Hi again, this is a long chapter to make up for the long wait between this and the last (sorry!).

Before we begin, first a massive thank you to the writer Talk With Your Hands, who not only reviewed and followed as so many of you wonderful people have done, but also drew this fic's first ever fan art. I love it so much, and it definitely encouraged me to hurry up and finish this chapter, even if it did make me very conscious that I had to make it as perfect as possible to make it worthy of such an accolade. You can check out my or their Tumblr for the art (see my profile for the link) – and also their fics are really good so check out them too!

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!

Coraline was not a rebellious person. The explosion, the grounding after and the nightmares that had reminded her of her one moment of rebellion over and over for most of her teenage years had seen to that. After the accident she had gotten quieter and more resigned, until her parents and the farmhands had all but forgotten the girl who tinkered with machinery and jumped off haystacks while insisting she could fly.

The historian was remembering those moments though, as she pressed herself against the wall of a side corridor and watched Fury pace passed. The stolen ID card left dents in her palm as she clutched it, its surface damp with the sweat from her palms. Coraline's body was terrified, but her mind was clear in its certainty that she needed in.

She waited until the sound of Fury's boots on the floor had completely disappeared. Then she extracted herself from her hiding space and moved to stand in front of the doors to the cell room.

The doors were large and without windows. The metal looked heavier than any other door on the ship, though Coraline imagined that was more her imagination and apprehension than anything else. She paid them only a minute's peace of mind before she turned all her attention to finding the keypad, and getting closer to what was behind it.

When Bruce had briefed her on who exactly Loki was, and when they'd both received word of exactly what it was he had been doing in Germany, Coraline's interest had peaked to a level now causing this moment of craziness.

A wannabee tyrannical dictator proclaiming his superiority and forcing a smattering of German people to bow down to him: for a historian like Coraline, that was like a moth to a flame.

It is a badly disguised secret that historians want to meet dictators. Not all of them, of course, but for modern historians and war historians alike, if asked for the person they would most want to meet from the past, most of them would name a dictator. Coraline was among this number. To get into the mind of the most famous of the 19th and 20th centuries dictators and royals, to find out how the ticked and what caused them to commit the acts they did, that was as much her fantasy as any other historian she had worked with.

So, when she had heard about Loki – about what he had said and what he had done – she had felt like the 8 year old in the war bunker again, knowing what she was about to do was 100% not allowed, and doing it anyway because of her own damned curiosity.

The keypad required retina recognition.

Coraline swore under her breath. The key card that also needed to be swiped was now a useless stolen item, and she couldn't even use her own eye scan and hope to confuse the machine with it and the card of someone with higher clearance, because she was such a low clearance that an an eye scan hadn't even been done.

There was also no way to plead ignorance and knock on the door, because after seeing how easy the god behind it could manipulate loyal agents, Fury had ordered that no personnel remain inside the room. Loki was being monitored by CCTV cameras at every angle, but agents would only enter the room under orders straight from the Director.

"Dammit," Coraline reeled away from the door.

She was seething. It was dumb to get so mad - she knew that, but in equal parts she didn't care. Her situation wasn't good. Even if she was convincing herself she was coping, she was still scared and nervous and tired from sleepless nights spent worrying about where she had been for the gap in her memory. She had been behaving as agents should and doing as they do, and then there was a chance for the historian part of her – the familiar, neglected part of her personality – to shine.

A dictator – an actual, living dictator in training was behind one heavy door and the glass of a fishbowl. And she couldn't get to him.

CRUNCH.

Coraline jumped at the noise. She looked down at the keypad – now beeping incessantly where the retina scanner was mangled. Then she looked at her hand. More specifically, she looked at her fist.

Her first thought was that it was the second time she'd punched something in under a week –the first being Coulson who was (thankfully) significantly less breakable.

Her second thought, as she inspected the broken scanner, was that she definitely hadn't been taking part in any of the offered combat classes in the ship's gym, and so where the hell had she learnt to punch with such force?

Cora flexed her hand experimentally and hissed. Her knuckles were covered in small cuts from the plastic of the scanner. They stung as she moved her fist around.

"Huh," Coraline said to herself.

"Oww!" She then yelled as she slammed her fist into the nearest wall, and remembered for the second time that she hadn't taken any combat classes.

The wall next to the scanner was as smooth as it had been before she'd attempted to punch a dent into it. The scanner was in pieces.

Coraline looked from one to the other, then down at her hands. She was about to repeat the motion when she remembered why she had broken the scanner in the first place.

The door slid open as she swiped Bruce's key card.

