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May 2000
“We should get married.”
Bucky groans and pushes his face into the pillowcase. “This is supposed to be goodbye sex,” he grumbles. “Hot, sweaty, messy goodbye sex before I leave for Atlanta.”
“Didn’t that qualify?” Steve asks, and Bucky laughs. It’s surreal, he thinks, that they’re actually here, in a hotel room three weeks after graduation, and nobody’s storming in to stop them. Prom night, Steve’d missed curfew by ten minutes and his Nana’d nearly killed him. Now, there’s a bad movie on HBO, three half-finished Chinese food meals, and—
A lot of bare skin.
Bucky’ll never say it where anyone can hear him, but he likes how soft and smooth Steve is. Even if Steve’s in one hell of a hurry to bulk up.
“I’m serious,” Steve presses. He rolls onto his side. “You’ve got basic training, plus at least a two year commitment—”
“You’re ruining the hot-and-sweaty mood, y’know.”
“—and who knows what’s gonna happen after that.” Their eyes meet across the bed. “We should get married, before you go.”
The room goes quiet, once he says it, and Bucky watches Steve’s hand twitch. It’s the twitch that means he needs to touch. With anybody else, it’d just be a want, the way you want a burger or a long shower. Steve’s not like that. Bucky’s pretty sure Steve’d spend every minute of every day with hands on him if they could get away with it.
Bucky runs fingers through his hair. “You really think I’m not coming back?”
“What?” Steve blinks, but he’s the world’s worst liar.
“You think I’m gonna go to Atlanta, get shipped off, and disappear,” and when Steve’s hand twitches, again, Bucky reaches out and grabs it. Steve trembles, this whole-body shake, and Bucky drags him across the cheap hotel sheets. “Listen to me, okay?” he says. “I’m coming back. I’m not going to ditch you for the Army, the same way you wouldn’t ditch me if the roles were reversed. I’ll do a couple years, and then I’ll be out and home.”
“Bucky—”
“I’ll come home.” He presses two fingers to Steve’s jaw and forces him to look up. Their eyes meet and dammit, that look from Steve Rogers could melt the polar ice caps. Bucky’s whole chest hurts. “I promise.”
They lie there, halfway-tangled and Steve’s eyes on him, for whole minutes. Bucky isn’t sure why he feels like his heart’s going to drill right through his ribcage, but he hates the feeling.
Finally, though, Steve says, “That’s not how you’re supposed to respond when you get proposed to.”
There’s a tiny grin touching the corners of Steve’s mouth, and Bucky laughs. “What made you think I’d let you propose?” he demands, and Steve’s still grinning when Bucky presses him into the mattress and kisses him.
The next morning, as Bucky’s throwing his bag over his shoulder, Steve says, “I’ll still be here when you come back.”
“I know,” Bucky says, and forces himself to leave while he still feels like he can.
May 2002
“We should get married,” Bucky says.
Steve’s still panting, but he laughs as he rolls onto his back. “I’m pretty sure we’ve had this conversation before,” he points out, staring at the ceiling. He swears there’re still white spots in his vision. He presses fingers to his eyes and rubs. “And actually, I’m pretty sure you—”
He turns to glance over at Bucky, grinning, but the grin drops away when he sees Bucky’s expression. Two years ago, they were eighteen and stupid, but now— Steve sometimes thinks that Bucky’s aged a decade in the last two years. His eyes are dark and steady.
“I mean it,” he says, and Steve forgets about the panting. He forgets about breathing, and the sweat on his temples. “We should get married.”
“Bucky—”
“I go over there, and there’re all these guys.” His voice is soft, catching on the corners, and something in Steve’s belly twists. “They have wives and kids and whole lives to go home to. And when I got there, I thought that didn’t matter. I was taking care of my country, but now . . . ” Steve watches his throat move. “I need to know I’m coming home to something. I need to know it’s gonna be there no matter what, like those other guys know.”
Steve wets his lips and, very slowly, nods. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“I told you when you left that I wasn’t going anywhere.” He rolls onto his side, and his fingers curl against the sheets, just once, before he finds Bucky’s skin. It’s meant to be his arm, maybe his chest, but he ends up finding his fingers. Ends up tangling them against the scratchy sheets. They can afford better than the place two years ago, but it means something that they stay here, instead of in Steve’s dorm or some fancy hotel that isn’t theirs. “And I told you then that I wanted to marry you.”
