marvel fic: heroes of old brooklyn
heroes of old brooklyn
steve/bucky, pg-13, 9722 words.
Steve felt cement, gritty under his cheek, and blood pooling thicker than spit and coppery behind his lip. A sharp ache had started up in his arm, and he hoped dully that it wasn't broken, thought feverishly of doctor bills and how far that would carve into the too-small pile of coins Bucky knotted into the lining of his coat pocket.
"Goddamnit, Steve--"
and that was Bucky, his pounding steps echoing off the buildings that rose up on either side of the alleyway, like a particularly shattering heartbeat that matched Steve's own too-fast and stammering one. Steve opened his eyes, the knee of Bucky's worn-down trousers a few inches from his nose as Bucky knelt, hands wide and warm on Steve's shoulders as he said, "Steve? Steve? Fuck, what happened to you?"
"Ah," Steve tried to say, but it came out wispy and cracked. "Um, the usual," he tried again, coughing a little. "You know, some guy--"
"Yeah, yeah," Bucky said distractedly, running his hands down Steve's arms and looking up sharply at the little gasp of pain Steve let past his clamped-down teeth. "That hurt?" he asked.
"No," Steve said, a transparent liar even at the best of times, and Bucky gave him a look, raised eyebrows and mouth pulled tight at the corners. "It's really not that bad," Steve amended. "I mean, no worse than usual, I guess." He winced, realizing how that sounded, and before Bucky could say it he added quickly, "I'll be more careful, okay, I won’t--overreact, I'll just--" He shrugged, honestly not really sure what he'd do.
"Yeah," Bucky said, brushing his palms off on his pants, standing up and looking up at the fast-darkening evening sky. "Yeah, I believe you. Just run away, that's the Steve Rodgers style, right?" He looked down, grinning too big for his face, the grin he only ever gave to Steve: Steve grinned back, a little rueful. "All right, kiddo. You can stand up, yeah?"
Steve scrambled to his feet, holding his aching arm carefully away from his side, and he could see Bucky track that with his eyes wary and the tightness back around his mouth. "Don't call me kiddo," Steve mumbled, half to take that wary sheen from Bucky's eyes and half because he wasn't a kid anymore, eighteen the last summer and grown two inches in as many months. Bucky, still taller than him by almost half a foot, slung an arm around Steve's shoulder and said, "Whatever you say, Stevie," and Steve groaned, drove his good elbow towards Bucky's ribs, but Bucky was too fast for him, always to fast, and he sidestepped Steve's jab and laughed at him with his head thrown back.
Steve could feel the smile flickering like candle flame around his mouth: Bucky's laugh has always done this to him, and he ducked his head so maybe Bucky wouldn't see this embarrassingly visceral response to his crinkled eyes and busted-open grin, the laugh the Steve would think about trying to fall asleep that night, that he'd dream about it the way kids nowadays dreamed about enough food and warm rooms, wallets stuffed full of gold. Bucky was everything good to Steve, it had been that ways for years now and Steve couldn't ever see it stopping, and he ducked his head down so maybe Bucky wouldn't notice this sort of diluvian devotion that had always been a trademark of Steve's knowing him.
"What?" Steve asked, vaguely aware Bucky was looking at him, that he might've said something while Steve was away in his reverie.
"Nothin'," Bucky said, his arm back around Steve, the crook of his elbow warm and jacket-rough against the back of Steve's neck. He tugged Steve into his side, careful that Steve's arm can stay un-jostled, and they started walking out toward the street.
"So, how did you find me?" Steve asked once they'd turned out onto North Street, passing a man selling apples out of a crate, mottled with brown spots and they still made Steve's mouth water.
"Aw, it was easy," Bucky told him. "Just asked people if they'd seen some skinny kid getting the shit beat outta him, I was pointed to you like that." Bucky's face dropped from it's smile, suddenly, and he added, "Though not fast enough, apparently," with a dark glance to Steve's gingerly-held arm.
"It's fine, Bucky," Steve protested. "Really, I mean it, it's just a bruise, promise."
