Battle Royale
"Now we're in the ring, and we're coming for blood."
-Glory and Gore / Lorde
Chapter One
"How many other innocent punching bags have died at your hand?"
Rogers isn't home. It's late (and not raining, incidentally) when she gets to New York, so it could be that he's just sleeping and that's why he doesn't answer when she knocks, but she doubts it.
She knocks twice–protocol says she should knock three times, but she's tired and is fairly confident that he's not going to answer anyway–before pulling out the gadget SHIELD gave her. She knows how to pick a lock, but the tool they gave her is quicker.
Nothing. Leila knows how to listen for signs of life. Footsteps. Movements. Breathing. People are never silent, not really. They think they are, though, and if you listen closely, you can get a bead on what they're doing before they know that you know that they're there. And that extra second of reaction time can be crucial. It's saved her life more than once.
That's another thing she'd already learned on her own before SHIELD picked her up, long before. Years and years. Probably she was doing that analysis longer than she remembers; she's just better at it now.
She doesn't bother to turn the lights on, so she doesn't see much of the apartment-just that it's small and threadbare–before she leaves, re-locking the door behind her. The file Fury gave her mentioned a second address, just two blocks away, some gym that Rogers frequents, so she heads there next.
Gleason's Gym is old and run-down, with a World War II aesthetic, which is fitting, she supposes. The sign says closed, but there's at least one light on inside. The door is locked, but she figures that if she were a gym owner, and Captain America asked her for a personal key, she might be inclined to say yes. Either way she uses the same tool as before and is inside in seconds.
The floor is huge and Captain Rogers is in the middle of it, pummeling the hell out of a white punching bag. A dozen or so matching bags are lying on the floor next to him. The corners of the room are dim; she can make out a few benches here and there, and a boxing ring in the corner. Rogers is standing directly under the light, in the brightest spot, like some kind of Messianic figure, but the lightbulbs are fluorescent, dim and flickering, and they seem to desaturate the entire room.
The whole thing makes Captain America look sort of like an old movie, or maybe an oil painting come to life. Unreal. Maybe that's appropriate.
Maybe that's how the rest of the world looks to him.
Leila watches him for a long moment from the shadows, and then Rogers punches a hole through the canvas of the bag. Sand spills out, the chain breaks, the bag goes flying, and Rogers picks up one of the other bags and starts to hang it up.
Leila decides to make her introduction now, and pushes herself off the beam she's been leaning against. Her heels click on the old tile floor. "Oh Captain, my Captain."
He looks over at her, breathing hard from exertion, and reaches up to finish hanging the bag before sitting down on the bench. "The door was locked," he says, unwrapping his hands. It's not an accusation so much as a question.
"Oh, honey, you'll have to do a lot better than that to keep me away." She smirks. "I'm agent Leila Whittaker. I'm with Shield. The people who pulled you out of the ice?"
"Right. SHIELD." He studies her for a moment, sizing her up. "You here with a mission, ma'am?"
Leila can't decide how she feels about being called "ma'am"-part of her bristles, part of her finds it inexplicably endearing–but either way, now's not the time to catch Rogers up on popular lexicon, so she ignores it. "You catch on quick," she says, and hands him the manila file folder. A different one than the one they gave her, because it's need-to-know and he doesn't need to know as much as she does.
She pulls up a chair that was leaning against the wall and sits across from him as he starts to flip through it. "Trying to get me back into the world?" he asks, glancing up at her.
My guy, I could literally not care less how well-adjusted you are or are not. That's not how to make friends and influence people, though, so she smiles charmingly. "Nope. That's just icing." She leans forward, propping her head on her hands, with her elbows on her knees. "I'm not here because you need a babysitter, Captain. I'm here because we need a super-soldier."
Rogers shoots another appraising glance at her, but says nothing before turning back to the file. She can see a photo of the tesseract pinned to the page he's on. "Hydra's secret weapon," he mutters, more to himself than to her.
