Aria stepped out of her car after finally completing her hunt. It was nothing hard for her, just a simple demon. She had been a hunter for so long that tricking a demon into a devils trap and reciting an exorcism was just another day. She noticed the amount of blood on her guys gray v-neck under her brown leather jacket and frowned. This had been her favorite shirt and it didn't look like she could get it all of out.
Aria unlocked her motel room door and was met with a man in a black suit standing in the middle of the room holding a file. The last thing Aria expected to see when she walked into her motel room was a man in a black suit. Men in black suits are never a good sign. Once she saw him she immediately thought of her options. She could easily draw one of the many knives hidden all around her person, or she could grab the lamp directly to her right and hit him over the head. The man obviously saw her eyeing the lamp next to her and quickly tried to get her brain off the topic of harming him.
"Hello, my name is Agent Coulson of Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. or just S.H.I.E.L.D." The man spoke. Aria's face fell. She hadn't heard that name in years, S.H.I.E.L.D.
"I thought I fell off your radar after I, left the testing." She spoke pushing the stray piece of brown hair out of her face. Her voice had a faint english accent that was almost completely gone. She remembered quickly how S.H.I.E.L.D had treated her better than the first place. But being a lab rat, no matter what the conditions, was not a way she wanted to live.
"We never lost sight of you. It was never a secrete that Howard "snuck" you out." The Agent said making quotes in the air while he said 'snuck'. Aria stepped closer to the only bed in the room and put down her bag that held all the essential hunting tools.
"Well why are you here now then?" She felt her hand sliding up toward the knife hidden up her sleeve. Most hunters were handy with guns, Aria put her faith in knives and had become very handy with them over the years.
"A team is being assembled, of extraordinary people," Agent Coulson started. Aria snorted.
"There's no way in Hell I'm extraordinary." She cut in.
"I'd say being 2% bird is rather extraordinary." He paused and stepped closer to Aria, handing the file to here. "Earth has been threatene and we are putting together a team." Aria peeked into the file getting a glimps of some words and pictures. Her eye caught the name Loki. She recognized the name from Norse mythology. The trickster.
"So I won't be some lab rat?" Aria asked slowly. She had the intent as treating this as any other hunt. Loki wasn't the first God she had encountered, she had taken down others with fellow hunters Dean and Sam. The God of Mischief shouldn't be so hard.
"None at all."
"Alright Agent Coulson, where to?"
Aria stepped out of the car after the long ride. She spend the majority of the drive staring out the window counting the different colored cars, memorizing liscense plates, and hoping to see a black '67 impala. The latter was unlikely though. That car would most likely be seen on backroads. She couldn't remember a time when Dean actually drove on a heavily traffic ridden road. She idley flipped through the file a few times but as soon as she started reading, car sickness would begin to sink in.
Aria threw her backpack that was filled with her essential weapons - which were basically all knives and some holy water - on her back and took in the sights around her. She was on what seemed to be a military base. Though the planes didn't look like the standard military planes. They were unlike anything she every saw before. It wasn't a surprise to her that S.H.I.E.L.D. had possecion of these.
She follwed Coulson closely, not wanting to loose sight of him among the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Another black car pulled up and Agent Coulson stopped. Aria watched as a man emerged from the car. He was tall and nicely built, but everything about him screamed man out of time. From the way he walked over to Coulson she could easily tell he was a man from the military, the hair cut helped the cause. Her theories were proven right when Coulson addressed the man as 'Captain Rodgers.' Aria froze as she remembered reading that name in the file, he was a man out of time. He was Steve Rodgers. He was Captain America. The worlds first superhero.
"My name is Agent Coulson, and this is Aria." The Agent motioned to Aria who felt stupid for not realizing who he was at first. She may not have had a normal education but everyone knew who Captain America was. Everyone knew the story of how he helped the Allies win the War.
The Captain greeted Coulson with a handshake and Aria thought he looked like he would have a heart attack. A smile crept oer her face; she wouldn't have pegged Coulson as the Captain America fan boy type. He turned his attention to Aria.
"Nice to meet you Miss." He outstretche his arm. Aria was caught off guard. She wasn't used to the manners of a man from the 40s.
"Oh just Aria is fine." She smiled and shook his hand. When the short little meeting was over they followed Coulson to one of the planes. Aria couldn't imagine what the man out of time was thinking as they stept onto the ramp going up the small plane. She looked around at the smalle area. They were told the ride would take around an hour and Aria found herself holding back a moan. One of the only things she hated was being inside a plane. It was not that she was afraid of flying, that was perfectly fine. It was the whole concept of being inside of a plane.
