suited to a place like this. Made for paradise. “I was in low-income housing on the 48. My aunt and uncle, y’know.”

“Explains your fashion sense.” Jessica smiled. Hand-me-down clothes, secondhand clothes—Peter had been less fashionable than her. “I’d never belong here. No matter when I was born.”

“It grows on you,” Peter said. “The quiet. The simplicity.”

“People beat their kids here, same as anywhere else.”

“I suppose,” Peter agreed with a heavy breath. “You wanna go somewhere else? A high-rise apartment? Mount Everest? It’s VR, so—“

“I’ve been.” She had been. Everywhere, for real. Kilgrave on a first-class ticket on any flight he wanted, an invitation to every party, and she was his permanent plus one. “These VR shit is a crock. It’s the company that makes it.”

“I think they have a virtual Jennifer Garner you can hang out with.”

“You’ll do,” Jessica said. “I just wish this place didn’t look so… perfect. Things are look perfect never are. They’re trying to fool you.”

“Well, seeing as it’s all virtual…” Peter lashed out with his foot, kicking out a bannister on the porch railing. It cracked and splintered, giving the house a sudden, appealing, lost-tooth quality.

“Feels realer now. Lived in.” Jessica drove her elbow into the tree, dropping a shower of leaves, blasting a spray of bark from its trunk.

They kept going, growing in intensity, losing all restraint. Tearing up the carpets, tearing down the walls, stomping through floorboards and hurling furniture across rooms. The anger didn’t pour out of Jessica. It seemed to be summoned out of the ether. She hadn’t known she could feel this rage—this joyful, unencumbered fury that was so pure, it had to be righteous. For so long, all she’d felt was sad and tired and weak. But she was alive now. Kilgrave hadn’t snuffed her flame, he’d only starved it of fuel.

And Peter joined in, more for her than himself, relieved at her fierce laugh and the glee she took in not having to hold back. Maybe she’d fucked up her whole life, even before she met Kilgrave, but at least they’d been her fuck-ups. She’d take all the responsibility in the world, so long as the wreckage left was hers.

And when there was nothing left to break, no brick standing on another, nothing but the rubble strewn at their feet like a field of dirty roses, they destroyed each other. They kissed.

***

There was no way Kilgrave would’ve let Jessica own a virtual deck without having the modification on it that projected the VR experience onto a monitor. Mainly it was used for parents, the occasional kinkster, but required consent for an adult to be monitored. Of course, that was no problem for him and Jessica. He booted it up as soon as he got in.

For a moment, he couldn’t take his eyes away. In some sick joke of the universe, he could see in vivid color how a cock was invading a moist, red-mouthed cunt, the projection having opened up on what amounted to a close-up. Kilgrave stared at it a moment, shocked. Is that how it really looks? He’d never actually thought about it before.

The balls beneath the cock tolled like bells, the shaft itself repeatedly penetrating that submissive, accepting womanhood. Kilgrave was entranced. Obviously, he’d fucked Jessica a number of times, but he’d never seen it in such immeasurable detail. The way the labia lips moved with the invasion. The dark dampness formed on the shaft as it moved in and out. The way a few of the hairs of Jessica’s pussy clung to the cock as it entered, broke away from it as it left, and were sucked in again with the next stroke. What the hell? What in God’s name?

Shocked out of his inaction by the continuing fuck, just as he’d been shocked into it, he manipulated the controls to pull the screen back. Now he could see in full what he’d first seen so intimately. The man was handsome, if you liked that sort of thing, his chest sculpted in its thinness, finely muscled, with a fine, golden-brown brush of hair, light on the chest, thicker and curlier around his middle. His eyes were the same brown, set wide in a handsome face, his looks clean-cut, even with his nudity.

And there was Jessica, letting herself go as usual. Pale-skinned, fragile of face, her breasts sagging, he really should make her get implants, and that little belly because God forbid she be expected to eat right when he didn’t specifically tell her to. But from the way he was fucking her, you wouldn’t be able to tell how disgusting she looked, Jessica’s eyes closed, her mouth in a continual moan of acceptant ecstasy.

The man played with her small tits, her fingers continuously finding her nipples before abandoning them to explore ore of her flesh, white streaks showing in her skin where he fondled her, and she writhed against his pressing body with little twitches and wiggles that swallowed him ever more eagerly.

Kilgrave watched, turning the sound up, hearing “ohhh,” “ahhh,” “mmmm,” “fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”—he’d have to tell Jessica to be so vocal the next time she was with him. Then the man pulled himself free of Jessica’s clinging wetness, Kilgrave’s eyes narrowing as he watched the man fist his cock, jack it a few times, then spill his cum all over Jessica’s bush and belly, ejaculating in big lashings that streaked Jessica’s stomach and clung to the hair of her pussy—funny how in the virtual world, she wasn’t shaved.

Jessica reached down, fingers puddling in the seed. She massaged it into her skin, scooped it up with her fingers, licked it like she’d never tasted anything so delicious. Kilgrave wondered why she hadn’t taken it on her tits or face, where it belonged. It was like she’d learned nothing from their time together.

And then there was this latest ingratitude. He didn’t mind Jessica seeing other people, it made quite a good show as this occasion proved, but this definitely seemed in poor taste. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like an act of betrayal. All he’d done for her, all the detailed instructions he’d painstakingly crafted to let her know of his expectations, and she’d still found a way to cheat on him. It was just hurtful, that’s what it was. Flagrantly uncaring of his feelings, if not deliberately damaging.

Really, the kind of thing you should end a relationship over.