The hiss of the metal shutting behind her covered the sound of her footsteps as she snuck into the room.

Coraline got halfway up the stairs before realising how dumb she looked. She wasn't a rebellious eight year old anymore, however much she felt like it internally. For the final few steps upwards she made a concerted effort to walk normally – less like a member of Mystery Inc when searching for monsters.

Her steady steps and laid back shoulders almost made her look confident as she climbed to the top of the steps, that was until she saw him.

He was watching her, in a way that made the historian shudder inwardly. His eyes were calculating, eyeing her up as she stepped up onto the raised platform and stared into his cell.

More than anything, Coraline wanted to turn tail and run, just like she had done from the bunker all those years ago. The cell room was the tantalising forbidden space and the god in front of her was the spider in the dark that made her run.

Last time running hadn't worked out so well for her. This time she was going to try something new.

aAa

As part of her university degree, and the masters and PhD that followed, Coraline had had to conduct interviews. Oral history was not her favourite by any stretch, but in many cases it a vital part of contextual analysis and that meant many trips to nursing homes and Legion meetings over her years of study. It also meant that she had gotten good at getting the information she needed quickly, through a simple 5 part system.

Coraline moved to directly in front of the god behind the glass, then slunk down into sitting cross-legged.

Time for Step 1 : Introductions

"Hello," She waved, and noticed the brief moment of surprise cross Loki's face before it was ironed out by the god into a look of boredom.

""My name is Coraline. I am a historian, from…uh…London."

Usually she would state her university, museum or other research position. In this case, with none of that applying, she quickly found herself improvising.

"Do you have historians where you come from? I assume you do, your society sounds far more advanced than ours and someone has to document that. I should imagine your exploits have a historian in a stuffy room somewhere tearing their hair out right about now."

It was hard to flatter a god, but when it came to oral history interviews, flattery did get you everywhere and so she had to try.

"I heard about what you have done – since getting here, I mean."

She looked up at the god on the other side of the glass, seeing if anything she had said so far had caused a response. He looked as bored as ever, but he hadn't turned away. Yet.

"I have some questions, about your ideological standpoint and individual motivations," Still nothing, so Coraline decided to change tactics.

"Normally at this point I would ask if you were free to answer some questions but you're literally just standing here, and I don't see anyone else coming to entertain you so…"

Loki bristled at this, no doubt planning all means of destruction on the woman sitting before him and gesturing around the cell room with nonchalance. Before Coraline could continue, he moved directly in front of the glass, looking down on her with malice.

Loki smiled a toothy smirk as he laughed – the noise breaking the silence sharply.

"Interesting strategy. I would have thought an agency with such prowess would have thought of something more complex than a simple ruse, but then again you Midgardians are so banal."

Coraline looked confused for a minute before her eyes widened with realisation.

"Oh no, S.H.I.E.L.D didn't send me. I don't even really work for them."

"Your uniform suggests otherwise," the prickling of his eyes on her skin multiplied as he looked her up and down.

Coraline glanced at her lap, and the ill-fitting skirt that adorned it.

"Touché," She admitted. "Honestly though, I'm not even meant to be in here. I…uh…I don't have the clearance."

"And yet here you are," Loki's attention had clearly been caught.

"Yeah, I think technically I broke in," Coraline looked sheepish as she said it, before muttering: "My fist certainly feels like I broke in."

Inside, her mind was spinning as she tried to remember the steps and work out which one she was on. The second step was usually discussing the interviewee's current situation. Discussing the weather, the quality of the scones being served or lightness of the room the interview was taking place in, worked wonders for getting the conversation started.

Here though there really wasn't anything to discuss, and so Coraline was debating this internally until realising that in all her worrying about steps, she had let her interviewee direct the conversation, and when the interviewee was a potentially psychopathic god hell-bent on destruction, she'd really rather maintain control.

"Right," She clapped her hands together as she raised her voice, " To recap, I'm not meant to be here but am, usually work as a historian but currently work for S.H.I.E.L.D, and I have some questions for you. Ready?"

Loki coked an eyebrow. Coraline ignored him .

"From an ideological standpoint, would you align with an authoritarian method of ruling."

Loki scoffed and began to turn away. Coraline glared.

"I've dealt with enough school visits at the museum to not be intimidated by 30+ teenagers, Loki. You acting like a petulant teen will do nothing to stop me, however much it might make you feel better."

"You know nothing of me or my methods," Loki snapped.

"Well yeah," Coraline replied, " That's the point of me asking you about them. Shall I phrase it differently? How about this: do you want to take over this planet?"

