Hi. A new chapter. A lot happens but hopefully it's still clear. Any feedback as always welcome.

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!

The grass was damp underfoot. It was early, and the dew of the July morning hadn't yet dried as the girl trudged through it. Her welly boots were slick with the dawn's moisture; her jeans collecting their own dew strands from brushing against the longer grass as she got closer to her destination. One hand was removed from her horse emblazoned fleecy jacket and a loose strand of unruly hair was tucked back behind one ear.

The girl, as dewy in age as the grass around her, looked up at the metal door buried by brambles from under her fringe. She had snuck out of the house and past the early morning farmhands with as much haste as an 8 year old wearing wellies could do. All for this: for the door in front of her and the tantalising chance of uncharacteristic disobedience it promised. After bundling her hands back into her coat sleeves, she tentatively brushed the brambles away from the door, and watched as the rusted handle emerged from the thorns…

Coraline awake groggily, her eyes blinking first to orient to the real world and then in confusion when she recalled what she was dreaming about.

She had omitted some details when telling the Captain about her one attempt at childhood rebellion. Three bones had been broken, and she had been grounded quite literally for the remainder of the summer. But she had rather downplayed the fact that the main reason for her 'grounding' was the four pins screwed into the bones in her left leg to keep them together; that if you were being pedantic it was six bones broken when not counting the fibula, tibia and patella as just one broken leg. Adding to that the broken wrist and fractured rib, not to mention the fear of loud noises, small spaces and anything dark and metal sounding that had stayed with the historian right up until a university psychologist had coaxed the terror out of her, and the dream recalling the beginning of that day was a little more than just a peculiar memory.

Coraline spent a few minutes breathing, inhaling and exhaling away the memory as she took stock of her room.

It was a little cleaner since she'd started working smarter hours. Museums weren't made for all-nighters, so she'd had most evenings following a day with Captain Rogers to herself. That had left time for organising the piles of paper that had been making their residence wherever they pleased around her bed. Speaking of…

The historian stretched, wincing at the now familiar twang in her back from the unforgiving mattress. While she may have been getting more sleep, it wasn't the most relaxing. It definitely made her envious of the good Captain's bed. She was only in his apartment for a few hours, but while organising his wardrobe she could hardly have ignored his luxurious king sized bed.

She could picture it as she collected her shower items together with her clothes for the day. Perhaps it was only the delusions of her stiff neck, but she could practically feel the softness of his duvet and the plumpness of the pillows.

As she was showering in the blissfully empty S.H.I.E.L.D changing room, she briefly allowed herself to imagine herself in that bed, while the hot water beat down on her shoulders in as close a way as she was going to get to its warmth.

For a second, Steve's body was tucked behind her generating his own source of heat, but almost as soon as that thought crept up on her, she swept it away with a shake of her head and the wonder of when Captain Rogers had turned so suddenly to Steve in her mind.

That added thought had sped up her morning routine, but not enough to stop the need to rush back to her room to grab her bag and notepad for whatever museum was on their list that day.

As she jogged out of the room, she bashed into the one box still avoiding her decluttering. She cursed and let the door slam behind her. The box hovered for a second before falling over.

aAa

8 hours later and the box was knocked into again, this time by the historian entering the room with Steve on her tail.

"You live here?" The Captain spun around as much as the confined space would allow. His apartment seemed a world away from the basement box room lit only by fluorescents.

"Oh, uh, yeah," Coraline shuffled some papers back onto her desk self-consciously. She too was thinking of Steve's apartment and how orderly it was in comparison to her own space. "Sorry it's a bit messy, I'll find the guide book and we can be out of here."

She rummaged as she spoke; only trailing off when she noticed the lack of response from the man filling all the other available space. She turned around to find the Captain with the guidebook and the beginnings of a frown.

"Come on," She attempted a chuckle, "It's not that bad."

Steve looked at her, then at the guidebook, and then again around her room. Coraline fidgeted under his glare.

"I have something I have to do," Steve's voice was cold, forceful. He seemed to notice the slight shock behind the historian's eyes and softened his tone as he met her gaze. "It won't take long. Meet at the room in ten minutes?"

Coraline nodded and accepted the guidebook thrust in her direction.

