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1.
Maria is trying hard to be cynical, she really is. But SHIELD is making is it damn hard. Unlike her previous employer, the United States Army, SHIELD does not believe that having a vagina automatically disqualifies one from combat duty. Consequently, even though she has been employed here for less than twenty-four hours, she has already halted a robot invasion. In addition, she has a bad ass black jumpsuit that makes even the most mundane trip to the water cooler look graceful and dangerous. The chair in her cubicle actually spins and rolls, the water in the locker rooms is always hot, there is no sand anywhere, and she is ninety-five percent sure that when her security clearance is high enough, she will get a laser pistol. Oh, and her computer works. All the time. She hasn't whacked it even once since she got here.
It's a long fucking way from dusty barracks in the ass end of Afghanistan, and Maria isn't complaining -- not even about the Robot Incident Report form that has to be filed right now even though it's 11:46 p.m.
Only one small discomfort mars her pleasure: she has a cubicle, and a cubicle mate. He is balding and wears impossibly bland black suits, which contrast awkwardly with the lurid colors of the Captain America posters he's plastered all over his side of the cube. And he has Captain America trading cards. Five of them, vintage, that he keeps flipping with a little snick, snick, snick noise that reverberates through what should be a silent space.
Maria spins in her chair to face him. "Why do you love him so much?" she asks, gesturing at the Captain Americas smiling winningly from the walls.
The man, whose name plate identifies him as Phil Coulson, says, "The real question is why you hate him so much."
Maria thinks of young men and women blown apart by IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her anger flares. "Heroes aren't real," she snaps. "Captain America was a propaganda trick. A way to cover up the complicated truth of complicated missions."
“So you’re blunt, cynical, and slightly combative,” Coulson says.
“No fucking shit,” she answers.
“Okay, maybe not slightly combative,” Coulson says, but he doesn’t look ruffled. “You know, most people, when they meet for the first time, ask if you have any kids, a pet dog, where you went to school. Things like that.”
“People like us don’t have kids or a dog.”
“You’re right. I do have an iguana though. His name is Larry.”
Coulson's poker face is very, very good.
“You’re fucking with me," Maria says.
“No, I’m not. He’s an excellent pet. He eats all the spiders and flies.”
“And then he dies while you’re on two-month missions to the ass end of nowhere?”
Coulson drops his voice to a whisper. “Well, technically, he’s Larry IV. But I don’t talk about the other three.”
2.
Two days later, Maria is crouching behind an overturned table in the break room next to her cubicle mate, watching him hurl cans of creamer and bricks of napkins at the remnants of the robot assault force she thought she'd eradicated yesterday.
"Does this happen often?" she asks, ducking just in time to miss a laser pistol shot.
"About once a year," Coulson says non-chalantly, flinging a salt shaker at a robot's eye scope. Its next shot goes wonky and shatters the coffee pot.
"We needed a new one of those anyway," Maria mutters. She eyes a laser pistol lying abandoned in the middle of the floor.
"Can you give me ten seconds of cover?" she asks.
Coulson nods. "Done."
Maria inches across the linoleum floor beneath a salvo of salt shakers, napkin bricks, and cans of creamer. A blast from one of the pistols singes her hair. Her fingers close around the butt of the weapon on the floor, and with a few shots, she ends the robot invasion of SHIELD's third floor breakroom.
Coulson steps out from behind the table, breathing heavily and straightening his suit jacket.
"Any idea where those came from?" she asks.
"Probably Steve in accounting. You know, white guy, going a little bald, always wanting superpowers." Coulson shrugs. "You never can trust the boring-looking ones."
Maria raises her eyebrows. "So the next annual robot invasion is coming from you?"
"Oh no," Coulson says. "I don't need robots to be cool."
3.
Maria hands Coulson a cold bottle of beer. "Happy Friday."
"It's Wednesday." His eyes don't leave his computer screen.
"Technically, yes, but medical says we're not allowed to work twelve days in a row, so they're shutting down our computers in six minutes. For us, it's Friday." Maria pops the lid off her bottle. "They also said they're coming back in half an hour to make sure we drank the beer and to escort us off the premises."
"Fucking medical," Coulson says. She's never seen him look angry before; she'd almost started believing it was impossible.
"What are you working on?" Maria asks. Five minutes and twenty-six seconds isn't long, but if she can help him before her computer shuts down, she will.
"I was looking for a girl. Svetlana Drakova." Coulson hits the power button on the computer with an angry little jab. "It doesn't matter. I lost her. The Black Widow has her now."
Coulson looks defeated, and for the first time, she notices the dark circles under his eyes. None of what he said makes sense to her, except that he hates failure as much as she does. She knows better than to try and console him.
