this will follow the events of captain hill week 2014 hosted by f*ckyeahcaptainhill [on tumblr]. i don't know where this will lead, or if every chapter will be connected to one another. i just don't know okay.

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day one; miscalculation.

She flicks a pen and draws a line.

A straight line. And it's long — longer than her hand expands from her wrist to the tip of her nail — but short enough that it doesn't terrify her. She tells herself that if she ought to love someone, to care, it will be in this amount. But she doesn't have to. Love. Care. All of those things, she mean. It's just a concept, a back-up plan.

There's a few moment in her career where she has to draw that line again, and mismatch it with the current situation. Just to remind her where to stop; because there's a limit, there always is, and Maria doesn't like breaking them.

The line gets fuzzy sometimes. (She cares too damn much for her own good.) And it gets blurry. Everything does. So she draws it time and time again. The line. To know where she's at, know where her mind is running through, keep herself in check. Order. Because when the world burns and collapses all around her, that is what she will have: a good ole order.

Or at least, that's what she'll prepare to have when the time comes.

It doesn't disappoint her. Setting this boundary. It gives her view on what she's supposed to do and what she's supposed to say in any given situation. Because this is who she is, or who she has trained herself to be, and it's goddamned comfortable even if everyone keeps reminding her how truly lonely she is, and dammit Hill, don't you feel?

(They don't get it. It's because she feels, she has these lines you know?)

It gets shaky eventually, like it's going out of control. It's the explosion afterwards, she blames, flicking the pen and drawing the line over and over again. Order. Control. It's messed-up. It's such a freaking huge mess that she doesn't even notice when his large figure looms over her.

She stops, and tilts her chin up. "Can I help you?"

Rogers, her mind goes, accessing to every SSR and SHIELD's Level 8 files Fury had forced her to read through, picking up information and abilities and weaknesses as her sharp blue eyes run over the white shirt and torn blue pants. His face is bruised, dirtied — which is understandable, because it's only been 48 hours since the Chitauri Attack and she isn't looking like a goddamned princess either — but there's a hint of so much more than just the nation's personal soldier, the white-blue-red mantle everyone so proudly holds him as.

He just looks tired. Handsome (that, she won't deny), but tired.

He looks normal.

She's miscalculated, she doesn't tell him that, setting the paper and pen and the lines he doesn't ask questions to on the table before getting up and facing the council. She doesn't know why he's there in the first place, why he shows up and sits across from her like they're friends or something (they don't even know each other), but he's gone when she comes out from the stupid meeting, and she doesn't know where he is.

He left the paper (the paper that she scratches with horrible lines because Coulson is dead and she miscalculates everything. Everything. The boundary. The control. The order—) and she doesn't know if she should be surprised finding the thing now doodled with a pair of clowns hanging from a trapeze, one of them holding a flower to the other.

She doesn't know what it means, doesn't fully acknowledge the scrawly I'm sorry written at the bottom of the page instead of his signature, but she keeps the sketch.

Even until now.

(Because she may be miscalculating, but she figures it'll come in handy one day. Maybe.)

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