Chapter Text
"Joe Dawson, I'm here about the archivist position?" There weren't a lot of jobs around in library sciences, and a place at the Steve Rogers Memorial Collection... Let's just say he'd jumped at the chance.
"Joe Dawson?" Mr Stark asked, that far-too-familiar grin on his face.
"Joe Dawson, Mr Stark. Yes, like 'Highlander', no, I wasn't named after him, I'm not that young. Any joke you can think of, I've heard already, trust me." Uni had been dreadful. And seriously, Dawson was introduced in '93. He knew he looked younger than his age, but really?
"But the show had come out when you decided to go into librarianship, right?" Mr Stark smirked. "Apart from a historian, is there anything more like a Watcher than an archivist?"
Joe sighed. "It honestly didn't factor into my decision making process, Mr Stark. I got into information studies because I love books and I love knowledge and I like organising things, and I got into archives because primary sources are our gateway into the minds of others, and preserving and facilitating that is important to me. Something like the collection here... how many people think they know the 'true story' of Captain America? How many of them have thought about Steve Rogers at all? Without archives like this, he could go down in history as 'the man who punched Hitler over two hundred times' and we wouldn't have any way to figure out who he was outside of that. Archives turn heroes into ordinary people. And vice versa, in a way. You'd be surprised the number of ordinary people who have become famous among historians simply because there's good records of their lives."
Mr Stark looked at him appraisingly. "I like you. You're on the short list."
And that seemed to be that.