Chapter Seven

"Talk to me again and I'll use that card to slit your throat."

The on-call room is a lot quieter than the lab, which she did not anticipate. Prior experience would indicate that it should be busy. It had seemed counter-intuitive to her when she'd first joined SHIELD, but when there's a lot going on in the helicarrier, the on-call room is usually packed, the door revolving, carrying agents in and out as people work in rapid-cycling shifts, trying to get whatever rest they can in between.

Today, though, it's relatively quiet. There are a few nameless techs lounging around in the corner, playing some kind of card game, but that's it. Maybe it's because, despite the novelty of Loki's arrival, there's not actually much that can be done about the situation. Leila shoots a sharp glare at the other agents to warn them against bothering her before tucking herself into a chair in the opposite corner and tuning everything out.

She pulls the bottle out of her pocket and examines it warily, holding it at eye level for a brief moment. It feels like holding a bottle of cough medicine, somehow-it's something she knows she has to consume in some way, but very emphatically does not want to. No, that's too mundane. This is like….like being a puzzle piece and having someone try to force you to fit another one. It just feels strange and viscerally violating and wrong wrong wrong -

She slams her eyes shut and connects, once again, to Loki's powers.

It takes a moment to get through her own barriers. The last few times she tried to get in touch with these abilities, it resulted in stress and headaches and anger, and her mind has apparently decided that the correlation is causation and is making the executive decision to lock out the abilities themselves.

But there's another subconscious, natural force at play. Leila's abilities always seem to be drawn to others'. Once she gets close enough, it's hard to stop the two from connecting, much like how magnets-once they reach a certain point of closeness-move towards each other of their own accord. Taking abilities takes focus, but copying them...it's almost too easy. That's how she discovered her powers—when she realized she'd accidentally picked up a handful of other people's.

This isn't exactly the same—she can't just mindlessly duplicate these abilities like she did then. They're too vast, too complicated, and different than anything she's seen before. But that magnetic feeling, drawing her mind towards Loki's powers, is still very much there. She leans into that, and soon enough, her powers collide with his.

She recognizes the feeling from the quinjet: vast and slippery, constantly moving. But that's all she recognizes. Usually taking powers takes a moment of connection and then she's let go, back to herself, changed but with her feet on the ground.

Not now. Not with this. This one doesn't set her back on her feet. It doesn't even hold her hand, like she expected, knowing it would take longer than usual. These abilities seem to pull her in-

In where? She doesn't know. She doesn't feel like she's in any one place. She has the vague sense that she's still physically on the helicarrier, but her mind, her soul if she has one, are not present. It's like she's been sucked into the powers themselves, and that twisting feeling she sensed is now surrounding her, like being trapped in a nest of snakes, like being drowned, wave after wave crashing over her, every time she thinks she can breathe it buries her again, like quicksand, like being pulled into the vacuum of space, unable to breathe, unable to think, blood boiling and freezing at the same time, surrounded by this vast, white smothering emptiness, filling her lungs, clouding her sight, and under it all this familiar sense of cosmic correctness–

Her eyes snap open, and suddenly she's back in the helicarrier. She has no idea how long she's been stuck in...whatever the actual fuck that was. Was it seconds? Minutes? That feels right...no. Hours? Days? Also both right and wrong. Leila's always been good at gauging time, a benign knack she's held since long before she discovered her powers, and the sudden lack of that ability to center herself is...well, it's one of the least disconcerting things about the entire situation, but maybe that's why she focuses on it, why suddenly it's all she can think about, figuring out what time it is-

She can't even run on autopilot like she usually does, her mind is moving too fast to grab on to any one single protocol. She takes a deep breath-and then another, and then a third, reassuring herself that she can breathe-and then walks herself through the process the way she would a child.

How do you tell the time? You look at a clock. Is there a clock in here? She looks around, but her vision is blurry for some reason. Maybe a watch. She looks down at her wrist. It looks like there's something attached to it. She picks it up, mechanically, and holds it at eye level. Yeah, that's a watch.