Steve turned on his heels and walked, no, marched out of the door and away down the corridor. His expression was steely, his fists clenched. Coraline wondered whether she had done something wrong as she was left in his wake.

aAa

Some rust had come off on her fingers as she had turned the handle, lifted the bolt, pushed open the door. Curiosity had dismissed the sharp dustiness of the brittle metal. The door creaked and the sound echoed down into the dark. Coraline gulped and bit her lip. It was cold and damp smelling and she could practically hear the telling off she was going to get for doing this, but at the same time this was a new place, her space and she was getting in trouble however much she explored. And if it was her secret place, she sure as hell was going to know every twist and turn.

The first footstep in was the most exciting. The 'clomp' of welly on concrete was bellowing in the otherwise silent space, but it was a brilliant kind of loud, one that made the young girl stomp her way down the tunnel with glee. As she reached the first bend, she yelled ineligible nothings into the still air, just to hear them bounce back and greet her from wherever they had been.

She had paused momentarily to extract the 'I Heart Ponies' flashlight from her jacket pocket. When the small beam of light had lit up the corridor before her, she had continued onwards, though with more tentative and a whole lot quieter footsteps.

She didn't really understand what she was looking at. Boxes were stacked, many offering just a glint of metal from inside. Papers were strewn on the floor, and many others tacked to the walls with lines and numbers that the child's brain couldn't even begin to comprehend. She backed up to move her torch beam higher but no amount of light could make the documents any more readable.

While breathing in the musty air, Coraline arched her light up to the roof of the bunker. A spider, disturbed from its twilight life by the barely there torch light skittered from its web and slightly down the wall closest to the girl.

Coraline screamed.

The scream echoed back at her, and in the shock of the sudden cacophony of noise, the girl staggered back and tripped over a crate.

She fell to the floor, the torch rolled away until its beam settled upon the now fallen crate's contents.

The dusty visor of a gas mask lit up in the darkness of the tunnel. The spider advanced further down the wall, as if curious.

Coraline screamed again.

The scream drove the spider back up the wall, and in one movement the girl dove for her flashlight and all but crawled over the crate. While staggering to her feet, she brushed a hair out of her eye. The hair came off on her fingers and stuck to them.

A spider wriggled free of the web now entangled in her fingers and scuttled up her arm.

Coraline whimpered, then squeaked, and then wailed -

Coraline's eyes snapped open. The sheets tangled around her, her hair mussed and the damp of cold sweat down her back all culminated in the groan that introduced her to a new day. There had been a gap between the dream segments, one glorious night's sleep that didn't include a trip down memory lane, but apparently that one night was all she was going to get and the dream was back.

Groggily, the historian checked the alarm clock at her bedside. Disoriented as she was, it didn't feel like 7.30am yet, and she sure as hell wasn't getting up before it.

Sure enough the blaring numbers that meant 6.05 stared back at her.

Coraline groaned again, and was just about to roll back over when she was hit by the realisation that something had snapped her from her nightmare, and whatever that something was could still be in the room.

"Ah paranoid 6.00am ideas," She muttered to herself as she wrapped her bedsheet around herself toga style and grabbed a textbook off the floor, "How I have missed you."

She made one cautious lap of her tiny room, textbook outstretched, before a knock at the door caused her to drop it with a thump.

"Coraline?" Steve's voice was muffled by the door, but even with it between them she could hear the concern in his tone. "What was that? Are you alright?"

In getting to the door, her sheet toga was tripped over and hastily rewrapped, and that stupid bloody box had its contents slid out across the floor as she all but vaulted over it to get to the door.

"Yeah I'm fine-" She opened the door to see a very awake looking Captain Rogers getting ready to kick the door down on the other side. Instinctively she raised her hands with a hastily: "Woah, stand down soldier!"

Steve backed up and shook out his arms, clearly looking the smaller woman up and down to check for grievous injury.

"I heard a crash," He started.

"I dropped a book," Coraline explained. "You startled me when you knocked."

"Right," Steve looked at his hands apologetically. Coraline wrapped her sheet around her more tightly while inwardly hoping that the very short S.H.I.E.L.D shorts and tank top weren't too scandalous for the 1940s man in front of her.

"Did you…uh…did you need something?" She looked up at him and stifled a yawn.

The Captain looked confused for a minute, before obviously remembering what he was doing outside her room at stupid o'clock and breaking into a tentative smile.

"I'm here to help you pack," He said plainly.

