Higher Faster Further More (captainmarvel) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-06-23 14:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, carol danvers (captain marvel), jessica jones |
Who: Carol and Jessica Jones
What: Drinking, showing off super powers
When: late May
Where: The Nightcrawler
Status: Complete
Rating: PG-13
The Nightcrawler was a little less rustic than she’d expected, considering who owned it. It still screamed ‘classic bar’ but the decor was up to date and the music wasn’t entirely country. Carol could dig that, as long as the drinks were good. She ordered herself some beer, tossed a dollar in the jukebox to play something a little more modern, and commandeered a table in the corner to people watch.
Carol needed to decompress after some of what she’d seen talked about on the network; and the dream she’d had the previous night.
Jessica didn’t exactly have a home bar. She tended to go from bar to bar, not for any particular reason except that getting to know other regulars at any particular bar wasn’t very high on her priority list. But the tune playing over the jukebox was one that Jessica actually enjoyed. It was definitely better than the swill that had been playing before, so Jessica caught the eye of the other woman and lifted her glass in acknowledgment.
Even with Tony’s ‘welcome’ packet, Carol had had a hard time believing in what everyone was talking about. But then she’d had a dream that felt too real, had felt too alien and…
She knocked back her beer and ordered another one. It was going to be that kind of night.
Jessica sat for a little longer at the bar, occasionally looking over at the woman who was also sitting, drinking alone. Normally, Jessica would have just left her there and let her enjoy her drinking in peace, without bothering to help her, but there was something about the woman that felt almost familiar despite the fact that Jessica was certain she had never seen her before.
So, when she saw the woman was nearly done her next beer, Jessica finished off the rest of her drink, ordered them both a fresh one, and walked them over to the woman’s table. “You look like you could use another one,” Jessica said, putting it in front of her.
Carol wasn’t even in the mood to hustle some pool, and hustling some sexist pig usually made her feel better. Drinks would have to be enough tonight, and she looked up when the woman spoke, raising her glass in acknowledgement. “Thank you, kind ma’am, that’s exactly what I need!”
And she might just be a little tipsy on top of it.
There might have almost been a hint of a smile on Jessica’s face at the exclamation. “I know the feeling,” Jessica said. “You mind if I sit?” she asked, indicating the seat opposite Carol.
“Don’t mind if you do,” Carol said, gesturing at the seat as if she was the one to offer it. “I’ve been having one of those days.”
As if Jessica might somehow understand. It took all of Carol’s will to not down her new beer in one gulp.
“I know the feeling,” Jessica said, though she wasn’t sure if she could say the same when her entire life seemed to be ‘one of those days.’ “Pretty sure that’s why they invented alcohol.”
So she ended up downing her beer in half a gulp so she could nurse the rest, and squinted her eyes at Jessica with a half smile. “I’m Carol, so who are you besides the bringer of beer?”
“I like ‘Bringer of Beer,’” Jessica said, smiling a little. Though, ‘Drinker of Whiskey’ was probably a better title for her. “I’m Jessica.”
“Jessica, Bringer of Beer,” Carol intoned, her eyes crinkling up a little as she smiled. “Nice to meet you, and good choice in beer.” She lifted the drink again and took a sip, before setting it back down. ”I really needed one.”
“Yeah, it looked like it,” Jessica said. “It’s a good thing alcohol’s a pretty good fix for just about anything.” At least, as far as Jessica was concerned it was. She wasn’t going to ask what was going on, though if Carol decided that she wanted to talk about it Jessica would listen.
Carol looked down into her drink for one long, morose moment, before she declared. “I dreamed I was an alien who bled blue blood and it was so real that I woke up feeling like being awake was dreaming, and I don’t actually know if that’s more unbelievable than the fact I once made out with Taylor Swift.”
Then she knocked back the rest of her drink and signaled for another.
“You made out with Taylor Swift?” Jessica asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’d definitely say that’s more unbelievable. Strange dreams are kind of the norm around here.”
“I say I’m an alien and you focus on Taylor Swift.” Carol shook her head but decided that made perfect, logical sense. So she shrugged and nodded. “Was a couple of years ago, but I did.”
“Hey, some of my best friends are aliens,” Jessica said. Well, Yondu at least, though maybe Peter too. Sure, he wasn’t blue, but he shared the same dreams as Yondu so it stood to reason that there was a chance. “The longer you stay in a place like this, the more weird things just start to seem normal.”
