Picking up a Stray

An Avengers Fanfiction

by Pheather McKelle

A/N - I'm in the middle of a writer's block and this is mostly to help with that, and to put down a little idea that's been kicking around my head for a while. Probably won't expand but when it comes to the Avengers, nothing is certain. ;D

Anyways, customary disclaimers about non-ownership and all that jazz.

My day already started out horribly, so don't try to tell me that this wasn't the icing on the fucking cake. My car stalled, I cracked my phone, and I was late for work. And to top it all, aliens invaded my work.

Typing the last few sentences on an accounting report, I was just about to send it to my boss when we heard a terrible, metallic shriek. In unison, we jerked our heads up, fully expecting to see someone with a pair of speakers playing some office prank. What we saw instead was a fleet of hovering platforms, controlled by humanoid beings with exterior plating like a bug, shooting blue bolts of crackling energy every which way. I and several others ducked to escape a flurry of such projectiles, and was one of the few people that did.

Clutching my stomach, I tried to fight the transformation that usually threatened to happen whenever I perceived danger. For nigh on forty years, I'd had the best-kept secret in Manhattan, but no longer. I felt appendages grow, organs rearrange themselves, bones splinter and reform, until I was no longer Samantha Jones, accountant at a law firm, but a huge, scaled purple dragon.

This, of course, did nothing to lessen the terror in those around me, who didn't know that I was Samantha Jones. All they saw was another monster to contend with. Most scooted out of my way as I shouldered past the cubicles. Someone threw a book, but it bounced off my violet armor with a dull thud. I head-butted the glass that overlooked Manhattan, shattering it into thousands of small fragments that dusted the street below, as well as the carpet of the firm.

Several extraterrestrials zoomed by almost faster than I could process; one struck me on the shoulder with its weapon. The bolt skated off my scales and crashed into the floor above. Drywall, cables, and insulation rained down on me and I roared my displeasure to the world, shaking myself as a dog might get rid of water.

Spreading my wings, I dived off the building, flaring my wings just as I landed on one of the many cruisers that sped around. With a savage yank, I tore it clean in half, willing myself bigger so as to cause maximum damage. Before crashing into the ground, I flapped twice with my powerful wings, managing to save myself just before crashing.

As I tried to get a grasp of the battlefield, one hovering pad slammed me in the side, knocking the breath out of me. I roared, but it was hoarse and choked as I struggled for air. Two of the little beings that manned the pad had survived and were digging needle-sharp claws in my scales, trying to find purchase. One shot its gun, but again my scales somehow protected me from the worst, deflecting it into a nearby building. I struggled to stay aloft, but with two humanoids on my back and no oxygen in my lungs, it wasn't long before I landed on a street with a dull thud.

Twisting my neck around, I caught one between my teeth, crunching down and spitting him out as quickly as I could, though I managed to taste an excess of metallic elements in its blood, as well as a slightly sweet, tangy flavor. I rolled onto my back, crushing the other. I shook my head as if to rid myself of gnats before I kicked off from the ground, leaving deep furrows in the asphalt and buffeting the two corpses with huge gusts of wind as I took to the skies.

Using my tail as a mace, I managed to knock one hovering pad into a building. I caught another in my claws, crumbling it as easily as I would sand at a beach, but with a bit more satisfaction.

I almost dropped the next cruiser when a bolt of lightning, more powerful than any other I'd ever seen, spiked down from the heavens, hit a needle-shaped tower, then fried several squads of aliens which plummeted from a large, dark, blue-ringed hole in the sky. I glimpsed night speckled with stars before a thunderous roar shook the city. And it wasn't me.

Could there be another shapeshifter here? I wondered, alighting on the roof of a mostly splintered building. I returned my gaze to the gaping tear in the sky and the snake-like being that slithered from it made my blood turn cold. I almost considered running before I remembered that I could be almost as big as it.

"Stark, we have a bit of a problem." Steve told Tony through his earpiece.

"Yep, I'm seeing it." Tony grumbled as he beheld the behemoth leviathan that floated through the city streets, its huge flippers gouging wide gashes in the buildings beside it.

"No, not the leviathan, the dragon." Steve said.

"Excuse me?" Tony asked, hoping he had misheard.

"There's a giant purple dragon on 5th." He said, oddly emotionless.

"Where the hell did a dragon come from?" Clint chimed in, the twang of his bowstring in the background a death gong for chitauri warriors.

"Now we have to deal with a dragon?" Natasha growled, sounding thoroughly exasperated.

