Work Text
Lia wakes to the sound of her phone ringing, which startles her out of the half-doze and dream about being unable to find the kitchen in a shopping mall. It startles her for two reasons. Firstly, she didn't mean to be asleep, so it's unsettling and disorienting to have the semi-demi-hemi-real landscape of the dream dissolve into being on the couch with her phone ringing.Not that accidentally falling asleep doesn't happen all the time lately, leaving her hissing curses at herself about fuck not again as she scrambles to reach the phone. Her doc and her neuro both swear blind that the fatigue is going to get less, and that she's still totally within the reasonable recovery window and nothing seems to be going wrong, but Lia's not so sure she believes them. The prospect - and she knows it's real, she knows that traumatic brain injuries can just be like that - of never quite getting better again lurks around in the back of her mind, freaking her out. No matter how much she knows they know what they're doing, that these things usually turn out fine, that there's no bad signs yet, that if anything she's healing pretty well and if she follows all the recommendations and (and man does she hate this bit) doesn't strain herself, it'll all be good. It just doesn't help she keeps falling asleep all the damn time. The other reason the noise from the phone startles her, though, is that only calls from work make her phone ring. She's got everyone else set to vibrate. It's her personal cell; she's got her work-phone still but it's turned off in her bureau. Work does not call her personal cell much, because work is actually pretty good about that, and when they do it's an emergency, so they get to ring. Except she's still on leave, so in theory there shouldn't be anything too urgent they can't just email her. Even texting is more immediate than they should need. And it's not like SI messes with that stuff much. They really do believe that when you're not on company time, your time is your own. Well. HR and - Lia hears - PR heads do, and they dictate how the rest of the company acts on that one. Sometimes Lia thinks that certain people in StarkSec chain of command would like to do the corporate life-takeover thing, but they're not allowed. Though she wonders how that's gonna play out, if the rumours she's been seeing on the closed company chats are true. She manages not to drop her phone on the floor in the course of picking it up and swiping to accept the call. Of course, the second she moves Duke's got his big jowly head up and he's hurrying over to see what's up and if she's somehow being killed by some evil monster. It means that right after she says, "Stone," into the handset she has to go, "okay yeah I'm fine you big-ass sucky baby now get off me - " and add, "- sorry that was to my dog, not you," as she tries to push away over a hundred pounds of concerned mastiff-mutt. Because if she doesn't talk to him Duke will absolutely keep worrying at whether or not she's okay, whereas now he sort of settles down over onto the other two thirds of the couch where she pushes him, with his head still up and all his attention on her. The "hey," from the other end is in Mabel's voice and that's a relief, as she goes on to say, "no problem, go ahead and settle Duke, I can wait a second." Lia appreciates it being Mabel. Not that anyone else at work would be likely trying to make her feel bad, because nobody has an unnecessary amount of stick up their ass - but some of the other admins do still manage to somehow make it clear that they're forgiving you for your lack of professionalism, because they're nice. Mabel's just Mabel. That helps Lia get a handle on the second or two of scramble. She scruffles Duke's ears a bit, sitting up and letting him put his head in her lap. She tries to get her abused brain into some kind of gear. Lia could have happily gone her whole damn life without learning just how wrong all kinds of fiction are about head injuries. She could have gone without being that person, the person who now gets real cranky at the TV and movies and everything about how casual and cavalier they are about having people bashing each other over the head and then just getting up and being fine. She could have died happily of old age being completely deceived about the dangers of anything, ever, hitting your head, having believed what everyone else believed. Life could have missed her with the whole "oh hey now you get to find out how it doesn't work like that" thing.Lia would've been fine with never ever learning better. It really doesn't, though. Work like that. At all. The memory of the exact moment the gun hit her skull keeps coming back to her. The shrink calls it "acute traumatic stress disorder", which is basically PTSD that hasn't had enough time to be "post" yet, and they both know she might be making it up, inserting a memory where there isn't one but if so Lia's brain has definitely made up a very very vivid recollection of the exact second it hit and that her brain sloshed around and smashed into her skull. It's pain and nausea but also a feeling like somehow the whole world is dissolving into sand or individual pixels, disintegrating into the black of unconsciousness - but not just the visual, the everything, sound and feeling and taste and everything - until it all wavered back and she opened her eyes and realized it was only a minute or two later, that she wasn't dead, and that the son of a bitch had put the gun down on the access console. And he wasn't looking at her. Especially considering how sick she got afterwards, with the headaches and the nausea and the agitation and even confusion for a while, Lia has no idea how in the hell she could think so clear in that moment, or how she got her body to work. All together. All at once. All coordinated so that she could launch herself forward, get hold of the gun, kick him really hard in the knee sideways, roll over on the floor and shoot the fucker until he was definitely dead. That is a lot of coordination given that the next day she spilled water all over herself because her hands didn't work when she picked up the jug. It's really annoying how the moment sticks to her, too, ready to come right back up at a second's notice.Here and now she says, "Hey, what's going on?" to Mabel on the phone. Because while Mabel is nice to talk to and all that, if it were a personal call Mabel'd be using her own phone, not the work line. And as for work, Lia is still on leave. Something has to be up. "Alright first off I want you to be clear you can say no, okay," Mabel says, ratcheting up Lia's wary anxiety just a bit. "You're still on leave, this is out of the blue, everybody knows that, nobody's trying to put you on the spot exactly, okay? And no it's nothing bad, so relax, I just want you to know that before you even start thinking about it." "Okay sure," Lia says dryly, "so now that I'm trying to crawl up my own spine, I'm asking again: what's going on?" "You up for a visitor?" Mabel asks, which is just more weird on top of weird. And isn't really an answer but what the hell, maybe answering it will make Mabel stop playing guessing games faster. Lia hesitates before answering. She looks around her place and takes it in, checks out her visitor-ready status. Her kitchen's pretty clean, just some snack dishes on the counter she can shove in the dishwasher pretty quick, the nice thing about open floor-plan is it's easy to just do things like fold up your blankets and make them look like part of the decor, and her laundry hasn't been delivered from the laundromat yet so she doesn't even have to move the big bag behind the divider and pretend it's not there. Basically there's nothing in her loft that she can't make mostly look like it's just boho style in five minutes or less, even if she is a bit woozy. Her hair's a mess but she can just grab a wrap along with her clean shirt, and wash her face. "I mean," she says cautiously, "as long as they're fine with a big noisy dog and that I haven't exactly vacuumed this week - basically, as long as nobody's expecting much?" "So here's the thing," Mabel says. "Ms Hill's mom fell down a flight of stairs and broke her hip so she had to pack up with some of the field guys and drive out to Jersey to see her in the hospital, and now they're on their way back and apparently she's wanted to talk to you about Insight Day since she got the debrief on what happened here but she hasn't wanted to make you go in and her going anywhere's kind of a circus right now, but since the circus is already out and they're coming back by you, she wanted to know if you'd be up to her coming by now."Lia kinda feels like someone smacked her in the head again. "The circus would stay in the car and at the elevator," Mabel finishes up. "And it's just Jerry and three people she's brought in from SHIELD, but they're nice as far as I've met them so far." A very definite panicky part of Lia wants to go oh fuck no and go hide in her bedroom, but it's thankfully not the part in charge, or she might never get over the embarrassment. Instead she closes her mouth on the long uuhhhhhhh . . . . as she tries to take that in, and instead she says, " . . . yeah. Sure. That should be fine." It totally should be fine. And her heart can just slow right the hell back down right now. "I was told to emphasise it's just a conversation for pertinent details, you're totally not on the spot, you're not expected to entertain," Mabel notes, "and that she'd totally just have scheduled some time for you to come in but she gathers you're still not supposed to be spending a lot of time driving or on transit, especially not in bright daylight, so . . . " Lia's sighing and nodding to herself even as Mabel finishes that, and says, "Yeah, I know, trust me. And yeah, it should be fine." As fine as it can be.After a couple more checks just to make sure, Mabel tells her that they're about an hour or so out, so no need to scramble, and they hang up. When Lia puts her face in her hands Duke decides she needs kisses. After she fends him off and rubs his tummy for a minute, Lia sighs again. Then she digs through her side-table drawer until she finds her hands-free headset, and gets up to start dealing with the dishes while the phone dials and rings her cousin. Actually, she rings Brian and Graham's house, since that's where her cousin is and she actually trusts their landline better than she trusts her cousin to actually keep his phone to hand at home. It's a bad habit, but it's a persistent one, and since for now Brian and Graham's house is "home" . . . Lia's just not in the mood to have it ring in Antoine's bedside table drawer for a couple minutes and then have to call the landline anyway. It's dangerous, being ex-SHIELD right now. Especially if you were far enough up the chain in External Ops to know a lot of secrets, and especially if you were good