Unlike many young men his age, Steve Rogers never dreamed of fame and fortune, never longed to rise above the masses and deem himself 'better' than the rest. All Steve had ever wanted was simply to be a part of it all—a puzzle piece to make up the bigger picture. He dreamed—no, he longed (here, the word finally seemed right)—to be involved, and as a proud American, he believed it was his patriotic duty to partake in all that the states had to offer. Should his country have gone to war at that very moment, then he would have enlisted immediately, not because he wished to kill, not even because he wished to fight, but because it was his duty to protect. But protecting meant more than simply raising your fists to the good fight; protecting meant preserving, absorbing and expressing life because this life, as Steve well knew, was for living, and up until that moment, he'd been quite unable to do so.

Mr. Sick, poor, and unlucky—that had been Steve's moniker growing up. At sixteen, when all the other boys his age were playing baseball and flexing their muscles to impress a pretty dame, he was stuck in bed—ninety pounds, asthmatic, and shorter than most of the girls of his class, let alone the puberty-sprouting six-foot male giants of the eleventh grade. He did his homework from his hospital bed and watched his mother work her fingers to the bone to pay for his bills. It wasn't until he was twenty-one years old that biology caught up with him—a growth sprout and strength that he groomed at the gym until there was no job he could not do. And he did them all—cooking and cleaning and manual labor, anything and everything to put food on the table and take care of his increasingly weakening mother, as though she had taken all his sickness upon herself. When he was twenty-two, his mother passed, and Steve found himself alone in the world with nothing but a string of dead-end jobs, and a journal full of half-finished stories.

Steve had never been great at science, and he certainly would never be a psychologist, but it wasn't hard to figure out why he wrote. No matter how dark his world, no matter how bleak, his stories existed with endless possibilities.

So Steve packed up his things, all his earthly belongings folded up into one small bag, and he set off to see the world, for while he loved his country, life was waiting, and the hub of life, the pinnacle of art and expression in 1899 was Paris, France. It was not, as the nuns of his schooling had said, "a village of sin," but the center of the Bohemian Revolution, where writers and painters and musicians from around the world came to express themselves in a cultural and artistic extravaganza created by a people known as 'The Children of the Revolution'. Now, Steve was under no impression that he could single handedly represent his country and its vast creativity—he was only one man—but he was one man wiling to contribute his two cents to history, to lend his mind and his pen to a revolution he was sure would never be forgotten.

Steve had come to live a penniless existence, had come to live in a hole in the wall apartment with a grouchy landlady that threw the key at his head rather than hand it to him, had come to nothing but the endless expanses of his own imagination. He had come to write about truth, beauty, freedom, and that which he believed in above all things: love.

His mother had often teased him about, his "ridiculous obsession with love," and his high school friend, Bucky, had bullied and ridiculed him for years—all in good fun, of course, because no one ever quite had his back the way Bucky did. Whether Steve was sick and scrawny, or tall and fit, Bucky had always stuck by him. Now, Steve was on his own and battling an addiction that consumed him—his crazy, ridiculous "obsession" with love.

Maybe he was simply a romantic at heart, or maybe he'd read too many books while locked away in his sick bed, but Steve never could get the idea out of his head. He dreamed about it all the time—not just any love, mind you, but the right love. Hell, he'd never even danced with another human being in his whole life simply because he was too hung up on finding the right partner. It just seemed nice, that was all—someone with whom you could share everything, someone you could hold.

There was only one problem: he had never been in love.

Luckily, at that very moment, as he sat in front of his type writer, racking his brains to find a good start to his romance, an unconscious scientist fell through his ceiling. At least, Steve thought he was a scientist, or perhaps some crazy person, as he wore a white coat streaked in grime and something green. He was suspended from the room above by a rope that was tied around his ankles.

He was quickly joined by a man dressed as a nun and carrying a bow on his back and a quiver of arrows at his side.

"Hello, how do you do?" The nun said with wild enthusiasm, as though an unconscious man had not just fallen through the roof, he was notdressed like a woman, and they had all not just come barging into Steve's newly rented apartment. "I'm Clint Barton. Sorry about all this. We were just upstairs rehearsing for a play. Awesome new idea called Spectacular, Spectacular. Set in Switzerland. You'd love it. Everyone's going to love it. If our friend here could stay awake," he said, poking the unconscious man in the ribs. "When he gets angry, he gets weird—sort of green around the edges—and then he passes out. You don't want to make him angry."