Coraline didn't know what to think. Steve's words echoed in her head as she tried to work out how she felt. Packing would mean leaving, and surely that could only mean going home? She could be back to her 9-5 job and small apartment and nosy neighbours. London would be familiar and dreary and probably raining all the time, but it would be rain falling on streets she knew and with people who didn't carry guns everywhere they went.

But that lovely, monotonous London would be sans one super soldier standing across from her. And as she looked at his slowly growing smile, she wondered whether that would be a good thing or not.

"Come on, say something," Steve nudged her shoulder playfully. His smile faded as he looked at her face, blank with shock.

"Anything?" His voice wavered.

"I…uh…what?" Coraline spluttered as reply.

"I had words with Fury. You can't live here with S.H.I.E.L.D breathing down your neck. Not when I'm in an apartment funded by the same organisation. It wasn't right…"

Steve faded off as he watched Coraline's face fall slightly, something she tried to hide as soon as it happened.

"They've set up an apartment for you. I helped," Steve's voice was draining of emotion as he spoke. "All your things will be shipped there this afternoon. I thought you might need help."

Coraline slowly raised her gaze to his. He looked empty, not sad or angry or pleased. Just nothing.

Quite a lot like her.

She wasn't going home. That thought hit her in the stomach in a stab of sorrow. But nor was she off on another adventure with the Captain to a museum or a park or a gallery. She had planned a trip to the zoo for the end of the week, but by the look of complete disengagement on his face that wasn't going to happen. He was stoic and stone still in front of her; all sparkle in his eye dampened; all mischief sparking around him quenched. Somehow that hurt Coraline more.

"I'm not dressed but once I am I can…" Coraline trailed off again, feeling very small under the Captain's stare.

Steve took it the wrong way. Her look of disappointment told him all he needed to know about the historian's feelings. It had been the two of them against everything else S.H.I.E.L.D could throw at them, and he had thought that the smiles, the bounce in her step, the giggling in art galleries that they had shared, that that all meant that she was here, with him, together against the world. But one mention of leaving and her heart was already half gone. And that hurt Steve Rogers like a knife in the gut.

"Sorry," He said tersely, "I am sure you can manage packing one room's worth of belongings." And then under his breath: "You have a Master's degree after all."

Coraline reeled back, towards her open door and the dream-mussed sheets beyond it.

"W-what?" She stuttered. "Where…where is this coming from?"

Steve couldn't stop himself. His head was a mess and he was replaying Bucky falling, Bucky leaving over and over.

"Don't act like you don't know."

"I don't, I really, really don't know what you're talking about. You're…you're scaring me. Are you-"Coraline reached out and placed her hand on Steve's arm. She couldn't understand why Steve was suddenly turning on her, it was so sudden, so unprovoked. It was the kind of irritability she'd thrown onto her own friend's before she'd been frogmarched to a psychologist. Her eyes widened with the beginnings of realisation.

"Captain Rogers, I don't know what I did, or if I did anything but it is alright, I am here and you are safe and –"

"Captain Rogers," Steve mocked, shrugging off Coraline's hand roughly. "Why so formal, Miss Quinn? Was the friendship just a front? Would it kill you just once to call me Steve?"

A twinge of pain shot up Coraline's arm as it was dropped from Steve's arm. The pain resonated in her mind, provoking memories of the first meeting with the man in front of her. She remembered the sling, the awkward handshake, the trip through the city a few days later. And as she watched the back of the only one she had had with her against all S.H.I.E.L.D had sent their way, she could barely fathom what had happened, on what she might have just lost.

aAa

It was dark by the time she had carried the last box up the flights of stairs to her new apartment. It was small and dingy and nothing at all like the room's she could still picture from her first 48 hours in America. But they belonged to a living legend, an illustration out of one of her history books, the man that she had befriended who had knocked on her door that morning and not answered any of her messages since.

The historian looked at the meagre pile of cardboard boxes that waited for her at the door of her building. She hadn't been in yet, feeling that as she was moving entirely on her own it would make more sense to do all the heavy lifting in one go.

Without much enthusiasm Coraline fished the door key from its place hanging around her neck. It fit into the lock easily, and the door required only a small shove before she was inside the shadows of her new home. Her very, very empty home.

Wearily, she hit the lights. And then she froze.

The light was cheap, fluorescent, an off white shade of blinding. But the room was still bathed in a warm glow.

Post it notes were stuck to everything, this time orange and with messages far longer than those she had left.

Coraline picked one up without thinking.

'Hello Cora – welcome to your new house – Steve.'

