Snow Storm
Chapter 1: Snow Storm
Maria had officially given up on working in her office at the New York base. Every year, without fail, the building slowly began to erupt with chaos with the approaching holidays, causing disasters within all departments which eventually ended up with Maria marching down to sort them out.
SHIELD own personal grinch.
Which was not necessarily true, Maria enjoyed the festive season. The cold was always given a warm welcome by herself along with a small prayer of hope that maybe it would slow down the world. That the cold would ignite a deep subconscious craving to hibernate and lay off the criminal actives, just long enough that Maria could enjoy the festive season and allow her to sleep for more than five minutes.
Maria never got what she wanted.
This year, somehow, was even worse than all the previous years combined. People were bustling past her office, causing her to grind her teeth as she watched them fly by in a frosty blur. The hallway outside her office was rarely busy, as people knew better than to annoy her with their hesitance outside her door as they attempted to get approval for something ridiculous.
Something about the holiday season meant that everyone grew a backbone as they constantly rapped their knuckles against her door to bring her request up request, followed by more than necessary paperwork, that somehow she had to do?
She grumbled as she filed several pieces of paper that could have easily been filed out by the agents superior officer rather than the deputy director. She would have to hold a meeting or send out yet another mass email about what paper work was appropriate to send to the deputy director.
How come Fury never had to put up with as much bullshit as she did? Then again, he seemed to have a way to paw off his paper work onto her.
It wasn't as though she hated doing paper work, she loved it as much as the next senior agent. It was just easier knowing that the paper work for missions was done correctly; that agents were going in with the best information that they could have, along with detailed plans and that the end results were record correctly in case they needed to be used in another missions.
It was all about efficiency.
Except, this year she actually booked some time off. She wasn't really going to do much with it, just relax at home. Natasha had mentioned to her that she wasn't doing anything for Christmas this year, so maybe they could spend the day and get wrecked. Always a good plan, in Maria's mind. Then, of course, Natasha was staying at the tower nowadays, so Maria might have to put with Stark, but she supposed, at least Pepper would be there to stop him going "Full Stark".
Another rap at her door pulled her from her thoughts as she turned and glared at the door appropriately.
"Enter." She said through gritted teeth.
"Deputy Director, I have a request form for-" an agent began, but Maria had enough.
"Let me see the form." She demanded, cutting the new agent off, holding her hand out as she stared them down. The agent nervously placed the file in her hand and she scanned over it quickly.
Another file which could have been dealt with by a superior officer.
"What is the name of your superior officer?" Maria questioned the women, glancing up from the request form.
"Agent Daniel Hope" She replied, only a hint of nerves in her voice.
"Pass this to him, tell him it is easily achievable within his level" Maria instructed, passing the paper back and dismissing the women.
"But... Agent Hope said-" The women spoke back hesitantly.
Maria could feel the glare slowly appear on her face. "Let me guess, Agent Hope couldn't be bother with the paper work so near the festive seasons and sent it to the senior agent he thought was on duty for the season?"
The agent nodded, clutching the filer in her hands.
"Well, you better tell Agent Hope that I'm not here to pick up his slack and if I find another request form with him listed as the superior officer, he will be demoted as he so seems to desire." Maria spoke slowly, making sure the agent in front of her understood.
The agent nodded quickly and left even quicker, her door falling gently behind her in a quiet slam.
Maria sighed and leaned back in her chair, rubbing the sides of her forehead as she attempted to think of a way to finish her work without being distracted or obtaining more work. She tilted her head back, staring up at the celling, working out her best options. She could find a quiet room here were no one could find her; although the chances of that are very slim as people seem to obtain super powers and gain the ability to find her within the office when she does not want to be found. An alternative was that Maria could go home, but she has not yet set up a study in her new apartment and knew fine well that if she sat on her couch she would be out in an instant.
The only other place that she would be welcome to sit and do work undisturbed would be the tower. Surely Pepper would be able to prevent people from knowing that she was doing work there? Only one way to find out. She reached for her phone blindly and mumbled out a gentle "call Pepper" as she stared to pull files together, getting ready to transport them.
"Maria! Hello!" came the quiet answer of Pepper, Maria quickly hit the speaker button before responding.
"Hey Pepper, I need a place to work in quiet without anyone disturbing me. Think there is a place for me at the tower?" Maria asked, there was no point in speaking pleasantries with the CEO, the two tend to leave that for when they met in person. Phone calls were strictly business, unless something catastrophic had happened, even then there was still a business element to it.