enough often enough to stick on people's radar. Between other agencies and enemies, and HYDRA assholes looking to settle scores before they finish going down, a lot of those who lived through Insight Day are in hiding, and those that aren't are still taking a lot of precautions. Graham's not related by blood, but he's family in the big mess that happens when you're descended from the five surviving men who followed Captain America around Europe blowing things up. So he's also a kind of cousin, and also since he and Brian are both ex-Special Forces and kinda paranoid their very nice house is also pretty secure and a good place for Antoine to hang out until fewer people want to kill him. In Lia's parents' generation you could keep a little closer track of exactly what the relationships might be - uncle, aunt, cousin, whatever - but by now uncle and aunt mostly means somebody enough older than you it feels weird to think of yourselves as the same generation, and cousin covers everyone else. Graham answers the phone, and it's clearly been A Long Week because he says, "Oh God Amelia please tell me nothing's gone horribly wrong," because he obviously saw her number on the caller ID. Probably fair: they know each other well enough to have each other's numbers programmed in, even though this one's technically unlisted and wouldn't show up on normal caller-ID, but not enough that she calls, like. A lot. So it's not totally unreasonable to assume she's got something dire to share. "Nah," she says, immediately, "deep breaths, I just need to talk to Antoine - your week been that bad?" Graham sighs explosively and says, " . . .nobody's actually dead, no one's in jail, nobody's actually in current danger, and there's no fires currently burning, metaphorical or literal," like that's as much as he'll commit to. "It's a long story, otherwise - you'll get in the weekly email, anyway." Because post-Insight, after everyone finished panicking and making sure everybody was accounted for, even the five or six people who'd kinda dropped out of contact with everyone else years before, Auntie Brigid had insisted that for the next while at least it was only fair if everyone tossed out an email once a week to let people know what was going on, and that they were okay. A touch in. We're kind of a special case, was Brigid's argument. Even those of us who haven't been out pissing people off for years. Lia figures it makes perfect sense, and she's actually liked doing it and getting the emails, but even the people who were reluctant eventually gave in. You usually eventually give in, when it comes to Auntie Brigid. A couple of times Lia's mom's said it's probably a good thing Brigid couldn't have her own kids, which is pretty unkind but also Lia's not sure it's not . . .true. With being everyone's auntie, Brigid's fussing is at one remove and it's mostly helpful: if she were someone's mama, that might just be too much. "But yes, Tripp's here, you need him?" Graham finishes. "Yeah, if he's not busy," Lia says. You can pretty much tell when someone met her cousin by what they call him: everyone who met him after he was grown calls him Trip, the nickname he picked up in Basic before he figured out that while he could hack it in the Army he probably shouldn't, that it wasn't good for him, and went for SHIELD instead. Lia and all the rest of the cousins who actually grew up together - plus the aunties and uncles - hang onto Antoine, even if sometimes Lia gets the sense he'd rather his cousins didn't. Lia considers it fair pay for the fact that her mom will not stop showing any boyfriend she brings home the pictures of her and Antoine when they were tiny and in the bath together. Antoine sounds tired when he does take the phone. He's still cheerful, still being him, says, "Hey cuz," in at least an attempt at a chipper voice - but Lia can tell. "Wow," she says, "so it really is all that good huh," to let him know he's not fooling anybody. She hears him sigh, too. "I could do with this month cutting the hell out, yeah," he says, in a decidedly less chipper tone of voice. "Or this year. Has it been long enough since Insight to blame the whole year? It feels like it." "Fuck don't ask me," Lia replies, vehemently. "I feel like it's been three hundred years. But everyone's okay, though? Or . . .okay-ish?" "Yeah," Antoine confirms. "Couple friends in the hospital, but all stable and recovering and all that fucking jazz - trying not to brood, so I'll send you the email, okay? You need something?" Lia takes the hint: she knows Antoine's tally of dead work friends is already in the double-digits, and since he'd been deep out in an op at the time he hadn't been able to help anybody but himself at first, and that's hard on a guy like him especially. So something else blowing up after they were starting to hope it'd all wrung itself out already . . .can't be easy. And since Graham and Brian are right there and Brian especially isn't gonna let anything fester, Lia's happy to let her cousin close out going over it all again, if he doesn't feel like it'll help. "Right, so," she says, "quick and dirty version is: I got Maria goddamn Hill showing up at my place in - " she checks her watch, "a bit less than an hour to talk over Insight Day, so how freaked out should I be right now?" "Rea - " Antoine starts and then cuts off his own noise of surprise with, "oh right, she's at Stark now isn't she? I did hear that, I just . . .guess I didn't think about it. And you've been home since you got out of the hospital, right? Not back to work at all." "I'm still on less than an hour of full sunlight a day," Lia retorts, knowing she sounds really cranky. "I'm living like a goddamn vampire. No, I have not been back to work. And yeah, word is they're basically restructuring everything so she's in a consolidated directorship or something like that, running StarkSec and Logistics and a bunch of the back-end of what's currently Operations and stuff. I have no idea what they're planning to do with Hogan, don't ask me, or how it's gonna shake out or anything, and there's only been a tiny bit of official announcement yet, but - " and she just sort of lets that trail off into a verbal shrug. "Yeah, yeah, I get it," Antoine says, and he sounds like he's perking up a bit. Like maybe wondering about that's more appealing than whatever he's been thinking about. "Okay, right - you know honestly I don't think you need to freak out at all?" And then she can almost hear him grin. "And yeah I can hear that look you're giving the phone right now." "I don't know what you think you're talking about," Lia says, pretending to be aloof, because she did just give the phone an incredulous expression. "For real, though." "No, for real," Antoine echoes, "you're fine. Um - okay, think about it like this," he says, and she can hear him sort of shifting around and yeah, he does sound more alive than he did a few minutes ago, so that's nice. "Like yeah: Hill has definitely got standards and expectations, and she can definitely come off as a hard-ass from Hell and if you fuck around on her time she's going to come down on you like the hammer of God, but that's because she sets the world up so if you're working for her it's because you should be that good and you've been given everything you need to meet the expectations she's got. Honestly," he adds, as Lia still gives the handset on the table a dubious look, "I liked ops where she was heavily involved. Because they worked, you knew exactly what everyone was doing because she made sure you did, and when you didn't know things it was because nobody could know them, you know?" "You better not be messing with me," Lia says, in a mock-warning voice, but she doesn't really think he is. She almost adds Captain America will know if you're lying because that's what they used to throw at each other when they were kids, but all of those things feel weird these days. It's weird and uncomfortable when you're not talking about the half-mythical Historical Personage who's safely dead and only exists in history books and the Grampas' memories. When it's someone who's actually out there in the world and, like, somewhere out there is eating supper for tonight. Or something. "Promise," Antoine replies. "And in case you forgot, you're on leave because you saved everyone's ass despite having your skull bashed in, because you're a goody-two-shoes who got super bothered that someone wasn't at their post, right?" "Tiny fracture," she corrects, automatically. "Not bashed in. Don't do that, the tiny fracture's bad enough I am so goddamn bored of being injured, you have no idea." "Oh I absolutely have an idea," Antoine disagrees, "I have a solid idea - you know the thing I'm dreading? The thing I'm dreading is when my mom or your mom or both of them realizes they can go digging through the database drop and find all the shit I have not been telling any of y'all for the last ten years, okay? I have done the endless boring recovery from a TBI, Lia, and I know you, I know exactly how out of your mind bored you are right now. And my story wasn't even anywhere near as cool as yours." "I hope you don't think flattery's gonna make me forget you just admitted you've been injured that we don't know about yet," Lia tells him in a mock-dire voice. "Besides, stop it, you're embarrassing me." "Pfft," Antoine replies, and goes on without waiting for her to respond, "my point is, Miss Invalid, unless there's something big you left out of telling us in the first place, right now you're already in Hill's Gold Star book and she hasn't even met you. So relax." "You better not be messing with me," Lia repeats, but this time she makes it clear she's joking. Mostly. She talks to Antoine a while longer while she finishes tidying up and digs out a nicer shirt and a matching wrap for her hair. Mostly she explains why Maria Hill's stopping by her place at all, and then she digs out some admissions about when he cracked his head (apparently during a car chase that ended in a car crash), because he sounds more upbeat and less dragged out while he's pretending not to be really damn proud of his work and scared of their moms freaking out about the danger instead of pleased they finally get to know what he did. He's had a shitty month, so Lia doesn't give him shit about that for now, either. When she says good bye, she turns off the handsfree and puts it away, picks up her handset instead and slides it into her pocket. Pausing in front of her mirror she really hesitates over whether or not to put on makeup, too, but makes herself skip it. She is on leave. For an injury. A thought occurs to her and she cleans out the coffee maker and puts a new pot on to make because she figures there's just about zero chance that Maria Hill isn't just as addicted to coffee as anyone else Lia knows. She double-checks to make sure she's got milk, soy milk and sugar. And actually