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They all blamed her. Ever since she was little she was the one her father blamed for her mother's death in childbirth. Not a day passed by without him telling her:
"If not for you, she'd still be alive"
His father had loved her mother. That was the reason he hated Maria. Little useless Maria who couldn't do the dishes or cook like her mother used to. During her tenth year of life, her father began to drink. He began to drink a lot. He had done so before too, but it used to be only at special occasions, like her mother's birthday, the day her mother died (and also Maria's birthday), the day they got married, those days were the days Maria feared most, because she watched the news. She knew what drunk people were capable of.
Her father never laid a hand on her. Not once, not when he was drunk, not when he was sober. He probably didn't think she was worth the effort to do even that.
She drowned herself in her schoolwork and books. She stayed away from any social life whatsoever. It wasn't like she wanted to date someone. Why bother when she was sure that one day the police will knock at her father's door and blame her for god knows what murder and take her to prison. She was sure her father hoped that too.
The teachers blamed her every time she didn't get an A at an exam, though most of the time she didn't get a high score it was because the day before was one of the mom-related days when she locked herself in her room and just sat there until his father drunk himself until he passed out. She didn't want to be blamed for killing someone anymore.
She didn't miss her mother. She had no way of missing her since she didn't remember her at all. Maybe that was why her father blamed her. At least if she felt something about her mother's death, her dad wouldn't be as mad at her all the time. Maybe she'd be able to tell him she's sorry. But since it wasn't the case she accepted everything he told her.
When she was legally able to manage on her own, she ran. She joined military school.
Which wasn't any better.
Being one of the few girls there, she was the source of jokes and as if that wasn't enough she was blamed for every wrong thing that happened. Someone wrote something on a wall in a toilet. Who was responsible? Maria Hill of course.
"You shouldn't have come here if you knew you couldn't handle it"
So she shut up and began painting walls in toilets. She shut up and continued to improve, which brought up another problem. Male ego. Who has ever heard of a woman to be top of her class in military school? Such things should have been unheard of.
When three of her classmates caught her walking at night back to school they decided that if she was dead or at least wounded enough she couldn't continue her studies.
When she saw three shadows jumping on her, Maria snapped. She kicked and scratched. She bit and hit with force to match the three men. She was punched, almost swallowed one of her own teeth, lost a lot of hair and broke an arm, but when she pinned two of the men down and the third ran, she felt powerful for the first time in her life.
She didn't say anything about the fight, not wanting to attract more attention that way. Her broken arm was because she fell off the stairs and she watched at the lunchtime how the boys which had attacked her started to make jokes.
"Trust her not to look what way she's going"
"Was she looking in a mirror or something?"
Naturally, their injuries had been caused by "saving a woman from rape last night". Of course it was that way.
Maria ignored all of that and focused on her schoolwork. She got straight A's for everything and graduated the top of her class.
That's when she met Phil Coulson. After the graduation ceremony, a 30 something man in a suit told her about an agency. Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistic Division they called themselves, Quite a mouthful she thought.
"We get that reaction a lot" the man said before introducing himself as Agent Phil Coulson.
Agent Maria Hill. She liked the sound of that. A secret agency didn't sound that bad she thought, so she accepted. It wasn't like she had anything else to do.
SHIELD was rough. She didn't go into any mission in the first two months since Coulson welcomed her into the Hellicarrier. Yet it was rough. All she had to do was paperwork for different missions. She had heard rumors about Agent May killing over fifty bad guys, killing a hundred with a single bullet, cutting ten in little pieces, but Maria knew none of those stories were true. She read the paperwork after that mission.
It wasn't at all like that. Good people died. Agents died. Maria wasn't sure how she would have reacted if she had been in May's place.
She got the chance to find out soon enough when during a mission she was leading she had to chose between going back to save five agents and endanger ten civilians or leave the agents, some of which she had chatted on the hallways, behind. She made her choice and two days after she returned to the SHIELD alone, two other agents she had left to die showed up. One had lost a leg and the other one an eye.
The other one happened to be Nicholas J. Fury.
While the agent who had lost a leg blamed Maria for everything, shockingly, Fury didn't. The legless agent was paid a lot of money to retire and not tell anything about the agency something he agreed to do, but he made sure everyone knew not to trust Agent Hill to save their lives. Heartless bitch they said. Maria was to be blamed for the deaths of the other three agents. The list of deaths was slowly expanding. While amazing on field, Agent Hill showed the capability to make the choices nobody else was prepared to do.
