Chapter 93: Jessica Jones — and the Glint-Glint Fruit
The Lucky Dragon was doing well enough these days that Ethan no longer needed to be in the kitchen. The staff had doubled, the regulars had become regulars in the way that matters — people who brought their families, who recommended it to their coworkers, who knew May by name. Ethan could sit in the corner booth and wait, which was a luxury he'd apparently forgotten how to appreciate.
He was appreciating it now.
The door opened and Wanda walked in.
She was in office clothes — fitted blazer, slim trousers, wire-frame glasses she'd apparently acquired somewhere in the past month — and she looked like someone who had been running a multinational enterprise and had found the work agreeable. Ethan had a brief, involuntary thought about the concept of power dressing before he registered the small figure trailing behind her.
A girl. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Holding the hem of Wanda's jacket in one fist with the specific grip of someone who had learned that staying close to safe people was a survival skill.
Ethan stood.
"Who's this?"
Wanda bent down and said something quiet to the girl — something that produced a small, cautious relaxation — then straightened up.
"Jessica Jones," she said. "Her family died in a car accident. She was taken in by a man named Kilgrave afterward — the one who goes purple." She said goes purple with the flat specificity of someone describing a mildly inconvenient weather phenomenon. "He was using her. Sent her to Fisk Tower to cause problems for us. I dealt with him and then looked at her situation and decided she needed somewhere better to be."
She met Ethan's eyes with an expression that was not quite a challenge and not quite an apology.
"I made you her legal guardian. My age is an issue for the paperwork."
Ethan looked at Jessica. Jessica looked at him with the eyes of a child who had learned to evaluate adults very quickly and was currently running that evaluation.
He crouched down to her level.
"Hi, Jessica. I'm Ethan." He extended his hand. "You're safe here."
She considered him for a moment. Then she took the hand — a small, deliberate shake, more formal than most adults managed.
Smart kid, he thought.
He straightened up and turned back to Wanda. "Kilgrave. You finished him?"
Wanda thought about it with the thoughtful frown of someone reviewing a memory for accuracy. "I broke his arm. I didn't check whether he survived."
"Probably survived."
"Probably," she agreed, unconcerned.
Ethan filed deal with Kilgrave properly under the growing list of things Hell's Kitchen required of him, behind HYDRA and ahead of approximately forty other items. The man's ability worked through skin-contact pheromones, which made him functionally harmless against anyone with sufficient willpower or any kind of resistance to chemical influence — but genuinely dangerous to anyone who didn't have those defenses.
Jessica had spent time in his custody.
That conversation, Ethan thought, can wait until she trusts this place. But it can't wait forever.
"She'll go to the community school," he said. "With Peter and Richard."
Jessica's expression shifted — not quite protest, but the particular look of someone who has opinions about decisions being made about them.
Ethan looked at her. "You'll hate it for the first week. Then you won't."
She seemed to accept this assessment as at least honest.
Tony and the Fisk family arrived together, which had apparently happened because Tony's driver and the Fisks' car had ended up at the same intersection.
Tony came through the door first, took in the scene — Wanda and Jessica at the corner booth, Ethan looking domestic and vaguely overwhelmed — and said, with the precision of a man who had been saving this line:
"One month. You were gone one month and you already have a kid."
The laugh came from several directions at once. Vanessa's was warmest. Fisk's was the rumble of a large, contented man.
Wanda's cheeks went red. She stood up, crossed to Vanessa with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation, and launched into the explanation of Jessica's situation with the detail and warmth of someone who genuinely wanted this child to be received well.
Richard, who was nine and had been surrounded by adults for his entire interesting life, spotted Jessica across the room and walked directly to her without any of the social caution most adults would have applied. He sat down next to her and said: "Do you want to see something cool?"
Jessica blinked. "What?"
He showed her something on his phone. She leaned over to look.
That was, apparently, that.
Tony had found a seat and was already three sentences into a complaint about the commute when Ethan steered Doc Ock across the room toward him.
"Tony. This is Otto Octavius. He's a physicist from a parallel universe and he's been living with me for the past month." He paused. "He's better at fusion power than anyone in this universe."
Tony looked at Otto.
Otto looked at Tony.
The specific expression that crossed Tony's face was the one that appeared when his brain registered someone who might actually be able to keep up. It was rarer than he would have admitted.
"Tony Stark," he said, extending a hand.
"Otto Octavius." Otto shook it with the formality of a man who took introductions seriously. "I've heard a great deal about your arc reactor work. The efficiency problem with the palladium core is—"
"Has been solved, actually. New element, different binding structure."
"How did you arrive at—"
They moved to the far end of the table and were essentially unreachable for the next forty minutes.
Ethan watched them go and felt the particular satisfaction of having correctly predicted a chemical reaction.
Fisk settled into the seat beside him with the ease of a man who had discovered, late in life, that he enjoyed sitting at restaurant tables.
"You look like the trip agreed with you," Fisk said.
"Parts of it." Ethan smiled. "You look like retirement agrees with you."
Fisk laughed — the full laugh, the one that made surrounding objects feel the air pressure change. "Principal of a school, Ethan. Me. I find that I'm rather good at it."
"You're terrifying and no one misbehaves."
"Which is all anyone ever wanted from a principal." He looked around the restaurant with visible satisfaction. "The neighborhood is doing well. The school has forty-three students. The hospital renovation starts next month." A slight smile. "Your HYDRA friends are paying for that, incidentally."
"I know."
"Good arrangement."
"Short-term," Ethan said.
Fisk nodded slowly, reading the context in Ethan's tone. "Something's coming."
"Something's coming," Ethan confirmed. He reached into his jacket and produced a fruit that shouldn't have fit in his jacket pocket but apparently had — round, with a distinctive spiral pattern carved by whatever process the Grand Line applied to its products.
He put it on the table between them.
Fisk looked at it. "What is that?"
"Devil Fruit." Ethan kept his voice matter-of-fact. "This one's the Glint-Glint Fruit. Eat it and your body transforms — light form, essentially. Intangible when you want to be, moving at light speed when you need to, functionally immune to physical damage."
Fisk studied the fruit with the expression of a man who had survived several decades of dangerous situations through strength, intelligence, and the willingness to hit things very hard, and was now being offered a different relationship with the concept of being hit.
"There are no side effects?"
"You can't swim," Ethan said. "Permanently."
Fisk considered this. He had not, to Ethan's knowledge, ever expressed particular attachment to swimming.
"And this is the kind of gift you give someone when something is coming," Fisk said.
"It's the kind of gift I give someone I don't want to lose," Ethan said. "The something coming is a problem I'll handle. But I'd rather you were harder to hurt before I handle it."
Vanessa had drifted over during the last exchange, the way Vanessa sometimes moved — quietly, and then she was there, and her presence clarified things. She looked at the fruit. Looked at Ethan. Looked at her husband.
"Eat the fruit, Wilson," she said.
Fisk picked it up.
☆☆☆
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