She answers anyway. "After your crash, your buddy Howard Stark went looking for you. He found that instead." She reaches over and taps the picture once. "SHIELD's been poking at it ever since. Trying to unlock clean energy, which is one of the sexier capital-i Issues at the moment."
She doesn't choose that phrasing specifically to throw him off, but she is surprised when it doesn't. He is from the 1940s–but then again, he's also a military man. He's heard worse.
Rogers looks up, finally. "What happened to it?"
"Guy named Loki took it. Weird guy. If you're in, I can tell you more about it. If not, I won't waste either of our time." For a moment, she thinks of Clint–where he is, if he's okay, what he was thinking before he–
She pushes the thought away. "It's kind of time sensitive."
Steve glances back at the file once, and then stands up. She notices then the way he moves–heavily, like there's some physical burden on him. As if he's carrying the heavens on his shoulders like Atlas of old. Maybe he thinks he is.
It's annoying.
He goes over to pick up the broken punching bag, hefts it onto his shoulder effortlessly. The heavens can't be too heavy for him, then. "When do we start?"
She smiles. "Our ride's going to pick us up on the corner in ten minutes. That's how long you have to pack a go-bag." She stands up to leave. "By the way, can I ask?"
He turns to her, raising a brow.
"How many other innocent punching bags have died at your hand? Assuming that's not the first one," she says, gesturing to the one he's holding.
"Seventeen."
"You monster." She smirks, pausing at the door. "I'll be waiting."
And maybe it's the light, but she could swear he's smiling when she leaves.
"You're late." This is what she tells Coulson by way of greeting when he finally picks them up. He's seven minutes late and she's never been more annoyed with him. She considers writing in an official complaint. Please instruct Agent Coulson to not leave me alone with historical figures for longer periods of time than I was led to expect.
Steve is a nice enough guy; apparently she looked cold, because he offered to give her his jacket, which she would have a lot more mixed feelings about if he were not as old as he is. It's a nice gesture, okay, but he's obviously got a lot going on in his head when he meets her at the corner. He's giving off Vibes and she knows she's supposed to ask if he's okay but honestly, she wouldn't touch that question with a ten foot pole. If Steve Rogers can carry a punching bag one-handed, he can carry his own baggage without her help.
(If she asked, he would probably say that he is fine, thanks for asking, but it's still not a dice she wants to roll. Besides, he might say "I'm fine" and then ask if she's okay, which is almost worse.)
And that is how Leila spent seven minutes in silence with Captain America, making awkward small talk at two minute increments.
Honestly, Steve seems as relieved as she is when the car pulls up.
Leila immediately goes for the backseat. "You can sit up front," Steve offers, but Leila shakes her head. "I like the back seat. I get more space to myself."
Steve shrugs, and puts his bag in the trunk while Leila slips into the car, and then shoots her best serial killer stare at the rearview window, and hisses "You're late."
Coulson is unruffled, which would be normal for him, if Steve Rogers were not climbing into his car now. Leila makes a bet with herself over how long it will take him to crack.
"I was dropping Pepper Potts at the airport," Coulson explains.
"So you talked to Stark, then?"
Steve's head perks up at the name Stark–probably reflexively–before looking down again, and Leila feels mildly bad for him, in a distant kind of way.
"He's going over the files I gave him. He'll be joining us tomorrow."
"Great." Leila has never met Tony Stark. She knows from his file that he's narcissistic, egotistic, and doesn't play well with others. He knows from Natasha that he's a пизда, which is a Russian insult that Natasha never felt the need to teach Leila until it came to describing Tony Stark. And she knows from the media that he's a bon vivant with very precise facial hair. That's it.
"That reminds me," Coulson adds. "We have to catch Rogers up to speed." He doesn't look at Steve while he speaks, but she can see him glance at him just slightly. "There's a tablet in the pocket behind my seat."
She pulls it out, turns it on, and hands it to Steve, who does not look confused so much as curious, and determined. He studies it for a second.
