Chapter Four
"Only if you buy me dinner first."
As soon as her boots hit the ground, Leila hears something ping off Steve's shield-presumably the energy blast from Loki's scepter. Before Steve can straighten up and reveal her presence, she falls into a back roll, deftly landing among the civilians-the movements made easier by the dais she just rolled off. Thanks for the drama factor, old man, she thinks, and softly shushes the people around her.
She shoots a glance at the old man in question, the one who refused to kneel. Steve is standing now, and she uses that to her advantage, letting Loki focus his attention on Steve while she moves through the crowd.
Frankly, it would have been easier for her and Steve to jump separately if they wanted to get on either side of Loki. That said, it's hardly Steve's fault, however reluctantly she admits it to herself. They would've had to take two jets for that, or else timed their respective jumps down to the millisecond, and it's not like they knew what the scene at Stuttgart would look like before they got there.
Steve begins to approach Loki, who is getting to his feet-she assumes the energy blast must have backfired on him in the literal sense as well as figurative.
"You know," Steve says, "the last time I was in Germany, and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing."
This feels a little long for a one-liner, in her opinion, but the premise of it is solid.
"The soldier," Loki says, sounding amused. "The man out of time."
"I'm not the one who's out of time," Steve replies. Much better, in terms of comebacks.
She hears Natasha's voice, slightly altered by the speaker from the jet: "Loki, stand down."
Loki pauses, making a show of actually considering it, before shooting another energy blast at the jet. The jet pivots sharply to avoid being hit, and the crowd around Loki scatters in fear. It's almost perfect timing, because she's almost directly across from Steve now, with Loki in the middle-exactly where she wants to be.
Steve throws his shield, which bounces off Loki's armor; he catches it like a boomerang and moves in closer. Meanwhile, Leila pulls out her throwing knives and directs them at Loki-one going for the chest, one for the neck. They're sharp, but not sharp enough to break through skull. Spine, though...maybe. Definitely if he were human, but she can't be sure. Of all the things they taught her at SHIELD's illustrious Academy of Operations, Alien God Physiology 101 was not one of them.
Frankly, hitting him at this range is a longshot, because despite watching and rewatching footage of his attacks on Earth, putting her rapid learning ability into overdrive, she doesn't have a tight enough grasp on his fighting style to predict where he'll be by the time the knives even reach him. He's too inconsistent, too erratic.
Long shot or not, though, Steve's surprised glance at her from over Loki's shoulder-apparently he didn't know where she was?-reduces that 10% chance to 0%, and it does not endear him to her.
Loki follows Steve's eyeline, knocks him back several feet when he gets close, then pivots and knocks Leila's knives aside in one fluid motion. He doesn't look remotely surprised to see her, just annoyed, so she can assume he knew that she was here, just wasn't expecting her to join the fight. Maybe he thought she was working a civilian perimeter. If he did, he has either vastly underestimated the extent to which SHIELD wants the tesseract back, or vastly overestimated the extent to which she cares about preventing civilian casualties.
Leila can feel the wheels in the back of her mind spinning wildly, filing Loki's every move away as a reference to what he might do next; she did that before the rapid learning, but sometimes the abilities take on a life of their own, and feel like separate entities. It's like having a machine in her mind.
"The atoner," he says. "The criminal who calls herself royalty."
She smirks. "Well, I guess we have something in common."
She gets the desired response, or at least as close to it as can be expected. Loki doesn't respond verbally, but the smile slips off his face, and she can see him tense up with anger. She pulls out her ring daggers (bad for throwing because of the uneven weight, great for close combat due to being so easy to hang on to) and runs at him.
One hand goes for the neck, the other goes for the gut. Loki dodges the former by leaning back, and blocks the latter with his scepter-but then, instead of pulling back, he locks, and Leila pulls her other dagger back up to cross with the first, pushing back against the scepter. She's grateful, not for the first time, for SHIELD's enhanced weaponry; the scepter is strong, and the man (or god, or whatever) inching it towards her forehead is even stronger.
"Kneel," he hisses.
"Only if you buy me dinner first," she manages, and kicks him in the shin.
