Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Fifteen

WHAM!

Leila feels her neck snap as a chitauri launches her into a nearby building. There's only a moment of numbness before the nerves heal, the vertebrae clicking back into place. The rest of her body follows suit, and she gets back onto her feet. The chitauri that put her there is lurking over her now, and she throws one of her knives into its throat.

It crumples, and she runs over, watching the surrounding chitauri carefully even as she dodges them. It's something she first noticed holding the bridge with Clint and Natasha. The chitauri seem coordinated, somehow.

Their movement isn't totally human, so she might be imagining it, but she could swear that when the knife cut through her chitauri's neck, the others started twitching.

She pulls her knife out of the chitauri and starts running back to the street when she hears Tony over comms.

"Not so fast, Princess."

She pauses. Staying in one place makes her a sitting duck, but there's only a few of them surrounding her just then, and really, better to handle them then and there than bring them back into Natasha and Steve's fray.

"This better be important, Stark," she says as she plunges a dagger into the eye of the nearest chitauri. It lets out a sound between a roar and a hiss, throwing its head back, and she takes the opening, cutting into its throat.

"It is. I'm about to fly into the belly of the beast. I need you with me. Or your eyes, anyway."

It takes her a moment to remember the goggles atop her head. Right. "Why?"

"Call it a hunch. You've got that eidetic memory thing, and if there's anything in there worth remembering, I'd rather not have to look at it more than once."

The last of her chitauri fall. She glances at her arm, a deep scratch from her last kill already healing. "I'm not in the mood for sustaining anything fatal right now."

She looks up, watching the red speck in the sky that is Tony Stark in that moment.

"Find me a quiet place."

__________

She feels stupid, crouching down between an abandoned mazda and a dumpster. Like she should be doing something more. She knows it's not the same thing as actually hiding from a fight, but mentally, it's hard to distance herself from that. Which sucks ass, because the damsel hiding in the corner is something she's been trying to distance herself from for her entire adult life.

She pulls the goggles down and hits the button on the side. A screen flickers, and suddenly she's watching the city from above, with several holographic screens in front of her.

"Hello, Agent Whittaker," a male voice with an English accent says pleasantly. "Thank you for joining--"

"Not now, Jarvis." Stark's voice is loud and clear in her ear. She could hear him on comms just fine, but this is like he's standing right next to her.

"You ready?" he asks, already flying towards the chitauri leviathan.

She takes a breath, turning a switch in her mind. The rapid learning is in high gear now.

"Hit it."

__________

The inside of the leviathan is easily one of the most disgusting things Leila has ever seen, and she's seen a lot of disgusting things.

It's a sort of combination between the organic and the synthetic--there's clearly something alive about it, but the machinery is embedded so seamlessly into it that she can't tell which one came first. If it's a robot-made-alive or a life-made-mechanical.

The big thing, though, is the lightning. Small lightning bolts seem to go off all around, flickering on and off. This, oddly, is the part that seems the most alive.

And there, right in the center of its back, is where the most lightning seems to exist. Something that looks sort of like a brain is set in the middle of it all, not really moving anywhere, but undulating enough to look alive. The lightning all seems to be either going to that spot, or coming from it, radiating to and fro in gentle electric waves that turn frantic a moment after they enter as the chitauri seems to recognizes a foreign body.. The brain-or-whatever's movements seem to pick up as well.

She wonders if it's panicking because of their--well, Stark's--presence, tearing through it. She wonders if he noticed the change, too, or if it's the rapid learning in her head picking up on it. It's hard to tell sometimes.

This all happens within three or four seconds, and then suddenly she's out in the sunlight again. Chitauri guts slide off her--no, Stark's helmet, clearing her vision. The city is just as they left it, and she makes a point to look at the chitauri on the ground. "Jarvis, zoom in on the chitauri."

"Hey, backseat driver, who's calling the shots around here?" Stark complains. He doesn't stop Jarvis from following her command, though, and they watch the chitauri on the ground twitch as the leviathan starts falling.

"Stark, did you see what I just saw?"

"The neurological center?"

She's too curious to call him a nerd over it. "Yeah, and now this. I knew it. There's a hierarchy. They're connected."

"So what's connecting them?"

Leila pulls the goggles back onto her head. She's dizzy for a moment, readjusting to her own body, her own position on the ground. "I don't know," she says, looking up. The portal in the sky is still going strong, even if the flow of chitauri coming through has slowed a bit. "But whatever it is, I'm betting Loki wouldn't bring it anywhere we could reach it."

"Uh, guys?"

Leila jumps to her feet at the sound of Steve's voice, running back onto the street. She sees what he sees: the chitauri leviathan, still alive, but clearly about to die, twitching and groaning as it starts to fall;

The surrounding chitauri, still twitching themselves, putting up a fight but clearly struggling;

The brief flicker of hope this all creates;

And then the portal, suddenly flooded by a new hoard of chitauri, accompanied by their very own leviathan, just as big and ugly and destructive as the last.

God. For a split second, she thought they really had a chance. She really thought she and Stark had found the achilles' heel of this invasion.

She decides to put the whole "beating herself up" thing on hold for the moment as she reaches the street, coming to a stop behind Natasha and Steve, who are both looking up. She doesn't need to see their faces to know what their expressions say.

Natasha turns. "Guys, none of this is gonna mean a damn thing if we don't get this portal closed down."

"Our biggest guns couldn't touch it," Steve replies.

"Well, maybe it's not about guns." Nat glances up at Stark Tower.

Leila studies her. "If you wanna get up there, you'd need a ride." She can't possibly be thinking what Leila thinks she's thinking.

"I have a ride. I could use a boost, though." She turns to Steve.

She is, Leila realizes, thinking exactly what Leila thinks she's thinking.

"Romanoff. You want me to take this one?" she says pointedly. Natasha is amazing, but she's not indestructible.

"I got it," she says. "It'll be fun."

Part of Leila wants to argue, but she decides against it. Her time working with Strike Team Delta has taught her to trust her teammates' instincts. If Nat has a clear idea of what she's going to do once she's in the air--better to just let her do it then have to be talked through it herself.

"Cap'n," Nat says.

Steve angles his shield accommodatingly in response.

Natasha looks around, times it, and then runs, takes a boost from a car, and lands her feet on Steve's shield. Steve boosts her into the air, and she grabs onto a flying chariot, which promptly pulls her away.

"Romanoff," Leila says softly, "you tiny Russian genius."