One: Make Sure That You are Sure of Everything I Do

S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Operations - May 2004

The end of any graduating term at the Academy is like Draft Day, except it lasts for weeks and nobody gets a sports car at the end.

All the headhunters, and the headshrinkers, and the number-crunchers descend in full force to push, file, stamp, index, brief, debrief, rank, trade, pitch, poach, pull, prod, groom, and finally - unavoidably - number the cadets.

Hill used to enjoy emptying a few clips on the range for relief. Now, there's a middle-aged cowboy for every fresh-faced shooter, criticizing stance and grouping and speed with every pull of the trigger, offering all of these suggestions while they're looking for the agent to snag for their strike team or hazardous field posting.

She's too fast. She's not fast enough. She's using the wrong kind of gun. She's standing Weaver when, they think, she should be standing Isosceles, never mind the rotator cuff issues inherited from one of the few injuries of her childhood which was a genuine accident.

Radley's the best of the worst, she thinks, a petrified stick propped against the rear wall, observing targeting exercises in mute contemplation. He watches as she pumps round after round through the paper. Sometimes he frowns. Sometimes he doesn't. Hard to say what either state of being means.

(Cadet Knopfler, with the oily wisdom of the eternal brown-noser, once confided to her after a session that he'd heard Radley was the section chief in Madripoor. "Poor bastard," he'd said, clicking his safety back on. She wished she'd just kept her headphones on until clearing the range.)

Garrett, now, most of the cadets seem to like Garrett. Texan, quick with a wink and a joke. A nickname for every cadet and a cadet for every nickname. She's seen the way a cadet like Morales, already all thumbs on the range, just locks up tighter when Garrett starts giving advice, and wonders.

Once, just one time, she'd like to shoot a frowny face into one of the targets at the far end of the range with a handgun and see what the cowboy-on-watch does then. She won't. Over the last three years, she's learned her particular flavor of she-supposes-you'd-call-it-whimsy is rarely appreciated here and is best kept under lock and key.

She's also afraid that kind of display might attract their attention. She's spent too many terms blazing a trail into Logistics - all the game-and-theory types - to find herself poached at the last second by a strike teamer looking for fresh dead meat.

Sometimes, the best defense is just to look unappealing to the offense.

Cadet Hill runs the track like she's chasing something.

Or like she's being chased by something.

That's what she imagines her instructors are thinking, anyway, as they watch her out here at two in the morning, burning up the rubber instead of sleeping. She has no illusions of privacy. The Bosses probably have eyes on the students every second of every cadet's day, from the second they wake up to the second they fall asleep.

Some of the cadets, they hop the proverbial fence and trek out into town looking to get drunk enough to screw, or screwed enough to drink. She's done her share of both, more than some, less than most. Jogging's what she does now when the lights are low and sleep isn't forthcoming.

The larger graduation's shadow has loomed over her, the more she's cut the shit and dedicated herself to doing the best she can with what she has to work with.

The result is high test scores, higher firearms proficiency, and highest physical fitness reports across the board. She's not the top dog, not exactly, but ranking top ten at Operations is worlds beyond good enough for a poor girl from the south side still counting lucky stars she won't bag groceries at Fairplay for the rest of recorded time.

Swansson has all but guaranteed her she's got her post in Logistics secured. Just so long as she doesn't skid out and burn on one of the last few exams, anyway.

So if she's chasing anything, it's the beat of "I Hope I Get It" from A Chorus Line, but there are things you tell people around here and things you don't.

As she rounds the last turn on the last lap, she spies the senior mentor they've paired her group off with for final advice-and-consent purposes, agent named Coulson, watching her from under one of the lamp posts.

Coulson. A little too milquetoast for some of the cadets in her group, the ones she suspects wish they were joining an organization called P.E.N.I.S. or B.A.L.L.S. instead of S.H.I.E.L.D. His unruffled, last-gentleman-in-the-company demeanor gives her hope that not all of her future colleagues are going to be so lost and damned.