"I owe you an apology," she says. "For the other night. I didn't need to be such a bitch."
Coulson smiles faintly. "It's alright. I read your personnel file. It says you have the social skills of a porcupine."
"We're both level four," Maria says, surprised by her indignance. "You don't have access to my files."
"True," he says. "But sometimes I do things I'm not supposed to."
"It doesn't really say that," Maria protests. She has social skills; she just doesn't always use them.
"Darn. Computer's shut down. Otherwise I'd show you." He drops his empty bottle into the trash can with a clink and holds out a hand. "Come on, let's go get a real drink."
4.
"A strike team is coming to retrieve Coulson," a faceless agent says over Maria's headset. "Orders are to maintain position."
Maria is pretty sure she's supposed to make a dramatic declaration that the team won't arrive in time and she isn't letting her partner die. Instead she takes off the headset and takes out her gun.
And then she stares at the seventy-two story skyscraper where the Yakuza is apparently holed up, selling organs to the Russian mafia with the help of a morally bankrupt American insurance corporation. She would laugh at the ridiculousness of it if the evil Japanese-Russian-insurance mafia weren't trying to kill her partner, whom she's grown rather fond of in the past six months. Of course, she has no idea how she's going to rescue him because every training manual in her head screams that lone wolf attacks only work in action movies. So she does the only thing she can think of: she assaults a passing Pizza Hut driver, steals his pizza, and takes his uniform.
That plan lasts for approximately twelve seconds, which is how long it takes the door guard to notice that her uniform is six sizes too large. They make eye contact, but Maria shoots first, and then there's nothing to do but run, shoot, kick, and hit. When she runs out of bullets, she takes a gun from an enemy agent. It's a good fight, but she''s seriously outnumbered, and she's pretty sure she's going to die until she finds the gas line feeding a hot water heater on the forty-fifth floor. The fire is an excellent distraction.
She finds Phil on the top floor. Light streams from floor-to-ceiling windows that look down over the whole city, and Phil is tied to a chair in front of one of them. The man standing over Phil wears mirror sunglasses and a black suit, and for a moment, Maria worries that she's gotten lost in the Matrix somehow.
The man turns toward her slowly and says, "Ah, Agent Hill. Your fighting skills are most impressive, but --"
Maria shoots him in the head. Nothing good comes of bantering with enemies.
5.
Maria meets Phil at their bar in Almaty. The sliver of Oklahoma farm girl left in Maria can't believe she has a favorite bar in the capital of Kazakhstan. Not that long ago, she hadn't known this country existed. Five years of working for SHIELD will give you favorite bars in all kinds of places though. This one at least is fairly normal -- a stall in the back of the bazaar that sells one drink: vodka, straight.
"Fury offered me a job," she says.
"No wonder you look profoundly disturbed. What did he ask you to do?" Phil asks.
"Kidnap the child of a weapons dealer and hold her hostage until he stopped selling nuclear blueprints to rogue states."
"And since you're here, I'm guessing you said no."
"I said more than no. I told him he was full of shit and if any agent on my team said yes, I'd have them fired on the spot."
Phil smiles faintly. "And then he asked you if the well-being of a single child was really too high a price to pay to avert a nuclear holocaust. And you said that if we walk over too many moral lines, we become the exact thing we're fighting against."
"How do you know all this?"
"I know him. I know you."
"Did you know he asked me to be the Deputy Director of SHIELD?" Maria leaves the rest of her doubts unspoken: that she's been at SHIELD for far less time than the senior officials on their team, that she's only a level seven, that becoming the deupty director would take her straight up to ten.
"I'm not surprised. He wants someone who will say no to him. He wants a conscience."
"I don't want to be someone's conscience."
"Well, maybe you have to be," Phil says. "How many Acting Deputies has Fury been through since the last one died? They all failed the test. You passed. This orgnization is in danger every day, Maria, and it's not from bullets or grenades or nuclear weapons. We operate in the shadows. We don't have limits -- unless someone puts them there. You have to be the one to do it."
He slides one of his Captain America cards across the bar. "Good doesn't have to be propaganda, Maria. You can be the hero."
She snorts, studying the image of the red, white, and blue superhero charging into battle, before she passes it back to Phil. But he doesn't take it.
"You keep it. I want you to have it, Deputy Director."
"And if, one day, I need someone to draw the line for me, you'll do it?"
"Absolutely," Phil says, and he looks so open and honest that Maria believes him even though SHIELD has taught her to trust nothing and no one.
"You're the hero," she says, too quietly for him to hear.
In the morning, she flies back to New York and takes the job.