***

“That was nice,” Jessica said, lying on top of Peter afterward. Having his body as a mattress shielded her from the debris strewn all over the ground.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Peter asked.

“Yeah. I mean, maybe that was a spectacularly bad idea, but at least it was my spectacularly bad idea. Fucking up an old friendship by jumping someone’s dick feels like coming home for me.”

“Spectacularly bad idea it may be, but you’re not the only one who came up with it.”

“Oh, trust me, Parker, if we’d been waiting for you to make the first move—“

“I can be pretty suave when I want to be.”

“You wouldn’t even think of me as a sex object unless I started giving you the sign. I planted that idea in your noggin. I pulled some Inception shit before you even thought of flirting with me.”

“Was the Inception having boobs? Because I’m pretty sure those have always been there.”

“That’s what you think, Cillian Murphy. That’s what you think.”

Jessica raised her hand to caress his chest and abruptly it froze, lagging, her forearm suspended in mid-air while her arm above the elbow smoothly detached, continuing the gesture—simply without the corresponding half of her arm. Then her hand jumped forward, completing the movement, sitting in alignment with her elbow, just without the forearm between. As Jessica stared, horrorstruck, her forearm finally rejoined the other portions, pulling her arm together in a claw of rictus that she jerked back, as if worrying she might infect Peter.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked, even if she knew. Kilgrave. She didn’t know how or why, but if she couldn’t control it, it had to be Kilgrave.

Peter waved his hand in front of her face, noticing her pupils didn’t react. “You’re being disconnected from the network. Who the hell would do that, it could kill you?”

“Well, stop it!”

“It’s in meatspace, we’re virtual—even if I logged off right now, I’d be miles away from you.”

“Oh God…” Half of Jessica’s face had froze, a stroke victim mask, while the other half looked increasingly terrified. “I can feel it.”

“System’s trying to log you off automatically, put you back in your body before it reaches terminus.”

“So nothing to worry about?” she asked hopefully.

“That works about two percent of the time. Do you trust me?”

For some reason, Jessica didn’t need to think. “Yes!”

“Alright.” Peter reached up diagonally and back, a little-used movement, one that allowed his avatar to call up his deck. “I’ve got some mods on here that are less than legal. I’m going to try to bury your consciousness in the system, call up so much processing power that it’ll be frozen inside the OS instead of letting the terminus close it.”

“That’ll work?” Jessica asked.

“I’ve heard rumors. They say there’ve been people who broke the connection deliberately, stayed in VR forever.”

“Christ… fucking Christ…”

“This will probably feel weird,” Peter said, and Jessica felt something very weird.

***

Kilgrave waved his hand in front of Jessica’s face. He’d removed the VR equipment, but she was as slack and empty-headed as if she were still in. He picked up her hand, then let it drop. Nothing. But she was not dead. She breathed, her skin was warm, she even licked her lips.

It was rather arousing.

“Suppose I should take this as your two weeks’ notice,” he said gamely, undressing. “Can’t say I’ll miss all the moping about—really, barely even noticed a change—but at least I’ll still have the body around until I find a new model. But believe you me, I did always love you for your mind…”

He laid on top of Jessica’s body and embraced her, enjoying her even more knowing that this would be one of his last times with her warmth, her tightness, her hapless devotion to him. And, in some rudimentary fashion, in some primitive part of her mind, she finally reciprocated. His instructions, unencumbered at last by the objections of her higher self, now gained a foothold in baser instincts. She wrapped her legs around him, her arms, clinging to him in pure instinct. There was nothing left of Jessica but the desire to be close to him, just as he had always wanted.

And she pulled him closer and closer and closer.

The body that had been Jessica stopped a few hours after his spine snapped.

***

“Was that it?” Jessica asked. Her whole body felt like it had fallen asleep, pins and needles, then abruptly come back to itself. Only the surroundings were different. She was not in the ruined house, but back in the theater, empty now. The screen showed a continuous film reel countdown, looping from four down to one and back up again.

“How do you feel?” Peter asked.

“Like I slept so long I got those weird imprints on my arms. But also like I didn’t go to sleep or wake up or dream. What happened?”

“Your consciousness fractured. It was supposed to, but I had to write a whole new algorithm to reintegrate all your data from being scattered. It’s, uh… it’s been three months.”

Jessica blinked. “So I guess I missed Law & Order?”

“I bought some servers, a whole hell of a lot of memory, and pieced you back together as best I could. Your avatar, that is. It’s not perfect… I imagine your recollection of the last few years is going to be pretty scattershot. And your body is… well, it’s in the hospital, coma, and I’m not sure how to get you back in it. I, ya know, brought you here because it seemed like neutral ground. The house seemed a little loaded…”

“You’re babbling,” Jessica said.

“No I’m not, I’m not babbling at all, not even a little—“

“So I’m trapped in cyberspace,” Jessica interrupted. “And my memories are all screwed up.”

“Yeah. There was also a dead guy in your apartment, back in meatspace… maybe we should wait a little while to get into that. It’s a little complicated.”

“Zebediah Kilgrave?”

Peter nodded reluctantly. “You knew him?”

Jessica tried to remember. She could, bits and pieces, but it all felt like it had happened to someone else. A bad dream she had woken up from. “So I can still move through VR.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “The real world’s just a little iffy.”

“Uh-huh.” She offered her hand. “So where to first? The Nile River? The Himalayas? Australia?”

Peter’s brow furrowed. “I thought you’d been.”

Jessica shook her head. She didn’t know what surprised her more: that she was smiling or that she wasn’t that surprised about smiling. “Not that I can recall. Besides. It’s not the places you go, it’s the company.”