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Tweak says, "FEED ME!"

Jessica Drew☠Spider-Woman (nospiderbite) wrote in wariscoming,
@ 2011-02-13 23:50:00

Entry tags:

danny ketch, jessica drew/spider-woman

WHO: Jessica Drew, the demon in Jessica Drew, and Danny Ketch.
WHAT: Depossession and aftermath.
WHEN: Night, 2/13.
WHERE: Starts in an alley.
WARNINGS: There may be some emotional breakdown in here.

To say that Jessica Drew wasn't herself lately would have been pretty much dead on. On the outside looking in it might have seemed like she was just having a bit of an off time for the past couple weeks. She hadn't been returning to the complex, hadn't been contacting people when she didn't need to, nothing like that. But there was a reason for all of this.

See, Jessica wasn't herself lately. Literally. Sure, she was still in there, but she was locked away, forced to watch herself do things she didn't want to do as she lost control to a demon. She'd been locked away in her own mind for two weeks and, considering she had a problem with being locked away in a room for a day, it almost felt like she was going to end up dying from it. That was one of the many issues Jessica had. Fear of being imprisoned. Again.

She was snagged just after the big rescue from the big kidnapping, the one where they gathered up all sorts of heavy hitters. Just when Jessica thought she was going to get away came the demon that took her over, snagging the heavy hitter she was promised. The demon had access to all of Jessica's memories, so she knew she wouldn't be able to get into the complex, and she knew that Jessica knew some people that would have identified her on the spot, so she went with her first instinct and just... stayed away from everyone. She kept her eye out as she traveled, managing to dodge other residents when she saw them on the street.

And that was what she was doing that night. She thought she saw someone up ahead, that Felicia woman, and quickly side stepped into the closest alley, waiting for the blonde to go by. Really, she should have probably thought to check behind her.

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heavensfool
2011-02-14 05:42 am UTC (link)

Danny hadn't been quite right the past few weeks, either. The rescue had been one of the few times that he and the Spirit within were pretty much in harmony, and there were a few unfortunate hosts who could attest to that while they rubbed ointment on burns they wouldn't remember getting. The thing about divine wrath, even in the Bible, was that it rarely came without collateral damage, and with a human at the helm that certainly didn't make it any better. It wasn't the rescue that threw him off, though. It would have once, if he were still the kid he used to be, but he'd done many more horrible things than burning some shmuck's face since then. The sad thing was it didn't even make his top ten, these days.

It was what came after that was throwing him off. He was forcing it with a Peter and a Johnny he didn't know, but the truth was, he was still learning to be alone again. Truth was, these days, Danny and all his thoughts didn't do so well when they only had each other for company. It hadn't been so bad before because, for better or worse, Jess had been fairly constant company. Sure, maybe it was only on the sort of suicide watch she had him on, but it was still more company than he was used to having. More sane company, anyway. Danny wasn't sure if Zadkiel or his brother really counted.

Without Jess around, he'd been left alone with his thoughts. Thoughts that still focused so severely on the things he'd lost and the things he'd done. More than once, he'd had to physically stop himself halfway to the complex kitchen with every intent of chasing that old boozy dragon. He hadn't done it, so far, but the urge was there, and for all the progress he'd made, poor Danny Ketch still wasn't quite sure how to cope.

Maybe that was why he was looking for Jess. Because he needed to ask her how the hell he was supposed to avoid booze when practically every other thought made him want to either forget or just stop thinking entirely. Or maybe there was some other reason for it, some reason that everyone else could see and that Danny could only barely grasp, something that brought up memories of an earlier, simpler time, back when he was just the nineteen year old kid with increasingly deep feelings for a certain spider...

Alleys were easily some of the best places to look for superheroes, especially at night. Even with nightfall as a cover, most criminals preferred to do their crimes off on side streets or alleys, off in society's peripheral vision where there was less chance of someone stepping in to intervene. When you stumbled on a crime right in front of your eyes, it was sort of hard to ignore. But those guys in that alley could just be arguing, and that might not be a knife in the big guy's hand, and it's not like you could do any difference anyway, right? It was strategy, and it worked. So where was the logical place to find a crime fighter? An alley.