she's got honey too so that really covers everything. Then she pulls out her iPad mini and messes around on Facebook, because she won't keep that app even on her personal phone but it's still kinda the only way to keep up with half the friends she has who aren't just at work with her all the time. So she keeps it sequestered to the one little iPad that doesn't link up to anything else, with a purpose-made email address, and makes sure people know it's not a good way to get ahold of her fast. Of course when the intercom goes, Duke goes into full alert; and when Lia answering and Jerry letting her know it's him - or rather, them - leads to noises outside the loft door Duke follows up by a full explosion of loud, territorial barking that makes Lia hope that her one set of pain in the ass neighbours aren't home. Not that they can say much as long as it doesn't go on for a long time and it's during daylight hours, but that lady's just a mean, mean bitch and she looks for everything to complain about. Lia's not sure if the husband's just as much of a douche or if he's just totally a doormat but either way . . .when she first got Duke it'd eventually come down to her having to get signed testaments from every other neighbour she's got that Duke's barking was not, in fact, that bad. Jerry's the one who comes up to her actual front door, too: Lia checks the peephole and opens the door while blocking Duke from bursting out onto the porch and says, "Hi, sorry, come in and let me get this idiot under control." She grabs the dog's collar to pull him over and out of the way and then gets him to focus on her and to sit. He whines, and his tail sweeps a small dust-bunny back and forth on the floor, but he does keep his eyes on her face until she tells him to lie down and gives him a treat from the container in her pocket. Out of the metaphorical corner of her ear she hears Jerry note that he's stepping back outside, and there's a momentary weirdness at the idea of someone doing the bodyguard stand outside her door, even if it is for someone else. But it's not a very loud weirdness. She's had this job for six years now, after all. She wonders, suddenly, if Antoine even thinks about that stuff as weird anymore. She should email him and ask. Maybe he'll talk about it now. Lia's not sure if having to settle Duke makes her nerves better or worse as she turns back to the dark-haired white woman standing just inside her door. Maybe it does both. On the one hand, now she could be being judged for her dog-training skills as well as her housekeeping and her clothes and everything else; on the other, who the hell cares? And it does help to break that initial moment of anxious fright. The woman standing in her doorway isn't exactly intimidating. Not as such. Maria Hill's wearing what they call business-casual, but the collar of the light-blue shirt is open and the sleeves are rolled up to her elbows and it's definitely got "I have been wearing this all day and I also had a nap in the car" creases in it. No jewelry, basic makeup, black flats and her hair pulled back into knot at the nape of her neck. She's got a small messenger-bag on her shoulder, and a definite stance of "I have been let in the door but not actually invited in yet so I'll just wait here." She's also smiling, a little bit, and asks, "Rescue?" about Duke as Lia finishes turning back and putting the little bag of treats back into her jeans pocket. "Yeah," she says, dredging up a smile back. "Yeah, he's a mastiff crossed with who knows what, the rescue org says he came from a farm in Kentucky where the original owner had an animal hoarding situation, and he's only about two years old." Duke's gotten back up and come over to hover behind her legs, but this time he's just doing it slowly and a bit nervous, instead of full on anxious explosion barking. "Looks like he's doing pretty well," Hill says, with the kind of weight to the words that at least tries to imply that the person knows about dogs and how recovery looks. And so knows that yeah, actually, Duke is doing pretty good. She extends a hand, and adds, "Maria," and that's the tone of voice that is totally wryly aware of how ridiculous formal social forms sound when you know the other person knows who you are. Lia takes the handshake and says, "Lia," and then hesitates on whether or not she wants to say it's an honour to meet this woman out loud. It honestly is. Unlike most of the world, Lia knew about the Assistant Director of SHIELD before Insight, and while SHIELD was better than most of that kind of organization about sexism . . . well, it's not like it existed in a whole different world or anything. Society is what it is, and being a woman and the Assistant Director couldn't be easy. Being a (comparatively) young woman . . .Lia already knew enough about her to respect her before the world turned upside down; since then, well. It might've been a little intimidating to find out the woman was going to be coming to Stark, and that StarkSec was going to be under her wing, and all of it. And now she's standing in Lia's apartment and Lia hasn't vacuumed in like a week. There was a dust-bunny for Duke's tail to bat back and forth. In that split second, though, before she can make the decision, Maria's already saying, "I'm very glad to finally meet you," and then with a small smile she's adding, "and I'm absolutely aware of how much of an awkward intrusion this is. I also do want, if possible, to talk to you about Insight, but -" She makes a slight gesture with one hand to go with the admission. "I have to admit to you now that's not actually the reason I needed to speak to you so soon." Part of Lia thinks, Oh hell. Out loud she says, "Should I be worried?" "Personally, or professionally, no," Maria tells her, which is not the most reassuring qualification ever, but is at least something. "All things considered, your neurologist may be pissed off at me in about ten minutes, though." Lia's not even sure how that sounds. Other than that Hill's definitely got a "competent not-quite-friendly-but-not-averse-to-friendly" vibe going on. Like she knows she can be overwhelming and actually being friendly as such would come across as completely false, but she's found a place where she's not metaphorically looming. Or something. Lia absently rubs the back of Duke's head and says, "Can I offer you coffee before we sit down? It's a fresh pot, and I have milk. And sugar. And soy milk." "Oh god please," Maria says, and sounds like she means it. Lia's pretty sure it's also a deliberate ice-breaker move of the "make myself seem more human" variety crossed with the "people feel less awkward when they can do something for you" variety (thanks, Antoine, she thinks, I will never be able to just have neutral feelings about hospitality rituals again because you felt the need to share your learnings with everyone after SHIELD started making you take those courses), but hey: it was on her end, too. Except with the offering, instead of the letting-someone-do-something. She gets Duke to sit in front of the couch by giving him a chew-treat to work on, and gets coffee for her and for Maria, who says she takes milk but no sugar. When Lia finally settles herself on the couch with Duke at her feet, Maria pulls a security-sealed envelope out of her bag. It's opaque, and it's serious-business, and Lia lets her eyebrows go way up. People are sometimes surprised that SI still uses hardcopy stuff like this, but then most people would be surprised to know that there is a kill-switch in the Tower that serves to take it completely offline and dead to the rest of the world, all connections wireless and otherwise severed, complete with extremely robust signal jamming. The in-house incinerators could also totally reduce a body to total ash in seconds, although Lia doesn't really mention that to people very often. And apparently there's some kind of in-house super-magnet that all hard-drives are fried by before they're even taken apart and crunched. Hard-copy isn't exactly better than quantum-encrypted digital - everything has its up and downsides. It's just that . . . everything has its upside and downsides, and you pick which one's more important. If something's being handed around in hardcopy, it just means that it's really, really important it stay under specific physical control, and be limited in distribution as hard as possible. It implies pretty strongly that whatever's in this envelope is the equivalent of unstable nitro. It needs to be easy to destroy, and even more easy to disavow - after all, anyone could copy SI stationery and letterhead and stuff, if they tried hard enough. Lia takes the packet, giving Maria Hill her wide-eyed questioning look, and Maria shrugs. "I'll let you read it," she says. "That'll get us there fastest, and I'm confident you won't need a lot of extra catchup from me once you have."Fair, although Lia cannot for the fucking life of her think what could possibly be in this envelope.Until she's pulling it out, opening the file inside and going wait, fucking what now? and realizing that she apparently just lacks a certain amount of imagination. Lia reads through the file the first time in a kind of weirdly detached, suspended moment. It's not a very long moment, she knows that. She's been able to speed-read since she was a kid and her mom had to go fight with the Gifted program to let her in. So it can't take her more than a minute or two to get through the whole thing. It just feels like there's no time until she's done that, like time stops for the first scan and then restarts when she starts over. And she has to start over. To read it through again. It's like she can't actually absorb the content until she's already looked through the shape, put the shape of the words and the reports in her head, and now her mind can actually colour in the shapes in terms of deriving meaning from that shit. It takes a third reading for the meaning to actually mean anything, to connect to the rest of her brain and her thoughts about the universe. For her to totally grasp what's in there. Then she says, "Oh holy fuck." Because she can't think of anything else to say. As a general rule she'd prefer not to spout profanity in front of her possible new boss but the fact is oh holy fuck is just about all she's got. Or some other profanities. And she has to say something or her head's gonna explode. Duke picks his head up and whines and she absently reaches over to scratch behind his ears while she flips back to stare at the page of the five comparative photos and says, "Holy shit. Oh shit. Holy fuck." And there's a part of her that wants to ask if this is a joke, except obviously it's not. Hill's sitting back in her chair with a kind of tired satisfaction on her face and her coffee in her hands; Lia figures it probably is kinda satisfying to have someone react to . . . this, especially if it's mirroring