Author's Notes At The End

The first time Maria Hill saw Clint Barton, she was three months out of a USAF flightsuit and starting to question what the hell she was doing in SHIELD. The pay was good, but all she'd done so far was practice at the range, fill out background check evaluations, read incident reports for increasingly uncanny events that never made the Washington Post, and fly training simulators for aircraft that didn't exist.

Her training group included a bazaar's worth of backgrounds – Army, Marines, civilian security, a former bounty hunter, a mix of alphabet agencies and two other pilots (one military and one civilian – and only the civilian was American). The security, predictably, scored better on the pistol ranges, and the rest of the group struggled to keep up. Especially when the arms switched from the familiar M9 to more…exotic… weaponry.

She was sitting against the range building's outside wall, head on her folded forearms and eyes shut against the bright desert sun, when the bounty hunter nudged her arm.

"Hey, Hill."

"Yeah."

"We just spent two hours trying to shoot ray-guns." The bounty hunter, a ruddy-faced man named Burkholt, hailed from South Africa, and on his tongue, raygun sounded like a president's name.

"Trying is right."

"And Yue says they actually have universal translators."

She grunted, head still down. Yue spoke seven languages, according to Yue.

"And didn't you and Kim and McKnighty spend yesterday flying some crazy heli-chopter plane?"

"VTOL."

"Come again?"

"It was a vertical take-off and landing craft. And it was a sim. And we spent most of our time crashing it."

"…right then. Anyway. So, ray-guns, babblefish, invisible jets – we're definitely out in Star Trek territory, here."

Hill grunted again.

"So what the hell is that fellow doing playing Robin Hood with a bow and arrow?"

Hill turned her head. "What?"

The bounty hunter jerked his chin at the outdoor range across the access road. And sure enough, there was a guy – short hair, olive skin, dark glasses – standing at an angle to the firing line. A bundle of arrows leaned against the firing rest before him. As Hill watched, he plucked a shaft from the quiver, smoothly threaded it on to the bowstring, raised the bow, drew and released - all in one motion.

Thunk. Hill and Burkholt turned to follow the bright fletching. A trio of arrows already stood in the hundred meter target – the same black silhouette their training group had been scorching with lasers since lunch.

Another moment, another thunk. The target's throat was growing crowded.

The range door opened. "Hill, Burkholt – you're up again. Come on."

As they scrambled to their feet, Burkholt asked, "Are we going to learn that, too?"

Their wrangler leaned out, watched as the bowman shot again. "Not today. Maybe next week." Raising his voice, the senior agent called out, "Barton, you're going to be late for the range safety meeting."

The archer didn't turn around. "Thought you said it was a waste of time, Coulson."

"No, that was you. I said, go to the meeting, Barton, if you want to use the range again this quarter."

Another arrow struck the target, this one shaving a fletching off another.

Burkholt hesitated in the doorway. "Can he teach us to do that?"

"No." Coulson and Barton spoke at the same time. "Come on," Coulson said, holding the door ajar. "Laser-scoped sidearms now. Corruption by poorly socialized snipers later." He ushered them back inside, letting the door shut on Barton, slinging the bow over his shoulder.

Five years later, Hill ran into Burkholt again, in a bar in Rio. Over a beer, he told her a highly improbable tale of a mission gone wrong – salvaged, at the very end, by three nearly-impossible shots Barton had made in under twenty seconds. "Coulson was right, though – Barton's a lousy instructor and an anti-social ass. Good with a gun, tactics, and that bow." He grinned at Hill. "You two would get along great."

"In his dreams." She'd spent four deeply annoying days with Barton during a Quinjet refresher class the year before, and get along great didn't cover it. "SHIELD's a big place. Neither of us is likely to ever work with him again."

Burkholt shrugged, took another swallow of his beer. "World's getting smaller all the time."

She crossed paths with Burkholt a handful of times after that. The last time, she was bustling in Fury's wake into the bowels of Western Division, and Burkholt was hustling up and out, all but shoving a pair of spectrometer-laden techs out in front of him. They'd nodded at each other, and she'd followed Fury down the long curve of the stairs.

She found out later that Burkholt had put his techs in a car, told the driver not to wait, and gone back inside to check for stragglers.

