Chapter Text
Maria’s fingers closed around the edge of the tablet and a hot spike shot up both wrists, sharp enough to make her breath catch. She held very still, counting backward from five in her head, waiting for the flare to subside into the familiar, grinding throb that had settled into her bones.
The tablet balanced awkwardly against her knees, wedged into the hollow between her thighs and the stiff hospital blanket. Her hands rested on either side of it, thick white bandages wrapped from wrist to knuckle, palms facing up like something offered for inspection. The right one had a darker stain near the thumb where the dressing had been changed that morning. Blood, probably. She hadn’t asked.
The room smelled like antiseptic and the particular plastic tang of medical equipment. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a flat, unforgiving white that made the walls look gray and the single window—covered by a thin curtain—seem like it led nowhere. A wall-mounted monitor tracked her vitals in glowing green numbers that she’d been ignoring for two days. Heart rate: elevated. Blood pressure: higher than Luna would like. Oxygen: fine. She was fine. She’d been worse.
A rolling tray table sat beside the bed, cluttered with pill bottles in childproof caps she couldn’t open herself, a half-finished cup of water with a bent straw, and a stack of reports she’d badgered a junior agent into bringing her. The reports were untouched. The tablet was the only thing she could manage on her own, and even that required a kind of focused determination that left her temples aching.
She’d just pulled up the quarterly budget projections—because if she was going to be stuck in medical with hands that didn’t work, she might as well be useful—when the door swung open without a knock.
Nick Fury filled the doorway like a weather system, slowly blowing into her room to cause chaos. He didn’t sit. He never sat in medical if he could help it. He planted himself at the foot of her narrow bed, arms crossed over his chest, his eyepatch catching the overhead light in a way that made the scarred tissue around it gleam wet and angry.
Maria straightened. She reached for the tablet, meaning to set it aside, and her fingers closed around it wrong. The pain lanced through her forearms and into her elbows, white-hot and immediate. She didn’t make a sound, but her jaw locked hard enough to ache.
Fury watched her with the flat, assessing stare he reserved for agents who’d just fucked up in spectacular fashion.
“Medical leave,” he said. “Effective immediately. Before the surgeries.”
Maria’s mouth opened. “Sir—”
“Phil’s covering your desk. All of it. The budget, the personnel rotations, the Pantheon briefings. All of it.”
“With all due respect, the Pantheon intelligence is—”
“I’m aware.” Fury’s voice didn’t change. “You’re going home.”
Home. Her apartment in DC. Three rooms, a kitchen she barely used, and a view of a brick wall that she’d chosen specifically because it had no sightlines. The thought of being there, alone, with her hands wrapped up and nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and wait for the next round of surgeries, made something cold settle in her stomach.
“I can still—”
“No.” Fury cut her off with the kind of finality that brooked no argument. “You’re going home, and you’re taking Romanoff with you. She’s been moping around outside like a brooding pitbull. Don’t think she’ll stay when you go anyway, probably sit outside your apartment and mope some more. So just take her with you.”
The room went very quiet. The monitor beeped. Maria’s heart rate jumped three points, and she knew he could see it on the screen over her shoulder.
She stared at him. Fury’s expression didn’t shift. It never did. But there was something in the set of his shoulders, in the way his single eye held hers, that made her brain start running angles. Why Natasha? Why the specific pairing? Yes, Natasha had led the rescue team that pulled her out of that FSB safe house. Natasha that had turned Maria’s torturer into ground beef with his own hammer before he could finish whatever he’d been planning to do after breaking Maria’s hands. Natasha had been posted outside her door in medical for the past forty-eight hours, refusing to leave even when Luna threatened to sedate her.
Natasha, who had kissed her in her quarters three weeks ago and then run away.
Maria kept her voice flat. Dry. “What exactly is Agent Romanoff supposed to do? Babysit me?”
Fury’s mouth twitched, once, at the corner. “Sure. Something like that. Can you even feed yourself, Hill?”