Bucky smiles, and the warmth is almost suffocating. “I like your ideas better when I say them,” he replies.
Steve rolls his eyes. “Trust me, I’ve noticed,” he says, and presses his face against Bucky’s skin.
May 1999
“You’re such a jerk!” Steve declares, laughing.
Bucky laughs, too, and shoves him hard enough that he flops over on his grandma’s stupid over-stuffed couch. It’s an old-lady couch, the kind with the huge flowers and the fringed pillows, and it always smells a little like moth-balls. Bucky knows about the moth-ball smell because he sleeps on it at least one night a week. It’s easier on his aunt, who picks up extra shifts at the hospital sometimes, to drop him at the Rogers’. Makes sure he gets up, showered, and dressed for school.
She hasn’t noticed that, since he and Steve started hanging out, he hasn’t missed a class.
Or a homework assignment, actually, which is what they’re supposed to be doing right now. Mrs. Rogers is out at some church thing, and their pre-calculus is spread all over the coffee table, but instead they’re screwing around. Bucky can’t even remember how it started, right now, but he thinks Steve’d mocked his addition and—
And he takes a fringed pillow to the face, all of a sudden. He sputters, but on the other end of the couch, Steve’s grinning.
“You’re gonna regret that,” Bucky warns.
Steve tries to drop to this serious expression, lips pursed together and eyes narrowed, but his shoulders shake. He’s about ready to laugh. Bucky loves that expression, loves watching it jump around. It’s Steve, all of him, in five seconds. The playfulness and the spirit and how fucking good he is, all in the fact he can’t fake seriousness no matter how hard he tries.
“Am I?” he asks.
“Oh yeah.”
“Then make me.”
And before Bucky can do anything, Steve’s off the couch and darting out of the room, up the stairs in a fucking thunder of feet that leaves Bucky tripping over himself to follow.
It’s a good thing Mrs. Rogers isn’t around, because when Bucky catches Steve at the top of the stairs, he catches him by his jeans and they both end up sprawled all over the hallway. She hates it when they screw around, hates it when they wrestle, but Steve— Bucky’s pretty it’s Steve’s favorite thing. He’s not the scrawny kid who people beat up after school, not with Bucky. They’re balanced, somehow, and can kind of hold their own against each other.
“You’re cheating!” Steve laughs. He’s wriggling halfway out of his jeans, his briefs peeking out over the waistband, and Bucky laughs at him. He’s like an eel or something, snaking around on the carpet. “No grabbing clothes, remember?”
“I’m supposed to follow your rules, now?”
“Unless you want to explain how these got ripped again!”
Steve rolls as he says it, hard enough that Bucky either has to let go of his jeans or lose a wrist, so Bucky lunges forward. He’s aiming for Steve’s arms, trying to pin him, but Steve moves too fast. It overbalances Bucky, and he only just catches himself on an arm before he crashes down on top of Steve.
As it stands, they’re close. Panting in each other’s faces, on the carpet, with nobody else in the house. The thoughts, they kinda line up that way, too, and Bucky looks down at Steve.
Steve stares up at him.
Neither of them moves ‘till both of them do.
Bucky knows Steve’s never kissed somebody before—he’s talked about it all the time, how he wants to find the “right person,” how he’s not sure he could just date around, how he feels weird that he’s not as casual as the rest of the class—but when they start kissing, Bucky can’t really tell. Because what Steve maybe lacks in experience, he makes up for in effort. His fingers thread into Bucky’s hair and one of his legs ends up around Bucky’s, and Bucky has no fucking idea how a guy who’s never kissed knows the right balance of tongue, but—
But Bucky presses Steve into the carpet, pins him with his groin, and Steve rolls up into him. Bucks, more than anything else, and Bucky’d laugh at his own stupid word choice if they weren’t both hard in their jeans and rutting against each other.
When he pulls back enough to just breathe, Steve keeps his eyes closed. He looks like one of those artsy porn magazines, where the girl has her hair all messed up and her lips parted in a gasp. Like a virgin—and it hits Bucky that Steve is a virgin, jesus—getting ravished and used.
God, he’s good to look at.
And Bucky’s about to say it, somehow, maybe not in those exact words, when Steve whispers, “Tell me it’s okay.”
