AN: Another plot bunny that's been waiting for a break in my book-writing to be freed. A work in progress but it will be updated as often as possible. Focused on the Defenders extended family and how none of them is willing to leave a man behind (again). Team Avocado gets a new honorary member. Also available on AO3. Comments are life, and I hope you enjoy! Happy reading :)

She gave a fake name, of course. Wore a dress that stopped most men from paying attention to her face. Put her hair up and even invested in the cheapest makeup she could find. Trish had done her nails. She looked nothing at all like Jessica Jones. She'd blazed through a whole pack of Tic-Tacs for good measure, drowning the tang of whiskey from her breath with an aggressive layer of mint. Even if they had kept tabs on her, she defied anyone to recognise her like this. Even Trish had done a double take when she'd slouched out of the bathroom, teetering slightly in unnecessarily high heels. She had said the scowl was the only familiar thing about her.

Jessica wasn't sure if she was more excited or angry. Or possibly nervous. She and Trish had been investigating for months, ever since Trish decided Jess needed a distraction after the Midland Circle thing. It took a lot of digging to reach the well-hidden dirt buried under the PR-perfect IGH, and a lot of time trying not to puke on the darknet. People were freaks. And now she was, as far as these assholes knew, a freak of the finest order.

She laughed at the man's shitty joke, her voice transformed into the slightly simpering falsetto that was most associated with an under-active intellect. She flirted back at him, her words jerking through the air as though carried by meat hooks, her thick Californian accent complementing the fake tan she'd spent twenty goddamn dollars to slather herself with. It would be worth it when she got to the punching.

The tour began, and Jessica was glad she hadn't had a breakfast. It took everything she had – years of embracing stoicism and months of Kilgrave-induced repression – for her to maintain the character she'd sculpted. To keep her expression impressed. Interested. Ingratiating.

All she wanted to do was rip this godforsaken building to the ground and make sure that everyone from the CEO to the plumber got landed in jail with multiple life sentences. Anyone who knew this was happening and did nothing. Everyone whose nine to five revolved around finding new ways to violate human rights and who woke up eager for another day of torture.

There were currently twenty-three 'patients' in IGH's carefully concealed and covered up 'research laboratory' in Westchester. 'Patient' was the word they used for victims of their experiments. And 'experiments' was their word for torture. There were currently twenty-three people who had 'volunteered' (which meant they could go missing without anyone loud enough raising a fuss big enough to be noticed by anyone important enough) to be made better. Several had been homeless, plucked from some soup kitchen with lies. A few were people new to New York who didn't have any family checking in on them. Jessica was a tough woman, anyone who knew her knew that. So did several who had dealt with her in passing. By the fourth viewing, she felt sick. Rotten to the core with putrid cockroaches crawling all over her sick while her heart focused intently on pumping blood so it didn't fall to tatters.

"Maybe my next recommendation would be more suited if you told me a little more about what kind of bodyguard you need, Miss Hannigan?"

Jessica blinked back another wave of revulsion at this man, this secretary-turned-Satan's-PA man who was talking about people as though they were customisable headphones or some shit. Plastering a smile so sweet it hurt across her face, she pretended to think about it.

"Well, given my work and the, eh, clientele I usually deal with, I need someone fast. A good fighter, and definitely one with a good radar, y'know? Someone who'll identify threats before they're real threats." She caught herself, her smile faltering as a pair of unfocused chocolate eyes and a dopey grin flashed behind her eyes, quickly erased by a burst of flame behind glass and a shockwave that struck her gut and then her heart as dust billowed into the sky with a groan that sounded like misery itself.

She covered her stumble with another dazzling (if wavering) smile and forced herself to hear the guy's next words.

"Well we have several subjects with extraordinary strength and fighting skills, but if it's a guard dog you want we have one in particular I think will interest you."

God did she want to punch his smarmy face off.

"Although I must warn you," he continued, dropping his voice as though imparting the single most scandalous statement ever conceived, "it is still a bit rough around the edges. I shouldn't even be showing you, strictly speaking, but we so rarely get a woman of your stature and, if I may be so bold as to say, beauty, I feel honour-bound to inform you."

His face got worse the more he smiled. She smiled back and imagined choking him with his stupid pink tie.

"Mr Sawyer, you're gonna make me blush," she flirted back in her most simpering, cringe-inducing tone. She blinked, injecting porn-worthy false innocence into her eyes. "But what do you mean 'rough around the edges'?"

He led her to the next observing deck – an antechamber behind the two-way glass that offered an unpleasantly detailed view of what IGH did to people. Well, she amended, remembering the reason she started investigating these shitbags in the first place. The unlucky people.

"Well it can take some time to, shall we say, distill the essence of a particular trait or ability so it can be transferred and otherwise made marketable. This subject I'm about to show you has been … difficult to fully, ah, quantify."

