Chapter Five
"Is she touching everyone's face? Cause I didn't get the chance to shave."
As soon as Loki is restrained, Leila takes the opportunity to pull Steve aside. Granted, maybe "aside" is a stretch; there's no real privacy in the back of the quinjet, so she keeps her voice low and hopes that Stark has the good sense to mind his own goddamn business.
"What the hell was that?" Leila hisses.
"What?"
"I told you I can't die. Literally immediately before we landed. You said you understood."
Steve squares his shoulders, clearly defensive now, which only serves to make her angrier. "Yeah, and I did," he says. "Something told me you'd never been up against...whatever that was." He gestures in Loki's direction.
He's not wrong; she's still unsettled by how strongly Loki's scepter affected her, like her molecules haven't quite stopped vibrating from the impact yet. Still, though.
"You let him get the drop on you," she says. "You could have been compromised. If Stark hadn't shown up-"
"I recovered," he says. He's a lot better at covering his anger than she is. His tone is a sort of strained calm, anger under a shiny veneer of 1940's gentility. It just annoys her more.
"Okay, so what about before then? When we landed? Do you think I didn't notice how you took the brunt of the impact?"
"Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about how you let me take on Loki while you hid in the crowd."
"Oh, I'm sorry, did the super-soldier feel scared fighting all alone?"
"You could have gotten people killed," he hisses through his teeth. "Who's to say Loki wouldn't have seen you? Who's to say he wouldn't have aimed into the crowd? You put civilians at risk."
He's well and truly angry now-this, apparently, is the hill he wants to die on-and it's vaguely satisfying and yet infuriating all at once. "I was trying to get my best chance of taking him down," she says, a little more calmly than before (if only to annoy him), "because if we didn't? If he got away? We'd be dealing with a lot more than a few civilian casualties."
"So that's it. That's how it works? The ends justify the means?"
"I'm not a soldier, Captain. I'm a spy. I'm not in this for the heroics. I go in and I get the job done. You get on board with that, or you get out."
She storms away before he can answer-inasmuch as she can "storm" anywhere. Loki is only a few steps away, and she pauses in front of him.
He smiles serenely up at her. "Trouble in paradise?" he asks.
"If this is paradise, I'd love to know what hell looks like to you," she says.
He just smiles. She rolls her eyes and mumbles "Hold still."
She leans forward, bracing a palm against the wall behind him, and reaches out with her other hand to touch his face.
Taking abilities works best when she's touching an area with the most blood flow-the heart or the head. The heart is better, and in a lab setting she'd prefer it, given the unknown nature of Loki's abilities, and how they'll react with her own. But they're not in a lab-they're in a jet, and she can hardly ask him to take what has to be like 20 layers of clothes off just so she can feel him up For Science. So, the head it is.
She lets her eyes slip shut, and hears Stark's voice a moment later. "Is she touching everyone's face? Because I didn't get the chance to shave."
"No," she replies, eyes still closed. "I charge extra for groups."
She hears him snort.
It's funny; she expects Loki to fight back in some way. To turn his head, to keep talking to distract her, but he doesn't. He stays still, and it's honestly more distracting than any deflection would be. Which is probably his intention. The fact that it works just irritates her even more.
She slams the door on those emotions and lets her mind latch onto his powers instead.
If describing what letting go of abilities feels like is hard, then describing what taking them feels like is impossible. It's like trying to explain sound to a lifelong deaf person, or sight to someone who was born blind. It's a perception that exists beyond the five senses.
Loki's powers, if she had to describe them, feel...vast, and constantly moving and shifting, twisting around each other, and they sound like the loudest silence, that high-pitched whine you pick up on when it's quiet for long enough.
She knows, somehow, that she won't be able to take them; they're too deeply embedded in him, inextricable. But she can duplicate them. She can feel her very DNA shift as her cells change to more closely mirror his. The sound of Steve and Stark bickering starts to come back into focus. Loki is listening intently.
"What's the matter? Scared of a little lightning?" someone-Steve, she thinks-asks. She tries to tune him out again.
"I'm not overly fond of what follows," Loki replies.