"Of all the things!" Clint snarled, a thud at the other end signaling the caving in of a chitauri skull.

"I did not know this realm had dragons." Thor screamed from the other end, and everyone flinched.

"It shouldn't." Tony replied, and a disturbance at the other end told the others that he was rifling through some of JARVIS's files.

"It looks like it's… Helping us." Steve said.

Tony swore. "We'll deal with it later, I've got a host of stragglers on my tail." True to his word, Tony flew across Steve's field of vision, fifteen or twenty chitauri trailing behind.

"Get 'em in a tight corner, they don't handle very well." Clint advised Tony, who grunted an affirmative.

I was just about to bank into a tight corner when a small red something almost collided with me. I recognized it as the Iron Man suit before twenty three aliens streamed from where he had been, shooting their strange blue weapons. With barely a glance back, I used a half-ruined building as a springboard and launched myself at them, knocking two into each other with my tail, catching half of another in a clawed hand, and snagging the driver of a third in my teeth, flinging him against the building. Iron Man took care of the rest, blasting them with his palms or small projectile weapons concealed within the suit. His sightless rectangular eyes stared at me for a moment as I clung to the building, mouth streaked in purple alien blood, before flying off.

Launching myself off the building and wincing as its facade crumbled to the streets below, I took off after one of the snake-like beings, bellowing a challenge to all who cared. Flapping twice to gain altitude, I soared above one of them and abruptly locked wings, diving so I landed heavily on its head, driving it into the ground so its lower jaw was scraped off, as well as most of the plates of metal covering its belly. With a savage yank I flipped it over, exposing the gray-pink flesh, and tore into it with tooth and nail, spattering the streets with a generous portion of purple lumps of steaming flesh. The creature whined as I yanked at what appeared to be a tendon, thrashing like a hooked fish before letting out a piercing screech and falling silent.

I roared a triumph, flaring my wings and beating the ground with my tail, before a throbbing roar split the heavens and more of those larger beings split like the roots of a twisted tree, screaming their own challenges. A flurry of fresh reinforcements came after, their wheedling cries pale in comparison. I again surged into the air, flattening any ground troops with the churning wind from my wings.

As I landed on the back of one of the worms, I began to feel the effects of extreme size expansion: fatigue, nausea, extreme hunger, and light headedness. I shrugged them off, telling myself that I could maintain this form for another half hour if needed. I sunk my claws into the plating on its back and listened with a kind of perverse pleasure to the keening cries of a wounded enemy.

"Tony, can you try and get the dragon's attention? We need it over on 32nd, they're really causing some damage down there." Steve's voice crackled over the earpiece.

"Roger Rogers." Tony said, veering away from the leviathan he was attempting to sever with his lazer. He found the massive purple dragon in the final stages of dismantling another leviathan. With a shudder, it collapsed, almost gnawed clean in half.

Using the voice projector of the suit, Tony called out: "Hey, oversized lizard!" The dragon paused, hovering in the air, and leveled its head with him. He cleared his throat. "You're needed on 32nd street! There's a huge squad down there!" With a nod, the dragon veered away, almost clipping Tony with a massive, leathery bat wing before making its way towards 32nd.

I almost didn't want to acknowledge the man in the suit, since he undoubtedly caused the mess. It was all over his damn tower! All the same, 32nd street needed my help, and when I got there, she saw why. Civilians milled in confusion, hemmed in by several aliens. Diving to the ground, I snared three with my spiked tail, knocking several others to the ground, and grabbed another in my teeth, relishing the sweet taste of battle. I grabbed a large piece of rubble and dropped it on the remaining aliens, crushing them as a human would an ant. "If you're all done here, you could help out Cap and Widow." he suggested. I snarled, unwilling to take commands, but gliding to where a red, white, and blue man fought more aliens alongside a red-headed woman clad in black.

I had just landed alongside them when twenty aliens surrounded us. I shrunk so ground battle wouldn't be so taxing and jabbed my head forward like a snake, snapping my jaws closed and severing torso from legs with a crunch. With my tail, I knocked five others to the ground for the woman to dispose of, and pounced on another, crushing its skull in my teeth. I ran my barbed tongue over my teeth, annoyed at the accumulated scraps of purple flesh and sharp metal bits that were lodged between my canines.

"How many more are there?" I asked, my voice a guttural rasp. The patriotic man shook his broad shoulders.

"I don't know." he replied.

While rescuing several trapped civilians inside a building, I stumbled, lost my balance, and crashed to the ground in a purple heap.

