It took Daisy a little while to locate Blonsky. He was half-buried under hardened lava, unconscious and badly wounded—and even in that state, he hadn't reverted from his transformed state. The grotesque, monstrous shape remained.
They strapped him beneath the jet and flew back to the Pentagon.
His massive frame and horrifying appearance drew stares from every soldier they passed. The man already ran hot at the best of times; after being coated in lava, he looked like something fresh out of an oven. The heat radiating off him was simply too intense—the soldiers assigned to take him into custody and the lab personnel waiting to slice Blonsky open were all at a loss for what to do.
"Banner! Banner! — Wait, who the heck is this?"
When Betty saw that they'd captured a giant who wasn't moving, she came rushing over, eyes red and swollen from crying, ready to plant a kiss on what she thought was her green-skinned disaster of a boyfriend—only to find a stranger lying on the ground.
Meanwhile, a cluster of military specialists huddled together, debating in hushed tones about how to contain Blonsky. The monitors confirmed he was still breathing, though barely.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had no formal chain-of-command relationship with the Department of Defense—which side outranked the other had never been clearly established. This whole operation had been a favor, and a five-and-a-half-billion-dollar favor at that.
They set Blonsky down, declared their end of the mission complete, and didn't bother deplaning. They turned around and headed straight back to headquarters.
The aftermath took time to unfold. Over the next two weeks, Daisy picked up fragments of news from various sources, and what she learned was nothing short of a political firestorm.
She still had no idea what cards General Ross had played—but somehow the old man had walked away clean.
Which made it all the more jarring when she spotted him at one of Obama's campaign dinners.
"Don't look so surprised, Miss Johnson." General Ross was not in uniform tonight. He'd traded the medals and brass for a suit and tie, his hands in his pockets. The sharp, commanding edge he usually carried had softened into something more measured, even refined. "The world doesn't know about your powers, and you don't know my hidden cards."
Daisy had only recently started navigating political circles, but she was quick. She chose her words carefully.
"You've left the military. You're going into politics, aren't you?" The suit at an Obama fundraiser made the answer obvious.
Ross let out a long breath. "I gave forty years to the Army. Most of my life. I honestly don't know if I can start over without a uniform."
Daisy didn't believe a word of it. A man who'd maneuvered out of what should have been a career-ending disaster had connections deeper than anyone would guess. The line between military and politics had never really existed—this was just a title change. Nothing about it was starting from zero.
She raised her glass. "Well, congratulations are in order. I'm sure the candidate will find the right role for you. Let me guess—Secretary of Defense seems too on-the-nose. Secretary of State?"
She was thinking of Civil War—in her memory, Ross had been Secretary of State when he'd pushed the Superhero Registration Act. She just hadn't expected him to be a Democrat.
They clinked glasses lightly. Ross leaned in and lowered his voice. "Banner is still under your organization's watch, I assume. Pass a message to Nick Fury for me: I don't care what plans you have—keep that monster away from my daughter."
The conversation ended quickly. That evening, Daisy mentioned it to Fury, who said he'd noted it and hung up.
She went back to digging through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal files. That's where she found the official story Ross had used to walk free.
The tectonic event at Culpeper—and the lava eruption that followed—had become his get-out-of-jail-free card. Working both overt and covert channels with a deftness that left Daisy genuinely impressed, he'd managed to redirect all blame onto a natural disaster. In both the government and military reports, the official cause of the Pentagon's collapse, the deaths of hundreds of soldiers, and the civilian casualties numbering in the thousands was listed simply as: an act of God.
Culpeper had been buried under lava for half a month. The smoke hadn't fully cleared. Survivors were told by an army of psychologists that the giants they'd seen were stress-induced hallucinations—the product of panic and darkness. By the time the dust settled, even the witnesses weren't certain what they'd actually seen.
Every journalist who'd gotten eyes on the scene worked for one of a handful of major media conglomerates. All of them had been silenced. The soldiers, too.
Online, the theories multiplied: alien invasion, a Russian superweapon, terrorist organizations claiming responsibility for the "Culpeper Incident." The noise buried the truth completely.
By the time the public was demanding answers from the earthquake bureau, Ross had already shed enough of the blame to walk away—at the cost of his uniform, and nothing more.
His military network remained fully intact. If anything, his move into government gave him more room to maneuver. He introduced his daughter to Air Force Brigadier General Talbot, clearly grooming the rising officer to carry his influence within the military going forward.
The old general's contingency plans came one after another. Daisy could only admire them. In his position, facing what he'd faced, her only option would have been to defect.
Culpeper became a talking point that neither party's candidates could stop referencing.
She watched Obama on stage, voice rising as he called for early-warning systems, accountability for the USGS, and funding to rebuild Culpeper. The crowd roared with applause.
As a key member of the campaign staff, Daisy and Ross stood not far away, clapping along with everyone else. To any observer, they looked perfectly unremarkable—two people with nothing to hide and nothing to do with any of it.
Three months of intermittent work. That's what it had taken.
From the initial decision to purchase it all the way through installation, the supercomputer housed in the basement of Daisy's Long Island estate was finally online.
The first two payment installments had been waived. The third wouldn't be due until a full year of operation had passed—which meant Daisy had essentially received a supercomputer for free. She was thrilled.
Her machine ranked seventh fastest in the world. She named it Ideal.
It would carry her ambitions—and help her reach the top.
She called all her staff and her "pets" back to celebrate.
"What does this big thing actually do?" Lorna asked. She carried herself with a bit more refinement these days, though the wildness in her eyes still flickered through occasionally.
What could a supercomputer do? The list was nearly endless—studying her own Inhuman genome, calculating interstellar distances, decrypting the Ring's login data, and dozens of other things—but Daisy realized, in that moment, that she couldn't say any of that out loud to Lorna.
"It can... build a training facility," she managed, after a long pause. "To help develop your abilities."
That much, at least, was true. She'd build her own Danger Room simulation—all the underlying data was already on hand.
"You bought all this just for me?" Lorna looked genuinely stunned. Those forty-odd "refrigerators" clearly hadn't come cheap.