A new update, and though there was a wait between them ( as per usual) I feel like the length of this one should make up for it, if not for the fact that it is finally 'secrets revealed' time.
17 Word pages later and hopefully you will all be satisfied with what I have been working towards up until this point. This chapter is a turning point in many respects for Cora's character and the plot going forward, so hopefully it is to all of your likings and you don't get too mad at the brief history interlude you have to work through first!
Many thanks to all that have reviewed, favourited, followed etc since the last update. I am going to make my best effort to reply to you all tomorrow, so chapter 21 reviews will get a response more swiftly than in normal scheduled programming if you review before then ( hint hint). For those of you who haven't received a reply from me before, I tend to write them when I am next uploading a chapter so there is something of a delay period in responses.
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!
aAa
4th July 1995: Cambridgeshire, UK.
Marcus Quinn cursed as his most recent Styrofoam coffee cup succeeded in its beside table space jostling, sending its empty predecessors to the linoleum floor below.
Too many cups of coffee. Too many sleepless nights to necessitate them.
Across the room his wife stirred from a cricked-neck attempt at snoozing. They had been grateful for the camp bed at first; it made it easier to rotate shifts so that neither had to spend every moment awake and waiting. Now though, nearing two weeks in, the comfort of closeness felt on the first days was shifting to an unease of worrying that this would become the new normal.
Coraline hadn't woken up.
They hadn't been expecting it, not at first. Those first days, the worst days, they had been thankful enough that she was breathing (even with help from a tube down her throat). They had spent hours then, watching the machines and trusting their promises of stability more than anything the doctors were saying.
After a week though, the dread had started to collect in the corners of the room.
The scans, so positive at first, were beginning to sour. The breaks were more serious, the planned open reduction and internal fixation couldn't guarantee the stability it had first promised. The damage to her rib, though not severe in itself, was threatening the integrity of her left lung. The broken arm was a minor issue, but the brain damage sustained by the blast force was potentially more serious. All of it was dependent on waiting. None of it sounded like the quick fix the Quinn family had first been presented with.
By the beginning of week two, their daughter had her name placed within the same sentence as 'hospice'.
They had clutched her extra tight that night. For the most part they had tried to remain positive while in her room, just in case she really could hear them beneath the spider web of wires, but on that evening Marcus had let his wife sob. It didn't seem to make much of a difference anyhow.
"Cora?" Penelope Quinn's voice cracked in the hospital air. Everything was dry here. Dry and sterile and growing staler by the day.
"It was nothing, Pen," Marcus hushed her. "I just dropped the cups."
"Oh…I thought…"
Penny didn't finish her sentence.
"I know, pet," Marcus abandoned his efforts to stomach another cup of the liquid nothingness the canteen called coffee and crossed to his wife, open armed.
"Mr and Mrs Quinn," A voice interrupted them from the doorway.
Both turned with trepidation. Somewhere in the latter half of the second week they had gone from 'Cora's Mummy and Daddy' to the names you'd use if you were giving condolences. Despite the fact that their daughter was right there in front of them, every conversation starting in that way raised the hairs on their necks.
"Yes," Marcus sighed as he looked up.
It wasn't a doctor in the doorway.
Instead of scrubs and Janus-faced smiles, the woman at the door was unapologetically plain. Her outfit was work appropriate but not showy, and her expression was devoid of either false hope or unbridled pessimism.
But despite her refreshing appearance, she still wasn't a doctor.
"What do you want?" Marcus' voice was gruff, surprising his wife at his side.
"I'm here to talk about your daughter," The woman responded calmly. Her accent was crisp, but still British. Penny couldn't help but think that is contained a depth far beyond the simple authority her suit gave her.
"Whatever it is you have to say, I don't want to hear it."
"Marcus!" Penny turned to look properly at her husband and found him bristling.
"They're going to say it was her fault, Pen, as if they shouldn't have cleared the bunkers when the war was over instead of messing around in European politics."
Penny went to pacify her husband but he hadn't finished as he directed his attention back to the woman in the doorway.
"You're from the government aren't you? Or the police or Ministry of Defence or something. Well you ain't getting anything from us, from our little girl. Maybe she shouldn't have wandered off but you sure as hell should have bloody well done your job to make it safe for her to play wherever she wants. Treating the bloody English countryside like a bloody minefield, as if we hadn't won the War and all the bloody others that followed it. If anything we should be accosting you, you miserable bags of-"
"I'm not here to blame your daughter," The woman cut him off before Penny could.