"I have killed more people in the last week than will have ever visited you little museum. You world will not be taken over, it will be exsanguinated."

"Exsanguinated – that's a big word for someone grossly overestimating their own prowess."

Loki bristled and moved to speak. Coraline didn't give him the opportunity.

"I am the great and powerful Loki," Coraline mimicked the god, making her voice deep and gravelly. "I am mysterious and no one can understand me, don't make me sound like a dweeb."

Internally, the sensible part of Coraline's mind was screaming at her to not annoy the powerful megalomaniac any further, for the love of God! Coraline ignored the screaming as she continued. She really hated oral history interviews.

"80 people in two days – big woop. You do realise that that number is pretty pathetic. I mean kudos for trying, you definitely ruffled some feathers and ruined some lives, but if we're talking devastation and oh, what was the word you used, oh yes that's right 'exsanguination', then you've got a long way to go yet. I mean 80 in the two days you've been here is 40 a day, but when you compare that to say, I don't know, Stalin, even with my poor maths his figure is more like 4000 a day on average."

"Your Midgardian squabbles mean nothing. Your world will know nothing of the destruction I will bring upon it."

"You mean world war?" Coraline looked up at Loki, her eyes wide. She held the pose for a second before rolling her eyes.

"There have been two of them in the last century alone. What else have you got?"

aAa

The lab was busy with the sound of instruments now on overdrive, due to the smatterings of Stark tech powering them around the room. Banner and Stark worked at their respective stations, or rather Banner worked while Stark wandered around the lab, moving things and fiddling with equipment.

The genius stopped as he reached the collection of snacks left by Coraline. He flicked an empty packet onto the floor, before snatching up a blueberry packet and grunting appreciatively.

"Are we expecting someone?" He asked as he opened the packet.

"What?" Bruce looked up from the sceptre and seemed to suddenly notice the historian's absence.

"Dr. Quinn should be here actually…" He looked around puzzled, as if Coraline could have somehow eluded them for the full time they'd been in the lab.

"She probably just went out for fresh air…why are you smiling like that?"

Stark's grin faltered for a second as he realised Banner wasn't sharing his joke, before it broke out again with full wattage.

"You don't realise…Dr. Quinn…" he paused, waiting for a response he didn't receive. "Dr Quinn… as in Colorado Belle, Medicine Woman."

Bruce stared at him. Stark blinked and then ate another handful of blueberries.

"Never mind, wrong crowd. Anything on the sceptre?"

Banner waves the scanner over the sceptre before glancing at the readings.

"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's going to take weeks to process."

Tony flicked more switches on his personal computer screen as he passed it.

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops."

"All I packed was a tooth brush," Bruce muttered.

Tony looked up at him before smiling.

"You know," he said, "You should come by Stark Towers sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it; it's candy land."

Banner managed a dry chuckle.

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke...Harlem."

Tony joined Bruce behind the sceptre as he countered:

"Well, I promise a stress free environment. No tension. No surprises."

The jab was quick, straight into Banner's side with a FZZTT.

"Ow!" Bruce exclaims as Tony looks at Banner intently.

"Dr. Banner," Steve's voice trailed in from the hallway, "Have you seen Coraline, as I can't find her…Hey, are you nuts?!"

Tony didn't look up as the Captain strode into the room, his face stormy.

"Jury's out. Nothing?" He turned to Banner instead.

"You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"

"Is everything a joke to you?" Steve accused.

Tony shrugged his fury off with ease: "Funny things are."

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny."

Realising his tone, Steve turned to Banner, "No offense, doctor."

Banner waved him off.

"No, it's alright. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things."

"You're tiptoeing, big man," Tony crowed. "You need to strut."

"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr Stark," Steve interjected.

"You think I'm not? Why did Fury call us and why now? Why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables."

As much as he didn't want to associate this man currently rubbing him the wrong way with mirth, and the historian currently unaccounted for somewhere on board, Steve couldn't help hear Coraline asking very similar questions as the one Stark was posing. He didn't want to admit that the egotistical engineer in front of him had a point, but Coraline's disappearance, and her won confusion about what had happened during it made him falter.

"You think Fury's hiding something?" Steve's curiosity won over his sense of loyalty momentarily.

Tony's response confirmed to the Captain that he and the historian were on the same page indeed.

"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets… It's bugging him too, isn't it?

Banner looked up on realising the conversation had been swayed back to him. His answer was nervous, as if he was trying to think of a way back from the potentially dangerous road he was heading down, even as he spoke the words.

"Uh...I just want to finish my work here and..."

"Doctor?" Steve prompted.

Banner paused, before sighing and conceding to his own internal doubts.

