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Steve realizes at the most inappropriate time possible that Hill’s face is actually very expressive. It just so happens that the emotions she’s often feeling are rage and exasperation. He watches the supple lines of Hill’s lips flatten as the implications of what Romanoff is reporting in their earpieces dawns on her. He’s none too happy about it either.
“Say again?” Hill asks. Her casual stance against the marble balustrade of the ballroom becomes rigid. Steve has to shove his hands into his tuxedo jacket to stop from bracing it against the small of her back. Probably not the best idea considering her royal blue gown is backless.
“The target isn’t receptive,” Romanoff confirms. “We need to switch out.” Her throaty voice is laced with disbelief. It’s not every day the Black Widow’s sexual advances get turned down!
“I’ll have Agent Connors move into position,” Hill says.
“No time!” Romanoff bites back. From his vantage point Steve can see her crimson head weaving through the crowd towards the bottom of the staircase. “He’s getting ready to leave. It’s got to be you, Lieutenant.”
Hill doesn’t quite shake the handrail with her knuckles weaved around it, but if Bruce were in her place Steve imagines a piece of the marble would be crushed to dust. She only gives herself a fraction of a second to be annoyed and then duty overrides disgust as she glides past him without looking back. Moments later, Romanoff is beside him. His attention however, is focused on the lithe figure parting the crowd on the dance floor like the Red Sea as she sets her sight on the target.
Dimitri Sukov, or The Surgeon as they call him in the underground, has been a blight on the intelligence community for the better part of three decades. Super soldiers, trans-species mutation and genome manipulation are the name of his game and recently his game has clashed with that of S.H.I.E.L.D’s in a major way. The man they’re shadowing tonight, Mikhail Stepanenko, is a known benefactor of Sukov’s and with any luck they’re tight enough that Stepanenko will know where to find the other man.
Romanoff greets Steve with a wry smile. Her eyes find his behind the holographic mask disguising his all too recognizable features. He can see her barely concealed laughter in the flash of her canines before she turns her attention back to the floor.
“Well,’ she says. “This is going to be interesting.”
Steve crosses his arms in front of his chest. He doesn’t realise he’s scowling until she digs him in the ribs with her elbow. “We’re at a fundraising benefit,” she says. “Try and at least crack a smile.”
“I don’t understand why we couldn’t have done this some other way,’ he says. Romanoff doesn’t answer at first. She’s too busy trailing Hill as the brunette tentatively catches Stepanenko’s eye.
“It’s a lot easier to get intel from a willing participant,” Romanoff says.
“It’s the willing bit that concerns me.”
“Because muscles are tools but looks are shameful?”
Steve's been around Romanoff long enough to know when he’s on dangerous ground. Despite the squeaky clean image he’s been asked to portray, Steve isn’t as naive as all that. He’s seen Peggy’s SSR files and the logs of her early S.H.I.E.L.D missions. More than once she’d had to use her physical attractiveness to manipulate her opponents. He doesn’t blame her but he wishes things were different. It irks him that in seventy years, not much has changed for women like her.
Steve doesn’t take his eyes off where Stepanenko’s arm has circled behind Maria’s back. It looks like he’s still leaving, only this time he’s taking her with him. How can Steve explain to Romanoff that he doesn’t have a problem with the why but with the who? How can he explain to himself without opening up a Pandora’s box of other questions? Possessiveness without mutual consent didn’t fly with the girls in the 1940s either. At least not when it came to Steve.
“Well whadaya know?” Romanoff says. “Look at Hill getting the job done without her muscles!”
An hour later, at the rendezvous point, Steve tries not to be too relieved or too smug when Maria informs them she’s gotten a location. And that she needs medical attention for potentially broken knuckles.
If there’s one thing Steve’s learned about well laid plans, it’s that they’re always bound to go pear shaped. Crouched like a thief outside Sukov’s facility deep within the Siberian tundra, Steve can’t help but be reminded of his icy bed for seventy years.
On Steve’s signal, he and Romanoff begin the first assault on the perimeter guards before he gives the Strike teams the all clear to join them. Everything is going to plan until they’re pushing deeper into the belly of the facility and come up against two dozen heavily armored men. Each one is the size of a mountain, dwarfing even Steve’s bulky frame.
That they’re not carrying weapons is a bad sign.
“Do you think these guys would have passed Dr. Erskine’s test?” Romanoff quips a second before a wave of enhanced soldiers bears down on them. Steve takes aim with his shield, whipping it through the air at the closest guard, slicing the man’s arm clean off. Where cartilage and muscle should have been, wires and circuits spark. A thick liquid smelling of motor grease hits Steve’s nose. The Strike teams open fire but their shells bounce off metal anatomy.
“Which genius analyst classified this mission as a level three?” Rumlow wants to know.
