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psocopteraThis was supposed to be a quick thing sketching out a backstory for Maria Hill, sort of responding to all the Coulson-backstory fic, and then I had trouble with the voice, and at this point I have no idea if it works, but I've put too much time into to want to abandon it, so... here we are.
Also yes this is my third recent story about older* female supporting characters dealing with alterations in their career paths (previously Lin Beifong and Dr. Nora Barlow). Some people retell "the earnest one getting it on with the angsty one" or whatever, me, I apparently write... this. Personal issues much?
*Maria Hill's actress in the movie is actually weirdly young for holding a late-career position like Deputy Director; I've heard that Joss Whedon wanted her for Wonder Woman (which she looks just perfect for) so maybe he wanted to use her somewhere in Avengers, and that was the role he had. Anyways.
Title:Five Secrets Maria Hill Would Like To Pretend She's Keeping From The Rest of SHIELD
Fandom: Avengers
Word Count: 1900
Rating/Warnings: SPOILERS FOR MOVIE. About as "teen" as the movie was. Gen.
Characters: Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanoff
Summary: Like it says in the title.
Five Secrets Maria Hill Would Like To Pretend She's Keeping From The Rest of SHIELD
1. How Fury recruited her
The lunchroom gets the bare bones: Air Force, Fury needed a pilot for taxi duty, he kept her.
People with access to her file and an uncanny memory for dates (Coulson) can put together a little bit more: one of Fury's destinations was a trap, there was a bomb, she had disarmed it. Maria doesn't like to talk about it because people always react like it was some big deal, and it really wasn't; it was the guy on the other end of the radio, telling her which wires to cut, who had the hard job. So she doesn't tell the story, but somehow it seems to get around anyways. She's even seen oblique references to it on those mostly-joking lists of "ways to get Director Fury to notice you" that the junior agents circulate.
What no one seems to wonder about is why she took Fury's offer. (The starry-eyed junior agents wouldn't think to ask, but her peers, the division heads and ADs, should know better.)
"I can give you the keys to the best ride in the skies," he had told her.
"You're going to get me accepted as an astronaut candidate?" she'd asked, half raised-eyebrow and half secretly hoping he really had that string to pull.
"My boat could eat the Flying Brick for breakfast," he had said, and, yeah, okay, that wasn't a lie: the Helicarrier is an E ticket ride like she'd never imagined. Helming it, commanding it, makes her feel larger than life.
But it's a rare day when she gets to drive. Fury keeps her on a short leash, and Fury likes to take the bridge, when they're even onboard at all and not in an endless series of meetings.
It had been a classic Fury lie, a technically-not-a-lie, "can" and not "will", making her think she was hiring on as a pilot and not an administrator. It's embarrassing to think he suckered her in with a childhood dream; better to act like she was gunning for Deputy Director all along, better to act like she can fill in at any station on the Helicarrier bridge because she's just that competent, not because she's the kind of plane geek who reads training manuals for fun. (Although she does. And she can beat that guy's high score at Galaga, too.) So she's never told anyone.
(She'd once come into her office to find Coulson hanging up a set of framed original Helicarrier blueprints.
"No decoration," he'd said blandly, shaking his head at her, "Bad for morale," and she'd thanked him briskly and waited until he was gone to grin.)
2. Which Avenger she'd sleep with, given the choice
None of them?
Sure, she and Coulson had mock-encouraged each other to make a move on Captain America when he woke up. But Rogers is an asset and Steve is a messed-up kid and either way, that's not getting off the ground. Likewise Stark (taken), Barton (gay), Banner (scary), and Thor (alien, also taken), if any of them interested her. Which they don't.
Romanoff she can't help but think about. Maria thinks she'd rather like to be seduced, if it was done well, and Romanoff, if she had some reason to target her, would do it very, very well. (Unlike the agents who assume that because she hasn't taken the training, she won't recognize the SHIELD standard moves if they try them on her. She's read those manuals too.) But she's read Romanoff's file - the long version - and she knows just how she came to weaponize her sexuality. She respects that it's Romanoff's choice, now, to continue to use it, to take it like she takes everything and subordinate it to her purpose, but it will never be okay that she had to.