It doesn't have the same effect it would on a human, but it does break up his rhythm as he shifts his weight to his unkicked leg. She takes this brief moment of distraction to glance, without moving her head, over his shoulder, and sees that Steve is about to throw his shield. A good move for the moment-hit him while he's off-center-but Loki could easily duck it and let it hit her instead.
She hits the ground before that can happen, and propels herself forward using the butt of her daggers as oars. The impact between the knives and the ground throws faint sparks into the air as she slides between Loki's legs like a swing dancer, but self-propelled and with significantly less jazz music.
She actually sees the underside of Steve's shield as it flies towards Loki; she waits until she hears an impact (another clink; he must have knocked it aside) before getting up. Steve abandons his shield and runs at Loki, and she joins him as she gets up.
Steve throws a punch; Loki dodges. Leila lets the boys have at it and half-circles them until she's behind Loki, and then piggybacks him. She crosses her daggers in front of the scepter and uses it to try to wrestle it out of Loki's hands, or at least direct it away from Steve.
She's effective at the second objective, at least. There's a split-second where she realizes her mistake, thinks that she's never seen anything so blue, and then she takes the energy blast straight to the forehead.
She's stunned enough that she doesn't actually feel herself flying through the air, or hitting the concrete, or cracking her head open. She doesn't even really see it, either. Leila doesn't feel pain the way most people do, but this time she doesn't feel it at all-it's like her mind is somewhere separate from her body. It's not her usual dissociation. This feels...otherworldly. Cosmic. And somehow, it kind of feels right.
And then, all at once, with an almost physical vacuuming sensation, she's pulled back into her body, and looks up.
It can't have been as long as it felt since Loki hit her, because Steve is still staring at her in horror, which doesn't surprise her. What does surprise her is that Loki's watching her, too, head tilted. Surprised. Curious. She wasn't supposed to survive.
Leila survives a lot of things she wasn't supposed to, so this makes it easier to compartmentalize whatever the fuck that was just now. As she sits up, Loki shifts focus, taking advantage of Steve's distraction to land a punch to his gut, before knocking Steve to his knees with the scepter.
"Kneel," Loki says.
"Not today," Steve replies, and it's the first time Leila's heard him sound genuinely angry.
Leila has to assume that Loki knows she's going to get back up. He might be an asshole, but he's not an idiot; getting Clint to tell Loki all of SHIELD's dirty secrets is probably the first thing he did once they were safe. He called her "the atoner," so he knows at least as much as Clint does about her past. When Loki asked Clint about her, there's no way he didn't lead with the whole "can't die" thing. Strengths and weaknesses are the first thing Loki would've wanted to know about a prospective enemy.
This being the case, Leila doesn't bother with the element of surprise that she does not have. She struggles to her feet–she's survived worse injuries than cracking her head open, and she's always moved past it faster than this. It's something different than the scepter just adding to the injury, or weakening her abilities–that cosmic feeling is still there, and it almost physically feels like it's trying to pull her back. Is this what dying feels like?
She'll never know, because she has no plans on dying tonight.
She's still in the process of standing up when Steve lands in a heap next to her, knocked back by Loki's scepter–physically, no blast. He jumps to his feet instantly and holds out a hand to Leila, who is on her knees now. The aching from the impact is mostly gone now, and that pulling feeling is finally loosening. She steadfastly ignores his hand and gets to her feet on her own, and suddenly the sound of AC/DC is surrounding her.
For a split second, she thinks she might be hallucinating, but no; Loki and Steve are both looking in the same direction she is, so she has to assume that they are also seeing the same thing she is: Iron Man.
He lands several yards in front of Steve and Leila, and aims his blasters or whatever at Loki, knocking him back several feet. Tony doesn't lower his weapons.
"Make your move, Reindeer Games." Stark's voice sounds slightly scrambled, no doubt because he's speaking through machinery.
Loki raises his hand in surrender, his helmet disappearing. Leila heads over to stand next to Stark, and Steve follows, standing on his other side.
Stark's weapons slide back into the various parts of his suit they were hiding in. "Good move."
"Mr. Stark," Steve greets.
"Cap'n. Princess." The faceplate of Stark's suit slides open. "Thought you could use a hand."
"We appreciate it," Steve says, nodding stiffly. Then he turns to Leila, and it kills her a little, the way his eyes soften. "You okay?"
And she almost feels bad about walking away without a word.