your own feelings about it. So it's obviously not a joke. And also who the fuck would set this up as a joke? Maria Hill definitely has better things to do with her time than come over here to punk Lia. So no, this is not a joke. This is real. It's really real. Lia's thoughts are going around and around in circles like a mass of fucking spooked rats in a barrel until one of them pops out like a cork and Lia blurts, "Oh shit Cap must've lost his fucking mind," without any part of her asking whether she wanted to actually say that out loud. But oh shit Cap must've lost his fucking mind. Hill doesn't say anything; the hairs on Lia's neck just stand right the hell up and she ends up looking at the other woman and wishing she hadn't said that. But Maria's expression doesn't look hostile. Not exactly.In fact it doesn't look negative at all. Just suddenly all interested and maybe like she's curious about something. Lia looks down at the file again, and then back up, and tries to think what to say. Hill puts down her empty coffee cup. "Well you're sure as hell not wrong," she says, in a complicated tone of voice Lia can't quite get a read on. "You could definitely call what Rogers did and is doing 'losing his fucking mind' and nobody could really argue, but I'm going to have to admit I'm really curious why your mind went there first and above all else." That is probably a really fair question. There's so much bad in this whole file, so much complicated and messy and yeah, you could definitely say there should have been some other thoughts first. Like holy shit how dangerous is this? or, like, is something being done to catch him? or how much of a threat - but . . . no. No Lia's really gotta go with holy shit Cap must be out of his goddamn mind oh my fucking god. There had been a point in Lia's life when she swore that the whole "open mouth, realize you don't know what you're going to say, close mouth again" thing wasn't something that really happens to people in real life, and now she realizes - as she opens, and then closes her mouth - that she's wrong. How about that. "Okay," she says, trying to do a quick and dirty reshuffle of all her thoughts that just, like, fell out of her head onto the ground like dumping a whole five packs of cards from a great height, "like two things, okay?" Maria makes a little go on gesture. Lia grasps at the words. "Okay," she says, "so one is that I was only twelve when Grampa Jones passed so like, I never talked to him about shit about the War beyond the simple fun stories cuz as far as he was concerned twelve was way too young for that, but Mom was totally his favourite," - which is noooot the kind of thing Lia's normally say out loud because that is a touchy family point but fuck she can't even be bothered to give a damn right now - " - and he eventually told her a lot and I've talked to her but it's gonna get real annoying if I have to put 'Mom said that he said' in front of everything so just . . . assume that? Like yeah this is all second hand, but it's second hand from a really good source and she wouldn't lie to me either." And Maria's nodding as Lia takes a deep breath and goes on, "And second, while all things considered there might be like, a special clause because of like, your history - but I don't know - and I mean I don't know if you've noticed but the Family -" she makes a little jazz-hands gesture with both hands spreading out as she tries to keep herself from sounding like a babbling idiot, "- kinda keeps secrets?" Maria Hill gives her a no shit Sherlock look. It's a really, really good one, too, not confrontational at all, just all of that feeling in the slightest few seconds of blank look and tiny quirk of eyebrows. "You know Fury consulted directly with your cousin when we found Rogers, right?" Hill says, dryly. Lia stops, a little derailed. She tries to grasp that, and then covers her face with one hand. "Oh god I didn't even think," she admits. "But yeah right, of course he did, why wouldn't he?" She actually puts her face in both her hands, trying to imagine that. Asks, "Did Antoine actually tell him to go fuck himself? In so many words?" Because now she's got to know. "At one point yes," Maria replies, in the same dry voice. "I mean I thought he might die of a heart attack as he did it, but he did. Fury was impressed, not that he'd've ever admitted it to Trip right then. Or admitted that it contributed to his getting fast-tracked promotion, since it definitely showed he had the strength of character to maintain his resolve in the face of extreme stress."Given that Fury, Nicholas J was in so many ways basically Antoine's hero . . . yeah that'd pretty much cover it. Poor Antoine. "Yeah so, in the interests of not having me killed in my bed by my relatives," Lia says, "I didn't tell you shit, for the record, but I mean . . . " Her head feels like her brain's running down a steep slope, that feeling like where if you don't run fast enough you're not gonna stop you'll just stop running and instead end up pitching ass over teakettle all the way down and maybe break your neck, and as it runs it's throwing out all kinds of thoughts that Lia hasn't had time to really think about, but she's pretty certain of. And thus far she's never gone horribly wrong trusting her brain to handle this kind of stuff under stress, so she might as well not stop now. And besides, there's absolutely considerations she can already see. Like - "I mean if this shit - I mean," she rephrases herself, "he's still alive, right, he's out there, which means no matter what the answers to the like eight hundred questions I've got right now are, this is holy-shit complicated and there are so many ways it can blow up and I'm assuming since you're here and you're giving me this to read that if it blows up then we, I mean the company, I mean especially StarkSec, we're gonna be right in the middle of it, right?" "That's a pretty good summary," Hill agrees. Lia thinks maybe she looks impressed? But that might be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the part of her that is totally also now, in the background, reassessing the whole future of StarkSec and also Lia's own career. It never hurts to impress your boss. Duke whines a bit and noses at Lia's arm, so she strokes his head - she must smell pretty agitated again. "Yeah so," she says, looking at the file again and shaking her head, "I'm gonna go with you actually kinda . . . need to know the things I've got that we're not supposed to talk about? So I'm gonna tell you? But seriously if it gets back to my mom there is a serious chance she will take my head off." Then Lia puts the file down on the table. Suddenly just all the paper and stuff feels way too heavy and primed to explode. And this might all be too much, except she needs to get it together. So she adds, "Also I . . . totally need more coffee and also this is really annoying, but I need to turn the lights down a bit?" She grimaces. She hates this. It's already dimmer in her apartment than she'd honestly like but no: no her head has to need even less light right now. "Please," Maria says, and it sounds absolutely genuine. "I told you your neurologist might hate me. And yes," she adds while Lia gets up and goes for the coffee pot again, "Stark and Potts have committed their resources to backing Rogers actions on this issue and yes, there is a significant potential that could get explosive, which is also yes, why I couldn't quite justify waiting until after your neurologist wouldn't hate me any more to tell you." Lia's coffee isn't actually finished, but the stuff in the pot is way hotter and it brings the stuff in her cup up to a temperature that actually feels grounding to drink, solid. So it counts. She also silently offers to refill Maria's cup, which is empty, and Lia figures the woman must run on coffee. Duke follows her to the coffee pot and then to the lights to turn two off and dim the overhead hanging light, glad in retrospect that she'd let her mom talk her into getting the dimmer switch installed right away even if it did cost extra. "Uhhuh," Lia says, and also grabs her worry-doll from its place in the kitchen as she comes back to sit, because she's gonna need something to do with her hands. "I guess concussion management must be - " "Concussions, broken ribs and gunshot wounds," Hill says, accepting the coffee back with a grateful look. "The three most common injuries that would keep an agent out of the field and need careful monitoring because agents are absolutely terrible at admitting when they're injured. Yeah." "I hate it so much," Lia confides, even a bit more edged than she means it to be. She sighs. "Like every time I push too hard I get reminded but I am not made for sitting still. Anyway." She takes a sip of her coffee as a way to brace herself. And it's kinda ridiculous, she supposes. She's thought that more than once lately: that in this day and age the Family's protectiveness around this stuff is probably not necessary, maybe even . . . not a great idea? But it's so ground in. It's habit. Even for her. Even talking to someone who has got to have a pretty goddamn broad mind about human relationships. "So," she says, taking a deep breath, "you know, like, Cap and Barnes weren't just friends." Maria leans back in her chair, face kind of impassive but not in a bad way. It's just like she's listening and absorbing now, like Lia's got her full attention and she'll take in the whole thing before she decides how to react. Lia sighs, the doll moving through her fingers. "Nobody ever talked about it, and I mean that includes Grampa and the rest of them, and like they weren't 'out' in any sense of the word at all but. . . . according to Grampa there was absolutely no question they were sleeping together."And then again right up against the part of her that thinks maybe they don't need to be like this anymore, Lia has to admit, there's the part that knows from experience that there's a goddamn reason her shoulders are tight now. That you can suddenly get the most bigoted shit from the most unexpected quarters and just because someone's made peace with the way "the homosexuals" are "in society today" doesn't mean they're not gonna lose their shit when you you imply that gay people (or bi people, or whatever, Lia reminds herself) didn't spring fully formed out of the Stonewall Riots and someone they looked up to might have been one. It's like everything else. Like you're going along with someone until suddenly their well women have no place in combat and-or affirmative action is reverse racism! or whatever hits you in the face and it's ugly. Lia really, really hopes Maria Hill's not gonna make herself into Lia's next memory of that shit happening. She's got enough of those. Some of them pretty painful. So her shoulders are turning into blocks of wood. "Grampa had no idea how that squared with the part where Cap was also