"Then we'd appreciate it if you would leave us alone," Penny responded tiredly, her attention already back to the beeps and whistles of the machines by her child.
"Mrs Quinn, I am offering to save her."
Penny could only gasp. Marcus on the other hand…
"Get out."
"Mr Quinn, I don't think you heard me, I can-"
"I heard you. Now get out. We don't need any more of your pandering…we've had enough false hope."
Marcus's voice caught then and he looked down in an attempt at regaining composure.
"I don't intend to bring you false hope, Mr Quinn. Your daughter's injuries are severe. If she wakes up she will likely lose the use of her legs and risks brain damage to an extent the doctors here cannot fully predict. I would not bring you any element of hope if I didn't know the severity of your situation, and my ability to do something about it."
Penny crossed the room to her daughter's bedside, taking her limp hand between her own as she did every time a doctor asked for another sample or another scan.
"Who exactly are you?" She said softly as she watched her daughter sleep on.
"I'm with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
"That's a whole lot of words without saying anything," Marcus retorted gruffly.
"We are an agency, tasked with a duty of care to the planet in the face of…unprecedented challenges. Much of what we do is classified Mr Quinn, so I am afraid I cannot be as direct with you as I am sure we would both appreciate. What I can say though is that we were partially responsible for what happened to Coraline, and we wish to rectify this situation."
"This situation," Marcus hissed, "Is my little girl's life getting blown to dust because of whatever mistake you made. I don't care who you are, you did this," He gestures wildly before a sob forces him into the nearest chair. "You did this."
The woman sighed as she surveyed both parents.
"I…I have children too. I daren't imagine what you are going through, what I would do in your place."
Neither Marcus nor Penny reacted as they heard the clasp of a bag unclip. The documents the woman handed them however made them first stutter breaths in and then finally look up.
"That's…that's not possible," Penny eventually managed at the same time as Marcus exclaimed: "That's inhuman."
"It is both of those things," The woman acquiesced before her resolve hardened. "But it is also the one chance we have of ensuring your daughter's future."
The parents stared again at the documents, trying and failing to digest just what it was suggesting, not just about their little girl, but about the world she had been and would continue to grow up in. A world that had just gotten a whole lot wider.
"Why is this even an option," Marcus eventually managed. "What possible purpose could this achieve, and…and what would it mean for Coraline?"
The S.H.I.E.L.D agent smiled inwardly at the desolation moulding to hope in the man's words. Her response wouldn't matter now, these were desperate people faced with a desperate plan. But still, she chose her words carefully. It may not matter to the Quinn parents, but this was something beyond them, something extending to the girl on the bed she was promising to save.
"There was an idea…"
aAa
20th July 1948: Soviet Occupation Zone, East Germany, to the West of Berlin.
The blockade had been in effect for less than a month, and already Peter Lehmann's life had been complicated.
They had assumed, of course. As soon as West Germany had announced the new currency those in the East had expected some kind of Soviet retaliation. And in a way the blockade hadn't been much of a surprise. The intention to force the capitulation of West Berlin to the Soviet zone was not a hidden one.
"We are warning both you and the population of Berlin that we shall apply economic and administrative sanctions that will lead to the circulation in Berlin exclusively of the currency of the Soviet occupation zone," The Soviet representative to the West had said.
And a blockade certainly sounded efficient. Without access to Soviet routes, the Western powers couldn't transport food or goods to their parts of annexed Berlin, deep within Eastern Germany. Western oversight had never attained a written assurance of rite of passage through the Soviet zone, and so not only could East Germany close the rail, road and sea links to West Berlin with logistical ease, but they could also do so without legal ramifications.
When the vast outnumbering of Soviet troops to American or British became apparent, the blockade's initial success became even more of an event of celebration.
But there had clearly been some scrambling from the Western side beyond a simple retaliatory blockade as was put in place on the first days. Because on the 26th June the aeroplanes started flying. Peter didn't recognise the planes themselves, and the echo of war made the force of habit to duck and cover more urgent than any urge to look up, but he heard them near constantly as they droned their way to the West Berlin runways.
The East German press ridiculed it of course. 'The futile attempts of the Americans to save face and to maintain their untenable position in Berlin' the papers had proclaimed.
But Peter heard the planes and tended to block out the Soviet reports that denied them.
So, apparently, did his son.
Klaus was seven and so astutely aware of the operation happening beyond the borders of Western occupied Berlin that sometimes his father wondered quite how worried he should be about the renowned Soviet walls with ears.
That worry was particularly relevant now, he commiserated, as he crossed the street under the cover of darkness and made his way towards Tempelhof Airport.
