When you’d been to Hell and back, it wasn’t hard to recognize people who’d done the same. Robbie had seen the flames of the underworld reflected in Jess’s eyes the first time he’d met her, had understood as she’d approached him in a warehouse full of bodies he’d put down that she wasn’t the sort of person who was content sitting back and doing nothing at any given moment. She had the Devil in her, just like he did. And, just like him, she wasn’t afraid to let the Devil loose. It was necessary sometimes, something most people didn’t quite understand. They wanted the world to be generous, wanted forgiveness to fall from the skies like rain, but that wasn’t how things worked. The world never gave Robbie anything he didn’t take for himself, and he knew Jess understood that. People like them couldn’t rely on the kindness of angels. Sometimes, the Devil was all you had. “My experience wasn’t much like Mean Girls,” he admitted with a shrug, thinking back briefly. His high school experience had been teachers who didn’t understand the weight of the shit he was carrying and students whose lives seemed so goddamn easy that it was hard not to resent them. Gabe always made it seem like Robbie ought to regret dropping out, but he never had. He’d never felt more free than the day he’d walked out those doors with the knowledge that he was never going back.
“I’ve thought about it,” he admitted with a shrug, still grinning. Of course he’d thought about it. When you grew up with nothing, it was hard not to imagine what you’d do if you suddenly found yourself loaded. “Upwards of $17 million, depending on the condition. They don’t come on the market often. Not many of them left.” Rarity was a sure-fire way to make things more expensive. People always wanted things they couldn’t have, after all. “Yeah? Shit, I might have to hitch a ride on the party boat, then. I get the feeling we could have a hell of a time with it.” He’d never been one for the water, either, but she was right — exposure therapy was a good a way as any to get rid of that discomfort. “Guess we run in the same crowds,” he shrugged. “Oh, Jesus Christ. You tell me werewolves are real and I swear I’m out of here.” Some things were just a little too ridiculous, even for a guy with the Devil riding shotgun. He raised a brow at her question, tilting his head to the side slightly. “You think, what, I just don’t feel anything? Nah, I still feel it. It doesn’t tickle, either.”
Jess had friends in high places. She dated Clint, considered Natasha a soulmate, knew most SHIELD agents by both their name and their number. For some reason, people seemed to trust her. In the beginning, that was hardly unexpected. Jess was trained to shift like a chameleon into whoever the person in front of her wanted. It was only months or years later, when that facade started to shift (because not even the best spy in the world could maintain a ruse forever) that Jess began to have questions over why she was still a part of people’s lives. She could only come up with one explanation, and that was the fact that, against all odds, she managed to have good people caring about her. She managed to drag them down to her level, make it so they were indebted to her, or at least protective. With Robbie, she didn’t need to worry about that. He already had the Devil. He had far worse than she could offer, and there was something reassuring in that. “You’ll need to pull together a realistic high school movie for me, then,” she replied. “What if I’m undercover sometime and they ask me what I did in science class? I couldn’t answer them.” It was mostly teasing. Hydra covered many topics, and typical education programmes so she could bluff her way through was only one of them.
“Seventeen…” Jess let out a low whistle, trying to contemplate the magnitude of that kind of cash in her head. “Holy shit. I don’t even think I’d know how to write that without thinking about it.” There’d be six zeroes after it, she knew that much. “Money’s never really been something I considered. Easy to ignore it exists when you don’t have any, right?” Jessica made a habit of moving in with people who did have it, or scraping it together when she needed it. Her lifestyle hardly required mortgages or saving, after all, nor was it conducive towards planning for the future. “A hell of a time? Did you, Robbie Reyes, just make a joke? I dare say I’m rubbing off on you. You should be careful – I hear my sense of humour’s contagious,” Jess singsonged, a grin coming onto her face that didn’t fade even at the next sentence. “I know a girl that’s part fox. She’s out in Madripoor. You can find anything in that place.” Jess shrugged a shoulder, unsure exactly what she thought. “It was a hypothesis I was testing out. Sometimes things hurt so much they go numb.” That happened for her more than a few times throughout her life, after all. “Anything help?”
