How to Train Your Avengers

Nicholas Fury had retired from the interrogation room that contained the young Viking and returned to the main deck. The sun was beginning to set, leaving an obnoxious glare on the control room. The SHIELD agents paid it no mind as they continued their duties on their computers. Agent Hill approached Nick Fury.

“Are you concerned?” Agent Hill asked her director. “This one came with a dragon.”

Although Fury tended to compartmentalize almost everything around SHIELD, he always told Hill the truth. She was one of the few people that he trusted with his life, especially after the Attack on New York. He responded candidly, “I’m not sure.”

“How do you think they got here?” Agent Hill walked towards the edge of the center platform and looked out over the agents below her feet.

“I have a million theories, each as unlikely as the last.” Director Fury replied. He furrowed his brow.

Agent Hill touched her right hand to the comm. In her ear, listening carefully to the frantic agent on the other end. With urgency, she said, “Sir, another has been spotted. That’s the third one this week. What orders should I give?”

“Send out the team,” Fury responded as he punched in a code into the computer screen in front of him.

“What should I tell them? The Avengers know nothing of this yet. Not even Natasha or Barton.”

“Not that team,” Nick Fury growled and Agent Hill looked at her feet, completely embarrassed at her misunderstanding. She positioned herself to his right and punch in the necessary codes to give the order to that response team.

“With all due respect, sir, why not send the Viking out? Wouldn’t she be useful?”

Nick Fury stopped his work on the computer and turned his entire body to face his most trusted Agent. “I can’t be sure she’s not on his side.” He turned the computer screen towards Agent Hill. On the display was an image of another young Viking, about the same age as Hicca. His brown hair was a mess and there were several blue facial tattoos on his forehead and left cheek. His smile was crooked and the gleam in his eye was deranged.
***
Inside the containment cell meant for the Hulk, the young Night Fury fired several plasma blasts, hoping to shatter the glass. To his dismay and surprise, nothing happened. The bluish-purple plasma blasts hit the glass and exploded, which was normal, but the glass didn’t even reverberate. It didn’t make sense, since even if the explosion of his fire wasn’t enough, the heat surely should be. Toothless cocked his head to the side in confusion.

Toothless let out a cry, which echoed across the chamber. He hoped that Hicca could hear him and release him from this prison. He looked back at his handicapped tail in dismay. Everything in the universe was working against him…His feet and wings were bound and he couldn’t use his firepower to escape. His fabricated tail rudder was broken, an arrow sticking up through the red fabric.

Once again, Toothless felt as helpless as his did in the canyon five years ago when Hicca had shot him down, breaking his tail rudder. Dejectedly, Toothless breathed sustained fire onto the ground to warm it up, for there was nothing else he could do but wait and hope. Miserably, the Night Fury did his best to curl up and sleep until someone came. He hoped it would be his Viking and not any of these other humans.
***
Steve Rogers held the door for Natasha as she walked in with a tray of food for the young Viking. She placed the tray on the table and Hicca eyed her curiously as the former Soviet spy unchained her handcuffs. “Eat,” she commanded.

“What is it?” Hicca asked cautiously.

“Steak.”

“Is anything in it?”

“Yeah, cow. Eat, you must be hungry. Fury’s interrogations always made me starved.” She sat down in front of Hicca and cradled her chin in her hand. Steve Rogers unhinged his shield from his back and leaned it against the leg of the table. He pulled a second chair up next to Natasha and sat with his hands folded neatly in his lap. Hicca tentatively picked up the utensils and cut the steak open. Then smell was delicious, but she wouldn’t give into temptation so easily. She stabbed the small piece with a fork and passed it off to Steve.

“Have some.” What Hicca lacked in strength, she definitely made up for in smarts. Steve took the fork eyeing her and Natasha curiously. Natasha smirked as Steve stuffed the steak into his mouth.

“You are a clever one, I’ll give you that. There’s no poison in it. It’s just steak.”

“Figured I had to give it to him to eat because you strike me as the type of person who has been building up an immunity to poisons since you were little.”

