Queen's Gambit

Queen’s Gambit

“The touch of a hand lit the fuse

Of a chain-reaction of counter moves

To assess the equation of you

Checkmate, I couldn’t lose”

-Mastermind // Taylor Swift

Leila’s having the dream again. 

It’s the one she keeps having, ever since the Patrice Joh mission--the one that gave her her healing ability. It’s not the kind of nightmare that wakes you up with a jolt, breathing hard and covered in a cold sweat. Leila’s been relatively successful at burying the demons that bring those dreams. 

No, this is the kind of bad dream that you have to peel yourself out of and scrape off your mind. The kind that leaves a kind of psychic residue for the rest of the day. The kind of dream that settles on your shoulders with you as you slip back into the waking world. 

She can never remember the details; they slip away as she wakes up and she’s left with nothing but the memory of sensory details. The smell of smoke, the acrid taste of it in her lungs. The satisfying, electric feeling of taking a new ability for the first time. The color pink, a bright white light, and always, always this medical beeping sound, steady, too steady, like the heart monitor of a brain-dead patient.  

Except this time it’s ringing. Why is it ringing? That’s not right. It--

Her eyes flutter open in realization to find her phone buzzing on the nightstand. 

She sits up and catches it on the last ring, with just a moment to glimpse the caller ID. 

“Agent Whittaker,” Fury says, before she can say anything. 

“Good morning, Director,” she says, unable to fully shake the annoyance from her voice. Not that she resents being woken up from that dream, especially, but she does resent being woken up this early in general. Which is not really fair to Fury--waking her up when he needs her is, in fact, well within his rights as her boss--

That’s another thing. She usually gets the call from someone else. Hill, Brock Rumlow. Coulson, before he...well. The point is, if Fury’s contacting her directly, it must be important. 

“I have an assignment for you,” Fury says. 

You fucking better . “And here I thought this was a social call.”

“I want you to reach out to Captain Rogers and convince him to run some tests with us to see if we can replicate the super soldier serum.”

“Have an intern do it.”

“We also need you to copy those powers during those tests.”

“Have an intern do that, too.” 

He scoffs. 

“Not to question your undoubtedly endless wisdom,” Leila says, “but why am I the designated Captain America Whisperer, exactly?”

“Because I, in my endlesswisdom, said so.”

She sighs, pushing her hair back idly. She shouldn’t be surprised. The day Fury explains any of his decisions to her is the same day hell freezes over. Which, incidentally, is the same day she manages to get Steve Rogers back onto the hamster wheel. 

“You realize he’s not going to want to submit to testing,” she says, as if she’s going to change his mind. “Historically, I’m told he didn’t especially enjoy being a lab rat. For some reason.”

There’s a pause, and Leila can’t be sure, but she imagines Fury rolling his good eye. 

“Just make it happen, Agent,” he says. “You have 36 hours.” Click . 

She sighs and sets the phone down. 

“What’d Fury want?” Brock Rumlow asks, sitting up next to her.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” she tells him. 

“Then you should talk more quietly.”

She looks over at him. He’s still propped up on the bed by his elbows, lazily blinking himself awake. Rumlow has many assets, as Leila’s learned over the past month, and her thin sheets are doing nothing to conceal them. 

God, Fury really does have shitty timing. 

She sighs, flopping back onto the bed dramatically. “Apparently I have to go talk Rogers into letting us run some labs.”

He looks down at her and smiles. “Good luck with that, kid.”

Leila doesn’t bother stopping at the address Fury sent her. If she’s right about Rogers, he’s going to be exactly where she found him the first time. 

She’s almost right. Gleason’s Gym is empty of customers when she gets there at ten, with no defrosted super soldiers in sight. The man she assumes owns the place tells her that Steve usually comes by at 10:30. And then again at 2:30, and then again at 8. Frankly, she’s surprised he ever leaves the place at all. If she were him, she wouldn’t want to stop punching things, either. 

She could leave and come back, but she decides to wait. About five minutes in, she gets bored of her phone. So she takes off her jacket, jewelry, and heels, and starts wrapping her hands. 

Rogers comes in at 10:38. 

“You’re late,” Leila tells him without looking away from the punching bag. 

Rogers doesn’t seem especially fazed by her presence. “Sorry,” he quips, “did we have an appointment?”

“Not one that you knew about,” she says, throwing one last punch. “So I’ll let it slide this time.”

She turns to him, crossing her arms. He’s not letting her interrupt his routine; he’s already wrapping his hands, sitting on a bench by the wall when he looks up and asks, “so what’s the occasion?”

“SHIELD wants you to come in for some tests,” she says. 

He’s not surprised by this, either. 

“Took you long enough,” he sighs, with a sort of weathered resignation. 

“Is that a yes?”

“Haven’t I spent enough time as a lab rat?” he asks, glancing up at her. There’s that self-deprecating smile playing on his lips. If Steve Rogers takes himself as seriously as the rest of the world does, he puts on a good show of pretending not to do so. She smiles back a little. 

“Yeah,” she says, “but that was what, like eighty years ago?”

“Seventy.”

“Exactly. They say you should have a physical every year, so you’re seventy years behind.”

Steve shakes his head. “I had one when they defrosted me,” he says, surprisingly nonchalant about the whole thing. “And you seem especially invested in my signing on,” he adds. 

