I blocked out the memories
Natasha stopped abruptly when she saw Maria Hill in the changing room. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see the woman, it wasn’t even that she didn’t want to be in the same room, although she had come to the gym that late because she thought it would be empty. It was the fact that the woman’s back was turned to her, and that Natasha had noticed for the first time the scars that adorned it. She was a good spy. Natasha often prided herself on that. She was one of, if not the best in the world at what she did. But for some reason, the redhead had never seen the Deputy Director’s scars. She’d never so much as thought that there might be some. She knew the woman had to have scars, that feat was inevitable in their line of work, but scars like the ones she could see right now weren’t just the usual scars that always adorned an agent’s back. Natasha knew that for a fact, because the woman’s back looked more like her own than it did other agents’, which could only really mean one thing. They were scars that probably dated back to the woman’s childhood and could only come from a long-lasting form of abuse, one most likely suffered at the hands of someone she knew well. Maybe even someone from her own family. For some reason, that thought tugged at Natasha’s heart. It made her clench her fists in anger and draw in a calming breath.
Thinking back on the time she had spent at SHIELD so far, Natasha realised that the Deputy Director was better at keeping secrets than she’d originally given her credit for. She’d never seen so much of a glance of the woman’s back, be it in the changing rooms, in the sparring ring, or anywhere else really, which probably should have set off some sort of alarm in her mind. The fact that it hadn’t only fortified her newfound idea that the Deputy Director was a pretty damn good spy.
Natasha gently cleared her throat, indicating her presence to the older woman. To her surprise, the usually composed woman turned around so quickly she almost fell, her face displaying a startled expression the redhead had never seen appear on it. Her hands were shaking slightly, knuckles white from holding onto the hem of the shirt she was holding. She’d probably been here for quite a while before Natasha came in.
“Romanoff. I didn’t hear you come in.” The brunette said, schooling her features back into a neutral expression.
“Hill. No problem. Are you okay?” Natasha asked, some concern creeping its way into her otherwise cool voice.
“All good. Have a nice evening.” Maria had quickly put her shirt back on. She said her goodbyes and hurried out of the room, leaving behind a dumbfounded Natasha. She thought about going after the other woman but decided against it.
‘Well that was weird.’
Natasha quickly changed into her working out gear and went back into the gym to start her evening routine, her mind still focused on the weird behaviour Hill had displayed. Perhaps something really was wrong with her, and in this case the logical thing to do would be to go and ask her about it again. But Natasha also understood the desire to be alone that Hill had shown earlier, and she understood that going to see her could potentially do more harm than it would good.
So she settled into the familiar routine, the movements coming to her as easily as they always had, and when she was done in the gym, she made her way to her room to try and get some sleep, mind still stuck on Hill’s weird behaviour and haunted eyes. A small part of Natasha couldn’t help but wonder what would leave the Deputy Director of SHIELD shaking in the gym’s changing rooms at 2 in the morning. She didn’t think the woman had been on a mission the previous day, but she’d need to double-check, because a difficult mission could probably explain the way Hill had behaved. If she hadn’t been on a mission, the only explanation Natasha could come up with was ‘nightmares’. And if Hill’s nightmares were anything like her own, they would have been about whatever had caused the scars Natasha had seen on her back. And since she’d never before seen the woman in the gym so late at night, something had to have triggered the nightmares. Natasha fell asleep comforted by the fact that, even though she was bound to the Helicarrier for now because she had no official missions to busy herself with, she’d just found an unofficial one that she could put her focus on.
Maria was basically running back to her room at this point. She’d never admit it, to herself or anyone else, but Romanoff surprising her in the gym’s changing rooms had affected her. A lot. She was good at hiding what she wanted to keep hidden, and saying only what she wanted to say. That was one of the things that made her so good at her job. But she’d been distracted all night long. She probably wouldn’t get any more sleep that night, not after the nightmares that had led her to the gym in the first place anyway. She’d always had nightmares, they weren’t new to her, but they’d mostly faded into a nuisance she could ignore most nights. For some reason though, her most recent mission had made them come back at full volume, and they now crowded her head every night, stealing away precious hours of sleep. She knew exactly why this mission had triggered the change in her nightmares. Maria wasn’t oblivious to the few similarities that could be found between herself and the children her team had found in that house. They’d been sent in there because they had intel implying that the house could be a HYDRA safehouse. Her team had walked in guns blazing, expecting to be met with soldiers or security of some kind. Instead, they’d found a lab, occupied by a dozen beds, all empty. The horrifying discovery, though, had been behind the door at the end of the lab. When her team had opened it, they’d found 9 children, all dressed in rags, bodies bruised and bloody. Maria had recognised the signs of abuse and malnutrition as soon as the feed from her team’s cameras had made their way to her screen. ‘Get them out of there.’, was all she’d said. She genuinely didn’t expect her nightmares to come back after a mission like this. Maria had first thought that exercising would help her get her mind back into the headspace she needed it in, but that had repeatedly failed. Night after night, she went back to her room and laid down on her bed, only for sleep to evade her again. After almost a week, she had hoped the nightmares would have faded back a little, but they definitely hadn’t. She was most likely exhausted by now, which could explain her zoning out in the changing rooms earlier. She was still a little worried that the ex-Red Room operative had seen her back. It wasn’t that she was insecure about her scars per se, she’d come to accept them and she respected the story they told, but she was worried about what the woman would do with that newfound knowledge. She could ask questions, tell people, hack into her file, … So many things that Maria didn’t want her to do. Things that would mean her best kept secret wasn’t a secret anymore. That scared her beyond reason. Weakness was not tolerated. It hadn’t been when she was a child, it hadn’t been when she’d joined the army, and it couldn't be now that she was Deputy Director of SHIELD. And her past was a weakness, one she needed to hide and try to forget. And she had, mostly. But some missions were harder than others. It wasn’t the first time a mission brought back carefully put away memories that she’d tried to forget, and she imagined it wouldn’t be the last either, but it usually wasn’t this bad. She’d had plenty of rescue missions for which the objective was a child. She’d seen plenty of abused children before. But none of these missions had ever triggered nightmares as bad as the ones she’d been getting since that one mission. It usually only lasted for a couple of days before it faded back into background noise, which is why it was particularly difficult for her to deal with the nightmares now.