Apparently one of the planes flying supplies into West Berlin was also dropping chocolate. Peter wasn't sure how Klaus had heard about it, but upon the seven year old's insistence that some chocolate had been dropped on their side of the fence, Peter was trying to look as inconspicuous as possible while making his way to said fence in the hope that dawn's break in a few hours would herald enough of the candy to make his son smile.
If it would also stop him from filling the position of Western collaborator in the neighbourhood then that would be good too.
Peter heard the drone of another engine as he crossed between burnt out buildings.
Germany had not been rebuilt after the war. There were effort of course, but Peter shared the belief of much of the German population that the occupying forces were rather more focussed on each other than on those they were claiming to be protecting. Some muttered that Germany would best be left alone rather than in occupied hands. Others did more than mutter, but as far as Peter saw it, neither rebuilt the bombed out shells that both commiserated, so what was the point in getting angry.
Getting by was all that was important. Getting by and not getting caught.
The droning got louder which made Peter break his habit and look skywards. Hearing the planes at this hour was unusual in itself. Hearing one so close, when considering the strict regulations of Western flight paths, was even more so.
Dawn was just beginning to break behind him as he walked eastwards, bathing the ruins in front of him in the orange- grey mix of sunlight and shadow.
Peter didn't see it at first. Then, when he did, he didn't believe it.
There was something flying overhead, far lower than a plane and far quieter too. The light distorted it, but if he squinted he could see twin jets of blue fire from the back of the craft. And if he could see the engines, then something certainly wasn't right.
That feeling of trepidation intensified as he watched the wings of the craft fold inwards as the machine went into a dive.
No…not a machine…
"Mein Gott," Peter staggered backwards as the thing landed in front of him.
The person, because that is what it was however unbelievable, shook out their shoulders as they turned to face him.
Peter watched in both horror and fascination as the gleam of metal wings against their back rippled in the dawn light.
"Tempelhof?" The angel called out.
How strange, Peter thought as his knees turned to jelly. He hadn't expected a Holy proclamation to mention his own destination. Or to be in such terribly accented German.
"Tempelhof?" The angel tried again.
Peter's feet moved without his permission, his fascinating winning out over his fear. Up close the angel was not as impressive. He wore flying goggles, thick boots that glowed as he bounced from foot to foot, and was that a jumpsuit?
"Wo ist der Flughafen" The American in front of Peter asked tiredly as he pushed the goggles up his forehead.
Where is the airport? The question was simple enough, but it took Peter a good few seconds to formulate an answer. The words just wouldn't come.
In the end he pointed.
"Osten."
"Ah," The man with wings made a big show of smiling and offering thumbs up. Clearly 'East' was enough of a direction for him.
Peter expected the man to fly away then, and probably for himself to wake up back in bed with a few minutes to contemplate a particularly bizarre dream before making breakfast. Instead, the 'angel' rummaged in a pouch attached to his jumpsuit till he found what he was looking for, brandishing it with an 'Aha!'
"For you."
Peter didn't understand much English, but he took the offering nonetheless. The American smiled again, before putting a gloved finger to his lips in a caricatured display of requested silence.
Peter nodded.
Dawn swept more rays over the bombed out building. With one final over-exaggerated hush motion, the American readjusted the goggles and made a show of shooing Peter back. The German was all too happy to comply, but waited long enough to see the wings stretch out and a hop-skip-jump motion send the man rocketing skyward.
The engine drone picked up again. Peter didn't look up this time, fearing a final glance at the impossible made real would only further turn his brain to the gibberish it was threatening to become.
Instead he turned on his heels and began the trudge homeward. Klaus would have to wish for chocolate from now on. His father would not be returning to Tempelhof while there was still a chance of another encounter like the one he was only partially convinced he had witnessed.
He was almost the whole way home before he remembered the American's gift.
Ducking into a nearby alley, Peter unwrapped the object from its fabric layer.
'Hershey's' the bar proudly proclaimed.
Of course, Peter chuckled inwardly as he continued on.
Die Schokolade.
aAa
29th May 1972 : Forest, near Play Ku, South Vietnam
The air was thick with the smell of smoke.
They hadn't bombed this particular area yet, though naturally it was in the plans, but still the arid stench of burning vegetation drifted. He'd had to replace the air filters twice already and he'd only been stationed at Da Nang for a week. Clearly the labs back in Brooklyn hadn't been expecting this level of destruction.
Or perhaps they had but didn't care enough to do anything about it.