So, no. No Avengers. (The secret isn't that she would never consider it, the secret is that in a couple of cases, she's a little sad about that.)
3. Her dislike of violence
No, really. She'd joined the Air Force because Test Pilot School was the straightest path to Shuttle Commander, not because she wanted to shoot at things or blow them up. She could hold her own in a dogfight, but believed a well-planned mission should never come down to pilot-vs-pilot.
Working with SHIELD, she accepts that sometimes there's no choice but shooting or blowing things up, but she'll never have that Rambo streak like Fury has that tells him to pick up a bazooka when things go south. Of course she's qualified in pistol and hand-to-hand, she puts in her hours at the range like any other good agent, but if she has to resort to force, she wants something more decisive than her little human fist, or a gun she can pick up by herself. She wants to end the fight, not start one. Her favorite operations are the ones where her targets never even know they've been neutralized - spy rings tricked into infiltrating each other, hackers who spend years breaking into dummy systems, bioterrorists whose cultures always die off mysteriously.
(She's furious at Coulson for going up against a superhuman hostile alone. Yes, things had gotten messy, but she's analyzed the attack on the Helicarrier down to the minute, she's reconstructed everything she can of the paths of every single person on board, and she knows that Coulson had walked past sixteen other agents or teams of agents on his way to the confrontation, all of whom he ranked. He could have tapped any of them for backup, could have grabbed them all and had a squad at his back. She'll never know if the big gun made him feel invincible, or he didn't want to risk anyone else, or he just calculated that going solo was his best shot at stalling Loki until one of the friendly supers could engage. She wishes she could yell at him about it.)
4. Her real feelings about the Avengers Initiative
Fury needs a skeptic, so she's skeptical. But privately, she doesn't think it's a terrible idea.
Sometimes she even daydreams about running her own version of the Avengers. War Machine instead of Iron Man. Sif instead of Thor. Jane Foster for science nerdery, she seems smart, and round it out with… Wonder Woman, what the hell, it's her fantasy.
(She'll keep Barton and Romanoff, they've been at this awhile and get the job done.)
"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Romanoff says, and leaves a Wonder Woman figurine on her desk, which, what the hell, that was in her head, time for another round of agency-wide mandatory telepathy testing.
"Nat only messes with you if she likes you," Barton tells her helpfully, and, okay, that's actually on her to-do list, "make sure Barton and Romanoff bond with someone else at SHIELD now that Coulson's gone", but she'd still like to know what her tells were there.
5. Why Fury picked her for Deputy Director
When she gets promoted over dozens of much more senior agents, some ugly things get said, that it's affirmative action, or Fury's hot for her ass.
She makes sure the worst offenders get reassigned to places where their stupid won't pose a problem for others (there's a listening post in Greenland that's handy for that). It's harder to know what to say to the higher-ups who are politely curious about why someone with half their experience just jumped over their heads.
"You're all too valuable exactly where you are," she tells them, and it's true, enough, but it's not quite the whole story.
"I assume you're filling out NASA applications for fun," Fury had said one night, suddenly looming over her shoulder, "Because I'm sure you're not leaving me."
She didn't jump, but she did roll her eyes; it was her own apartment, she could indulge.
"Doorbell's broken again?" she asked in reply. Fury of course had ignored this. "You know they're going to kill Orion," he pointed out. "And you don't really want to go up in a Soviet tin can."
She'd been in annual budget hell for weeks, if she wanted to spend an hour of her Saturday night pretending she might leave SHIELD and take up microgravity basket-weaving (or whatever they're doing on the ISS), she didn't think she had to defend that to her boss.
She had sighed and pulled together her duty face. "Mission?"
"Promotion," he had said, and tossed her the new ID badge naming her Deputy Director.