His eyes are big and blue, when they open. They peer up at Bucky, and something inside Bucky, it jumps. “Tell me I didn’t mess everything up,” Steve murmurs. The words are caught in the back of his throat like when they watched The Fox and the Hound together, like he’s about to cry. “You’re my best friend, I don’t—”
“I kissed you too,” Bucky interrupts, sort of stupidly. Like he isn’t totally sure what’s going on in Steve’s head. He’s usually pretty good at interpreting Steve.
But all his blood’s south of his waist, and he really wants to go back to the kissing.
“You like girls.”
“I like people.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“And that’s the best kind of boyfriend to have, the one where he already knows that you snore or whatever.”
“You—” And it’s like they figure it out at the same time, what Bucky’s said, because Steve stops with his mouth wide open while Bucky looks away. He looks away, and his heart feels like it’s being battered with a stone. It’s one thing when it’s the first thought you have. It’s another thing when—
“Every time I talked about wanting to find the right person,” Steve whispers after a couple seconds, “I kind of meant you.”
Bucky smiles and glances over. Steve’s got this sweet look on his face, like in a whole different kind of magazine, and Bucky feels a lot less stupid for the “boyfriend” thing now. Mostly, at least. “I knew.”
Steve snorts. “No, you didn’t.”
“But you can’t prove it.”
“I don’t need to,” Steve retorts, and it’s so smug and smiley that Bucky kisses him all over again.
And then a couple more times, just because he can.
May 2004
“They sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at these things, right?”
Steve’s in the middle of what’s gotta be his twentieth photo of the night, mugging for the camera with a bunch of the other guys in the criminal justice department, when his stomach turns to stone. They’re all draped around each other, still wearing their robes, and there’s a whole pile of diploma folders on the floor. They won’t get their diplomas for six-to-eight weeks, but the folder, it means enough.
But not as much as that voice.
Ethan grabs him, tries to hold him still for the photo, but Steve apologizes and just sort of slips out of the way. Slips, and then stands there, staring.
To everybody else, the guy in the uniform with the flowers, he’s just a guy.
Steve can count on one hand the number of his college friends who’ve been around at breaks and gotten to meet his husband.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he finally forces out. He knows it’s the wrong thing to say, the wrong answer to a surprise, but—
But he’s woken up from dreams convinced that there’s somebody on the other half of the bed, and he’s learned to talk himself through it.
Bucky knows this. He knows this, and he smiles the smile Steve fell in love with, wide and brilliant in its confidence. “I was hoping for a ‘gee, honey, glad you came all the way from Germany for my graduation, you look great,’ but hey. I’ll take what I can get.”
They’ve kind of got an audience, now: Steve’s friends, his friends’ families, a couple professors who were chatting with the rest of the group. Strangers and acquaintances alike stop and turn to see what’s going on.
Because Bucky’s opening his arms.
It’s stupid, Steve thinks, that he can’t come up with the words. He’s had all the right words in the last six months: words for his law school scholarship interviews, words for his final presentations in his classes, words for his grandmother’s eulogy. He’s been Mr. Congeniality through the hardest year of his life—through the LSAT, through Bucky being sent to Germany for his last year of service, through his grandmother’s cancer, through his senior capstone—and now—
Now, his eyes are filling up with tears whether he wants them to or not, and he’s completely out of words.
Bucky’s solid, sturdy, and strong when Steve grabs onto him, and he doesn’t let go. His fingers grip his uniform, his face finds his neck and presses there, and even though he hears other people around them—people clapping and cheering them on, people who don’t totally understand but are happy, anyway—Bucky’s the only real thing in that reception hall. His scent, his warmth, his arms around Steve, those are the only things in the universe that matter.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” Steve manages, and the words are kind of choked.
“I always told you I’d come home,” Bucky reminds him, and he doesn’t let go.
May 2001
“Who the hell are you and what did you do to my boyfriend?” Bucky demands, and Steve blushes red from his collar to the roots of his hair.
He has seventy-two hours of leave before he’s shipped off to somewhere hot, sandy, and miserable. He’s not entirely sure where it is, exactly, but he knows there’s a –stan at the end of the name and that his boots’ll melt to the pavement.
He and another guy in his unit’d bitched about it all night the night before, pretending like they couldn’t sleep for complaining. Really, they couldn’t sleep for this, the precious sliver of leave before they end up in hell.
