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Maria stared into her coffee, slowly twirling the stirrer, making brown liquid mini vortexes that quickly petered out of existence. She reflected on the fact that she didn’t know how Coulson had liked his coffee. She knew so many details about the man; they had worked together for years, had collaborated on many missions and projects together. Surely they’d shared many long nights together that would have required an abundance of caffeinated beverages. How had she never noticed how he drank his coffee?
“Penny for your thoughts?”
The average person would have probably been startled. A strong, but not unkind voice, wafting out of the ether to cut into her quiet reflection - had Maria Hill not been Maria Hill, she imagined she would have jumped in her seat. But she was Maria Hill, agent of SHIELD, and she’d known since she left the gravesite that Steve Rogers had been following her all the way to the coffee shop.
She offered him a quick smile in greeting. “Captain. Would you like to sit down?”
Steve nodded and sat across from her, a mug in his hands filled with dark steaming liquid. Steve likes his coffee black, Maria thought idly to herself, filing the information away.
“Do I really need to find a penny to hear those thoughts? Because I don’t actually have one. Apparently nobody uses cash these days. I just used a piece of plastic to pay for a sixty-nine cent coffee.” Steve chuckled to himself and took a drink from his mug.
Maria wondered if he felt the burning of hot coffee on his tongue, or if the super serum had made him impervious to such minor annoyances.
“Just thinking about work,” she said instead. “I’m probably going in for a few hours tonight, to get a head start on tomorrow.”
“Tonight?” Steve asked skeptically. “But...”
...we just buried Coulson. Maria’s mind supplied the rest of Steve’s sentence. She wished it were that easy. That when a coworker, a friend - a good person - died, that she could be like everybody else and grieve. But the idea of going back to her apartment, changing into her pajamas, and curling up on the couch to watch a movie made her want to cringe. Down that path lay nothing but self-pity. Action was better. Action took her mind off things; dulled any remnants of pain.
“I feel better when I work,” Maria supplied as explanation.
Steve considered that for a moment, then nodded thoughtfully. It didn’t seem like he was going to press her on the matter, and for that she was thankful. The pair sat in silence for a few moments, sipping their respective drinks, watching the passerby outside of the coffee shop window.
“So how about you?” Maria asked, curiosity finally pushing her to ask. “Did you need something from me?”
Steve looked confused.
“You did follow me here,” she said.
“Oh, right.” A sheepish expression crossed his face. “I guess I wasn’t that stealthy. My mind was a little preoccupied.”
Maria raised an eyebrow.
“Not that I was trying to be stealthy! I mean - I just wanted to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. Well, Agent Coulson, I guess.” Steve reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a few old Captain America trading cards. The ones with Coulson’s blood.
Maria narrowed her eyes at the sight of them. They used to represent the light side of a good man. Now they represented the ways in which the memories of the dead could be twisted and manipulated for the gains of the living. “Where did you get those?”
“I asked Fury if I could have them.”
Maria bit her tongue. A part of her wanted to tell Steve the truth about where that blood came from. Not just because Coulson’s memory deserved better, but because a small, twisted part of her would enjoy seeing Steve pissed off at Fury over it. Fury deserved it.
“What are you going to do with them?” Maria asked instead. Even the momentary discomfort her boss would get from having a pissed off Avenger on his hands wasn’t worth it. Fury would smooth things over with Steve quickly - he did have results on his side, after all. No matter what else, it had worked. It had saved the world. She could hear his voice now... It’s what Agent Coulson would have wanted. And he wouldn’t be wrong.
She had the feeling it would hurt Steve more than Fury, anyway. And he didn’t deserve to be brought in the middle of that.
“Take them home. Put them in a box with my other war memories.” Steve smiled at the cards, then tucked them back into his pocket. “I want to do something to honor him.”
“Didn’t you already do that?” Maria waved her hand out the window, indicating the city. “By helping to save humanity?”
Steve shrugged. “I want to do something a little more personal, you know?”
Maria did know. She was going to do the same herself. She’d volunteered to take over Coulson’s current cases, doubling her own workload. It was the best tribute she knew how to give. But she didn’t know how to help Steve. She put her hand on his.
“Hey, it’s Captain America!” a shrill voice rang out in the quiet coffee shop. A patron had entered and immediately spotted him. Maria reasoned that probably everyone else in the place had spotted him too - kind of hard to miss the face of one of the Avengers out in broad daylight - but were more polite and let him have his privacy.
Maria withdrew her hand and shrugged on her coat. Steve tossed her an apologetic look as his fan swarmed the table and started to frantically ask for an autograph. “I’ll see you later,” she said, waving off anything he was about to say, and slipped out of the coffee shop, leaving the excitement behind her.
She needed to get to work.
***
Going through Coulson’s files was taking her even longer than Maria had anticipated. It had been three weeks, and she was maybe halfway through his backlog. How did he manage to keep up on so many active cases? Being second in command of the helicarrier seemed almost easy in comparison. Maria had started delegating some of the less important cases to Coulson’s junior officers.