clearly totally gone on Carter?" she continues, also trying to pretend she's not watching for Hill's reaction like a hawk. But she feels like she's gotta add that part, since it's the part that just about everyone in the Family asks when they get to this part of the lore, and it's easier to just get it over with. She goes on, "And he said the one time he tried to ask any of the others - specifically Monty and Frenchie because it worried him for all of them, because he could see how it could go bad, or . . . well actually he said he couldn't see how it wasn't guaranteed to go bad since nobody seemed to be figuring it out? Anyway when he did that, Monty told him very politely and very firmly to mind his own business and that kind of thing wasn't anyone else's job to think about."For a second Hill almost looks fleetingly amused, or knowing, or something - like somewhere in her head for a second there was a thought that was like well of course he did. But it's gone and Lia doesn't know how to ask about it. Maybe someday. She shrugs. "He said they didn't act like boyfriends? Exactly? Said the closest it ever came was that when they were annoyed with each other they sounded exactly like a cranky married couple except with insults instead of saying dear or honey or anything. Said they were never lovey-dovey or anything, and he wasn't even sure if they were sleeping together from before, like, back in Brooklyn or if it started some time after Cap blew up the factory but - "She takes a drink of the coffee and thinks of the perfect illustration and says, "You know the stories about Paris? Like the one about the Eiffel Tower?" "And having to keep Dernier from assassinating de Gaulle?" Maria asks, mouth quirking up and impassivity cracking for a second. That bit of history'd been declassified a while ago. "Right," Lia says, "well the thing is, contrary to popular belief Cap did not skip the drinking and the brothels and all that because he was just such an upstanding young man, okay - according to Grampa, Cap and Barnes skipped all that because they did not make it out of bed and into actual clothing and out of the hotel room for more than a few hours, right. Like they met the other guys for dinner every night and that was just about it."Now Maria does get a kind of an Expression, and not one Lia can read at all so she gives in and goes, "What?" and takes a drink of her coffee to cover her own spike of nervousness.Hill looks ever so slightly embarrassed, but also like she's owning it, and says, "Probably the most inappropriate - " she sighs and leans her head on her hand, " - I just found myself immediately wondering how Barnes could even walk." Fortunately Lia's almost finished swallowing her coffee by that time so she only chokes a little, and manages to gasp out, "Oh my Mom said that's what Grampa'd admit if he was drunk enough," so that maybe Maria would stop looking quite so suppressed-awkward. And she does, trading it for amusement. "But I will also absolutely say that's none of my business," Maria adds, "so I'm gonna apologize for that." It strikes Lia that Maria Hill may be a bit overtired. It also strikes her to wonder if Maria's one of those people who is just . . . incapable of resting, herself. Like she had to have gone through a lot recently, and yet here she is, taking on huge new jobs . . . Well. She's also a grownup, and that's none of Lia's business. "Yeah, anyway," she lets that all go, "there wasn't anything like boyfriend-y, just the bickering and the part where they seemed to like, almost be connected by some kind of invisible string, and how any time you couldn't find them for a bit it was always both of them, and then the leave, and they just . . . knew? You know? But nobody talked about it." Lia looks down at the worry-doll. It's not the same one her grandfather brought back from Guatemala, because she'd worn that one out ages ago, but it looks pretty close still. "Grampa also said," she adds, "that the days in Paris were pretty much the only handful of days the whole war Barnes didn't scare him a bit. Said he always felt bad about that, because he couldn't pin down a reason and wasn't like Barnes was anything other than a friend to him, but still."He also said half the time it was like Cap and Barnes were in each other's heads, like they knew each other so well they could have three quarters of an argument without even saying a single word out loud," and then Lia pauses, distracted, by the not-quite-sigh Maria breathes out. She tilts her head in a question. "I've known people like that," Maria explains. "Honestly with a couple people I've been a bit like that, but not anywhere near as bad as I've known." "Grampa said it could get straight-up unsettling," Lia says, and smiles a little bit because those stories were ones she got straight from her grandfather, and he did always seem a bit baffled by it, even all those years later. Then she takes a deep breath and finishes with, "And mostly, I guess most important - Grampa said Cap went down with that airplane on purpose, because he didn't want to stay alive in a world Barnes wasn't in, and really this was his best chance of getting any way out without having to actually admit he was killing himself." Lia glances at Maria's face and then shrugs as Maria's eyebrows go up. "It doesn't take a pilot to point a plane down and crash it into the North Atlantic," she says, "and they'd pulled Cap out of some bad stuff before and he'd healed okay, so there wasn't any reason why he couldn't've tried giving them his coordinates and abandoning the plane and seeing if they could pick him up. Hell according to Grampa, Carter tried to get him to do it and he gave her some bullshit about it being too late and being his choice and that's when they left her alone in the room with the radio?" Maria's eyebrows are way up by now, not like she doesn't believe what Lia's saying, but like she's surprised by it. Lia shrugs again. "Grampa said something inside Cap died the day Barnes fell off that train," she says. "Like he was half dead. He says it was like Cap just had to finish off the Red Skull first before he could finish off the last half and stop hurting. But he was too Catholic to even say anything about actually killing himself, he just . . . made sure he could die doing his duty. Like really sure." She takes another mouthful of the coffee and says, quieter, "It came up a lot, I guess? According to Mom, Grampa always felt guilty about it. It ate him up. Like if he'd done something different that day on the train, been faster or something, made different choices, Barnes wouldn't've died and none of it would've gone wrong. Which was stupid - he did everything he was supposed to do and he did exactly what he was supposed to do but . . . " She shrugs. "Mom says the only one who could tell him anything about it was Gramma and after she passed it started haunting Grampa a lot again. She said any time that came up, all there was left to do was take the glass away and make him go to bed." That's probably a little bit more than she really had to share but it did come out, like it couldn't stay behind. And now Maria's nodding slowly. Then she pinches the bridge of her nose and looks really tired when she says, "That . . . tracks, and clarifies, some of - actually a lot of what he did on Insight Day and what he's doing now. So thank you. And I absolutely understand that everything you've said is in confidence. And I truly appreciate it."Duke's wormed his head under Lia's arm. She gives up and sits back enough for the big doofus to pretend he's a lapdog and get half in her lap, lay his head on her chest because right now she'll take something to hug for a second and just . . . not bother feeling defensive about it. But she gives up after a second and asks, "Do I even want to know what Cap's doing?" because oh man her imagination's going to come up with so many bad things otherwise. Maybe Hill won't tell her, but she's still got to ask."Currently, scouring the globe," Maria replies, sitting back again, her voice somewhere between sour and resigned. "With Wilson, the man who took down the helicarriers with us. How much luck he's going to have, I don't know, and what he's going to do if he succeeds I also don't know."Which she's clearly not happy about, and Lia does not blame her. "But," she says, taking a deep breath herself, "as you surmised, yes: whatever he does manage to do and decides to do about it, the intention in place is that Stark will back him with anything Stark has, which in this case is going to include the company, and StarkSec in particular. And given your family, and your actions on Insight Day, I figured it wouldn't be fair to drop that on you after it happened." Lia breathes in deeply, rubbing at the side of her neck and trying to figure out how she even feels right now. It's not . . . easy. This is all a lot. Like a lot. She can't even decide if she's glad Grampa's already dead and doesn't have to deal with this shit, or if it would've been better if he weren't, or if that'd be the worst thing ever because this was maybe even worse than Barnes just being dead and she just . . . Lia has no fucking clue, even. No clue. . . . and now she misses her Grampa. And kinda wants her mom. And she's definitely getting a headache but the last, last thing in the universe she wants to do, right now, is go lie down in the dark with this all in her head and try to have a nap. She strokes Duke's ears for a second of silence before she says, "Okay this is probably gonna sound weird but, like, if you want to go over what happened on Insight Day I would really rather do that than sit with this." Maria actually says, "I can completely understand that," and it feels like she means it.