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It was 44 degrees below 0°F the day Maria Hill was born. Her mother died in a brightly-lit Chicago hospital room to the sound of Maria's bawling young lungs. That cold stayed with her all her life.
As a child, Maria learned about forgiveness. Her father handed out stories of her mother like sweets—lovely, loved things you should be ashamed of devouring.
"Well, you're not shy," the guidance counselor said. Maria was sixteen and bored, twirling her pencil between her fingers like a feat. "Have you thought about a service industry job? I'm afraid your grades..."
Maria had three distinguishing qualities in high school: expressive and sarcastic dark eyebrows; a few cross country records and some near-misses in track; and a tendency, when she thought homework was pointless busywork, to simply not do it.
"Run, Hill, goddammit," Coach screamed in the afternoons, on weekend races, and Maria stuttered across the finish line. She stumbled, gasping, digging her fingers into her thighs and tottering forward.
What a thing, to be screamed at for the things you were asking your body to do for you.
"Did we win?" she said.
Maria ended up going to a Chicago community college, due to both her grades and a knowing self-awareness of how she would react to academic high-brow snoots. She went out running on muggy summer mornings. She liked the way air strained in her chest. She liked the way this was hers, all hers.
At six forty a.m. on a Thursday, Maria was thinking about groceries as she made her third turn around the campus and heard the rhythmic boom of sneakers on concrete.
A dozen young men and women ran with easy movements past her. Their hair was all cropped short or tied neatly back and they wore the plain gear of the college ROTC program. They passed her and Maria's hackles went up. She picked up her feet, breathing deep, and gave chase.
(No homogenous little soldiers were going to outrun her. These were her mornings. These were her legs).
It was a long chase, this girl in her civvies keeping stubbornly in pace. She thought they sped up for her, but it didn't matter. Maria sucked in warming morning air and heard Coach screaming in her ears.
Maria took basic classes, worked part-time at a machinist's shop, and tried to find her feet. She called up a cross country buddy from high school now and then, shared stories. "A boy in statistics called me as stubborn as a pit bull," Maria told her friend with some measure of pride.
There was a long pause. "Were those his exact words?"
The ROTC kids ran every day at six. It was farther than Maria had been going, but not as far as her longest runs. She showed up every morning— she had a class at eight thirty, after all, and she liked having something to put her metaphorical shoulder up against and shove. She liked having something to chase and something to challenge.
“What are you studying?” one of the ROTC boys asked, three weeks in.
“I was thinking biochemical engineering,” Maria said. “Or art.”
He blinked at her.
“I don't know,” she said.
“You should think about joining up,” he said.
The next semester, they handed Maria Hill her first uniform in a long line of shifting allegiances and she cropped her hair so short the bristly black inch of it stood on end.
She sped through the program at an average but solidly competent pace. There was a boyfriend she could have done without, and a little gelato shop on Grape St. she could have done with more of. But everyone has their regrets.
Stationed in at the embassy in Moscow, the first two words of Russian Maria learned were niet and nikada— no and never . She called up her old cross country friend now and then, said, "Someone called me something in Russian today... I think he said he was as scared of me as he would have been about a frothing Rottweiler. That's a compliment."
"If you say so."
After a broken leg and a split skull, they put Maria at a desk job in London to heal up. The paperwork was worse than the cast; she was off trying to do fieldwork as soon as she could hobble well enough.
During a long discussion with a coworker over proper security concerns for their London office, Maria was aware they had gathered an audience of sorts. She finished with a swift description of three ways the building could be breached and then stalked back to her desk.
A woman was waiting for her there. “That's not how you make friends,” said the woman. She was older, grey hair curling around her cheeks, her eyes bright and her lips a precise red.
Maria shrugged, dropping into her desk. She started sorting through her paperwork. “I'm not pretending he ever wanted to be my friend."
“Do you know who I am?” said the woman.
“Director Peggy Carter.”
Peggy smiled. “You don't care who you're talking to, do you?”
“Just trying to do my job, ma'am.”
"About that," began the director.
When Maria met her years later, Pepper Potts reminded her of Peggy. Pepper had dignity even barefoot in a pair of cutoff jeans. Peggy had lived her life with dignity, in war zones and old boys' clubs.
