23. You remind me of me: Hill and Captain America
Here In Lieu of Leader.
She’d heard the joke passed between her men when they didn’t think she was listening, didn’t even know she was capable of hearing them. As if the director of SHIELD couldn’t remotely access every inch of the floating kingdom from her throne in the director’s office. The cameras and microphones that Fury had woven into the very fabric of the ship reported back to her more efficiently than any human agent sent to spy among them ever would have, the lifetime work of America’s most infamously paranoid man at her disposal.
She knew the men hated her in charge almost as much as she hated it herself.
Maria wore Fury’s title like a child playing dress up, a girl slipping on her boyfriend’s shirt to bed: large and unwieldy, it hung off her, enveloping her until she was nothing but a small slip of a thing helplessly buried in its mass. The position was too big, SHIELD was too big, and Hill teetered on the edge of being swallowed whole by a name and rank that had never been meant for her. Had never been meant for anyone save its creator, in reality, though others had tried their hand at it along the way. Nick Fury, the Director of SHIELD. She would splatter his brains across the too perfectly polished surface of the director’s desk if she ever saw him again.
They had only given her the position because she was willing to kill all the right people.
The President hated the caped community. The less you mention them, Hill, the better we’ll get along. Those had been some of the few words he’d given her along with the position of director, before he ordered her back out and about her business. As though SHIELD were a weapon to be picked up or put down at his leisure, remodeled and redesigned without a thought. His position on the issue suited Maria fine. She hated them too. Hated their entitlement and disrespect for order, hated that all a cape required to be promoted to the rank of Captain was an injection in an underground lab. She hated that Steven Rogers hadn’t even served in the military before they gave him his shield and proclaimed him a hero. It was simply his for the taking and no one had questioned it since. Most of all, she hated that he had the nerve to point out how severely undeserving of hers Hill actually was.
The fact that he was right.
It was a twisted, hollow vindication when Captain America leapt from the SHIELD helicarrier to lead the rebel movement. She’d wanted to lean out the shattered window and scream at the world below that she had been right all along. About him, about the world, about her position, about everything. Captain America had bourn the hopes and dreams of the most powerful nation on earth, only to buckle under the pressure when it needed him the most. It was the end of an era, the end of the people’s hero.
She only wished that, before he’d left, she could have told him he’d never deserved his shield either.