Who: Maria Hill (+open to SHIELD) NPCs: n/a When: 12/31, late night (forwarddated) Where: SHIELD HQ What: Maria rings in the New Year Rating: PG-13 It was New Year's Eve, and Maria was spending it exactly where she'd spent the rest of the holidays; sitting in the main comm room, eyes on the wall of screens as information scrolled passed, similar chatter through the headset in her ears as SHIELD monitored the status of the world. She'd dispatched units to various locations on other holidays - even Christmas Eve, for Chrissake - but so far, the New Year's revelers were behaving themselves. Or, at least in a way that the local authorities could handle.
With even the various superpowered of the world behaving themselves, there wasn't much for her to do except lean back, put her feet up on the desk because there was no one else here with her, and drink her coffee. She'd fairly well demolished the plate of cookies she'd been left as a gift, and between the sugar and the caffeine, she'd see midnight wide awake and slightly twitchy. As her shift wasn't over until closer to dawn, it was probably for the best.
She called this her holiday gift to SHIELD; sure, there were squads on call, but the rest of the command team got the night off to go be with their families. If they had families. Though she supposed that just because she didn't want to go back to Chicago over the holidays didn't mean that everyone in SHIELD lacked a life. But when her options were to hole up in the empty apartment she slept in or take the late watch at SHIELD, well, at least this way, she was doing some work and not just cleaning weaponry until she got bored and tired enough to go to bed.
People were all for making resolutions for the New Year, and because she was alone and the world was quiet and still - the footage of the party in Time Square notwithstanding - she wondered if she should spend the next year making an attempt at having more people in her life than just the agents she commanded.
Probably too late for that. She was a ranking officer in SHIELD: she couldn't afford friends. Even if that meant that next year would see her here again, manning the comm solo because she had nowhere else to be but at SHIELD.