She wasn't the broke newcomer she'd been when she first arrived. Daisy had a little money now, and over the Christmas holiday she'd sent James Wesley off to set up a private training facility — top-of-the-line equipment, no exceptions.
After four months of intermittent shooting, the Jurassic Park production had wrapped completely.
The actors went their separate ways. Field operatives returned to their assignments. The research team buried themselves in their projects. Mr. Ward kept doing whatever spies do. Daisy, meanwhile, had to oversee the CGI team's work, and then spend weeks in the editing room with both directors.
Mornings were for studying. Afternoons for work. Evenings for brutal training sessions — and occasional, very discreet stress relief with Hill.
After grinding through it for over a month, the film was officially declared finished.
Normally, a production would pivot straight into a promotional tour — cast and crew flying around the world like circus performers, talking to every camera that would have them. That wasn't a problem for this team. Nobody on earth knew who they were.
For the major powers, Daisy personally made the rounds under SHIELD's banner, leveraging the organization's authority to open doors. Smaller nations just got a memo.
The message, stripped down to its essence: Watch it or don't. Your call.
The major powers weren't quite sure what had gotten into SHIELD — since when did spy agencies make movies? — but they played along. Word came down from the top, and theater owners across their respective countries quietly received the message: This film has powerful people behind it. Just screen it, and don't ask questions.
Almost overnight, multiplex chains were offering the new film some of their best time slots.
With a large chunk of the marketing budget having mysteriously vanished into certain pockets, it was something of a miracle that anticipation for the film was as strong as it was.
Standard pre-release rituals — press screenings, critic invitations, advance junkets — were skipped entirely. As film industry insiders began muttering about the production's lack of professionalism, Daisy simply waved them off. Nationwide release. Go.
Audiences, puzzled by the film's unusual rollout, walked in driven by sheer curiosity.
But context is everything. This world was different, this era was different. A classic from another universe wasn't guaranteed to land as a classic here. Daisy wanted to see the public's reaction for herself.
"Hah—" She exhaled slowly in the private training room, set down the barbell, and grabbed her towel.
Nearly a year had passed since she'd manifested her powers. Months of intense, high-volume training had produced real results across the board: raw strength pushing past 800 pounds, peak burst speed no less than 435 mph (700 km/h), and a recovery rate that blew past normal human limits — but that seemed to be the ceiling. Breaking through to the next level wasn't something she could grind her way into anymore. Sheer repetition had stopped moving the needle.
A rhythmic clang, clang rang out from the far side of the room. Her best friend Hill was working the salmon ladder — dressed in a sports tank top, toned midsection exposed, both hands gripping the horizontal bar, hauling herself rung by rung with the full force of her body.
Daisy watched her for a while. When Hill finally dropped down, she held out the towel.
"Want me to work out the knots?" she offered, with a smile that implied more than the question asked.
"Go change. The movie's about to start." Hill didn't take the bait. She steered Daisy toward the locker room, then went to clean up herself.
Afterward, they changed into civilian clothes — sunglasses, baseball caps — climbed into a car, and headed for a theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Daisy had watched the film hundreds of times between production and editing. The novelty had long since worn off. She just wanted to read the audience. Hill, on the other hand, was genuinely curious — curious about whether Daisy's film was actually any good, or whether it was something you politely sat through and never mentioned again.
Outside the theater entrance, Hill suddenly spotted someone.
"Isn't that one of the leads?" she asked, pointing across the courtyard.
Daisy was mildly puzzled. Among the SHIELD personnel, Hill was the only one attending for personal reasons — because she actually cared about Daisy's work. Everyone else had caught an internal screening and moved on.
She hadn't expected any of the cast to show up at a public theater.
She followed Hill's gaze — and broke into a grin.
It was a cast member, alright. A minor one: Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, apparently running into each other by coincidence.
Peter had a friend in tow. Gwen had another girl beside her. It looked like they'd each come with a friend, and bumped into each other at the entrance.
Their social strategy, Daisy noticed, was remarkably similar to her own younger years: find a friend who makes you look better by comparison.
Neither she nor Hill had any intention of flagging the kids down. Their relationship wasn't something they put on display, and Daisy especially didn't trust Peter to keep his mouth shut. He wasn't Spider-Man yet — hadn't gotten there — but the boy had always run hot at the mouth. How bad depended on how comfortable he felt and how nervous he was. Right now she wasn't willing to find out.
They entered through a side access route. Whether four kids who were clearly underage managed to talk their way past the ticket counter was not their concern.
The film began shortly after. The Sky Pictures logo appeared on screen before a public audience for the first time.
"Stop eating." Hill reached over and tapped Daisy on the arm. "Have you thought about what you want to do after this?"
Hill was dressed in a fitted skirt and heels, legs crossed, watching her companion demolish a bucket of popcorn — which was already gone — and wash it down with a full bottle of cola, and they were only ten minutes in.
Daisy blinked. "Do after this?"
"After all of this. You're not an agent yet. Have you ever thought about going back to a normal life?"
There was something unreadable in Hill's expression.
Normal life. Daisy's mental response was immediate: absolutely not. Her plans had no such option. She still had a Tesseract to find.
She shook her head, then remembered it was dark in the theater and Hill probably couldn't see her. "SHIELD's been good to me," she said quietly. "There's something here for me..."
"Like what?"
Daisy considered saying a cosmic energy cube and discarded that immediately. And the sentimental version — she couldn't make herself say it. She scratched her cheek. "Family."
Hill had been steadily reminding herself that what existed between them was a slightly out-of-bounds friendship. But hearing that word, she felt something warm stir anyway. She promptly reasserted her priorities — career first, relationships second, they were friends, nothing more — for the record.
Daisy gave a series of appropriately noncommittal affirmatives to signal that she understood completely.
By the midpoint of the film, the audience's initial curiosity had deepened into genuine engagement. People had stopped watching and started feeling — unconsciously placing themselves in the story alongside the leads.
On screen: the hero struggled to climb an electric fence alongside two terrified children, while on the other side of the island, the heroine raced to restore power to the grid.
The audience was hooked. Logically, everyone knew the protagonists wouldn't die. But watching the countdown tick toward the fence reactivating, watching each switch come on one by one — the tension was almost unbearable.
The script, mercifully, didn't go full tragedy. The hero got both kids over the fence just in time — well, one of them. The boy hesitated too long, and the current knocked him off. He was reached in time. He woke up.
The whole theater exhaled.
Even Hill had been pulled in. She murmured, almost to herself: "If that happened on a real operation — if you didn't know, and your teammate died because of it — what would you do?"