"Stupid stupid stupid! And cruel! And stupid!" Coulson yelled at Fury.
While May and Daisy had been off handing Ward and Deathlock, Fury had stepped in to help Coulson in handling Garrett. After, he had given Coulson a flash drive with all of the info on project TAHITI. Coulson had been supervising it and recommended terminating it due to the side effects of the GH325 on all of the patients. But Fury still used it on him and and rewrote his memory so he would forget everything.
"Agent May was on top of it and she says you're fine." Fury shrugged.
May nodded from next to him.
"And you are. Aren't you?" He said. "It was a break glass in case of emergency kind of thing."
"Yes." Coulson answered him. "But that emergency was supposed to be the fall of an avenger."
"Exactly." Fury said, much to Coulson's shock. "And I'm damn glad I did it to. To built something you need a strong foundation. You know how few people I trust, Coulson."
"You can count them on one hand." Coulson confirmed.
"And I'm not afraid to cut fingers off. The principal SHIELD was founded on is pure."
"Protection." May said.
At the end of the day, Coulson was made Director and was given what was called a "toolbox" by Fury. He would built SHIELD from scratch. From what they had right now which was him, May, Daisy, Tripp, and hopefully FitzSimmons.
The first thing out of the box was a set of coordinates. Upon landing and opening the hangar door off the bus, Simmons was standing there.
"Is Fitz okay?" Daisy asked as they all embraced her.
"He's alive." She said but obviously still a little choked up.
"So what is this place?" May asked.
"Don't know, coordinates lead us here. They were the first things in the toolbox" Coulson answered.
"I call it the playground. Although it doesn't really have a name, being a secret base and all." What looked to be Eric Koenig appeared.
"Eric?" Daisy asked. "How are you feeling?"
"Billy! But I can understand your confusion. Eric is still recovering but he'll be here soon. If everyone would follow me please." He ushered them all forward.
Their new journey began. They now called the Playground home. It was an old SSR base Fury kept up in case of emergency. They had to start recruiting and getting things going. Hydra was still out there and a threat.
May continued on with Daisy's training, harder than ever. Daisy was needed as a field agent but as her S.O. and mother, May ran all missions with her.
That was fine with both her and Coulson, it meant they didn't have to worry about what was happening with their daughter. And there was no one in the world Coulson would trust more than May. Especially since he was off on recruiting trips a lot.
After a particularly bad mission when a man was killed and a third, bulletproof party got away with what they were after, they arrived back on base with him actually there. May marched up to his office to debrief and lecture him about being gone so long without checking in.
Because the first night they had spent in this base, he began carving. Strange, alien symbols. The same things that John Garrett carved when he had the drug injected into his system, right before he completely lost it and ended up dead. May wasn't going to let that happen. She was going to watch him and take care of him. She wasn't going to lose him, and Daisy wasn't going to lose her father.
"I said check in with me every few days, it's been two weeks." May told him.
"I know. I'm flying back out tonight. I need fo focus on recruitment. It's starting to wear me down." He answered.
"The hours?" May asked.
"The numbers." He replied.
"Daisy won't be happy."
"She has you. I'm going to see her before I go back out." He sighed. "Any progress on cloaking?"
"Like I can tell."
"Well we can't risk a take off without this guy on our ass." He pointed to the television which showed General Talbot speaking about dismantling SHIELD and Hydra.
Things at the moment were incredibly frustrating. They were being hunted and forced underground, but that meant so was Hydra. Whoever this bulletproof man was, he was likely Hydra. The man he killed was former SHIELD.
After the debriefing May sent Idaho, Hunter, and Hartley up and Daisy walked in.
"Did you take the material to the lab?" She asked her daughter. "It's top priority now."
"Yeah but I don't know what it'll get us." Daisy said slightly glumly.
"How's the mood in there?" May asked with a hand on Daisy's arm.
"It's as good as can be expected." Daisy looked down a little.
FitzSimmons was alive, thankfully. But Fitz suffered brain damage due to a severe lack of oxygen. He spent over a week in a coma and couldn't speak a word at first. Now he worked in the lab, still helpful but he had a hard time communicating and with his fine motor skills.
May decided to go to the lab herself. Daisy might be her real daughter but she thought if Fitz as a sort of surrogate son. And she was just as concerned about his condition as she would be about Daisy.
"Any update on the metal we found?" She said. She waited patiently while he searched his brain for the correct thing to say, which was that he was working on it but no.
