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Stark's people expect Maria Hill to kick up a fuss when Steve Rogers brings back the Winter Soldier and so do most of the Avengers. Rogers looks braced for a fight when he introduces them. Barton and Romanoff don't even glance Maria's way, and it makes a little easier to know she is not entirely bereft and unknown here.
Maria looks James Buchanan Barnes up and down and sees exactly what she expected to see, half the man he has been and half the weapon. "I hope you realize," she tells him flatly, "that you have at least three weeks worth of paperwork and boring meetings ahead of you."
It's hard to figure out who looks more surprised, Barnes or Rogers.
Mentally, Maria is already starting to run down her list of the people he needs to see besides Tony's legal department. The list is long to get him connected with his previous life, to say nothing of certifying him for any kind of fieldwork with the Avengers, if he's ever interested. Rogers will probably want that more than Bucky.
"What? No therapy?" Barnes suddenly asks, sounding far more human and witty than a brainwashed assassin would.
It's a good sign.
"You can find your own fresh meat to chew on," she tells him curtly, then kicks the team out of her office.
"It's strange," Maria admits to Pepper later. "In SHIELD, this would've been history repeating itself."
Pepper's quick. She figures it out in less than a moment. "Natasha?"
"I was there when Clint brought her in," Maria points out, slightly annoyed. "She and I are friends."
Pepper smiles. "Men."
Yes, men.
Maria was twenty-five years old before she really started trusting any. She'd grown up with a man who looked at her and saw his dead wife, the woman who'd died giving birth to her.
"Your mother was a saint," Maria's father would say, sneering.
Maria never even tried to be.
Barnes has issues, but all of them have issues. He'll be morose and serious one day, eventually vanishing somewhere to brood, then be laughing and charming the next. Steve seems to think it's only a matter of time before Barnes becomes an Avenger, but Barnes never says a word about it, changing the subject whenever it comes up.
Maria pauses in the gym door and crosses her arms. She watches the Winter Soldier running through an exercise routine she's seen before and that used to make her wince. Maria was a Marine once and she'd always thought herself pretty hardcore until Natasha Romanoff came along and gave her a new high standard to aspire to. This isn't Bucky Barnes of the Howling Commandos; this is the Winter Soldier training to kill.
For a long time, she doesn't say anything, just watches, then she walks to the other side of the gym, feeling his gaze heavy on her back, and starts her own routine.
"You work out every morning?" he asks her the fifth time they butt into each other's training time.
Maria thinks he could pick a better moment to ask her than when she's lifting enough weights to break something if she drops them. She sets them down and tells him, "You want private time, you need to schedule it like everyone else does."
Barnes leans one arm on her weights and gives her the charming grin that tells her exactly which mood he's in today. "Who says I want private time?"
Maria calls his bluff and lifts her weights anyway.
He slides off and backs up a step, then chuckles and asks her out for a drink.
Naturally, she says no.
"So what would you say if I told you I was interested in joining the Avengers?" he asks her a few days later, appearing in her office door like a ghost materializing out of nothingness.
She looks up at Barnes and his serious eyes and his charming smile and thinks she knows just enough to say with confidence, "I'd find your motivations suspect."
It wipes the smile off his face. "Hypothetically then. What would it involve?"
Maria stares at him. He's been actively avoiding the entire topic since he arrived. "Hypothetically, I'd grill you on why the change of heart."
"Forget it." He shrugs jerkily and walks out.
If there's anything Maria has never had a lot of time for, it's male angst in leiu of actual communication. She lets him go and doesn't even ask around for why that odd conversation happened.
Of course, she doesn't actually have to ask since less than two hours later, Natasha has her feet up on Maria's desk and a small smirk on her face. "Did Bucky ask you out again?"
"Pardon?" Maria has never minded that Natasha occasionally puts on a girl-talk persona and things get weird and entirely too communicative about Barton and Romanoff or Steve Rogers' lack of a love life or simply the current highlights of the betting pool (which Sitwell used to run, she remembers with a brief pang). But this feels a little different. This feels like Natasha trying to set her up.
"He's nice," Natasha says, smiling and confirming Maria's suspicions. "He asked me what kinds of things you like to do."
"And please tell me you kept those details to yourself."
No such luck. "I told him you like dancing, working too hard, and scaring new recruits."
Which sort of clinches a theory Maria hadn't wanted to entertain. "He wouldn't be a new recruit even if he did join the Avengers."
Natasha blinks, absorbs that, and then shrugs. "Well, at least he asked something."
Yes, men.
As if Maria doesn't have enough trouble babysitting the lot of them whenever they decide to do something crazy, which is sliding past fifty percent on a good week, one of them has to go ask Natasha about what she likes.
She blows past Barnes in the gym and takes her frustration out on a punching bag for a half hour. The one time he opens his mouth to say something, she gives him the expression Natasha calls 'more pissed off' and tells him curtly, "Don't."
When Maria hands him the note clearing him from the world threat list, she tells him, "Next time you want to know something about me, don't ask someone else."
"Would you go dancing with me?" he asks, all boyish grin and old-world charm. It's really little wonder that Bucky and Steve get so many longing looks from the female staff at Stark Industries.
Maria Hill isn't entirely as immune as she likes to pretend either. "Eight o'clock. Don't be late."
"Ma'am, yes, ma'am."
He playfully salutes her. She rolls her eyes.
Yes. Men.