If she had dismissed Barton as just another showboat with eccentric taste in weapons, Hill suspected she'd have died under Western Division.

SHIELD acquired people in a variety of ways. The process often left Hill – accustomed to the military's well-regulated pipeline of assess, recruit, assess again, train, test, and train again - astounded by the haphazard methods Fury used to collect new assets. His attitude towards the integration of new tech followed a similar pattern – identify a novel tool, order a requisition, and then find a place to weld the new equipment into the framework.

Over the course of decades, Fury's judgment had not proven flawless, and there were those who still counted Romanoff among his questionable decisions. Hill was among those – and she didn't end the list there.

Barton pre-dated her at SHIELD, of course. It was a part of the mythos that he spent all that time as a field operative, instead of doing as Coulson and Hill herself did, and slowly slipped out of the field and into the upper echelons of the agency, where decisions and policy got done. Barton actually preferred to remain a loose cannon out in the wilderness, rather than bend his neck to the responsibility of a team or heading a department.

By the time she was appointed Deputy Director and was Fury's acknowledged right hand – the one that occasionally was not permitted to know what the left was doing – Hill knew Barton's background. Knew the history and backstory and skeletons on most of SHIELD's staff, in fact. Her third job for Fury was to increase staff retention – a freaking personnel tasker, of all things. She'd spent twelve months and three weeks wrist-deep in agent field evaluations and psych profiles and medical reports stamped with permanent physical/psychological damage documented and come out understanding more about more agents than she had ever wanted to learn.

Fury kept more secrets, she knew, but she'd quenched her thirst. Once drained, though, the glass couldn't be refilled.

She knew about Barton's trust issues, and the trail of frivolous relationships he'd carved through SHIELD's junior admin staff, and why he had no problem boasting about his prowess with the bow, but couldn't bring himself to associate with anyone else who had an interest in archery. That Barton would call Coulson sir to his face and stuck-up rule-bound prick behind his back; would quibble over shoot-don't-shoot orders with half of the supervisory agents in the agency (the half that would work with him) but kill without hesitation on Coulson's instruction.

So she understood, a little, why Barton had taken the risk of bringing Romanoff in, and why Coulson had supported him from the moment the three of them had set foot on the helicarrier. And she knew enough to suspect that Coulson's endorsement hadn't been automatic. She'd have given a great deal to have been in the room when Barton had revealed his latest insanity to Coulson.

Whatever had been said, it stayed off the helicarrier. In front of Fury, in front of other agents, and to the world as a whole, Coulson had been Barton's champion, and Barton's support of Romanoff had been as unflinching. Some would even say that Barton had been vindicated. Together and separately, the two were well on their way to becoming notorious even in SHIELD, which drank down myth with morning coffee and spread legend on toast.

Hill knew enough to know a full third of the rumor was vapor and half the rest gross exaggeration. The other half –

- the other half was why Fury called Barton one of my best men. And why it had been Romanoff who went in after Stark, when Iron Man was still on SHIELD's capture-or-kill list, and no one knew, hour to hour, which it was going to be.

Competent didn't entirely cover it.

The ground shudders beneath her feet. Dust drifts from the ceiling on to her shoulders, on the face she turns upwards to check for spreading cracks. She's so certain it's the earth which will kill them that she nearly forgets about more mortal threats.

Barton's face gives him away – the way he looks past her, that he doesn't drag his eyes over her, gaze catching at her hips, that he doesn't use that faint smirk Barton directs towards every female except Romanoff. The trembler fades as she walks – still strong enough to hum through the soles of her boots, still enough to throw off her stride. It distracts her, encourages her to let her guard react to Barton's reflexive scan of the dock access, the remaining vehicles, the agents with their hands full of equipment. Her eyes follow his, her body turns to check the far bay door, and that is enough.

She dives for cover, comes up and ducks again, eyes moving faster than her hand, every bit of her slower than the rounds snapping by.

Fury's warning has given her time enough for cover, but not to bring the Glock to bear. Barton snaps off another pair of shots – unaimed shots, covering fire – but even that is far too close. Then he is gone, tires squealing and gone, with someone who is not human riding in the truck bed and SHIELD's best hope for planetary defense tucked away in a locked case.