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Maria completely understands why Lia Stone would rather talk about something - anything - than sit by herself with everything Maria just dumped on her head. The younger woman's taking it well so far. Probably better than Maria would be, if their positions were reversed - at least, totally reversed, including swapping personal and family histories. And while ideally Stone should probably have some rest in a dark room around now, ideally Maria wouldn't've upended Stone's entire world a bit more than it already had been since circa 2012, so nothing's ideal anyway. There'd always been a kind of . . . Complicated, for lack of a better word, relationship between SHIELD and the slightly amorphous, hard-to-pin-down not-quite-institution that the Howling Commandos and later their family had turned into. Complicated, tense, and in some ways very ambivalent. It might've been different if Steve - and Barnes, Maria supposes - had survived. She'd often thought that while she'd been immersed in SHIELD, and Rogers' re-emergence into the modern world had only added a whole new possible direction it could have been different in. Since Maria's by no means sure that Steve wouldn't've ruptured, badly, with . . .well, everything and everyone, really, during the Cold War. She does not think he'd've taken that level of moral ambiguity and double-dealing well. And how that would have fallen out - who knew? But as it was, it'd just been complicated: ties of loyalty to an idea, as the SSR turned into SHIELD, but also ties of loyalty to Carter both as comrade and as (if you wanted to get right down to it) the woman Rogers had both loved and unconditionally respected, had always kept a sometimes uneasy place with various levels of mistrust and the simple fact that the older they got, the more Falsworth, Dernier, Morita, Dugan and Jones had turned inwards, towards each other and towards Carter, and away from everyone else. They shared something nobody else in the world did, especially after Phillips passed, and an experience nobody else could understand, and on top of that they actually both cared about and cared for one another. That kind of thing creates even a tighter version of the kind of bond that's already pretty damn tight. Nick had once confided to Maria that he thought that - in her last years as Director especially - Carter almost relied on that. In her private life, to keep herself sane. That she'd almost clung to this space where she went and she was just Peggy Carter, friend and comrade and one of the only other people in the world who shared in their private memories of a near-private war, and their private losses. Beholden to nobody else, because nobody else quite lived in their world. Jones had gone for the regular military and made a career of it; Morita and Dugan had both worked for SHIELD for a bit at the beginning and then stopped, citing family needs and going onto small but stable civilian careers. All three of them had a bunch of kids. Falsworth had spent a decade or so disappearing into the truly opaque world of Britain's early Cold War espionage, the kind where nothing got written down, ever, before abruptly retiring to a property near his ex-wife to spend more time with his kids and coincidentally to give Dernier somewhere to live and to keep him from trying to assassinate most of the French political and military elite. Jacques Dernier had taken the flawed world of the Cold War pretty hard, Maria understood. You couldn't quite call him a hermit, being as he lived at Falsworth's house and still went into town, but the things Maria'd read made it clear that he'd become a kind of hermit in his own mind, rejecting the whole world because it had too obviously failed him. One or two of the Commandos' kids and grandkids had ended up in SHIELD, several more in the military in the US or the UK or - because of some fight between Margaret Carter and her oldest daughter that had ended with the latter taking off and marrying a guy from Perth - Australia; the rest sort of spread out, got married, had their own kids, and all kept in touch, had big family reunions, had their own in-jokes and in a strange little way had an intense, unquestioned loyalty to each other that rivalled or (Maria often suspected) superseded any they were supposed to have. Because when you're raised by men who don't quite belong to the same world everyone else does, neither do you. Because all of the United States might have a Captain America shaped hole in their history, but the greater family had one in their psyches and maybe in their souls, passed down from the Howling Commandos themselves. And through it all they met up at least once a year, often a lot more. Leant each other money, got each other jobs, leant or gave or borrowed cars and homes and anything else anybody might need. Had acted like a big family, everyone in each other's pockets except for the handful who couldn't take it anymore and ran away and were still (because hey, just look at those family members in SHIELD) quietly kept track of just in case they might need help some day.Became cops and teachers and firefighters and doctors and who knew what else, and stayed tied together. And then, just about the time the effect of that was starting to break up because we're into generation three and starting on generation four and everything does drift eventually - then boom!Here comes the Battle of New York and the news that Captain America isn't really dead, and all that meant. Antoine Triplett really had told Fury to go fuck himself, and had looked like he was going to maybe piss himself doing it. Had spent at least fifteen minutes before it playing a pretty respectable game of "no idea what you're talking about sir" when Fury started pushing at the fact that they all knew there was shit that never made it into reports, takes and assessments and understandings and everything else. His last defensive position before the last stand had been that Fury should go ask Carter. Maria knew that Nick had, and had been quietly run around the metaphorical tree for an hour with Carter being politely obstructive and British in the way that only the ex-Director could possibly be - and Fury shouting at Carter wouldn't just be pointless, it'd be embarrassing too, and everyone knew it. But in theory he could shout at Trip and not just have it work, but have it be legal. So he did. That was the point that Triplett had looked Fury dead in the eye and said with all due respect, sir: go fuck yourself. Which also counts as the one single time in her life that Maria has actually heard someone use "with all due respect" and mean to be respectful, while also cutting someone dead. Maria had only worked with Triplett directly a few times, but she'd liked him a lot; she suspects that if she gets the chance, she'll like his cousin, too. Likes her so far. And feels bad for adding yet more mental and emotional chaos to the last few years. So she really does completely get why Lia would rather talk about something else that's still probably stressful than sit alone and think about a grandfather who passed on still feeling crushing guilt, and also figuring out whether what's turned out to be true is even worse than what that grandfather thought in the first place, or better, or what, and also what it's going to mean. Especially when she can't just go out for a walk, or go to a bar, or be out finding something else to think about. Probably can't even watch TV much. Lia Stone takes a deep breath and rubs her dog's stomach for a minute, as the mastiff-mutt rolls over and lets its tongue roll out. "Where should I start?" she asks. "I mean I've got almost all of it - memory loss and the really big mood swings are like the only two concussion symptoms I don't have," she adds, more than a little acidly. "Which I guess I can count my blessings, at least." Maria leans forward to pull her tablet out of her bag, because this is stuff she wants notes on and is perfectly happy to have those notes entrusted to encryption and other digital safeguards. "Want to just take me through it from the end of your shift that day?" she suggests. She makes an effort to keep the phrasing and all the rest of her fairly casual, not turn this into a more intense debriefing. It's way too easy to do that and Maria has it on reliable authority that when she's in debriefing mode she's a bit overwhelming. But she does open the short-hand note-taking application on the tablet and let her fingers hover over the adapted touch-screen keyboard. "Okay," Stone says, glancing up and taking another breath, appearing to organize her thoughts. "So - I'm pretty sure you've already caught up on how stuff runs at the Tower, right?" And at Maria's nod, she says, "I was on kill-switch duty, because I was taking the intensive French course and they'd worked out it worked pretty well as a way for us to study and do a shift at the same time."Maria nods again, and now Lia sighs. "So my shift was done, but Trina, the girl who was on after me, was in the same course and she had a couple questions she wanted to ask - pulled out her workbook and it turned out we were both pretty unsure of the same thing, so I wasn't a lot of help. By then it was about ten minutes after the end of my shift. I got my stuff together and started heading up the stairs. That's when I ran into Paul Serrano on the stairs." There's a lot of bitterness in the way Lia says the name, and definite anger and hurt moving over her face at the same time. She shrugs, although Maria knows she didn't react at all. "Paul was a friend. I thought, anyway. Not like, close, but he'd been there forever so I'd known him the whole time I was working there, and I thought he was a good guy. He was always willing to help people. He was a good boss. And apparently fucking HYDRA the whole time. Anyway. He just said he was checking in with Trina, needed to talk to her about something." She exhales like she's letting that go, and picks up with, "Nothing super weird about that, either, because Paul always did rounds - one of the ways he was a good boss. That and he could manage Hogan without Hogan getting all touchy about how he was supposedly the boss." Maria suppresses a grimace: she's still not a hundred percent sure how things are going to shake out with Hogan, but it's the kind of thing where she's got contingencies for every possibility she can think of, and it's just a matter of waiting to see which one happens. Most of it's up to Pepper and Stark, anyway. They'll just have to wait and see. But that tracked: at least half of Serrano's job, loyalties regardless, would have been managing to run a basically functional security operation around Hogan and his in-way-over-his-head security theatre song-and-dance without making the man sulk. "So I said hi, and he asked me how the course was going, I said it was fine, he told me to have a good day and I went up the stairs and he went down. Nothing to notice until I got to the top, because there's supposed to be someone at the little desk there, too. And like - " Lia makes a little gesture with one hand. "Kill-switch is the most potentially boring duty in the Tower, hands down, and because it's basically four hours of sitting in the same spot you're allowed to more or less do whatever you want while you're on - as long as you stay there. You do not leave the upstairs desk or the downstairs room respectively without paging in and having someone come spot you, okay? Even if you're suddenly gonna throw up, you throw up in the garbage can there until someone can come take over, is the thing. It's kind of a big deal." Her face is very serious, and Maria finds herself nodding again. "I won't say nobody ever screwed up," Lia notes, "and I didn't know who was on after Yancy - the guy I was on-shift with - so maybe they were new and just didn't realize how serious it was, but it really is a big deal. So I was just completely - what the hell, you know? Who the hell's f - screwing the dog right now? I went looking just because I was