Steve’s standing on his grandma’s porch wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt, normal Steve gear except for the fact he fills it all out. From head to toe, he’s a full person, all muscle and tone where he used to be scrawny as hell.
He shifts from one foot to the other. He’s wearing dorky sandals and Bucky’s never loved him more. “I told you I’d started working out,” he says.
“No,” Bucky challenges. He’d dumped his bags at his aunt’s house before he’d headed over to the Rogers’ house, so he’s still in his Army gear. He wants to charge up the steps, but he feels rooted stupidly to the spot. He ends up stalking slowly in Steve’s direction, a finger leveled at him. “You told me you’d worked out a little.”
Steve’s blush deepens. “It doesn’t feel like much when you’re doing it.”
“It’s a hell of a lot when you haven’t seen your guy since Labor Day, and now he looks like—” Bucky can’t come up with a word, so he waves his hand. On the porch, Steve shoves his hands in his pockets and waits for Bucky to come up and stand in front of him. He’s even grown a couple inches, and Bucky—
Bucky loves Steve for everything that’s inside of him. He’s almost positive that’ll never change. He thinks a lot about marrying him, a lot about what their life’ll be like in ten years, a lot of what it’ll be like to puff out his chest and talk about his husband the lawyer.
But right now, it’s like Steve’s two people: the guy he loves, and then—
“You’re making me think I screwed up,” Steve says. He looks down at the porch, almost sheepish, until Bucky kisses him. He means it to be just a quick greeting before they head inside for lasagna with Mrs. Rogers, but he makes the mistake of pressing a hand to Steve’s chest.
Then, his mind wanders other places. He backs Steve up against the front of the house and holds onto him a lot tighter than he maybe should when it’s dinner time and they’re in broad daylight.
Steve smiles at him when they break apart. “I didn’t screw up?” he asks breathlessly.
He’s such a little shit. “No,” Bucky promises, and kisses him again just to prove the point.
May 2008
“Hey, hey, you’re named after two of the toughest women we know, what are you crying for?”
Steve knows that he’s meant to be in bed. Bucky’d grumbled it before rolling off the mattress and stumbling down the hallway, replacing the shrieking, urgent crying on the baby monitor with reassuring hushing sounds and infant gurgles. Dorothea Evelyn Rogers Barnes turns three weeks old tomorrow, sleeps worse than any baby her parents’ve ever heard of, and is incredibly, unbearably beautiful.
Steve’s spent almost nine years thinking that he could never love another human being as much as he loved Bucky. Then, he’d met their daughter.
Bucky walks her up and down the length of the nursery, chatting idly with her while he calms her down. In his ratty old pajama pants and faded Army t-shirt, he reminds Steve of the teenagers they used to be, only this time with a fussy baby. A fussy baby whose entire wardrobe is pink, thanks to a very hyperactive godfather who has money to burn.
“I know,” Bucky informs Dorothea—already nicknamed Dot, because as much as they argued about her last name, the first’s never been a mystery—as he crosses back toward the window. “I told your dad to stay in bed too. But, you know, he’s a big, tough lawyer. God forbid he get enough shut-eye the night before he heads back to the office.”
He lifts his head just enough to wink at Steve in the half-light from outside the window, and Steve rolls his eyes. He leans his shoulder against the doorjamb and crosses his arms before he notes, “I’m not the one of us who’s supposed to take orders.”
“No, but you wanted to be. Too bad you didn’t figure out the beefcake thing a year earlier.”
“With my luck, I would’ve been sent to Timbuktu instead of Turkey,” Steve points out.
“As long as you’re sending me dirty pictures, baby, I don’t care where you’re stationed.”
He winks again, cheesy and overblown, and Steve abandons all hope and snorts a laugh. In Bucky’s arms, Dot wriggles and stirs, fussing all over again. Bucky sighs and shifts her against his shoulder, his hand too-big against their baby’s tiny back. “If you’re this moody at three weeks,” Bucky warns, “I’ll be selling you on Craiglist by the time you turn sixteen.”
Steve grins and shakes his head, staring at the carpet instead of Bucky’s endlessly incorrigible smile. “I might not let you sell our daughter,” he points out.