Bucky gave him a disbelieving look, which Steve didn't think he deserved at all: he lied about this stuff sometimes, sure, but he didn't want Bucky to worry, or spend their food money on doctors Steve didn't need, and that was just common sense. Bucky lied to him all the time, Steve knew, about money and where he gets their food and about how things are going to get better, one day. It was only fair, Steve thought, that he lied about some things too.
Bucky's mouth had pulled tight again, and Steve tried to think of something that'd get it to curve back into its smile that affected Steve so disastrously, that Steve seeks out anyway, because if there was one thing that Steve'd never really gotten the hang of it was running away at danger signs.
He elbowed Bucky's side and said, "Hey, promise not to get myself beaten up if you take me to Coney Island tomorrow."
That surprised a laugh out of Bucky, and so Steve went on, "Really, I wouldn't even go on rides or anything."
"I think that's kinda missing the point of Coney Island, Steve."
"No it isn't," Steve protested. "I like it, even without the food or the rides or anything. It's nice there." He looked up at Bucky, who was watching him and shaking his head a little.
"I've been saying this for years," Bucky told him, "but you are the weirdest kid, swear to god."
Steve nudged into Bucky's side happily, knowing he'd won because Bucky was smiling again. "Yeah, yeah, you've said," and they walked Brooklyn streets down to the quick-setting sun.
*
They hadn't lived with a solid roof over their heads for about a year now, the orphanage happy to be rid of them once they'd turned eighteen. Bucky was nineteen now with Steve two months shy, and they lived on whatever they could find, no one much caring about two boys with parents long-dead when they had their own families to feed and worry over. So they were left to worry over each other, fight each others fights and take whatever they could get, live wherever they could.
Steve was just glad the winter had broken, snow slushing around their ankles and his feeble health not standing a chance against the stinging cold. Steve was just glad it hadn't rained for weeks now, that the heat hadn't gotten sweltering, glad for that a thousand bad things that hadn't happened yet.
That night they went to the camp under the bridge, where they'd left their stuff--two blankets, a few extra shirts between them--with one of the women there. "Thanks, ma'am," Bucky said, nodding and more polite than Steve could've imagined, if he hadn't seen it before. Bucky's back was stiff, neck held at a bad angle, and Steve knew he hated coming here: sleeping here was giving up, to Bucky, admitting that they were just some more outta-luck kids with no place to stay and no money to speak of. It ate at Bucky's pride like acid, chipped under his skin and gave his shoulders a solemn fixed look, like he had something to prove.
Laying that night on blankets layered futiley over the rocky ground, Steve turned his head from the grey underbelly of the bridge to whisper, "Hey Bucky?"
"Yeah, champ?" Bucky shuffled around to his back, looking at Steve with eyes that glinted faintly in the far-away city lights.
"Nothin'," Steve said, smiling. "Just wanted to see if you were awake."
"You're such a fuckin' pain in the ass, Steve," Bucky bitched half-heartedly, shoving at Steve's shoulder, the good one, his other arm still held out at a stiff angle from his body like a geometry problem. "I dunno why I even put up with you." Steve grinned.
Five minutes later, Bucky whispered back, "Steve?"
"I'm awake," Steve mumbled, crossing one arm across his chest against the creeping summer-night cold, and Bucky told him, "'s not that."
"What, then?"
"You ever think about California?" Bucky asked, and Steve could feel something hitch in his chest, a trapdoor opening and underneath it all the fear he'd buried away, always known Bucky was going to leave him someday.
"What?"
"California," Bucky said again, like the word hadn't been branded into Steve's head, flaming letters a mile high. "I heard they have jobs there, that anyone can get work picking fruit in the summer. I could go, get some money and come back here and we could live like kings, huh, Stevie? What d'you say?" Bucky had on a big shit-eating grin that Steve knew was trouble, the kind of grin that led to ill-advised adventures and some of the best times of Steve's childhood.
Steve could look Bucky in the eye again, so he did and he said, "Sounds like a great plan, just don't call me Stevie" and Bucky muffled his laugh against Steve's shoulder, breath warm and uneven flitting across Steve's collarbone. Steve fisted one hand in the blanket, thin worn cotton almost nonexistent between his fingers, and tried not to do anything rash.