Coraline sank to the floor, clutching the note and remembering how Steve had cancelled their plans to see the Statue of Liberty the previous day. He had said he had a training exercise, and apologised with a gleam in his eye that had made Coraline start to wonder what, but he was gone before she could voice the question.

She picked up another note.

'Not too sure on cooking, but there is a box of teabags in the cupboard – something to make you feel at home – Steve.

There was a beat of silence as Coraline's mind whirred.

Then the silence was broken, as she curled in on herself and sobbed.

aAa

She was running before she even knew which way she was headed. Her flashlight was still entangled in the spider web, and she was using the smell of dew on grass and the promise of an entrance that a thin slither of light promised to find her way out, out, out.

As Coraline ran, her flailing arms knocked boxes and scattered papers. Her welly boots thudded on the floor, crunching plane schematics underfoot as she sprinted for what she hoped, what she prayed was the door.

Up one tunnel, then around a corner. She kept running, feet slapping concrete, breath catching in her throat and begging for a reveille.

She had stopped screaming, the tears that had come with the wailing drying on her cheeks as the stale air of the tunnel buffeted them. Instead she had settled for whimpers interspersed by stuttered breaths.

One more turn and she saw the brightness of the field just a few metres ahead. The thorns looked almost welcoming: reaching into the tunnel to catch on her jacket and tangle in her hair; to make sure she was out of the bunker with the spiders and the monsters and that she'd never go back.

As one welly boot brushed grass, Coraline let a sob, a proper 8 year old parent-wanting sob escape her lips. That sob muffled a sound, a good few turns below. A sound of a click. A sound of a tick. A sound of a boom.

Coraline heard it in her ears as she was thrown forward. The half of her still in the bunker's doorway hit the wall: hard.

The half that was outside forced the broken inside half out into a ragtag tumble of limbs and blood and skin.

Through one good eye, Cora looked at the dew-dipped grass flattened out around her. Vaguely, she heard a shout, and a small part of her infant mind told her to giggle because the shout was a swear word.

She started a giggle, but it hurt her chest and her head and her mouth. It turned to a hacking cough for a few seconds, and then the breathy rattle of giving in as her vision faded and she let the swishing of the grass guide her inhales.

There was another explosion that shook the ground below her. Coraline could hear it in her heart.

Boom.

aAa

She was hot. Hot and sticky and scared.

She didn't know where she was. No wait, new apartment. Argument, packing boxes, post it notes. A vague recollection of getting into bed.

Cora breathed. She was safe. No bunker. No explosions. No need to be panicking.

A drink of water would do it. The minute she had the thought she was parched. One cool glass of water coming up, she hummed in her mind.

The room spun as she propped herself up on her elbows. The room continued to spin even once the initial head rush from going from horizontal to vertical. Coraline felt weird.

A cool glass of water would do it. Had she had that thought? Maybe it was just the dream, messing with her; like it always used to.

One cool glass of water.

Coraline struggled for the bedside lamp. The room was dark, and the only thing helping to guide her way to the wonders of electric lighting was the dim glow of the digital alarm clock.

3.12am, April 29th 2012.

Apri l29th.

Coraline's breathing sped up.

She had moved into her apartment on April 18th. She knew because it was the last time she had seen Steve Rogers, and it was the small sketch he'd done of her from one of their many adventures, dated as the morning it had all gone wrong, that had waited for her on the kitchen table of her new home.

April 18th. April 29th.

Two weeks. She had been gone nearly two weeks.

Steve. That was Coraline's next thought. Where was Steve? Was he ok?

The question of whether she was ok came as an afterthought.

"I've got to get up," She mumbled. Her body agreed and she lurched forwards.

Her feet touched the carpet and then invited the rest of her to join.

She slumped forward, crumpled at the knees and wondering why it didn't hurt.

She breathed. She re-assessed.

She had been gone for almost 2 weeks. In that time, Steve Rogers could have gone anywhere, done anything, had anything happen to him. She had woken up from a nightmare she hadn't had in years. She had been disorientated, tired and unable to see straight.

And now add to that list of ever mounting panic: she couldn't feel her legs.

Coraline Quinn knew calling out for help was pointless. But that sure as hell didn't mean she didn't try.

"Help. Oh God. Somebody, please! Somebody…Steve!"

As always, please do tell me what you think of this. All opinions, good or bad, very much appreciated!