She's never that close again. In the tunnel, her first shot tears the windshield into lace. She keeps her hands clenched on the steering wheel and her eyes darting between the rear view mirror and the truck charging at her, and never locks eyes with him at all.

When she crawls out of the crash, her teeth still rattling in her jaw, she can look her fill at his work.

She'd been with the Agency eight years when Fury moved her into the Deputy Director chair.

Even in her wildest, most self-aggrandizing imagination, Hill did not dream that it was based purely on her considerable talents. She'd simply outlived the other candidates.

She wondered, sometimes, if she'd grown soft, if she'd lost the strength she had as a pilot. Then, she'd spent her waking hours living on the edge between flight and falling, with failure a constant possibility and death breathing at her elbow. Now, here, in the world she and Fury inhabited, there were no permanent deaths, only political ones, and no battle was ever the last one.

She channeled resources and projected repercussions and made decisions when Fury wasn't there to make the call. She carried a sidearm, and went to the range every quarter. But she was back from the fire, living away from the edge, and her days of flying steel were done.

Or so she had thought, before she met Barton's azure gaze and he tried to put a bullet through her.

Eleven hours after Loki destroyed the Pegasus Project, Hill stands on the bridge of the helicarrier weaving order out of chaos and wishing for another flask of coffee.

"No," she says on the satellite channel, "No reports of additional attacks, and we have no intel on future operations at this time." She nods at the Austra-asia director on the other end of the coms, even though the man has no way of seeing her. "I recommend you contact the remainder of the agency departments, confirm that they have received the direction to step down to LEVEL five. We have no indication how long this crisis will last, we need to be able to maintain normal function. Hill out." She takes a deep breath, waits until the active channel light flickers to red, and says, off mike and through gritted teeth, "Com, take a note. Unless otherwise ordered, no more requests for geographic specific updates. We don't have any. Tell them to expect the next attack to come at them, and prepare to react accordingly."

Leaving extra-continental issues in other, less crowded laps, Hill turns her attention back to more local matters. Nino, the duty officer, pushes a portal interface into her hands. "What's this?"

The duty officer sighs. "Delegation of fuel transfers. Unless you want to have to sign for all the JP8 we're going to be burning."

Hill presses her thumb against the tablet, passes it back. "Speaking of burning fuel, have we got all our birdies back in the nest yet?"

The DO shakes her head. "Two more still out."

Hill grimaces. "That chiller in the forward bank fixed?"

"Maintenance called half an hour ago, says the temperature is dropping. We'll be able to go to full utilization of the mirrors as soon as we lift off."

"As soon as we have those last two birds in, we'll go."

As if summoned, the bridge coms crackle with an inflight call. "Blacktop, this is Black Widow reporting in, en-route with assigned asset."

Hill catches the com officer's eye, signals confirm. Coms nods, flicks the channel open and sends, "Acknowledged, Black Widow. Authenticate."

Hill knows she is not the only one in the room who hears the irritation in Romanoff's voice as she gives the verbal passcode. Coms finds Hill, nods, and at Hill's signal, says, "Authentication acknowledged, prepare to receive heading and distance."

After that, the flurry of activity calms. Hill and the bridge crew wait. Fury – still in conference with the WCS – is notably not there. Hill chews it over, decides eventually that his absence is a good thing. Fury energizes the crew, but she'd rather they stepped it down a hair, settled in for the long stretch. At the edge of her vision, she spies Fokterton opening up a video game again. It is that quiet.

It does not last.

Romanoff's flight lands two minutes ahead of schedule, and she hits the bridge less than ninety seconds after that. For the sake of the pilot, Hill hopes the half-muttered "Her Highness is on board" goes out only over the inflight channel, and not general coms.

On the bridge, Romanoff's face reveals nothing. She passes a tablet to the DO, nods to one of the security agents, and delivers a terse report to Intel. Hill, still listening for Coulson, ignores most of it. Romanoff succeeded, as she typically did, and didn't kill many people in the process, which is less common.

The operative finishes her report with "…and I'd like a status on the recovery operation."