"You hit the–"
He figures it out himself. She raises an eyebrow, impressed. "There you go."
Leila hates planes. She always has. She can handle it–she has to, in order to function in her job–but there is not a moment that she spends in the air that she is not thinking, on some level, about how much she cannot wait until they land.
Steve is still using the tablet to catch up on the Weekly Weird News, as Clint likes to call it. She watches him so she has something else to focus on.
Steve doesn't notice until Coulson hisses at her to stop staring, and then he looks up inquisitively.
"Sorry," she says. "You just. You're good with the technology. You don't act like what...a lot of people thought someone from the '40s would act like."
"Well, maybe a lot of people don't know the '40s like they think they do." He's not just glancing at her now; his attention is on her. He's smiling–sort of sullen, but genuinely, like the way you smile when you joke at a funeral.
"And how well do you know the 2010s? Not counting that," she waves a hand at the tablet.
"Hey, I've been here for six months. How long have you had to open a textbook?"
He's still teasing her, but his words make something freeze inside her all the same, because the question he thinks he's asking is not the question he's asking, and she knows if she says Well, my parents thought women who could read were witches, so I'm a little behind, it'll make things weird AND give Rogers leverage against her, should things go south.
Things go south a lot for Leila, so she keeps the words to herself, and digs her nails into her thighs instead, looking away.
"You win," she mutters.
She can feel Steve staring at her, probably wondering why she suddenly turned to stone, but he doesn't ask about it, and a second later she can hear another video starting on the screen.
"We're about forty minutes out from base, sir," she hears the pilot say, and her fingers relax a little.
"So," Steve says, and it takes her a moment to realize he's talking to Coulson, not her. "This Doctor Banner was trying to replicate the serum that was used on me?"
Coulson takes the three steps from his seat to Steve's. "A lot of people were. You were the world's first superhero. Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the key to unlocking Erskine's original formula."
The hulk in the video roars.
"...Didn't really go his way, did it?"
Leila's lips twitch in a smile. Now that she's starting to relax, she feels a little bad for shutting down on Rogers earlier, if only because she was enjoying the conversation. She sits up again, facing forward. She's not participating, but at least she's not actively ignoring anyone now.
"Not so much," Coulson tells him. "When he's not that thing though, the guys like a Stephen Hawking."
Steve looks up, bewildered.
"He's like a genius," Leila says tentatively. Steve glances at her, and sort of nods. He's not sure where he stands with her now, she realizes.
Well. Maybe that's for the best.
"I gotta say, it's an honor to meet you, officially."
Steve smiles. Maybe Coulson will keep it together.
"I sort of met you. I mean, I watched you while you were sleeping."
Steve is not smiling. Coulson did not keep it together. Leila checks her watch. As per her earlier self-wager, she now owes herself twelve gummy bears. Nice.
She leans her head back against the cold hull of the jet. Almost there.
Coulson tries to double back. "I mean, I was present while you were unconscious from the ice. You know, it's really, it's just a, just a huge honor to have you on board."
"I just hope I'm the man for the job," Steve says, sounding sincere. Leila frowns.
"Oh, you are. Absolutely." Leila would not call Coulson unbiased in this assessment, but he's probably still right incidentally. "Uh...we've made some modifications to the uniform. I had a little design input–"
"The uniform?" Steve asks, and by his tone, she can imagine his brow furrowing in surprise. "Aren't the stars and stripes a little old fashioned?"
"So are you, but we kept you around," Leila quips. She doesn't look up, but she glances over out of the corner of an eye. Steve looks like he's trying not to smile. Coulson looks like he's trying not to kill her.
She closes her eyes just as Coulson finally stops glaring daggers at her long enough to answer Steve's question.
"With everything that's happening," he says, "the things that are about to come to light...people might just need old-fashioned."
Leila bites the inside of her cheek. The words make something twist in her gut. The things that are about to come to light.
She hopes like Hell that she's not one of them.