The mention of Nazis had an immediate effect on Sharon — her curiosity sparked and she spent the rest of dinner peppering Daisy with questions about how she had tracked them down in the first place.
The three of them finished the meal, hit the gym together, and went their separate ways.
Lying awake alone in her New York apartment well past midnight, Daisy reflected that Hill had said all the right things about not being bothered — and probably believed some of them. But feelings and words weren't always the same thing, and she wasn't naive enough to think this had landed cleanly.
She wasn't backing down.
If she hadn't known, that would have been one thing. But she did know. And knowing, she had no intention of walking away from the position. She would find ways to make it right with Hill — later. Right now, the priority was keeping her hands on the wheel.
She knew Fury's read on Hill was accurate: Hill wasn't built for the top seat. What was coming — the superpowered threats, the chaos, the knives coming from every direction — would eventually eat her alive. As capable as Hill was, she was still an ordinary person trying to hold ground in a role that increasingly demanded something more. That wasn't an indictment. It was just reality.
Running S.H.I.E.L.D. required a very specific kind of person. Thick skin and the ability to smile while calculating — that was the bare minimum. You needed to negotiate with politicians without losing your temper, sell ideals to heroes without rolling your eyes, and find the leverage point with people who had none of the above. Most critically, as Fury himself had always operated: the person in that chair had to be willing to put their own survival first. Always.
By that measure, Hill fell short. By that same measure, Daisy felt entirely at home.
There was nothing more she could say out loud — not yet. Time would prove it one way or another.
She glanced at the clock. Past one in the morning. She stripped down and lowered herself into the bath, letting the warmth start unwinding the tension from her shoulders.
"Miss — are you all right?"
The door swung open. Matsumoto Maki stepped in, hair damp with sweat, clearly mid-training — then stopped short when she found Daisy already there.
She looked more carefully. Daisy's expression wasn't quite right. Hence the question.
"Oh, Maki." Daisy looked up at her. "Training is important, but you've got to give yourself recovery time."
After the Antarctic operation, Daisy had turned up some interesting documents buried in Yashida's files — including an ancient Yashida clan manual on ninja training methodology. It held no appeal for her personally, so she'd handed it straight to Maki.
The maid who had nearly been converted into a gunner had taken to the manual with ferocious dedication. She worked her day job, trained every night, and had been advancing at a rate that was genuinely impressive — in pure swordcraft alone, she had already surpassed Daisy, who freely admitted to being a three-days-on, two-days-off kind of practitioner.
In response to Daisy's concern, Maki bowed deeply.
"Take care of yourself..." Daisy's gaze drifted sideways. Maki had come to bathe, which meant she wasn't wearing anything, which meant a ninety-degree bow had a certain kind of geometry to it.
"Let me scrub your back." Maki identified a task and moved toward it.
After more than a year together, Daisy had long since stopped reacting to this sort of thing. Maki had gradually assumed responsibility for most of the practical dimensions of Daisy's life — it had just... happened, incrementally.
The makeup Daisy had worn to the Obama meeting? Maki's work. Daisy's baseline was a solid eight out of ten on her own; with Maki's touch she reached nine. Left to her own devices with a makeup bag, she was hovering around six — and that was being generous.
Maki trimmed her nails, occasionally cut her hair, handled makeup for important events, and did the aftercare too. A back scrub in the bath wasn't remotely strange by comparison.
Daisy settled at the edge of the tub, and Maki went to work.
"Miss has such beautiful skin..." she murmured as she worked, not as flattery but as a simple observation.
Daisy had noticed herself, in the mirror. Her back was genuinely something. Black Widow and Viper both had a certain magnetism that worked on virtually everyone — it came through the eyes, the posture, the precision of how they moved through a room. But in a straight comparison of exposed skin and raw physical presence, neither of them could quite match Daisy. The radical factions among both mutants and Inhumans liked to claim their kind were superior to ordinary humans. Looking at herself in the mirror, Daisy found it hard to fully disagree.
