who: Jessica, Open to Anyone. setting: SHIELD Labs, then the streets. Nighttime. You know how she do. content: Chemicals. summary: Jessica FINALLy finds a solution! I was going to wait a while to make this happen, but I got impatient. So. Oh. And it's a long read, brace yourselves!
It'd been a really shitty couple of days. Jessica hadn't talked to any of her teammates since that horrible confrontation, at most, she acknowledged them with a nod through passing. She ostracized herself from them, not the other way around, and maybe that wasn't the way to go about it. Obviously she wanted to be apart of the group, otherwise she wouldn't have agreed to join when Nick suggested it, but she was finding it incredibly difficult to recover from such a horrible start. God, why hadn't she told them? For an intelligent person, she was actually pretty stupid, wasn't she? Heh. At least she could admit it.
Jessica lifted the test tube from its burner and swirled the yellowish solution around, provoking its scent to sway upwards like a charmed snake. Her pupils expanded to disks, her green hues serving as nothing more than thin lines by which the black voids were defined, and she felt like fire had just been ignited in her throat. "Fucking A," Jess coughed, hand clasped around her throat, body hunched over while she expelled toxic air from her lungs. It was amazing she wasn't coughing up ash-like matter, she was half expecting it. "Too goddamn potent," she grimaced, though pulled together again shortly after. Thank God she was immune to poisonous shit, right?
After discarding the hazard, Jessica slunk into her metal chair and dropped her face to her palms. She was frustrated, but having an anxiety attack wouldn't fix this. Stupid fucking formulas. Stupid fucking pheromones. Nick was right - what the hell did bitching do? Nick...damn, she had screwed things up with him, hadn't she? Yesterday's conversation was still very fresh in her mind, and maybe it was just her but - it very distinctly sounded like she broke up with him. Wishing him to leave her alone like that. Not that she'd admit it though. They weren't together, they weren't "exclusive", they were just - well, whatever they were, Jessica convinced herself that it was better that they were not.
A heavy sigh caused a brief pass of vertigo and Jessica waited a beat before standing up again. She'd work to morning and beyond that if she had to. At least she wouldn't have to go back to the Tower. With her arms draped over her head she paced, pausing at the counter where various books and notes were scattered. Fingers brushed across looseleaf papers decorated in formulas and equations that no longer made sense to her. "I swear to God," she murmured privately, holding one of the pages up. "If it turns out to be as simple as some fucking recipe for a perfu-" Perfume. She paused. Perfume? She grabbed her pen and began jotting down the components of a basic fragrant substance. Water, oils, alcohol...
"Alcohol." Jessica shuffled through her texts, muttering the word like some mad woman, flipping through and tossing books that were no good to her until she settled on one. "...alcohol...nonpolar...nonpolar, that's familiar, where did I hear it...nonpolar..." she drummed her fingers against her temples, grinding her teeth as she searched hastily in her mind for this file where this word had been kept. "Pheromones...class of small molecules--" her eyes rolled behind her lids, almost as if she was reading a script, "molecules known as steroids...steriods...they don't dissolve well in water, they dissolve in nonpolar fluids. Nonpolar fluids like alcohol."
This revelation left her breathless and, not catching her breath, provoked her to rush to the chemical cabinet, shoving through containers and bottles and various labeled substances until she got her hands on a plastic bottled with ALCOHOL printed across its body. She brought it to her lab table and poured some into a small measuring beaker, drawing forth her glass of distilled water and another chemical solution, less obnoxious than the one she dealt with earlier. God, she hoped this worked. Taking a deep breath, Jessica forced back her nerves and carefully combined each liquid together and stirred it. Please let this be it. She gently fanned the scent to her nose only-- "There is no scent." The first chemical must have eliminated the alcohol's odor.
Quickly, she wrote down this observation and more in her notes, doubtful and hopeful, nervous and excited all at that same time because this would either work or it wouldn't and honestly she didn't really want to stay here past morning to work her ass off and end up disappointed for the upteenth time. Jessica transferred the solution into a pear-shaped glass bottle and corked it. It was late, but it wasn't too late, it wasn't the city's bedtime yet, people would still be out. The only way to see if it'd work was to test it, so after cleaning the lab up, Jessica slung her book bag over her shoulder and left.
Once she was out the doors, the woman stopped a moment and held the bottle up. "Here goes nothing," she sighed, applying the liquid to her fingertips. Jessica brushed it across her neck and a little over her collar bone. And then she was off down the sidewalk. Okay...not many people were out on this particular sidewalk, but the low-key japanese restaurant nearby was still open and now that she thought about it, she hadn't eaten at all today. Stepping through the door, Jessica looked around to see but a few occupants, but that's all she needed really. Deliberately, she walked by a couple at the booth. They glanced up and Jessica smiled politely. The woman out of the pair - curly haired, real pretty - smiled back.
She smiled.
Jessica could only nod. A little foolish, but she was stunned. There wasn't a single glare made, not a single growl heard, not a single look of disgust. Just a smile. Of course, this could have easily been a fluke maybe and so Jessica walked up to the counter where a man greeted her. He was smiling too, staring, but it wasn't that kind of stare. It was normal, patient, nothing like the tranced looks she was so familiar with. Wow. It was...it was working. Not a single reaction out of the ordinary. Wow. She made an order of sushi and once her to-go bag was handed to her, ambled out into the street, caught in a complete daze.