Before Steve could do more than silently gape in confusion, two more faces appeared around the hole in the ceiling—a man with long blond hair, and a woman with sleek red hair and sharp eyes.

"How is he?" asked the blond man in a booming voice that reminded Steve oddly of thunder. He thought he might be Norwegian by the sound of his voice, but he never could tell.

"Could you stop making him Hulk out?" asked the woman with the fiery hair.

"Hulk out?" Steve repeated, managing, finally, to find words, though they hadn't exactly been the ones he'd expected (he'd expected words such as 'what are you all doing here' and 'could you please fix my roof').

"It's what we call it, when Bruce does this," Clint said, poking the unconscious man, who must have been Bruce, in the ribs once more, but it was no good; he was out cold. "We can't find a name for it. So we named it ourselves.

"We're not going to have the play ready for tomorrow," said the woman, her eyes narrowing. Her lips formed a sharp, straight line.

The man beside her frowned, a perfect upside down 'U' that was far more comical than it should have been given the situation. He rather looked like an oversized kid who had dropped his ice cream. "And I have not finished the music," he said gravely.

"We'll find someone for the part," Clint said, rolling his eyes. "You two worry too much."

"Who will we find on this sort of notice?" the woman asked.

Immediately, three sets of eyes fell upon Steve's face and scanned the length of his body, sizing him up. Before he knew quite what was happening, Steve found himself upstairs, dressed in Swiss clothes and playing the role of the sensitive Swiss poet. Feeling ridiculous in the too-tight pants and funny hat, he stood on a poorly constructed 'mountain' and surveyed the room. A piano in the corner, clothes and props scattered across the floor, and several half-painted back drops against the wall.

And the players were just as chaotic as their room. From the second Steve stepped into their world, they did nothing but argue. They argued over the music—whether it was too quiet, or too loud, or if the pitch was right, or if they should have music at all. They argued over the scenery and which backdrop should go where, and if they were good enough, or bright enough—did they distract from the scene or add to it. They argued and yelled and screamed at one another for their acting, and each actor seemed to play a handful of different roles, which served only to confuse Steve further. They desperately needed leadership, especially if their play was to be presented to their, as they called it, "money," the next day.

It was a role that, like many things in Steve's life, simply fell upon his shoulders. He'd never been captain of any sport team, never lead a club, never even been the leading voice of his own friends, but he knew when to step in and when to let things lie, knew which causes were worth fighting for, and just as he saw hope in every forsaken fight in a back alley that had him raising his bony fists to a bully twice his size, he saw hope in this group of uncoordinated and unprepared actors. Because what they lacked in organization and raw skill, they more than made up for in determination.

"Hey!" he called over the chaos. "We need to plan this." He stepped down from the mountain and crossed his arms over his chest as he mentally mapped out the room. "Clint, you stand there." He pointed to a spot across the room. "And you—" He pointed at the redhead. "Over there."

"Natasha," she supplied helpfully, and, despite the curl of her lip and force of her stare, moved to the location in which he had instructed.

Steve then told the last man, Thor, as he soon found out, to play something soft on the piano so the lines of the play could easily be heard above it.

As things finally—finally—began to come together, Bruce woke up from his state of sleep or unconsciousness (Steve was still unsure), watched, in silence, as they rehearsed for several minutes, then crossed his arms over his chest and announced, "I like it. This could work. Do you write? I thought I saw a type writer down there." He gestured at the hole in the floor that led directly to Steve's apartment.

Steve nodded. "Yes, I write."

"Good. Write our play."

And that was how Steve got his first job as a writer in the Bohemian Revolution—his original dream come true—all because he happened to be in the right place at the right time with enough talent locked away in his mind to get him by. The only problem was that the "money" had to sign off on the writer of the play if he were to sponsor it, and Steve, in his old ripped clothes and penniless existence was hardly a man that this prestigious and mysterious "money" would support.