"Fine," Bucky said, laughter under control but his mouth was still precipitously close to Steve's. "What d'you think, though? There's nothing like that here in Brooklyn, no one can find a job here, you know that."
Steve did know that, knew it well, and that didn't stop him from saying, "I'd miss you."
Bucky didn't say anything right away, and Steve bit down hard enough on his lip to draw up a thin line of blood. "I'd miss you too, kid," Bucky said finally, rougher and more whispering than before, like he doesn't want anyone to hear but Steve. "Why'd you think I haven't taken off already, huh? I mean, who'd be there to take care of your sorry ass if I was gone?"
"Hey, I can get along on my own," Steve protested, though secretly, he'd thought the same thing.
"Sure you can." Bucky was still close, enough that Steve could feel his breath, regular now and beating a soft feathering spot on Steve's cheek. "Sure you can."
Steve huffed a little, for appearances, and then said, "Really? Would you go?"
"Sure." Bucky shrugged. "Find a train to hop, I could get there in three days." He went quiet for a moment. "That's weird, isn't it? Three days, and I could be on the other side of this whole goddamn country."
Steve didn't say anything, but he understood Bucky, always had and always would, better than most anything. Three days away didn't sound as bad as California, and Steve didn't know why but he'd take it, Bucky's hand just above Steve's elbow and fingers slatted on bare skin. Steve had the sudden wild desire that Bucky should be that close to him, always, not to anywhere so far away as California or even the next borough, but here next to Steve with his hands dry and familiar and his breath steady as a drumbeat. Steve had started to need Bucky like air, and maybe that was misleading: maybe it had always been that way. Steve shook the thought off quickly, scared what he'd do if it was left to hurtle down that track.
"Hey," Bucky said, and he looked concerned. "I won't go if you don't want me too," and Steve felt that trapdoor slam shut again in his head, all bad things eradicated with that worrying look in Bucky's eye like he'd do anything for Steve, and that sort of scared Steve but only because he knew that these things, they worked both ways.
Then Steve felt a little awful for wishing so hard that Bucky would stay, and he said, "You could go if you want," and Bucky said, "Maybe," and they stared up together at the gray industrial cables of the bridge above them, and slowly, Steve started to fall asleep.
*
Coney Island in April was just this side of eerie, too few people to be bustling and too many for it to feel abandoned, and Steve liked it best this way. It'd just reopened for the summer, and at ten in the morning the crowd was patchy and the sun glinted crystalline off the rides, paint so bright it made your eyes ache. Steve sucked at his lip, trying to keep the smile contained, but he didn't think it worked out all that well.
His bad arm was done up in a sling fashioned out of one of Bucky's shirts, worn through and ripped in too many places to be mended again. His free hand caught the sleeve of the shirt Bucky had on that day, over and over to point out the shapes the rides arced out onto the sky, the interesting colors of women's dresses and a few gaggles of kids pooling pennies together to buy hot dogs, one for every three kids. Bucky kept laughing, and Steve loved that, taking away the worry he'd felt deep in his stomach over the subway fare here and the lean look of Bucky's stash of coins.
Bucky offered a few times to get Steve popcorn, or tickets for a ride, and Steve always said no. It was enough, he thought, that Bucky was willing, food money be damned if Steve had wanted a go on the rollercoaster, and Steve felt guilty and warm and happy, all at once. But Steve kept saying no and really, it was like he'd told Bucky last night, he hadn't been lying at all: he liked it just like this, watching something go by him, for once, instead of jumping into the middle of it. He noticed snatches of things he'd like to draw, once he had better pencils; for now, the nubs Bucky gets him from the drugstore could give an idea of the magisterial height of the rides and the ear-pounding yells of the vendors. He stayed deep in thoughts of grayscales and shading, until Bucky elbowed him in the ribs with a "Hey? Steve? You in there?"
"Sorry." Steve grinned up at him ruefully, and Bucky swiped a hand through his hair, making Steve duck and grin some more. "I was just thinking about drawing this, you know. I mean, not the colors, but the shapes and the--the people." And Bucky, Bucky with his hair run through with fairground dust and shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, but Steve didn't say that much.