“She’s all cute and harmless now, but in a decade and a half? Full-blown teenager.” He can hear the laughter in Bucky’s voice. “You’ll be the one with your finger on the mouse button.”
“Even if I am,” Steve argues, “Tony might veto the whole endeavor.”
“Hey, long as she gets one of those nice kennels like the dogs have, he can have her,” Bucky returns, and Steve finally gives in and laughs.
He sticks around in the nursery while Bucky walks Dot back into sleepiness and then when he settles her in the crib. She’d hated the bassinette in their room—she’d woken up almost every time either of them’d rolled over—but Steve can’t help feeling like she’s too small for her big, otherwise-empty bed. Bucky knows he’s thinking it, too, because he steers Steve out of the room with hands on his back.
“No extra cuddles,” he insists, and Steve shakes his head. “She’s gotta get used to me getting up and down with her now that you’re going back to work.”
“I can still get up with her,” Steve argues.
“And fall asleep in court? ‘Your honor, may it please my nap’?” Bucky grins over at him, and Steve snorts as he drops back into bed. Bucky climbs in after him, immediately slipping into Steve’s grip. Steve pulls him close under the covers, spooning a little more tightly than usual.
In her room, Dot lets out one fussy grunt of discontent and then falls silent.
They lay together for a long time, Steve’s hand against Bucky’s chest and Bucky’s fingers trailing up and down along the length of Steve’s arm. Steve’s soothed by the motion and feels himself drifting.
At least, until Bucky asks, “You’re gonna miss being the one who’s with her all the time, aren’t you?”
Steve presses his nose into the back of Bucky’s neck. “Only every day,” he replies, and falls asleep to the sound of Bucky’s breathing and the dull hum of the baby monitor.
May 2006
“Please tell me you’re listening to yourself right now.”
They’re sitting at the kitchen table, textbooks spread all over, but neither of them are actually working on homework. Steve’s got his final Constitutional Law presentation due in the morning, Bucky’s studying for a Spanish exam, but neither of them cares. At least, Steve doesn’t care, and Bucky has to admit, deep in his belly, he maybe doesn’t, either.
Because Steve’s clinging onto the legal pad with his chicken-scratched calculations like it’s the holy grail.
“Last time she offered, you said you’d think about it,” he reminds Bucky, and Bucky rubs his face with a hand. He knew he should’ve made more coffee. Steve’s hand twitches, and then he reaches and grips Bucky’s arm. “You said it wasn’t a bad idea.”
“I said that about farming alpacas, too.”
“At least one of us’ll still be in school and home all the time. Between me being out of law school and having a job and your loans, we’ll have enough money.”
Bucky swears that his left eyebrow twitches. “If you fail out of law school because you’re up all night changing diapers,” he argues, “you won’t get a job.”
“And if we don’t do it soon,” Steve retorts seriously, “she’ll finish her PhD, move away, and we’ll have to wait another five or six years before we can even talk about having a baby.”
Bucky sighs and looks back as his Spanish textbook. He hates Spanish, he hates that his communications degree requires “advanced language mastery” (whatever that means), and he hates how right Steve is. He’d known when Lana sat them down at Christmas and offered that they’d end up rooted in this conversation, debating whether or not to make a baby.
He hates that it’s this difficult. A chick in his propaganda class got accidentally knocked up over spring break, and Bucky’s only option is to beg his cousin to carry his husband’s kid.
Their kid, he thinks, and can’t breathe for a second.
“Bucky,” Steve says quietly. It’s in a tone Bucky knows too well, the one that means he’s fighting a battle he can’t possibly win. “I want us to have a baby. I want there to be a kid in this world who grows up knowing his parents’ll fight for him no matter what happens.” Bucky wonders for a second how many times Steve’s rehearsed this, whether he’s recited it in front of the mirror. Steve never blinks away. “I want there to be a kid,” he presses, his voice even quieter, “who calls both of us dad and counts on us to make everything better. And I want him to know that we had him when we were young and stupid because we couldn’t wait for him.”
Steve’s fingers flex against Bucky’s wrist. They sit in silence for a lot longer than maybe they should, the thoughts circling around in his head.
“Could be a girl,” he finally replies.
Steve frowns. “What?”
“Lana has four sisters. So does my mom.” Bucky lets a tiny smile nudge at the corners of his lips. “Pretty good chance we’d get a girl.”
