Note: I don't seem to have long uninterrupted chunks of time to write lately. So I'm going with something I can put down in shorter bits. I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but I had this idea itching around so I scratched it. We'll see where it ends up. This will not be a big ole epic, just a little adventure.

"Thor, Tony! The portal casters are in the park. West side of the green. Focus on them!" Steve yelled into his comm, over the sounds of people screaming.

It was aliens again, but they didn't look like aliens. They looked human. They'd appeared out of nowhere in every major city of the world, and all the humans of Earth could do was fight. There were no space ships, no plasma cannons, no energy weapons. Just strange, aggressive people speaking a fluid, clicking language. People who wanted them dead, or at least enslaved.

Steve, Tony, Thor, Sam, and Rhodey had taken to the air for advantage over the ground battle. Then, the portals started. Several times, Steve had almost been caught in the shining silvery pools that shimmered open in midair in front of him. Thor had almost lost Mjolnir to one, but he'd called the hammer back an instant before the portal closed. Tony apparently had some means to avoid the portals because more than once, Steve had seen Iron Man veer off course suddenly right before a portal appeared in front of where he would have been.

The invaders were radiating out from an apparent point of origin in the park, and spreading in a general advance north, methodically overwhelming block by block of terrified people. The local National Guard and Coast Guard units were trying to hold ground until the full force of the military could be engaged. It was a mess. The Avengers and several unknown enhanced people were doing all they could to defend everyone.

There'd been no communication and no diplomacy. The invaders had streamed into the street in the tens of thousands, by some still mysterious means, probably the silvery portals. They'd started exterminating New Yorkers as if the streets were a medieval battlefield. They only used bladed weapons, but people were dying by the thousands, mostly men, or anyone who tried to fight. They were almost as eager to kill women, but they usually left children alone. The elderly were ignored.

Steve braced on the deck of his Chitauri glider and spun about as quickly as he could do so and still keep control of the craft. He had to cover for Tony and Thor while they neutralized the portal casters. Portals seemed to be the invaders' main advantage.

Mjolnir flew again and again and Tony was probably expending all the munitions his Iron Man suit carried.

"The portal casters die well enough," Thor said.

"If you poke enough holes in them. Tough bastards! I'm expended. Rhodey!" Tony exclaimed.

Colonel Rhodes swooped in to take Tony's place while Tony flew to the tower to re-equip his suit.

The fight was in the streets, in the park, in buildings, on vessels in the river, on the bridges. The only place it wasn't was in the air. Civilians were pouring out onto rooftops. Steve knew that meant the buildings were being taken from the ground floor, then up. People were either in shock or panicked.

He threw his shield at an angle to take out what appeared to be a leader of sorts of the invading force. He arced his throw so that the shield would be where he wanted it when his glider came around for the catch. Steve extended his arm as he banked the glider. The enemy leader's head was no longer attached to his body.

"Portal casters are almost-" Rhodey said.

Steve felt a sliver of coldness, and whatever Colonel Rhodes was going to say cut out abruptly as the comms went dead.

His vision went white and he felt weightless, but his battle adrenaline forced any disorientation from his mind in an instant. The shield didn't return to his hand as he expected, so he looked to find it somewhere down in the chaos on the ground.

"Shit!" Steve exclaimed.

He banked the glider with a hard lean just before he could be swallowed into the leafy branches of a huge tree. Leaves and twigs scraped against the bottom of the glider, and Steve was startled that a tree so large and tall could suddenly be anywhere in the city.

The complete silence finally caught his attention as soon as he was clear of the tree. Steve looked around to see how he'd gotten so far off course. And he kept looking. His eyes scanned to the horizon in every direction. His glider slowed to a hover as Steve tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Below him was nothing but forest. Thick, deep green forest that looked wild and tangled. The tree he'd almost been swallowed by wasn't the only large one. There were small clearings below that showed meadow grass, and more normal sized trees of all kinds, and dead, skeletal tree snags sticking up among the giant trees. His heart was pounding in his ears, and his breaths huffed loudly, which was normal for hard combat.

There were no buildings, and no streets. No people, no invaders, no structures of any sort. Just the endless green of forest all around. A slight crackling sound got his attention and he snapped his head around to see a silvery line in the air behind him. Immediately, he raced the glider to a less side-on vantage point, but the shimmering portal was closing from oval to linear quickly. Panic spiked more adrenaline into his blood, and he made a fast run at the closing portal, but it was already too late.

Steve had to bank aside as the last of the portal flashed like a knife blade in the sun before it disappeared entirely. The right rear corner of the glider deck was sliced off with laser precision as it touched the last wisp of the portal.

"God, no!" Steve said with fervent dread.