When Nick Fury became the Director of SHIELD she thought she was going to get fired. She kept waiting for the moment when he was going to call her into his office and tell her she had done enough for SHIELD.
That moment didn't come in the first months and neither in the ones that followed.
A rumor reached her years that Agent Barton, Coulson's latest discovery, brought the Black Widow in. She learnt the day she joined SHIELD that Coulson enjoyed recruiting new agents. Sometimes with a military career behind, like her, sometimes mercenaries and cold blooded killers. She couldn't say she liked Barton. She didn't really like anybody at SHIELD. Truth be told she didn't get the chance to interact with the man who was rumored to be the best shot ever seen until she found him in the shooting rage with a gun in his steady hands, surprisingly, since even Maria knew the guy never left anywhere without his bow.
"You're Hill, right?" he asked without turning his head to look at her
"Yeah, and you're Barton" he just nodded before cocking his gun and shooting the target. Perfect shot again.
Maria took out her gun and they trained together. Not talking or even looking at each other, just shooting. It was nice actually. A nice change for Maria, since she wasn't exactly popular among the majority of her colleagues, spending most of her time alone unless she was sent in missions which required more than three agents. Then she took someone along with her and got the job done.
The Black Widow, Maria knew to be in SHIELD's top five most dangerous people to walk on earth. That woman was basically a legend and for some reason Barton decided at first that he needed to kill her. All she knew about the Budapest mission was that Coulson and Barton had been sent in to protect some billionaire whereas the Black Widow had been paid to kill him. No one really knew the details, but the Widow was brought in as Agent Romanoff.
Maria had watched her train with Barton and learnt why she was thought so dangerous.
Hill fought her herself one time.
A well placed punch in the abdomen barely made Natasha flinch a she immediately tried to pin Maria against the wall. Hill guessed her move and managed to throw the Widow off balance as she tried to choke Maria with her tights. Natasha was back on her feet in a second and attacked again. She was fast; Maria had to give her that as she avoided about 70% of the punches sent towards her. She even managed to throw some of her own to match. Natasha was already forming a bruise on her clavicle and Maria was sure she dislocated a shoulder when Natasha threw her against the wall for a second time.
They had started easy, but they ended up not holding back at all. Barton had to get in between them to stop it. It was all good in the end as they went for coffee afterwards.
Maria made a new friend.
When Fury started to look for a second in command, everyone put bets on Coulson or Romanoff. Barton whined because no one in their right mind considered him as a suitable candidate.
"You're a pain in the ass that's why" Maria snapped at him the reason why he was never going to become "Commander Barton"
On her twenty first birthday Maria was annoyed. She was annoyed at the rookie she'd been sent on the mission with. The girl was useless. When Hill told her to shoot towards her left she did exactly the opposite. When Maria told her to get down so that her curly head wouldn't get bullet holes through it, she froze. Actually froze. Hill had to tackle her to the ground and got shot in the process.
The poor girl heard, on their way to the base how it was all her fault. The fact that Maria got shot, the fact that they didn't get the files they were sent after, everything.
"If you hadn't been so stupid as to freeze in the middle of a gun fire, I wouldn't be bleeding on this chair" she kept snapping at the girl, which was piloting the plane with unsteady hands.
"If you're going to crash the plane, god help me I will kill you with my bare hands, do you underst-"Maria yelled at the girl who was probably eighteen only to be interrupted by the younger agent.
"SHUT UP! God, don't you ever shut up?" the girl turned her head slightly to see Maria which was now speechless on the co-pilot seat. "I fucked up! I know and you're entirely entitled to be bitching about it, but damn have you never made a mistake?"
The girls was then staring at Maria with unleashed tears in her eyes and looking at her made Maria remember a black haired little girl who everybody blamed for everything. She broke the girls' gaze and stared into the night through which they were flying.
"Now I know why no one wanted to be assigned into missions with you" she heard the girl say without even trying not to let Maria hear it.
After they landed the plane outside the SHIELD base, Maria got immediate medical attention and after the doctors stopped bugging her, because she was fine, dammit, she asked Coulson about that girl.
"Which girl?" he asked her without raising his eyes off the paperwork from his desk. Barton and Romanoff were giving him tons of it since they became a team.
"The one that's been on the last mission with me"
"She quit" Coulson still didn't raise his eyes off the papers and Maria thought that maybe he was as disappointed with her as she was with herself.
