Still, Daisy had always felt that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s founding ideals were too vast, too idealistic. A rare few with exceptional moral character might hold to them for life — but intelligence organizations were built from ordinary people.
Agents who bled for the cause, came home with bodies wrecked by years of fieldwork, and got nothing to show for it — no recognition, no acknowledgment, no one who could ever know what they'd done. Maybe a pension. A quiet retirement, shoulders full of scars that couldn't be explained.
Too much sacrifice. Too little return. When enough of the rank-and-file felt that way, resentment festered — and that resentment was exactly what HYDRA had exploited to hollow S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside.
Agents with no path upward, no sense of value, no future within the organization — if S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't provide that, they'd look elsewhere. Even if "elsewhere" meant HYDRA.
Daisy suspected that was exactly how many of them had reasoned it. And she had no power to change any of it. She was nobody here — no voice at the table, no standing to push for reform. Leadership might know. They might not care. Either way, the institutional neglect of frontline agents was a fact no one wanted to face.
Coulson spent a full day on history, then led the group through the Captain America memorial gallery, narrating with obvious reverence and emotion.
Daisy could not have been less interested. If Coulson ever found out that in some parallel timeline Steve Rogers had risen as a HYDRA general, the man would probably have a breakdown.
To the people of this era, Captain America was a symbol. To Daisy, he was just a person — one she'd probably sit down to dinner with at some point. She felt nothing in particular about it.
Sharon Carter, on the other hand, was absolutely transfixed. After the session ended, she cornered Coulson with a barrage of questions about Cap's history. Two obsessive fans, united at last. Daisy watched them and felt a slow crawl of secondhand embarrassment.
On the fourth day, Natasha Romanoff — the Black Widow — came to teach hand-to-hand combat and field intelligence tradecraft.
Day five: Melinda May, close-quarters grappling and vehicle operation.
Day six: Clint Barton — Hawkeye — covering long-range weapons: bows, throwing knives, darts, and how to maximize sensory awareness in the field.
Day seven: Jasper Sitwell, recently promoted — Daisy recognized him from before — arrived to teach proper mission planning and how agents should manage their relationship with the government and the civilian population.
The elite agents taught the way they operated: direct, practical, no wasted words. It suited Daisy perfectly. She had no use for theoretical frameworks — she needed things that worked.
Though she still couldn't figure out what Fury had been drinking. Was the world so quiet right now that he could spare all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top operatives for classroom duty?
She set aside the quantum physics books and poured herself into the instructors' sessions entirely.
And then, something unexpected happened.
The student who had spent a month hovering near the bottom of every academic ranking suddenly stood out like a lighthouse when the practical combat curriculum began.
Hawkeye noticed first. Archery — she'd never picked it up. No one did, really. In the modern world, a firearm was more useful than a bow by every metric. But throwing knives and darts? Those she took to well. Bladed weapons still had their place: silent, compact, throw them from a distance without a drop of blood on your hands. For long-range targeting, it was heavily dependent on individual aptitude — and the other students couldn't touch her. Not even Hill. Not even Sharon.
She could launch a tennis ball into the air and put a knife through it nine times out of ten. Hawkeye could hit every shot with an arrow. The difference was a slightly faster nervous system — hers, courtesy of her enhancement.
May's close-quarters curriculum — Xingyiquan, Wing Chun, cross-style training with no loyalty to any single school — Daisy absorbed it all. May acted like she'd never met her, maintaining her default expression of barely-concealed displeasure, as if everyone in the room owed her ten thousand dollars. But every class, she yanked Daisy to the front to serve as the demonstration target for grappling techniques.
Their sparring became the unofficial centerpiece of each session. May's assessment: Daisy's combat instincts weren't exceptional, but they were well above average.
Everything else — marksmanship, vehicle operation, electronic infiltration — she ran laps around her classmates.
It was only then that Hill started paying real attention to Daisy in the group. Hill had known Sharon for some time, thanks to her proximity to Fury. Slowly, what had been a two-person pretend-friendship became a triangle.
"God, I can't spar with you anymore..." Sharon, blond hair disheveled, took an elbow to the stomach and spent a good minute doubled over before managing to straighten up. She reached out and felt Daisy's arm. "You don't even look that muscular. Where is all that strength coming from?"
Daisy certainly wasn't going to say: My body was upgraded once — I'm not exactly in the same category as you.
The more time passed, the clearer the dynamic became. Sharon's strength was breadth — she had exposure to everything, but depth in nothing. Daisy was the opposite: devastating in practical application, shaky in theoretical foundations. And Hill brought something different entirely — a precision that came from years beside Fury.
They pushed each other. All three felt themselves improving.
Daisy liked nearly every aspect of the elite agent curriculum. Nearly.
The exception was Natasha's undercover intelligence module. Dressing up, going in with a high slit and a smile, laughing at men's jokes to extract information — she wanted nothing to do with any of it.
If she had to get something from a target, she'd just knock him out and interrogate him. Still not talking? Start with a finger. After that, confiscate whatever he valued most. Very few people held out past that.
She wasn't the only one.
Both Sharon Carter and Maria Hill pushed back against the same module, each for their own reasons.
Sharon had grown up with a singular idol in mind — Peggy Carter, a woman who commanded respect through skill and will, not sex appeal. She wasn't prepared to compromise that image for anything.
Hill had arrived at the Academy as Fury's anointed deputy, still baffled as to why she'd been redirected here, and carrying her usual cool self-possession everywhere she went. Flirting with men on command? Not happening.
To give them practice, Natasha divided the students into male-female pairs and had them run mock seduction-and-counter-seduction drills.
What followed gave her a headache.
Sharon's attempt was at least functional — she managed to exchange a few words with her partner, even if the distance between them could've fit another person. Technically a pass.
Daisy slid one foot back into a defensive stance and somehow produced a combat knife. The overall impression was less "seduction" and more "I'm about to gut you."
Hill simply looked at her partner. He retreated.
Natasha stared at all three of them.
She'd have liked nothing more than to kick them out. She also knew she couldn't.
"Ladies," she said at last, with the weary patience of someone who had seen everything, "you have made it impossible for me to teach this class."
Daisy felt the need to be clear. "I can handle targets just fine." The implication: without any of this.
"Same." Hill, immediately.
Sharon just smiled and said nothing. Her point was made.
Natasha let it go. She had a job to do — and if her three most problematic students refused to use feminine charm as a tool, she'd just have to adjust the lesson plan.
None of them left. The infiltration and surveillance material that followed — the practical tradecraft stripped of its seduction framing — was genuinely interesting, and all three stayed for every minute of it.
Natasha knew when to adapt. The class, in the end, ran smoothly.