Michael banked slowly as he scanned the forest beneath him. This was his fifth patrol in daylight and he still wasn't any closer to finding what he was looking for. If he was honest, he wasn't entirely sure what that even was. Aerial reconnaissance was a key component in this kind of a war, but even with the technology granted to the US army by Project Eyrie, none of the operatives were getting any closer to spotting Vietcong fighters, let alone the separate targets S.H.I.E.L.D had them looking for. All he saw was trees. Endless, endless trees.
A sudden light from below him had him scrabbling to gain altitude, before a closer inspection revealed it to be nothing more than the reflection of Vietnam's reddening sun off of the metal of his wings. Michael knew himself lucky to be so far removed from the conflict down on the ground, but the horrors heard in training did little to stem his nerves now he was finally in the warzone.
Scolding himself for being so jumpy, Michael banked again, this time into the glow of the sunset, and consulted the panel on his wrist to find the best coordinates back to base. At first when he had done this his flight had faltered, as if his brain couldn't focus on doing two things at once, but now his wings continued beating as he set his course and turned for home.
The sound of engines brought him out of autopilot mode. Of course they weren't uncommon – Project Rolling Thunder had been the first of many bombing raids and since its commencement the Vietnam skies had hardly been short of planes – but the sound was still jarring.
Flights were meant to be rerouted when Eyrie operatives were on manoeuvres.
Looking up wasn't possible when flying: the suit's constrictions meant to protect against muscle fatigue induced flight cutout also reduced movement to looking left, right, and down. Nor could you continue flying upside down – not for want of trying back on the training grounds of upstate New York. They'd all walked away sore from that particular experiment.
Instead, Michael twisted his shoulders into a roll. Once, twice, three dizzying passes later and he still couldn't see the plane. Orienting himself again, he checked his wrist panel, this time for altitude.
12,000 feet. Lower than any plane, but still just enough wiggle room to….
Michael twisted again enough to have his back to the ground. Sure enough, he felt the snap of wind against his wings as they hit the air currents beneath him like a solid surface. Wincing at the whiplash, he tilted his head downwards and went into a dive.
It wasn't perfect, and it certainly wasn't procedure, but if he reported an unauthorised plane in his airspace without so much as a silhouette ID then a wrap on the knuckles for poor flying technique would be the least of his problems.
For the first few seconds the sky above was still empty. Michael was just preparing to come out of the dive when the shadow crossed his face.
His goggles were collecting ash particles as he squinted behind them for the shadow's source. It took him another few seconds to work out that that wasn't right, and by then the heat on his back and the beeping of his oxygen belt alerting to a compromised filter had done the rest of the work for him to let him know something was on fire.
More specifically, the forest was on fire.
Michael processed this information with just enough time to remember the shadow before the napalm hit him. In his panic, because this was panic pure and burning, his gloved hand hit the transponder for his radio, but it wasn't like that did anything because all Base got was his screaming as his dive became freefall and the fire smoked closer.
Base kept the radio connection till the heat melted the transponder. The Eyrie Project leader kept Michael's file open till the wing metal scrap had been recovered from the burnt out remains of the forest. Then it, and the rest of the project, was shelved.
aAa
April 4th 2012, The Bridge, S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier
Coraline finished the final page of the file with the satisfied feeling that came from any completed academic reading. Absentmindedly she tapped the table to her right, reaching for the cup of tea she always kept on hand for lengthy research tasks. Feeling an absence where her mug should be, and then the warmth of someone else's hand over hers, she looked up with a start.
Steve looked back at her, his eyes sympathetic as his hand squeezed hers.
And that was when Coraline remembered that the reports she had been reading weren't just another history assignment. That they were about her past, her future, and everything in between. And that not only was the comfort of Steve's hand apt, but it was also something she really, really needed.
Slowly, she let a breath out from between clenched teeth.
"That bad?" Steve asked softly.
"Certainly not good," Coraline whispered in response.
Fury's entrance drew the comfort from the room as hands retreated to laps and gazes got diverted, Cora's to the table and Steve's to the wall.
Fury himself stayed silent. Cora liked to think it was because of the pressure she had put on his vocal chords before Steve had managed to pry her fingers from the Director's neck. She even afforded herself a small smirk to that end, before the arrival of Stark, and Fury's expression when he turned to face them wiped it from her face.
"Ooh, recently unclassified files," Stark reached across for Cora's pile of papers. She stopped him with a glare, but added a hissed 'Back off!' for good measure.
Tony raised his hands in surrender as means of a response, the look in his eyes betraying the shock his joking demeanour didn't permit in his actions.
