Hello, here I am with my first Marvel fic! I'm really excited about this. I love the MCU and I've wanted to contribute to it for a long while.

This is completed already, so I'll be posting weekly while I work on my NaNo project. If any of you reading are on the NaNoWriMo website, head over and add me! My username is the same as on here.

Please tell me about any errors, but be gentle about it and I'll correct them as swiftly as I may. Flames will be used by SHIELD in their defrosting of Cap.

Note: Sorry about the weirdness that happened before. I still don't understand what went wonky with the formatting here, but hopefully I've corrected it.

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognize.

Introduction: Before the Sun

"Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always"

― Dante Alighieri

If there was one thing Steve trusted, it was his heart. Where his brain was deceived and his senses lied, he knew he could listen to that frantic, uneven beat inside his chest and it would lead him right. That usually gave him nothing but trouble.

This time though, it was different. Whenever he thought back on this time, his heart sang and a smile spread on his face. Somehow, it always helped, because this was the time that kept him going.

It was March, 1943 and Steve had been rejected from the army for the third time. It was his bad health, his skinny frame, his frail body, and he hated it. Not for the first time, he hated the body that he was given for not being able to keep up with him and his dreams.

When a bright blue light deposited something in an alley with a loud crash, it was able to get him there. All he wanted was to see what it was. If he could help.

What he did was almost get his head blown off by a man in a gas mask. It was so sudden, Steve barely had the opportunity to duck. With a yelp, he dove behind a dumpster.

When what sounded like a car crash happened on the other side of it, he couldn't help sticking his head out again. The fight that he saw astounded him. The man in the gas mask had a metal arm, which had made the grinding crushing noise when it crashed into the arm of what could only be a robot. It was bright red and gold, the eyes glowing white and almost alive as it gripped the man's metal arm and used it to throw him into a brick wall.

The man hit it with his feet and used the force to throw himself back at the robot, a knife gleaming in his hand. This time he scored the victory, the knife a distraction for a punch to the face that rattled the metal of the robot's head.

The robot flew back into the opposite wall but got to its feet quickly. For a moment they simply stood there, watching and analyzing each other.

"I don't want to fight you," the man said, voice deep and gravelly and strangely familiar through the gas mask.

"Yeah? Well I want to fight you," the robot retorted in a tinny, but angry voice.

Steve nearly fell over in his hiding place. A machine that could talk? Never mind talking, it could feel and want things? That was impossible, he hadn't even dreamed that when he was drawing his comics!

"Why are you so set in fighting me?" the gas masked man questioned. Somehow he merely seemed curious, rather than afraid or angry like any normal (sane) person would be. Like Steve knew he would be.

"You tried to kill the Cap. You nearly succeeded. Why wouldn't I want to fucking kill you after that?" the machine replied, it's voice suddenly like metal grinding together. Was it possible for a mechanical voice to be furious?

The man in the gas mask was still, and silent for a long minute. "When the time is right, you can do what you like to me," he offered, emotionless, "But for now, stay out of my way, Iron Man." He said the last two words like a name, or a title, which Steve found curious. What machine had a name?

Before the Iron Man could do anything, gas mask man melted into the shadows. One minute he was there, the next he wasn't, as if he had never been.

Now that the confrontation was over, Steve fell back against the dumpster. His chest felt tight, like he was on the verge of having an asthma attack, but he knew better. It was the relief of a fight being done with, the adrenaline fading away, even though he hadn't been directly involved after the first shot.

"You okay, kid?" the metallic voice of the robot asked. Without his noticing it had walked, strangely silently for being made of metal, to stand at the side of the dumpster.

"Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't hurt," Steve told it, getting to his feet. It left him several inches shorter than the robot, but he was used to that. Being short, not robots.

"Good," the robot said, and began to walk away.

The entire thing over, and its attribution to stress inevitable, Steve began to move on as well. He was almost at the mouth of the alley when the voice called after him, "Hey kid."

With a roll of his eyes, Steve said, "I'm not a kid."

When he looked over his shoulder, the robot seemed stunned. There was no movement, the glow in its chest and eyes dull before they suddenly brightened. "You remind me a lot of him," the robot, Iron Man, said with a grin in its voice.

Steve's eyes were wide and he knew his mouth was gaping open as he watched fire spurt from the bottom of the robot's boots. The robot was propelled into the sky, and after it gave him a salute, the metal being disappeared beyond his sight. The night was suddenly darker and less interesting, the usual yowling cats and whistling wind accompanying him where he stood in that alley.

Shaking his head and wondering if maybe he was being too hard on himself (that couldn't have possibly been real), Steve slowly walked away from the place that had tipped the first domino in an extraordinary events.

Bucky was never going to believe this.

0-0-0-0-0

Sure enough, when he got in, his best friend was mad with worry. "What happened? You were supposed to be home half an hour ago," Bucky demanded, examining every inch of the shorter man for injury, "Did you get mugged again? Should I go out and give the bastards what for?"

Still bewildered by what happened, Steve shook his head. "No, it was nothing, I just… I think stress is getting to me or something," he said, not sure how to phrase what he had just seen. He was better at drawing things than describing them.

"What happened?" Bucky asked again. He closed the door behind his friend and walked him to the couch, sat beside him.

"I was getting home and then I saw this… whitish blue light," Steve began, and with surprisingly few interruptions he told the whole story. It was halting, the words never quite right, but telling it to Bucky lifted a weight off his shoulders.

"So you're saying that you saw a robot fighting a guy with a metal arm because the guy nearly killed one of the robot's friends," Bucky summarized, dumbfounded, "And then one just disappeared and the other compared you to his almost-dead friend then flew off." He had gone from sitting back attentively to leaning forward, fist supporting his jaw.

"Yeah," Steve agreed, still not sure himself.

"You're right, stress is killing you," Bucky said, in response to his friend's earlier statement, "Let's eat and then get to bed." That was so him, thinking that food and sleep solved everything.

Steve smiled and pushed himself to his feet. On the more than likely chance that this really was just stress, he should be vegging out on the sofa with his feet on his best friend's lap, or turning in for an early night. But there was no way he was letting Bucky into the kitchen after that fiasco with the grilled cheese sandwiches.

"Ham sandwiches or ham sandwiches?" he called in a dry voice, remembering that he needed to go out and pick up something more from the grocers the instant Bucky got paid.

"Fried chicken," Bucky responded in a wishful tone.

"Ham sandwiches it is, then," Steve decided, and set to making them.

Things would be better, or at least less mad, in the morning. They had to be.