So Maria did the same thing she had everyday for a week now. She laid down on her bed and waited for sleep to overcome her. Just like everyday that week, it never came.
So she laid there, desperately trying to keep her mind focused on anything that wasn’t her father or her latest mission. She started counting sheep, and when she got bored and her mind started drifting back to bad memories she grabbed her SHIELD issued tablet and accessed every mission file of hers, filing the paperwork she still needed to do. When that was done, she thought 4 in the morning was a great time to put on a documentary and learn some stuff, so she turned on her TV, putting up the National Geographic channel. She spent the next two hours absorbed in a documentary on wildlife in the savanna (lions and cheetahs and everything else, who knew it could be that interesting to watch them interact?). She figured 6 was an appropriate time to get up and she got dressed and ready for her day. She walked out of her room and headed to the cafeteria to get some breakfast.
Natasha woke up early the next morning. She’d had a relatively restful sleep and, now that she was well-rested, she was intent on finding out more about the Deputy Director of SHIELD and her past. It wasn’t that she hadn’t already tried. She had, as soon as they’d let her out of her cell and allowed her to have access to a computer and internet network, some time ago. Hill’s climb up the ranks hadn’t gone unnoticed in the organisation, and it had earned her as many enemies as it had friends. That had made the redhead curious. An agent so young, and a woman at that, climbing up the ranks of the world’s most famous international organisation had raised many questions in her mind. Before meeting Fury and learning to somewhat trust him, Natasha had never met someone in power who hadn’t screwed others over to make it to the top. Yet from what she’d heard about Hill before then, her moral compass was probably one of the most oriented towards good and justice in the entirety of SHIELD. The woman was interesting, frustratingly so too. After around ten minutes of trying to hack into the brunette’s file, Natasha had gotten bored and given up. (No, really, it had nothing to do with it being slightly more challenging than she’d come to expect from a SHIELD file.) Whatever was on there, someone wanted it kept secret bad enough that they’d gone to the trouble of hiring a pretty damn good hacker to encrypt it. So, Natasha had let it go. Nothing warranted her putting any kind of effort into it back then. She wouldn’t let it go this time, not until she found some satisfactory answers. The redhead made her way to the cafeteria. If she was going to hack into Hill’s file, she was going to need to do it on a full stomach. When she walked through the doors, Natasha noticed Hill sitting in a corner, seemingly engrossed in paperwork. Within seconds of Natasha walking in though, she noticed the brunette gathering all the papers spread on the table, getting up and out of the room. Not thinking much of it, Natasha just grabbed a tray and filled it up. As soon as she was done eating, she made her way back to her room. She most likely needed to be discreet. Getting caught hacking into SHIELD’s second-in-command’s file wouldn’t look great, especially since many people still didn’t completely trust her (not that she blamed them though, she understood where they were coming from). She locked her door behind her, grabbed her SHIELD-issued computer and walked to the only table in the room, dropping into a chair with the computer in her lap. She turned it on and immediately got to work, putting all of her focus into the task at hand. In the end, the encryption was good, but not good enough to keep her out. Natasha started reading Hill’s file with a small smile on her lips, satisfied to have managed to hack into it. She was surprised to learn that the woman was born in 1982. That made her 27. She was way younger than Natasha originally thought. That put her position in SHIELD into a whole new perspective. She wasn’t even 30 and was already almost at the head of one of the biggest spy organisations in the world. Natasha’s smile quickly disappeared as she read on though.
Her mother had died when she was still a baby. Both of her brothers had enlisted in the army by the time the girl had turned 12. She had graduated highschool and immediately enlisted in the Marines herself. In 1999, Natasha noted. That would mean Hill had only been 17. Three tours before she’d been honourably discharged. The redhead noticed that the names of the other men on Hill’s team were all followed by the three letters ‘KIA’. Hill had been recruited by SHIELD as soon as she’d been discharged. A quick climb up the ranks until she was second to only Fury himself. A soldier at heart, Natasha deduced. A survivor too, if her entire team had died but her, right before she’d been discharged.
