As they made their way inside, Daisy swept the room — and every person in it was a woman.
Each one dressed to impress, some of them barely dressed at all. A low, creeping unease settled in her stomach. Is every bar in Europe like this? She couldn't figure out why on earth Dr. Pym would come to a place like this.
She made a careful scan of the layout. It matched the description in the files — mostly. But some of the decoration was different from what she'd expected.
She walked up to the bar and ordered a whiskey, using the noise of the crowd to decompress from the weirdness outside, and keeping a quiet eye on the room.
Hill ordered something light and said a few words. The music swallowed them whole.
She had to lean in close to Daisy's ear to be heard at all.
Her timing was a beat off — and at exactly that moment, Daisy turned toward her to check in.
Lips met her earlobe.
Daisy went still. Hill had always projected a do-not-approach energy, and yet here she was, secretly nuzzling her ear? What was going on inside that head?
Hill went completely motionless. Lips slightly parted, she stood there for a solid ten seconds, seemingly having lost the entire thread of whatever she'd been trying to say.
Then she pressed two fingers hard to her temple, gathered herself, and said quietly: "We should split up. I'll work the room and talk to people. You check whether there are any hidden rooms or back exits."
And before Daisy could respond, she was already gone.
Finally. Daisy watched her go and let out a breath.
Then the other matter settled back in — the one she was going to have to face eventually.
Men or women? Men were off the table, full stop. She couldn't even begin to entertain it. Women… could be considered. The aesthetics were genuinely not a problem. She let her mind wander for a few seconds, then reined it back in and dropped her eyes to her tablet.
She'd barely pulled it out before a woman materialized in front of her — heavy makeup, very little left to the imagination — and said something in a tone that needed no translation.
Daisy didn't understand a word of Hungarian. She caught the aggressive wave of perfume and waved the woman off with a flat gesture. The woman withdrew, visibly unimpressed.
Weirdo. Daisy hacked into the bar's local network — found nothing useful — and shifted her search to the public-facing police database for the Budapest precinct.
She waved off two more women while she was working, growing increasingly baffled. Is everyone here this friendly?
The familiar sound of heels announced Hill's return.
"Staff say the bar's been fully booked for tonight," Hill reported, a strand of hair out of place, expression slightly more ruffled than usual. She'd also clearly had her own encounters with Budapest's warm hospitality. "Some kind of party."
"Then there's probably nothing on Pym to find here tonight. Should we head back?"
"We continue. There might be regulars."
Hill had quietly positioned herself as the decision-maker. Daisy thought it was a little presumptuous — but she also had no experience to back a counterargument, so she let it go.
The crowd was thickening, and serious hacking was no longer viable in the noise and press of people. Running an infiltration off a small tablet in a packed public space was beyond her current skill level; maybe the real pros could pull it off. She put the device away.
Sitting there doing nothing wasn't an option, either. The two of them had barely talked before — just brief professional exchanges. To fill the silence, Daisy started making small talk.
She was genuinely curious about Maria Hill. The woman who, in another timeline, had taken command of S.H.I.E.L.D. more than once — what kind of experiences shaped someone like that?
The bar shifted into warm-up mode for whatever the evening had planned. The music softened. For the first time, they didn't have to shout directly into each other's ears. They could actually sit and talk. Daisy's enhanced physiology meant alcohol was essentially irrelevant to her; Hill matched pace with the easy confidence of someone whose training had included harder things than a few drinks.
"I never got to ask — being the Director's deputy must've been relentless. What was a regular day like?" Daisy propped her elbow on the bar and leaned sideways against it, her curiosity easy and open.
What she didn't notice was how that posture turned her profile directly toward Hill. Hill's eyes moved — involuntarily, briefly — to a couple of specific points before snapping back to neutral.
"Very demanding. The Director's standards are extremely high." Hill paused. Then, as if the words cost something: "Actually… I'm not his deputy anymore. I'm in exactly the same position as the rest of you now."
Daisy blinked. That didn't line up. That was a significant deviation from what she remembered — in everything she knew, Maria Hill was Fury's most indispensable asset.
Her expression shifted. Hill read it as sympathy and gave a casual shrug.
"Honestly, it's fine. No responsibilities. Just run the missions. That works for me."
They didn't push further on work. Hill had her confidentiality principles, and Daisy was genuinely not that invested. She could talk for half an hour about the origins of the five cosmic entities. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal office politics? Not exactly riveting.
After work, the natural next topic was family.
People with good lives all seem much the same. Hardship has its own particular shapes.
Daisy's childhood was practically a textbook case of resilience — navigating a system that wasn't built to protect her, surviving by wit and sheer stubbornness. The girl who'd lived this life before her had done it with something close to grace.
Hill had grown up in Chicago. The night she was born, the wind chill had plummeted to minus forty-four degrees Celsius (around minus forty-seven Fahrenheit). Her mother had frozen to death not far from the hospital. Her father had never warmed to her — no matter how exceptional she was as a child, there was never a single word of praise. The two of them had lived like strangers in the same house.
"Honestly, your life as an orphan might not have been so terrible," Hill said. "At least you didn't have all that weight to carry."
"And I always envied people with parents," Daisy said, pitching her voice toward sympathy even if it wasn't quite genuine. "Being completely on your own is its own kind of hard."
They clinked glasses and swapped their griefs. A time-honored bonding ritual.
The truth was that hardly anyone with a genuinely good home life ended up in this line of work. Everyone carried something. They just didn't bring it up.
"I started my training at sixteen," Hill said. "I haven't had anything close to a normal life since. Every time I passed through New York it was always on the move — I never once stopped to watch how ordinary people lived." There was something genuinely wistful in her voice.
Daisy laughed under her breath. "We've each got our own problems. Trust me, ordinary people envy you. Your skills alone—" She paused. "And hey, two months ago I had a deranged old woman try to gouge my eyes out. So."
Hill's attention sharpened immediately. "What happened? Is that how you ended up at S.H.I.E.L.D.?"
Daisy shook her head. "Sort of. The old woman got away. I reported her to the NYPD. Whether she comes back for me — I honestly don't know. Coming to S.H.I.E.L.D. had some protective logic to it."