grav_ity | New Fic: Frozen (Avengers)

AN: There was that trope thing for stories you weren't going to write. And, technically, this is in the spirit of that, since I stole it from the prompt I gave to

tielan. Unbetaed flashfic is unbetaed.

Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit

Spoilers: The movie

Characters: Maria Hill, Steve Rogers

Rating: Teen? For now.

Summary: When Maria gets an alert about a security breach at a derelict lab in the Yukon, she goes to put it right.

Frozen

The red light on Maria’s desk blinks for almost ten seconds before she notices it. Well, before she acknowledges it, anyway. Far be it from her to shirk her duties, but sometimes she really wishes other people were as good at her job as she is.

She activates her comm before Fury is finished his sentence, buzzing in her ear like an over-worked bee, and assures him she’s got it. She’s not quite fast enough de-activating it, though, because she hears him quite clearly when he says “Take Rogers”, and now she’s lost plausible deniability. She sighs and allows herself exactly two and a half seconds to lament her lot in life before she issues the appropriate calls and heads down to the armory for her gear. She’s many things, and even more now that she’s wrangling various permutations of the Avengers two times a week, but she’s not one to wallow for long. Plus, this one, this one is personal.

Rogers is in the jet when she gets there, priming the engines like paint by number because the new tech doesn’t come naturally quite yet (and also because, according to Stark, he crashed the only plane he ever flew. Maria doesn’t usually listen to Stark, as a general rule, but on this one occasion, she’ll admit at least privately that he might be on to something).

“Agent Hill,” Rogers nods as she takes her chair and begins the double check. He’s in uniform, but his cap is down. The shield is lying down on top of his pack, next to hers on the bench. “Where are we headed?”

“The Yukon,” she tells him. “I’m inputting the coordinates now. I hope you packed warm, Captain.”

“The cold doesn’t make a huge impact on me, Agent,” Rogers says. “As long as I keep moving.”

“Noted,” she says. She adds it to the list she keeps, the one that lists all their strengths and weaknesses, just in case.

Rogers is not much of a talker, so it’s all business until they’re in the air, and then he sets the autopilot and takes out a sketchpad. Maria passes the time looking at maps, even though the floorplan of the place they’re headed might as well be burned into her brain.

“So,” says Rogers after a long time. “What exactly are we in for? I mean, your orders were pretty brief. And you’re looking at that datapad like you’re planning something very big.”

“It’s an old SHIELD lab,” Maria says. “From before Fury’s time. Things were a little different then.”

“Different, how?” Rogers asks.

“There were experiments Fury didn’t like.” That’s putting it mildly. “I didn’t like them much either. Putting a stop to it was one of the few things we’ve ever fully agreed on.”

“And a proximity alarm has been triggered?” Rogers asks.

“Last time it was the caribou migration,” Maria admits. “But I have to be sure.”

Rogers doesn’t say anything, but Maria realizes that this probably means they finally have something in common. The Avengers are a mess of personal motivations and old grudges. Her professionalism is a bit slippery when it comes to the Yukon lab, but her determination is adamant. Rogers will back her, completely, just because it’s something on her conscience.

Rogers goes back to his sketchbook and Maria does her best to focus. Usually she’d look out the window, but the SHIELD jet flies so fast it would only make her nauseated. She’d known that Rogers could draw. It was in his file, and Phil had told her about eighteen times in the year between finding his shield and finding the rest of him. Somehow it makes him smaller, having a normal hobby. Stark has hobbies, but they aren’t normal. Banner won’t let himself settle down long enough, and Barton and Romanov aren’t exactly the puttering type. Maria does her best not to think about what Thor gets up to. But Rogers draws, and all of a sudden he’s human.

She’s saved from her own thoughts when the computer alert begins to beep, notifying them that they’re coming up on their destination. Rogers puts the book away and leans forward to the control. Stark would say something stupid about now, but Maria isn’t even tempted. Rogers lands by the book, and Maria undoes her straps to start wrestling into her cold weather gear while he does the post-flight, and then the pre-flight, in case they have to leave in a hurry.

“Just in case it’s not caribou this time,” he says, when he catches her looking.

“Good thinking, Captain,” she says, which is the sort of thing one says when one has no idea what to say.

He grabs his pack and she pulls out her gun, and they go, falling into formation. Rogers was in the army too, she remembers: he was a soldier before the others were, literally and metaphorically. He follows her lead when she takes point, using the shield to cover them both as they cross from the helipad to the doors.

She puts her code in, the stealth one that won’t actually deactivate anything. She’ll have to unlock everything manually when they get inside, but that’s procedure, and tells Rogers as much.

“I’m right behind you, Agent,” is his only reply.

There are six doors before they can get to the control room, but they only get as far as the third one before they find out that it is not, in fact, caribou that have set off the alarm.

It is, in fact, several very well armed commandos, with tech that Maria does not recognize, even though she’d have to admit that she didn’t get a particularly good look at any of it, what with all the gunfire.

TBC, in Chapter 2