Natasha tried to imagine what could’ve happened to the brunette’s team. Since Hill had been honourably discharged, she couldn’t have been the reason her team was dead. But in that case, Natasha couldn’t quite figure out how the woman had survived when the rest of her team hadn’t. Maybe she’d been benched during the mission that got them killed, or maybe she’d had a position that put her in a rather safe spot. Natasha didn’t know.
The file did help her understand how Hill had ended up on SHIELD’s radar, and how she’d made it to the top. She had an almost perfect track record within SHIELD: barely any failed missions, no civilian casualties, and no agents lost during the missions she’d taken part of as handler. Same story with the Marines. Hill’s team had one of the best success rates Natasha had ever seen for a US Army unit. A quite impressive file, really. However, it didn’t explain the woman’s scars, and it didn’t help Natasha figure out why she’d had this haunted look in her eyes the night before.
The next step of the redhead’s unofficial investigation was to use the wonderful tool called the internet. She googled the brunette’s name and clicked on every single link that came up at that. In the end, it might have taken her almost an hour to read through it all, and she hadn’t learned anything new. The one interesting thing that came out of it was a picture Natasha found on Hill’s highschool’s website. Hill had to be around 15. She’d been on the school’s official track team. She was wearing the school’s sports uniform (a beautiful sight, objectively: it really brought out the blue of her eyes) and was holding a trophy, a wide smile adorning her face. She had the same blue eyes, but they lacked the icy quality that was so characteristic of them now. Hill looked so happy in that picture. Perhaps slightly underweight, the redhead noted, but genuinely happy. Natasha didn’t think she’d ever seen the other woman look so happy and carefree before. She downloaded the picture onto her computer, planning to print it as soon as she found the time to do it. For now though, she needed to move on to phase three of her investigation: asking around. She picked up her phone and texted Barton. He would probably be the only one willing to talk to her.
‘You free to spar?’
Barton’s reply came through almost instantly. ‘See you in ten.’
Natasha quickly changed into workout gear and made her way to the gym.
She was relieved when she realised that the gym was mostly empty. There were a few people doing weights in the far left corner, but nowhere near close enough to the sparring ring that they might hear her upcoming conversation with Barton. As soon as Barton got to the gym, the both of them stretched together in silence and got into a fighting stance once they were done.
Natasha was holding back. Barton was far from a match for her, and they both knew it. But she’d asked him to spar because she needed to ask him a few questions, and dropping him to the mat within seconds of sparring with him would most likely get in the way of that. She was still thinking about the best way to bring up the Deputy Director when Barton interrupted her train of thoughts. He was already out of breath, while Natasha had barely broken a sweat.
“What did you want to talk about Nat?”
She’d hated the nickname at first, had done everything she could to get the other agent to stop calling her that, but he’d proven to be more stubborn than she’d realised when she first met him. She’d gotten used to it, eventually, and sort of liked it now.
“Don’t get mad, okay? What do you know about Maria Hill?” Natasha asked as she easily dodged a blow aimed at her throat and immediately retaliated.
“Maria Hill?” Barton seemed to think for a second, as he tried to block Natasha’s punches. Natasha’s first remark had him make a face and look at her funny. It let him know that she’d been up to something that would most likely end up getting her in trouble. “She’s Fury’s second. Smart, dedicated. She’s a damn good agent, from what I’ve heard, and just as good of a leader apparently. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just curious. What else do you know? Things that you gathered, things that I couldn’t find in her file?” Natasha pushed, retreating to defence to give Barton a chance.
“I don’t know what more I can tell you. I’ve never really had to interact with her. Only a couple of times, not nearly enough to form an educated opinion on her. From what I’ve heard from agents who were on her team before she was promoted, she’s fair, to a fault sometimes. She’s a workaholic. That’s what comes up most often when she’s mentioned. Always working beyond what’s expected and what’s healthy. I don’t think I can tell you more than that. Sorry, Nat. Now the truth. Why do you want to know?” Barton said as he tried to attack the redhead.
Natasha dropped her guard and stepped away from Barton, effectively putting an end to their friendly fight.
“I’m not sure, honestly. I saw her in the gym last night. She was acting weird.” She stated in a forced calm tone.
“So what? Just ask her about it then.” Barton added, unhelpfully.
“I don’t think that would help. She closed off as soon as she saw me.” Natasha countered.
“Snooping around isn’t the way to go, Nat. She won’t like it if she finds out.” Barton warned, ever so serious.
“She won’t find out if no one tells her now, will she?” Natasha joked, tone growing more playful.
Barton let out a laugh at that and slapped her arm joyfully.
“Right. Sorry I couldn’t help more.” He apologised quietly, a fond smile tugging at his lips.
Natasha nodded and held out her arm. Barton shook it and got off the sparring ring, waving Natasha goodbye.
“See you around kid.”
Natasha flipped him off jokingly for that, and he replied in kind, laughing.