It's probably false hope.

It's probably also false hope for her to think Coulson's easy-going nature means there's a chance she won't turn out the same as the rest of them.

"Cadet Hill," he says as she finishes mopping her face with a towel creatively liberated from the locker room for just this moment. (Anybody calls her on it, she was just practicing breach and entry skills.) "Another late night pounding pavement?"

Again step kick kick leap kick touch

"Just thinking, sir," she says.

Again step kick kick leap kick touch

She stops the mini-disc player strapped to one arm and pulls her earphones out, throws the works in her gym bag.

"Well, knock it off, would you? All that 'thinking' you're doing out here, you're making the rest of us look bad."

"Sorry, sir."

"That was a joke, Hill."

"I'm aware of that, sir." No, really. She was. "Why are you out on the track at this time of night, sir?"

"Looking for you, to be honest. You'd have saved me a lot of time if you'd just stayed in your dorm after hours like your roommate." Morales is a year behind Hill. She's even more monastic, but she's buckling under the weight more with each passing day. Some students, they seem to shine under pressure. Poor Morales is shredding like soft tissue.

Hill likes her. She's too honest for this place, and it shows in her every action, but it makes her better company than most of the others.

STEM scores like hers, she should have gone to Science & Technology.

You have to lie at least a little to get along in Operations.

You have to have something you want to lie about.

"So you're admitting you don't know where all cadets are at all times, sir?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny," he says. "And you can quit calling me 'sir'. I have a name, you know."

"Yes, sir. To Mr. and Mrs. Coulson, a son, Agent, was born."

"Was that an attempt at a joke, Hill?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny, sir."

He laughs, a little laugh, evidently in good spirits.

At least one of them is.

There's a cold wind blowing down the Rockies tonight, chilling her sweat, and she shivers despite the summer's relative warmth.

(And for a moment, for propriety's sake alone, she's also glad she pulled on a sports bra before heading out. This time of night, she's already not supposed to be out on the track talking with a superior officer, dripping sweat from every exposed inch of skin.)

"Do you trust me, cadet?"

"Less now than before you felt you had to ask me, sir."

"That's a good answer. You need to come with me. We have a lot to talk about."

"Now, sir?"

"Well, unless you'd rather stand there sweating."

"Come with you where, sir?"

"Aw, you can't just ask like that," he says, "and expect I'm going to tell you. That's like shaking your Christmas presents the night before to find out what's in them. It ruins the surprise. Are you the sort of person who shakes her Christmas presents the night before, Hill?"

"I never really got any Christmas presents," she says, and he laughs again, that little laugh, like she's joking.

Maybe it sounds like she is.

Oh ho ho it's magic, you know

Wherever it is Coulson's decided to take her, it's an hour's drive away in one of the academy's custom Denalis. It's a very long hour. Coulson's tapping the steering wheel and singing along to the compilation of AM Gold hits that seems to be superglued into the SUV's stereo.

Never believe it's not so

She'd complain, but she's a Broadway kind of girl. Having a soft spot for bell-bottomed cheese doesn't make Coulson a kindred spirit among the sea of stomping feet and shuddering machismo around here, but it almost makes him a kindred spirit.

The destination, as it happens, is some bar in what amounts to a rustic wooden shitbox so many rustic, shitbox towns away from campus she'd bet good money no S.H.I.E.L.D. cadet's ever been this way before.

Coors neon flashes in the window. Nothing says "undisclosed location" quite like being ninety miles down the road from one of the biggest breweries in America.

"If you wanted to buy me a drink, sir, you didn't have to go all this trouble," she says, unbuckling her seatbelt.

"Please," says Coulson. "Who do you think we work for? There's nothing but trouble to go to. Besides, I have a wife, and I wouldn't try to 'poach' cadets even if I didn't." He looks her in the eye. "And your record, you don't strike me as the sort to 'date' superior officers even if I were, either."

