Jessica

I can't help to love you

Jessica was so stupefied by what she saw that she started talking to herself, like a character from some 70's comic book that just couldn't help but share her thoughts with the reader.

"What am I doing?"

Two years prior she refused to wear anything that reached higher than her knees; she tried her best not to attract too much attention and, overall, rejected anything stereotypically feminine. It was already unbelievable that she would ever wear that kind of dress... but doing it on that day, of all days... at the anniversary of someone's death?

"What was I thinking...?" she cursed at the ceiling as she fell back on her eternally messy bed. "I must be– what am I doing?!"

Not just any person's death. Peter's. Although she stopped talking aloud the question still ran circles around her head: who was she to even set foot in that household? What happened to that law she imposed herself to save Peter's friends from all that trauma?

The state of her room fit a lot better with her mind than it did with her looks. Sure, a bedroom of her own didn't require obsessive order like the S.H.I.E.L.D. apartment but it wasn't an excuse to leave it in utter chaos, with her bizarre looking dumbbells next to her raggedy bedsheets among more junk. It seemed that she would only ever tidy her house when someone else's presence would force her to.

Her surroundings only agitated her more so Jess took a deep breath and isolated herself. Now that she was serene she asked herself those questions again but not in the accusatory manner they took before. Now they were earnest and she was genuinely trying to answer them: why would she go there? Whatever happened to her secrecy?

A new question arose now and she tried to answer that before the others: why was she beating herself up so much?

It had been two years since Peter passed. Two years since things started making sense, when she realised that she never was him. Objectively it shouldn't make sense for her to doubt anymore but her feelings didn't care. She just didn't want to see any of those familiar faces. Even though the memories had gotten nonsensical and blurry, it was still hard.

It was like relapsing into an old vice. She knew she wasn't him, it's just that sometimes she had to remind herself and for that she needed reasons, both the proof of her individuality taken from her true memories of the past two years and also the present reason for her to subject herself to this:

Peter deserved to be remembered; May was kind enough to invite a stranger like her; she had to check on Gwen, make sure that MJ was ok.

She got up from her bed, realising that her driver must have been waiting by then and the same must have been true for Lana. She would probably have to convince her, too, in some way.
She looked at her reflection again. This time she wasn't scared because she wasn't Peter. She was Jessica and she was pretty, healthy and proud of herself for all the progress she made.

She wasn't doing this for herself, she was doing it for him.

"...my brother."

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Déjà vu literally means "already seen". It's only natural for anyone to get a weird feeling when visiting a place they used to know. There was nothing natural with what Jess was feeling.

Just how long will it take for those extraneous memories to leave her mind? Would she miss them once they were gone...?

"Are you coming or do I have to convince you like you did earlier?!" Lana asked, seeing that Jessica had frozen in place.