Chapter 6
It’s twilight when she wakes up.
She’d managed to get Steve to agree to letting her call her contacts before she fell asleep. Not that she wouldn’t have done it anyway, but listening to him bitch about it as she got voicemail after voicemail might’ve actually made her snap, so it’s still for the best.
Now, though, she’s the one getting the call; she’s woken by the feel of her phone ringing in her pocket. It’s kind of unsettling how easy it was to fall asleep with him there, but she ignores it and pulls her phone out of her pocket, hitting accept. “You’re on speaker, Vira.”
“I got a hold of Fury,” Vira says breathlessly on the other end. “I mean, he got a hold of me, but I told him what happened. Where are you?”
“We’re five minutes out,” Steve replies, not looking away from the road.
“You were right. Harker has chitauri tech. We think he’s used it to enhance one of his students’ projects but we don’t know which one.”
“Which one is most conveniently explosive?” Leila asks, and there’s the sound of typing before Vira responds.
“One kid made a fission generator,” she says finally. “But it’s pretty small.”
Leila thinks for a moment, tries to place what chitauri tech is capable of, and then remembers suddenly, the way that all the chitauri in new york were linked. With each other, with their weapons--it was like fighting one single entity, with all the cost and benefits that came with it.
“But if he built a bigger one, he could connect it to the smaller one. Blow up one, blow up the other.”
“That means we have to stop the bigger one,” Steve says, glancing at her. “Like Stark did with the missile.”
“Vira, do we know where the bigger generator would be?”
More typing. “There’s a huge energy signature coming from the boiler room,” she says. “It’s in the basement on the other side of campus.”
“That’s where Harker will be,” Leila says.
“And the generator,” Steve adds.
“We can only hope,” Vira says dryly. “SHIELD is on their way with evac, but they won’t be there in time for diffusion. The fair started ten minutes ago, it could go off at any minute. Disarming the explosion is on you.”
The parking lot is crowded when they arrive, cars packed like sardines alongside each other, a monument to the prestige of the exhibit. Leila would be surprised if there was even one spot available. Steve doesn’t even try, just parks across the street, cuts the engine and takes off running. She follows.
There are a few security guards walking the perimeter, and she pulls out another fake cred, this time FBI. Security guards usually don’t have the same God complex that cops do, she’s found.
They pass a guard and she flashes him a badge. “Where’s the boiler room?” she demands, and he peers at the badge before his eyes widen and he points southwest of their direction. “Across campus, in the basement under the cafeteria,” he stutters.
“Great. Don’t let anyone else in the gym,” she tells him, putting her badge away. “Even if they work here.”
“Especially if they work here,” Steve adds-slash-corrects, and she nods and follows him into a run.
The boiler room is locked, but Steve manages to break the lock anyway while barely trying.
“Remind me to try that later,” Leila says.
“You still have the serum?”
“Only until I need an excuse to see you shirtless again,” she quips, and he scoffs, but she’s sure if the lights were on she’d see him blushing.
The overhead lights in the boiler room are off, but there’s a dim blue luminosity hovering in it, making it at least bright enough to see that the room is huge, and labyrinthine, pipes snaking around walkways and ladders like a maze of machinery.
The light is coming from around the corner, and she can see a shadow bouncing around near the wall. Movement.
“I have to be the one to take him in,” Leila whispers. Steve might not technically be a civilian, but she’s pretty sure he doesn’t have the power to arrest people. She pulls out her phone and hands it to him. “Vira should be in the recent calls. Call her and ask her to walk you through disarming--”
“Disarming what, now?”
It’s almost comically villainous, the way Felix Harker steps out from around the corner, his hair sticking up like some kind of mad scientist--probably static, but still. His shadow is long behind him and the dim blue glow of what she assumes is the generator around the corner makes him look like a cartoon character. He’s holding a chitauri blaster with both hands, and detached from the battle, it looks like some kind of science fiction cosplay bullshit.
“This is usually where I’d make a joke, but you already look like one,” Leila replies, pulling out her gun. “I’m Agent Leila Whittaker with SHIELD. Stand down, Harker.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” Harker assures her. “You’re Snow White. You saved New York. With the help of Captain Rogers, of course.” Harker turns his gaze to Steve. There’s nothing but disdain for either of them.
Steve doesn’t have a weapon on him (that she knows of) but she sees him shift into a more fight-ready pose out of the corner of her eye.
“SHIELD will be here any minute. It’s over,” she tells him.
“Really? Damn, that sucks. I was really hoping I could take a minute to tell you about my evil plan.” With that, he shoots the chitauri blaster right above Leila’s head, hitting the pipe above her.
It’s the second time in less than two weeks that they’ve found themselves in this position, with Steve’s body hovering over Leila’s--this time in the aftermath of him having pushed her out of the way of the falling pipe.
