Chapter Six
"Is that what the bad guys do in the field? Just wait for you to genetically strip-search them?"
When they arrive back at the helicarrier, an unofficial Loki-based summit is formed on the platform behind the bridge. Leila's not sure how Stark and Rogers convinced Thor to work with them; she assumes it involved some level of violence, if only because Steve was out-numbered two-to-one by men who seem to shoot first and ask questions later, but she doesn't care enough to ask.
Mostly, Leila would really rather just get to work on copying Loki's powers. Between what he did with the scepter and how hard it was to copy the first time, not knowing what he's capable of is making her anxious. Especially given that he's on the helicarrier with them. Staring at them, even. Through a camera, but still.
He's talking to Fury, technically, but he's clearly directing his Shakespearean monologue to them. Loki wouldn't be roasting Banner like that if he didn't know Banner was listening. The mindless beast, makes play he's still a man. Jesus.
Finally, Fury leaves Loki to his solitude. The God or whatever continues to smirk at them through the screen, but at least he's shutting up for the moment.
The room is quiet for a moment, and she glances at Banner. Please don't be sad please don't have feelings please—
"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Banner grins.
Thank you. She silently moves Bruce Banner into the "tolerable" folder in her brain. Then she glances at Steve pointedly, as if to say See? This guy gets it.
Steve isn't looking at her, though. "Loki's gonna drag this out," he says. "Thor, what's his play?"
The other God-or-Whatever seems distracted, upset even. A far cry, she thinks, from the guy who tore up a plane, stole an entire person, and peaced out less than six hours ago. It's probably connected to Loki's theatrics, but she doesn't have enough context vis-a-vis their relationship to figure out the exact A-to-B causation between said theatrics and Thor's current expression. She files the observation away for future reference.
"He has an army called the Chitauri."
"Chitauri," Leila repeats. That sounds fake.
"Yes. What about the Chitauri?"
"It sounds fake."
"I can assure you, they're very real." Thor sounds annoyed at her skepticism, which is generally a red flag for her, but maybe it's just the general situation that has him on edge, so she lets it go for now. "And they're not of Asgard, or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth. In exchange, I suspect, for the tesseract."
There's a beat. Then: "I'll take your word for it." She smiles innocently under Thor's annoyed gaze.
Steve holds up a hand. "Wait, go back. You said an army? From outer space?" There's a very clear note of seriously? in his voice. Steve Rogers did not wake up from a 70-year nap only to find out aliens exist and are about to invade the Earth, Leila is pretty sure of that.
"So he's building another portal," Banner says. "That's what he needs Erik Selvig for."
"Selvig?" Thor perks up at the name.
"He's an astrophysicist," says Banner.
"He's a friend." For some reason, Thor hadn't struck Leila as the type of person to have friends. Maybe that's because all she's really seen of him is from when he-again-tore a plane open and stole a man from inside it.
"Loki has him under some kind of spell," Natasha interjects. "Along with one of ours."
She and Leila share a glance. It's been harder to almost-kind-of-forget about Clint since she admitted to herself that she kind of wants him to be alive, so she's definitely never doing that again.
"I wanna know why Loki let us take him," Steve says. "He's not leading an army from here."
Leila points at him in agreement. May as well get a headstart with the whole "be nicer to Rogers" thing at this moment, when he happens to be right about something. "I've met low-level gifteds with more fight in them. He shouldn't have gone down so easy."
"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag of cats. You could smell the crazy on him."
"If anything, being criminally insane just makes whatever hellish powers he has even more dangerous," Leila snaps.
For the briefest of seconds, she expects Clint to chime in with some dumb comment about how maybe they shouldn't trust Leila either. She even feels her arm muscles tense so she can reach over and punch his shoulder, before realizing he didn't say it, because he isn't there. She bites the inside of her cheek.
Nope. Definitely not caring about whether someone dies, ever again.
"Have care how you speak," Thor says. "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and my brother."
"He killed 80 people in 2 days," Natasha points out.
"...He's adopted."
Banner draws the conversation back to the science shit. "Iridium, what did they need the iridium for?"