The duty officer shrugs, steps aside to let one of the runners bustle past. "You mean, for Project Pegasus? The complex was devastated, it'll be weeks before –"

From the corner of her eye, Hill sees Romanoff wave that aside – brush away, with a pass of her hand, a quarter of a billion dollars in crumpled infrastructure, ninety months of research by some of the best minds in thermonuclear astrophysics, and fourteen of those best minds ground to dust along with fifty eight agents, staff and guards, all lost in the same hour that Barton crashed his way out of Western Division.

Hill is wearing her third best pair of boots. Her best pair is caked with dust and blood. She had shoved the tunic into the disposal, but hasn't decided about the boots yet.

She half-turns, ready to throw Romanoff off the bridge, when the coms crackle again. "Blacktop, this is Flight Zetta-Kate Tree-Oh, requesting landing authorization."

Coulson, finally. And about time. They have a war to get to. The com officer leans over and authenticates, same as with Romanoff, but with seventy percent less attitude in return.

Hill swaps channels. "Air, this is the Bridge. After Zetta-Kate Tree-Oh sets down, close up the runway and prep for elevation. Hold execution for my order." The SIGINT geek in the corner waves a hand for her attention. "Yes?"

"Agent Hill, the image search Director Fury ordered is ready."

God, she'd all but forgotten he'd done that. Barton, Selvig, and Loki – they had found the body of Agent Riles in west Texas – reduced to pixels, sorted by the finest of sieves. She would have ordered a different search – one more lethal – but Fury had over-ridden her. "Find, then fix." He had left finish unsaid.

If it had been anyone else, Hill would have cursed them. But Fury had held out the slug from his light armor, a round with Barton's thumbprint on it. Hill had nodded and passed the order on, even authorizing them to shut down two of Jackson's lower priority talent searches to clear server space.

Signals has, as usual, surpassed her expectations. Two of the techs are still red-eyed and damp-faced – she needs to get them off the boards as soon as possible. They'd been the ones to receive the list of the dead at Western, and Signals has always been one of the departments which loans manpower heavily to the research staff. Some of them may even have been the bodies Hill found, when she went back after the last of the Phase Two pelican cases.

Romanoff ignores the techs, kneels on the walkway above the console prepped for Barton's image search and flips through the screens with a careless hand.

Hill grinds her teeth. "Good job, Signal. Hold on commencing the search until we get a senior agent to do an independent verification on any hits. I don't want to waste time or resources chasing ghosts." Romanoff stirs at the edge of Hill's vision. Hill doesn't turn, just puts an edge in her voice. "A senior supervisory agent. Call Logistics, see if they have anyone to spare. And someone collect that civilian wandering around on my flight deck before Zetta-Kate Tree-Oh lands on top of him."

She can feel Romanoff's gaze burning into the back of her skull, but Hill can still see Barton's face – sharp and distinct over the unfocused blur that was the iron sight on her Glock – as she pulled the trigger.

For half a heartbeat, she had her sights center mass, and those eerie blue eyes never blinked, never lost focus.

There's a nice triangular symmetry to it, and Hill isn't about to ruin the moment by flinching.

Romanoff turns on her heel and walks off the bridge, taking a handful of shadows with her.

Fury had briefed both of them – Coulson and herself – in the short van ride to the expedient LZ that the Alamogordo responders established outside the ruins of Western. "Loki's glow-stick staff is apparently a multi-use tool – destructive fire damage twice to three times that of a squad weapon, with some thermal effects as well." Even under the circumstances, Hill could see Fury thinking I have got to get me one of those. "And he can use it to co-opt personnel to his direction. Offense is a distance weapon, the…allegiance changer is close-order. He got Barton, Selvig, and Riles."

"Can it be reversed," Coulson wanted to know.

"Unknown. Until we determine otherwise, we assume it can be, if we find the proper tools. Treat our three as compromised, not hostiles. Barton, at least, is functioning on Loki's side –"

Hill would've laughed, because if five rounds weren't an indication of allegiance, she didn't know what was.

"- so assume that all of his knowledge and access codes are now Loki's. We can't depend on being able to bring all our resources to bear."

"Sir, we can't just wait like sitting ducks until he hits us again!"

"We're not, Agent Hill. You'll go back to the Blacktop, start transferring all command functions there. I need that platform mobile and secure."