"No need to get your wings in a twist," He said airily as he took a seat out of smacking distance from the now bristling historian. Only Steve had witnessed the wrath that was the woman seated across from him in all its unleashed glory, but Fury's brief trip to medical and the cough that accompanied it was enough to get rumour spreading on the ship. Besides, a happy rumour was something everyone needed right about now…
"These were in Phil Coulson's jacket," Fury broke the silence. "Guess he never did get you to sign them."
The cards skidded across the table in a fluttering of soggy cardstock as Fury scattered them.
Cora let out an audible gasp as her eyes scanned and failed to fully take in what she was seeing. Across from her Steve picked one up with a grimace. Cora barely processed this.
No one had told her. But equally she hadn't asked.
How could she not have asked? She could count the number of friendly faces on this ship in one hand. There had been three. Banner had dropped it to two, though the feel of Fury's throat under her hand had somewhat softened the blow that had caused in her chest. But Coulson?
"Save me an opening night ticket to your exhibition"
The memory made swallowing difficult behind the lump in her throat. Glancing up again only added to the historian's guilt. Stark's grief was quiet – hidden in his eyes and the way he clenched his jaw. Steve wore it obviously, emblazoned on his face and in the slight tremble of his hand as he stared at his own image soaked scarlet.
What claim did Cora have to be grieving? Coulson had been friendly yes, but she had barely known him. Steve – though she presumed not having any more contact than her with the man – had the weight of his own legacy to shoulder; a guilt Cora couldn't even begin to imagine. And Stark – the glistening behind steely eyes told Cora more than she needed to know about the relationship he had had to the man now memorialised in collectible cards.
Cora bit her lip as Fury continued.
I don't deserve to be grieving, she thought as she tasted blood. I'm a mess enough as it is; don't add melodrama to the mix.
"We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, location of the cube, Banner, Thor. I got nothing for you. Lost my one good eye. Maybe I had that coming."
Silence prevailed as the Director paused for breath. Cora kept her gaze to her file as she focussed on the copper in her mouth and the repression in her mind.
"We were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract."
Fury's concession had her looking up, which forced her to cross gazes with Steve. Neither of them fully looked at each other. The space just next to Steve seemed like a far less emotionally fraught place to concentrate on.
"I never put all my chips on that number though, because I was playing something even riskier."
Fury paused again, perhaps expecting a reaction but getting nothing.
"There was an idea, Stark knows this, called The Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, see if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could."
The breath caught in Cora's throat.
"She is an Initiative member, confirm?"
That was what the man, what Joe had said to her in the hallway. Before her thoughts could switch to what happened next, to blood and lies and sobbing, Cora closed off the memory and focussed instead on that one line.
Her file hadn't included anything about an 'Avengers Initiative'. It had mentioned the project she had been activated as a part of – even thinking about that word made the historian shudder in her seat. Project Eyrie certainly fitted the bill of 'remarkable people', and seeing as she was living proof of it not being decommissioned in the 1970s Cora rationalised that it would not be too much of a stretch to presume it fitted the 'group' part of Fury's definition either. At least, she really hoped she wasn't the only one…
But to be part of this, a project within a project. Cora didn't want to think what that would mean, what Coulson's reaction to her plea to be able to help were really referencing when he directed her to the room and the man shot while guarding it.
A flurry of movement to her left accompanied Fury's quiet:
"Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea, in heroes."
Cora forced herself out of her thoughts to witness Tony's quick departure, even has her mind kept returning on loop to that phrase: 'Initiative Member, Initiative Member, Initiative Member'.
"Well, it's an old fashioned notion," Fury finished his speech as he watched Stark depart.
The bridge maintained its grip on its occupants' tongues for a minute, then two. Steve didn't move. Fury didn't move.
Cora let out a shaky breath and stood.
Instead of leaving, she crossed in front of the table and towards the control panel. It took her a minute to spy what she is looking for, but with a quiet 'aha' she crossed back to Fury, a tablet in hand.
"Log me in," She requested quietly.
Fury stared at her, so she pushed the tablet into his chest with a glare.
"Log me with the highest clearance you can think of. I want access to all the files, not just the ones you handpicked to keep me happy."
Steve had stood by this point, wavering on the edge of her vision as he clearly weighed up whether he needed to intervene again. Cora backed off slightly to show him she wasn't about to throttle the Director (again), but her determination remained steadfast.
"Alternatively you could just tell me why S.H.I.E.L.D decided to implant an exoskeleton worth of metal into an eight year old when the project necessitating it was shelved in the 70s, but you've been awfully cagey about speaking so far so I figured written access might suit you better."