She was currently poring over a file about an overzealous scientist who’d potentially been developing some sort of shrink ray - definitely someone of interest to SHIELD - when Fury let himself into her office, knocking sharply on the door seconds before entering.
“Sir,” Maria said by way of greeting.
“Hill,” he replied, looking around her office, taking in the piles of paper files and tablets everywhere. His eyes stopped on a silver briefcase sitting on the floor, leaning against her desk. It was Coulson’s. Fury met Maria’s eyes, expression unchanged. “One of Agent Coulson’s cases just became top priority.”
Maria put down the tablet in her hand and leaned back in her chair. “Oh?”
“Foster, Jane. Astrophysicist. Colleague of Erik Selvig. Thor’s - ‘friend.’”
Maria knew of her, of course, but not any particulars. She dug around in the piles, looking for the Foster file. Coulson had marked it with a low priority level. Maria read the most recent notation in the file. Foster was under close watch at a SHIELD facility in Norway doing research.
“What about her?”
“She’s missing.”
“From a secure SHIELD facility? Is foul play suspected?”
“It’s unlikely. The director of the facility believes she left of her own free will. There was a note.”
Maria was puzzled. “Forgive me, sir, but Dr Foster is a civilian. What can we do if she left on her own?”
“If she had left on her own to go teach physics to undergrads, I wouldn’t have the problem that I have.” Fury sighed. “And the problem that I have is that she’s very likely to instead hole herself up somewhere and try to open up her own Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”
“Isn’t that what we had her researching in Norway?” Maria scanned the file again to double-check.
“Yes, where we could keep track of her progress, and stall it as long as possible.”
Maria blinked. “Sir?”
“Opening up wormholes on planet Earth isn’t exactly the most solid of ideas, Hill. We wanted a full working knowledge of just how exactly one of these Bridges would work, and from there, figure out a way to close or destroy them when opened up from other places. Before ever opening one to Asgard.”
“Dr Foster didn’t agree?”
“To put it lightly. New York is still sweeping up the rubble from our last alien incursion. We don’t need a reckless astrophysicist doing it all over again.”
Maria nodded. “Any idea where she may have gone? Her old stomping grounds -” She looked at the file. “New Mexico?”
Fury tilted his head in that way meant to give the air of a shrug. “That’s your job now, Hill. Find her, and stop her by any means necessary.”
“I’ll find her, sir.”
***
Maria couldn’t find Jane Foster.
Papers were splayed out on the table in front of her, and she hunched over them with a cup of coffee between her hands. The liquid in the cup sat untouched, cooled nearly to room temperature, but it gave her hands something to hold onto. The top 40 hits emanating out of the coffee shop’s tinny speakers somehow helped her focus, rather than distract her. Not that any of it mattered, because she was making very little progress.
“One little astrophysicist. How could she have disappeared?” she mumbled to herself as she reviewed her notes for the millionth time.
She’d had Jane’s former assistant, Darcy Lewis, tracked by a couple of agents, and her phone and email monitored. She was living in Albuquerque, studying at the University of New Mexico. Lewis hadn’t spoken to Jane in weeks; the last communication was a generic-sounding catching-up email. Maria had driven herself crazy for about two hours studying that email, wondering if there was some sort of code in between so did you try any of that weird nordic soap fish yet? and it’s not soap, it’s lye, it’s a curing agent and a cultural dish that I will definitely try one of these days. There were no calls or texts between the two, just emails. The agents tailing the student had reported no unusual movement or activity over the four days they’d been watching her.
Either they had some very stealthy way of communicating, or Jane had deliberately left Darcy out of her plans. Maria though the latter very likely, since Jane knew of SHIELD’s tenacity and would want no trail left behind. The investigation of Erik Selvig had come up similarly empty-handed, probably for the same reasons.
Maria threw her pen down. It flew off the table and rolled on the floor for a few feet, before knocking into a brown shoe.
“Whoa, what’d that pen ever do to you?”
“Captain,” Maria said, startled out of her thoughts by the sight of Steve Rogers in front of her. He bent down to grab the pen and handed it back to her. “Thanks,” she said.
“Mind if I sit?”
Maria nodded and tried to gather up her papers in a somewhat more manageable pile, clearing space for Steve.
“Working on something tough?”
Maria shrugged, putting some papers face down on the rest to obscure their contents. It gave her a bit of a rebellious thrill to review classified papers in public - Fury would doubtlessly not approve - but she drew the line at letting non-SHIELD personnel see them. “Just a problem I can’t seem to find the solution to.”
Maria flagged down a waitress and handed her over her now-cold cup of coffee. “I’d like a fresh cup, please. Captain? Coffee, black, right?” He nodded, and the waitress left to get their drinks.
“Please, call me Steve. I prefer it when I’m out of uniform.”
“Sure,” she said. “So, did you follow me again this time?”
