Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Sixteen

The downside to the whole rapid learning thing is that it comes with an uncontrollable focus. Leila can't turn her brain off, she can't go into autopilot, even if she's fighting the same creatures in the same way minute after minute.

It is, frankly, exhausting.

She keeps going anyway, regardless of how futile it feels. She tries to glance around her, keeping an eye on the chitauri corpses around her to remind herself that she is, actually, making progress. Allegedly.

"I miss when killing these guys was fun," Leila says as she kicks a chitauri in the chest, sending it stumbling into another until they tumble over like a row of dominos. They scramble back up quickly.

"This is fun to you?" she hears over comms.

"No, I just said it wasn't anymore. Listen better, Barton."

"Whatever. Captain, the bank on Madison and 42nd--they cornered a lot of civilians in there."

Steve throws his shield, sending it tearing through a line of chitauri.

"Whittaker, you wanna handle it?"

Given her very recent, very vocal endorsement of the joys of murder, she's mildly surprised that he sees fit to leave her unsupervised, but she's certainly not about to complain.

"I'm on it."

**********

When Leila arrives at the bank, the fact that she can't see inside very well is a tell in and of itself. The electricity to the building must've been cut off, because there's no light from inside, and the sunlight that could illuminate it is being blocked by chitauri figures--three of them, as far as she can tell, significantly taller than the ones she's been dealing with on the bridge, hovering over the crowd of civilians.

If this were a bank robbery, she'd know exactly what to do, how to sneak around and into the building, what shots to take and when. Robbers are human; they can be tricked, surprised, lied to, negotiated with.

Chitauri are different. Their entire job is to wreak havoc, and they do it systematically and with cutting efficiency. She could almost respect it if they weren't so busy trying to kill her.

She moves closer, hovering near the doorway. They haven't seen her yet. Good.

These new chitauri are equipped with what look sort of like swords to her--she honestly can't tell if those are crossguards that cover their wrists like sockets, or if what she thinks are swords are actually just extensions of the arms.

She can't take all of them at once, not without doing some preliminary damage first, so she looks around for something she can use. There's a fire in a dumpster next to a car that is, itself, not on fire. It triggers an idea. You don't need much to turn a fire extinguisher into a flamethrower, and everything she does need can probably be lifted from a nearby car. There's definitely a fire extinguisher inside the building--

But it'd be hard to get to without being seen, and there's a decent chance it's already been damaged.

Okay. What else? A molotov cocktail isn't off the table, but she'd have to make more than one before throwing them, and she's not sure how practical that is, or how much time she has.

She turns back to the bank and sees the nearest chitauri hovering over a what she assumes to be family of civilians--a man, a woman and a little girl who bears a resemblance to the two of them. The chitauri is raising it's sword, or arm, or whatever, ready to attack.

The thing is, Leila knows, she knows, that if she focuses on taking down the chitauri, it'll benefit civilians in the city as a whole. She knows that, she was trained for that and she's lived by that. Protect via offense, not defense. Crowd control is valuable, but it's not her job, specifically. Breaking every bone in her body might be temporary, but it's still six seconds she's not focused on fighting aliens, and the scale she's been using ever since she joined SHIELD is telling her it's not worth it.

But God, Captain fucking America is down the street and he trusted her implicitly when he sent her to protect these people and for some reason that trust matters to her. For some reason she's seeing these people the way he does. She's registering the fear in their eyes, and she doesn't like it.

She moves fast, diving in front of the chitauri just as it thrusts its sword towards the family, taking the hit right to the chest.

Awesome.

The thing is, she can feel her heartbeat stop as it's punctured. It's an odd feeling, being alive enough to feel herself die. There's still enough blood in her brain to let her pull out a dagger and slice the hand off the chitauri, disconnecting it from it's weapon, and then pull it out of her chest and throw it aside. She feels her heart start to regrow, and then start pumping blood again. There's a moment when her heart has started beating but isn't totally healed where she feels blood splatter all over her suit.

It also splatters all over the chitauri, which seems--if she's reading it's body language right--confused, and she takes the opportunity to shove the arm-sword through its chest.

It falls to the ground.

Leila turns to the other two chitauri, who are staring at her. She pulls out her knives as if daring them to come closer. They don't take the dare, to her surprise; they just run, crashing through the bank windows, tearing the few remaining pieces of glass from the edges.

Interesting. It's possible they're being called back by whatever controls it, but it seems to her that they were running from her, specifically--looking at what just happened, at the fact that she just sustained a wound that should have killed her and walked away without a scratch--and making the tactical decision to not fight her. Which would imply that they do have some kind of independent sentience. She files this away for future use.

She glances around the room, looking out for any other chitauri with unkicked-asses, before she starts to leave.

Then she hears a small voice, and for some reason, she stops.

"Are you okay?" The little girl asks her, even as her parents try to pull her away. Most of the civilians have started flooding out of the room now.

She stares for a long moment. It's been too long since she interacted with kids, and she tends to avoid thinking about when she did. Or tries to avoid it, anyway. How do you talk to kids, again? Do they even understand English at this age? Can they speak but not understand? Or is it the other way around?

"I'm okay, kid," she says finally. "Now you go...be okay too."