[S.H.I.E.L.D.] . Gotta Knock a Little Harder Yoko Kanno, Mai Yamane Cowboy Bebop Video | Lyrics .
What survival mechanisms that had taken him through childhood (w. abandoning mother, abusive father, foster care, running away) and adolescence (w. carny life, idol worship of Swordsman and Trick Shot, the price of their training: indoctrination to their world of petty crime and gang warfare)—Fury made clear the same mechanisms would no longer serve him in training for S.H.I.E.L.D. They had to be deconstructed, mostly shed. What kernels of strength they provided had to be come by and focused down other avenues.
Not to mention his having to tackle things he'd never had any hope of reaching, or had actively rejected, before. Study. Expand the mind. Become knowledgeable in general and in a host of eye-blurring specifics. Relearn interdependence. Cooperation. How to follow without abdicating all responsibility and judgment. How to be healthily skeptical. And how to trust. If any of it had ever come naturally to him, he'd spent a long time teaching himself the opposite. Now he had to unlearn the unlearning. The physical demands of training were nothing. It was the intellectual and psychological demands that nearly killed him.
But every time he hit a wall, he refused to stop until he'd cracked through it. Using, as it often felt as if literally, his own skull as a battering ram.