MCU fic: "if time is all I have" - General [Maria, Steve]

My story for the auexchange:

if time is all I have (4217 words) by tielan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Maria Hill/Steve Rogers, Maria Hill & Steve Rogers
Characters: Maria Hill, Steve Rogers
Additional Tags: Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier
Summary:

Maria knows what that look means. She knows the mindset behind it. She's seen it in the resolve of agents who knew the odds of going in, heard it in field operatives calling for an exit in impossible situations, witnessed it in extraction targets who didn't believe that they'd actually make it out. And sometimes the odds were defied, the impossible happened, and everyone made it out in one piece. Sometimes.

To see that expression in the man they call the Winter Soldier....

I do love my regular readers; I may not be a BNF or someone who writes what the majority of fans enjoy, but the people who enjoy my work enjoy my work and I really love when they enjoy reading what I like writing. (Even when the writing process is a PITA.)

fanfic meme: answer post the first

Answers to the fanfic meme I posted last week.

27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received? requested by beatrice_otter

I've gotten a lot of comments over the decades, and I can't actually remember which one was "the nicest". But I can tell you the ones that I love receiving and often later re-reading when I come back to a story and read the comments weeks, months, even years later.

It's always delightful to hear from people who loved the story, but particularly delightful to hear what they loved: the phrasing, the characterisation, the situation/crisis and how I resolved it.

As an example, my recent fic 'Twelve Steps' is a canon-divergence from Endgame, and quite a few of the comments mentioned that they not only loved the changes I made and the reasons I gave, but also they loved that I'd followed the logical conclusion of the events of the movie, as well as how clear it was that the characters had changed in their time apart from each other.

Those are the comments that warm my heart: where people appreciate and pick out the details that struck them, particularly when those details are ones that I took pains to include in the story.

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2. Why do you write fanfiction? requested by rmc28

Thinking all the way back to my earliest days of fanfic conceptualisation, it was usually because I wanted to see a variation on a story that wasn't contemplated in canon.

I wanted to see Leia save the galaxy and her brother. I wanted to read more about Generation X (of the X-Men comic books)'s interactions with each other and the world around them as teenagers rather than as superheroes. I wanted Sam Carter to end up with Jack O'Neill without losing her sass and her delight in technology and her duty in the military. I wanted to explore the dynamics between the characters of the Justice League cartoons both when the world's fate rested on their shoulders and when it didn't...

A lot of times, I write fanfic because I want to see a scenario about a character that I like, but who isn't well-liked by most fans, or whose fans can't write them as the character in which I see them. And yes, I have a type when it comes to fanfic characters, and yes, they're a bit like me in character (which makes it considerably easier to write tem).

And, you know, the feedback is nice. :)

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Coming up: 17, 22, 30, 3, 19, and 5.