Before she can snap at him to hold still, there's a metallic screeching sound, and she looks up just in time to see an enormous guy in a red cape land in the quinjet. She knows him from the newsreels and SHIELD's files. Thor.
Frankly, she doesn't much consider her next move; being interrupted while that deep into a duplication-especially one so complex, one that she's now realizing took exceptionally long-never does sit well with her. She's got a blinding migraine suddenly, and she scrambles out of Thor's way.
Thor grabs Loki by the throat, tears him from his restraints, and flies off. She rubs her temples. She's vaguely aware of a hand in front of her, and she's in too much pain to be proud or petty about it, so she takes it, and lets it help her onto the seat behind her. She realizes a split second later that it has to be Steve's, since Stark's still got his stupid robot costume on. There's a streak of annoyance there, and a mild sense of guilt, and it actually helps her focus a little. The pain is assuaged, just a little.
She decides to keep focusing on that. Feelings. This is why she hates being interrupted; the only thing that helps her cope with the resulting migraines is focusing on human emotion, which she tries to do as little as possible.
She chooses an easy one: how much she hates Loki just then. In the past hour, she's displayed two weaknesses-one of which she didn't even know she had (fuck that scepter too, while she's at it)-in front of two men she barely knows, assuming Stark saw her get knocked on her ass earlier along with Steve. That green alien bastard didn't even give her the chance to establish herself as someone who definitely could and would kill them if she felt like it before putting her weak points on display. Fuck that guy.
He also took Clint , she remembers. God. She doesn't even know if Clint is alive. For a split second, she allows herself to acknowledge that it matters to her if he is. Whatever. It's not like she's ready to lay down her life for him or some shit. She just has a mild preference towards him being alive over him being dead. She also has a preference towards Mexican food over Sushi but she's not gonna die if someone hands her a California Roll.
She's losing track of her train of thought. She needs to get it toge- ow. She remembers the headache now, but it's mild enough that she can open her eyes. She does.
The quinjet is empty, aside from Natasha in the pilot's seat. She takes a long, deep breath. The back of the jet is still broken and wide open.
"Might wanna put your seatbelt on, Princess," she hears Nat say from up front.
"Don't tell me what to do, Romanoff," she replies, before putting on her seatbelt.
She can't see Nat's expression, but she can almost hear her smiling. "You okay?"
Natasha's seen this happen once before. It wasn't nearly as bad that time; that was a routine power extraction of a human gifted. This is something else, and Leila's vaguely unsettled by it. She did not sign up for S.H.I.E.L.D. just to get her ass kicked by Alien-slash-Gods who won't play by the rules. Granted, she didn't have that much of a choice in signing up, but she might have tried harder to find an out if she'd known this was going to happen.
No, she wouldn't have. Whatever else it may entail, S.H.I.E.L.D. is still her best shot at finding who she's looking for.
She's still pissed, though.
"I assume the boys are on the ground fighting over their toy?"
"Yeah. You plan on joining them?"
"You know what? I'm gonna go ahead and let them handle it." If Loki does get away, she's probably going to get disciplined for it, but she can't bring herself to care just then. And as much as she hates to admit it, she'd probably be more of a hindrance than a help, given her migraine. Her eyesight is still fuzzy.
"Rogers asked if you were okay," Nat says out of nowhere. Leila glances in her direction. "Before he jumped."
"And that means I owe him?"
"No," Nat says. "But you could be a little nicer to him."
A few one-liners come to her-"I've never been nice in my life," "He's a big boy, he can handle it," "Why, because it's important to respect our elders?"
But she doesn't really have the energy to fine-tune any of them right now, so she just gives a flat "No."
Natasha snorts, and tells her to think about it. And she doesn't answer, but she keeps thinking about when she was half-blind and his hand hovered in front of her. It's not even a huge thing to do; it was probably just instinct, nice '40s manners or whatever. But it does make it harder to imagine being mean to him in the future. At least, not until he gives her a reason to.
Frankly, she just feels empty, and continuing to resent him sounds exhausting.
"No promises," she says quietly. And again, she can't see for sure, but she knows this time that Nat is smiling.