When Fry made her his second in command, that made about five agents quit. She didn't care really. She stopped doing so a long time ago. If they didn't like being led by her then they could just as well leave.
It took her about a week and a half to get the chance to ask Fury about it, though.
"Why not Romanoff, sir?"
Fury blinked in surprise with his one eye and it reminded Hill that the eye patch was there because of her.
"Are you asking me why I didn't chose a former KGB spy to be my second in command?"
That annoyed Maria. "I was convinced that at least you, sir, are able to look past people's mistakes." She was disappointed to say at least.
"I am. It doesn't have anything to do with me, Hill. You know as well as I do that the Council can't stand the fact that the Black Widow is now Agent Romanoff"
He returned to writing whatever he was writing and Maria focused her attention on the laptop in front of her. The silence didn't last long, though.
"Why not Coulson, then?"
Fury sighed and spoke up without stopping from writing. "Because I chose you"
"Why?"
"Is it really necessary to explain myself to you, Agent Hill?" he was using the tone he generally used to remind people who was in charge. Maria didn't buy that.
"Yes, sir, it is"
"I needed a person ready to do what needs to be done"
Maria stood up and walked to his desk. "Am I that kind of person?"
Fury took off his eye patch and Maria saw clearly the wounded eye. He pointed at it. "This proves that the answer is: yes, you are"
He put it back and dismissed her without saying a single word. She got out of his office and walked through the halls not bothering to care about the glares she received or the flashes of fury in some agents' eyes when they saluted her "Commander Hill"
She nodded in response and went into her room. It was small and simple. The bed was awful to sleep on, the water pressure in the shower wasn't exactly great, but it was all she had. She checked her schedule to check whether she had any missions that day. None. She hummed happily and took a shower before she jumped on the bed, and closed her eyes waiting to fall asleep.
"Sir, are you sure it's a good idea to mess with the kind of power?" she walked with Fury down the halls.
"Are you questioning my reasons Hill?" Fury, never the one for bullshit.
"No, sir, I just don't think it's wise to try to use it to make weapons"
Fury stopped and turned towards her, frowning.
"That information is classified"
"Not for me, sir, it's not"
Fury looked around for signs of other agents that might have overheard. "It is for a lot others and you shout it at the top of your lungs."
"I know what I'm doing sir, I don't know what you are, though"
Fury didn't bother to wait for her as he continued to walk and got into the helicopter. He flew off without her.
Maria sighed and looked around to see another one with an agent getting ready to get in.
"Hey, you" she addressed him.
"Yes, ma'am" he stopped and turned towards her.
"I'm riding with you now."
He nodded and swallowed nervously.
Of course that the person to be brainwashed had to be Barton. Of course. The guy knew more about SHIELD's flying base than Maria herself because he had the annoying hobby of travelling via air vents and dropping from up there to scare the shit out of new agents.
Plus, Barton was one of the most dangerous and capable men she knew. She hoped she had shot him the moment she'd seen him leave with Selvig and a weirdly dressed stranger. That would have made their lives much more simple and possibly much more safer. If she did then a lot of people would have still been alive.
One of those people was Coulson.
Agent Phil Coulson, the first SHIELD agent she had met, one of the most optimistic agents she had ever met and one of the best. Fury and Romanoff were affected by Coulson's death more than her. She had no idea what Barton was thinking or if he even knew that his handler died.
The battle of New York went down and Maria kept wanting to punch the Council for sending a nuclear missile towards one of the most crowded places in New York.
She had warned Fury that the Avenger Initiative wouldn't work out. She had never been more glad that she was wrong. Sure, Thor was never supposed to be there and neither was Doctor Banner. She doubted Fury meant for Barton to be there, but she might be wrong as ever since Phil brought that guy in, Fury did his best to make sure he stayed as far away from the base as possible for as long as he could.
Maria was sure Fury had a soft spot for the archer, but Clint was driving everyone nuts with his natural inclination to break each and every rule.
Fury told her he wanted to have a SHIELD agent inside the Avengers in case they ever decided to break free of SHIELD's influence on them. It happened and as much as Fury trusted the Widow, she chose the Avengers over SHIELD in the end. Maria couldn't say she minded. Sure, she would have slept better if she knew for sure where Banner was, or if Captain America got used to this century, but since Natasha didn't want to say anything on the matter, both Fury and her let it slide for the time being.
Hill noticed the Council's annoyance with Romanoff as well as their annoyance with Hill herself.