Fury sighed as he took the tablet from her, tapping on its screen till it produced a muted 'ding'. Cora gestured for it back, but instead he met her gaze.
"Project Eyrie failed when too many people had access to the technology we developed. Considering the context, we thought it best to remove the temptation from the world stage till the world got a little less Cold. After the Wall fell, and new threats started to rear their heads, it was decided to reactivate the programme, quietly this time, in case of events like these where Eyrie members could be of service."
"How many others?" Cora asked quietly.
"60 were selected. 8 responded negatively to the initial procedure. 4 were withdrawn before reaching adulthood. Of the 48 remaining, 30 were seconded from military service to S.H.I.E.L.D training once Stark hit the headlines – if an independent party was claiming hegemony of the skies, we wanted our guys ready to claim it back."
"And the other 18?"
"All were brought into the programme once Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S was initiated to study the Tesseract. You were read in later due to your work contracts in Sokovia."
"Wait," Steve interjected, reminded both members of the face off that they weren't alone. "If Cora was being brought in for the Tesseract project why was she tutoring me?"
"It was a good excuse," Cora answered softly, not taking her gaze from Fury. "If nothing became of the project for another year, I would still be in New York and under S.H.I.E.L.D monitoring."
"And when the project experienced…glitches…" Fury confirmed," You were extracted from your position, sent to basic training and had the final modifications made to ensure the Eyrie Technology was operational."
"My legs," Cora gasped in realisation. " That's why I couldn't feel them when I woke up in my flat. I'd been…operated on?"
"Yes," Fury replied plainly. "The Eyrie Technology requires large amounts of synthesised nerve wiring, which had been placed in a series of operations since you were 8. This final procedure ensured the connections were strong."
"Why didn't you just tell her this?" Steve stepped closer to Cora as he saw her clenched hands begin to shake.
"At the same time as Quinn was entering basic training, those who would have become her senior officers in the Project were being buried under my research facility in the Mojave Desert."
Cora gulped.
"So, of the 60 original members, how many are left?"
"40, of which 38 are being picked out of the rubble at the Mojave, another is receiving treatment…elsewhere… and then there is you. The proverbial thorn in my side from day one."
"Yes, I will make sure next time I am inducted into a paramilitary programme against my will that I mind my manners," Cora retorted, her words biting but her tone defeatist. "Is that everything?"
"It is all you have been cleared to be read into. I am sure I do not need to remind you of the highly classified nature of all of this."
"Go to hell Fury," Coraline turned to leave before pausing.
Steve wasn't quick enough to stop the swing, but he couldn't lie and say he wasn't a little satisfied at the sound of the punch hitting home and Fury's nose crunching under the impact.
Cora shook her hand out with a cry of pain as her knuckles throbbed. Seeing the way Fury held his hand to his nose though brought a vindictive smile to her face.
"I imagine your Avengers Initiative has a screening process for cohesion and discipline. Consider that punch the evidence you need to know I will not be a good fit."
aAa
By the time Steve had found her she was on her third bowl of porridge.
"That is a lot of oatmeal," Steve muttered as he slumped into the seat opposite her.
The canteen was empty but for the both of them. Steve, on noticing this, allowed his terse position to drop as he sighed into his seat. Coraline, having been in the canteen since she had stormed from the bridge, remained bunched up in her own chair as she shovelled down oats on autopilot.
"My parents always said to start a big day with a good breakfast," Cora said between mouthfuls. "Of course they also said the doctor's that fixed my legs were from Great Ormond Street but I guess the truth is subjective when it comes to S.H.I.E.L.D interference."
Finishing the bowl, she didn't give Steve time to respond, knowing that if she did he would say something sympathetic and the thin wall keeping her from breaking down would shatter completely.
"You spoke to Stark?"
"Yes," Steve's response was curt, and a quick glance upwards confirmed Coraline's suspicions that the man across from her was trying his best to shoulder the weight piling onto him.
"And?" Cora probed.
"And we are heading for New York. Not S.H.I.E.L.D. Stark, once his suit is fixed and Romanoff if she's up for it. Hopefully Thor will catch us up."
"How long till wheels up?" Cora stacked her bowls as she made to stand.
Steve's hand on her arm made her pause.
"I can't ask you to do this, Cora."
Cora tilted her head in confusion. "What are you talking about?"
"We were trained for this. War and death and danger. I can't ask you to follow us into that. I want…I want you safe."