"It's a stabilizing agent." The five of them-six of them if you include Maria Hill, who's been silent so far, if attentive-look over in unison at the sound of Stark's voice to find him walking in with Coulson. He'd been escorted off upon their arrival so he could take his armor off somewhere. Frankly, it took longer than she'd expected.
Tony says something inaudible to Coulson before splitting ways with him as Coulson goes to supervise the bridge, and Tony approaches the table.
"Means the portal won't collapse on itself like it did at SHIELD." He turns his attention to Thor-"No hard feelings, Point Break; you've got a mean swing"-and then pivots back to the iridium. "Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long as Loki wants."
Next, Tony turns to the crew. "Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the topsails…" Leila watches his antics with a smirk. He's funny, she'll give him that, although she's not sure the rest of their little board meeting agrees.
He turns back to the table after a monologue of smartassery and dives back into the science debate with no preamble. "The rest of the raw materials…"
Leila does her best to follow it, so when she feels she has enough of a layman's grasp on the situation, she stands up.
"Okay, so I'm done with this conversation," she says, cutting into the middle of Tony's sentence.
"Nobody's keeping you here," Tony shoots in her direction. "Just make sure to tell Principal Fury you're dropping out."
She ignores him. "Hill, did you get something from Loki that I can use?"
"We have hair strands and a small blood sample," Hill says. "We didn't want to risk a full biopsy; we just wanted him secured as quickly as possible."
That's fair. More than she was expecting, really. "I need someplace quiet." Sometimes when there's a lot going on, the helicarrier gets busy. Loud. Like when they're holding a God prisoner, for example. And she'd really like to get this done without interruption. One skull-splitting migraine is enough for the day, she thinks.
"You could use the lab," Banner suggests. "I won't be in for a bit, and I don't make much noise, believe it or not."
Leila glances at him. Definitely tolerable. "I'll hold you to that," she says, and follows Agent Hill out of the room.
To his credit, Banner is quiet. If it had just been the two of them, things probably would have been fine. Just beeping machinery, quiet footsteps. White noise.
Unfortunately, Stark-who has apparently been asked to stay on for the time being by Fury-has no such reservations.
Sure, at first it's okay. They talk to each other about more science shit she neither understands nor cares about. Easy to tune out, even if Stark's voice is louder than she'd prefer. Frankly, if she wasn't trying to focus on Loki's powers, she probably wouldn't mind at all. There are very few people Leila finds actively enjoyable to be around, but honestly, she gets a kick out of Stark. He's funny, and she enjoys watching someone give exactly as few fucks about SHIELD as she would like to. At any other moment, she probably wouldn't be annoyed, or at least less annoyed than her baseline level of annoyance. Timing really is everything.
"Keep it down," Leila says, too focused on the blood container in her hand to be snarky about it.
"Oh, sorry. I can see you're doing very important, world-changing science there, princess," Tony says in a stage whisper.
"Tony," Banner says, a gentle reprimand. Another point in his favor.
"I need to focus," she says.
"Is that what the bad guys do in the field? Just wait for you to genetically strip-search them?" Interestingly, he doesn't actually sound like he's mocking her this time—at least, not completely. He seems to actually be looking for an answer. He's curious.
She looks up despite herself. "With most gifteds, no. It usually only takes a second or two."
"Sorry, 'gifteds'? Is that what they're calling people like you?" At her affirmative facial expression, he adds "That's a stupid name."
"That's what I said!" She sits up, feeling vindicated. "Thank you!"
"So Loki…" Bruce says, presumably before she and Tony can start brainstorming better names for people with superpowers, which is, frankly, a reasonable concern.
"Loki is...different. You know that theory about how our brains are like supercomputers?"
"You mean that pop-biology shit from daytime talk shows?" Tony asks. "I've heard of it, yeah."
"Great. Pretend it's true. Some powers take up more space than others. Bigger files take longer to transfer."
"And that's a big file," Tony says, gesturing to the serum bottle in her hand.
She holds it up. "I don't even know if it'll fit."
"Well, you know, they make exercises for that."
Better than 'that's what she said,' at least. Props for that. "I can't imagine that information would ever have been relevant to you, Stark."
Stark just smirks, looking vaguely impressed, and turns back to Banner. Leila turns back to the vial, letting the conversation turn into background noise. This time, Tony does stay quiet–or at least, less loud.