Steve grins. “Then we’re kind of screwed,” he jokes, and Bucky finally laughs. He laughs, and he remembers Lana’s laughter when he’d accused her of trying to steal his husband. I don’t want to have sex with him, she’d insisted, smacking Bucky on the shoulder. I want to help you guys have a kid and hopefully cut down on how much sex you have.
Steve’d asked why she’d used the word hopefully, and Bucky’d accused her of being jealous.
“So?” Steve questions expectantly after a few more seconds.
Bucky can practically feel the nervousness radiating through Steve. He pulls in a deep breath, but then, slowly, he nods.
“We’ll call Lana in the morning,” he agrees, and god, Steve’s smile is worth the fear that sits in his gut.
May 2011
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Bucky’s already armed with a beer by the time Steve walks into the apartment at just after three in the afternoon, and he waves it vaguely the direction of the front door. He’s still wearing his dress pants and his button-down, but his suit jacket and tie are discarded haphazardly over the back of the couch. Also strewn on the couch is the case file from his very first full-blown trial. Some of the papers are loose, now, and a few’ve fallen to the floor.
Steve frowns at the mess as he slips off his shoes. “Natasha mentioned—”
“That Coulson slaughtered me?” Bucky demands. He trails out of the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He points the neck of the beer in Steve’s direction like an extension of his hand. Steve tries to decide whether it’s meant to be his index or middle finger. “Like I said, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Your opening was good,” Steve says gently.
“Don’t,” Bucky repeats, “want to talk about it.”
He stalks back into the kitchen, leaving Steve to stand there in the middle of the apartment in his suit and socks. Interoffice victories always spread like wildfire, cluttering up his inbox and causing Tony to dip into his secret stash of victory booze, but Steve’d been attending to first appearances when the jury’d returned. By the time he’d ridden the elevator up from the first floor and walked through the secured office doors, Tony’d already been halfway through his toast.
At least Natasha’d caught Steve in the hallway and murmured an explanation before he’d joined in the revelry.
He liked justice to be served, just not at his husband’s expense and not during his very first jury trial.
Bucky’s leaning against the counter when Steve walks into the kitchen, his head tipped back against one of the upper cabinets and his eyes closed. Steve studies him—the shape of his chin and his mouth, his dark lashes against pale skin—and allows the only noise in the room to come from the running refrigerator. The beer’s half-full, proof that it’s more a distraction than anything else.
“Oh for one,” Bucky says.
“Bucky—”
“No, you can’t actually make this one better,” he cuts off. His eyes flutter open and shoot Steve a cutting, wounded look. “The first client I take all the way to trial, and I lose. No glossing that up. Twelve people decided I was the worse lawyer.”
“Twelve people decided your client was guilty,” Steve replies.
“Same thing.”
“Bucky.” Bucky never moves as Steve crosses the kitchen, or as he plants one hand on the counter next to Bucky’s hip. One hand, then the other, until he’s effectively pinned Bucky in place. Bucky meets his gaze, even-eyed, and Steve watches as the practiced, neutral mask he’d learned in law school flickers into place.
Prior to all his trial advocacy classes, his poker face had been worse than Steve’s own.
They look at each other for a long moment before Steve asks, “Did you do everything you were capable of doing?”
Bucky rolls his eyes. “Steve—”
“Yes or no question, counselor.”
Steve watches the corner of Bucky’s lips press slowly in the direction of a smile. “Yes.”
“Did you zealously represent your client?”
“Little good it—”
“Yes or no.”
Bucky sighs. “Yeah, I did,” he admits with a shake of his head. “I worked my ass off for that douchebag.”
“Then the result doesn’t matter.” Steve can tell Bucky’s trying not to roll his eyes a second time. “You controlled what you could up until the point you gave it to the jury, and in the end, they decided the outcome. Not you.”
He lifts one of his hands from the counter and presses it to Bucky’s side, and he feels Bucky tip into his touch. It’s sometimes funny to him that his life’s taken this shape—in love with the same man for twelve years, married to him for eight, as hopelessly devoted as Sandra Dee for even longer. Because sometimes, he’s still surprised when Bucky tips into his touch, still surprised that the guy who half the school crushed on wants to be with him.
When he kisses Bucky, he tastes like hops and smells like his aftershave, sharp from every angle. Steve spends longer than he needs to pressing Bucky to the countertop and exploring his mouth.
