Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Seven

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 andwrong 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--

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--