“Adapt and overcome, sir.” She studied him. The lines around his eye, the tight set of his jaw. He was worried. That was the thing she couldn’t quite square—Fury didn’t worry. He planned. He contingencied. He had backup plans for his backup plans. But the order to take Natasha home with her had the distinct flavor of a man covering a base he hadn’t anticipated needing to cover.
Maria’s bandaged hands rested in her lap. She’d stopped trying to gesture when she talked, it hurt too much, and the morphine they’d given her made her movements sloppy in a way that embarrassed her. So she kept them still, and controlled her breathing through the steady throb that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
She gave a short nod. “Understood.”
Fury held her gaze for a beat longer than necessary, then turned toward the door. He paused with his hand on the frame, back still to her.
“Actually rest, Hill. For once in your goddamn life.”
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
The room felt smaller without him in it. The fluorescent buzz seemed louder. Maria looked down at her hands. The bandages were pristine white except for that one dark stain, and beneath them, she knew, her bones were in pieces. Shattered metacarpals. Compound fractures in both wrists. Tendons severed and hastily reattached. Luna had laid out the surgical plans in her calm, no-nonsense way: three procedures, minimum. Months of physical therapy. No guarantee of full function.
She’d be lucky to hold a coffee mug without dropping it.
Maria let her head fall back against the pillow and closed her eyes. The kiss played behind her eyelids without her permission. Natasha’s mouth on hers, soft and uncertain. The way Natasha’s hands had come up to clutch fistfuls of Maria's shirt. Then the sudden stillness. The withdrawal. Natasha stepping back, her eyes wide and terrified, and then she was gone, and Maria had stood in the middle of her quarters with the taste of her still on her lips and the certainty that she’d ruined everything.
She’d blamed herself. Of course she had. She’d pushed. She’d wanted. She’d seen something in Natasha’s eyes and reached for it without thinking about the consequences, and Natasha had run because of course she had. What else was she supposed to do in that situation?
And now Fury was sending her home with the woman who’d bolted from her quarters, and Maria was supposed to—what? Pretend it hadn’t happened? Have a nice, normal medical leave with the most dangerous woman she’d ever met hovering at her elbow, both of them tiptoeing around the elephant in the room?
She opened her eyes. The ceiling tiles had a pattern of tiny holes, like someone had taken a pin to them in a fit of boredom. She counted them until the numbers blurred.
Her hands throbbed. The pill bottles on the tray table gleamed, promising relief she wouldn’t take because she needed her head clear. The half-finished water looked stale. The tablet had gone dark from inactivity, her reflection ghostly and thin in the black screen.
Maria reached for it with her forearm, nudging it onto the tray table without using her fingers. The movement sent another spike through her wrists, and she breathed through it, slow and measured, the way she’d been taught in Basic.
Tomorrow morning. She was going home tomorrow morning, and Natasha Romanoff was coming with her.
Fuck.
Maria pushed through the door of the medical wing with her shoulder, both hands cradled against her stomach in their thick white cocoons. The corridor outside was narrow and too bright, the same fluorescent hum following her from the room like a persistent headache.
Natasha was already there.
She was leaning against the wall beside the water fountain, one shoulder pressed to the concrete, arms folded across her chest. A data pad rested in the crook of her elbow, screen glowing blue, but her eyes were fixed on the medical wing door before Maria even appeared through it. She’d been waiting. Not casually. Not the way someone waits for a elevator or a coffee order. She’d been planted there, still and watchful, like she’d taken up position and hadn’t budged in hours.
Her red hair was pulled back in a tight braid that exposed the sharp line of her jaw. She wore black tactical pants and a gray SHIELD-issue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and Maria noticed, with the clarity that pain sometimes granted, that Natasha’s forearms were bruised. Faint, yellowing bruises along the inside of both arms, like she’d been grappling with someone who fought dirty.
Maria didn’t ask.