"Are you okay?" The man asked, but my muddled thoughts couldn't comprehend. With a snarl, I heaved myself to unsteady feet, but my head felt heavy and my limbs felt thick and cumbersome. With a shudder, I felt bones contract, snouts shorten, scales turned to hair, and my claws shrank until they were no more than fingernails. I was human once again. Ebony-skinned, frizzy-haired, almond-eyed me. And completely naked.

Averting his eyes, the man scooped up a discarded jacket and hesitantly placed it around my shoulders, hauling me to my feet even as I wanted to stay down. "No soldiers are left behind on my watch." he muttered as he set me down under a sheltered eve. Conveniently close to a bakery, he grabbed a loaf of bread, which I tore into even as I tore into my enemies, scarfing down as much as I could without feeling sick. Vaguely, I heard his earpiece buzz with chatter. "Do it!" he exclaimed. More talking. "Stark… You know that's a one-way trip." his voice had sobered, his previous excitement gone, giving way to the voice that one uses when they lay out reality. There was a hesitation, then a reply.

After a few heartbeats, the Man of Iron flew by overhead, a large white object on his back. He flew straight for the portal, where fresh reinforcements still trickled from, albeit at a steadier pace. He watched him fly right into the portal, vanishing in a wink.

More waiting. I discerned a flash of light, then the portal slowly shrunk. It was almost closed, no more than a black pinprick in the azure sky, when a small, shining red object fell down. The man smiled broadly.

It was Iron Man.

I shivered along my length, itching to join him in the sky, when I noticed he wasn't stopping. The man might have commented on it to his companions, but I didn't hear, and his voice was drowned out as I turned back into my dragon form; not as large as before, but still larger than a horse. With a burst of new-found energy, I grasped the man's arm in my talons, taking off somewhat laboriously, having not carried a human before.

I touched down to drop off the captain just as a green speck shot from a nearby skyscraper, caught him on the way down, landed on the side of an apartment complex, then jumped to the ground near our party, Tony Stark draped over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, but deposited on the ground as if he were made of glass. The green creature was tall and thickly muscled, with black hair peppered with gray on a small face with distorted features. A human, to be sure, but horribly mutated. I then looked at my own scaled feet and realized that "mutated" was a relative word.

The captain crouched down, tearing off his facial mask. Tony's eyes were closed, looking for all the world as though he were asleep. I nosed between him and a burly blond man covered in strange scaled armor, sparkling reflections from my scales scattering multi-colored light on him. I rumbled in my throat, willing him to wake.

Suddenly, the green man roared, beating his chest with his fists as Tarzan might do. With a jolt, Tony was awake, amber eyes darting around, breathing heavily. I roared triumphantly, melding with the green man's own bugle of joy.

"What just happened?" Tony demanded, glaring at the odd assortment of people that surrounded him. "None of you kissed me, right?"

After two separate comas which lasted three days apiece and were spaced with a feast that was only sated when I devoured five servings of chicken pot pie, I planned on returning to work as an accountant, attempting to make up a story that coincided with my absence, but each was more far-fetched than the other. In the end, I decided I would simply switch jobs and claiming destruction in the battle as my reason for leaving, which wasn't entirely untrue. Though the epicenter of the debris was centered mostly around the Stark Tower, my office building hadn't escaped the carnage. In fact, a rotting leviathan - as I learned they were called - was draped over the roof, contaminating the whole block with its foul reek.

I stayed at a SHIELD-sanctioned hospital for several days, in case I contracted a disease from the amount of chitauri I had apparently ingested, but so far the worst symptom I had was an upset stomach from all the metal I invariably swallowed. After my momentary self-induced coma, gorge, and coma again, I finally regained the metabolic stability necessary for the nurses to release me into the world, but not without a visitor.

A tall, bald man with a floor-sweeping black coat and a black eye patch walked in to my room shortly after my second coma ended and I was eating copious amounts of apple sauce and banana smoothies. I preferred a one-week fruit diet shortly after such a transformation, as it helped right my metabolic processes, especially now that I was older.

"Miss Jones." He said, his hands folded behind his back.

"That's me." I said, setting aside the empty container and propping myself up in my hospital bed.

"My name is Director Fury. On behalf of SHIELD, I would like to thank you for your participation in the Battle of New York. You performed a great service to this country." Though they sounded somewhat stiff and formal, I could tell he genuinely appreciated my actions.

"On behalf of me, I accept your thanks." I smiled. Directory Fury paused.

"I'd like to talk to you about something called the Avengers Initiative."

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