A/N: I said at the end of YSWM that I would be posting the first part of Steve's story soon, and here it is! I actually would have posted it sooner, but I had originally planned a short flashback chapter as chapter two, and that turned into way more than a chapter, and I don't like doing flashbacks longer than a chapter, so I had to rearrange stuff. We'll get to Steve in the future… eventually. I'm not totally done writing and plotting this story, but I love to hear y'alls feedback. I hope you enjoy this first chapter, and please leave a review!

One day, when Steve was twelve, he found his ma staring at him in confusion, and muttering something about letters, and school.

Steve had been worried that it was a letter from the school kicking him out for fighting bullies in the schoolyard (he'd given Robbie a black eye and broken his own nose yesterday), but instead she'd opened a cupboard, and pulled out a long, thin box. Steve watched curiously as she opened it with careful reverence.

There was an equally long and thin stick inside the box. Sarah Rogers had slid the box across the table to him.

"Go ahead, pick it up," his ma had said. Steve did, puzzling the whole time about why they had a polished stick kept up in a fancy box. The wood was warm, which was odd, because it was winter in New York, and the apartment was cold, but the stick didn't do anything when he picked it up. It was exactly what Steve had expected from it, but evidently not what his ma had thought would happen.

"Swish it around," she'd said softly. Steve thought it was a weird request, but his ma also looked as if she was about to cry, so he did. Nothing, again.

"What's wrong, ma?" he'd asked her, oh so innocently. "It's a stick. Is it s'posed to do a trick?"

"Oh, Stevie," his ma had sighed, and then she took the stick from him, and suddenly, from the tip, a golden shower of sparks flew out.

"Wow, ma! How'd you do it? Can I try again?" He'd asked eagerly, and then, to his sudden horror, his ma had burst into tears. He'd hugged her, patting her back in terrified confusion, and then she told him about witches, and wizards, and a magical school across the ocean called Hogwarts. Steve was utterly fascinated.

"But how come," he'd asked naively, "how come I ain't never seen any wizards around?"

She'd left them, she told him, when she'd married his da and moved away from Ireland. His da didn't have any magic, so she had to give it up. He'd been something called a muggle, and witches and wizards weren't supposed to tell muggles that magic was real.

(Steve thought it was a funny word. American wizards called them something different, ma said, but she couldn't remember what.)

She'd never been much good at magic, anyway, his ma told him, so it wasn't so bad, leaving it behind. The spells had never seemed to go quite right for her.

And then she told him that he'd never be able to make pretty golden sparks, ever. He hadn't got any magic of his own. If he'd had any, he'd already have gotten a letter from the school, inviting him to attend, but they sent those to children when they were eleven, not twelve.

He was something called a squib.

She hadn't meant it to be mean, and Steve adored his ma, but it was just another thing to add to the list of things that Steve could not do. (It was a long, long list.)

"But you don't need magic to make a difference in the world, Steve," she told him as she put the box away.

The wand was never brought out again, and for the most part he forgot, except sometimes when he saw things that Bucky couldn't, because he wasn't a wizard, or even a squib, like him. (Not that Steve cared. Bucky was his best friend, and he didn't see any wizards steppin' up to help him fight bullies.)

Apart from that one day when he was twelve, his ma never brought up magic again.

When his ma died, though, he found the wand again, still in the same place in the cabinet, and he couldn't throw it out. The rest of her things, aside from some photos, he had to get rid of, but the wand felt special.

He moved in with Bucky, and got odd jobs between bouts of sickness, anything he could get that wasn't too labor-intensive. Somehow, they always managed to scrape by together, but sometimes, when Bucky was out, he'd take out the increasingly battered box the wand was in, and wish that he had magic..

Their walls were all covered with the sketches Steve churned out while he was stuck in bed, and Bucky had the crazy idea that they could save up enough, and he could go to art school. That was Bucky, though, always the optimist. Steve did want to go, really, but he knew they'd never save enough, and with how often he was sick, or beat up, he'd never be able to keep up. (He pretended not to know about the savings Bucky kept in a coffee can under his bed.)