She doesn't bother to tell him he's right. He clearly already knows that. "So why are we here, then, sir?"

"If you want to get along in S.H.I.E.L.D., Hill, let me give you a dollar's worth of free advice. Sometimes, you just have to accept the mystery." He opens the car door and steps out. "Coming?"

She thought it looked bad from the outside.

The place is a goddamned strip club, and clearly the worst one in the area. She doesn't have to see any of the others to know this. Nobody would. From the holes in the wood paneling to the scars on the dancers – one's so old her C-section scar could probably be a paying customer – it's an empirical fact.

Coulson has his arm around her shoulder as he's guiding her to a table in the back. Which means he can feel her tense up. "You need to trust that I wouldn't bring you to a place like this without a really good reason. My wife's going to have my head for this as it is."

"And what reason could possibly be good enough to justify taking an academy cadet here, sir? You're violating fifteen separate codes of conduct, and those are just the ones they taught us."

"Maybe," says a man shrouded by shadow at the next table over, "Agent Coulson here's bending the rules to see if you can stomach the floor show."

"If a prospective agent sits through Candy's routine without running," says Coulson mildly, seating himself beside the other man, "then they'll never have to prove their courage any other way." He gestures to the other chair. "Sit down."

"Maria Hill." The other man leans back into shadow rather than forward into the light. "Born in Chicago, April 4, 1982. Never met your mother. Your father liked to push you around for that, 'til you got old enough to push him right back. You tell everybody they're both dead. JROTC in school, mostly to piss off your old man, but you got good marks and high grades and it was enough to get you here. You've been angling for assignment to Logistics. Your performance is just about good enough to make that happen. Do I have that right, or am I leaving something out?"

"Close enough, sir," she says in a quieter voice. She wonders if the guy knows enough about her to know how angry she is right now. If he doesn't, she's thinking she could oblige him with a free demonstration of just how good the Academy's hand-to-hand classes are nowadays.

Mossad doesn't have shit on her.

"Sit down," he says.

"Director Fury means now, cadet," says Coulson. Just as friendly-sounding, but somehow the velvet glove's come off and the iron fist of a hardened field op is on full display.

So this is, it turns out, the story of how she meets Nick Fury. In a bargain basement strip club, uncounted miles of lonely mountain roads away from the Academy, still reeking of a late-night jog. She's got pit stains darkening the light gray of her S.H.I.E.L.D. t-shirt and she's taking a face to face meeting with the Director himself and one way or another, nothing's ever going to be the same again.

Nobody would believe this if she wanted to tell them about it, even if she could.

"What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for, Almost Agent Hill?" There's a mocking tone in Fury's voice, and she knows he's poking at her to see what he stirs up, but she still feels an irrational flash of hatred surge up her nerve endings.

"Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division," she says. "Sir."

"And what does that mean to you?"

"Before you answer," says Coulson, but he's cut off by Fury before another word.

"I know what you think about all of this, Agent Coulson," says Fury. "That's why you're here. I want to know what the cadet, here, thinks. That's why she's here. When you're ready," he says. "Almost Agent."

A thousand options, from the glib to the flippant to the surly, pass through her mind. That's clearly not what Fury's looking for here. It's (probably) not what she really thinks. She closes her eyes, instead, blots out the flashing lights and undulating sights of the floor show of horror. Tries to tune out the rock song blaring from the PA system.

And we'll all float on okay. And we'll all float on anyway.

Yeah, she thinks, and everything floats down here.

What a bunch of bullshit.

You don't float. You sink. Or you kick against the current until you learn to swim.

That's the S.H.I.E.L.D. she sees, sometimes.

Garrett, all folksy charm on the range but she's seen his eyes tighten just a little too much at the corners - just a little too much like her father - whenever he makes his little jokes at the expense of somebody's performance. All the just-funning-yas in the world can't make that right even if he really means them.