When Maria was stuck, when she was lost and searching, these women were the ones who brought her in out of the cold.
"Why?" she asked Peggy once.
"I've been in the back of an office before, doing paperwork, because I wasn't who my bosses wanted me to be. The world has changed, but not that much."
In those days, Nick Fury was a young hot shot in Peggy Carter's administration with two sharp eyes and a terrible drive.
One of the best pieces of advice Maria ever got was from Fury. “It's stupid, sure. But sometimes you've got to do stupid things to get where you're going. So turn your brain off for a moment, Hill, and write the damn report.”
Peggy was a stunning listener and a better deliberator. Her eyes shining over her wrinkles, she let conferences run noisy and competitive. When she shut her notebook full of precise minutes—a quiet sound—the whole room would go silent. "Fury, you call the— Chang, I want two pages on my desk on—"
Maria learned to bite her tongue. She was still blunt more often than not (nothing would ever soften her edges) but she bit her tongue, she stood fast, she listened.
Peggy made sure to keep an eye on her recruits. She'd stop by Maria's dinky little cubicle, a tiny space fit for the junior government intern she was, and ask Maria out to drinks. Over Peggy's tasteful scotch and Maria's unashamed chocolatini, they'd talk sports and politics. Peggy was careful not to talk too much about her first war, running away from home as a teenager to fight with the French Resistance, getting recruited for the SSR, Steve Rogers, missions with the Howling Commandos.
When Peggy did, though, Maria felt her world start to make more sense. This was a woman who understood how to play the game and loved the people who didn't.
Peggy had loved Erskine's unorthodox kindness and Steve's tiny, scrappy bravery; the eclectic, effective antics of the Howling Commandos. In her eighties, Peggy's lipstick was perfect, her eyes were bright; she was the director and cofounder of SHIELD.
Peggy Carter surrounded herself with bright chaos and built something powerful out of it.
People called Maria cold. They called her hard or they called her the kind of names that meant Maria would call up her friend and say today someone told me I was as energetic as a golden retriever. They called her cold.
Maria outran them.
Peggy didn't talk much about her first war. Once, a spry old man she called Dum Dum of all things came to visit the office. He banged around with his cane and beamed at Peggy sitting in her wide, brightly-lit office. Maria had her latest intern bring them coffee. Peggy smiled, her accent rolling, and they talked about their children and they talked about their war.
Maria moved up from rookie to mentor. Fury gave her Sharon Carter as her seventh mentorship charge and Maria eyed him over the top of her mug of chamomile.
"A legacy?" said Maria. "Sir, you sure you want me babysitting the little princess? I might make her cry."
"You won't."
"I made the last one cry."
“If she can't handle you, she shouldn't be here.”
“Plenty of people here who can't handle me,” said Maria, and Fury grinned.
Peggy was already starting to delegate, more and more as the years passed.
Fury got his own set of lieutenants. "You'll tell me when I'm being stupid," he told Maria when he offered her the promotion.
"You won't listen, sir."
"There we are. Look what a good team we make. Real stand-up comedy. Now take the promotion, Hill, and get back to scaring the rookies."
Fury's trust tasted nothing like forgiveness.
Maria didn't make a "bring your kid to work" joke on Sharon’s first day, but it was a near thing.
Sharon Carter stayed late and came early. She had Peggy's dignity but little of her charisma, withdrawn where Peggy was strong and warm and Maria was blunt. Sharon stayed so late that Maria joked that she slept in the Triskelion more often than at her own home.
"Well, it is home," said Sharon. She lifted her chin, staring at the rather boring walls and cubicles, and said reverently, "This is everything I want to be."
"Well one day you can be it from a room with a better view," Maria said. "Want to get drinks? I promise that paperwork can wait. I know; I assigned it to you."
They had beer and buffalo wings and Sharon told her all the stories Peggy had never wanted to tell. Bullets pulled out of Peggy's hip somewhere in Burgundy, staying on the comm with Steve Rogers until the plane finally went down, pranks and missions and love with the Commandos.
"Your aunt and Triplett's grandfather?"
"We joke that we're almost cousins," said Sharon. "It was a brief fling. Aunt Peggy would be the first to tell you that being a comrade is more important than a lover."
