Chapter 3
Steve has a few seconds headstart, but he stops on the driveway to wait for her. “Leila,” he says when she seems to look right past him, and her eyes snap to him.
“Hm.”
“You’re talking the way you did at Linda Harker’s house.”
Leila can feel her defenses go up. “I’m not having this conversation again,” she says. God, can’t she just get some quiet? Does this guy ever fucking stop talking? There’s this childish part of her that just wants to cover her ears with her hands and rock back and forth on the ground until everything goes away.
“Okay,” Steve says, holding his hands up in surrender. “You’re fine. I get it. I just wanted to ask if I can drive.”
She studies him, and it’s like she’s trying to find something to be mad about, but she can’t. He didn’t push for answers she can’t give him. He didn’t demand the keys. And he’s not looking at her with pity in his eyes. Confusion, maybe, but not pity.
She pulls the keys out of your pocket. “All yours,” she mumbles.
A few minutes later, when they’re on the road, she hears Steve say her name again, and looks up.
“I don’t know what happened in there,” he says, “and I won’t push. But if you ever do want to talk about...what I think I saw. I’m here. That’s all.”
She watches him carefully. He glances away from the road for just a moment, and he’s so earnest, she almost smiles. God, he’s hard to be mad at.
“Eyes on the road, Rogers,” she tells him. “This is more of a third mission conversation.”
He smiles wryly and obediently turns his full attention to the road. “Got it.”
She has absolutely no plans on taking him up on his offer. And the fact that he did at all, the fact that he thinks something’s wrong with her, should change their entire dynamic. She should be demanding a transfer by now. It should be infuriating. It should be terrifying.
It’s not that she feels comforted, exactly, but there’s an acute absence, a big gray nothing where her anxiety over Steve should be. Maybe this is how normal people feel all the time, she thinks idly.
Regardless, she keeps coming back to Richard Harris’s hand on his stepdaughter's shoulder, and to Tessa Nolan’s brown eyes following her out of the house, like their conversation wasn’t done yet.
Leila had been hoping that, like her, Steve had been holding onto his apartment, but apparently it either wasn’t an option (given that it was in SHIELD’s name) or he just didn’t think it was worth it, because he didn’t. She vaguely considers forcing him to get a motel room, just to get some space from him, but decides against it. The mission still has to come first--SHIELD comes first, as they so kindly reminded her when they forced her to leave New York--and she doesn’t quite trust him not to go rogue.
Besides which, if she’s honest with herself, she really doesn’t want to be alone tonight.
“I’m going to go get dressed,” she says. She’ll shower in the morning. “You’re taking the couch.”
When she gets out, dressed in black leggings and a tank top, she finds Steve’s changed into a pair of gray sweats and is pulling a blue t-shirt over his head. She can’t fault him for that; there’s really nowhere else for him to change. Leila has always favored studio apartments. She likes to be able to see everything going on. Outside of the bathroom and her walk-in closet (into which he was not invited), the whole thing is one big room. Not that she’s complaining.
“Sorry,” Steve says when he’s pulled the shirt over his head and sees her.
For a moment she considers not saying anything, but she has a brand to maintain, so she allows herself to glance over him, and smirks. “Oh, don’t be.”
He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.
David...
It’s dark when Leila wakes up, and she’s covered in a thick miasma of sweat trapped between herself and the blankets. It’s this headspace she wakes up into sometimes, where all these walls she’s built between herself and her demons disappear. She’s too afraid to be ashamed of being afraid.
Given the events of the day, she doesn’t have to guess what whatever nightmare she’s waking up from was about, but the details slip away before they can imprint on her waking memory. All she remembers is the smell of smoke and that damn name, echoing in her mind in her own voice.
There’s really nothing to be done about these episodes--she usually just waits until she falls back asleep. It doesn’t usually take long, but then--
Click. She hears the door open, senses light spilling in from the hallway outside, and within a second she’s standing, pointing the gun she keeps under her bed at--
“Steve?”
“Jesus, Leila--”
“Why are you up this early?” she snaps.