So they came up with a plan: to dress Steve in one of Bruce's old suits and pass him off as a well-to-do English writer. His job then was to talk to, well, someone—they had yet to give him a name—and once he had impressed this someone, he (he being the mysterious and captivating 'someone' that they all talked about with differing views of awe, respect, and disgust) would insist that the "money" support Steve and his little play.

All of this was decided without Steve's input and all within ten minutes of meeting these strange and eccentric group of actors (as a group, they called themselves The Avengers, but what they were avenging or why, Steve had not the slightest idea).

"I don't know," Steve said as they all turned to him with identical stares of hope and excitement. "I don't even know if I am a true Bohemian writer." He'd barely been in the city half a day, after all, and while he'd hoped to one day be in this position, it was all happening rather fast.

"Do you believe in truth?" Bruce asked.

"Yes," Steve replied honestly.

"And freedom?" asked Clint.

Steve nodded. "Of course."

"Love?" asked Natasha.

Steve froze. He thought of the busy dance floor at his school and how he'd sat in the corner alone; he thought of the stacks of books he'd read and the love stories in all of them—whether they be drama, mystery, or murder, there was love in them all; he thought of his untouched keyboard in the room below, a tool practically screaming for a good story. "Love," he repeated, the word soft on his lips. He liked the sound of it. He loved the feel of it. "Above all things, I believe in love."

Natasha, in all her fear-striking coldness, gave him what was undoubtedly a warm and supportive smile, and it was that, above everything else that day, that assured him he was doing the right thing. "That's it," she said. "You're the voice of the Revolution, Captain."

That night, they dressed him up like a doll, straightening his suit sleeves and knoting and unknoting his tie at least a dozen different times before they were finally satisfied.

"This person must be pretty important," Steve said, staring down at the dress shoes that Bruce was currently shining for him. It was odd, being made up in such an extravagant outfit, when all his life he'd had nothing but rags.

"Steve, you're meeting with Tony Stark," Clint informed him. He grabbed several different hats from their prop table and tried them each on Steve's head. He chose a tall black one—proper, but not quite Lincoln styled—then took a step back to admire Steve in his transformation. "This should work."

Steve, meanwhile, was far more interested in the name than his outfit. "Tony Stark?" he repeated.

"Engineer, genius, show monkey," Natasha replied. She sat in the corner of the room, legs crossed as she watched the boys fuss about their outfits; she had gotten dressed in under two minutes and still looked stunning in a dress and heels. "He's the face of the company that we're trying to get to sponsor the play. They're all about forming the future, and they're a big player in the Revolution. It's owned by a man named Nick Fury, but Stark's the brains—he brings in the clients, he puts on his show, and he gets them to stay and to pass over their money in the process."

"His show?" Steve asked.

"Yeah. Showing off the future. He talks about the new machinery, and the art, and the music; he's like a spokesperson for Tomorrow, and people listen. He could get you to buy anything," Natasha said with a shrug.

Clint snorted. "Including him."

Steve raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Let's just say, Stark will do anything to get a deal, and if he didn't, he'd be out of a job. Fury likes success, and he likes money, and those are two things Stark does well," Bruce explained. He stood up and looked Steve over from head to toe before nodding once in approval. "You're ready."

Nick Fury, as it turned out, owned a club on a hill just a few blocks from Steve's apartment entitled, simply: SHIELD. No one would explain to him what the letters stood for, but, upon entering the building, Steve soon found that he didn't care. SHIELD was a circus to the new eye. A blur of color and noise, there was something different to see in every direction—musicians playing around the room and women dancing in bright dresses of orange and pink and red. The dresses were shorter than any Steve had ever seen before, and though he tried not to make assumptions about anyone, he remembered what Bruce had said about 'selling everything,' and so he could not say he was completely surprised (though startled) when a woman propositioned him for the night. When he told her his pockets were empty, she quickly moved on.

From the looks of it, SHIELD was one big party with a stage set out in the middle, waiting for the real 'show' to begin. And begin it did when, suddenly, the lights all around went dim and a single spot light appeared on stage.

"There he is," said Bruce just as a man in a perfectly tailored suit walked on stage. "Tony Stark."