so much like that, I'm not even sure if I thought I might do some new person a favour because I found them before they got in trouble, or what? Just - this was weird and needed to get followed up on. I mean - " Here she laughs, a bleak, short laugh. "I mean I had the thought you have when those things happen, right, the one you think is totally outrageous. Like when you get up at night and think the shower curtain's at a weird angle and even though you know it's nothing . . . " She shrugs again. "You're still wondering if there's going to be a body when you pull it back," Maria finishes. "Or a serial killer." "Exactly," Stone agrees. "Or your mom hasn't texted you back in a bit and part of you's suddenly sure she's dead, or kidnapped, whatever. I sure had those kinds of thoughts, right then: that whoever it was supposed to be there was actually dead somewhere, whatever. But at the time, I thought it was exactly that kind of thought. The weird intrusive supposedly unrealistic kind." For a second Lia looks into the middle distance before she shakes her head, shakes it off. "I mean there wasn't any blood anywhere. Apparently Serrano stabbed the guy in the chest somehow so he bled into his chest cavity instead of out of his body, or something?" "There's a technique," Maria confirms, with quirk of her mouth she lets go wry to acknowledge that it is, from a normal person's point of view, disturbing that she knows this. "If the stab-wound is small and in the right place in terms of gravity and you hit an artery, someone can bleed out into their chest and abdomen and just about nowhere else. It's pretty difficult to achieve on purpose, usually needs surprise, and he might just've gotten lucky.""I kinda wonder," Lia says, "given what happened later - anyway, there wasn't any blood I could see, and maybe he even cleaned it up - it's not like you'd be able to tell from a cleaner smell or anything, air circulation in the Tower is pretty good everywhere. Anyway my point is there wasn't any reason to worry really but it still bothered me and it was still really weird, so I started looking?" She grimaces a bit and adds, "I probably should've called it in right then, I've thought that so many fucking times - " Maria cuts her off gently by noting, "In this case, you'd just have alerted Serrano that you were suspicious, and that would not have helped." Because it's true. And while technically it's also true that the optimal thing would have been for a security officer in that context to have both a formal place to call it in and for that place to log with multiple aspects of the system including - this being SI and Maria being happy to take advantage of Stark's paranoia in all forms, since he might as well be as useful as possible - with Stark (and obviously with JARVIS), that's not something Lia Stone had a damn bit of control over, and it wasn't something she'd been trained for. It will be how shit works - among other changes - by the time Maria's done with the refit, but the fact is that it wasn't before, it's not Stone's fault in the fucking slightest, it's not useful for her or for that matter for Maria for her to dwell on that one, and Maria only applies her own standards to anything after it's reasonable to expect them to live up to them. And in this case, it's coincidentally a good thing it didn't. "I guess that's a point." Lia rubs her neck. "Anyway I went looking at the closest bathroom and the downstairs staff-room just in case it was some newbie being a fucking dumbass and I looked in the fire-escapes in case, I dunno, they tried darting up somewhere real fast and down and fell and broke their neck or something? And I finished up back at the desk at the stairs and at that point I figured I might as well just go down and tell Paul myself, since it'd be quicker than filing a report or anything." She looks up in that way where it ends up looking like someone's finding their thoughts on the ceiling. "Paul was downstairs, but Trina wasn't. He was surprised to see me but I didn't think anything of that, because it seemed totally reasonable - it was almost half an hour after my shift by then. I did notice that the narrow door to the actual tiny server room down there that runs the switch was closed, when I usually leave it open, but that's also not like . . .it was unusual but not really a red flag." She pauses and takes a deep breath. "Apparently he shot Trina in there - made her go over and kneel down and then used a .22, and the bullet stayed in her head. There was some blood but not enough I'd notice and I feel like maybe I smelled something weird but I didn't think anything of it at the time and I might be making that up in hindsight." This pause is long enough that Maria chooses to break it with, "If you'd like to find out, and I swear to god I am not joking, it is entirely possible to run a course or a demo on what it smells like if someone's been shot - or stabbed - dead in an enclosed space." Lia focuses on her and blinks. "Wow," she says and then frowns. "I feel like that should be standard, like, law-enforcement or something." Maria waggles her hand, more than happy to explain because it'll also break up the moment of unhappy recollection. "It's actually useful only in very, very limited spaces of time - if the dead body's been there for even a little while then 'dead body' is going to overwhelm the shooting-death smell, if someone takes the body out and does any clean up, same thing in the opposite direction. SHIELD taught scent recognition for that kind of thing for more or less exactly the kind of situation you're describing, which cops don't actually have to deal with a lot. Extremely useful for covert agents in situations of extreme duplicity, not so much for anyone else." Lia laughs a little helplessly and puts her head in her hands, then rubs at her dog's side again to settle it when it whines. The dog licks her arm and worms its head back onto her lap. It's funny: Maria's always kind of wanted to get a rescue, but always ends up talking herself out of it for exactly this reason - dogs are so goddamn sensitive to human stress and emotion, and she's never going to have a life where she doesn't have that as a major concern, so even if she arranged to take the dog with her everywhere, the way Eva does with that cat, it'd still end up stressed out all the time. So she just makes do with her sister's dogs, and occasionally other people's. "Yeah," Lia agrees, "I guess 'has someone been covertly murdered in this room leaving no blood trail and then shoved into a closet to make shit look normal' is a pretty specific kind of scenario. Anyway, I told him - Serrano - about the guy upstairs being missing and asked him where Trina was, and he said she'd looked really tired and had told him she'd had an awful night so he sent her to go get a latte and something to eat while he babysat the station, and I guess that seemed a bit weird because Trina didn't look that tired to me, but again not like . . .a warning sign. So I was just gonna go, because I was done." Another pause and this time Lia shrugs and spreads the arm that's not rubbing her dog's ears. "Then the PA comes on, right. First with the JARVIS system voice that goes with the serious alarms, saying that there was a developing situation in DC of great threat to security and everyone should go to emergency stations, which is a thing we've had since the Chitauri, right, and then that the following audio was being patched from SHIELD HQ at the Triskelion as we speak and then suddenly . . . . " She drops her arm. "Captain fucking America's telling us . . ." She stops, with another gesture, like she can't even find the words. "I know," Maria says, with wry sympathy. "I was there." The quick flash of genuine amusement on Lia's face says she judged the joke right and then Lia asks, like she's distracted by the thought, "Did he fucking write that speech ahead of time, or - " "There was no ahead of time," Maria replies, in the same tone of voice. "Between Fury's assassination and that speech Rogers had maybe three hours downtime at most, and that was when a doctor was patching up Romanoff's GSW and we were arranging to plant her at the airport, so no by any measure he fucking made that up more or less on the spot." "Grampa said he could do that," Lia says, looking distracted again, and shakes her head. "Anyway. Nothing clicked. I mean I froze and I listened and it was impossible and I was completely freaked out and I was turning around to see what Serrano thought we should fucking do and - " she trails off. Inhales, and says, "And there's a gun right in my face and I knew I was dead. Except then there was a click instead." "The report says the .22 jammed," Maria supplies, quietly, and Stone blinks like she's breaking the moment. "Yeah, something like that," Lia agrees. "I was still totally stalled out, I couldn't put anything together - I wasn't even fucking scared yet I just, I was totally locked up, and then he hit me really hard with the gun and I went down." Maria waits, as Stone stares at the table for a minute, hand moving against her dog's neck, before she shakes it off. It's the kind of moment it's just best to wait through. "So then I can see again, my head hurts and feels a little bit like I'm drunk, I'm on the floor on my face, and it's all emergency lighting, the quiet-alarms with the slow flashes, and nothing on the PA. I almost start to get up and something tells me to absolutely fucking stop and stay very very still and just focus on getting my eyes open instead and figuring out what's going on, so I do, except I'm looking at the wall which is not helpful." She's pulled a little bit of her hair from under her wrap and is twisting it, an obvious nervous tic, as she goes on, "I can sort of tell by what part of the wall I'm looking at and how I'm lying that Serrano's probably over on my left and I think I can hear him, and since I'm obviously not gonna get anywhere this way I try to really really slowly get myself around so maybe I can see him. And it feels like I'm two different people, there's this me that's all drunk and stupid and slow that's driving my body, and then this other me that's trying to give them directions. And then some blood gets in my eye," she adds, "which hurt and did not help with anything, but I got most of it blinked out and now I could see him." Maria shifts, but doesn't interrupt, as Stone marks out positions in the air with her hands. "So the panels with the switches are here," she says, "and there's a kind of counter and cabinet underneath them, and I'm over here by the table and chairs on the floor, and I've turned enough I can see Serrano's over here by the switch-wall, and his back's to me, and the gun's on the counter, and he's fucking fixated on something else in his hand, I think it was his phone." "Any idea why he didn't shoot you?" Maria asks, because it's the obvious