He rolls off her and onto his feet and she follows. There’s a crash around the corner and when they round it, they see the chitauri generator--big, blue, kind of looks like Stark Industries’ arc reactor--but something in it is damaged.
“Consider that my evil plan being expedited,” Harker says from around another corner. “We’ll see if SHIELD gets here soon enough to stop it.”
Leila turns to Steve, still moving. “Stay here, call Vira. I’m going after him.”
And before Steve can speak, there’s a crash from behind them, from way behind them, and screaming. The gym.
“I’m gonna go help them,” Steve says. “You handle Harker.”
“No,” she snaps, and he was already on his way to turning around when she does.
“Someone needs to handle this--” she continues, gesturing to the generator.
“You do it, you’d probably be better at it than me anyway.”
“I have to take in Harker!”
“So he gets away, so what?”
“So he builds a bigger explosion next time and more people die, you absolute fucking dumbass.”
Steve’s eyes narrow. God, she does not have time for this argument.
“So we just leave them?” Steve gestures back to the screaming.
“Of course not. SHIELD is coming, we’re not just leaving them, but if we don’t diffuse the generator--” as if on cue, a few sparks shoot from the generator, indicating the time ticking down.
“How do I know they’re coming?” Steve demands, and that’s really the crux of it, isn’t it? He’s not convinced SHIELD cares.
And honestly, Leila’s not even sure he’s wrong, or how good or bad SHIELD really is. It’s just that she just almost got concussed (not that it would last, but still) and Harker could be anywhere and there’s a ticking clock on this mission, or whatever it is, and God, Steve fucking Rogers has the absolute worst timing in picking fights. There are too many variables swirling around the situation, and she doesn’t have the wherewithal to think over her words carefully.
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” she says instead, instinctively, almost desperately.
And maybe it’s that desperation that reaches him, that makes him pull her phone out of his pocket and say “Okay. Go.”
She runs.
Felix Harker might be a genius, but he can’t fight for shit.
“You know,” he says, when he’s almost lost, probably to distract her, “I haven’t heard from our friend in awhile. Listen. You hear the silence?”
“Nope, I just hear bullshit coming out of your mouth,” she says, hooking a foot under his leg to bring him to his knees.
“I’m just saying,” he says, looking up at her, “I overheard your little conversation. Echoes,” he adds, waving a hand. She grabs his wrist, and then the other one, and starts tying them with the tape measure she’d grabbed off a custodial cart during the chase.
She ignores him, or tries to.
“He didn’t sound convinced, is all I’m saying,” Harker says. “Who’s to say he didn’t leave the generator the minute you turned your back?”
And Leila knows she shouldn’t let him get under her skin. She knows he’s just trying to distract her, or trick her, get her to turn her back on him so he can make his getaway.
It’s just that her whole argument for Steve staying was that he should trust her, and Leila is probably the least trustworthy person she knows. If it wasn’t enough for Steve, she probably couldn’t even fault him for it. Not that much, anyway.
If she had a walkie talkie she’d be radioing him. She can’t call him; he has her phone (God, she should’ve taken his), and anyway, if he did stay behind, he’d already be on the line with Vira, and going off his assumed prior experience, she’s not even convinced he knows how to decline an incoming call when he’s already on the line, so there’s basically know way to contact him, and--
She spends a few tense, heavy moments in that silence, keeping her eyes trained on Felix Harker because fuck if she’s going to let him get the best of her even if he does happen to be right--
And then the blue light goes out.
There’s a particular kind of annoyance that comes with Leila’s abilities, which is: the feeling of knowing that you would have been better off if you’d chosen a different ability that day. There is no hyperspecific German word for the feeling that she knows of.
There was a little old lady Leila met in Berlin once with enhanced eyesight, including night vision. A lightweight ability, and one that would really come in handy in apprehending a subject in pitch black.
Instead, she has the useless supersoldier abilities that stop at 20/10 vision in the daylight.
Felix Harker takes the opportunity caused by the sudden darkness and gets away, and she’s trying to decide which way she thinks he went based on sound, when she hears--
“Leila?”
She turns around to find Steve shrouded in shadow, using her phone as a flashlight.
“It’s done,” he says. “The generator--”
“It’s not over,” Leila says. “Harker got away.”
“No,” a familiar voice says from behind her, as the lights suddenly go on, “he didn’t.”
Steve’s face lights up in recognition and relief, and Leila turns to see Natasha holding Felix Harker by the shoulders, his hands tied with a zip tie. He looks furious, like he knows it’s really over now, but he stays quiet this time. Leila can only assume it’s out of fear; Natasha does that to people, even where Leila can’t. It’s something she’s always envied.
“That’s a pretty small fish for them to send you to catch,” Leila says.
“You’re welcome,” Nat replies. “Besides, I was in the area.”