And find her he did, though not in quite the way he expected. He heard someone enter the alley he was in right about the same time as he fell under the sway of a nearly crippling vision of sins. Not just tiny sins or a short list of big ones, either. This was a long list of sins that would have priests slitting their wrists in the confessionals. Sins from all different eras, far and away beyond what a mortal could have. A monster, then. Possibly a demon, if the feeling of wrong he was getting from the Spirit within was any indication.

He took a handle of himself as best he could through the vision and looked up...and then everything went dead quiet in his head. The vision played like a video on mute, intensely painful but equally as irrelevant to the new data his mind was processing. That was Jess. There was a demon in Jess, and suddenly little pieces of a puzzle slammed into place with the kind of horrible precision you usually only saw in the Hellraiser movies right before the box summons the demons that were going to rape your soul with barbed chains.

There was a demon in Jess and he hadn't seen anything.

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heavensfool
2011-02-14 05:42 am UTC (link)

Danny wasn't aware he'd dismounted his bike. In fact, right now he wasn't aware of much beyond the pure, white hot RAGE that thrummed through every vein and pricked every nerve ending he had. His brain was on fire and for once he didn't try to shake it off, didn't try to claw for purchase as the Spirit came forward. For once Danny Ketch and the Spirit of Vengeance within were in utter and complete harmony, and the calm that settled over his face a moment before it lit with hellfire was the kind of calm that could make the devil himself quake.

Danny advanced two steps, thrust out his hand, and sent out a lance of hellfire. As it neared Jess it broke off and dropped to the ground, tracing intricate marks as the otherworldly flame ate up the ground it touched. It took barely more than a few seconds for the hellflame to die away, leaving the recognizable pattern of a Devil's Trap scorched into the ground around Jess's feet. Danny could have launched into the Latin right there, but he didn't. He had just enough presence of mind left to make a brief post, and then he dropped his phone to the ground as if the tiny piece of plastic meant no more to him than a wisp of illusory smoke.

He advanced, slowly around the trap, letting the demon hear every thud of his heavy boots. When he came to the front, his huge frame blocking off sight of what was about to happen, he spoke in that same unearthly voice that could send chills down the backs of the most hardened murderers. "Someday. Maybe not today. But someday, I will kick in the door to Hell and make you sorry you ever crawled topside." There was no overwrought threat there. Danny didn't have time for testosterone-fueled antics from a ridiculous action movie. This was just a statement, a calm, cold statement that as far as Danny was concerned was utter fact.

And then, without so much as transforming back came the Latin, as eyeless sockets burned with judgment for the demon within Jessica Drew.

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nospiderbite
2011-02-14 06:23 am UTC (link)

One of the things Jessica knew about Danny was that he moved a lot faster than most people would expect from someone his size, and since Jessica knew that so did the demon.

Hell, knowing that may have let the demon get away (and take Jess with her, of course) if she had actually seen Danny coming. But she had been too busy focusing on making sure that Felicia woman didn't see her to take note of her surroundings. A rookie mistake that she was much too old to have made, but it was made none the less.

Before she knew it flames were circling her feet, then going out just as she tried to fly off and escape. The problem with that was once the flame went out she was stuck in the middle of one of those pesky Devil's Traps. She rolled her eyes at the threat, sure that this Danny guy wouldn't be showing up in the Hell of this world in that particular way, and was about to reply to his threat when the Latin started.

There were a few useless pleads for him to stop before the exorcism reached a key point. Jessica's head flew back and she let out a scream, a long stream of black smoke flowing out of her mouth as the demon was sent back to where she came from. Once she was gone Jessica collapsed, whimpering softly and shaking visibly as she squeezed her eyes shut and scraped her nails into the pavement. It hurt, but she was doing it herself.

Plus, she was trying to keep from bursting into tears. She hated being locked away as it was. She had been imprisoned for ages back when the Skrulls were trying to take over. But being locked away in her own mind, even for just a couple of weeks, that was worse. It was a lot worse.