Coulson shook his head, grabbed at a handhold as the van jolted over a bump. "The carrier's not going to have enough firepower, sir. Not against the tesseract. We need help."

Fury smiled. "And we're going to get it. Coulson, bring in Romanoff. Bring in Stark – get him up to date on the situation, but keep Phase Two close-hold for now. Have Romanoff bring in Banner."

"And Rogers?"

The driver interrupted, "Sir, we're here. Your transport is on the ground, the next is two minutes out."

"Don't worry, Agent Coulson," Fury said as he slid the door open, "I'll collect him myself. And Coulson –"

"Sir?"

"Neither you nor Agent Romanoff are authorized any side trips to try to rescue Barton. Make it clear to her."

Coulson's face became even more blank. "Yes, sir."

On the flight out to the carrier, she sat across from Coulson, watching him stare through the skin of the airframe. Part of her knew that she should say some word of comfort, some assurance that they'd bring Barton back, safe and sane. For Coulson's sake, if nothing else.

The other part of her was starting to feel the post-adrenaline ache, and the abrasions on her knuckles from digging through rubble. She stank of dust, sweat, and blood.

As Hill dozed off, she thought about Romanoff, who had not yet heard the news, and wondered how long Fury and Coulson could have protected her from the assassin, if Barton had not moved as fast as he did. She decided she was humoring herself, by assuming Coulson would have tried.

She has no recollection of the skirmish on the bridge. Later, they tell her that she'd seen the grenade first, called it, and knocked Wilson off his feet to get him away from the blast. That when the direct assault came, she had found a weapon and her feet and saved Fury's life. That Barton had put a virus into the system and cut out another engine, and the carrier had begun to fall.

She remembered none of that. She remembered that there were monsters, tearing apart her ship. They tell her no, it was only the Hulk, and Barton's assault. Hill didn't argue with them.

The medics told her she might get some of it back, eventually, but the percussive force of the grenade, and the crack of her head against the deck, most likely disrupted memory transmission from short to long term.

Nino, the duty officer, put her in for an award, later, and she tried to refuse. But Fury insisted, and so Hill's got a commendation in her file for something which she can't say she's done.

Her memory started again when she was sitting down, trying to swallow away nausea and the foul smell of burning electronics, and Fury called over the general coms, that Loki was away and Coulson was down.

The hour after that is layered in pain – her head pounds, her off hand throbs, and her chest is one huge ache, that started with they're here-they're calling it and tasted of cordite and passes through the two bodies the medics took away while she was still running on automatic. She can't find an end to it. She doesn't know the names of the dead – Sickbay is full and people are cross-leveling all over the ship. The staff here, now, are all alive. The ones who are not…she'll find out eventually.

Her ear-com keeps cutting out – first one channel is dead, then all of them, then all of them are active at once. She tries swapping headsets, but Coms claims it is a central problem. Hill rubs her forehead, regretting not accepting the shot the medic had offered her. She had refused it from fear of the drug dulling her thoughts, but actually ripping someone's head off in irritation isn't going to help the manning problem.

Engine three develops a heat spike, which Engineering reports with an eerie calm. An auxiliary cooling system is found to have failed, post-crisis. Engineering reduces the load on the engine, dropping power and hence lift, while the other cooling components are brought to full. The heat dissipates. Hill unclenches her hands to find her nails have scored raw patches in her palms.

Fury briefs the Initiative – no, he briefs Rogers and Stark, and Stark gets up and walks out before Fury finishes. Hill stands at the door, bearing witness for the rest of the crew. They've bled, they've lost heart. She can see the brave faces her people put forth, but the carrier still struggles to maintain a heading. When Rogers leaves, Hill does, too.

Eventually, Engineering announces that they are ready to try restarting Engine two. That kicks off a brief but explosive disagreement with Signal, who objects to opening up the rest of the ship to the bug that nearly killed us all already, you morons. Engineer One – until three hours ago, Engineering's number two – disagrees. Com and Power pile in, more from physical proximity than expertise. By the time they sort it out – a tri-section team to scan the governing stack for any virus left behind – Hill's headache has doubled and she is on record as having threatened to throw all of them into the still functioning turbines.