When war broke out, and Bucky got his greetings*, Steve tried to join up. He didn't want to be left behind, and he hated the thought of his best friend going into danger without him. And while some people could ignore a bully, Steve couldn't. (He wondered, sometimes, where all the wizards were hiding, and how they could just ignore everything in the muggle world.)

The army rejected him. He knew that was the most likely scenario; he was underweight and too prone to injury and sickness, but until he'd actually been rejected, he'd still been holding out a little hope. He and Bucky were never able to afford the best of anything, and he'd thought maybe, if he got in, they'd be able to whip him into shape.

Apparently, they didn't have anything strong enough to cure everything that was wrong with him.

But he was nothing if not stubborn as hell, so while Bucky was at boot camp for six weeks, Steve managed to get rejected four more times. He told himself it was alright, he could help the war effort from home, he didn't need to be on the front lines, and Bucky would have other soldiers with him. Steve told himself every lie he could, until Bucky came home from training.

Bucky wouldn't tell him more than the bare basics of what boot camp had been like, what they'd told them to expect overseas. For the rest, he'd just shook his head.

One more time, Steve decided, in a desperate, last-minute decision the night before Bucky left, pretending to laugh before the ship came to take his best friend halfway around the world, into an unknown battlefield.

He'd try just one more time, he told himself, as he snuck away from the expo.

"So, you want to go overseas. Kill some Nazis?" The man said, peering over his glasses at Steve.

"Excuse me?" Steve stared at him, dumbly.

"Dr. Abraham Erskine," the man said, offering his hand for him to shake. Steve did, automatically. "I represent the Strategic Scientific Reserve."

"Steve Rogers," he said politely, still having no clue what was going on. They should have told him by now if he was accepted or rejected.

Then he saw it, peeking up out of the doctor's pocket.

A wand.

"Where are you from?" he asked in awe, oblivious to how his question sounded.

"Queens. Seventy-Third Street and Utopia Parkway. Before that, Germany," Dr. Erskine said, with a hint of a challenge. "This troubles you?"

"No," Steve said, quickly backtracking. "That's not - it's just, I never met a wizard before."

The doctor froze, and looked at him with no small amount of alarm. Steve realized that was probably a bit forward of him, and they were in a curtained exam room, in a building full of muggles.

"I'm, uh, just a squib," he offered lamely, like that made his rudeness any better.

Dr. Erskine regarded him carefully, an unreadable look in his eye. Steve tried not to squirm under the attention.

"Just a squib, hm?" Dr. Erskine said, finally, and he shifted the papers in the folder, looking at each one. "And where are you from, Mr. Rogers? Is it New Haven? Palamas? Five exams, in five different cities-"

"That might not be the right file," Steve cut in, trying not to sound desperate.

"No, it's not the exams I'm interested in," Erskine continued as if Steve hadn't said anything. "It's the five tries. But you didn't answer my question. Do you want to kill Nazis?"

"Is this a test?"

"Yes."

"I don't wanna kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from." Steve answered honestly.

"Well, there are already so many big men fighting this war, maybe what we need now is a little guy, huh?"

Steve felt his mouth drop open a little in shock.

"I can offer you a chance. Only a chance," Dr. Erskine told him, pulling back the curtain and leading him back out to the main room.

"I'll take it," Steve said eagerly.

"Good. So where is the little guy from, actually?"

"Brooklyn."

The doctor nodded and stamped something on his paper, and then turned back to Steve.

"Congratulations, soldier," the doctor said, handing him the folder, and walking away.

Steve flipped it open eagerly. There it was, in the lower corner of the page, the two letters that would get him in the Army.

His arm pressed against the long, thin box in his jacket, and his breath rattled out of him in relief.

He'd made it.

* The draft letters sent out for WWII began with a "Greetings" from the President, and people would say they 'got their greetings' when they were drafted.