“I’m Natasha Romanoff and this is Steve Rogers. We’re part of the Avenger’s Initiative here at SHIELD.” Natasha introduced herself. “So you must have questions for us.” Natasha didn’t want anyone to know that the little Viking woman jibe had some truth to it. Couldn’t ever be too careful in this business. The woman’s statement surprised Hicca though. Here she was, prepared for further interrogation and the SHIELD agent was feeding her and offering to answer her own questions. She had a million, but the only one that really mattered to her was, “Where’s Toothless? Is he okay?”

“He’s in a containment cell. He’s fine. In no worse shape than you, in fact,” Natasha kept her tone completely even, but her calculating eyes watched Hicca’s reactions.

After breathing a sigh of relief, Hicca began to eat the platter in front of her. “So what exactly are we in? I thought it might be a sub-species of the Seadragonus Giganticus Maximus but you can’t put people inside of it.”

“A helicarrier.”

Hicca hummed. As she reached into her back pocket for her notepad, Natasha placed her own hand on the gun at her side. When Natasha saw that Hicca was only pulling out a tattered leather-bound book, she relaxed her grip and resumed cradling her chin. She watched as the young Viking drew the helicarrier onto the paper and labeled it in Norse. “This is exciting. I haven’t discovered…er… encountered a new dragon since the baby Typhoonmerang. Why do you call it a helicarrier? What’s its shot limit? Is it afraid of eels? What class would you put it in? My gut feeling is stealth class because it has the invisibility like a Changewing.” Hicca inhaled sharply and stopped herself from firing more questions off at the pair of agents. “Listen to me, I sound like Fishlegs.”

“This isn’t a dragon,” Natasha’s tone never changed. “It’s a machine.”

Hicca sat back in her chair, putting her charcoal pencil down. “How did you make the machine fly?”

“This might be hard for you to take in,” Steve started, knowing he needed to be the one to break this to her. He knew exactly what it was like to be in an unfamiliar era. The only difference was that he had only missed 70 years; technology had just improved. In Hicca’s case technology was all but non-existent in her time. “But this is the 21st century. The year is 2013.”

Hicca looked from Natasha to Steve and back again. They were pulling her leg, right? Her real one? It was definitely 1013 when she and Toothless woke up this morning. “T-that’s i-impossible.” Damn, her stutter always came back when she was nervous.

“In my experience, nothing is impossible, just highly improbable,” Natasha said.

“Let’s say I do believe you, which I don’t, why on all of Midgard would you want me? Why bring me here?” She picked up her fork and stuffed some of the carrots into her mouth, awaiting the agents’ answer.

“We didn’t,” Steve supplied.

“Again I’m not sure I believe you anyway, but I’ll play along…if you –didn’t- bring me here, why are you keeping me…” Hicca’s eyes widened. “By Gods!” She dropped the utensils and stood up, pointing accusingly at the pair of Avengers. “You want Toothless! You…you can’t have him! I won’t let you or anyone take him.”

“Calm down, miss. No one is taking…er Toothless.”

Natasha was growing quite bored of the conversation. Again she asked the young Viking, “Whose side are you on?”

Rather than answering directly, partially because Hicca didn’t really know the answer herself, she replied, “You don’t have to fight them, you know. Everything you think you know about dragons is wrong. Most are trainable and will only attacked if provoked. They’re extremely loyal. I’ll show you if you want. What do you have here? Naddars? Terrible Terrors? Changewings?”

“There are no dragons here, except your Toothless.”

“My Night Fury?” Hicca asked, incredulously. “Then why are you keeping me? I’m telling you I’m no threat to you. Ask any Viking from Berk to Outcast Island. Gobber berates me all the time telling me that I can’t wield a sword, I’m no good with an axe and I’ve got no aim whatsoever. I’m really of no consequence to your tribe.”

“Having a dragon makes me beg to differ,” Natasha replied. She pulled her smart phone out from between her boobs and smirked as she caught Steve staring in bewilderment. She swiped her thumb across the screen and pulled up an internet tab on the Hairy Hooligan Tribe. A painting of Hicca and her father on a shield, the very one from the Great Hall that hung next to all of the former chiefs and their sons, was on the screen. She placed the phone onto the table and slide it towards the Viking. “Is this you?” Hicca raised an eyebrow and nodded.

