Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Five

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 a little 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.