Birds of a Feather (Oswald Cobblepot)

AKA No

"Natalie-..." he pauses for a moment, tilting his head to the left.

"You're not Natalie."

A flash of light blinds Jessica, and she stumbles back. Rubbing her eyes, she opens them again to find that she's in an unfamiliar room. Books, and drawings of birds surround an old, beaten bed. It's nighttime, and the quiet bustle of the city could be heard from just outside.

Jessica glances out a window overlooking an old fire escape. It's...New York? No, it feels like New York, but something about the atmosphere of this place is off. Gargoyles hang from art-deco buildings, and an endless stream of smoke pipes from old chimneys.

She tries to open the window, but her hand goes right through the glass, as if she were a ghost.

Jessica holds her head. Kilgrave's power is disappearing fast, she no longer hears his voice. Do his powers not work here? But...where is "here"?

"You know I wasn't expecting you to turn up so soon. I'm rather...pleasantly surprised," an unfamiliar voice echoes from very close by.

Jessica whips around, assuming a fighting stance. But there's no one else in the room. She then hears shuffling coming from the other side of the room. Jessica slowly starts walking over to the other side, as the wall rattles slightly, moving the bird sketches along with it.

"...you have no idea how much I've missed that," the male voice is definitely coming from behind the wall, and as Jessica comes closer, she can also hear someone else, panting and scrambling. Jessica puts her hand on the wall, and her hand sinks right through. Taking a deep breath, Jessica pushes her arm, and then her entire body through the wall.

She's hit with a rack of black, old-fashioned suits and colorful neckties. She stops, as if she's about to run into them, but remembers that she could walk right through them. The voices are louder now, and as Jessica turns to her right, she finds that the closet stretches out a little farther, past the rack of clothes.

"So, I take it you want my tracking device? Hmm? Don't worry, your secret's safe with me," the man asks, his tone almost playful.

Jessica looks up at the walls of the hidden corner of the closet, as the single-bulbed light illuminates disturbing drawings of muscular men inflicting pain, or having pain inflicted onto them.

She finally reaches the end of the closet, where a man with black hair in a suit has a woman pinned to the back wall. Jessica can't see the woman's face, obscured by the man who's holding her down. Jessica walks around them, and once her sight passes the man's arm, she recognizes Natalie as the woman being pinned to the wall. She has a tense look of anger as she stares him right in the eye. Even as she pulls herself closer towards him, Natalie maintains that expression of hate, of defiance.

"Oh really? Well Oswald...in that case, I guess the trip was wasted," her words come out like silk, coaxing and calm.

From Jessica's point of view, she can easily spot Natalie reach into the man's jacket pocket and pull out what Jessica can only assume is the tracking device, with a large radar insignia and red buttons on the bottom. But clearly the man is clueless to what's going on, as he smiles at her, laughing.

"Mhm...nonsense," he chuckles, before leaning in to kiss her.

Natalie wraps one arm around Oswald's shoulder as she pockets the tracking device with her other hand. He moves her to the floor, using both arms to keep her locked in place.

"Don't ever be angry at me again," he scolds, before kissing her on the forehead.

Natalie raises an eyebrow, "You...you do realize that there are reasons why I'm angry at-"

"No!" Oswald presses his hand into her elbow, further keeping her down as he places a grimy finger on her lips, "...you were upset with me, but not anymore."

His tone's quickly changed from charming and playful to forceful and angry, as he moves his hand away from her lips to stroke her cheek.

"Shh...sh...my love, now's not the time for petty quarrels. Right now, we appreciate each other's company, even if it's in a small, dark closet."

Even if she'd never seen this man before in her life, Jessica felt like she knows him, knows him very well in fact. As this man smiles at Natalie, kissing and licking her neck, Jessica recognizes the way his hands grab her with no regard as to whether or not she wants him to. How she fakes affection in her response to his kisses simply because doing otherwise would displease him. How the look of confusion in her eyes signals that his thoughts, his desires, his commands, are beginning to muddle with her own.

The scene around Jessica starts to fade away back into the black fog. She tries to reach out to Natalie, but Jessica starts to grow further away from her, as the scene in enveloped by the fog. Just as Natalie and Oswald are about to disappear, he licks her on the neck one more time, he looks up at Jessica, to reveal that he has Kilgrave's face.

"No!" Jessica shouts, reaching out to Natalie, but before she can do anything, she disappears into the fog.

"My apologies, it appears I have mistaken you for someone else," the voice of Oswald with the glasses returns, and Jessica whips around to find him stepping out from the fog.

"You...you're looking for Natalie, aren't you?" Jessica realizes aloud, looking at Oswald.

He nods, adjusting his glasses, "Correct, but, because your time signatures are so similar, I managed to pull you through the time vortex instead. Although, I should have suspected that something was amiss, you were being affected by some sort of manufactured virus that was cancelled out by the temporal shift in dimensions."

"This place...this place cancels Kilgrave's powers?" Jessica glances around the shifting fog.

"We don't know much about the possibilities of these...transition spaces between dimensions, or the effects of traveling between them," the man confesses, "what I can do is send you back to your own dimension. If...you happen to run into Natalie, uhm, tell her that I'm on my way. Edward Nygma, that is."

Jessica stares at him for a couple of seconds, "Sure...Ed."

He gives her a peculiar, wayward smile, before disappearing into the fog. Jessica's blinded with a flash of light.