Pepper seemed to pause for a moment, Maria could practically hear the clogs in her head turning as she thought of a location for her. "There is a small office on my floor with a single, medium-ish window, no glass walls if that is what you are after?"
"That sounds perfect Pepper, I will be making my over immediately." Maria said, sighing with relief that she was getting away from the nightmare the was currently shield.
"I'll make sure there is a gallon of coffee for you." Pepper teased.
"Better make it two." Maria joked back, gather the last of her files, "I'll see you soon, Pepper."
"Bye Maria." Pepper finished, the phone call ended as the two women went back to their work.
Maria grabbed the last of her stuff and made a swift exit. She fired off a quick text to Fury, letting him know that she would be off site for the rest of today. Technically Maria finished up for the holidays two days ago, but thought it was better to get her paper work out of way so she could enjoy her holidays, stress free.
Fury responded with the eye rolling emoji and told her to enjoy her holidays. Sometimes she was grateful that Natasha showed Fury how to use the emojis because it resulted in hilarious conversations between the two of them and playing silly games of describing an event only using emojis, but other times it as annoying, like him telling her to act more "human" and "enjoy" things more.
As if she had the time.
It wasn't long until Maria drove into the private car park for Stark's building and made her way up to Peppers floor, where the CEO greeted her with a warm smile and a tight hug.
"Long time, no see." Pepper joked with her, grabbing two cups of coffee of off an assistant that stood waiting for them and passed one to Maria.
"Are you god?" Maria mumbled as she took a deep drink. It had been exactly one and a half hours since her last cup of coffee. Sometimes she thought Natasha had hit the nail when she suggested that Maria was overly dependant on her coffee.
"No, just a powerful CEO with an amazing personality and an even better body." Pepper said, chucklingly to herself. "I would have thought, that a powerful women such as yourself, would have an assistant that brought you coffee constantly."
"Fury says I'm not allowed to misuse the agents like that and I have to get my own coffee, unless it's a 'oh shit, the world is about to end' type of situation. Which, doesn't happen very often." Maria replied, glancing out the windows and frown at the overcast look outside that had approached without her knowledge. "Looks like it might snow" she commented casually.
"There was recent news update saying that the snow storm might hit tonight rather than tomorrow." Pepper responded, looking outside as well, just in time as the first delicate snowflake gently came to a stop on one of the buildings massive windows.
Maria sighed again, "well, I better get a move on with this work before it gets too bad outside."
"Oh how horrible, you might be forced to spend one night with Tony Stark, whatever will you do?" Pepper mocked her, showing her the room which she had chosen for Maria.
Maria walked into the room before turning back to face with Pepper with a grin, "hide with Natasha the entire night. Stark is too scared of her to annoy her."
Pepper rolled her eyes at the young deputy director, a smile gracing her face as she watched the way the women's face lit up at the small thought of staying the night with Natasha. "You seem to like that idea." She said casually, gently probing the subject of Maria's obvious crush on the Black Widow. The two of them had been flirting and teasing each other all year round and were the most relaxed within each other's presence. Everyone knew they were dating except them.
Maria shrugged, "Natasha knows how to party." She said, leaving the conversation at that as she turned to face the pile of paper work that she laid on the table.
"I'll leave you to it then." Pepper said, placing her hand comfortingly on Maria's shoulder, squeezing before leaving her be.
"Yay, paper work." Maria muttered sarcastically to herself as she closed the door and settled in for a few hours of rigours paper work. She sighed once more as she glanced at the time, it wasn't even nine thirty in the morning yet.
It took more than a couple of hours but Maria was finally finished with the paper work that she had to do, and she only drank about five cups of coffees. It was impressive, even for her. Maria stretched as she glanced at the clock and winced, noticing the time of six in the evening. She had barely eaten anything past the couple of bites out pastries that she bought herself, all of them half eaten as Maria had forgot about them during her wok, too engrossed in her files to really care about trivial thing such as eating.
Maria packed all the files away in a secure, secret compartment within her bag and made he way to Pepper, to let the women know that she was done for the day and would be heading home. Maria rushed through the halls, ignoring the orange tinted light coming from the windows besides her as she attempted to hunt down her friend.
It took only a couple of minutes before Jarvis sounded above her, telling her that Pepper was upstairs, enjoying some down time with the avengers as she was officially done with work until after Christmas. Maria groaned at that, she was honestly hoping to avoid Tony, it wasn't as though he was a bad guy, its just that you had to be in the right mood to put up with his humour and antics when the mood stuck him and Maria wasn't sure she would be all that nice to him if he started anything.