Morales, so good on paper, good enough to fly all the way here from a crowded bungalow in Santa Barbara, and so bad in practice. Falling behind. Poor shooting. Worse scores. Becoming the wrong kind of example, getting pulled under by the Garretts and nobody else seems to care.

Fury, dragging a cadet out to a civilian titty bar in the dead of night to ask her if she knows what the organization she's a part of means to her. He could have had this conversation on the campus or a thousand other places out of it. He chose this one because...

Because.

Because the way he's decided to ask her implies the answer he expects her to give.

And that gives her her answer.

Hill opens her eyes. "I don't like bullies," she finally says, and meets Fury's gaze directly for the first time all conversation.

Fury leans forward, and she gets her first real look at the man who might very well be her many-rungs-up-the-ladder boss in a week unless she fails what is increasingly starting to feel like some kind of security-black final exam.

His dark face is even darker in the club lights. He's impossible to read. "You don't like bullies? Is there more to that, or do you want me to guess?"

Even if things get heavy we'll all float on alright

"I misspoke, sir," she says, not looking away. "I hate bullies."

"Oh," he says. "You hate bullies. That's a useful clarification, don't you think, Agent Coulson?" Coulson shifts in his seat. She can't see him, but she can imagine him shrugging with that nonchalant, almost befuddled air he cultivates, playing good cop to Fury's asshole. "Why do you think that's relevant to S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"Because we're not called S.W.O.R.D., sir," says Hill. The eye which doesn't see stares into her harder than the one which does. "We're not supposed to attack. A bully attacks. We're supposed to defend."

"Implying we don't," says Fury.

"Implying I don't really know what we do. You asked me what S.H.I.E.L.D. means to me. I gave you my answer," she says. "Sir," she says.

Fury makes a noise halfway between a grunt and an exhalation.

The song ends.

Something with a friskier beat starts.

Fury stares at her in full a second longer, taking - she assumes - her full measure as a human being and a trained cadet one week out from final assignment. She'd look away, oh god does she need to blink, but you don't live to be a matador by ignoring the bull. "Dismissed," he says. "Almost Agent Hill."

It's less magical and even easier to believe it's not so on the long ride back to campus.

Somewhere in the dark between towns, idling at a stop sign with no other drivers and no cops around, Coulson turns to face her. "Just so you know," he says, and she can feel his enthusiasm radiating from all the way over here in the passenger seat, "and it should go without saying, but that meeting back there? Never happened."

She throws him an unimpressed look, and goes back to contemplating the dark scenery outside her window as he speeds back up.

The Colorado sky's lightening from black to grey when Coulson finally turns the Denali onto the access road leading back to campus.

The Academy of Operations rises above the road, a sprawl of world-of-tomorrow hangars, domes, and white stone buildings tucked into a recessed valley in the Rockies. After Paperclip, S.S.R.-about-to-be-S.H.I.E.L.D. put all its shiny new ex-evil-empire scientists to work designing experimental aircraft here.

When the focus of the Cold War turned away from direct military adventurism, and S.H.I.E.L.D. expanded to meet the new paranoid style, the facility became a training center for future officers instead.

They're nearly to the front gate when Coulson speaks again. "Any exams today, Hill?" He wrestles his badge out of his breast pocket.

"One, sir."

"Sorry," he says, sheepish. "If we'd known - "

"You did."

"But you didn't say anything."

"I didn't feel as if I had a choice, sir."

"There's always a choice, cadet." Coulson rolls the window down before the guard on duty can tap on it. He flashes his badge before the guard can speak. "You still didn't see us," he says. "We still weren't out here."

"See who, sir?"

"Good man, Tucker." Coulson rolls the window back up. The Denali goes back into gear. The two guards she can see both relax. The countermeasures she can't presumably go back into stasis, waiting to brown the pants of the next tourist who turns down the wrong mountain path and gets an eyeful. "Got to tell you," he says. "Being able to say all that cloak-and-dagger stuff? Hands down the coolest part of working for S.H.I.E.L.D."

