Who: Maria Hill and Phil Coulson When: Wednesday, 5/9 (backdate) Where: Phil's NYC apartment What: Maria and Coulson talk business...more or less. Rating: Safe for work. But language
Maria didn't know an agent who wasn't glad to get back from Gotham and thankful that they were in one piece. She did what she'd said she would and set the Helicarrier to hover over the New York harbor, and worked her way through her paperwork - they needed to recruit more aircraft handlers for the flight deck, which means she needed to connect with the Naval aircraft carriers and pick her way through the Able Seamen.
The more she buried herself in her paperwork and thought about nothing but the details of what it meant to run a flying aircraft carrier - and one that dwarfed the USS George Washington or Nimitz - the less she thought about the agents she got hurt. Specifically, the agent who'd most recently been hurt in Gotham, and she couldn't shake the nagging feeling that if they'd gone to dinner Saturday, he wouldn't have been in Gotham to get hurt.
She knew it was complete bullshit: he would have gotten hurt anyways, because it was their job to go into danger. He'd done everything right. Gotham just had a habit of churning out criminals who were both insane and loved explosives.
As she promised, they were going to have dinner; she was just going to cover her bets and make this a bit of a working supper. It wasn't a date, so she didn't need to worry about it being a date, but it was still not a formal meeting on the Helicarrier, but she'd already been to his apartment so it wasn't new territory that made her jumpy.
She was still going to lecture him on taking his goddamn meds and medical leave, and had some excellent points lined up. She also had a bag of Chinese take out and had mostly shoved down all the unhappy jitters in her gut - yes, she was unhappy, but she'd just had an agent hurt. Natural. She never reacted well to people being hurt under her watch, either in the Marines or in SHIELD. If she could help by feeding him, well, it wasn't stupidly female, it was practical: he'd offered her dinner and all.
Pounding on the door, she shifted her weight before settling into something close kin to parade rest - well, hell, she was in fatigues and a black tank under a leather jacket, a weird mix of uniform and casual.