It's then that Sickbay reports the last of Loki's mercenaries dead, lost in surgery. Sanchez-Ramos actually sounds aggrieved at the loss. Knowing the surgeon, though, Hill judges it is due to the loss of intel, not life. Izzie made her peace with battle medicine long before.

"And what about Barton?" Hill asks, when Izzie has finished cursing the merc for exhibiting the poor taste to die on her.

"Concussed, battered, dehydrated, cortisol and lactic acid levels excessively elevated. He should be confined to quarters. I turned him over to Romanoff, as Fury said."

"Fury – where are they now?"

"Still in a treatment room."

"Lock the door."

Izzie sighs. "Not my call, Maria, and not yours, either. Fury said to let Romanoff decide. You want to talk to her?"

"No. I'm going to Fury." She has never spoken to Romanoff about Barton, and she's not about to start now.

She turns on her heel, scans the control room, finds the DO leaning on – sagging against – a console. "Nino, you have the Bridge." Nino straightens, nods.

As Hill reaches the hatch, a Signals tech waves her over. Hill gestures to the DO – the tech shakes his head sharply. "Agent Hill, you asked to be notified – Agent Barton's passcode just opened the armory. So did Agent Romanoff's."

Hill blows out a breath. "Thank you. Carry on."

She finds Fury in the upper briefing room. Stark and Rogers have left – she has no idea what they're doing and part of her does not care. Her ear-com snaps and then is back on line, pouring out a steady stream of updates and damage reports. Hill notes them unconsciously, adding them to a lengthening list of grievances. Her ship is wounded, perhaps crippled, and barely making way against the headwind. Her head is pounding and her sight still flickers down to tunnel vision when she turns too fast. Coulson is dead.

And all of it would be inconsequential if she could have her target back in her sights.

"Sir, did you authorize Barton access to the weapons room?"

Fury turns toward her and nods, but it is his blind side and she can't read it, not now.

"Sir, he just led an assault on this vessel! He –"

"Has been recovered. And is under Agent Romanoff's supervision. She'll see to it that Agent Barton is debriefed."

"On what he managed to do to us? I think that should be pretty clear. What is she going to tell him, that he's responsible for Coulson's death, but oh, all is forgiven, come back home?"

"Possibly. If he needs it."

She draws breath to shout…something. Then she notices his hands, and what he holds there, and that the color is still bright scarlet, and bleeding onto his hands.

Fury folds the red-smeared cards back into a tidy stack. His face is quiet – no frown now, no anger, no despair.

"Sir. Those were in Agent Coulson's locker. Not his jacket."

"I know. They just needed…a push."

Against that, Hill has nothing.

Air comes over the general coms, announcing the unauthorized departure of an aircraft. Stark's suit blazes past, easily outdistancing the Quinjet.

"Barton," Hill snaps. Fury raises a hand.

"Let them go," he says. "Let them try."

Rogers' Quinjet was not the last unauthorized launch of the day. Hill broke two toggles on the alt side console, hammering on the board as though it were the fighter's canopy, her voice cracking as she ordered, then begged, the Alpha alert pilot to stand down.

Fury did one better, storming out of the VTO room and snatching a Stinger off the rack on his way to the flightdeck.

"Alpha, do you read, abort, abort –"

Signals snarled furiously among themselves. "No response, lost encrypted link, no ping back, it's still on our damn deck –"

Thirty seconds later, it was over. The Alpha took off. The decoy jet did not.

"God damn it," Hill swore, and slammed a fist into the console. "Get me coms with that bird! Find out who hacked our system, and how they did it, and shut. It. DOWN!" Dotson and Henrys, already at the keyboard, nodded without turning around. Hill pressed her earpiece for Fury's private channel. "Sir, it's gone. We're trying to find out how it happened. It was the Alpha, I don't know who was in the decoy."

Fury's voice shook with anger. "Fire suppression has the decoy. God-damn WSC pulled rank on me – they probably set up some sort of backdoor into our coms. Find it, shut it down."

"On it, sir." Hill shut off the com, looked around. "And someone find out who was in the decoy bird! If they're still breathing, I want answers!"