She couldn't say she was surprised since she had no intention whatsoever to stop verbalizing exactly what she thought of them. A bunch of suit-wearing assholes that thought they could do whatever they wanted inside SHIELD.
Somehow she managed to receive almost every week from Fury a file with a new mission accompanied by a sorry look towards her by her superior. Besides that she had paper work to do for Barton since Coulson wasn't able to do it. She was the first to find out what Fury did for Coulson and she had to leave the room not to smack him over his head.
She also wanted to hug the one eyed man for trying to bring Coulson back.
She settled to vocalizing her disapproval every chance she got.
Coulson turned out fine in the end, but still Maria made sure to get Agent May keep an eye on him. She also made sure the team May was secretly recruiting for Coulson had the best agents they could put their hands on.
She had seen Ward in action' had read his mission files; had even worked with him on a mission. The man was capable of kicking ass and making the best choice in difficult situations. Simmons and Fitz were an obvious choice and that girl Skye wasn't planned, but it turned out fine.
She was the one to convince May to return into the field even just as a pilot, something Hill knew May wouldn't stand for long before she jumped in the middle of a fight.
When Fury called her back to D.C. before the Winter Soldier attacked him, she was, well she didn't remember really the name of the town where she was undercover as a bartender, but she managed to finish the job two weeks before the term and about six minutes after Fury called her, which gave her enough time to return to the city.
She knew it wasn't fair for Natasha to think Fury died. It wasn't fair for Steve and she almost felt bad for pretending to cry.
She was a bit proud she managed to convince Romanoff though.
Fury woke up after she got him underground and let him with some agents for protection. She personally tested each and every one of them though. She didn't want to be responsible for Fury's death too.
"Go, Hill, they're clear. I checked it myself"
"Might I remind you how HYDRA infiltrated SHIELD though you check yourself all the agents?" she asked and then added "Sir?"
"Might I remind you how you also double checked them yourself and HYDRA still managed to infiltrate SHIELD?"
She left. She went undercover for the second time that day, though this time it was more fun, since she killed off a HYDRA agent and took his costume. She didn't even have to talk at all. She just had to stay there until the opportune moment came around.
It did and taking Nat, Steve and Sam out of that car was much more interesting than pretending to listen to drunk people telling their life stories back when she went undercover for that mission.
The plan was fairly simple. Take out the Hellicarriers she reminded Fury she never agreed to be constructed in the first place.
When Steve told her to destroy the Hellicarrier with him still inside it, Maria did it. She had know that was the right thing to do even before she asked Steve. Rogers knew that too, knew that she'd be able to make the difficult choice.
She wondered, if Steve hadn't survived, how many people would call her a heartless bitch again.
In the end Fury had to keep a low profile and she needed to find a job. Stark hired her right away. Frankly she doubted that Tony had been announced she was working for him, since when he entered the building one day and saw here walking by he freaked out and almost called the security thinking she was HYDRA. Thank goodness for Pepper Potts anyway.
She got the call and went to tell Coulson to leave SHIELD behind, because it would never be the same. SHIELD had been compromised for good and even if he did managed to find about a hundred agents willing to return to SHIELD, nobody would take the agency seriously anymore.
She helped Coulson in the end partly because Fury made her to, but mostly because she wanted to kick Ward's ass. She was more disappointed that she didn't realize Ward was HYDRA than she had been that she didn't see that half of the agency was HYDRA.
It had passed and she got to laugh with Natasha and Pepper at the "eye candy" comment Ward made. Natasha had a weird gleam in her eyes that Maria recognized and was slightly afraid for Ward's life. Slightly. That guy deserved whatever she was going to do to him.
Hill knew she wouldn't work in an office at Stark Industries for long, so she made sure she enjoyed her time there, where she wasn't being looked down upon because there she didn't have to make any choices that might end someone's life.
Still she wished she knew where Fury was, at least. She wasn't sure that giving Coulson the task to build SHIELD back up was a good idea. Sure, she trusted the man, but lately he hadn't been the definition of mental stability. Furthermore, she had found out what happened to Garrett and for Fury's sake at least she hoped it wouldn't happen to Coulson too.
If Coulson showed any signs of what happened to that bastard, John Garrett, Maria Hill wouldn't hesitate in doing what needs to be done. Even if that means defying Fury's orders.
Because doing what needs to be done is what Maria had always been good at, even though people would judge her for it.