Steve chuckled. “No. I just decided I like this place. I come here almost every day. I needed a new coffee shop after my old one got in the way of an invading alien army.”
Maria nodded. A lot of that had gone around after the battle of New York. She’d been trying to find a new bakery, one that made their everything bagels just like her last one had. None of them did. They never got the ratio of onion to poppyseeds right.
“Can I help with your problem?”
“I doubt it.” Maria paused while the waitress delivered their coffees. She didn’t miss the flirtatious smile tossed in Steve’s direction. “Get a lot of that, I bet,” she said after the waitress had left again.
“It’s a little embarrassing, actually.”
“Is it better or worse than before?”
“Before the super-soldier serum?” Steve took a deep breath, and Maria wondered if she’d asked too personal a question. But curiosity had gotten the better of her. “Well, I didn’t really talk to girls - women - before. Except one. But that one... at least I knew she liked me for me.”
Steve went quiet, staring out the window, and Maria was content to let the issue drop. She knew the rest of that story, anyway. It was all in his file.
“Maybe you can help me.”
Steve turned his attention back to her and sipped at his coffee. “Anything.”
“Any idea where an astrophysicist might go to open up a wormhole in secret?”
Steve blinked. “Is this a hypothetical question?”
Maria didn’t answer.
“Oh, boy. Well, my first question would be, how is he going to do that?”
“She. And I have no idea how wormholes work, I’m not a scientist.”
“No,” Steve said, setting his cup down. “I don’t mean scientifically how. I mean logistically how? If I learned anything about scientists while working with Dr Erskine, it’s that what they do takes a lot of resources and a lot of money. He was always worried about funding.”
“Right,” Maria said. “SHIELD was funding her, and before that, she’d relied on grants. Without SHIELD, where would she get the money?”
“Another grant?”
“No, that would have come up in my searches. Nothing’s been awarded to her, or for a project remotely resembling hers.”
“Wealthy benefactor?”
“If she knew any, she wouldn’t have needed SHIELD in the first place.”
“Unless she’s made a new friend,” Steve supplied. “A new, wealthy friend.”
“Not just any wealthy friend. But maybe one in particular that has a bone to pick with SHIELD?”
Steve raised an eyebrow. “I only know one person who fits that description.”
“Tony Stark.” Maria narrowed her eyes. That man would never stop annoying her, would he? “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.”
“I find that when troubleshooting a problem, it can help to have someone to brainstorm with.” Steve smiled widely.
“Well, you’ve been amazingly helpful, thank you,” Maria said. “I need to go check up on Stark. It has to be him...” She started shoving the files into her bag, but in her haste several of the pages fell to the floor. Steve picked them up, glancing at them before handing them over. His eyes fixed on Coulson’s name printed on the corner of the sheets.
“This is one of Coulson’s?” he asked.
“Someone had to take over his open cases. I was the best choice, since the helicarrier is sitting in the harbor getting repaired.”
Steve handed over the rest of the papers. “I want to come with you.”
“What?”
“I told you before, I want to do something to honor Coulson. Maybe this is one way I can. By helping you.”
Maria was about to refuse him. Normally non-SHIELD personnel just got in her way. But if her next stop was Tony Stark’s office, she thought having Captain America on her side might work to her favor and make answers come easier.
“Alright. But if you’re tagging along, that means I’m responsible for you. Which means what I say, goes, because I don’t really need a rogue Captain America on my hands. Got it?”
Steve grinned. “Yes, sir.”
***
Tony Stark was easy to find, since he didn’t exactly bother trying to hide. Maria was fairly certain that he enjoyed the constant attention. She wasn’t sure which would kill him faster - the removal of the arc reactor from his chest that kept his heart beating, or the eradication of his legions of fans and detractors that talked about him non-stop and kept his ego afloat.
She’d gone directly to Stark Tower, Steve in tow, but Tony was in Malibu. She was sure the receptionist had passed on that the two of them were looking for him, and yet instead of saving everyone some time by putting on one of his suits and jetting back to New York, he let them go to all the travel effort of taking a plane out west.
It was kind of nice to have Steve along for the trip; he made the hours-long plane ride less boring. Maria wasn’t much of a talker about personal things, especially with colleagues, but she supposed Steve only counted as a colleague in the loosest sense, since she didn’t think “Avenger” was a valid occupation and it definitely wasn’t a SHIELD-approved one. Besides, he seemed happy to do most of the talking. He regaled her with several entertaining stories about his exploits during the war, before being frozen. Maria thought he was a good storyteller, and it seemed other people felt the same way; she got the distinct impression the passengers in the seats surrounding them were eavesdropping with rapt attention. He was handsome, of course, and that always got him attention; but it was more than that too. He spoke more like someone who’d lived that 70 years in the ice, rather than slept through it. He inspired people.