She'd raised her eyebrows. "You don't actually have to bribe me to stay," she had said, "And if you did, two weeks vacation would - "
Fury had snorted. "Tell me something. If Stark tells you he needs to electroschizoid the biomodular tensors before the thion pulse initializes spliceosome cascade, you say - "
"That makes no sense." She frowned. "Some of those weren't even words."
"I have agents who can kickbox a polar bear but not clear their browser cache. I have agents who can hack an iPod but whose idea of requesting military support is to phone the geographically nearest base and hope they know what to send." They both winced. "From where I sit, looks like the future belongs to STEM whiz-kids - that's science, technology, engineering, and magic - and SHIELD needs someone in the big chair who knows what the hell they're talking about."
Maria frowned again. "I'm no scientist, sir."
"No," Fury had agreed. "Plenty of SHIELD scientists smarter than you. In fact, there's not a single thing you can do that someone else at SHIELD can't do better."
"Strange reason to promote me, sir."
"But." Fury held up a finger. "You have the highest composite score across twenty key measures. Plus you're one of the only three people to ever beat me at Go."
It had been her turn to snort. The Go thing was a joke - Fury was a mediocre player at best, and there were about two dozen agents who had become "one of the only three people to ever beat him" when they needed a morale boost. But then she'd seen his real point - that she knew that, that she was already deep enough in the internal machinations of SHIELD to pick up the reins.
"Can they really all be said to be 'key' if there are twenty of them?" she had replied, and had clipped on the new badge.
"I'm well-rounded and Stark might have to work harder to snow me" is hardly something she wants to go into with her division heads, though, so she puts on her best blank face and deputy-directs like she was born to it. And if sometimes she has to close her eyes for a moment and picture herself on the Helicarrier bridge, well - this is SHIELD. She works with super-spies. She can't, realistically, pretend that there's anything they don't know about her. Maybe in thirty years, if she survives, she'll be as mysterious as Fury, the stone-faced old woman still flying her own jet and assigning herself to every mission in space. Recruiting little Stark-Potts Iron Kids onto the next generation of the Avengers. Still checking out Captain America's ageless ass. The other day she intercepted a list of "ways to get Deputy Director Hill to notice you". She will never be Fury. But she supposes it's not so bad being SHIELD.
Or read it at the AO3
Also yes this is my third recent story about older* female supporting characters dealing with alterations in their career paths (previously Lin Beifong and Dr. Nora Barlow). Some people retell "the earnest one getting it on with the angsty one" or whatever, me, I apparently write... this. Personal issues much?
*Maria Hill's actress in the movie is actually weirdly young for holding a late-career position like Deputy Director; I've heard that Joss Whedon wanted her for Wonder Woman (which she looks just perfect for) so maybe he wanted to use her somewhere in Avengers, and that was the role he had. Anyways.
Title:Five Secrets Maria Hill Would Like To Pretend She's Keeping From The Rest of SHIELD
Fandom: Avengers
Word Count: 1900
Rating/Warnings: SPOILERS FOR MOVIE. About as "teen" as the movie was. Gen.
Characters: Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanoff
Summary: Like it says in the title.
Five Secrets Maria Hill Would Like To Pretend She's Keeping From The Rest of SHIELD
1. How Fury recruited her
The lunchroom gets the bare bones: Air Force, Fury needed a pilot for taxi duty, he kept her.
People with access to her file and an uncanny memory for dates (Coulson) can put together a little bit more: one of Fury's destinations was a trap, there was a bomb, she had disarmed it. Maria doesn't like to talk about it because people always react like it was some big deal, and it really wasn't; it was the guy on the other end of the radio, telling her which wires to cut, who had the hard job. So she doesn't tell the story, but somehow it seems to get around anyways. She's even seen oblique references to it on those mostly-joking lists of "ways to get Director Fury to notice you" that the junior agents circulate.
What no one seems to wonder about is why she took Fury's offer. (The starry-eyed junior agents wouldn't think to ask, but her peers, the division heads and ADs, should know better.)
"I can give you the keys to the best ride in the skies," he had told her.
"You're going to get me accepted as an astronaut candidate?" she'd asked, half raised-eyebrow and half secretly hoping he really had that string to pull.
