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It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in Central Park, and Sam Wilson was having a normal day.
"Behold!" the angry little man shouted from his perch on top of the gate to the Children's Zoo. He was waving what appeared to be a 1950s-era toy ray gun that pulsed an alarming shade of purple. The crowd beneath him screamed and scattered.
"I am Doctor Devonian, master of the Mesozoic Era, king of the Carboniferous Period! I shall bring to this world the terror of the Cretaceous!"
Sam sighed and pressed the all-hands emergency call button on his phone. His standards for 'normal' had undergone some changes since joining the Avengers.
The gun in Dr. Devonian's hand pulsed faster, flashing through neon violet, electric green, and bright orange in quick succession. It let out an ominous high-pitched hum. The sound got louder and louder as Devonian warmed up to his monologue.
"New York will fall into chaos as the monsters of the past rush forth to overwhelm it! With the power of my time portal, I will--"
"Rule the world, yadda yadda, we get it," Sam interrupted, pushing forward through the crowd. It was best not to let villains hit their stride. Baddies-of-the-week would talk your ear off once they got going.
"What? No I won't, I --" Devonian said. "I will rule the zoo -- I mean, the city -- and, and." He trailed off, looking completely thrown. "And -- yeah."
Villains were always surprised when confronted by how unoriginal they were. In New York especially, your run-of-the-mill mad scientists were a dime a dozen these days. Sam had seen five in the last two months. Two of them had even had the same name, almost. ("Spooknoid" and "Spookanoid", respectively. This had made the S.H.I.E.L.D. paperwork more annoying than usual.)
Devonian shook himself and rallied. "Behold!" He shouted, pointing the ray gun at the crowd. He squeezed the trigger. There was an extended pause as the gun made an unhappy whining sound.
The crowd held its collective breath.
Nothing happened.
"Behold!" Devonian shouted again. The ray gun reached an ear-splitting pitch and then made a sad 'floomph' noise, like a scoop of ice cream plopping onto the ground.
Still nothing.
The crowd started to mutter angrily.
Devonian smacked the gun against his thigh a few times, then pointed it at the crowd again. With a tinge of desperation in his voice, he yelled "BEHOLD!!!”
The gun hit a sweet-sounding musical chord -- a perfect fifth, Sam thought -- and let out a beam of purple light.
"AHA!" Devonian burst out, triumphant. A fraction of a second later, a repulsor blast hit him square in the chest. Devonian landed flat on his back in the grass.
Tony hovered in mid-air, his face-plate just now clicking into place. "Wilson -- I was at the Met with Pepper -- say, can anybody do something about that -- oh, that's not good."
Rather than dissipating, the beam of purple light was pooling and condensing into a puddle on the asphalt.
"Uh oh, uh oh--"
Sam said, "I think it's bad, he said 'time portal', it must be bad--"
"No no no bad puddle bad puddle--"
The purple light flowed into a perfect circle. Its edges lit up blue, then violet, then some colour Sam couldn't see but that made Tony in his helmet say "Shit shit shit--"
There was a popping noise. The circle disappeared. In its place was -- nothing.
Literally nothing. There was a perfect empty circle of air where the paved path was a second ago, with a leafy-green tree branch sticking up out of it. Sam frowned. Something about the leaves looked -- different. Wrong.
"HAHAHAHAHA," Devonian crowed. He had climbed back up one of the granite plinths, clinging to the statue at its top and looking significantly worse for wear. The commotion had attracted a group of uniformed zookeepers. They looked up at Devonian with intense dislike -- he was probably upsetting their animals.
"I'm a genius! They said I was mad, but what do they know, I'm the master of Time, I've transmogrified -- arggh!"
The second repulsor blast put him down for good. The zookeepers surged towards him.
"Maybe it's not that bad," Tony said. "Maybe it's fine, maybe it's just the Pleistocene, hell, maybe it's only two hundred years ago, or two weeks ago--"
Sam was still staring at the branch, unsettled. "Tony," he said. "Tony, what the hell is that."
"It's nothing, it's nothing, just a little time-transplant, transplant, get it--"
There was a rustling noise from the tree. Its weird leaves shook. "Oh, no." Sam said. "No."
Devonian -- somewhat hindered by the pack of uniformed zookeepers pinning him down -- yelled out, "Monsters of the paaaast! Monsters of the paaa-- ow, dammit!"
The branch shook again. Then, through the empty circle, came a faint ‘chirrup?’
A scaly yellow snout appeared, hesitant. It let out another soft chirp and then its whole head poked through, amber-coloured eyes bright and curious. It was covered in glossy red-and-orange feathers. Sam had a second to stare at it in fascination before it leapt through the circle with an emphatic ‘SQUAAAAA!’, clawed Iron Man in his red-gold face, and took off into the underbrush. It was headed south towards 59th Street.
"Hawkeye, Hawkeye, where are you, we need you buddy--" Tony was saying into his comm.
Like he said earlier -- completely normal.
*
An hour later, halfway up a tree in the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, Sam decided things weren't going well. This was also normal.