Natasha straightened off the wall the moment Maria cleared the doorway. Not all the way—Natasha never stood at full attention—but enough that her spine went from casual to alert in the space of a heartbeat. Her fingers, which had been tapping a silent rhythm against the edge of the data pad, went still.
“Fury’s orders,” Maria said. No lead-in. No how are you, no thanks for saving my life, though the gratitude sat in her chest like a stone she couldn’t dislodge. “Medical leave. Effective immediately. I’m going back to my apartment in the States.”
Natasha’s expression didn’t change. She had the best poker face Maria had ever seen, and she’d sat across tables from some of the world’s most accomplished liars. But something moved behind her eyes—a flicker, quick and gone—and her arms unfolded, coming to rest at her sides with the data pad clutched in one hand.
“You’re coming with me,” Maria added.
The corridor was empty except for the two of them and the distant sound of someone’s shoes clicking against linoleum three halls over. The water fountain gurgled once, a low, digestive noise, and went silent.
Natasha looked at her. Really looked at her, the way she did when she was stripping away layers, and Maria let her. She’d gotten good at standing still under that gaze. Most people flinched. Maria had learned to weather it, to let Natasha see whatever she needed to see.
“Is that what you want?” Natasha asked. Her voice was measured. Careful. Each word placed with the precision of someone disarming a very delicate explosive. “Not what Fury ordered. What you want.”
The question hung between them. Maria could hear the hum of the lights, the faint electronic whine and beep of equipment, the sound of her own breathing. Her hands throbbed in their bandages, a dull, persistent ache that had become so familiar she almost didn’t notice it anymore.
She thought about the kiss. Natasha’s mouth warm against hers, the way Natasha’s hands had trembled—just slightly, almost imperceptibly—before she’d pulled away. She thought about the empty quarters afterward, the silence, the way she’d stood in the middle of her room with the taste of Natasha on her lips and the certainty that she’d crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
She thought about the FSB safe house. The man with the hammer. The sound her bones had made.
She thought about Natasha kicking down the door, blood on her knuckles, eyes wild and terrified, and the way those eyes had found Maria’s in the dark and hadn’t let go.
“Yes,” Maria said.
A beat passed. Natasha’s eyes held hers, green and unblinking, and Maria watched something settle in them.
Natasha gave a single nod. Small. Tight.
“When do we leave?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning. 0800.”
Natasha fell into step beside her as Maria pushed ahead, a packing list forming. Not behind her, the way she sometimes walked when they were on a mission and she was covering their six. Not in front, leading. Beside. Half a step closer than strictly necessary, close enough that Maria could smell the faint trace of gun oil on her clothes and the sharper note of the mint gum.
Neither of them said anything. The corridor stretched ahead of them, a long tunnel lined with identical doors, and their footsteps echoed against the linoleum in imperfect sync. Maria’s running shoes, squeaking slightly against the polished floor. Natasha’s, lighter, almost silent steps.
Maria kept her bandaged hands cradled against her stomach. It was the least painful position, and it kept them out of the way, but it made her walk with a slight forward tilt, like she was guarding something precious. Natasha adjusted her pace to match without being asked.
The question of what came next hung between them, unspoken and enormous. Medical leave. Her apartment. The two of them, alone, with a kiss and a rescue and three weeks of careful distance between them. Maria’s hands in bandages. Natasha’s injuries, old and new, physical and otherwise. All of it sitting in the air like static.
Halfway down the corridor, Natasha’s eyes cut sideways. Once. A quick, assessing glance. Maria felt the look like a physical touch—warm, careful, lingering just a second too long to be casual.
Then Natasha looked straight ahead again, her profile sharp against the fluorescent wash, and kept walking.
Maria sighed. The lights hummed. Their footsteps echoed. Somewhere far away, a door opened and closed, and the sound faded into the white noise of the facility.
Tomorrow morning. 0800. The journey back. Her apartment. Natasha.
She needed one hell of a map and several extraction plans.