"My boat could eat the Flying Brick for breakfast," he had said, and, yeah, okay, that wasn't a lie: the Helicarrier is an E ticket ride like she'd never imagined. Helming it, commanding it, makes her feel larger than life.
But it's a rare day when she gets to drive. Fury keeps her on a short leash, and Fury likes to take the bridge, when they're even onboard at all and not in an endless series of meetings.
It had been a classic Fury lie, a technically-not-a-lie, "can" and not "will", making her think she was hiring on as a pilot and not an administrator. It's embarrassing to think he suckered her in with a childhood dream; better to act like she was gunning for Deputy Director all along, better to act like she can fill in at any station on the Helicarrier bridge because she's just that competent, not because she's the kind of plane geek who reads training manuals for fun. (Although she does. And she can beat that guy's high score at Galaga, too.) So she's never told anyone.
(She'd once come into her office to find Coulson hanging up a set of framed original Helicarrier blueprints.
"No decoration," he'd said blandly, shaking his head at her, "Bad for morale," and she'd thanked him briskly and waited until he was gone to grin.)
2. Which Avenger she'd sleep with, given the choice
None of them?
Sure, she and Coulson had mock-encouraged each other to make a move on Captain America when he woke up. But Rogers is an asset and Steve is a messed-up kid and either way, that's not getting off the ground. Likewise Stark (taken), Barton (gay), Banner (scary), and Thor (alien, also taken), if any of them interested her. Which they don't.
Romanoff she can't help but think about. Maria thinks she'd rather like to be seduced, if it was done well, and Romanoff, if she had some reason to target her, would do it very, very well. (Unlike the agents who assume that because she hasn't taken the training, she won't recognize the SHIELD standard moves if they try them on her. She's read those manuals too.) But she's read Romanoff's file - the long version - and she knows just how she came to weaponize her sexuality. She respects that it's Romanoff's choice, now, to continue to use it, to take it like she takes everything and subordinate it to her purpose, but it will never be okay that she had to.
So, no. No Avengers. (The secret isn't that she would never consider it, the secret is that in a couple of cases, she's a little sad about that.)
3. Her dislike of violence
No, really. She'd joined the Air Force because Test Pilot School was the straightest path to Shuttle Commander, not because she wanted to shoot at things or blow them up. She could hold her own in a dogfight, but believed a well-planned mission should never come down to pilot-vs-pilot.
Working with SHIELD, she accepts that sometimes there's no choice but shooting or blowing things up, but she'll never have that Rambo streak like Fury has that tells him to pick up a bazooka when things go south. Of course she's qualified in pistol and hand-to-hand, she puts in her hours at the range like any other good agent, but if she has to resort to force, she wants something more decisive than her little human fist, or a gun she can pick up by herself. She wants to end the fight, not start one. Her favorite operations are the ones where her targets never even know they've been neutralized - spy rings tricked into infiltrating each other, hackers who spend years breaking into dummy systems, bioterrorists whose cultures always die off mysteriously.
(She's furious at Coulson for going up against a superhuman hostile alone. Yes, things had gotten messy, but she's analyzed the attack on the Helicarrier down to the minute, she's reconstructed everything she can of the paths of every single person on board, and she knows that Coulson had walked past sixteen other agents or teams of agents on his way to the confrontation, all of whom he ranked. He could have tapped any of them for backup, could have grabbed them all and had a squad at his back. She'll never know if the big gun made him feel invincible, or he didn't want to risk anyone else, or he just calculated that going solo was his best shot at stalling Loki until one of the friendly supers could engage. She wishes she could yell at him about it.)
4. Her real feelings about the Avengers Initiative
Fury needs a skeptic, so she's skeptical. But privately, she doesn't think it's a terrible idea.
Sometimes she even daydreams about running her own version of the Avengers. War Machine instead of Iron Man. Sif instead of Thor. Jane Foster for science nerdery, she seems smart, and round it out with… Wonder Woman, what the hell, it's her fantasy.
(She'll keep Barton and Romanoff, they've been at this awhile and get the job done.)