Hawkeye had arrived twenty minutes late, eating a danish and wearing a coffee-stained purple hoodie that looked like he'd slept in it. Sam's wings had finally showed up too, called to him by the remote Tony had designed last month after the Spooknoid -- not Spookanoid, that was different -- incident.
Neither Hawkeye nor Sam's wings had been helpful. Their target had proved more challenging than expected.
"Okay, here's the situation." Tony said, rubbing at the sticky tree sap gunking up his knee joints. The branch he was lying on creaked in protest. "Ugh. Devonian is in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, but if we don't find this lizard -- bird -- thing -- he brought back, God only knows what it'll do."
Bruce chimed in over the comms. "Act as a vector for Mesozoic parasites that kill off wild birds who aren't adapted to them, introduce novel diseases into avian livestock, maybe bring in new virus genotypes that mix with modern ones to make new strains of avian flu--"
"Yes, right--"
"-- poop out viable seeds from extinct plant species that don't have any natural predators here, damage the native flora and fauna. Maybe it's a female and maybe it's pregnant, I mean, the list is endless if you think about it--"
"Yes, thank you Bruce, that's great. So. We have to catch this fucking bird. Dinosaur. Thing. And get rid of it before it causes more problems." Tony waved his hands for emphasis and the tree branch groaned worryingly under his weight.
Clint nodded from up a tree on the other side of the clearing. "Right. But. Do we have to kill it? I mean, it's not it's fault it--"
"You didn't see it stick its freaky little lizard-head through the portal and then go for my face, don't tell me it wasn't asking for trouble--"
"I have a couple of net arrows left, I don't know--"
At the eastern edge of the clearing, the bushes rustled. All three Avengers shushed each other hurriedly and attempted to stay perfectly still without falling out of their respective trees.
"Nobody move," Clint whispered. "Just let it come out of the underbrush …"
The bush rustled again, then trilled a couple of octaves up and down, sweet and melodic.
"Come on, little guy, come on out …"
The dinosaur's red-orange head peeked out from the foliage. It took a few sideways hops into the clearing, chirping to itself.
It was out-of-place and awkward on the ground in a way Sam hadn’t expected. His nephews had a few dinosaur toys with feathers, but Sam had grown up with Dinotopia and The Land Before Time and the first Jurassic Park movie, and he still found the feathers a little strange.
The dinosaur’s beady little eyes examined the half-a-cherry-danish sitting invitingly on a sun-warmed rock. It cocked its head in suspicion.
It whistled and hopped forward again. It was almost clear of the brush now. Just a few more feet and Clint would have the shot.
"Come on, that was my breakfast, come on …"
The branch underneath Tony cracked with a sound like a gunshot. He fell with the grace of a bag of wet cement, but caught himself a few feet off the ground, all four repulsors firing. The dead wood hit the ground with a resounding crash that echoed through the woodland.
Off in the distance, a flock of ducks took off from the lake, quacking. Sam winced.
"SHIT!" Tony said.
The dinosaur shrieked in rage. Its feathers floofed out from its body, making it appear twice as large as before and ten times as angry. It spread its wings -- arms -- it kind of had both, they were obviously arms because of the claws but with long wing-like feathers on them -- in an aggressive flaring display of red-white-black and charged towards Tony.
Clint fired. The net exploded out around his danish but the dinosaur saw it coming and dodged. It jumped sideways and glided back down at an angle with an insulted 'skreeeeee!' Its little feet pattered over Clint's pastry, and then --
"You little bastard! You come back here!"
The runny white splotch on top of the cherry filling was unmistakable. Sixty-five million years later, bird shit still looked the same.
*
The team split up.
"It's only four acres," Tony said. "We'll cover more ground." His armour was covered in streaks of yellow-brown sap. Bits of leaves and tree bark had started to stick to the worst of it. "What is this stuff? Jesus!"
"Dinosaur ruined my breakfast," Clint said, mournfully.
Sam shook his head and walked off into the woodland.
It wasn't a real forest, anyway, not like the area around the Avengers compound upstate. The nature sanctuary was as carefully managed and monitored as every other part of Central Park.
A few big trees had come down in Hurricane Sandy. Someone had come through with a chainsaw to saw through their fallen trunks, improving access to deeper parts of the preserve. It was probably good for safety, too. Nobody wanted a tree falling on their head when they were out counting songbirds.
Sam found a little waterfall running over a rocky bluff but the source turned out to be just a garden hose.
He wondered what the little dinosaur thought of it all. It must be disorienting, to be in your normal bird-dinosaur home one minute, full of familiar (weird) trees and giant prehistoric bugs and clean skies that had never seen a plane, and -- and flowers, if flowers existed then, Sam wasn't sure when flowers had evolved --
And then to fly through a window into a whole new world the next minute, just because you saw a circle with a different colour of sky and you were too curious for your own good. The little dinosaur was probably lonely, being the only one like it in New York. It probably missed all of its little dinosaur friends, and didn’t know which way was up here in this world full of zookeepers and cherry pastries and waterfalls-from-garden-hoses.
It was sad.
Sam sat down on a tree stump and wiggled his toes inside his boots. The stump hadn’t grown over with new plants yet since Sandy, so all the age rings in the wood were still exposed.
