A/N: This is really a pet project; I'll need a fair bit of prompting to continue, and it'll most likely end up unfinished, mostly because I have a story I'm working on with my lovely beta reader TheSkyIsNotAlwaysRed that I'm trying to actually write well. BEWARE: Potential Mary Sue behaviour, Silliness, Swearing, Consistent Swapping Between First and Third Person, Cheesiness, Cliche's, Significant Plot Changes, etc. This is for fun, so I hope the people reading it have fun too.

"Miss Hunter, it's really a simple task."

"But... it's underground."

"We're underground now."

"Well, yes, but civilised underground. It's dark down there. And didn't you say rats chewed the wires?"

"I said there was environmental damage. You added the rats, Miss Hunter."

"I wouldn't be surprised. There's a reason no one maintains stuff down there. It's gross."

Agent Coulson, despite his infamous, near infinite levels of patience, was beginning to wear down. Today seemed to have been a hard day for his, what with the Cosmic Death Cube freaking out that morning, but my bickering was nothing compared to the stuff he talked about with Tony Stark. Still, even he wasn't getting me to lower myself into the maintenance tunnel to repair some wires chewed on by rats.

The glare he was giving me was pretty chilling, though, so I opened the top drawer of my tool box, grabbed a roll of gaffer tape and held it towards him menacingly.

"Fine, but you owe me sir." He didn't seem to register my comment at all. He turned away and approached the Tesseract again, but just before I turned away I saw him lift his sleeve to his ear and start power walking towards the stairs.

Guess the top man was here. Goodie.

With a heave I slid the metal grating out of its place and slowly clambered down the hole it left, into the maintenance shaft. It was only about 5 feet tall, and I'm sure it would have seemed a lot more spacious if not for the mind boggling amount of wires tied around each other running from the Tesseract station to the platform that – as far as I knew – would host the Intergalactic Portal of Doom.

Or maybe Barton was just screwing with me on what that Magic Death Cube actually did. It had been glowing and spitting all day though, so I wasn't about to walk up to it and find out for myself.

Luckily the wires were mostly intact; it was mostly cosmetic work on keeping them out of the elements. Which was good, because I wasn't sure what I'd do if my gaffer tape didn't fix anything.

Normally only the head of the Department was allowed down on this floor; they were keeping shit Top Secret, so we didn't get a whisper out of the Head. Normally he was good for all the gossip on the base, but whatever this was it was serious. Out of nowhere that morning, the Head called us all away from what we were doing to get working on what was on this floor – an apparent object of amazing power that these people were pretty much poking with a cattle prod to see if it bites. I had only started working on the base a year before, and mostly operated on simple jobs like replacing light bulbs and the coffee machine in the break room. I didn't do stuff like this.

Even worse than sending me down to fix it; why the hell were they just letting their equipment get damaged like this?

"They should really get an exterminator in here, if they don't want this happening," I muttered aloud. "Oh wait, yeah, top secret. Well, someone around here has got to know how to kill some vermin."

There was a scrabbling sound. I froze.

A squeak. Oh man, I was out of there so fast it's amazing I didn't hurt myself. Well...

Looking back on it now, it's amazing I didn't hear any of the ruckus going on above me. I was completely oblivious to the Tesseract activating until it was throwing me halfway across the room and, consequently, halfway across the world.

"Hill," Fury called from his station, spinning on one foot to see both of his monitors clearly. The SHIELD agent in question quickly approached, hands folded behind her back in typical military posture.

"Yes, sir?"

"Before Rogers and Banner get here, I think there's something I have to go over with you." Maria's brows furrowed, but she didn't move otherwise until Fury took a step away, pacing swiftly out of the door and towards the briefing room.

"Sir?" Maria questioned. Fury swiftly picked up a remote and pointed it towards the nearby viewing screen, which lit up with CCTV footage from the day of the Terreseract accident.

"There was another accident the day the Tesseract was stolen. One of our maintenance crew, Molly Hunter, was hit by offshoots from the device. We weren't able to find her body in the rubble, but we assumed her dead." The footage showed the ginger haired woman in the blue maintenance uniform jump down into a hole, crawl back out and be thrown across the room by a blue energy beam, out of the camera's view.

Pressing another button, the footage changed to another CCTV shot, this time of the same woman sitting up on a hospital bed, a young nurse dabbing at an arm wound with a cloth.

"This footage was taken 15 minutes later in a Sydney hospital." Again, Maria's brow furrowed. Clearly the facial recognition program had picked up similar looking, but different women; it was impossible for a woman to dig herself out of the rubble and get all the way to Australia in 15 minutes... wasn't it? Fury raised an eyebrow at her, clearly sharing her confusion, and pressed the button again, changing to new footage.

"This was taken in Amsterdam a further 17 minutes later." Hunter was lying in the dewy grass of a large park; even in the dark of night, Maria could see the woman was dazed and confused, one hand raised in front of her face for inspection. It appeared the ring finger on her right hand was missing, though Maria couldn't see it anywhere nearby.

"Sir... how is this possible?" she asked. Fury turned off the screen and dropped the remote, massaging his temples.

"We don't know yet," he stated honestly, "but we have a team bringing her here now. If she can be of any use to the Avenger Initiative, I want her in. You're going to be her handler."

Maria almost choked. She wasn't a handler; Coulson was a handler. He could deal with fussy billionaires and demigods from far away planets. Maria didn't do things like that. She just followed orders. She didn't even like most people.

"Sir-"

"She doesn't have any formal training. If she's deemed capable, I want you to make sure she's ready. We'll be keeping her under observation here, and if she disappears, we'll send a dispatch team out to find her. It's a simple job I'm asking you to do, Agent Hill; if it's too difficult for you, I can always find someone more capable to do your job." It was a thinly veiled threat, but Maria still felt the cold resignation of defeat.

"That won't be necessary, sir."

"Good. I don't want anyone to know about this until we're sure of what this is."

He slid a thin manila folder across the table and left without a further word.

A/N: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, so I just assumed that Hill and Coulson were pretty much at the same level in SHIELD, and thus both qualified to be handlers. If anyone can tell me what the goes is, I'd love to know. But for the sake of me having fun writing this story, I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want.

Anywho, tell me what you think, any ideas, whatever you want really! I'll try to respond to any reviews I get.