"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Romanoff says, and leaves a Wonder Woman figurine on her desk, which, what the hell, that was in her head, time for another round of agency-wide mandatory telepathy testing.
"Nat only messes with you if she likes you," Barton tells her helpfully, and, okay, that's actually on her to-do list, "make sure Barton and Romanoff bond with someone else at SHIELD now that Coulson's gone", but she'd still like to know what her tells were there.
5. Why Fury picked her for Deputy Director
When she gets promoted over dozens of much more senior agents, some ugly things get said, that it's affirmative action, or Fury's hot for her ass.
She makes sure the worst offenders get reassigned to places where their stupid won't pose a problem for others (there's a listening post in Greenland that's handy for that). It's harder to know what to say to the higher-ups who are politely curious about why someone with half their experience just jumped over their heads.
"You're all too valuable exactly where you are," she tells them, and it's true, enough, but it's not quite the whole story.
"I assume you're filling out NASA applications for fun," Fury had said one night, suddenly looming over her shoulder, "Because I'm sure you're not leaving me."
She didn't jump, but she did roll her eyes; it was her own apartment, she could indulge.
"Doorbell's broken again?" she asked in reply. Fury of course had ignored this. "You know they're going to kill Orion," he pointed out. "And you don't really want to go up in a Soviet tin can."
She'd been in annual budget hell for weeks, if she wanted to spend an hour of her Saturday night pretending she might leave SHIELD and take up microgravity basket-weaving (or whatever they're doing on the ISS), she didn't think she had to defend that to her boss.
She had sighed and pulled together her duty face. "Mission?"
"Promotion," he had said, and tossed her the new ID badge naming her Deputy Director.
She'd raised her eyebrows. "You don't actually have to bribe me to stay," she had said, "And if you did, two weeks vacation would - "
Fury had snorted. "Tell me something. If Stark tells you he needs to electroschizoid the biomodular tensors before the thion pulse initializes spliceosome cascade, you say - "
"That makes no sense." She frowned. "Some of those weren't even words."
"I have agents who can kickbox a polar bear but not clear their browser cache. I have agents who can hack an iPod but whose idea of requesting military support is to phone the geographically nearest base and hope they know what to send." They both winced. "From where I sit, looks like the future belongs to STEM whiz-kids - that's science, technology, engineering, and magic - and SHIELD needs someone in the big chair who knows what the hell they're talking about."
Maria frowned again. "I'm no scientist, sir."
"No," Fury had agreed. "Plenty of SHIELD scientists smarter than you. In fact, there's not a single thing you can do that someone else at SHIELD can't do better."
"Strange reason to promote me, sir."
"But." Fury held up a finger. "You have the highest composite score across twenty key measures. Plus you're one of the only three people to ever beat me at Go."
It had been her turn to snort. The Go thing was a joke - Fury was a mediocre player at best, and there were about two dozen agents who had become "one of the only three people to ever beat him" when they needed a morale boost. But then she'd seen his real point - that she knew that, that she was already deep enough in the internal machinations of SHIELD to pick up the reins.
"Can they really all be said to be 'key' if there are twenty of them?" she had replied, and had clipped on the new badge.
"I'm well-rounded and Stark might have to work harder to snow me" is hardly something she wants to go into with her division heads, though, so she puts on her best blank face and deputy-directs like she was born to it. And if sometimes she has to close her eyes for a moment and picture herself on the Helicarrier bridge, well - this is SHIELD. She works with super-spies. She can't, realistically, pretend that there's anything they don't know about her. Maybe in thirty years, if she survives, she'll be as mysterious as Fury, the stone-faced old woman still flying her own jet and assigning herself to every mission in space. Recruiting little Stark-Potts Iron Kids onto the next generation of the Avengers. Still checking out Captain America's ageless ass. The other day she intercepted a list of "ways to get Deputy Director Hill to notice you". She will never be Fury. But she supposes it's not so bad being SHIELD.
Or read it at the AO3
no subject
Date: 2012-07-15 02:31 am (UTC)