After disembarking the plane, waiting an hour for Steve’s bike to be offloaded from the cargo hold (because he’d insisted on bringing it despite Maria’s protests, and that had taken some abuse of SHIELD powers to accomplish), and navigating the traffic-filled streets of Los Angeles, they finally reached Stark’s place in Malibu. Maria had seen pictures but had never seen the place in person; it was impressive. The security guard out front was apparently expecting them, and waved them through an open gate. At the front door, Maria knocked loudly and confidently, ready to give Tony Stark a piece of her mind.
Pepper Potts answered the door instead. “Agent Hill!” she exclaimed with a smile. “Steve! What a pleasant surprise!”
Maria couldn’t tell if she was legitimately surprised to see them there or just acted the part really well. “Ms Potts,” she replied, nodding her head as a greeting. “Is he here?”
“What’s he done now?” Pepper asked humorously, and waved them inside.
“Funded a private citizen in scientific experiments that have the potential to jeopardize the safety of Earth and her inhabitants,” Maria replied matter-of-factly.
“Sounds like Tony,” Pepper said nonchalantly. “Would either of you like a drink?”
Maria and Steve both refused, and Pepper led them to Tony in his downstairs workshop. He was hunkered over a table, pieces of metal and electronics everywhere, and three computer monitors displaying streaming technical data were suspended above the table. “Tony,” Pepper called to get his attention, though Maria was sure he heard them come in. The man loved to showboat.
Tony spun around, and smiled. He stood up and held out his arms. “Agent Hill! And my good friend Captain America. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Steve and Tony shook hands. Maria kept hers crossed across her chest.
“Where’s Jane Foster?” she asked.
Tony pursed his lips and scratched his head. “Jane... Jane Foster. Nope, not ringing any bells.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“That’s cause you’ve got some trust issues, Maria. I don’t blame you. Working for a super-secret organization like SHIELD is bound to give anyone issues.” He walked back to his table and fell into his chair. Maria followed him, Steve right behind her.
“I think you know exactly who I’m talking about,” Maria said, putting her hands on the chair’s armrests of either side of Tony, leaning down. “And I think you know where she is. I need to find her before she unleashes the Battle of New York part two through a bunch of reckless, unsupervised experiments. Because when that happens, it’s on you, Stark.”
Tony narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw, but said nothing.
“Tony,” Steve said imploringly. “This is about more than just one person.”
“Yeah, Cap, that’s the excuse government organizations always like to give before infringing on someone’s rights. Maybe if you guys helped rather than hindered scientific progress, situations like this wouldn’t happen,” Tony said. “It’s obvious this Jane Foster needed something SHIELD wouldn’t give.”
Maria let go of his chair and backed up a step. “SHIELD wants to work with Dr Foster; the issue of pacing is where we disagreed.”
“Can’t help you,” Tony said, and turned back to his table covered in scraps.
Maria took a deep breath. Threats it would be, then. “If you can’t help me, maybe you can help yourself. You think SHIELD couldn’t go after you for half the stuff you do in this basement?”
“Yeah, and why don’t you? Cause you know you wouldn’t win.” Tony waggled a screwdriver at her. Maria grabbed it and slammed it onto the table.
“No, because we know it’s not worth the effort when most of the time, you are only putting yourself at risk. What Dr Foster is doing is far more than that. She’s putting potentially thousands of lives, or more, at risk. But I’m more than willing to alter that policy. I don’t have much to do right now, other than make your life a living hell until I get the information I want. I can have SHIELD agents crawling all over this place tomorrow.”
Tony smirked. “You’d be wasting your time.”
“Maybe. We’d be wasting yours, too. I’m sure we could never find all your secrets, but we can try.”
Maria crossed her arms again. Steve came to stand beside her in a show of support.
Tony rolled his eyes. “You guys buddy cops now? Look, I get it. But you can’t just shut her down.”
“Nobody’s shutting anybody down,” Steve assured, then looked to Maria for confirmation.
“Right. She wasn’t shut down in the first place. SHIELD just wanted to take a breather. Make sure all the variables were accounted for.”
Tony reached for a scrap of paper and a pencil. He scrawled an address. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Agent Hill, it’s that you can never account for all the variables.” He held out the scrap of paper, and Maria took it. “Now get out.”
Maria turned to leave, but paused. “How’d you find out about her project, anyway?”
Tony smirked. “Remember when I hacked into the helicarrier’s computers? I kind of downloaded the entire SHIELD database. Just the text, not the photos or other media. I only had so many terabytes to dedicate. But there’s a lot of juicy stuff in there. Dr Foster’s file was just one of several that caught my attention.”
Maria gritted her teeth and left. SHIELD would have to deal with that issue another day.
***
“That went well,” Steve said as he fastened his helmet on.
If that confrontation had been with anyone other than Tony Stark, Maria would have assumed Steve was being sarcastic. But considering they got the information they came for, everything else was irrelevant. She shared a grin with Steve.
Maria peered at the scrap of paper. “Palm Springs,” she said. “Well, the desert just outside it.”
“How far?”
“Only a few hours away.”
