So Then There's That

November 27, 2017:

Luke drops by to get Danny up to speed. About darn near everything.

Rand Mansion

Characters

NPCs: None.

Mentions: Jessica Jones, Emery, Daredevil, Dani Moonstar

Plot:

Mood Music: None.


Fade In…

Luke rarely comes to this side of town lacking reason, but he must have one today as his motorcycle makes the corner and he miraculously finds a slice of street parking. The engine grumbles off and he's unstrapping his helmet as he eyes the midtown mansion, approaching the steps only after a moment's hesitation. A finger stabs at the doorbell, and there he waits, half wondering if he should have called ahead.

*

The answer isn't immediate, but it's a big, big house. It takes Danny a little bit to get to the door. His phone is attached to the intercom, but he can't remember where he put that. So Luke would be forgiven for nearly giving up before the door flies open. Danny's wearing a navy suit with a white button-up. His hair's a little unruly. "Hey, Luke. What's up, man?" He sort of looks like the labradoodle is wondering if he's going for a walk. The subtext to his greeting is, 'is there a fight?!'

*

Sigh. Luke should have called ahead first.

Danny swings open the door just as he is turning to leave, the big man looking over his shoulder with a hint of incredulity in his eyes, "You answer your own door?" The huh of wonders never ceasing chucks off his lips as he starts pushing forward into the house without so much as a 'by your leave'. "I need a drink." Is the only explanation for his appearance on Rand's doorstep. Like he drove across town for just that instead of hitting up his own bar.

*

Danny is a pretty laid back guy, so he doesn't stop Luke's entrance. It's about as fancy as you'd expect inside, but a little bit sparse. "Yeah, uh, Emery's at his other job right now." He closes the door and moves further in. He motions towards the rear of the first floor, towards the kitchen.

It's huge and fancy and a mixture of classic and modern. It's also the only part of the house that looks lived-in. The other rooms they pass look a bit show-homey and actually smell a bit like a furniture store. That's a suggestion that they were recently re-decorated. "What'll you have? There's some fancy beers. The uh, the bar has just about every kind of hard liquor. And I think there's a wine cellar." He thinks.

*

Luke clunks his helmet up on a counter, finding the nearest place to lean as if that was the last ounce of his energy and had there not been something there to support his weight he would have crumpled right to the ground in a big old heap of bulletproof. "Something strong." He suggests, the novelty of Rand fixing him a drink not lost entirely judging by the twitch of his lips. "Yeah, apparently your butler is some sort of soul-detector, huh?"

*

"Soul detector?" Danny blinks, shrugs. "Maybe? I mean, I know he's some kind of meta." But who isn't? He pokes around his own cupboards until he finds a couple of bottles. He tugs them out and sets them within reach of Luke. They're 20 year old single malts, a few luxury bottles of gin, some top shelf tequila and a bottle of fancy-ass rum. This is the top of the top shelf kind of stuff. He fishes out glasses, that just happen to be crystal tumblers. He sets them on the counter by the bottles and looks a little helpless. He…really doesn't know booze.

*

Luke picks the first thing that's dark and moody, which seems to suit his mood more than his palate. Single malt is poured into the pair of glasses, making the decision for Rand without asking and drags his toward him with a crook of his finger in the mouth of it. There is no toast or salute on the way to his mouth, where he literally gulps it until the burn becomes too much. "He's wrapped up in some Demon Bear drama, which I never thought I'd say is the least of my problems right now."

*

"Uh, yeah, I heard that's a thing." Danny picks up the glass and sniffs it. He sips cautiously, coughs a little, but sips again. "What's wrong, Luke?"

*

Luke slouches down a bit on the cabinet that's propping him up, needing another belt of the scotch before he can even fathom to answer that question. "When we saved Jessica the other day…" He starts, mopping his free hand down his face. Cage's eyes are bloodshot, the only real outward appearance that something is off about the man besides just seeming tired. "The pills we found, that thumb drive." Things they vaguely talked about when Rand come out of his Iron Fist coma, "They're all leading back to my dead wife in some way or another. Reva."

*

"Your wife?" Danny sits on one of the stools at the bar height island. He folds his hand around the crystal glass, but doesn't sip. He just looks at Luke, brow furrowed in concern. "That's…are you and Jessica connected somehow?" Because it's not making a lot of sense to him. Then again, he's not exactly a crack investigator.