"Quantify?"

"Break."

She looked through the mirror at a man strapped to a table in the other room, surrounded by assholes in white coats and jumpsuits. Walking clichés of sci-fi horror, but then, all clichés exist for a reason.

A blue mask covered the man's face, it almost looked like a VR headset, only there was a thick tube connecting the mouthpiece to a bank of machines. The man was writhing and straining against his restraints, his body jerking horribly under the hospital gown as whatever they were doing to him intensified. An IV full of drugs that probably would have killed half the rats they hadn't been tested on was strapped to the man's left arm, while the fingertips of his right were attached to something grey that snaked from a small silver box to bite each finger like thimbles on wires. A light on the box flashed and the arm began to shake viciously, the man's unseen abdomen clenching in a pain he either wasn't vocalising or was drowned by double-glazing.

Jessica bit back her bile.

"This particular subject has been quite a devil for our team," Sawyer continued conversationally as he shut the door behind them. "It took over six weeks for him to stop fighting every procedure – you know we actually needed to call security to transport him from room to room?"

"Quite the fighting spirit," she mumbled, transfixed by the man on the table. One of the whitecoats injected something into his IV and his writhing changed. Now it was tight and painful looking, as though his muscles had seized into a prison of flesh and it was his soul thrashing in agony that caused those shaking tremors.

"Indeed, indeed. But they're all subdued in the end. He's truly been a fascinating subject, given the boys in the lab an awful lot to comb through. He's really opened our eyes about human sensology."

Jessica frowned as she watched the man on the table. His feet faced the mirror behind which she and Mr Dick watched his pain, the pale soles crisscrossed with angry red welts and burns. From the maze-solving 'exercises'. If you stood still too long or if your pain amused the fuckers at the controls the wires embedded in the floor would heat up enough to glow red. She'd seen it done. She took a moment to fight the urge to punch through the glass – and then the whitecoats. If Trish hadn't guilted her into pinky-promising to come home tonight, she'd already be halfway out of this hellhole, thirteen 'patients' on her shoulders.

Although, logistically, that would be problematic.

"What do you mean 'sensology'?"

"Well this subject has extraordinary sensory abilities – it's what makes him worth all the trouble, and," he chuckled, "the price of his abilities."

Jessica froze. The dickwad clearly interpreted that as an invitation to continue.

"It's really quite fascinating, and took us well over two months to quantify, but we're just a few weeks from finally verifying a serum that can replicate the subject's qualities. Injected into a host, it will enhance their senses to a point that, in some cases, even modern technology can't quite match."

Something cold and slimy squirmed in Jessica's stomach, her gaze boring into the mask that covered the writhing man's face. "What do you mean, 'enhanced senses'? Enhanced how?"

"Well," he began chirpily, clearly interpreting her expression as interest, "this particular subject has remarkable hearing – our tests show it's no less than twice as keen as a canine's. So one enhanced with the serum we're deriving from his blood and bone marrow would have similarly honed senses. This is of course highly useful – and weaponisable – in a guard or soldier. Early warning systems, excellent reactionary times," Sawyer droned on but Jessica barely heard him over the rushing in her ears. She was about to be sick. Or pass out.

Maybe both.

This couldn't be a coincidence, it couldn't be. No matter how unlikely. No matter how impossible. The ice curling from her stomach to her heart knew it wasn't.

"... detecting poisons and even lies!" the asshole she was most likely going to throttle finished with an air of affixing a truly irresistible bait to a gleaming fishhook. She nodded, hoping her face was more impassive than in felt.

"Why isn't this subject available to buy directly?" she asked, aiming for sweet to disguise the revulsion. The door to the torture chamber opened and a white coat stepped in, followed by two comically burly men in dark uniforms. They injected another something into the man's IV and waited until his convulsions stopped. His heaving chest eased to a slumberous rhythm.

"Ah, well, I'm sure it will be soon," the man she was definitely going to knock out assured her. "But for now we need more time to refine the formula, it's been having some undesirable side effects. And between you and me," he stage-whispered, leaning in closer to her fists while the burly men unstrapped the man's wrists and ankles, then the mask, "this one's been harder than usual to fully break. A funny thing, really, as we tailor the breaking to the subject," he added as though talking about some horse. "But this one's a fighter. Quite remarkable, really. Especially considering he's blind."

One of the behemoths lifted the man, his forearms forcing the comparatively scrawny arms wide as they pushed under his armpits. As the head flopped forward Jessica saw dishevelled and matted brown hair. She saw thick eyebrows and half-open chocolate eyes that were as alien as they were familiar.

Son of a cock-sucking jackass bitch.

It was him. It was Matthew fucking Murdock.

Or at least, her stunned mind amended, taking in the less-than-human deadness of his eyes, what was left of him.