Maria waited patiently as the lift took her towards her impending doom. Okay, maybe she was being a bit dramatic, but for once in her life she was actually looking forward to doing nothing, even though she knew fine well that after one day of doing nothing she would get agitated and start actively looking for trouble. Fury often called her, in an endearing way, a little shit, when she was in one of those moods.
Maria strode confidently out towards her co-workers, smiling at Pepper and Natasha, opened her mouth to let them know that she was leaving when her jaw dropped. Literally.
"Is- is that snow?" She asked incredulously, staring out at the snow that had piled up against the door to the balcony, it was at least half way up the door.
Natasha snorted from where she sat and held her hand out smugly towards Tony, "told you she wouldn't notice the snow."
Tony seemed to stare back at her, the same disbelieving look on his face, "how did you not notice the snow?" He demanded.
Maria blinked, "Honestly? I closed the blinds in the office and just finished my work. I don't think I actually left it, except to get more coffee." Maria responded, more openly than usual as she resigned herself to the fact that she would be staying hear for the next, light only knows, how many days.
At least she had some spare clothes here, in Natasha apartment.
"Hey, at least you got spare clothes in my room." Natasha said, breaking her thoughts. It seemed like an innocent statement to the others, but Maria knew better and narrowed her eyes at the assassin. Natasha looked back at her with a sweet smile. A smile, that Maria knew all to well.
They were going to cause some trouble.
"Yeah, that is really great planning on my part." Maria said, placing her bag down and joining the others on the couch.
"Most people would say that you were lucky." Steve commented from where he sat.
"No such thing as luck, Rogers. Only careful, calculated planning." Maria replied, sliding down next to Natasha and Clint.
Tony rolled his eyes at her, "of course you would think that. The greatest AI SHIELD has ever created," he mocked.
"Meaning you aren't the smartest man alive, like you claim to be?" Maria faked gasped. Maybe she was in the mood to have some banter with Stark, after all, she didn't want to be stuck in awkward silences for her duration here.
Tony grinned at her, seemingly happy that she wasn't snapping at him. Natasha squeezed her leg in appreciation as well. Maria was glad that she read Natasha's face correctly, she would need the others to not be overly suspicious of her for whatever Natasha had planned.
This was going to be a fun couple of days.
They were ending the night bunched together on the seats in one of the main viewing rooms. Tony had put on some cheesy Christmas movie for them (Steve) to watch. Maria was hardly paying attention, having watched the film several times a few years ago when she was doing a Christmas movie marathon with Natasha. The assassin had never really watched any previous to that and made it her mission to help the women get a good education of Christmas movies.
Maria and Natasha sat together on the love seat as everyone else scrambled to spread out on the couches, Maria found it weird that Tony didn't have a couch for every person that stayed in the tower in this room as the team had frequent movie nights, she shrugged it off as Tony being Tony. She didn't mind sitting this close to Natasha, that had been in much more situations that boarded uncomfortable or just downright awkward, which contributed to their close friendship. There wasn't much that the pair hadn't seen the other do.
Looking around, she noticed that no one was really paying attention to the movie except the Steve. The others had their phones out, periodically checking them and reading through whatever caught their eye. She supposed everyone had probably seen this movie a thousand times as well and were just doing this for Steve's benefit.
Natasha tapped on her shoulder and shoved her phone near Maria's face. Maria grinned as she watched videos of cats passing a single food bowl between each other. Natasha leaned against Maria's side, practically cuddling her as she continued to show Maria several photos of memes, cat videos and fail videos. Maria had to admit, she found it hard to not laugh outright at the fail videos. Did people not think before they acted?
Unknown to both the women, their team members were casting them approval looks and quickly firing texts off to each other in a group chat they had created.
Operation: Get Maria and Nat to stop being so Stupid.
Pepper: 'We should really change the name of our operation, it is very long winded.'
Clint: 'SHIELD loves long winded operations, it just needs to have a cool acronym. Like, GMANTSBSS.'
Tony: 'That's just stupid'
Clint: 'yeah, now that I've typed it out. It does seem stupid.'
Clint: 'At least they are cuddling. So far phase one has been a success.'
Pepper: 'Do you think they noticed that we removed some of the furniture?'
Clint: 'Maybe, but they have no reason to think there was any suspicious motive behind the action.'
Tony: 'Good, because phase 2 is is about to start.'
Steve: 'lets do this.'
Pepper: 'Thought you were watching the movie?'
Steve: 'I was but the buzzing in my pocket was distracting.'
Clint: 'I bet it was ;) '
Tony: 'I bet it was ;) ;) '
Tony: 'Gdi Clint. PHASE 2 IS A GO :D '