Maria met Pepper through Coulson, who had met her over the Iron Man debacle. Maria appreciated competence, Coulson shadowed compassion like he was trying to learn something from it, and Pepper had a soft spot for stark honesty. They got along well.
To tell Tony anything was to tell Pepper Potts. To tell Pepper was to make sure the needed things got done around Tony, with or without Tony's knowledge. Maria made sure to bring Pepper the good coffee whenever they had her in for questioning after Tony's latest whatever.
(Maria gave Tony the bottom of the worst pot. The first time, Maria felt petty, but he didn't even seem to notice. She brought him blacker and blacker cups, after that, as an experiment, and he gulped them without a care. Maybe the man was just a machine after all, run on coffee and self doubt).
Maria'd never quite met anyone as bright-eyed as Coulson before, never met someone with such a bright fervor for justice but such a chameleon skin. Coulson went tough for Thor, efficient for Pepper, made himself an obstacle for Tony Stark. For Maria he was solid and deeply, deeply invested in SHIELD and everything its guardian eagle stood for. He hero-worshipped Peggy and Maria hoped it was for the sake of the powerful old woman and not the young hero lost to the Atlantic.
But when Steve Rogers did come around, Coulson's fanboy was of a slightly different strand than the sort of shining-eyed stumbles he'd done around Director Carter.
(Years from now, during her review of Grant Ward for Coulson's team, she would draw what Coulson termed "a little poop with knives sticking out of it" under People Skills. (It was a porcupine).
Ward became who he needed to be for people to like him. (Natasha became who people needed— there is a difference). Maria wondered what it meant that for her Ward became a skilled, efficient little shit).
The staff would go out drinking: peppy, puppyish, steady Coulson and dry Melinda May with her eye roll for every occasion; spies kept their eyes on every exit and lab techs giggled into their martinis.
Young agents Triplett and Carter edged toward each other at bars, though they tended to ignore each other the rest of the time. They were as wary of obvious connection as Peggy had been of telling war stories. Maria had figured out, somewhere over the years, that Sharon was here on her own two feet, that this younger Carter was desperate to be needed, not known. Maria didn't draw attention to the two legacies in their midst either.
Triplett was the kind of steady that had an air of amusement tucked right behind it. He and Sharon ran in different circles but shared silent inside jokes across the room, over the brims of their beer glasses.
Maria went on missions, but as the years went by she found herself more and more on the leadership side of things, reports and patient paperwork, keeping her eyes on everyone in the room and cutting straight to the truth.
Natasha Romanov was whatever she needed to be but Maria could be nothing but herself.
Fury was assigned to the helicarrier and Maria followed. Peggy retired quietly, gracefully, and it was a rare handful who knew the name of care facility Sharon's parents had checked her into. At her retirement party Peggy was still sharp, her lipstick precise, her eyes bright. She called Maria Connie when she thanked her for the slice of cake Maria handed her. For once in her life, Maria hesitated to point out an inaccuracy.
They bunked on the helicarrier about half of the time and kept their old offices in the Triskelion. The giant metal creations made Maria think of stories she'd read out of a dusty old box of her mother's books, which her father had never been able to give away. Leviathan, sky whale, behemoth; metal clouds and floating fortresses; yet another step for mankind.
Maria knew better than to invest herself in the metal bones of this place. The helicarrier's engines roared like a thudding heart. The control room windows were vast. She stood at the helm there, at Fury's shoulder, in streaming daylight and in the peaceful dark of a moonless night pinpricked with stars somewhere high over the Atlantic.
The helicarrier rumbled under her feet and Fury ran a fond hand along one metal wall, like Coulson did with that car of his, the way Sharon stood in the Triskelion and nearly glowed.
Fury called it cancer once, after Loki’s attack was over, once Barton was back in the fold and New York saved. She kept in step behind him as Fury walked the helicarrier halls, reviewed the damage, as he mourned.
“No, sir,” she said. “Just war.”
Maria lived in her own skin. She had had eighteen birthdays with her father to learn the costs of pouring your own life into any body but your own.
Two years later, Nick Fury died.
Maria watched Natasha lay hands on him in the hospital morgue. Natasha's bright red head was bowed, and Maria wondered if she knew, if she was feeling for that infinitesimal pulse, trying to catch them at their game.