Aria took a seat next to Steve on the seats that lined the sides of the jet. It felt weird to her. Sitting next to the legend who went missing 70 years prior. She felt insignificant. Why would S.H.I.E.L.D need her if they found the famous Captain America? Though S.H.I.E.L.D knew some of her abilities inside and out, there were some things she could do they had no clue. The experiment had left her with some unhuman characteristics. The first things someone would notice about her was she was had more endurance than the average human, and was faster, strong, and more agile. Though they were nothing compared to the Super Soldier. There was also another effect. She had wings. Wings that had remained hidden under baggy shirts at all times.
She wasn't really proud of her wings. Most would probably spend most of their time in the sky and possibly show them off, but to her they were a burden. They destroyed her childhood years. Instead of running around playing with other children she had been kept in labs, tested and proded to see how she differed from a normal human. So she hid them from the world, pretending to be normal. Though being a hunter was far from normal, it was the closest she'd get to normal.
Coulson began to speak about something called the Tesseract but Aria wasn't paying attention. From the little parts that she was paying attention she understood that it wasn't human technology and could be an energy source. She head Steve mention Hydra and she squeezed her eyes shut. It was Hydra's fault she was the way she was. She didn't want to remember but the memories flashed over her eyes.
Hydra's testing was Hell. They had no care for treating her like a human. She stayed in a cold concrete cell with other experiments around her. Throughout the night she would be able to here moans of dying experiments who could not properly function. There were only few of them that would make it past one year. She would say she was lucky for being a 'successful' experiment but for the 8 years of her life spent at Hydra she wanted to die.
S.H.I.E.L.D found where Hydra was doing the testing and invaded it. Somehow she was able to escape away from the base before S.H.I.E.L.D bombed it. She may have been 8 but she knew that was wrong. Though she wanted Hydra to burn in the depth of Hell, there was no way for the other experiments to be killed in such a manner. Even if most of them wouldn't make it to their teen years.
Aria remembered hiking away from the building in the middle of no where. She was somewhere in England, malnurished and freezing. She didn't make it far till S.H.I.E.L.D agents who were scouting the area for any escaped Hydra agents found her. She thought she was going to be face. She thought she was finally going to live a normal life. She was wrong.
She remembered the final two years of being a lab rat. While with S.H.I.E.L.D she was always healthy and had an actual room. They gave her the nickname Angel because of the wings that adorn her back. She was never generally fond of the nickname but it was better than being assigned a number like Hydra had done. Even though she was treated a bit better sh always lived with the fear of dying everyday. There were no avon human crosses before her, so no one knew how long she would make it. It was a wonder she had made it to 8.
Finally on her 10th birthday, she got away from the lab life. It was late at night and Aria woke with a start as she heard the familiar sound of the large sliding door opening. Her thoughts went immidiatley to the thought of it being a test. Everything was a test in her life. She remembered being puzzled when she recognized the man as Howard Stark. She had seen him before in the building, though he always worked with weapons. He motioned for her to be quiet.
"I'm going to get you out of here. You have to trust me." He whispered. Trust wasn't something that came easy to her. It wouldn't come easy to anyone put in her situation. She hesitantly followed the man being as silent as she could. The two didn't waste anytime and made it to a car waiting for the two of them.
They drove to an airport and Howard shipped her off somewhere to a new life. Tons of forged documents went with her, birth certificates, past schools, even a new name. It was only then did she start going by the name Aria. She hoped to get a normal life, but she got the complete opposite. She was put with a family of hunters who had their own turmoil. They were called the Winchesters. She stayed with them till she was 16 and began to hunt by herself. The Winchesters had their own problems and she didn't feel the need to mix her childhood problems with the two brothers.
"We're nearly there." Agent Coulson announced. Aria was pulled from her thoughts and looked up. She hadn't realized that much time had passed. She looked to windshield of the jet. She could see a giant aircraft carrier in the distance. It didn't take a genius to realize that was the destination.
"You okay?" Steve turned and looked at Aria who was recovering from her memories. She let out a little laugh at the irony. Out of all the people to ask if she was okay it would be the one who wasn't even used to the current time period.
"Yea I'm fine, I uh, don't like heights." The lie easily slid through her lips. It looked like he didn't buy it at first, but he didn't question it. There was no way she was going to lay her years of trouble on a guy who was asleep for 70 years. He had his own problems.
Aria kept looking out the windshield and fixed her fishtail braid as Agent Coulson made a fool out of himself talking to his idol. She heard him say something about watching him while he slept and winced in her head. It was never a good idea to say that. Aria gave some props to The Captain in her head since he was being such a good sport about it. Aria felt the plane land and tried to prepare herself for what was going to happen next.
A/n: This was something I started toying around with but I'm not sure I really like it or will continue it.
Disclaimer: Since I am sucky at coming up with titles the title to this is the name of a 30 Seconds to Mars song (which is not mine) The idea of Aria being part bird comes from the Maximum Ride series (which is also not mine) I don't own any of the characters except for Aria.