"Steve," She breathed out as she tried to compile her feelings into words. "I…I can't just stop, not now. If Fury is being honest for once in his life, then I was made for this. I may not have chosen it, may not have made the life changing decision, but I can't risk innocent lives just because I am angry or anxious or scared or…or…"
Tears tracked down Cora's cheeks as she pinched the bridge of her nose with a muffled: "Dammit".
After taking a few short breaths, she sniffed loudly and met Steve's gaze.
"You are heading into the fray as Captain America. I don't have a fancy name, or an outfit, or really any experience beyond what I've read in textbooks. But I will fight with you, with the Steve who writes Post-it Notes and always has a snarky comeback and cares more deeply and broadly than anyone I have ever met. Let me head into the fray with that man, and we can work out the rest once this is all over."
Steve held her gaze, his hand still on her arm as they sat. After the first minute ticked over, Cora squinted her eyes, trying to look past the blue of Steve's eyes to what he was looking at, what was causing the ghost of fear in his pupils.
"What are you thinking?" She asked at a whisper.
Steve didn't answer, even as his hand brushed up her and then down again, the soothing ministration as light as air against the bare skin of her forearm.
But just like that the moment was over.
Steve was sitting rigid again, and Cora was free to stand and deposit her empty bowls on the nearest clearing tray before heading for the door.
"I'll meet you in the hangar bay in ten minutes?" She queried.
"Uh, yeah, yes. 10 minutes."
"Ok," She made to leave, before pausing and turning back to the man still sat stiffly in the empty canteen. "Oh, and Steve. If I get to the hangar and find you've left without me, I will throw myself off of this godforsaken flying ship and see how fast Eyrie tech can get me to New York under my own steam. Got it?"
"I've got it, Coraline," Steve said with a small smile.
That was good enough for Cora. She had somewhere else to be.
aAa
They hadn't cleared up the blood.
Cora tried not to think about it.
Just as Coulson had said, her retinal scan opened the door that Joe had guarded.
Don't think about him. Don't think about the noise. Don't think about the blood…the blood…the blood.
The door opened and Cora was stumbling through it, gulping for breath as she slumped to her knees.
She had 10 minutes. This was meant to be in and out.
Get it together, Cora.
The door had latched behind her, so when she finally managed to look up her eyes had to adjust to the darkness.
Staggering to her feet activated the motion sensors though, and so she went from squinting on the floor to shielding her eyes from the glare once standing.
There wasn't much to see.
Directly across from the door was the suit. Just as she had expected.
Her speech to Steve may have not mentioned it ( and even in the few minutes it took for her to reach the hallway she was already cursing herself for how tacky it had sounded) but the files Fury had given to her had come with pictures as well as schematics, so she had expected her omission to turn to a lie the minute she opened the door.
The material was softer than she had imagined. Not soft like fabric, which was something of a relief – no way was she going to wear something made of t-shirt material into a battle orchestrated by a God. But it was still softer than Kevlar, and thinner too. More aerodynamic she supposed.
Even with the light of the room she couldn't tell if it was black or just a very dark blue. As she lifted it from its hanger, it slunk around her arm in a swathe of shadow, save for the reflective bands crisscrossing the waist and cuffing the arms and legs.
"This is going to be tight," She thumbed the sleeve fabric absentmindedly as she tried not to think about how close fitting it was going to be. God she missed suit trousers and shirts right about now.
Dumping the suit on the floor, Cora moved for the next items.
The undershirts and accompanying leggings were fairly standard, all things considered, so they quickly joined the suit in its pile. The hood however, nestled as it was in its own compartment adjacent to the suit area, deserved far larger scrutiny.
It was made of the same material as the suit, and was really more of a balaclava than a hood. It reminded Cora of the kind of camping and multi-purpose snood her parents had always manhandled onto her whenever they'd attempted a more ambitious walk through the National Parks of her youth. Where it differed however was in the mask, which though still light held the tell-tale weight of a plastic air filter that Cora presumed, when worn, would suction around her mouth and nose and either filter air or supply it.
A quick glance at the tool belt settled to the right of the main display didn't hold many answers. Perhaps it did both?
Worry about that another time, Coraline, Cora chided mentally.
When she had first seen the photos – of a man dressed in goggles and a ghostbusters outfit (or at least a 1948 approximation) Cora had pondered the merits of having the nose covered as well as the mouth. Surely being able to smell was important in the reconnaissance missions Project Eyrie was intended for. What if there had been fire?
The report from 1972 had sought to confirm this suspicion as being of merit, but as she had reached her own files and the schematics dated from the 21st century, any query had been melted away.
