Chapter 1
Don't get too close, it's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
--Demons // Imagine Dragons
“We’re done for the day,” Leila says into the camera. “Bring the guards in.”
Felix Harker has been staring at the spot just above her shoulder for the past hour, but now his eyes glance to hers and he smiles. He always has this comic book villain smile, like he knows something she doesn’t.
Which, to be fair, he does. Which is why she’s been interrogating him for the last week.
So far, she’s gotten nothing out of him, and today is no different. The problem is that she can’t get him to talk about anything . If she could get him to have a conversation with her, she knows she could bring it around and get him to tell him something, probably without him knowing he’s doing it.
But he won’t engage at all. She’s starting to forget what his voice even sounds like. She’s asked him questions about the case, about himself, his life, about the fucking weather. She’s bribed him with lighter sentences and the chance at a job, if he proves himself. Nothing.
She meets his eye, tilting her chin up, challenging him. “Last chance,” she sing-songs.
He just smiles more and turns away as the guards enter the room.
She sighs and stands up, leaving the room before the guards escort Harker out.
“Gotta say,” Steve says when she comes back into the room on the other side of the mirrored glass. “I don’t feel like I’m learning a lot about interrogation.”
“Don’t make me put you in another iceberg, Rogers,” Leila says by way of response.
Steve’s lips quirk in a smile.
He’s been shadowing her for the last week, with almost nothing to show for it. She’s spent the entire week sitting in front of Harker, trying to coax him into a conversation, while he sat silently, smiling almost serenely, not even looking at her. Leila is one of SHIELD’s top interrogators, and she knows it; having a witness to her failure is just the cherry on top of the shit sundae.
Usually, she tries to explain her techniques to him when she’s done, and what she expected to happen. This time she just collapses onto a chair by the table. The room on the other side of the mirrored glass is dark, almost noir-ish.
“I swear to God,” Leila continues, “I’ve seen international terrorists crack easier than this guy.”
“What happens if he doesn’t?”
Leila looks up. There are a lot of loose ends leftover from Harker’s series of bombings, but most of them have to do with how he broke into a high-security bank without triggering any alarms; how he got ahold of chitauri technology; and--importantly--how he got the personal phone number of a SHIELD agent. Vira’s phone number was on a lower-security system, so it’s not the end of the world, but if Felix managed to get into any of their systems, they need to know how--and who, if anyone, he gave that information to.
She looks back down at the file on the table, flipping through it thoughtfully. “Then we go back to basics,” she says finally. “Do some detective work.” It’s not usually in their job description, but Fury likes cases to be completed by the agents who start them. Granted, she and Steve didn’t “start” the case so much as they were roped into it, but still.
“So what does that mean?”
There’s only been one moment when Leila got anything close to a reaction out of Harker, and it was when she mentioned his mother. He didn’t say anything as she asked about her, but his body language changed--his jaw tightened, his fists clenched. She pursued that lead for as long as she could, but it didn’t go anywhere, even when she revisited it later.
“It means,” Leila says, standing up, “pack a bag, and think about everything you know about Felix Harker. Because we’re about to talk to the woman who raised him.”
They leave at the crack of dawn the next morning, and the trip back to New York--or rather, the fact that it’s a trip at all--is disorienting.
Right after Leila’s debrief from the bombing case, SHIELD informed her she was being relocated to DC. In the aftermath of New York, Fury was making some changes, tightening the ship, and wanted his STRIKE agents closer to the Triskelion.
Sometimes, Leila can pretend that she’s in control. That she works for SHIELD because she wants to, because it’s convenient, because it can help her get what she’s after. And then they ask her to give up her city, the only thing she feels anything close to love for anymore, and it’s like hitting the end of a leash. It’s not a request; she doesn’t have a choice. She doesn’t even have the choice to quit SHIELD altogether, which is frustrating, even when she knows she wouldn’t quit if she could.
She keeps her apartment in New York, just in case. Just so she has somewhere to go, if she needs to.
Steve goes over Harker’s file again as Leila pilots the quinjet to Fort Falsworth. Really, the jet pilots itself, but she’s gone through the file so many times at this point, she’s pretty sure she’s got most of it memorized word-for-word.