There’s no time for anything now except staying alive. Steve manoeuvres his shield and his body like a finely tuned weapon, honed from hours of practical missions and sparring sessions. He discovers, with sickening realization at the crunch of bone, that the guards aren’t all metal but metal infused. Cyborgs of a sort he’s never seen before and completely impervious to pain.
Romanoff pivots like a dancer, striking while her opponents are busy trying to figure out where she is. When she can’t match their strength the blue lights of her Black Widow’s Bite scrambles their neuro-pathways long enough for her to cut them down.
The Strike teams are blunt instruments, shooting at anything remotely opposing and dealing out punishment with their taser rods. More than once, Steve has to compromise his attack to get out of their way. He takes out the final guard by jamming his shield against the man’s chest, pushing him back against the wall of the facility where Romanoff delivers the final blow using her electricity.
“No,” Steve says as he catches her under the arm to keep her from toppling. “I doubt these men would have passed Dr. Erskine’s test.” Looking around at the pounding of pulses and the congratulatory smiles on the faces of the Strike team, Steve very much doubts that any of them would have been super soldier material either. Then he reminds himself that it’s a different time and that things have changed. Men change to adapt to their surroundings. They’re not his Howling Commandos but they’re his team nonetheless. The thought hurts more than the open cut on his forearm. Not for the first time he feels the pang of loss like salt on an open wound. As much as he respects their skills, these men aren’t end of the line material. They’re not Bucky. He’ll never be able to go back.
Hill’s voice in his ear drags him firmly into the present. “Movement two levels below you, Captain. Facial recognition says we’ve got a match for Sukov.”
“Hostiles?”
“Affirmative. Two dozen heavily armed. Nothing you can’t handle.”
Steve’s never going to be able to understand all this new technology so he doesn’t bother asking how she managed to gain control of the facility’s surveillance cameras. Her confirmation is good enough for him.
Reaching the lower levels proves difficult once the intruder alarm is activated, locking down the bulkheads between the floors. In the end they have to resort to explosives that completely remove their advantage of surprise.
Sukov is waiting for them in his rabbit warren surrounded by guards. On metal slabs lining the walls are bodies hooked to beeping monitors. Steve grits his teeth to keep the flashbacks to Zola’s experiments at bay.
Steve’s memorized Sukov’s profile from the mission brief and the man before him is definitely a genetic match. What surprises him is that Sukov is ailing, his eyes sunken in and his skin sallow. What surprises him more is the way Sukov’s attention is focused on Romanoff.
“Hello, Natalia,” Sukov says. Then they’re being shot at and there’s not space for error in this room of death.
Steve takes down one, two, three opponents before he realizes Romanoff is nowhere in sight. Neither is Sukov.
He reaches the passageway hidden by a bookcase just in time to see her grappling with the old man. She has the advantage in confined spaces and her jabs steal the wind from Sukov’s sails. In a last ditch attempt at freedom, Sukov sprays her in the face with an aerosol.
Romanoff says something to him in Russian that is laced with sarcasm. Then she knocks him out cold with a single punch.
Afterwards Hill will hear no excuses from Romanoff about not needing medical attention. They lock eyes and it’s a battle between fire and ice before Romanoff sags and Dr. Russo leads her away to one of the quinjets.
Rumlow finds Steve sitting on the lip of the quinjet after Dr. Fine has patched up his arm. Steve doesn’t see the point when he’ll heal himself soon enough but he’s learned not to put up a fight.
“The boys are heading out to a bar in town before we’re due back, Cap,” Rumlow says. “Rumour has it they’ve got a vodka here that’ll put fire in even a super soldier’s belly.” He follows Steve’s gaze to where Hill is on the phone, her features etched with annoyance. She’s leaning against the side of the building and clutching absently at her side in a way that makes Steve’s stomach churn.
“Like a moth to a flame ey, Cap?” Steve wants to smack the lewd smirk off Rumlow’s face but he knows if he reacts the rumour mill will churn even faster. So he allows himself to be persuaded into drinks even though he'd prefer to stick around for clean up. For her.
“No, Sir,” Hill says as they move past. “That wasn’t the agreement, Mr Secretary.” He thinks for a second she’s talking to Pierce but then she suddenly switches to Russian and he realizes she’s liaising with the local authorities.
Steve wonders, as he piles into the Jeep with the rest of the Strike team, whether he’ll ever stop being surprised by Maria Hill.
Two days later he’s early for a mission debrief with Hill and catches her in a compromising position in her office.
Steve’s just about to knock when he sees through the frosted glass that Romanoff is in there with her. Something is the sombre expression on Hill’s face makes him cautious and instead he presses his ear to the cracks in the wood and his super hearing allows him to piece together snippets of the conversation.