Steve peered out over the ocean at the sun, which was still high in the sky, but trending downwards. They’d been busy travelling since 7am, and thanks to the time difference between the east coast and the west coast, they’d had a few extra hours tacked onto their day. “Maybe we should take a break before heading out there? Stop for a late lunch?”
Almost as if on cue, Maria felt her stomach grumble. She tugged on her helmet. “Alright, just a pit stop.”
They got on the bike; Maria slipped on behind Steve in what was a now-familiar position after their long ride up to Tony’s house in Malibu.
“Wait,” she said, before Steve could start the bike. She pulled out her phone and punched in the exact address that Tony gave them, bringing up directions. She kept them open on the phone and then stuck the phone into Steve’s front jacket pocket. “Directions are on there.”
Steve turned his head to the side. “Thanks,” he said.
The bike roared to life underneath them, and Maria gripped Steve’s jacket, though she wasn’t particularly nervous. The ride up, though windy, had been smooth. She admitted to herself that she didn’t mind he insisted on bringing his bike, because instead of having to concentrate on driving it left her to her thoughts.
She ruminated on the subject of Jane Foster. What would Coulson do in this situation? Would he shut her down completely? Nah - he’d recognize that she won’t go away. He’d sent her to Norway, with facilities and funding. He obviously thought that was the right choice. But SHIELD had stymied her every move since she got there. Would Coulson have approved? Once Foster was on the plane to Tromso, she stopped being one of his active cases. He didn’t oversee her day to day activities. Did he even know about what SHIELD was doing? Did he check up on her more than a casual review of status reports? Maria wished she could ask him for advice.
Maria shook herself out of her thoughts when Steve pulled off the freeway and found a slightly run-down-looking little diner to stop at for lunch. She realized he’d passed many chain fast food restaurants up for this mom-and-pop greasy spoon. She smiled to herself. Steve always loved the little guy.
“What?” Steve asked. He slung his helmet over the handlebars. Maria did the same.
“Nothing,” she said. They walked into the diner and were seated, earning stares from the patrons as whispers raced through the place.
They sat in a booth, and an older waitress came to wait on them. The woman called them both sweetie and didn’t seem to care who Steve was. That was nice, at least, among the stares from everybody else.
“I don’t envy you,” Maria said while they waited for their food. “Everyone watching you, all the time. It would make me nervous.”
“Nervous?”
Maria shrugged. “I don’t like being the center of attention. It makes me uneasy. I feel like I have to be on guard all the time.”
“Well,” Steve said, and looked out the window. “They’re not really looking at me anyway. They’re looking at Captain America. It’s actually comforting, in a way.” He looked back at Maria. “I always know how to act around them. They want the hero. The hero is something that goes on easily with the uniform. The man underneath is the thing I still don’t fully understand.”
Maria blinked. She hadn’t expected to hear that, or to hear Steve be so candid. She thought of all the things he’d gone through in what were to him, just the past couple years of his life. “I guess... you haven’t really had a chance to find yourself.”
“Who really does though?” Steve asked.
“Well, I like to think I’m pretty solid on my self-identity.” Maria tried to lighten the mood. “SHIELD agent extraordinaire, through and through.”
Steve smiled. “You probably are one of the most sure-of-themselves people I know.”
“Thanks,” she said. Although she had been joking, the compliment felt good anyway.
Eventually the food arrived, and they dug in to their slightly-overdone hamburgers and greasy french fries. They laughed together over how terrible the food was. But places like this is where the real America is, Steve had said. Maria tended to agree.
She looked around at the people in the diner off the side of the freeway, eating their mediocre food, joking with each other. A man with a ballcap on backwards and a flannel with rolled-up sleeves, a woman with a faded blue sundress but a loud and joyful laugh; people with lives they were coming from and going to. This were the reason SHIELD existed. These were the people she was trying to protect. Tony Stark didn’t see these people. Maybe in an abject way, he did, but she doubted that he really saw them. Maria not only saw them, she knew them. She was one of them. People like Tony were always one step removed; he was wealthy and smart and a futurist. And that was fine; the world needed people like that to advance. But when that advancement went unchecked, Maria was here to protect everyone else from the Tony Starks of the world. The Tony Starks, and the Jane Fosters.
It didn’t take them long to finish eating and pay up - Maria paid the bill with a SHIELD credit card, despite Steve trying three times to pay his own way (she finally agreed to let him leave a tip) - and by the time she was strapping her helmet on and climbing onto the back of the bike, her resolve had strengthened. She was glad Steve had suggested the stop. A little food, a little introspection - it was how Maria liked to get things done.
They got back on the road, Steve referring to the directions only once, his impeccable memory retaining all the information with one glance. Eventually they pulled off the freeway and onto route 62, headed north of Palm Springs. They rode for about half an hour, passing through some small towns, before turning off on a dirt road that was bumpy and seemingly unmaintained. They were in the thick of the desert now, surrounded by saguaro cacti, their fat, green, prickly arms reaching up to the cloudless sky. Scrubby little bushes were everywhere, and the rest was empty sand and dirt. Eventually, Steve stopped in the middle of the road, and shut off the bike.
