@masqe (shiro) continued from here
“Yeah.” Maria grimaces, flexing her left hand into a fist. God, why was anyone even here in the first place? She’d waited for a middle of the night just to avoid the chance of running into anyone. Well, she’d also gotten sidetracked by paperwork, but that was neither here nor there.
At least it was Shiro? She’d already seen him at a pretty low point, so maybe this was just the universe evening the scales. Maria would have preferred it being someone that had known her for a bit longer, if she’d known that she was going to be interrupted. “—no,” she corrects herself. The numbness in her arm is disconcerting. Being off kilter like this is probably why she admits it out loud. Normally Natasha and Clint would have to practically interrogate her for Maria to admit she wasn’t one hundred percent.
“Remember last week?” She asks, mostly rhetorically. It’s hard to forget someone trying to rip up half of Central Park. It hadn’t been a terrible fight, at least compared to some of the other ones that they’ve been involved in, but Maria had gotten thrown into a tree and ended up with a branch impaled through her bicep.
That’s not terrible; it’s something that SHIELD’s medical wing can repair without much thought these days, ever since Helen Cho shared some of her tech with them. But it’s been bothering her; random muscle weakness, slow healing (sure, the doctors told her it would take two weeks, but Maria’s always been a fast healer and she doesn’t have time to not be fighting ready, just in case). Hence the late night visit to the gym, to see what she can handle. There’s rumours swirling around in Europe that have her worried, and she can’t be weak on top of it —
“My arm’s bothering me.” She says bluntly, getting up off the bench to start picking up the weights that have scattered around the room. “I got frustrated.”