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heavensfool
2011-02-14 07:36 am UTC (link)

Danny watched the smoke disappear with the usual hellish puff. For a moment, just a fleeting moment, he felt the urge to carry out his threat right then and there. That was the problem with being in harmony with a spirit of divine wrath. That part of him didn't care about pesky little things like people or emotional duress. It existed for one purpose and all it wanted to do was fulfill that purpose, and smacking around unrepentant sinners in Hell was probably the textbook definition of its purpose.

It was one of the reasons Spirits had human hosts, to rein them in during situations just like this. He turned his eyeless sockets down on Jess again and, immediately, felt the harmony with the Spirit come crashing down. The Spirit wanted to enact judgment, but the human…the human felt a confusing mix of emotions, none of them good. There was the anger, though with the demon gone it was now turned inward at how blind he’d been to it all. The guilt would likely plague him silently for a good long while, even though, realistically, he couldn’t have really seen it. His guilt complex was big enough to have its own zip code in Irrationalville. There were…others. Something inside of him felt like it was breaking, something he couldn’t or wouldn’t put a name to. Something he didn’t want to look too deeply into right now because damnit, it wasn’t the time. It took a force of will, but Danny shoved the Spirit back and reverted to human form.

Now that he was in human form he felt a smidgeon safer approaching Jess. He honestly couldn’t think right now, couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to be doing, and instead was going based purely on instinct. He stopped a short distance away and dropped to his knees, not daring to go farther. The last thing he wanted to do right now was spook her. He held up his hands as if to reach out, but thought better of it and instead just kept them slightly raised as if to try and add a little extra bit to the nonthreatening image he was trying to project. What he wanted to do was reach out and grab her hands to stop her from hurting herself on the pavement, but he had a feeling grabbing her hands right now was probably not the greatest idea ever conceived of by mankind. Instead he settled for a soft noise followed by, “Jess?” It helped that he had some idea of what a possession was like. Those first few months with the Ghost Rider, back in the days when an ancestor’s ghost had been attached to the spirit, had been a lot like that. You felt powerless in your own body, arguably one of the worst feelings you could ever have, and it was really one of the toughest things to get over, mentally. And with Jess, that would be even worse. He didn’t know much about the Skrulls, even after living in the same time he’d been busy with Zadkiel’s work and missed out on the actual fighting, but he remembered enough from what she’d told him the first time to know that being prisoner was probably the worst thing that could happen to her. More than ever, he wished he could be that naïve kid he was when they’d first met. That kid would know what to do with this. That could would know how to fix it. All he could do now was just quietly reach out and hope she heard him. “Jess? She’s gone. She’s gone now.” He pointedly didn’t say it was okay now, because no. No, it wasn’t. And it probably wouldn’t be for awhile yet.

But that was okay. Jess was there for him when he needed it, and Danny would be there for her.

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nospiderbite
2011-02-14 10:22 pm UTC (link)

Jessica heard Danny saying her name, she heard him telling her the demon was gone, but she didn't respond. Not at first, at least. She spent a long minute focused on things she was doing. She was the one breathing. She was the one moving her fingers. She was the one that couldn't hold it back any longer when she let out a sob as tears built up behind her eyelids before finally escaping and rolling down her cheeks.

Crying was one of the things Jessica hated most in the world, and she hated crying in front of others even more than just crying in general. But at least it was her. It wasn't a demon making her do things any more, she was (relatively) in control of herself again.

Slowly, and still shaky, Jessica sat up and pressed her back against the side of one of the buildings they were between. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around them before letting her head drop, forehead resting on her knees as she continued to sob.

She knew Danny was watching her, and for once she didn't care if someone saw her break down. It was Danny, after all, and Jessica knew that he wouldn't judge her or call her weak. Plus, Danny was the one that had saved her from that hell she had been trapped in. But she also knew that she should say something to him to let him know that she was (relatively) all there and that she'd heard him. So she said the first thing she thought of. "I'm s-sorry," she said, but it might not have been that easy to understand. The words came out a bit muffled and between sobs.

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