*

Luke fishes into his pocket, pulling out a little thumb drive that he underhandedly lobs at Danny. It's not the one they retrieved but likely it's a copy judging by his next words. "I met her at Seagate, where they turned me into what I am. She was my shrink, helped me get into the program, saying maybe I could get out of my sentence early. All this time I thought it was so we could be together. Start over on the outside. But her name is all over those files, Danny. She had to have known what was going on, the people that died, the failed trials." His teeth grit together so hard they squeak, and the next words are seethed through them. "Jess. Kilgrave. We're all connected by what's on that drive."

*

Danny snatches the thumb drive out of the air and turns it over in his hand. It actually takes him a second to figure out what it is. He's still getting caught up tech-wise. Things move fast these days. "Your…your wife experimented on you?" He looks at the drive and frowns. "And you and Jess are the product of the same experimentation?" Now he sips the drink. And coughs again. And then fills up Luke's cup. "Wow."

*

"Yeah. Wow." Luke forces himself to calm down, lest that grip on his glass accidentally makes the thing shatter. He can't exactly afford to replace crystal. "Not directly, I mean Reva didn't put me in the tank and then try to kill me by cranking up the juice, but. I'm starting to think she might as well have." And that seems to be the rub, that the torch he's been carrying for that woman for years now just got doused by a big wet blanket. "They think we carry some common genetic marker, which is why we survived and others …didn't."

*

Danny sets the drive down on the counter. He wants to support Luke more right now than he needs to see the contents of that drive. Most of it will probably go over his head, anyway. "It's a betrayal and you'll never be able to confront her about it." It's as much a confirmation as it is a question.

*

"Because Jessica killed her." Luke doesn't drop that bomb too, he sort of slides it in there before taking another drink. "Not her fault though. Not really. That was all Kilgrave mind control shit right there, which means he could have been after the same answers we are now."

*

"Whoah," says Danny. Again, not the world's most articulate young man. But what else can you say to a revelation that big and that twisted. "And…wait. How did you and Jessica meet?" Because this is all seeming like way too much of a coincidence.

*

"Might wanna take another drink." Luke offers, taking his own gulp before he continues, trying to sort everything in his brain before he just spits it out. "So I, uh, was trying to find out about Reva's death, and Jessica's name pops up because of that really ugly and public trial regarding Kilgrave. So I showed up at her place once, asking her questions. About a month later, on the other side of the world, she finally gave them to me. That it wasn't a bus crash, some freak accident, but by her hand. And even later tells me she knew about me all along. She /surveilled/ me."

*

"Oh," says Danny. More frowning. He does indeed sip from the glass. "That's…a mess, man." What else can he say, really? "So, uh…what…what are you going to do? Are you going to keep working with her? Do you…want to find out the truth about your wife?" A beat, then, "Are you guys in danger again? Of getting grabbed like they tried to do with Jessica?"

*

Luke just gives a shake of his bald head, "The real kicker is, even after knowing half the shit I know about Jessica - I kissed her. I don't know man." He says quietly of what he's going to do, and that's the truth of it. He just doesn't know. "First time I even said it all together out loud, you know? All the fucked up pieces. But the reason why is, yeah, we're in danger. I mean, Daredevil says Jess being abducted was sort of an anomaly, someone acting above their pay grade because she's high profile, highly protected. And that robot chick that was with us…whatever she is, goes by Six, she's the one that de-encrypted the drive. But I'm on it too. Dozens of others. If they're looking for the genetic marker, no one on that drive is safe."

*

Danny takes a larger sip of the whiskey, but takes too much. He ends up wheezing and coughing as it burns down the wrong tube. His eyes start to water. Ahem. Smooth, smooth. "How…" he croaks, "…how can I help?"

*

Luke reaches out to whack Danny on the back, even though that's not proven to help anyone who is coughing in the history of ever unless they have food lodged in their throat, not scotch. "I think we're meeting back up tomorrow, go over some things. Make a plan. Maybe throttle that doctor a little bit. Come with. I can't take anymore of my past spilling out all over the floor in front of two other people I've never seen the faces of. Oh, and my name used to be Carl Lucas. I think that's everything."