“Wait,” Steve says, “this says the system Vira’s phone number was in is the same system you had the watchlist with Harker’s name on it.”
“Right.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“Not my fault you didn’t do the reading, Rogers,” she replies.
Steve shifts in his seat uncomfortably. “I’m doing it now,” he says flatly.
“I know, it’s a page-turner,” she says. “We don’t know if he was intentionally looking for himself or not. There’s no reason for him to have known he was on a watchlist.”
“But it’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
Linda Harker is, on paper, utterly normal. There’s not much they could dig up about her--no criminal records, no hospitalizations, nothing. There’s a birth certificate from the 1950s, a marriage certificate from 1978, and her husband’s death certificate from two years later, when Felix was an infant. That’s it.
When they arrive at her house, she’s in the front yard, pulling weeds. She looks up briefly as they approach before going back to her gardening.
“Mrs. Harker, I’m Agent Whittaker, this is Agent--”
“I know who you are,” Linda says, and pulls off her gloves. “Was wondering when you’d show up.”
She stands up and dusts herself off. “I assume you want to talk about the boy.”
“If I knew anything,” Linda says a few minutes later in her living room, flicking the ash off her cigarette into the ashtray next to her, “I’d tell you. But the boy doesn’t talk to me anymore.” She keeps calling him that, the boy, her voice dripping with disgust, and it’s keeping Leila on edge.
“I wond--” Steve starts to mutter, and Leila steps on his foot before he can finish.
“It’s a good riddance,” Linda continues, and Leila can feel herself getting lightheaded. She closes her eyes, digging her nails into her knee. “He was never any good, never anything but trouble. And he knew it.”
There was no indication in Felix’s file that he was at all a troublesome kid. Aside from the drunk driving incident, he was a model student. No homicidal triad.
She digs her nails in harder.
“So there’s just...nothing you can tell us?” Steve asks. “Nothing unusual happened recently?”
Linda seems to think about this. “One of his little students,” she says, and again, with this disdain, like teaching is something shameful. “The little redheaded boy. Showed up here a couple weeks ago, all in a tizzy, asking for the boy. Said it was for a science project. I told him I haven’t spoken to him in years. Dunno why he’d show up at midnight for a science project. Like I said, trouble. A curse, that boy.”
Leila almost springs from her seat. “We’re done here,” she says flatly, and her voice sounds very far away. It feels like she’s watching the situation play out as a third party witness, like a scene from a movie. She glances down at her hands and manages to unclench them, and sees little crescent moon shapes from her fingernails starting to heal.
“Thank you for your time,” Steve adds, with no particular enthusiasm.
“Are you okay?” Steve asks as they go back out to the car.
“I’m fine,” she says absently, as if she’s deep in thought, which she’s not.
Steve doesn’t argue, but she can tell he doesn’t believe her.
“Do you need me to drive?” he asks instead.
“I’m fine ,” she repeats. “I’m driving.” And she’s not sure why she’s so insistent; her aversion to being driven isn’t usually this strong, but she needs to feel in control, just then.
“Look--” Steve starts as she pulls back onto the road, and she waves a hand to cut him off. If he asks her if she’s fucking okay again she might actually throw up.
“Don’t press the issue, Rogers.”
“I’m not--” he sighs, sounding mildly frustrated. “Look, I know that woman was a piece of work.”
“I don’t care.”
“You just missed our turn.”
I don’t care about that either, she thinks.
“So I’ll catch the next one,” she says instead, and he stays silent, but she can feel the tension roiling off him.
At the next intersection, she makes a u-turn, or tries to. She turns too sharply, and suddenly the sound of the tires squealing and the smell of burning rubber in the air bring her back into her body as she just barely misses the center barrier, all while the guy now behind them--who Steve, she realizes suddenly, tried to warn her about--is forced to slam on his breaks, landing halfway through the intersection.
Leila sits, shell-shocked--not a familiar feeling for her; she’s usually a good driver--and then turns to Steve, whose expression is inscrutable.
“Get out of the car,” he says, and it’s that voice she teased him about, the one he used during the invasion. “I’m driving.”
And even if his tone had left room to argue, she wouldn’t have had the energy.