Maria untangled herself from Steve’s jacket; her fingers were cramped from having held on so tightly over the bumpy road. She massaged them.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Tried to make the ride as smooth as I could.”
“I’ve been in bumpier rides,” she said. She slid off the bike and took her helmet off, looking around. “Is this where the directions say to stop? Let me see.”
Steve handed her the phone back, and sure enough, the directions ended right there. In the middle of the road. Maria pocketed the phone. “I guess I wouldn’t want a road that goes right to the front door of my secret installation either. Look around for any indication of movement in the dirt.”
Steve nodded and the two of them took opposite sides of the road, examining the ground for evidence of tire tracks or footprints.
“Over here!” Steve eventually called from about fifty feet up the road. Maria jogged over to see what he was pointing at. Faint, but present, was a set of tire tracks leading off of the road and heading off towards a bank of small hills.
“This must be the place.” Maria looked up at the sun, which was just grazing the horizon now. It wouldn’t be long before dark, so they needed to hurry while they had the light to track. “Let’s go.”
They got back on the bike and followed the trail, stopping every so often when they lost the tracks and had to find them again. Dusk was setting in rapidly, the sky deepening and the air developing a sharp chill. Eventually, they found it. They noticed the dusty, old jeep first, parked at the base of an especially large hill. Near it, embedded in the rock, was a small metal door, with a lone 40 watt incandescent bulb above to illuminate it.
They stopped about a hundred feet short of the door. She and Steve looked around, but it was quiet. The only noise was from the bugs bouncing off the light bulb, which was quickly becoming the only source of light in a ten mile radius.
“Looks okay. Let’s knock, I guess,” Maria said.
“After you.” Steve waved his hand forward, and Maria knocked on the door. She wasn’t sure if anyone would answer, but after a minute it swung wide open and revealed a petite brunette, clad in jeans and a t-shirt, hair in a messy ponytail. Doctor Jane Foster.
“You took longer than I expected,” Jane said. She stepped back and widened the door, letting the two of them inside. She closed it behind them, and it took their eyes a moment to adjust to the cold fluorescent lights.
“We stopped for lunch,” Maria said drily, not even bothering to ask how she knew they were coming. She had expected Tony to give Jane the heads up. “I’m Agent Maria Hill, with SHIELD.”
“Jane Foster. Follow me,” Jane said, leading them down an empty, cramped hallway leading deeper into the hillside.
“Dr Foster,” Maria said. “I don’t believe you’ve met Steve Rogers?”
“How do you do,” he said to Jane’s back.
Jane turned around, walking backwards, and grinned, but it was a cold grin. “I certainly know who you are. Good to meet you. Are you the muscle? To make sure I do what SHIELD wants?” There was a definite measure of acerbity in her voice.
“No, not at all.” Steve sounded genuinely offended at the accusation.
Jane shrugged and turned back towards the front as she walked. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t really believe you. SHIELD hasn’t exactly been a friend to me.”
She led them through a set of swinging double doors which opened into a huge open space. In the middle of the space, on the floor, was concentric rings of wiring, wrapped in different colors of tape. There was a table to one side of the space, covered with papers and notebooks. Next to it was a bank of free-standing computer monitors, wires coming off and connecting with small black boxes placed sporadically around the floor, which then connected to the rings of wire. Maria looked up at the ceiling above the wires, and saw that ceiling was actually a retractable door. She figured there must be a passageway open through the top of the hill. She wondered if Tony had this place built on the quick, or if he’d been sitting on it all along. The rest of the room was empty and grey, tall concrete walls with no windows. A lone doorway was in the same corner as the computers and table. It was open, and through it Maria could see a small cot and a mini-fridge with a hot plate on top. Maria couldn’t believe that Jane had been living out here for a month.
Jane saw Maria evaluating her living space. “It hasn’t been so bad. I spend most of my day on work, anyway, so it does matter all that much.”
Steve walked over to the rings of wire to examine them. “What’s this for?”
“That’s the connection for the bridge,” Jane said. She flopped down into the chair behind the table.
“The Einstein-Rosen Bridge?” Maria asked, eying it curiously, remembering the term from her research into Jane’s casefile.
“No, the Rainbow Bridge.” Jane’s reply was sharp and sarcastic.
Maria turned to look at her. Jane was watching Steve poke at one of the black boxes with wires coming from it, her expression distant and forlorn. Maria felt a sympathy for Jane. She knew Jane had been jerked around a few times now. But SHIELD always had a reason. Maria thought of the man at the diner with the backwards baseball cap. That was her reason.
“We’re not here to shut you down, Dr Foster. We’re here to bring you back. SHIELD still believes in your project. SHIELD believes in you.”