Scientific opinion varied on if birds had a sense of smell. S.H.I.E.L.D, it appeared, had come down on the side of 'no', and so when adding the chemical compound to her brain that stimulated her senses of sight and hearing, they had also cut the sense of smell.
It was only for the first flight – some kind of failsafe measure in case she had been activated before accessing her suit and the tech within it that would become her eyes and ears in any future operations. But according to the schematics within the file, the chemical compound could be replaced by means of a simple shot, and so the nose remained covered in the masks and the assumption remained that if something was burning you'd notice before it burnt you too.
This time, Cora thought begrudgingly as she dropped the hood onto the slowly amassing pile and tried not to think about Michael from the file and the way in which his own tech failed him.
The gloves were as standard as she imagined fancy superhero gloves could be. There were more buttons than she could place functions for, having only heard about the radio button from the incident in 1972, but that was another thing to figure out later.
The boots, on the other hand, required more immediate attention.
They were chunky, reminding Cora more of ski boots than any kind of functional shoe. Realising she had stalled long enough in inspecting everything, Cora quickly shed her layers in favour of the base layers and shadow suit before sitting on the floor to put on the boots.
Just like ski boots, thick metal straps secured her feet in place at her ankle and across the instep. Differing from them, the same straps clicked into place going up her leg to just below the knee. All in all they fitted snugly, and didn't weigh as much as Cora had been expecting. Standing again she felt more of the weight, but her attentions were more drawn to the feel of the circular disks at the heel of the boot, the size of which pushed her height up a few inches as she jumped up and down to test out the fit. Adding the gloves to her ensemble by means of further metal bands clipping them to her sleeves started a whirring in the shoes as the motors started running.
Cora wasn't entirely sure how these worked either, but it was going to have to be something tested quite literally on the fly because the schematics she had skim read had given the strong indication that the propulsion force of the micro-engines in her shoes was really not appropriate for inside testing.
Although she positioned the hood correctly – attaching some wires at its base that threaded down the nape of her neck and into the suit mechanics – Cora didn't pull the hood up. Instead she let it lie like a bandana around her neck, her hair tied into a hasty braid resting next to it.
The goggles were the final step, and one that somehow pushed the entire procedure from surreal to downright ridiculous. As she scrunched and unscrunched her eyes into focus behind the light blue tinged lenses, Cora half wished for a mirror, just so she could laugh at how silly she must look.
A quick glance at one of the various word panels that had started to scan across her vision though had her pulling the goggles down around her neck and darting from the room.
She had almost reached the hangar, boots clunking as she tried and failed to work out how to run in them, when the breeze on her back made her skid to a stop.
She didn't need to see to know that the suit had two large slits down the back.
For the wings, her mind helpfully supplied, just in case she'd somehow managed to forget that little nugget of information in all the kerfuffle.
"As if" She muttered to herself as she ducked into an engineering lab just off the hangar bay and stole a mustard yellow flight jacket from the back of someone's chair.
Shrugging the jacket on, Cora entered the hangar bay just in time to see Steve, Natasha and a man she didn't recognise commandeer a jet. Steve noticed her as he made way for the plane's two other occupants to buckle in. His look of complete shock was the perfect cover Cora needed to jog the final distance to the plane and hop on board. Just in case he hadn't any last minute ideas of leaving her behind…
Cora watched Steve's shock double now that he was close enough to see just what she was wearing. He continued to gape as she clunked her way across the jet, acknowledging Natasha and the unfamiliar man with a nod as she did so, and then settled into a seat across from his standing position.
The jet whirred into action. Steve grabbed onto a ceiling handle for balance, still staring.
Self-consciously, Cora fiddled with the strap of her goggles, visible as they were around her neck, before taking a breath and looking up with mirth in her eyes.
"I may have lied about not having an outfit."
From the cockpit Cora heard a snort. Then, the sound of Stark over the radio and the force of the jet picking up speed drowned out any other thoughts of joviality.
"Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward," Cora muttered as New York pin pricked the skyline far ahead. "All in the valley of Death, Rode the six hundred."
Into the valley of Death.
This has been the longest chapter of the fic so far, and hopefully one both which answered questions and brought about some new ones too. Hopefully you stuck around through it, and are as excited as I am to see what happens next.
Cora's quote is from the opening Stanza of 'Charge of the Light Brigade' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, memorialising the aforementioned charge during the Crimean War at the Battle of Balaclava, October 1854. The poem was published in December of that year.
As always please do let me know what you think. Any thoughts, comments, questions, screams of frustration, theories, unintelligible yelling, is appreciated.