question and there's no point in dancing around it. Lia shakes her head. "I still can't figure that," she says. "Like if it was just a stupid mistake he made or if, I dunno, he actually did like me? Or something? I mean I have to figure he didn't realize that his bosses were gonna bomb the Tower to the bedrock since he was still there and he'd've gone out too. Or maybe he thought I was dead? Because you'd think if he thought I was gonna wake up he'd've tied my hands together or something, but he didn't." Maria nods, considering it. "Most likely he panicked and made a mistake then," she says, putting a little mental tic in that box for that question, because she's wondered. "It happens. Given where he was HYDRA clearly trusted him, but as you point out, he was going to go down with this place, so he might've been one of their most reliable but almost certainly wasn't one of their best." Because honestly even if the guy was motivated by affection, getting stuck on that idea isn't likely to help the woman much. Lia nods. "Anyway. I honestly don't know how long I lay there trying to figure out what to do - feels like forever when I remember it but it can't've been because Ms Potts insists they weren't shut off that long - my head hurt a lot, but I was mad and I was freaked out, and I managed to figure out he must've thrown the switch to cut everyone off? And it feels like I lay there forever but it also feels like I was thinking about what I was doing as I was doing it, because I kinda shoved myself up to my knees and lunged across to get the gun - " she gestures, and then sort of half-mimes it, turning a little in her seat and disturbing the dog, " - and I got it, but he was kinda going for me and I kicked him hard in the knee and there was a really awful sound and he screamed, so then I threw myself away from the wall, and my hands kinda did the drill for clearing the jam on their own, and he was lunging at me when I got the gun up and fired it at him. Like a lot. Kinda didn't stop pulling the trigger until it wasn't working anymore?" She makes a face, half-anxious self-deprecation, but Maria says, "Good call," because frankly in a situation like this there is no overkill, just open fire and - if you have the option - reload. Especially if you're not sure your aim on the shots is going to be good, better to put more holes in your target. The more holes, the more likely they are to go down and not get up. "Yeah so I apparently hit him once in the hip and once in the cheek and once in the neck and a lot of times in the chest but kinda through his shoulder as he was on the ground," Lia says, clearing her throat and still looking self-conscious. She manages to add, "Not my tightest grouping, but he didn't get up after that," with a little bit of humour. "Then I got up and almost passed out again," she goes on, "and I did throw up, apparently, but I don't actually remember doing that, just almost falling over and then getting to the panel and throwing all the switches back and hitting the intercom. That actually got me Mr Stark, and he told me to throw the second switch - the one that leaves telecom connection on but switches the Tower to physical lockdown and shoves all control to a particular server set that lives directly under the penthouse. Then the JARVIS system voice was telling me to please exit the switch room, and to drag both bodies out with me and that is when I found Trina in the closet after the system told me to look in that room and that was not fun, but I did it, and then the security door for that room shut behind me and locked." Maria lets this pause take a second to acknowledge the gravity of that, matter of fact phrasing notwithstanding, before she says, "For the record I'm extremely impressed." Stone looks a bit startled, but also cautiously pleased. "Every time I tell this story - I mean, every time I hear myself tell it, I'm listening from the outside and it sounds fucking insane," she says, like she's admitting something. "Like it can't possibly be fucking real. Except every second of it isn't just like something I know, it's in my body." "You should be extremely proud of yourself," Maria tells her, and means it. Because she is impressed. "I'm serious," she adds, when Lia glances at her like she's not sure what to make of that. "You did everything right, above and beyond anything you were actually trained for, and miles beyond anything anyone could expect. Frankly the world is really goddamn lucky you were at work that day and I'm personally pretty damn grateful. There are a lot," she adds, with feeling, "of really bad things that could have happened if that place had stayed offline." A lot of them. Starting with the surviving HYDRA pilots levelling most of DC. Lia's looking down now, but it's the pleased-awkward looking-down of someone who is really, really bad at dealing with praise, which only puts her right alongside almost all of the women Maria has met in her life. It's something that regularly makes her want to just drop rocks on the entirety of society, but it's hardly Lia's fault. The opposite, if anything. "Um," Lia says, and glances up, and twists the one bit of hair again, "for the record I'm . . .terrible at just taking good things people say about me without, like, trying to make it into some kind of joke or brushing it off and I might be worse at it right now than ever, so I'm just saying this, up front, so that I don't do that, or argue, or whatever, because I am choosing to feel that being this kind of awkward is better than coming off like I don't . . .appreciate? What you say." She pauses for a beat and says, "But you can totally shoot me now. I mean. I'm fine with that." Duke breaks any possible awkwardness at that point by trying to lick her face, making her startle, so when Maria laughs it's less completely like she's laughing just at Lia. The dog startles, but then looks pleased because its human is laughing and petting its head, so that's fine. The rest of Lia's story is shorter, and mostly consists of ending up in the Tower operations control centre with Stark, Pepper and everyone else, being seen by the EMS and nurse-practitioner that work at the Tower and being told she absolutely had to go to the hospital as soon as things were sort-of sorted out and the Tower wasn't locked down tight, and otherwise watching as the rest of that nightmare unfolded and then unwound after the worst didn't happen. More than once, Maria makes a particular note of the young woman being very observant, even when concussed: Stone points out, for example, that Banner and Ross were up in the same space, even though there wasn't a lot they had to actually contribute, and that Banner kept kind of putting himself and Ross right next to Pepper and Stark - never in the way, but always within arm's reach. Nobody'd mentioned that before, and Pepper'd probably been too distracted to notice, but Maria makes a note to follow up with Banner on that. As Lia describes it, it reads to Maria like he was staying close enough that if the original targeting had managed to fire, he'd've tried to shield definitely Ross and probably all three of the others as the Hulk. With his own body. It might even have worked - Maria remembers the Chitauri firepower the Hulk just shrugged off, and if he'd done it right his body might have been enough protection to get at least one or two of the other three out of that mess alive - which just put a whole new set of layers to Pierce not having the first fucking clue about what he'd have had to deal with after he thought he won. Lia hadn't managed to intuit quite that much, but she wouldn't have the background knowledge needed for it, and she still managed to notice and fix on it as worthy of remembering. Maria keeps her own thoughts to herself for now. "Then Stark was opening up the Tower again and I got transported to the ER, and they were concerned about scan so I got to stay there for like a week," Lia finishes. She laughs a bit and says, "It was a really nice hospital room. Nicer than any hotel room I've ever been in. And Ms Potts had really nice food sent which I thought was pretty nice." She shrugs. "And then I've been recovering ever since. Which is really boring." Maria looks over the notes she took, and asks a couple of quick clarifying things, and then gathers up the file she'd brought for Lia to read, putting it into a new secure envelope destined for the incinerator when she gets back to the Tower. She also gives in, as Lia gets up to walk her to the door and the dog inevitably bounds down to the floor to run to the door and bark, and crouches down to let the dog sniff her hand so she can scruffle behind his ears and fend off his attempts to lick her face. "Oh, um," Lia says, as Maria stands back up and readjusts her shirt, "speaking of hospitals - how's your mom? Mabel said that's why you were out and around." "She'll be fine - clean break, she's still young enough it should heal fine, just . . .incredibly awkward accident," Maria says, giving the other woman a quick smile. "Everything's just a bit more awkward when this happens just after everyone's found out you've been hiding most of your life for the last decade." Because she's not even going to waste the effort to pretend that's not the biggest thing at play, and given the amount the other woman's shared this afternoon, Maria's okay with evening those scales a bit. It can make things less awkward later. "Antoine's living in dread of when my aunt and my mom find out all the things he couldn't tell them about," Lia says, like she's offering sympathy at one remove. "Like apparently he's been in a major car crash before, which we never knew. And I mean at least they knew what he did in general. Gotta be even harder when they don't." "Could be worse," Maria says, in a way that hopefully acknowledges and admits that Stone's right. "Could be one of the people who don't have any family to get upset at them." She says it just to acknowledge the truth, but now as she says it, she also ends up thinking of Steve. As Maria opens the door and Faulkner stands up from where he's been waiting outside, Lia says, "Thank you, again. For coming today." Maria's impressed again by the fact that Stone leaves it at that, lets eye-contact stand in for the things that wouldn't be smart to say. "You're welcome," she replies. "Hope to see you at work when you're ready." Then she adds, "Not before," because it's probably worth specifying. In the limo, Maria glances over the short-hand notes she's taken. Then she sighs, turns off the tablet, puts it away and reaches for the in-car coffee machine.(Because if she had to go to Jersey because her mother fell down the damn stairs, she'd decided she'd be damned if she didn't take one of the nice vehicles.) She does force herself to go with decaf, but the taste is at least vaguely the same, and maybe there'll be some kind of placebo effect.