She's not convinced, but her opinion's not really being asked for. Coulson drops her off in front of the dormitory - round like an oil filter, white stone and polarized glass all the way up six stories - just as the sun's burning through the early morning fog. "Remember," he says as she fumbles in her bag for her ID to swipe through. "This didn't happen."

The shower she takes is about five minutes, three longer than usual. When she gets back to the room, Morales is already sitting at the desk, nose deep in a text about operations history Hill remembers darkly from this time last year.

Later that afternoon, she passes her exam, wondering more now than before to what end, and on whose behalf, she's put in all of this effort.

Graduation comes, as graduation does. Cadets lined up in their dress blacks, eagle patches perched on their shoulders for the first time. Director Fury gives the commencement speech, a fact which would have been a lot more exciting before she met the man.

He spins terse yarn out of straw about secret wars and last lines of defense. It sounds thrilling, and exciting, like being here on this day is the first step in fulfilling a heroic, action-packed purpose in a dark, weird world.

If there's a right answer to the question he'd posed her, what he's telling the assembled cadets now sounds like its precise opposite to her. There's nothing good in this. There's no defense. There's just an endless life of explosive intrigue which sounds like a warhawk's thirty-year-old wet dream.

At one point, Fury's gaze finds her in the crowd. She stares back, impassive. If she passed his test, if she failed it, if she even had an idea what the test was supposed to really be about - that bull charged a week ago. If it's going to gore her, or if she's going to duck its horns, well, it's beyond her control now.

After, as the now-former cadets retreat to their dorms to pack up, or to prepare for the long night of cut-loose partying ahead, parties to which she wasn't seriously invited and wouldn't attend, she sneaks out behind the library with her assignment envelope and meditates upon what the immediate future's going to hold.

(The library, a squat white frame with a massive parabolic window, is a building most students only visit after all other alternatives have failed. Around here, other alternatives are destined to fail, which just means people take their rage out on the place. Right now, there is no better place to be alone.)

The fruit of three years' worth of unblinking, unbowed effort are contained within. As soon as she opens it, she's not a student anymore, not a cadet, not even a girl. She's a woman with a serious assignment doing serious things on behalf of the whole human race. This, really, is always what it's been about.

She slips a finger under the flap, tears the envelope open with ease.

The sheet of paper within is blank.

Nothing.

That's what she got: nothing.

That's certainly one way to send a message, she thinks, numb.

She stares out over the campus until the dress shoes start to hurt. The triumphal shouts and shrieks and screams of the just-graduated echo even this far out, and tomorrow morning they'll all be shipping out. Some attached to strike teams, some to branch offices, some even to New York and the almighty headquarters she'd so had her heart set on.

She listens to it until she can't stand to hear anymore.

When she gets back to the dorm, Morales is lying on her bed, asleep, a book of highly technical analyses of the famous battles of Vietnam laying open across her chest. (Hill's read that one, too. She cannot recommend the experience to anybody who wasn't stuck with Palmer's military history class and, thus, unavoidably saddled with the book.)

She sits down on the bed and closes her eyes. Just for a second.

Then she'll worry about what to -

Morales is lightly nudging her shoulder and repeating, "Wake up, Maria."

"Gina," she mutters. "What time is it?"

"8:30," says Morales. "You need to quit leaving your shoes in the middle of the floor. There was a knock on the door, and I almost tripped over them trying to answer it."

"Or you could turn a light on," says Hill, rolling herself into a seated position. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. "And I didn't leave my shoes in the middle of the floor. I constructed an obstacle for you to, uh..." She swats the air with her hands. "Forget it. Who was at the door?"

"Some guy dropped off an envelope for you. So?"

"What guy?"

"I dunno. Suit. Sunglasses. Tie. Acts like an uncle. Looks like a dad. How'd you do?"

"Agent Coulson?"

"He didn't give me a name."

"You didn't ask?"

"Well, he didn't have anything for me. I didn't want to pry. So, how'd it go?"