Jane laughed mirthlessly and rolled her eyes. “Right. You believe in me so much you’d keep me locked away in Norway the next ten years, doing the same calculations over and over just to make sure I’m right. Look, this is a private operation now. You can steal my equipment again. You’ve done it before. But I’ll be back up and running again soon, and next time I’ll find somewhere even more secure. But you can not make me go with you.”
Maria stalked over to the desk and leaned on it, bringing her face close to Jane’s. “Dr Foster, I know you’re frustrated and tired and angry. I get it.”
“Oh, do you?” Jane said mockingly.
“Yeah, maybe you don’t believe me, but I do. But it’s about more than just your project. It’s about this planet. And your ideas and your math and your schematics are pretty sound, but they’re not foolproof. And we can’t unleash another event like the one six weeks ago.”
“It’s funny how you say that,” Jane said, slamming her own hands on the table and standing up, her sarcasm and defeatism morphing into anger almost instantly. “Because looking at the score sheet, I’m pretty sure that you guys are the only ones who’ve actually unleashed any danger lately. Didn’t Loki only come to Earth in the first place because SHIELD was playing with the tesseract?”
Maria startled, and looked around to Steve, who shrugged. She turned back to Jane. “Who told you about that? Stark? Selvig?”
Jane threw her hands up in the air. “What does it matter? I know. I know all about what happened. And it’s just another instance of SHIELD’s policy of do as I say, not as I do. But I’m tired of it!”
Maria opened her mouth, then closed it, unsure what tactic to try next. Steve took up the slack, coming to where the two women were staring each other down. “Dr Foster, I can see you’ve put a lot of work into this project. But is one scientific goal worth the potential danger and loss of lives?”
Jane bit the inside of her cheek, turning his words over in her mind. “Look, uh, Captain, I’m sure that Agent Hill here has told you how incredibly dangerous this project is, but it’s not true. I’ve run the numbers - not just me, the others back in Tromso - and they’re all within acceptable parameters for success of a stable bridge between here and Asgard.”
“Isn’t any chance of failure too high?” asked Steve.
“Science is never infallible.” Jane said, impassioned. “You can never eliminate every risk. But you can try your damnedest. And I know - I know - this will work!”
Maria considered her options. As Jane pointed out, Maria could take all her equipment, but Jane would just start up again somewhere else, and make herself even harder to find. She could try to keep convincing her to go back to Norway. Hah, right. That’s never going to happen. She could arrest Jane and take her back to SHIELD headquarters. Lock her away... for how long? Forever? Fury had said to stop her by any means necessary. Did that include indefinite detainment? That rang a little close to wrong for Maria.
Jane cut into Maria’s thoughts. “You - SHIELD - passed along a message from Thor, after the battle ended. ‘Thor sends his love.’” Jane slumped back down into her chair, energy spent. “I mean, what the hell is that? Like I’m some little lady waiting at home to be sated with love notes? I was so angry. And it’s about more than just Thor. Asgard - I want to go there. This bridge? This is my life’s work. This is all I’ve ever wanted. Just to prove my theories are right. That we can connect to other worlds. We’ve seen it come the other way, now I want to show that humans can be in control. That we have that ability.”
Maria stayed silent, so Jane kept going. “You keep saying I’m putting the Earth in danger. But I disagree. I’m doing this to protect Earth. You’ve seen Thor! Imagine a whole world of people like him on our side. Imagine how much quicker the Battle of New York might have gone.”
Maria looked at Steve, who appeared to have taken keenly to Jane’s side of the story. His eyebrows were furrowed and his eyes dark with concern as he looked around the room once more. “Maria... she’s right.”
Maria sighed. Outnumbered. “Say you are right. Say I think you deserve a better chance with this. What I think doesn’t matter. I have my orders. SHIELD -”
“SHIELD sent you out here with some measure of autonomy, didn’t they? Doesn’t your boss trust you to make your own decisions?” Jane asked.
Maria wanted to chuckle at that, but reigned herself in. She didn’t really know how far Fury trusted her, but Jane was right. This was her call. And Maria would argue her decision, whatever it was, to Fury. She’d certainly done it enough times before.
“I have an idea,” Steve said. “A compromise. Maria, SHIELD is worried about Dr Foster’s experiment getting out of control, right? And Dr Foster, you want to be in charge of the project and proceed at your own pace? Well, how about Dr Foster remains here, with all her equipment, and continues her work. Unimpeded. Provided that she check in with SHIELD on a regular basis with updates.”
"Regular updates? I don't want to be under SHIELD's thumb again," Jane huffed. "How do I know you wouldn't just swoop in and shut me down right before I open the bridge?"
Was she really negotiating on this with Jane? Maria sighed at herself, but it seemed to be the only option. "I know trust isn't big between you and SHIELD right now. But don't worry about trusting them. Trust me, and I will keep my word. As long as you keep us in the loop, SHIELD will let you continue your work."
Jane's mouth opened then closed again. She looked Maria up and down, likely wondering if her word was worth anything. "Really?" Hope had crept into her voice.