"'A warm light for all mankind, Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."

"I heard it," Steve said cautiously.

"Well, I think that was meant for you." Banner pointed at Tony and was offered a blueberry in response. He took one before continuing.

"Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"The Stark Tower? That big ugly -" On remembering who he was standing opposite Steve toned it down "- building in New York?

Bruce nodded, "It's powered by Stark Reactors: a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?"

"That's just a prototype," Tony muttered, before clearly not resisting the urge to brag and turning to Steve.

"I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now.

Banner ignored him as he continued with his point.

"So, why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project? I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"

"I should probably look into that," Tony crossed over to a different screen, and then fiddled with his phone, "Once my decryption programmer finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files.

Steve couldn't hide his shock this time.

"I'm sorry, did you say...?"

Tony seemed to revel in the Captain's aghast expression.

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge. In a few hours we'll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide…Blueberry?"

Steve scoffed. "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around?"

Tony didn't rise to the bait, merely stating:

"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome."

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up," Steve wouldn't be deterred. "This is a man who means to start a war, and if don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders, we should follow them."

Tony looked at Steve for a minute, before turning to the flat screen behind him, which was flashing.

"Following is not really my style," he commented as he tapped the screen curiously.

"And you're all about style, aren't you?" Steve scoffed.

Tony stiffened for a millisecond before turning back to the captain.

"Of the people in this room, which one is; A) wearing a spangly outfit, and B) not of use?"

Bruce looked up from the sceptre as he felt the atmosphere in the room shift. The captain and the billionaire faced off: Rogers' eyes steely, Stark's filled with a practiced nonchalance. The physicist was about to intervene, if only to end the tension before it could grow further. The beeping of the screen beat him to it.

Tony broke eye contact to look at the screen, and after expanding a part of the data, hummed in interest.

"Speaking of style, following is clearly not hers either."

He tapped another button and the blue of the screen was replaced by a black and white CCTV feed. Both Steve and Bruce recognised the glass cell and the god inside it. But it was only as Tony pointed at the figure sitting cross legged in front of the glass that both men realised they recognised them too.

"Cora?" Steve said at the same time that Bruce said: "Dr. Quinn?"

"Wait, this is Dr. Quinn?" Tony fiddled with the screen until the recognisable croon of Loki's voice flooded the lab.

"You seem nervous, Midgardian. Where are your words and over confident sneers now?"

The scientists and Steve watched as on the screen, Coraline stood and looked around. She looked small, and even through the screen the slight shaking of her hands could clearly be seen.

"Don't flatter yourself. I'm just very conscious that by now someone will probably have realised that I am not where I am supposed to be."

"You fear the wrath of your superiors over mine?" Loki followed Coraline's movements with the look of a predator following its prey. He watched as the historian scanned the room, and narrowed his eyes as she turned back to him and made eye contact.

"Of course I do. So far all you've shown to be is a wannabee dictator with no concept of math. At least Fury can estimate amounts."

From the other side of the camera, Steve gaped in disbelief. The Coraline he saw on the screen was nothing like the one he had left in the corridor a few floors up, let alone the woman he had come to know before this mess had started. Where there had been confusion, now there was confidence. Where there had been fear, there was now a fiery determination that was standing up to a god. As much as Steve could admire this newfound strength, it did nothing to ease the twist in his gut that wrenched with every reminder that she was in a room, alone and currently antagonising a megalomaniac.

"Oh, I like her," Tony chuckled as he surreptitiously searched the historian's name through S.H.I.E.L.D's database.

"With timing in mind then," Coraline continued on the screen, "I figured we'd talk about the long term."

"Your species need not concern yourself with that," Loki interjected.

"Sure, sure, you're gonna wipe us all out. But then where will the corn come from?"

"What?"

"Well, you've got an army, right?" Coraline explained slowly. "No one tries to take over without an army. But if you destroy all of us, who's going to feed your army? Where will they live? Your hat may look like a goat but I can hardly imagine you tending livestock. Unless they maybe don't need to eat, but I mean who doesn't need to eat, it's not as if soldiers run on some universal battery or something."

"Silence," Loki snapped. Coraline stopped her ramble with a gasp. "Your incessant chatter is beyond irksome. The needs of my army are not of my concern just as they are not of yours. Whatever means they require will be subservient to my needs of them."

Coraline bit her lip as she tried to work out work she was missing. She looked the god up and down, before snapping her fingers in realisation.

"They're not your army, are they? That's why you don't know about their needs. You've borrowed them off someone."

"I. Do. Not. Borrow."

