Hey guys. I am so sorry it took so long for me to update. Turns out when you combine starting new courses, visiting unis left right and centre, having some kind of 3 day plague, and then bruising all the tendons in your finger making them immobilised, it really slows down the writing time. Hopefully in future I will have updates a little more regularly, but no promises.

Thank you to everyone who favourited and followed- seeing the email notifications in my inbox spurred me on to get an update up, so thanks for the guilt tripping.

OmuiYuni – Thank you I hope you enjoy this chapter too!

Guest- Thanks!

SoCaitlinVeryNerd – Seriously it's like two metres along the hall to my room. But thank you anyway and nice pun.

ErinKenobi2893 – Yep Coraline is far from home yet. PS because I am paranoid I hope that sigh wasn't a frustrated one, if it was I am sorry!

Aoi – Yay thank you. Here is more!

TortoisetheStoryteller – Haha I hadn't thought about how quickly he'd get through that, you're probably right. I'm glad you liked it

Princess PrettyPants – And finally they meet (sorta) Thanks for your review as always!

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters aside from my own OC. The rights of the other characters belong to Marvel and its affiliates.

Enjoy!

They had told him to report to Director Fury at 0800hrs. The command had been familiar to him – his body acting out the order with little resistance from his otherwise engaged mind.

He had slept poorly, not that he had expected any different. The hours had whiled away with only a few short moments of respite between closed lids. When the ringing had started from the, from his, living room, he was already wide awake and reaching for his shield.

The search for the ringing had been tense with every step being closer to the bomb, the mine, the distraction, the trap. Each footfall had been tentative - even after the second lap of the room and the ringing still persistent in his eardrums. He was only a few moments from bringing his shield down on floorboards, from smashing the slightly squeaky wood and ripping up whatever remained to find whatever it was that was beeping and trilling its way into his brain; when he looked across at the fridge in a last ditch attempt to see if one of C's yellow squares informed him of basic modern protocol on your apartment beeping, and instead found a flashing oblong object resting on his countertop.

He had gripped it in his hand before his training had even kicked in to tell him to throw it as far out the window as he could. The tired, slightly uncaring part of him had ignored the instincts quite literally running through his veins when he had spotted the slightly tacky residue he recognised as being the tactile notification that C had something to tell him. After scanning the table top and floor around it and still not seeing the message on the paper square, Steve spun until he found the offending post it note stuck to his side.

The object was still ringing, vibrating beneath his palm which would have been unnerving if not for C's accompanying note:

'Mobile Telephone – will ring and vibrate if someone is calling you. Press the green button to answer, or the red if you are feeling antisocial – C'

He smirked at this as he ran his fingers over the unfamiliar raised plastic, before doing as C suggested and pressing green.

"Captain Rogers," He winced at the volume, holding the phone away from his ear as the voice continued to talk.

"You are required at the Triquetra at 0800hrs. You will be collected from your apartment at 0730hrs. Upon arrival you must report to Director Fury."

Steve glanced at the clock: 6.00am. While the name of the S.H.I.E.L.D base had thrown him off momentarily, the memory of a blurred face in a black suit telling him the address of the distinctive triangular building sparked the route in in his mind, past all the unfamiliar buildings and straight to the glass doors he'd burst out of a few days previously. Quickly he calculated his options, before realising that the phone was still talking at him.

"Captain Rogers? Report. Did you hear me, Captain?" The voice wasn't as tinny as Steve had been expecting, but the tone of it was annoying nonetheless.

"Yes," He realised he didn't know what volume you were meant to talk at for these mobile telephones. He hadn't encountered any kind of phone much- before the war he and his ma had been trying to make ends meet as the Depression waited at their heels , and during war communications were patchy at the best of times. Pigeons were often more efficient than something that required several miles of cables just to connect, and even then the speed at which he and the Howling Commandos had progressed meant communicating was often left till after the event rather than throughout it.

"Yes, I heard you," He continued as he looked around the room for the wallet he had noted the night before. "I won't require an accompanying agent. I'll find my own way."

"That will not be necessary Captain," The voice sounded annoyed now, just slightly on the edges of its commands. " The Director has asked for you to be brought to him."