It's been...she doesn't know. She can't remember when she came into the room.

Okay. 5:38. That feels like a couple minutes. That feels right. Not right-but-wrong. Just right. Okay. She can figure out time again. Good. Why is her vision blurry? Why is she so lightheaded?

She reaches up to her neck and feels her pulse. Her heart's beating rapidly; that explains it. If she wasn't immune to injury, she'd want to see a doctor about it. Honestly, she's not convinced she shouldn't anyway, since it's a day of firsts, and she can't rule out the possibility that Loki's powers somehow negated her own existing ones.

She wants to close her eyes, but there's still a part of her that's terrified that she's going to go back into that...place, so she keeps them open instead, staring at the floor as she breathes in and out slowly. She tries to think happy thoughts, things that genuinely relax her. Long showers. Thunderstorms. Train rides. Bodega cats. Really ugly novelty keychains.

Okay. That's better. She can see again.

When she looks up, she's suddenly aware of how cold she feels. Her face feels clammy, as if a fever's just broken.

But she's aware. She's lucid. All her faculties are functional.

What now?

Well. There's no instruction manual for what just happened, so she has to proceed as though it didn't, as though the duplication went as expected. What would she do, if it had? If she'd just taken a gifted's powers, without knowing what they actually were, in a lab setting (as it were) as opposed to a combat one?

She'd explore. She'd try to figure out what the abilities were, how they worked.

She doesn't want to do that now, but she has to know. Not just because it's her job. Whatever these powers are, whatever this thing is, it's inside her now. If she lets go of them without understanding them first, she'll just have to take them again, which she emphatically does not want to do. But she sure as hell can't keep them without understanding them, either.

So she reaches out. Tries to decipher the changes these powers have made to her. Tries to figure out what she's now capable of. It's like reaching inside herself with a microscope, trying to find anything foreign-

There. Strange. It feels like it...clashes. Not with her other powers. With itself. Like two genetic elements sloppily stitched together by a high school home ec student. They don't match, they don't quite fit.

She remembers, for a moment, that dichotomy of right-and-wrongness she'd felt when she'd copied the powers, and quickly pushes the thought away.

Let's see….what does she know about Loki's abilities already? Sometimes pattern matching helps. General enhanced abilities-stamina, speed, agility, etc. Illusions...there they are. They feel slightly off-kilter, like they weigh lighter or heavier than they should, but they're there. Something...cold. Cryo? Maybe. Then something that feels...sort of slippery, in the same venue of the illusions-

Wait, what the fuck?

There's that something else again, the other half of the powerset, the one that was grafted on, and she can't get a read on it, but it feels unsettlingly foreign.

She sighs, stands up, and slips the blood vial back into her pocket. Back to the lab. Well, a lab.

She's almost to the door when one of the techs from the corner calls out "You okay?"

She turns her head. The one who spoke seems innocent enough; his buddy seems amused. For some reason, it makes her blood boil, and were she not in such a hurry, she might press the issue.

"Talk to me again and I'll use that card to slit your throat," she says instead, and walks out.

The helicarrier holds more than one lab. There's three that Leila knows of, although she wouldn't be surprised to learn about a fourth. The one currently occupied by Banner and Stark is the smallest one, which is presumably why Fury put them there. No fewer resources to hinder their work, just less floor space.

No. There's another lab on the port side, larger and probably busier, which is why Leila didn't go there to duplicate Loki's powers. But it's the one she seeks out now, because it'll require less explanation as to what she's doing.

Sure enough, the lab is busier than usual, with several handfuls of scientists in identical white lab coats gathered in clusters around...whatever. Leila scans the room, zeroes in on one she recognizes, and grabs him by the arm.

Dr. Jahan Shirazi seems reluctant to turn around from whatever nerd shit he's looking at, but does so anyway, his eyes widening slightly when he sees her. Leila never comes into the lab unless explicitly asked. Until now.