"I have nothing to report," says Hill, pushing herself to her feet.

"I see how you are." Morales throws her arms up in not-entirely-mock aggravation. "You graduate. You get a cushy assignment. You forget all about the little people who had to put up with you and your annoying showtunes at all hours."

"I mean I have nothing to report." Hill fumbles around in the pocket of her now-rumpled dress jacket. Her fingers close around the crumpled sheet of blank paper and pulls it out. She hands it to Morales.

"This is blank."

"You," says Hill, rubbing her eyes, "are going to make some team leader a very happy supervisor one day. What envelope?"

"On the desk," says Morales, turning the blank sheet over in her hands. "Between the computer and the phone. Why is this blank? I thought you were set."

"Kissed too many of the wrong asses. Didn't kiss the right ones at all. Who knows?" Hill walks over to the desk. She finds a padded envelope addressed to "No-Longer-Almost Agent Hill" sandwiched between printed drafts of Morales's term papers, all covered with the other woman's nigh-indecipherable chicken scratch. "Do yourself a favor, Gina. Transfer out of this dump."

"And go where?"

"Science & Technology. Communications. Harvard. Stanford. University of Chicago. Anywhere." She turns it over in her hands. There's a hard lump inside. Way her day's going, somebody's probably decided to give her a hand grenade.

"And what about you?"

"There's always the Fairplay," Hill says, ripping the envelope open. Inside, there's a cell phone. When her hand touches it, it rings.

Hill looks at Morales. Morales looks at Hill. "This is nothing to do with me. I've gotta use it, anyway," says Morales, heading to the door. "And you still didn't move your shoes."

The phone buzzes again against Hill's hand. Cloak and dagger shit. Of course it's got to be Coulson. "Hill," she says, cautiously, looking around the room. There's no way the timing's an accident. She's been looking for a camera since the day she moved in, and she's been changing in the closet in the dark ever since.

(Morales just thinks she's paranoid, or thinks she just should quit if it bothers her so much. She knows there are worse things in life than creepy peepers surveilling on co-eds, especially if they're doing it to everybody equally, and one of the reasons she's here is to get away from them.)

"Congratulations!" Coulson's enthusiastic voice booms out of the cheap ear piece so loud it crackles. "You're an agent now! No more pencils, no more looks – "

"Lots of Fury's dirty looks, sir?"

"I figured that went one without saying, Hill. Listen, sorry about that whole blank envelope thing. We didn't really know where we were going to assign you until after the ceremony. We thought it was better to keep up appearances rather than have anybody asking questions."

"I was supposed to go to Logistics, sir."

"There were a couple of last-minute offers we had to consider before making our final judgment."

"'We', sir?"

"Yeah. You know, me, Swansson, a couple of other members of 'the gang'." Had she really handled Fury that badly? "Don't worry about it, agent. You've been singled out for much better things than spending your days in a New York cubicle, breathing exhaust every morning and spending two hours in traffic every night commuting to your apartment in Queens."

"Better things, sir?"

"Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about the tropics? You know, fun fun fun in the sun sun sun?"

"Do I have any choice at all, sir?"

There's a pause over the line that lasts about a second. "There's always a choice," says Coulson. "You could walk away right now. Go back to – what was it – packing groceries at the Fairplay?" She doesn't have anything to say to that, but she sweeps her eyes around the room, looking for bugs. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean the room isn't crawling with them. "Or you can get on the plane that's going to be taking off from Airstrip 2 in another hour. Agent Radley will be expecting you."

"Radley, sir?"

"Pack your suntan lotion and your bottled water, Agent Hill. You are going to Madripoor."

And he hangs up.

The son of a bitch.

Coulson, Hill, Fury, and S.H.I.E.L.D. ©2014 (and points before and beyond) by Marvel.

Quoted lyrics: "I Hope I Get It" from A Chorus Line; "Magic" by Pilot; "Float On" by Modest Mouse