Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Four

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 she 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.