Maria Hill ~ Acting Director (shield_2ic) wrote in newalliance, @ 2016-03-14 19:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, black canary, maria hill, nightwing, red robin, talia al ghul |
Who: Maria Hill, Bruce Wayne (+OPEN to all, medical tech means you totally lived this long)
When: December 18th, 2032 [FUTURE RETRO]
Where: Stately Wayne Manor
What: It's a charity ball. Twenty years after the one where they first met.
In the waning month of 2032, Maria Hill, retired Director of SHIELD, was in a pissy mood. The ballroom of Wayne manor was warm enough, but staring at the inevitable ice sculpture - somehow timelessly elegant instead of old-fashioned - just made her bones ache, especially the knee that had been replaced with titanium after skin and bone had been torn apart by a shotgun blast entirely too close for comfort. Women who were over fifty got to wear gowns that were almost comfortable, long and elegant even in stark black and subtly crystalled cream (she might be 55 but she was still proud to have damn good shoulders), and, more importantly, sensible heels, but her feet still ached as she strolled along the perimeter of the ballroom, short glass of scotch in hand. Her cybernetic right eye - because it was apparently a requirement that the Director of SHIELD only have one real eye - gave her real-time data on the people she was facing, and kept an exit route open, traced in red. Advancing medical technology pioneered by SHIELD kept it from being obvious now, but the starburst of scars over the eye, fading into the lines carved in her face, gave her as grizzled appearance as her hair, still short though by now nearly entirely silver.
All that, and she knew she was lucky to be alive, in this ballroom; her life had been brutal, and she'd fully expected it to be short. That was the whole point of being a soldier and an agent of SHIELD; protecting the world, even at cost to her own life. She wasn't entirely sure what to do with her survival, and especially not with being pushed back from the world and life she'd always known on the grounds that her body couldn't stand that life anymore.
She wasn't officially the Director of SHIELD anymore, and no matter that everyone in SHIELD knew who they still got orders from, being off the front lines, off even the logistics of a desk, rubbed her hackles up the wrong way until she was ready to fight anyone who was stupid enough to get in her way.
And some idiot had twisted some idiot in SHIELD's arm to get her on the auction ballet as a date. If it hadn't been for the Martha Wayne Foundation, heads would have rolled. However, as she'd been going anyways, Maria hadn't found an argument in time to get out of it.
And so now, gritting her teeth, Maria set her drink aside and glared at the uniformed Foundation staffer, rushing up to her, one those sheets of glass that were tablets these days in the crook of his arm and a micro-headset curved around his jaw. The scrolling data the cybernetic eye brought up gave his name as Sebastian Hunter, 22, current residency Gotham University dorms, employed as part-time waitstaff by Vintage Catering, contracted by the Martha Wayne Foundation for this event, which all just made her feel old. "Madam Hill, please come right this way, we're about ready to start the auction."
She had to give him a steely-eyed look, but followed with as much dignity as she could muster. She had other people she wanted to peel strips from; even if he was obnoxious, he had nothing to do with this.
No, she would save her wrath for the auctioneer who introduced her as the 'ex-Director of SHIELD' and suggested that she could spend the date in question regaling the purchaser with an old spy's war stories. "I could," she said, a fierce gleam in both real and cybernetic eye. "If the stories in question weren't still classified and therefore short."