"There's just one thing," Maria held up a hand. "We need to talk about what happens in case something goes wrong. Maybe your calculations are sound, and opening and closing wormholes isn't going to tear apart the planet. What about the potential threats out there that would come through them? In New York, it took a warhead and a group of super-powered misfits to solve the problem." She glanced at Steve. "Sorry."
"No, that's fair," he smiled.
“You can be here when I open it,” Jane offered. “You can bring a whole squad, or whatever, with guns. Be ready in case anything happens.”
“And what if something happens that one unit can’t handle?” Maria asked.
“Well, I am building in redundant failsafes,” Jane said. She rifled through some papers then held a stack out. “Bring these back with you. Show SHIELD. Back in Norway - they didn’t want to hear it. I don’t think they really took me seriously over there. But I’ve designed several backdoor shutdown sequences should anything happen. Two are automatic.”
Maria took the pages. She looked at them, but they were filled with numbers and symbols and a whole lot of math she didn’t understand. But she folded them up and stuck them in her pocket. At the very least, this was a temporary measure that could assuage both sides for a time. If they knew where Jane was and how to talk to her, and Jane was open to communicating, then that was better than what the situation had been; an astrophysicist loose in the world with mad science to do.
“Alright. Okay,” Maria said, and Jane smiled widely and clapped her hands. “Hey, a tentative okay!”
Jane stilled herself, but her smile remained. “Thank you Agent Hill. You won’t regret this.”
I already have, Maria thought to herself wryly. “When do you estimate you will be ready to open the bridge?”
Jane pursed her lips and looked at the rings of wire. “I’m almost there. One more month, tops.”
Maria nodded. She had a feeling she’d be back at this desert hideaway after that month passed. This was her case now, and since she’d definitely failed to achieve Fury’s end goal, Maria would have to see this through to the end.
Maria and Jane exchanged direct phone numbers, and Maria insisted on an email or phone call once a day for the next week as a show of good faith. Jane readily agreed. Steve tried to shake Jane’s hand, but she hugged him instead, giving him a heartfelt thanks. Jane turned to Maria afterwards and hugged her too. Maria made a face but patted her on the back. Steve grinned at them.
Jane saw them to the door, her entire personality haven taken a 180. She was suddenly bright, bubbly, and talkative. Maria felt like she’d made the right choice. Fury wouldn’t be happy. A small part of her felt she’d let SHIELD down by not achieving her main objective. But dealing with people was very messy, and at least they’d come to a partial solution.
As Steve and Maria were strapping on their helmets and readying the bike, Jane suddenly asked, “Hey, where’s the other guy? Coulson?”
Maria froze, her hands in the middle of tightening her helmet strap.
“He’s dead,” Steve said when Maria didn’t answer.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Jane said, looking at Maria.
Maria nodded, swallowing hard. “Good luck Dr Foster. And remember, every day.”
“Yes ma’am,” she said, and saluted.
Maria got on the bike behind Steve, and they roared off into the dark desert, Jane waving behind them. Jane and her bridge were instantly a million miles away in Maria’s head as she thought of Coulson: a little short with a signature gait, always that slight smirk on his face. They’d clashed occasionally, but mostly they worked well together. They both understood SHIELD, the nature of their work, and what was at stake. They had common ground.
She clung to Steve’s jacket as she lifted her face to the cold wind whipping against her face. The dark shapes of cacti sped by around them.
Maria had done her job to the best of her ability. Coulson would have approved of her decision. She was sure of it.
***
EPILOGUE
Maria sipped her coffee and leaned back in the plastic chair, letting the ambiance of the coffee shop sweep over her. People were milling about, getting coffee and muffins, and heading back out to enjoy the clear blue sky. It was amazing how humanity could pick up the pieces of a disaster and just keep going.
Steve sat across from her, eating a danish and doing a crossword puzzle. He kept having to ask her for help, since the crossword referenced many events and pop culture phenomena that he wasn’t yet familiar with. She was happy to be brought out of her thoughts each time to give him an answer.
The helicarrier was fixed. Officially, tomorrow was its first day back into duty. Maria was glad to be back to her regular job. Overseeing the crew of the carrier and commanding operations - that was more her speed than people wrangling. But overall, she hadn’t done that badly, she thought. Fury had actually seemed pleased with the solution to the Foster situation. Maria had wondered then if it hadn’t been some sort of elaborate test. Maybe she’d inadvertently found the right answer after all.
That was a bit too much mental gymnastics, especially for such a quiet Sunday afternoon. Maria watched Steve do his crossword instead. He grinned every time he knew the answer to something, especially if it was new knowledge he had acquired since being woken up, and Maria thought that if nothing else, at least she’d made a friend in Steve. She couldn’t seem to shake him, anyway, since he popped up at that coffee shop whenever she was there.
“Coulson would be proud of us,” Maria said.
Steve looked up from his crossword. He nodded, and put his hand over Maria’s. “Yeah, he would.”
Maria sipped her coffee with her free hand and smiled.