“I can’t feel anything,” Romanoff says. Her hand is splayed against Hill’s milky belly skin, with Hill hitching up her shirt to give Romanoff access. Steve is mildly embarrassed to be eavesdropping but he’s in too deep to backtrack. Besides, Hill’s never going to confide in him the way she does with Romanoff so he has to take any opportunity he’s given.
“I know!” Hill says, exasperation again lacing her tone. “It’s nothing, Nat. Just a bit of cramping. Now get off before someone sees us.”
Romanoff grunts her disapproval but retreats nonetheless. “That’s true. We wouldn’t want to give those bulls in Stike any more to fantasize about. Do me a favour, if I ever give any of those guys the time of day shoot me in the head.”
“Ditto,” Hill says.
Steve gives her time to tuck in her shirt before he knocks, trying not to get hung up on whether he’s grouped in with Strike in this instance.
“Rogers,” Romanoff greets as she walks out.
Hill doesn’t make any comment about him being early and their conversation is strictly mission related as she leads him towards Research and Statistics.
“What’s the verdict on Romanoff?” Steve says as they enter the elevator, hoping to somehow segue the conversation onto Hill’s ailment.
“She’s been given the all clear,” Hill says. Her attention is caught by an alert on her PDA. “The compound in Sukov’s aerosol was just human growth hormone and an inert saline solution.”
“And how are you, Lieutenant?”
The way her head tilts up and her eyes skewer him makes all the air in the elevator rush out. It’s not unlike the reaction he used to get from pretty girls when he dared to ask them to dance. She’s too smart not to make the connection between what he’s asking and what he might have seen a few minutes earlier.
Thank goodness the doors open and Jasper Sitwell walks in. He greets them both with a nod and then a second glance. Steve doesn’t know whether to feel relief or dread when Jasper gets out on the floor for human resources.
They ride the rest of the way in loaded silence but when the doors open and Hill attempts to leave, Steve suddenly finds his fingers laced around her upper arm.
She’s not a physically small woman but the way she mentally burrows in triggers Steve’s protective instinct in a major way. If only she weren’t the last woman in the world to welcome such sentiment. He sees her swallow hard before she turns and meets his gaze.
“For better or worse, Hill,” Steve says, “You’re part of my team and I worry about you.”
Nothing. Not a flicker of anything to indicate she’s thawing. “Thank you, Captain but I’m fine.” Then she gently extracts herself and heads off. “Rollins has a concussion though if you want to drop in on him and tuck him in.”
Sometimes, late at night or sapped of energy after a mission, Steve wonders why he bothers. Why his heart continues to push a boulder uphill when his head has well and truly surrendered. There are plenty of women more willing if not more able.
Then her foot slips on the metal staircase and he doesn’t think but weaves his arm around her to stop her fall.
Before he knows it she’s pressed up against him. He expects a reprimand or at least a slap. Instead her head rolls so that her face is buried in his chest. Heat blooms over his thudding heart at she exhales.
This isn’t the Hill he’s used to. Hill doesn’t trip over her own feet. Suddenly he’s afraid but knows better than to voice his concerns.
“You can let me go now, Captain.” As much as it pains him, Steve follows orders. He lets her help herself up to the top of the stairs, her steps light and self assured. No sign of whatever it was that caused her to lose balance.
She turns back when Steve doesn’t follow, his attention still fixed on the spot where he held her in his arms. She raises and eyebrow as if daring him to make comment.
Steve’s sick of holding back. “You’re scaring me, Hill.”
She glances away momentarily and Steve knows something is up. He closes the distance between them but there’s no room to speak here. Not with doctors and analysts crawling all over the place.
A frown etches across when she looks at him. “Me too,” she says. The words fall begrudgingly. “But the world turns.”
And it does. A day later she’s called away to New York and congress needs an appearance from Captain America.
As the cameras flash and he gives a pre-prepared address with all those faces smiling back at him, Steve understands why he refuses to give up on her. It’s because she refuses to give up on herself and that is something worth holding on to.
These people before him have put their lives in his hands, a responsibility he never signed up for. He’s a soldier at his core not a savior.
Maria doesn’t need or want to be saved. Steve’s not even sure if she notices that people care about her. She’s too busy cleaning up after everyone. He might be Captain America but when it comes to Maria Hill the kid from Brooklyn has taken over. And dammit if that kid isn’t stubborn. He’s also greedy and idealistic and once a notion pops into his head, he refuses to let it go.
Steve respects Maria’s caution even if he can't stand her need for it. She’s going to block him at every turn and he’s more than prepared for her cold, pointed barbs. Steve’s not a lightweight. He’s been hit before. Sooner or later, he’ll show Maria that he can do this all day long. And maybe, just maybe, he might make the Iron Maiden smile.