Who knew where the dinosaur had gone; it could be halfway to Yankee Stadium by now. Sam stared at his boots morosely. His foot had a cramp.
There was a tiny ‘cheep’ from the other side of the stump.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“You little sneak,” Sam said. “You’ve been following me this whole time, haven’t you.”
The other side of the stump said ‘cheep’ again. There was a rustling noise and its orange-red head popped up, hopeful. When Sam didn’t move, it climbed up the stump -- surprisingly delicate long fingers and toes clinging to the bark -- and perched on the edge across from him.
Sam took the opportunity to examine the little dinosaur. It wasn’t very big, maybe the size of a turkey, but it was pretty in a bizarre sort of way. Its face and snout were bright yellow and scaly up to behind and around its eyes, but the rest of its body was shades of red and orange and a deep, burnt gold.
Sam thought about what birds did. Maybe it hadn’t liked Iron Man because his iron plumage was too confrontational of a colour scheme?
The dinosaur bounced up and down next to Sam, letting its head-feathers floof up into a crest like a cockatiel. It spread its arm-wings out to show the dramatic black-and-white accents underneath, and bounced in place again.
Sam paid polite attention, spreading his own Falcon wings a little to show he was listening. A little of the red-white-black peeked out as the plates shifted -- he really did like the new colours. Tony had insisted Sam choose.
Apparently, so did the dinosaur. It burbled in excitement and repeated its bouncing dance, holding its arm-wings stiffly out at the sides and bobbing its head up and down. It ran through the same sequence of movements several times. Sam suspected it was an instinctive patterned behaviour. Poor little guy saw something familiar and tried to fall in love with it right away, compatability and timing be damned.
Sam caught a flash of purple in the corner of his eye. Clint’s net-arrow exploded around the little dinosaur on its next bounce-bounce-flare-flare-head-bob dance. Sam folded its arm-wings carefully shut against its body inside the net, not wanting it to hurt itself in a struggle to break free.
Clint let out a joyous whoop. “But he’s okay, right?” He jogged up to Sam anxiously and stuck a couple of fingers inside the net. The dinosaur promptly bit him. “Ouch!”
“Oh, yeah.” Sam said, holding the little dinosaur tucked up against his chest. It hardly weighed anything at all. It was mostly made of feathers, Sam guessed. And lots of pointy-bitey bits. Couldn’t blame it for that -- prehistoric life was probably a tough go.
Clint sucked on his bleeding finger. “Good. I like him.”
“Me too.” Sam smiled. “Us bird types gotta stick together.”
*
By the time they walked back to the Children’s Zoo gates, Tony and Bruce had secured the time-portal. By ‘secured’ they meant ‘thrown a large tarp over’. It seemed like a flimsy barrier between them and certain ecological disaster, but Sam wasn’t in charge of that part of the op. He was just the man holding the dinosaur.
“Sometimes low-tech is the best tech,” Bruce said with a shrug.
Sam nudged the tarp with his foot and looked over at Tony. “We gonna let this little guy go back home before you close the door?”
“I thought about having him for Thanksgiving -- I’m kidding, don’t look at me like that, I would never. Probably.”
Bruce rolled his eyes. “I’m guessing the probability that it’s acquired any modern pathogens in the past two hours is minimal. I think it’s fine.”
Clint and Bruce peeled back a corner of the tarp while Sam untangled the dinosaur from its net. Warm, humid air rushed up to meet him as the portal was exposed. It smelled like magnolias.
The dinosaur scrabbled against Sam’s chest and ‘peeped’ excitedly when it saw the weird (familiar) tree branch sticking out. It hopped out of Sam’s hands, clinging to the branch. Then it dropped back into its own world in a graceful dive, arm-wings and tail feathers steering it safely home.
Sam’s heart ached.
They all looked at the time-portal in silence for a moment. Bruce hit a combination of buttons and the ray gun powered off with a bell-like chime. The circle disappeared with a pop like a soap bubble, shimmering and effervescent in the late September sunshine.
"Well, that settles that," Tony said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pretend to be interested in Flemish embroidery with my lady love. Ciao.” He jetted off towards the Met, armour still covered in sap.
Bruce looked at Sam. “Want to get lunch?”
“Brunch,” Clint said. “It’s not even noon yet.” He yawned dramatically.
“Yeah, okay.” Sam said. “I know a place.”
They headed out down 66th Street, together.
*
“I heard you caught a dinosaur today,” Steve said over dinner. They were eating in front of the TV again. The Knicks game was on, volume turned down low.
“Yeah.” Sam said. “Yeah, it was pretty cool. It wasn’t so bad, though, it was just looking for a friend. And I have a lot of experience making friends with dinosaurs.” Sam winked, sly and pleased with himself at the joke.
Steve flopped down on the couch next to Sam. “Ugh. Wilson. You’ve got to stop listening to Natasha.”
“Hey, we’re all friends here. Someone’s gotta keep you on your toes.”
Steve looked over at Sam, a soft look in his eye. “What else is family for, right?”
Sam smiled back. “Right.”