"Well you can't have taken them, that'd be ridiculously stupid. Trying to force an entire population to fight for you always ends badly. It's a textbook stupid leader mad on power mistake to make. Literally never works, and even with you I'd have thought that would have been a bit too far on the idiot scale."

Coraline began to pace, her hands gesticulating as she exaggerated her thinking process.

"So you don't borrow, can't be stupid enough to take, so that lead only one thing."

She turned back to the god behind the glass and stood tall with her arms crossed.

The room was as silent as it had been since Coraline had entered, but for the men watching her on the screen, the quiet reached new depths, before it was broken by the historian raising one eyebrow and stating:

"You made a deal."

aAa

"What is she doing?" Steve barked the question more like an order as he watched Loki and Coraline face off.

"Stalling, maybe?" Bruce offered.

"Nope," Tony didn't look up from his phone.

"'Nope'?" Steve turned to him, his voice terse.

"She's too smart for that. She'll have a plan, if these test scores are anything to go by."

Stark showed his phone to Banner, who's eyes widened slightly in response. The genius snatched the phone back before Steve could look at it, but the captain's quick eyes still caught sight of the now familiar S.H.I.E.L.D logo and the bold font proclaiming the document as: PRIVATE.

"Is that her file?" Steve snapped.

"Uhh, yes," Stark looked at him blankly. "I feel we're going in circles here. Decryption programmer, secure files, accessing to find out what's going on…"

"That is private," The captain bit off from between gritted teeth.

"Well you don't have to read it," Stark quipped back. And then more to himself: "That's an awful lot of redacted information for a temporary consultant."

Inwardly, Steve wanted nothing more than to grab the phone from Stark – or demand that he finish the decryption and then hand it over, if only to catch some of the answers Coraline had been chasing about herself.

Outwardly though, he was too busy looking up as a screeching alarm began to drone over the lab and hallways beyond. Lights swung down to bathe the lab in a red hue, while the screen previously showing Coraline flashed instead to black with the phrase 'CELL BREACH', emblazoned in red bold print.

In the cell itself, Coraline flinched as the sirens started. Loki noticed this, and leered.

"Time to flee, I should think," He commented.

"Yeah, good plan. First though, please tell me the deal you made was good."

Coraline forced herself to stop looking around, and focus on the god instead. Up close, and especially on mentioning the deal, the god looked almost sickly – standing rigidly but also refusing to make eye contact.

"Oh no," Coraline said softly as she watched him. "You didn't, did you? You made a bad deal."

Loki remained silent.

"Deals rarely work. Hitler and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Hitler and pretty much anywhere really. Even the Allies had some issues with deals, especially after the war ended. Most of the time they fall through, or get changed, or somewhere down the line someone brings the deal back out to force a hand. But deals, they work even less when they're badly made."

The god continued to remain stoic. Coraline wrung her hands as she vocalised her thought process in the hopes it would take her less time to find an answer.

"Bad deals get made a number of ways, usually with lying but as much as I've mocked your intelligence, I'm sure you'd notice if you were being lied to so it can't have been that. Sometimes leaders make bad deals because it looks like it will help their country, but you don't really seem like a nationalist – very much a loose cannon – so it can't be that either. So…"

And she paused at this as she looked up and down at the stiffly standing god, and then winced in realisation and pity.

"So you were forced, weren't you? Forced to take a bad deal because it was better than the alternative. Oh you poor, poor man."

Loki was taken back by the woman's response. Though she had mocked him, only fuelling the anger pooling within him, now she was sincere, and she was sorry. Her eyes were clear with understanding, and it made him swallow the snapping response he had lined up. Whoever this Midgardian was, she was sympathising with him. She was either weaker or stronger than he had estimated, but as they stood, staring at each other, both in a new light, he doubted either knew quite which it was.

Shouting from outside the holding cell doors forced Coraline to turn first, and with it the prickling feeling of Loki's gaze on her skin was renewed.

She didn't give him a final glance as she made for the exit. If she had done, she would have seen the open curiosity in his face fade to a calculated stare.

As she snuck out of the door and off down the hallway, she didn't hear his laugh, or see his smile, or sense the changing danger in the air.

Once again folks, please do tell me what you think of this. All opinions, good or bad, very much appreciated! Also in terms of the changing character perspectives, do you guys find that jarring or have I got the balance right?

Anonymouscsifan: I'm glad you like the relationship between Bruce and Coraline, I initially didn't think it would be that major a part of the plot but actually I really enjoyed writing them so may add it more in the future! Hope you liked the update, and the Loki – Cora conversation.

Thanks again, for all the support!