“Fury gave me this mission personally. So if I don’t get you signed on, I’m letting him down. Which means if you say no, you’re making me let him down. So you’re letting him down. And he did fish you out of an iceberg.”

“And in return I helped you save New York.”

“Oh, just New York? Being modest, are we?”

He looks down, and shakes his head, grinning, and finishes wrapping his hands before standing up. The movement is fluid, easy, but weighted somehow. He really does move like he’s carrying the heavens on his shoulders. It annoyed her before, but now she studies him as he stretches his arm behind his neck, looking for an in. 

“I’ll fight you for it,” she says impulsively. His arms drop to his side as he looks at her curiously. 

She gestures to the boxing ring behind her. “Sparring match, right now. If I win, you have to let SHIELD stick you with needles this Saturday. If you win, I’ll leave you alone and never darken your doorstep again.”

“Really. Just like that.” He looks her over like he’s sizing her up. He’s considering it. 

Leila extends a hand, her small finger extended. “Pinky promise,” she says, with a smile and an ironic sort of innocence.

He meets her eyes, and she wonders what he finds there that makes him shake his head and say “Alright.”

Despite having been woken early, Leila’s in a decent mood at that point, so when Steve offers her a hand up the stairs to the ring, she takes it. She ducks under the ropes to join him on the platform and rolls her shoulders in preparation. 

“So how’s this work?” Steve asks, handing her a pair of boxing gloves. “What are the ground rules?”

“We do anything short of actually killing each other,” she replies, “and the first person to stay down for ten seconds loses.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t die.”

For a brief moment, her mind flashes back to Stuttgart, sitting up on the cool concrete, and that vast, empty darkness she’d come out of. 

She shakes it off and smiles. “Then I guess I’ll have to take it easy on you.”

“So,” Leila says, dodging Steve’s punch, “you still don’t trust SHIELD.” 

“Can you blame me?” Steve dodges Leila’s kick, making her lose her balance. She falls into a roll and stands up behind him, and gets in a kick to the small of his back before he can turn around. He stumbles into the ropes, but doesn’t fall.

Ordinarily, she would’ve gone after him again before he could bounce back, but she’s more interested in reading him than she is in beating him. He’s seen her fight; he knows she can hold

her own, and he knows she won’t hold back. Because he won’t go back on his word, and he knows that she’ll hold him to it.  

He won’t admit it to her, but he’s considering it. 

“Nope,” she says, popping the p at the end, and this, finally, surprises him, allowing her to get a punch in. She comes at him hard, and his head snaps back, only to turn back to her as if nothing happened. 

“I’m just saying, SHIELD isn’t all bad, you know,” Leila says, dodging another punch. “You’d be helping to catch a lot of bad guys.”

“Such as?”

Such as myself , she thinks. 

“War criminals, terrorist cells,” she says instead. “Jaywalkers. You know, real sick sons-of-bitches.”

“All that from a few tests, huh?”

So he did catch her sleight of hand. Interesting. He doesn’t seem mad, though; he’s smirking at her realization. Entertained, but not any more guarded than he was. 

“You’d be surprised,” she says, and feints right. He moves to dodge and she hooks a foot behind his knee, and with a quick wrench she’s pulled his leg out from under him. He falls onto his back. 

She falls to her knees, one of which lands on his chest, keeping him pinned. He doesn’t fight her; he looks up at her like he’s trying to read her. He doesn’t like having to do that. 

“Cards on the table,” she says, pinning his hands to his side, and something in his eyes changes. Rogers might know how to recognize word games, but he clearly doesn’t like playing them. 

That has to be very boring for him, but it might work to her advantage here. 

“Fury isn’t asking for your hand in marriage. It’s one day. We run some tests, and you can keep thinking about whether you want to help us vis-a-vis aforementioned bad guys.”

He looks up at her, studying her--they’re so close, she realizes, and breathing hard--and then suddenly breaks free of her grasp and flips them over, pinning her the way she had him moments ago. He’s not being nearly as rough with her and she was with him. Maybe because he’s a gentleman, but she thinks it’s also because he’s not fully committed to the competition. 

“You know, they tried to replicate the serum in the forties, too,” he says. 

She smiles up at him, vaguely impressed. She could try to break free, but she can already tell she’s won. 

“The forties didn’t have me.”

Steve studies her one last moment and then releases her wrists and sits up. “Fine. I’m in.” He stands up and holds a hand out to her; she takes it and gets to her feet. 

“You changed your hair,” he says, and the sudden shift in subject takes her a moment to catch up with. She’d been contemplating changing her pink streaks for months, but after New York it felt, somehow, like a good time to change, and she’d replaced the fuschia highlights with a lighter baby pink. 

She studies him for a moment, trying to decide how she feels about his noticing the change. The alarm bells that go off when she’s being manipulated are starting up, but she can’t figure out what he’d get out of pointing it out. 

“Thank you for noticing,” she says finally, smiling despite herself. Then she dusts herself off delicately and steps under the ropes. 

“Fort Falsworth. 10 AM. This Saturday. We’ll send you the coordinates,” she says, grabbing her jacket off the bench. She pulls her earrings out of the pocket and looks back at him as she puts them on. He’s still studying her, trying to make sense of her. Good luck, buddy . 

She smiles. “Don’t be late this time.”