Five minutes into flight, four after the launch, and thirty seconds after the nuke departed New York City airspace, the coms with Alpha came back up. Dotson shoved through the cheering, weeping agents and pressed another headset into Hill's hands. Across the room, Air gestured wildly for her attention, pointing to the com bank. Dotson took Hill by the shoulders, dragged her to an undamaged console.

"-in, Blacktop, this is Alpha Alert One, requesting return heading. I say again, come in, Blacktop, this is Alpha Alert One, payload is launched, requesting return heading."

Hill slapped the on toggle before Air could respond. "Alpha Alert One, this is Blacktop Deputy, what is your status?"

"Green on fuel and secondary arms, primary payload launched, but I can not confirm a strike on target. No secondary targets assigned, no bogies in sight, what are your instructions, Blacktop?"

"What is your heading, Alpha?"

"Ninety-two degrees magnetic, Blacktop, Mach 2.1."

Hill cupped her hand over the mike, breathed out. "Copy 92 degrees, 2 point one." Beside her, Henrys punched up radar and focused in on one target, still going like a bat out of hell due east. Hill nodded and Henrys changed the coding, painting Alpha friendly again. "Alpha, adjust course and proceed to Bangor for refueling. We'll recover you there."

"Copy Bangor, Blacktop. Can you confirm a strike on the target?"

"Negative, Alpha, Payload was re-directed, primary target neutralized by other options. All is good, Alpha, fly safe."

"Roger that, Blacktop, thank you." Relief was thick in the pilot's voice. "Blacktop, Alpha. Can you verify the status of Alpha Alert Two?"

Henrys met her eyes, shook his head. Hill hesitated a beat to steady her voice. "Not at this time, Alpha, we'll get you briefed when we get you home. Blacktop out."

Henrys held out a piece of paper. "We've confirmed the pilot names, both in Alpha and in the decoy."

Hill took the flight roster. "Status of the decoy pilot?"

"In Sickbay, unconscious, expectant. They'll let us know when that changes."

The roster listed the Alpha Flight Leader as Carver, Alpha Two as McKnighty. Hill stared at it a moment, then folded the paper over, running a nail down the crease before tucking it away.

They stuff Loki in a holding cell in the powerless but otherwise largely unscathed 2nd Precinct headquarters. One of Security's more agitated shift leaders had loaded a generator and a set of baffle fields in one of the Quinjets during the chaos after Engine three restarted. While Hill suspects their original target had been Barton, the courier is already en-route when Rogers checks in, reporting the portal closed and Loki in custody. Even the security team is comfortable with putting Loki higher than Barton on the "fix and hold" priority list. Rogers' team helps off-load the generator and angle the baffle fields into a cage inside the physical walls of the detention room, then security mounts three layers of armed guards around the (reportedly) markedly subdued Asgardian.

That evidently keeps the shift leader sufficiently occupied, so that Romanoff and Barton leave in the company of the rest of the Initiative, while New York City begins digging itself out of the rubble.

Fury takes advantage of the scrambled coms to make a blindingly swift trip to sea-level in order to set a personal eye on the destruction. In his absence, Hill shifts the carrier back off shore, out of the La Guardia loop of the Great Circle, and begins recovery operations. Fury returns, silent and drawn, and orders five teams diverted from Western Division to help New York.

"Sir, they've got the National Guard and half a thousand contractors. What difference are twenty people going to make?"

"Six of our people contributed to that mess. We made it, we'll clean it up. See to it that they've got all the supplies they need."

"And the Initiative, sir? The WSC has called for an update, twice."

Fury shakes his head. "Tomorrow. Time enough, now, to manage that tomorrow." He scowls at the still cratered deck, at the network lines strewn across the walkways and two hydraulic beams supporting the starboard console annex. "How long until we get back to offensive capacity?"

Any answer Hill gives will be met with, not fast enough, so she has no qualms about ducking that one. "Sir, both Power and Nav wanted to talk to you about that. They're down on Three Aft, with Engineer One." Fury snorts, recognizing a dodge when he hears one, but makes his way off the bridge.