*

Danny's entire chest rattles when Luke pats him. It may not help the burning, but it sure does distract him fromt it. He ends up reaching for a bottle of water he started earlier and taking a few big swallows. "Sure, man," says the ninja. "Can I borrow that?" He points at the drive. "I probably won't understand much of it, but I'd like to at least try to follow along."

*

"That's your copy, just…you know. Put in a safe or something when you're not looking at it. I'm assuming you have one of those in this giant ass yuppie box of yours. You answer your own /door/, man. Why don't you have like a fleet of forest animals flitting around and doing your bidding like some Disney prince?" Luke seems just the smallest smudge more at ease now that Danny has agreed to come along.

*

"Luke, I come home with bullet wounds and bloody knuckles. There's already people in Rand who are working on ways to push me out. Me playing vigilante would give them a good excuse. And money only buys as much loyalty as the next highest bidder." Those don't really sound like Danny's words. Perhaps it's a nugget of remembered advice from Wendell Rand. "I trust Emery, but he has other things to deal with. He can't always be here to babysit me." And yes, he's aware that's what people call him.

*

"You need a super suit. Maybe something with a cape. What is the fashion sense of the Immortal Iron Fist?" Luke says, pushing off the counter and finally leaving his glass behind with enough of that scotch coursing through him. Too bad he never really even tasted or appreciated what went down his gullet. "Not that that helps the coming home bit, but." There is a shrug of two mountains as his shoulders rise and fall, Cage yanking open the fridge and ducking his head inside and rummaging for food.

*

"I need to learn how to move in body armor before I wear something like that out. If it slows me down or cuts down on the strengths of my strikes, then it's not going to do much good." But it sounds like Danny is in fact, looking into it. Sneakily. So no one realizes he's kitting himself out to do hero work. "I can be a resource for everyone, but not if I lose control of the company." Or get arrested.

*

"Heavy is the head that wears the crown." Luke's voice echoes in the depths of the fridge before he emerges with a plate of cold cuts. "You gonna eat this?" Presumably he was at some point in time, or Emery was going to use it for sandwiches or something. It's not like they're just leftovers, but hey. Luke isn't splitting hairs. "Maybe talk to the Devil, he does all that kung fu shit too and he's worn body suits before."

*

"Help yourself," says Danny. "Just don't touch the lasagna. I think that's for later." He opens the bread box and tugs out a fresh loaf of sourdough. In case Luke wants to make a sandwich instead of just shoving cold cuts into his mouth. "What's the Devil's connection to all of this? I mean, besides the fact that he seems to be Jessica's friend."

*

Oh, there's bread. Of course. Yes, Luke already has a slice of turkey in his mouth before it appears, but he ambles in that direction to be a little bit more civilized about it. He starts slapping together a sandwich. "Just that, I guess. He's shielding her from this. Last thing she needs to deal with is all the Kilgrave stuff all over again. She might seem tough but this might just break her. So. Daredevil."

*

Danny rounds to the fridge and pulls out an assortment of condiments for Luke. Of course there's dijon mustard, but a lot of plainer condiments too. "Right," he says with a frown. "Well, anything I can do to help."

*

"Great, then you'll let me stay here tonight?" Luke asks with an uptick of his eyebrows as he squirts on some good old fashioned yellow mustard, the sort that's less than a buck at the grocery store. "Because I plan on polishing off the bottle of yours, and I brought the bike."

*

"Can you even get drunk?" Danny asks as he watches the mustard splort onto the meat. "Sure. I've got…" he tries to count, "…six…no…eight rooms, not counting mine?"

*

"Oh, I can get there. Staying there for any length of time, however, is the trick. But if you have that many spare bedrooms, I'm counting on the fact that you have a few spare bottles too for your new pal Cage. Oh, and thanks for the clothes, by the way. How did you know my size was 'tall and bulky'." Now wielding a sandwich, he starts to amble out of the kitchen. "We should take a shot for every TV we find…"

*

"There's only two TVs," says Danny. He follows behind Cage. "Most of the stuff is new. Joy was living here before and she had a bunch of her stuff here still. She just moved it all out. It was empty for awhile, but Emery and some of the staff at Rand filled it back up for me." Which explains why it smells like a showroom everywhere except the back half of the house.

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