At that moment a strange looked crossed his face, he wa staring at the metal shard they had. When May looked down she saw it turning to what looked like human flesh.
"Do you see that?" He stammered.
"Yeah I see it. It looks like blood." May said curiously. "Can you figure out who's blood?"
"That shouldn't be too hard." He said. He didn't look very confident.
"I'll stay and help anyway." May told him.
As it turned out, the DNA belonged to Carl Creel. Someone thought to be crossed off the SHIELD index, something that was done to deal with hostile candidates.
But here he was, alive and well. Because Garrett was supposed to handle it, but he had apparently recruited him for Hydra instead.
While they were discussing that problem, Coulson had put Daisy on figuring out what the alien writing was. They hadn't told her he was writing it, so as not to scare her, just to figure it out to see what it was that drove Garrett insane.
And after Coulson, May, and others that were on the mission identified Carl, Coulson went to inform Daisy.
"Hey, so I've cross referenced the writing but no one can seem to decode it." Daisy said in annoyance.
"That's not why I'm here." Coulson cut her off, "That bulletproof assassin you encountered, we know who he is."l
He handed Daisy the file.
She looked at it and then back at him.
"You want me to go down there." She said, her mood instantly changed. "Why?"
"Because the technology in play warrants it." Coulson said just as miserably.
"Copy that." She said and walked away.
Coulson sighed, he knew she was upset with him. He didn't want to send her down there either but they had no choice.
So once Agent Koenig assured her it would be safe, she went to the secure basement cell to get Hydra intel out of Ward.
"You sure about this?" May said back in Coulson's office, pacing back and forth like the mother bear she is, "Giving Ward exactly what he wants?"
They were all watching the feed from the prison cell.
"Of course he said he'd only talk to Daisy! He wants to fill her head with lies!" She stopped and crossed her arms.
"He hasn't lied yet." Coulson told her, not taking his eyes off the feed. It was true, all his intel had been helpful.
While they didn't enjoy him talking to their daughter, he did tell her that Hydra would be communicating with him through old frequencies.
Koenig did a check on them to confirm. Sure enough, there was a directive coming in and he would put out an echo request to find more Hydra agents.
"So it's true." Daisy walked in.
May and Coulson turned to look at her.
"I guess that visit was the first of many." Daisy said with an air off attitude.
"We kept Ward here for this reason. It's paying off. I know it's uncomfortable." Coulson said sympathetically.
"What is his deal?"
"I don't know, but it's giving us an inside look at Hydra's operations."
"Yeah guys, about that." Koenig chimed in.
They turned to see red dots appearing all over the screen, all indicating Hydra agents.
Talbot hadn't done anything but sent Hydra slithering back to the shadows.
And now he was in danger, the Hydra directive had ordered Creel to pick up Talbot. Coulson tried calling and reasoning with him but it didn't work, and they ended up having to fight him in public. Daisy was able to disable him, then her and May made a run for it back to the car, where two other agents brought Talbot to after disguising themselves as soldiers.
"Hi again." May pointed an icer at him.
"Dammit." Talbot huffed.
They took him back to the bus, had him stripped of his uniform, and secured him to a chair in the cage.
May, Daisy, and Koenig watched as Coulson proposed they work together with Talbot. What the General didn't know is in riling him up, he was tricked into grabbing the arms of the chair and giving them his fingerprints.
Coulson tried to convince Talbot that while he thought he had Creel secure, he had no idea what he was dealing with.
Talbot refused to help Coulson, so he had to be iced and left in a car at a remote location.
Once he woke, he used a phone they switched with his real one to call for help. But they were on the other end of the line, getting his access code.
Coulson was sending in every field operative they had to get the original 084 weapon and steal a quinjet so they could get the cloaking technology they needed for the bus. And while it was risky, it was needed.
"You taking point?" Daisy asked her mother.
She nodded. "Coulson will be on comms. Let's stick together on this one." May answered.
"You got it." Daisy confirmed.
And while the op was risky, it ended up paying off. They got a quinjet, but they lost the weapon and in a very tragic way. Hartley picked it up bare handed and it attacked her, she was unable to let go. They were on their way out and to get to a hospital when they ran into Creel. He caused the car that had Hartley, Idaho, and Hunter to wrecked horribly. Idaho and Hartley were killed, Hunter survived, and Creel took the weapon for Hydra.