Twenty hundred zulu finds Hill still at the com, chasing the last of the swing shift off their boards. Fury is off watch, finally, and Hill takes fifteen minutes to gulp down a cup of coffee and open her message stack. There is this for acute crisis – her inbox shows a ninety minute gap with zero incoming mail. But her staff has recovered enough to start looking for permanent solutions to the various deficiencies Loki's attack revealed. With an eye to calling dibs on the budget and her priority list, section heads and non-conformist self-starters alike have begun forwarding purchase orders, requests for budget overruns, and pleas for staff augmentation.

Hill approves a handful of the most urgent proposals, then crafts an all-hands message emphasizing use of organic resources and maximizing utilization of standard approval processes and there is still no magic money tree, people that she hopes will calm her staff and get them back to thinking instead of reacting. It takes an hour, but most of the incoming traffic knocks off after that. The exception is the security team at the precinct house, who keep asking for more coffee, and passing gossip about a detained civilian in a hotdog suit. Another hour and two circuits of the passable corridors of the upper deck later, Hill orders the day staff off shift, with instructions to not contact her until after 0700 the next morning. That earns her a flurry of emails, several mentioning black kettles, before traffic creeps to a crawl.

Late in the evening, one last note staggers in. From Romanoff.

The email is blank, only a shell for the attachment links. Two leave forms - one for Romanoff, one for Barton. Fifteen days, an innocuous address in central Virginia listed, no trans-boundary travel requested. For a contact number, Romanoff's current discard cell and Barton's low-use email. Barton's leave even has a psychological clearance. Hill opens the headshrink's note, enlarges the signature block. She knows Doctor Jinalt's scrawl and that's not it.

But then, it isn't actually Barton's signature under his name on the leave request, either.

The third form is a vehicle utilization authorization.

Hill stares at the email for a long time.

She should not have received the request. The email has been forwarded to her through Coulson's box – the message even has the routing trace, and the origination at the 2nd Precinct security team's portable terminal. Romanoff must have been half asleep herself when she sent it. Regardless, Hill's authority to approve leaves extends to most of the AMBER class assets. She's filled in the boxes before, when neither Fury nor Coulson could get to a terminal.

Initial estimates show the carrier will not be fully operational in anything less than a month. Medical reports no progress thus far identifying the bodies of the seven mercenaries Loki left behind. Romanoff's operation in Kiev has been blown to dust. Fury's rough priority list has no space for selected hits, and he has better surveillance & intelligence operators.

Hill knows Fury won't begrudge them the breathing room – so long as they come back.

Fifteen days, for two such as these, is a lifetime. In fifteen days, they could be anywhere in the world, and still increasing the lead over any pursuit. Loki's blows were not fatal, but SHIELD lost blood and breath, and not only in the research divisions. Fifteen days – finding Banner would be a stroll in the park, by comparison.

Hill touches the screen, pulls up her calendar. There is a new entry – Coulson's memorial service, in Virginia, in nine days.

He has one of ours, Romanoff had said. If she'd meant that, Romanoff and Barton will be at Coulson's service. If not…well. Hill and Fury will know, and at nine days, not fifteen. With nine days, it may be possible to track the two operatives. May be. Possibly.

With sharp, precise movements, Hill records her signature, saves the authorization to the central database and sends a copy to Fury's attention. She copies the calendar entry for Coulson's service to the return email. She adds no padding, no condolences. There is nothing that could soften this cut.

Wounds from sharp edges heal cleanly.

At the end, she starts to add a note to the vehicle approval – With my compliments, M. Hill – but reconsiders and deletes the words.

Fury told her once, never give an order you don't think will be obeyed.

Bring him back, with you, is the only thing she can justify telling Romanoff. But if Romanoff's choice is otherwise, there are no words that Hill can use to unmake that intent.

[end]

Title: The Mission Is the Man

Summary: She has never spoken to Romanoff about Barton before, and she's not about to start. SHIELD-centric.

Characters: Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton

Rating/Category: Gen. Some Blackhawk of the OTPartnership sort.

Author's Notes: Bechdel-negative fic. This was supposed to be more of a duet, but Hill decided she'd rather solo. Title from Saving Private Ryan. Spoilers for the movie. Mild adherence to comics canon. Thanks to Flora & Kernie for beta and encouragement – all errors remain my own.

Disclaimer: Not mine. They were broken when I found them, I swear. Thanks to Flora & Kernie for beta and encouragement – all errors remain my own.