The Inhuman bloodline had rewritten her body's baseline from the cellular level up. Every blemish, every old mark — gone. The large, unbroken expanse of her back was genuinely something to look at.
Even when her skin's oil balance ran slightly off, her natural recovery corrected it within hours.
She might not know the first thing about dressing herself up — but as an unintentional visual weapon, she was more than sufficient.
The mood still wasn't quite right. Daisy thanked Maki, left her to finish her bath, wrapped herself in a robe, and went to bed.
The next few days passed with an edge of awkwardness she didn't fully shake.
Then Viper reached out: she had located Erik Killmonger — the Black Panther.
Daisy put in for leave, citing the same cover story she always used when she needed to disappear: searching for her biological parents. It held up because it was partly true — her mother was almost certainly somewhere in the Inhuman city of Attilan, probably on the moon, and Fury's reach didn't extend that far regardless of how much he might want it to. Her father, Mister Hyde, was a different situation. Fury almost certainly knew where he was. He might even be sitting in one of Fury's private holding facilities right now. But Fury wasn't saying — he was holding that card for a moment when it would be maximally useful to him.
He called it "compartmentalized asset management." It was the same logic he'd applied to keeping Bucky Barnes's identity as the Winter Soldier from Steve Rogers for twenty years. Fury trusted no one. Not even Captain America, the man with a near-perfect moral record. Daisy wasn't offended — she'd have done the same thing in his position.
She was happy to play along. If Fury wasn't talking, nobody had to deal with the awkwardness of that conversation. She arranged her expression into a look of quiet worry and left Washington for Port Madripoor.
Port Madripoor occupied a strategic junction in Southeast Asia — a city that had no counterpart in her previous life, an island settlement unlike anything she had known before.
At its center rose a mountain; at its edges fell sheer cliffs. The city divided cleanly into Hightown and Lowtown, and the gap between them was not subtle. Historically, the island had been a haven for pirates. In the present day, it served the same essential function for fugitives, intelligence operatives, and smugglers.
The island's actual governing power belonged to the Serpent Society, and its leader was Daisy's associate: Viper.
As a port city, Madripoor hosted a constant rotation of ocean freighters along its docks, and the daily population flow was staggering. Like Jerusalem, it drew operatives from every major intelligence service in the world — some exchanging information, some simply drinking in the establishments that had learned not to ask questions.
Hightown was immaculate and deliberately opulent. Every major international bank maintained a branch here. Hotels rose in clusters, polished and extravagant, the architecture borrowing from palaces and making no apologies for it.
Daisy arrived looking like a tourist — jacket tied around her waist, sunglasses on, a large backpack over her shoulders. The shield and longsword were inside it. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s logistics team had coated the metal components with anti-detection polymer, and combined with her FBI credentials, the airport security agents had stared at the weight reading on their equipment with visible skepticism before eventually waving her through.
She got her bearings and walked the main boulevard to the entrance of a hotel called the Sovereign.
No dramatic incidents. She followed the concierge's direction to a penthouse suite on the top floor, where Viper had apparently been waiting for two days.
The moment they were face to face, Viper's first order of business was to look Daisy up and down and deliver her verdict:
"You have absolutely no idea how to dress yourself. Don't they teach you to use your appearance as a weapon anymore? Has Natasha given up on you entirely?"
Daisy had spent enough time around Viper to know how this worked. A few verbal jabs cost nothing. She cheerfully confirmed that yes, she was hopeless at dressing herself, and moved on.
To illustrate her point, Viper stood and turned a slow circle.
"Take a look at the new suit. Does it or does it not have a certain appeal?"
Daisy took a sideways glance. It was the same general concept as before — a combat outfit that covered every structural weak point and left the rest largely to imagination — but with modifications. The inner thigh protection on both legs had been reduced by roughly two-thirds, leaving a generous expanse of pale skin visible, with only the remaining third of the paneling bridging down to the knee guards.