"You know, you should come by..."
"Thanks, but last time..."
"Well, I promise a stress-free environment..."
There's a tiny zapping sound, and then footsteps, and then "Ow!" Leila looks up, annoyed. Stark's studying Banner curiously. "Nothing?"
"Hey!" The three of them turn their heads in unison to find Rogers standing in the doorway. "Are you nuts?"
Leila gets asked that question enough that for a moment, she assumes he's talking to her. There's a split second during which she tries to figure out what could have triggered it this time before realizing it was directed at Stark, who is now steadfastly ignoring Rogers in favor of interrogating Bruce about his coping mechanisms.
"Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"
Frankly, she hates every single one of those things, and yet any or all of them would be welcome at this moment if it would help her focus on Loki's powers and not the dick-measuring contest that she can feel brewing between Stark and Rogers. She'd leave the room herself, but Steve is blocking the door, and while it's not like she has qualms about pushing him out of her way (verbally or otherwise), he looks ready to kill, and she feels like drawing his attention is a good way to get dragged even deeper into the situation than she already is. So she stays. She can feel a headache coming on from her attention being split, and stops trying, rolling the bottle between her fingers as she tries to tune out the conversation.
And maybe it's good that she isn't entirely successful, because it means she picks up Stark's confession:
"I should probably look into that once my decryption programmer finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files."
It's like a record scratching in her head, and she snaps back to attention, saying "What?" at the same time Steve goes "I'm sorry, did you say…?"
Stark glances at her, and he seems mildly surprised, which is both reasonable and horrible. She hardly gives off the stickler-for-the-rules vibe that the good Captain does, which means it's obvious that her concern is not the same as his. Tony's a smart guy; he's going to put it together long before his program his program gets back to him. Hell, he's probably already put it together just in the last two seconds. Leila doesn't care about him finding out SHIELD's secrets. She cares about him finding out hers.
And if Stark is anything like Natasha told her he is, the fact that she doesn't want him to know something is only going to make him want to know it more. That's why he went after SHIELD's files to begin with, right? Because he knew they were hiding something.
Leila's not sure if any of this is written on her face as Stark looks at her. Her mind is short-circuiting; she's lost the ability to regulate her body language for the moment. She has no idea what he sees, and he doesn't tell her. He breaks eye contact after just a moment and turns back to Steve.
She runs through possibilities as they argue, keeping an ear open to get a bead on Tony's intentions in hacking SHIELD. He mostly seems interested in what SHIELD is hiding from him, specifically, regarding the tesseract, specifically. Her own history falls firmly outside that purview, and he's smart enough that his algorithm shouldn't pick up any irrelevancies. The only way he finds her past is if he's looking for it, and she doesn't know why he would, but giving people the benefit of the doubt has never worked out particularly well for her in the past.
She doesn't look up until she's called to do so.
"Whittaker, what do you think?"
She looks up to see Tony and Steve looking at her expectantly. Bruce mostly looks glad he's not the one being pulled into it anymore.
As a SHIELD agent, she has a responsibility to tell a superior about this conversation. But that's not the vibe she gives off either, and it would only make her look more suspicious-to Stark and, on the other side, maybe even to Fury himself, which would be another problem on her already heavy plate for the day. And she doubts anything can be done in time to prevent Stark from getting his stupid eyes on the files anyway.
"I don't care," she says sharply. "Just leave me out of it."
Steve studies her for a moment, then turns back to Stark. "Just find the cube," he says, and stalks off.
Leila stands up to do the same-maybe she can find somewhere quieter to actually do her job-and she's at the doorway when Tony calls her back.
"Hey, Princess,"
She turns, crossing her arms.
"Don't worry. I'm only interested in what SHIELD's hiding. Any dirty little secrets of yours that I come across are safe with me. Scout's honor."
This could mean any number of things-a joke at her expense, a threat, a genuine reassurance-but whatever the intent behind it, it does let her shoulders relax a little. At least she knows what's going on in Stark's mind now. At least she doesn't have to wonder about that particular puzzle piece. It's enough to let her joke about it, anyway.
She smiles. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Stark. I'm an open book. Ask anyone."
She walks away before he can say anything, but not before she sees him smirk in response, Bruce still looking flustered behind him.