“Huh.” Carol leaned back against her chair heavy enough to nearly tip herself over. She caught herself with a rough sort of strength; Carol’s gracefulness in the air ended when she landed on the ground.
“Wonder if I’d bleed blue here,” Carol mused, turning her hand over and moving it back and forth. “Alien… Kree. WIth amnesia, too. Sounds like a cliche.”
Jessica snorted. “I don’t know what clichés you’ve been dealing with that involve aliens with amnesia,” she said, with a bit of a smile. “Have to admit, I kind of wish I had amnesia in my dreams.” She didn’t remember much of the experiments that were performed on her as a teenager, but she did remember some of them. Add to that everything with Kilgrave… She took a couple of seconds to guzzle back the rest of her beer, and then gestured to the bartender to bring her a fresh one.
“Just the amnesia part,” Carol replied. She swung her arm around the back of her chair, tipping precariously again as she swung a booted foot onto the table. “I remember… some kind of wreck, or plane crash. Then waking up on another planet, a transfusion with another Kree. And then six years of training with their special forces.”
“So the only memories your dreamself has is of training in an alien army?” Jessica asked, frowning to herself. Jessica had had a lifetime of thinking the worst of people, and her first thought was that maybe, just maybe, this alien army had wiped Carol’s memories to make her more malleable. She tried to force the thought from her head. It wasn’t her business anyway, and it wasn’t as if she even knew if these Kree had that kind of technology. “That must be hard,” she said after a moment.
“Yeah, my whole life before that?” Carol made a fwipping sound. “Just gone! And it is hard, but they teach me to push past it, control my emotions to control the powers they gave me.”
Carol had some misgivings about it herself, her face contorting into an almost disgusted expression. “It feels like I’m doing good, but looking from the outside, how can I know I’m doing good?”
“How can any of us really know that?” Jessica asked back. “Hindsight is always a bitch.” Just ask any of the people who would hire her to find out if their spouse was cheating, only to accuse her of breaking up their marriage when she got proof that they were, in fact, cheating.
“Yeah, it’s a real big bitch that likes to kick you between the legs,” Carol remarked. But there was nothing much she could do about that, or what her dreams did. She wondered if her uniform might show up some day, or even her powers.
The powers would be pretty cool. “My fist glows and shoots energy.” She thrust her hand out but nothing happened.
Jessica waited for a beat, and then took a sip from the fresh pint the bartender had given her, raising her eyebrows at Carol over the rim of it. “Was that it?” she asked, wryly.
“It’s much more impressive in the dreams,” Carol said, squinting at her fist like it had somehow betrayed it. Punching her way through things was often how she solved her problems, literally and figuratively. Too bad one couldn’t punch a dream.
“Probably for the best. I doubt the barkeep would appreciate you blowing a hole in his roof,” Jessica said, glancing over at the man behind the bar. She didn’t know if Carol’s energy blast would be that powerful, but she had seen enough energy blasts in TV and movies to know that it might be.
“Sometimes these dream powers can take a bit of getting used to.” When hers had first shown up, she’d managed to jump higher than the clouds, and then had later accidentally thrown Klaus from his bedroom window.
Carol looked up at the roof, then around the bar, wondering just how much property damage she could do with her dream powers. Part of her wanted to see, but she couldn’t exactly practice in public - and didn’t exactly have powers to practice with.
But god did she want to try.
“You sound like that comes from personal experience.”
“Kind of,” Jessica said. “I don’t have laser eyes or anything like that, but the dreams gave me something.” She looked around the room, and then downed her pint. Despite how quickly she was drinking, she still wasn’t drunk. One of the many downsides to her powers was an excessive amount of tolerance for alcohol; Jessica used to have more spare money before they had kicked in. But, she was, at least, starting to feel a little more relaxed, nearly tips.
She put the glass down heavily on the table, and stood up. “You want to see?”
“Laser eyes,” Carol snorted like that was the most ridiculous thing imaginable. In a dream world of aliens with superpowers, it was the laser eyes that were a bridge too far for her. Though if she sat down and thought about it, there were certainly more ridiculous things to worry about.
“You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine when it shows up.”
Laser eyes were pretty ridiculous, even with everything that happened in the OC. Jessica wouldn’t be surprised if there were someone around here who could boast of them, but it was a very silly power.