“I went for a jog.”
“At--” she glances at the clock--”4 in the fucking morning?”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he says.
“I was already awake.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” He’s holding his hands up in surrender, a white paper bag in one hand. “You wanna put the gun away?”
She stares at him for another moment, mostly just trying to wrap her head around the situation--there’s no danger, there’s no intruder, she’s fine--before lowering her hands with a muttered “Goddamnit.”
She puts her gun away under the bed and then runs a hand through her hair. “I didn’t hear you leave,” she admits, glancing at him as he sets the white bag on the counter.
“I guess you were out of it,” he says. “I bought breakfast at this 24 hour diner.”
“I’m sure it’s disgusting.”
“You’re welcome. You mind if I use your shower?”
“By all means,” she says, smiling in a way that tells him she’s still annoyed. If it bothers him, he doesn’t show it; apparently running has left him in a good mood.
And maybe it’s a good thing, in the long run. Her heart rate is still slightly elevated, but other than that she can feel the anxiety subsiding.
Part of her doesn’t want to go back to sleep, worried she’ll fall back into a nightmare, this time with Steve present and awake. The other part of her is exhausted--the nightmare left her more tired than when she went to bed, and the anxiety and the whole gun incident didn’t help--and wants to get in a few more hours of sleep before they have to leave. Otherwise she might bite Steve’s head off again, and even though he promised not to push, it’s still not fun fighting with him.
She doesn’t expect to sleep particularly well. But when she lays down, she focuses on her breathing, and the sound of the shower running in the bathroom, and falls into a sleep more peaceful than she can remember having in a long time.
Their plan works; when they arrive the next morning at 8 AM, it’s clear that Camden has only barely woken up. The maid brings him downstairs, and he’s still in his pajamas, hair messy, with dark circles under his eyes.
“Camden,” Leila says. “Good to see you again.”
Camden stares at her, like he’s not totally sure he’s awake yet, but glances at Steve next to her and seems to decide that playing along is in his best interest for the moment.
“Uhhhh, yeah. You too, Leila. And Steve. Good morning. Um.”
“We just wanted to ask you some follow up questions after the questions we asked last night,” Steve supplies helpfully.
“Right. Yeah. Follow up questions.”
The maid leads them to an empty office that she says Richard won’t mind them using, and Leila immediately claims the spinning chair for herself. Camden chooses the chair across the desk, like he thinks he’s in trouble, and Steve leans against the wall by the doorway.
“So we’re Leila and Steve now,” Leila says, smiling faintly. “That’s pretty familiar.”
“I panicked,” Camden admits, his cheeks flushing. “Why did you--”
“We came to talk to you last night, but you weren’t here. I told your parents you were.”
Camden studies her, wary now. Clearly not used to random acts of kindness. “Why would you lie?”
Leila studies him in turn, and decides that the best way to reach him is through the truth. “Because I figured that if they punished you, you’d be less likely to talk to us. And we really need answers.”
She can see the exact moment it clicks for him why they’re there--the way his body language suddenly changes, his guard coming up. “About what?” he asks flatly.
She tilts her head and glances at Steve, watching from the doorway with an inscrutable expression. “You know why I’m here, Camden. So here’s what we’re not gonna do: we’re not gonna lie to each other, and we’re not going to play dumb. Because you’re a smart kid, you’re clearly very independent--” she adds pointedly, and he looks down “--and you don’t need someone like me to condescend to you..”
Camden looks away, staring intently at the floor with his arms crossed. For a brief moment, she remembers Tessa’s body language with her stepfather, and wonders...but no. There’s no shame in Camden’s tells, just protectiveness. Besides, men like Richard Harris don’t get to lie to her anymore. If Felix Harker was that kind of monster, she’d know by now.
“So let’s start here: I’m gonna tell you everything I know, and then you can decide what you feel like telling me, and we’ll go from there. Okay?”
“Are you going to torture me?” Camden asks, half-sarcastically.