"I understand that, Agent," Steve all but snapped as he found the offending wallet and the door key he had placed under it," But I am perfectly capable of navigating three blocks without an escort. I will be in Director Fury's office should you wish to see this for yourself."

Steve took C's advice as he pressed the red button with probably a little too much force. Then he shoved the small plastic oblong into his pocket – the weight of it foreign even though he was used to pocketing bullets and grenades and far weightier things. The wallet was added and, after locking the door behind him with the hint of a scowl entwined within his eyebrows, the keys followed suite.

Steve Rogers all but marched down the New York street, dodging the first of a parade of early morning joggers as he internally screamed his frustrations at S.H.I.E.L.D and whatever they had planned for him.

aAa

Coraline had woken up with a line indented on her cheek from the steel of a nondescript table top. As she had gasped at the realisation that her slightly too squashed flat didn't come with the table she was leaning on, her mouth and throat protested and evidenced the drought apparently receding down her oesophagus to make its point.

After coughing fruitlessly to force the desert from her throat, the world and her mind cleared enough for Cora to remember just where she was, and more importantly where she was.

She knew, as she glanced around her while her breath spiked in her throat, that she wasn't finishing her museum exhibit in London, nor was she sleeping of the jetlag from the kidnapping/excursion that S.H.I.E.L.D had put her through after she had been dutifully returned home.

Instead she was in New York, America. As in the country 3000 miles from home America. The America where apparently government agencies could lock you in a room that is then guarded by gun wielding black suits in a building named after a glorified triangle.

Coraline's stomach lurched downwards to somewhere about knee height as she realised the gravity of the situation. It was roughly about the same time that she realised that after the original intake of breath, she hadn't repeated the gesture, and so now was feeling more than a little dizzy.

Shakily, she breathed out through her nose while internally she frantically tried to remember all the techniques she had had no choice but to master back in her first university degree when the panic had lurked around every corner and air in her lungs was a rarity rather than a commodity.

With eyes darting, she found what she was looking for. The corner of the room was about as enticing as anything in this unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar routine could be. As soon as she had laid eyes on it, the urge to slide down and squish herself as small as possible into the support of the walls behind her was all she could think about, all she could focus on.

Distantly, Coraline realised that this response, this banal giving in to her flight or fight instincts probably wasn't solving the problem her mind was facing.

That thought was only corroborated when she unwittingly lurched towards the blessed safety of her corner, only to remember the last detail in the night before's hazy details.

It was quite an important detail- one that sent her crashing downwards as her arms were all but wrenched from their sockets.

It was the detail that before she had been left in her locked box for the night, she had been handcuffed to the table.

"Yow," she moaned as her body twisted in a vain attempt to accommodate for her arms going in different directions and away from their sockets.

"I don't know why you need a historian to tell you what you missed," The grimacing familiar voice of her new agent buddy, Clarke, drifted to Coraline's unnatural position half on her chair and half under the table. She glared at him, knowing full well the only thing that could witness the hatred behind her eyes was the floor and doing it anyway.

"Short version, Captain: We won."

The door opened and the glare on Coraline's face turned to a grimace as she heard Clarke laugh from the doorway.

She tried to shuffle aimlessly to at least be able to shoot daggers in his direction, rather than at the carpet which really hadn't done anything other than scrape her elbows on the way down, but froze when Clarke continued and she realised his position at the doorway was not a solitary one.

"Captain Rogers, this is Coraline Quinn. She's your glorified kindergarten teacher. I'll leave you too it."

Despite the ache in her arms, Cora twisted to get a sideways look at the doorway and the departing Clarke.

A man stood in the doorway – taking up most of the frame with his sheer size alone. He was looking at her curiously – not maliciously as she was expecting but not exactly in a comforting way either.

Later, Coraline would cringe at her complete inability to match the name to the face in her history textbooks, let alone to the meeting just a few hours earlier with the Director that had seemingly gotten her in this mess in the first place. But at that point in time, with her mind still working a mile a minute without the complete amounts of oxygen needed, she instead decided that the best course of action would be to struggle to her feet.

Which was how, not two minutes into meeting Captain Steven G. Rogers, Coraline Quinn was dislocating her shoulder and swearing right at him.

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