Hicca’s eyes widened as the reality of the situation finally sunk in. They told her that it was 1000 years in the future and they had showed her via witchcraft on this thin rock. Oh mighty Oden, she was in way over her head this time. Why couldn’t it be another Red Death—that would be manageable at least. “Are you a witch?” she asked Natasha.

The Soviet spy smirked. “Some men think so, but no. This,” she motioned to the phone on the table, “is called a cell-phone. We’ve advanced a lot in 1000 years. If you’re on our side, we’ll get you up to speed with everything. Cap’n here is an expert at re-familiarizing oneself with the world around him.” She winked at Steve Rogers, who immediately blushed.

“O-oh man, w-well. This is kinda crazy. You do realize this, right?” Then again, I thought that trying to fly a dragon, the sworn enemies of my people, was crazy too.

“It’ll get easier,” Steve assured her, knowing her plight all-too-well.

“Yeah, well I’m kinda used to being the outsider. Been-been that way all my life, it’s just this…this is a whole new level.”

“You’re an outsider?”

Hicca shrugged. “More or less. If anything, I’m a disappointment to my father on a daily basis. You’re looking at the least Viking, Viking ever to set foot on Berk. I almost didn’t make it through dragon training until I met Toothless. A Gronckle almost took me out my first day. And even after training Toothless, I almost messed that up with the Monstrous Nightmare in front of the whole village.” Steve watched her curiously, but allowed her to continue. “But Berk was home and I’m still a Viking. I was gone for a day and I’ve missed 1000 years. I don’t even know how that’s possible.”

Steve smiled. “Around here you get used to expecting the unexpected.”

“Yeah, meeting Thor and flying machines and voodoo cellphones gave me that impression. But I still don’t see how this all is possible.”

Nicholas Fury opened up the door of the interrogation room. “You, here, now,” he commanded to the Viking. She rose from her seat cautiously and unceremoniously shoved another piece of steak into her mouth. It might be her last meal for a while, and besides, the steak was freaking delicious. As she approached the director of SHIELD, he held out a small metal bracelet. “Put this on your leg…your real leg?” Tentatively Hicca obliged. Director Fury nodded in approval and Hicca thought to herself, That’s the first thing he’s approved of since I got here! Nicholas Fury pulled a small black cylinder out of his coat pocket. “If you so much as think about escaping or trying to get to your dragon, I will press this button,” he motioned to the red button atop the clicker, “And you will have a matching set of metal legs. Do I make myself clear?”

Hicca gulped. “Inescapably, sir.”

“Good, follow me.” Nicholas Fury turned on his heel and left the room.

“Where are we going?” Hicca struggled to keep up, although she imagined with the fast pace the man kept, she probably would have struggled even if she had two good legs.

“To give you a place to sleep.”

“Does that mean you believe me? Am I no longer your prisoner?”

“We’ll see. But we are suspended in the air on emergency boosters at the moment since your Night Fury took out one of our main engines. Thanks to Tony Stark, we’ve made some modifications from last time this happened and are able to stay airborne while repairs are being made. It should be about another day before we reach the HQ in New York.”

Nicholas Fury punched in a code in the wall and the airlock door hissed open. Hicca took a surprised stutter-step backwards as the door opened, seemingly by magic. I missed 1000 years, I missed 1000 years. Things are different. She tried to calm her nerves. She was more worried about Toothless than anything. Although the red-head—what was her name? Natasha? –had assured her that her Night Fury was safe and sound, Hicca couldn’t be sure until she saw her dragon with her own two eyes.

The Director of SHIELD ushered her into the room. “There’s a bed, bathroom and sink. Press this button,” he motioned to the green button on the wall by the door, “if you need anything. Natasha will be in tomorrow when we are back at HQ.”

Just as he was leaving, Hicca stopped him, “Wait,” she pleaded. “I’ve cooperated so you won’t hurt Toothless, right? If it means I need to sleep on the floor in a jail, I’d rather do that and know he’s safe. Just don’t hurt him.”

“Your dragon is in a containment cell. We won’t hurt him.”

Hicca muttered her thanks, although she wasn’t sure she believed him. It was going to be quite strange sleeping without Toothless in the same room. Gods, please don’t let anything happen to him.