Sad thing was, there were probably enough epic world saving events that her agents would still get too used to cake. "Maybe we reserve them for the people who actually do shit," she said.
Which meant she wouldn't be taking a cake for herself. Not this time around. "We should have thought," she countered, still somewhere between sick and angry and grieving. Dick wasn't wrong, and he was trying to be consolatory in a way she was familiar with, showing her simple facts and empathizing, but damnit, this had still happened on her watch. Snapping at him was a way to yell at herself. She didn't even consider why it felt safe to do with him - because obviously it would just roll of his back. This was Dick, sunshine circus boy, trained by the Bat. It was impossible to imagine him hurt by the arrows of her words, however biting. "It is our fucking job to think, to know, to be better than them. To stop them. Because people die when we're wrong, when we're complacent, when they're the ones who are better. People die and the world burns no matter what fancy heroics you people do."
She had to stop and inhale a hard breath, some perilous emotion latched in her throat. People had died. The heroes of the world in masks had pulled them out of the fire, but that didn't stop SHIELD from being literally gutted. "Yeah," she said with a bitter laugh. "I bet I can guess which one. She must be over the fucking moon the agency is crippled." Because that's what this amounted to. Maybe they were still here to count up the wounded and dead, but HYDRA had torn out of her agency's underbelly, and it would be a long time before they healed, even after they finished the butcher's bill of who'd been HYDRA and who'd been merely killed by them.
Maria bristled outright at his suggestion. "Sometimes people can't know the reasons why. Sometimes they just have to do their fucking job and trust." Her shoulders jerked in a shrug, and she returned to her coffee cup. "Though as apparently we couldn't trust about half the agents not to be traitorous dicks - sorry - pieces of shit, that might be asking rather a lot." She rotated the cup in her hands, staring into it like a fortuneteller. "I don't create things," she muttered. "I don't nuture them, make them grow. I just kill."