She led Carol outside and into the parking lot, and picked a car. She did a quick look around to make sure that there was no one around, not for any need to keep her powers secret but because she assumed whoever owned this car was not going to appreciate some woman picking it up, and then she hooked her hands underneath the back of the car, and with a bit of a grunt of effort, she lifted the backside of the car off the ground.
Carol followed, hands stuck in her pockets as she walked in silence, curious as to what Jessica was going to do. Was it a light show? Did she possess some car possession power like something out of Stephen King? It was like a roll of the dice never knew what you’d get.
And then Jessica just lifted the car with hardly any effort and Carol fought the urge to fan herself. “Holy shit.”
Jessica allowed herself a moment of pride. She still wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about her new powers; although it had been fragmented and hard to understand exactly what had been happening, dreaming of being experimented on wasn’t high on Jessica’s list of ‘favourite moments sleeping, and she was still getting used to having them and broke far too many dishes and other fragile things than she’d like to admit.
But, well, it was not to feel some modicum of pride when her powers elicited a response like that. “I can jump really high too,” Jessica said, though saying it outloud sounded kind of lame. It wasn’t something she especially wanted to demonstrate though. If she could avoid jumping anymore than she had to, she’d be happy.
“Hey, Superman was originally just able to jump really high too,” Carol pointed out, helpful as she could. And it sounded really awesome to her; anything to be in the air would have, if she was honest. Carol was born for the sky and the stars.
“And you’ve got a better jawline.”
“Just so long as I don’t start flying,” Jessica muttered. The jumping made her nervous enough, she didn’t need to start flying along with it.
Jessica raised her eyebrows skeptically. “A better jawline than Henry Cavill?” she asked. “Now I know you’ve had too much to drink.”
That made one of them with the not wanting to fly. More than anything Carol would want to fly. She hoped her glowing fists came with flight powers. As much as she relished the cockpit she couldn’t imagine what it would be like not needing one.
Carol tilted her head, eyes crinkling as she smiled. “Maybe it’s just really close.”
“I’ll take that,” Jessica said, running a hand along her jaw and smiling a little. “So long as I can pass on the frost breath and laser eyes. That would be too much.”
“And lose out on always having a cold beer?” Carol shook her head, still beaming a smile in Jessica’s direction. “Which we should totally do again. This drinks thing.”
“But at the cost of never being able to blow on your fingers to warm them up again,” Jessica said somberly. She assumed that there might be a way to blow where you didn’t freeze your breath, but she could barely control ‘jumping really high’ and she didn’t see that working out very well for herself.
“Right now?” she asked, tilting her head back toward the bar. She could go for another drink or twelve herself, though Carol had already been half-cut when Jessica had first shown up. Strangely though, Jessica actually found herself liking the other woman.
“I meant like… next week,” Carol replied, actually wobbling on her feet. “But I could go for another beer now that you mention it.”
It was probably a bad idea, but sometimes Carol really liked the idea of a bad idea.
Jessica noticed the wobble, and frowned a little to herself. As much as she wanted another, it looked like Carol might have had just about enough. At the very least, Jessica didn’t want her throwing up on her shoes later. “Next week sounds good too,” Jessica said. “Maybe we,” or at least Carol, “should call it a night for now.”
Carol squinted her eyes, trying to determine if she was stable enough for more and also not wanting to give up that easily, but when she tried to remember how many drinks she’d had she gave up. “...yeah I’m gonna need a cab.”
“I thought you might,” Jessica said, and pulled her phone out of her pocket to do just that. She had the cab company’s number down by heart; even her nights out at bars aside, she didn’t have a license and it was her main mode of transportation. She gave the company their location, and then went to stand next to Carol to wait for the cab driver to come.
“Thanks,” Carol appreciated that, “I try to avoid Uber. Half the time their creeps and the other half of the time they’re underpaid.”
Jessica had dealt with her own fair share of creeps in cabs too, especially when she was in New York, though it wasn’t something she had to worry about now that she could break a man’s arm with no effort at all. But she kept that to herself. Carol was no doubt aware of how cab drivers could be, and there was no reason to make he worried before the cab showed up.
Instead, she pulled out one of the beat up business cards she had in the pocket of her leather jacket, and handed it to Carol before the taxi showed up. “So you can call me for that drink next week,” she said.
Cabbies at least had unions which was better than Uber drivers could claim but they did have their share of creeps. Carol would have to break any faces if she had to.
She took the card and looked at it, then grinned at Jessica. “All right, it’s a date.”