Work Text:
Maria Hill took pride in being damn hard to shock.
After all, she'd seen and done some pretty remarkable things over the course of her life. She'd busted up terrorist cells and drug labs and fought everything from petty crime lords high on their own inflated sense of self-importance to alien nightmare creatures fully determined to turn planet Earth into their own personal amusement park. She'd seen desperate people crafting bombs out of their own fermenting feces and madmen casually boasting of the sophisticated devices they'd devised that could totally eradicate all life on one one side of the equator. She was one of the few people in the word who knew enough to know that it was impossible to have ever seen everything.
And she knew there was no point in giving in to the pure sensations of being surprised. The gasping and staggering, the acid rush of blood to the brain, the precious moments spent processing whatever had now become reality – all of that meant wasting time that could have been spent reacting. So Maria had become used to merely setting her jaw, checking her weapon and her instincts, and getting on with things.
But all that experience and training flew out the window when she came home after a hard day at Stark Industries to find a man sitting on her couch.
Normally any invader would have been on the ground, his arms and legs secured and his prone body being searched for weapons no more than 2.3 seconds after Maria opened the door. But she would have known him anywhere, even dressed as he was in the guise of a harmless bum who couldn't hurt anybody. There was always a certain energy he brought to the air, he had a particular pattern of breathing she'd never encountered in anyone else.
So there could be no doubt. Nick Fury was alive.
And for the first time in many years, Maria Hill felt her eyes bulging and her knees going weak.
This was what she'd denied herself the right to hope for, since she'd known from the second she got the (mistaken!) news of Fury's demise that false hope could have poisoned her, made her slow and sluggish and hesitant to act. She should have been overjoyed now; she knew that. But she also knew that genuine good news rarely came in the middle of the night or was delivered following a strong suggestion that she get herself a drink.
And after she'd sat herself down and poured out a triple whisky, Fury even managed to surprise her again.
“Coulson's in charge”, he told her, sipping from his own drink. “Coulson and his team. What's left of his team, anyway. They've had to replace one of the specialists, as you know, and one of the scientists is on the disabled list for the time being. I've taken the other one too – Agent Brand's got... a special project she needs her for. But Coulson doesn't need scientists right now; he needs soldiers. Which means you'll have to do the same as that young woman - make some excuses and go dark. If you were to keep working for Stark there's too big a chance-
Maria held up a hand for silence. This was important and she knew it, but all she could hear was one word. Coulson. Coulson's in charge. She said it out loud, trying to make sense of it. It didn't help.
“That's right”, Fury confirmed, a rare misinterpretation of the situation from him. “But he's going to need your help. He's got limited resources at the moment, and there's no way to know how stable he is.”
“Unstable”, Maria interjected. “There's no way to know how unstable he is.”
Fury shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen of another. No matter what, he's going to need your support.” He paused, obviously waiting for an affirmation that didn't come. Raising an eyebrow, he studied her face. “I'll make it an order if I have to, Agent Hill.”
That should have settled it. Maria had never – not once in her life – refused an order from this man. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd refused one of his requests. But this was apparently destined to be a night of surprises so she figured she might as well get into the spirit of things and surprise herself. She shook her head. “I'm not your agent anymore.”
Fury drew a sharp breath. “I did think of you. I want you to know that. But there's a reason I picked Coulson, and you need to trust me.”
Why should she? He obviously hadn't trusted her, not even enough to let her know he was alive. Not until all his plans were made and there was nothing she could do. He'd let her grieve and mourn, question herself and doubt everything she knew, rather than trust her to keep his secret safe. And she had trusted him, back when he'd made her his second-in-command and implied that if anything happened to him then she'd have the leadership role in the organization. She'd worked for years – so many years – with her trust in that unspoken promise. And where had it gotten her?
He had his reasons for choosing Coulson? That may well have been the truth. Despite her concerns over what the other agent had been through and how that might have affected him, Maria liked Coulson. She respected him as both an agent and a man. But there also had to be a reason that Maria, not Phil, had been given the job she'd had and promoted to the position that she'd held with S.H.I.E.L.D. What had happened to that?
She heard Grant Ward's taunting voice in her ear. Eye candy. She shook her head to clear it. And in that moment she knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that whatever supposed reason Fury had for making the choice he'd made, it wasn't going to be good enough.
“You're going to have to let Couson manage things on his own now. I'm out.”
She saw him assess her, from the tilt of her head to the rigid set of her spine. She saw him slowly accept the truth.
He knew better than to argue with her, and she was glad they still had that.
He gathered himself together, draining his drink and fastening his coat to go. He looked somehow smaller than before. It was possible he'd lost weight during his months on the run; Maria didn't imagine he was eating well or that he had a lot of time to hit the gym. But she would have sworn that the transformation had taken place in just the last few minutes.
“I'll see you again”, Fury said at the door. “If you're working for Stark. Our paths have got to cross, Maria. And I'll be proud to work with you again.”
He was right, and she wasn't sure if that made this better or worse.
It got her thinking though. Tony Stark – another man who made promises that were hard to keep, despite what she still believed were good intentions. Stark also demanded absolute trust, and then kept his secrets until the time that he saw fit to reveal them.
“I'm not sure if I'm working for Stark anymore either.”
Fury regarded her sternly. He got her meaning, she saw that. “It's a hard path you're walking down then, Maria. Lots of ways to get hurt. We do better when we're part of something bigger than ourselves. You've always believed that too.”
The answer came to her without any hesitation. “We're always part of something bigger than ourselves.”
She said goodbye to him before she shut the door. She was grateful that he turned around to say it back.
She poured the remains of her whisky down the sink, she needed a clear head. Then she moved to the mirror and tried to look at herself objectively.
She was a woman in her late thirties, but possibly one in her physical prime. She was muscled and strong, her response times had never been better. Still, there were a lot of people in her world that were capable of saying that. For a private citizen she had an impressive arsenal of weaponry, but it was a mere fraction of what she was used to working with. She had one armoured vehicle, a decent if not extraordinary knowledge of computers and an intolerance for political bullshit that had gotten her into trouble more than once in the past.
She shrugged. She would need to work with what was there. Would a mask become necessary? A costume or a name? Possibly, but she didn't think it was time yet. For all that she'd done in her life so far, the whole vigilante thing was new to her and she'd probably do well to keep things small for a while.
And that answered the question of where to start. Despite her tired state, she knew that a bath and bed were out of the question. There was no way she'd be able to sleep tonight.
So Maria Hill prepped her gun, donned her jacket and headed out onto the street. Where, she realized in a sudden burst of foresight, the myriad ways in which people could casually hurt each other was bound to surprise even her.
So she would need to put all her trust in herself.