In his gut, and in some vague place in his mind, he knew he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. He had to try to communicate, anyway.

"Tony. Thor. Clint. Anybody, come in," Steve said.

He'd never needed to before, but he pressed his comm unit more firmly into his ear, as if that would help.

The comm unit was as dead as if he had a pebble stuck in his ear. He turned it off, then back on, and scanned through channels. There was nothing.

"Jarvis?" Steve asked.

Jarvis was satellite linked to their comm system, and should be able to hear him anywhere in the world. Or anywhere in atmosphere and a good distance beyond.

"Jarvis, come in!" Steve barked.

Nothing.

He looked up at the sky as if he could find the satellites that should be transmitting the communications. Another oddity became clear to him. There was no air traffic. Not even a con trail. He took the glider up to five hundred feet, well above the treetops, and the sky opened up until he could see the slight curve of the earth. There was no air traffic. Only a graceful line of white cranes flew above the trees to the Northeast, the birds in no hurry to get where they were going.

Steve took a moment to assess his situation. Apparently he'd flown right into a portal. But as far as he knew, there was nowhere he could have been transported to that air traffic or con trails wouldn't be visible across a big enough slice of sky. They'd been in the African Congo once, and he'd seen con trails across the sky whenever there was a break in the overhead tree canopy.

A breath huffed out of him. It was the last moment he'd allow himself to feel panic or dread. There was no one and nothing. No threat. So, he shut his eyes and breathed deep until his heart and respirations slowed. The glider he stood on dipped and floated on the breeze. There was the cawing of crows somewhere in the forest below him, faint from the distance of his altitude.

Crows. Crows were familiar. So were the white cranes.

Start with what you know, no matter how simple. Steve reminded himself.

The urgency of returning to his friends and to the battle pulled at him, but he pushed it aside. There was no way to do that unless he could find a way back. And to find a way back, he had to know where he'd been sent to through the portal.

Steve looked around and glided back down to the tree he'd almost run into. His perfect memory served him well to orient him with the natural objects he'd already noticed. The tall, gray tree snag shaped like a question mark wasn't far from what he was looking for. Close as he could tell, Steve got himself back to the exact spot where he'd first been when he'd felt the flash of cold and the comms had gone silent.

Oak. Hickory. Sycamore. Pine. Maple. There were many trees he recognized, like the crows and cranes, so he was fairly sure he wasn't on a different planet in a different realm. Down among the treetops, everything smelled green, like damp earth, trees, and sunbaked grasses. But the breeze blew a hint of salty sea air to him, coming from the East.

The weather and the light were different, as was the air temperature. When he'd been fighting before he'd gone through the portal, it had been late afternoon, and the sky was gray and threatening rain. Wherever he was now, it was midday and the sky was blue with only a few wispy high clouds. The air was warm, and it felt like summer. For it to be midday now, but late afternoon a few minutes ago, he'd have to be West of home, somewhere over the Pacific.

Things weren't making sense. On a hunch, Steve mentally marked where he'd emerged into this place, then used the glider to gain altitude. He got as near to vertical as he could go and still maintain his stance on the glider deck. Tony had replaced the Chitauri indicators with standard American analog instruments on Steve's request, so Steve watched the compass and altimeter.

There was a river gleaming to the East. Still, he gained altitude, to see the forest beyond the river. There were large wooded islands, and beyond that, a coastline and presumably, an ocean. The white cranes he'd seen earlier were joining a massive group of other cranes nested in a coastal marsh.

Higher and higher Steve rose, and his instincts told him to watch for other aircraft which might be hostile, but there was still only him in the sky. As he rose up, the air got colder and the curve of the earth was more pronounced. He looked down at the land receding below him.

Things were starting to look familiar. The Jersey coast. The Hudson. Long Island.

All of it covered in thick forest that stretched inland for miles and miles, until he couldn't see beyond the horizon. Still no buildings, no roads, no aircraft in the sky, and not a single boat out at sea. A mind-warping sense of surrealism washed over him.

This was home. He'd come out of the portal not far from where he'd gone in, maybe a few miles inland in New Jersey. Steve took the glider down at a fast, steep angle, and the usually silent craft made whistling sounds at the back, where the deck was damaged from being cut by the portal. Down, and down, with his eyes tracking one spot all the while.

Steve set the glider down on a somewhat familiar rocky outcrop he could see through the trees. Birds startled up from the vegetation around him, and a deer perked its head, flagged its tail, and bounded off through the underbrush.

If he was really home, he'd be parked in Central Park. But there was nothing except rampant wilderness towering around him. Two butterflies dithered around each other, then gave up their dancing to settle on a tiny purple flower.

He knew where he was. Just not when.