It didn't occur to her that it might be grief.
Maria sent Steve in to move Natasha away and then she rolled Nick Fury's body out to the waiting truck. On the drive to their hidey-hole, Maria tried to think of it in sweeping terms, tried to imagine all of SHIELD dying in Fury's body.
Maria was holding a last vigil, in the back of this jostling truck, for an organization of killers and peacekeepers she had given a decade of her life to. They were rotting from the inside and she was the witness.
"No," Maria said, and shook her head. "No, sir, this is just war."
This was a truck on a bumpy freeway, a desperate con to save a single life with a drug Banner had meant for other things. Her butt was aching from sitting still too long on the metal seat. This was not SHIELD's death spiraling before her. This was just a man with an eyepatch, slowly waking up.
Maria wore a SHIELD uniform, plain except for the round sigil sewn on her shoulder. She wore SHIELD's guarding eagle all through the last battle, as she broke into their own base, fired on the helicarriers and watched them come tumbling down. It was a gesture of respect, or remembrance. It was not a funeral.
Maria was the one who pressed the button, who set each metal behemoth against each other. She burned down to the waterline this thing that had given her a home. If her hands shook, it was because she was sending Steve Rogers crashing to the Potomac along with them.
Maria kept the communicator on all the way to the water. She didn't say anything. She was no good at comfort and it would have meant nothing to Steve. But Peggy's life's work was crumbling here, this building, those ships in the sky. Steve was going down, going down again for the sake of people he loved. Maria owed Peggy many things and one of them was listening to the very end.
Three helicarriers tumbled from the sky. The Triskelion was sheared off at floor thirty nine.
Maria's heart kept beating.
Once, a jewelry shop clerk had told Maria, "Beauty hurts."
"Sticking a needle through your ear hurts," Maria had said then, picking out a brooch for her grandmother's birthday and uninterested in a sales pitch on piercing her ears. "No thanks".
"Run, goddammit," screamed Coach and sixteen-year-old Maria pushed her shrieking limbs forward.
"Gonna have to be faster than that," a drill sergeant said, on a rainy training field as she rolled out the far side of an obstacle course.
"Sometimes it hurts to get where you're going," said Nick Fury in the Triskelion cafeteria, both eyes staring her straight in the face.
And this time, this time, Maria listened.
She didn't fold them into her soul, because nothing touched her there—not Peggy's grace or Fury's respect, not her father's sorrow or Coulson's ideals. But she wrote them on her skin, these words, and made them hers.
HYDRA said pain was power. They weren't wrong but they were missing the point. Power came with pain. You had to sweat and cramp and swear to get where you were going. But the thing that made it power was you stepping into the ring. The thing that made it matter was you.
Coulson was shaking over SHIELD's fall, aching at all the wolves who were wearing their sheeps' clothing. "We are still agents of SHIELD," said Phil Coulson. "And that has to mean something."
Sharon needed a badge, something to tie her heart to, to name herself protector. She had had her heart shattered and now she had to rebuild.
Fury made it a rebirth, a branding, a phoenix's return, and he headed east to enact his justice.
Maria had always been a wolf anyway. This had always been about her. She woke up the day after SHIELD fell and put on her newest uniform— a sensible blouse and neatly creased dress pants.
She didn't have a badge but she did have a handgun tucked into her purse.
Fury, “dead,” had vanished and so had Victoria Hand. Coulson was gone, wearing his heart on his sleeve and refusing to let the sated demons lie. That left Maria in her civvies to go stand in Congress, in Langley, in FBI bunkers and defend her old home.
This is for Peggy, she thought, standing in Congress's halls and gritting her teeth.
For Peggy, Maria could play the game, for a little while. She could stay on the line until the ship went down.
But then she would move on.
A love dies in the Atlantic, so you build a place where you can save lives until the end of yours. Your latest uniform withers on your back so you trade it for a new one and keep going.
You are still here. You are still the reason you're here.
Maria went for runs in the early morning chill. She kept an eye on her tail as she went, picking FBI and CIA out of the civilian joggers. She took winding paths, up as many brutal stairs as she could, and then around and around the mall and its waking tourists.
She counted her watchers, eyed them, and grinned wide.
Maria had always liked having someone to outrun.