Shirazi glances behind her at the door, as if looking for someone else who can explain her sudden presence, before turning back to her. "I-sorry, did Fury send you down here? He didn't-"

"No," she cuts him off. She releases his arm, now confident that she has his attention. "I came here myself. I need you to get me into the Janus System."

"You're not cleared for that."

"I know that, hence my asking you to get me in." She narrows her eyes at him. "It's an emergency."

"Look, Agent–"

She reaches out, grabs his arm again, and pulls him away from the crowd, then hisses "I copied Loki's powers" through gritted teeth, digging her nails into him for good measure.

Shirazi's eyes go wide, and then narrow, finally understanding.

"Okay," he says. "That's an emergency."

Leila watches with arms crossed, bouncing her heel impatiently as Shirazi logs into the system. Part of her feels like it's stupid that she doesn't have clearance to do it herself, given that the program was written around her, specifically-but then again, she can't fault SHIELD for wanting to limit her access whenever possible. It's not like she's standing there out of some righteous conviction in their mission, or whatever.

Shirazi steps aside when the opening interface pops up, and Leila steps up to the screen. There's a life-size outline of a hand in the center of it, sort of like the lines around where the body was at a crime scene. She lays her hand on the outline, matching it carefully.

A light moves down the screen as it scans, and then the words "SNOW WHITE: IDENTITY CONFIRMED" appear above her hand. A moment later, in smaller text, the words "please do not remove hand from screen" come up. This is also stupid-she knows what to do, none of them are going to forget-but she ignores that, too.

It scans her several more times, in different colors, looking at different data sets, and then tells her to remove her hand. She does so, and steps back.

A small rectangle pops out of the side of a machine, the same way a disk drive would-still attached, but ejected. There's a hole in the center. She slips her finger into it, and there's a sharp prick before the screen tells her to remove her finger. She does that, too, watching idly as the small wound heals, while the machine scrubs her current DNA against prior samples-the first one they took when she joined SHIELD, one they took after forcing her to let go of all her abilities during the preliminary tests after the academy, and various others taken while holding different power sets.

It's a way to try to gauge what abilities might be hiding. They usually do it as a matter of course when she takes new powers-she reports to this room after every debriefing for every mission, sometimes even when nothing about her powers have changed, just out of thoroughness-but it's rarely been necessary to her using or understanding them practically.

She and Shirazi lean over the screen in unison, waiting for the system to tell them anything. It seems to sit on "Analyzing…" for ages.

Finally, the words "Analysis Complete" flash briefly on the screen before several data sets pop up-some boxes with text, a few diagrams. Most of the screen is taken up by an enlarged image of a strand of DNA.

Leila steps back, letting Shirazi handle it from there. He steps forward, using the touchscreen to manipulate the diagram, turning it this way and that. He brings up various dialogs, reading whatever jargon they have for him. It seems to take forever, but then, finally, he steps back and looks at her.

"Well?"

"I don't know," he says. "I've never seen anything like it."

"You've seen Asgardian DNA, right? In New Mexico."

"Yeah. Whatever you took, it's not a match. It's...there's a strain of something mildly similar, but then there's something else-"

"Like two power sets spliced together?"

"Exactly."

Well. That's vindicating, if a cold comfort.

Leila drags a hand through her hair and glances at Shirazi again. Despite his calm, professional tone, he's looking at her like she's a bomb about to go off. He's not literally holding his hands up and backing away slowly, but his facial expression tells her he's thinking about it.

She can't blame him, frankly. She has no idea what this, this thing is inside her, but whenever she stops to think about it, it feels wrong, it feels like sandpaper on the inside of her skin, she wants to tear herself open to get it out of her.

"Sorry I couldn't be more help, kid," Shirazi says, and he sounds sincere, although she doubts that regret is out of altruistic concern for her well-being.

She slams her eyes shut.

"I'm gonna go talk to Fury."