After they break apart, Bucky’s mouth swollen and lips parted breathlessly, he leans his head against the cabinet again. “You sure this has nothing to do with your mentor-boner for Phil?” he asks.
Steve snorts and shakes his head. “I don’t have a mentor-boner for Phil,” he argues for the hundredth time since he’d started interning at the district attorney’s office all those years ago.
“You kind of do.”
“Or maybe I just have one for you,” Steve returns, and somehow, they end up laughing as much as kissing, pressed up against the countertop and also against one another.
May 1997
“You okay?” he asks.
The kid’s lying face-down on the pitcher’s mound and he looks— Well, Bucky’s never seen a dead person, but he looks a little dead. His gym uniform is covered with dirt and grass stains, and he’s not moving.
The senior who pushed him laughs. “C’mon,” he says to his friends, nudging elbows the way assholes usually do. “He’s learned his lesson.”
Bucky considers screaming at the guy. But he’s new, and there’re already rumors about how he got held back (true) because he’s stupid (lie, but nobody wants to hear about how his dad got laid off again and he got sent to live with his aunt). Before he decides, though, the kid pushes himself onto his elbows. The dust is all over his face, and when he tries to wipe it off his lips and chin, he smears it. The older guys laugh and keep shoving each other.
“Need a hand?” Bucky asks, but the kid ignores him.
“People aren’t your punching bags,” the kid growls, and the guys all stop to look at him. He’s short and scrawny, like a living stick figure, and Bucky grimaces. He’s too small to be the ball boy, never mind play on the varsity baseball team. Was this a tryout, or a hazing? “Just because I’m not as tall as you—” He brushes dirt off his shirt. “—or as fast as you doesn’t mean—”
The ringleader laughs. “Rogers, you got a death wish or something?” He steps away from the group. “Because if you really want to, we can do this, but it’s only gonna end in you running home and crying to grandma, the same way you always—”
“Oh, leave him alone, will ya?” Bucky demands. He doesn’t know why, not really, but he steps in front of scrawny Rogers. Rogers blinks, frowning, but he’s still squaring his shoulders. “He didn’t make the team. He’s not really a threat. And if you punch him, the only thing that’ll happen is you get suspended.”
“And punched back,” Rogers threatens.
Bucky glances over his shoulder. The kid couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag, but you didn’t have to be a genius to see how much pride he’s got dangling from his sleeve.
“And punched back,” Bucky agrees, and balls his fists.
The ringleader snorts. “You’re not worth my time,” he decides. He turns back to his friends, and there’s a lot of back-patting and congratulating going on. Big tough guys decided not to hurt the scrawny kid. Real deserving.
They’re almost off the field when one of them shouts back, “You’re as stupid as they say you are for making friends with Rogers!”
Their laughter carries.
When Bucky turns around, Rogers is wiping the dirt from his face. He’s a mess, and Bucky’s pretty sure half the smears are from tear streaks. “Thanks,” he says weakly.
“Anybody ever tell you to pick your battles? Those guys could’ve ripped you in half!”
“I know,” he admits. He looks at the ground, and Bucky feels bad for yelling at him. He looks like he’s twelve, not fifteen. “I just hate the way they talk to people. They bully everybody. Nobody gets a fair shake.”
“And you think you can take them?”
“Somebody has to.”
Rogers lifts his eyes and looks right at Bucky, and Bucky— He knows a lot of kids who can fight and a lot more who’ll try to fight, but none of them really hold a candle to this one. He snorts and rolls his eyes. “You’re crazy, but I like crazy,” he decides.
It makes Rogers grin. “Can I take that as a compliment?”
“Was there another way to take it?” When Rogers laughs, Bucky kinda laughs with him. “I’m Bucky,” he introduces. “Bucky Barnes.”
Rogers thrusts out a hand, and then stands there, waiting for Bucky to take it. It’s too big for the rest of him, but Bucky likes how it feels against his palm. “Steve Rogers,” he replies. “We have history together second hour.”
Bucky snorts. “I guess between that and this, you’re going to expect me to have your back all the time.”
“No,” Rogers says, “but I’ll have yours.”
And it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, this skinny, short kid offering to have his back, but . . .
But Bucky can’t stop himself from smiling.
“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he decides, and slings an arm around Steve on their way off the ball field.