“No,” Steve says, suddenly appearing at Leila’s side and taking the chair next to her. Smart boy. It’s his comics Camden has sitting in his room; despite his guardedness, he might find lying to Captain America difficult.
“We don’t torture people,” Leila says. “It’s ineffective.”
Camden almost smirks at this.
“So here’s what we know,” Leila continues, ticking off items on her fingers. “We know Felix Harker was your science teacher. We know he helped you with your science fair project.”
“Which we know was a barcode that could hack the system that scanned it,” Steve adds, and Leila nods.
“And here’s where we get into speculation: I’m guessing Harker was the only real parental supervision you had, given the fact that your parents didn’t even know you were gone last night. I also know that a high school student with red hair showed up on his mother’s door a few weeks ago in the middle of the night.”
“Wow, you should really find out who that was,” Camden monotones, and Leila bites back a smile.
“So here’s what we need to know,” Leila says, and she finds herself a little more gentle than she would be with an adult, which is annoying, but hopefully effective. “One, we need to know how he hacked SHIELD’s database--”
“Harker didn’t hack SHIELD,” Camden says suddenly, looking up from the floor. “I did.”
“You did?” Steve sounds skeptical, but to Leila, it makes sense. Camden was the one who created the hacking device.
“Okay,” Leila says, leaning forward. “So why’d you do it?”
Camden shrugs and looks down.
She studies him for a long moment, tilting her head. He doesn’t know. It feels like a million years ago, but somewhere, something about Camden resonates with Leila. It’s easy to think of him as a subject in the abstract, just another puzzle piece in the case, but now the overwhelming humanity of him hits her full force. She knows that look. She knows what it’s like to be so lost and have so little to ground you that you don’t even know why you’re acting out.
There are probably a myriad of reasons why he did it. A cry for help. An act of revenge at a world he thinks abandoned him. A way to impress the only real authority figure he has. And he might not even be fully aware of any of them.
“Okay,” she says finally. “We don’t have to go into why. We do need to know how, though.”
“You’re the one with the supercomputers,” he says. “You figure it out.”
“Nice try,” Leila says.
“Where’s Mr. Harker?” Camden asks, looking up, and Leila wonders what it was that reminded him of his teacher.
“He’s in our custody,” Leila says. “Safe and sound. I promise.”
“Why don’t you ask him about all this?” Camden asks, sounding wary, like he’s scared of giving them ideas.
“Damn,” Leila says, “we should’ve thought of that. Steve, why didn’t we think of that?”
“I--” Steve glances from Leila to Camden, surprised at having been called upon. “I don’t know, Leila.”
Leila turns back to Camden, having made her point.
“So how come he wouldn’t talk?”
“I dunno. He wouldn’t talk, you won’t talk. Maybe I’m just not a great conversationalist.”
“You should work on that,” Camden advises, and she scoffs.
“We all have our flaws,” she says. “Okay. We’ll swing back around to the ‘how’. But first, though, let me ask you something.” She leans forward just a little. “Do you think you owe it to Harker to keep his secrets?”
He shrugs, looking down again.
“Do you think I don’t?”
“What I think is that I interrogated him for days and he never said a single word, literally. I’ve seen international terrorists easier to interrogate than him. And I think it’d be awfully hard to maintain that for his own sake, since we offered him lighter sentences. I think there was someone he cared an awful lot about that he wanted to keep from being implicated.”
“What’s your point?” Cam scoffs, and it’s a valid question.
“My point is that this is serious shit, and Harker didn’t want you involved in it. I don’t, either. But we can’t leave without getting some answers. Besides, nothing you say can make things worse for him. But it might make it easier for us to talk to him, and that might make it easier for us to make it easier on him.”
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He’s considering it.
“The server you hacked had personal contact information of SHIELD agents,” Steve says finally, softly. “We know one. Her name is Vira. And we want to keep her safe, just like your teacher’s trying to keep you safe. But to do that, we need to know who has access to her information.”
Cam considers this for a long moment, thinking. Finally he looks up, his arms still crossed. “Okay.”