Bucky looked at him funny for a second, then pulled him over to a free bench shaded by the back awning of one of the taffy stands. Steve asked, "Why--?" and Bucky said, "You look like you're gonna pass out, you've been walking around for what, three hours now?"
"I'm not an invalid," Steve muttered, though truthfully, sitting down felt pretty good. He rubbed at the back of the neck, and Bucky said, "Here, lemme see." Steve shuffled around to put his back to Bucky, who pressed cool thumbs against Steve's spine and said, "Yeah, you're burning up, Stevie. That's gonna hurt, later on."
Steve shrugged. "It's not a big deal." He turned back, and Bucky's hands dropped from his shoulders; Steve missed them briefly, before looking out over the floods of people and thinking quickly of other things.
Bucky kicked his legs out straight in front of him, digging his heels into the loose dusty dirt, and tilted his head back towards the surreally blue sky. It surprised Steve sometimes that the sky could still be this blue: sometimes he was sure he'd remember his whole life in grays and dusty browns, and maybe, if he was lucky, the better, deeper brown Bucky's eyes went in the right light. Nothing like the shining blue the sky was right then, though, that blue having no place in Steve's imagined sepia world.
"D'you ever wish you could go the school again? College? Art school?" Bucky was squinting up at the sun, head still tipped back onto the bench, and when Steve looked over he looked immobile, like he hadn't moved in hours.
"I dunno." Steve stubbed his toe into the dirt, digging a trench into the burnt, orange-ish earth. "I mean, I guess." He followed Bucky's gaze up to the skyline. "This is pretty good, though."
Bucky was broken out of his uncustomary stillness by that, turning his head to Steve and smiling like it came unexpectedly on him. "Yeah? Well, I've always said you were pretty dumb."
"You're pretty dumb," Steve muttered back, and Bucky laughed so hard at that he snorted a little.
On the subway ride back Steve dozed off with his head in Bucky's lap, still small enough to fit across the seat with his legs tented up, and still young-looking enough to get away with it. He felt worn down from the day at the Island, kind of like he'd walked whole inches off the bottoms of his feet and he's wake up tomorrow even shorter than he already was. Bucky'd probably laugh so hard he'd hurt something, if that really happened: Steve's thoughts were cut off into strange-shaped pieces, his eyes closed and his cheek on the rough material of Bucky's jeans. Around them the subway hurtled and clattered like damnation, louder than Steve remembered from the ride there: with his eyes closed, everything sounded louder and more important, like the steel car speeding and weaving under Brooklyn was the whole world, everything outside the barren fields and fiery pits Steve used to learn about in Sunday School at the orphanage. Steve was surprisingly okay with that idea, whole world in a subway seat under Brooklyn, and that's how he knew he was probably almost asleep.
The last thing he remembered before Bucky shook him awake ("Hey Steve, Stevie, c'mon, this is our stop--") was Bucky's hand in his hair, thumb rubbing circles against the crown of his head and fingers scrunched in the thin strands. Bucky's hands were familiar to him like so many things in his life, but none of them this pleasant: still thinking in potential memories, Steve was almost sure that of all the things familiar to him from these years, Bucky's hands would be one of the best. Then he sighed a little, Bucky's leg warm under his cheek, and didn't remember anything more.
*
A few weeks later Steve got sick, which just wasn't fair, Steve thought, with it being nice out with no cold or damp, and nothing to blame this on except for his own ill-faring health.
Feverish, with his throat feeling scraped red raw, Bucky took him back to the camp under the bridge with one arm under Steve's and supporting the greater part of his weight. It was an old, familiar arrangement, Steve knowing just how to lean in to Bucky so they can both walk easily down the dawn-tinted streets.
At the camp there was soup and extra blankets and people to keep an eye on Steve while Bucky was gone. Bucky flat-out refused to move from his post by Steve's side, though, even after being assured by one of the women living permanently by the side of the fire that she would look after Steve. "No, ma'am," Steve'd heard him say, voice hard-edged but polite. "I'll stay right here 'til he's better, thanks." After that, most everyone in the camp left them alone, carving a wide berth around Steve, lying curled and shivering under as many blankets as Bucky could get for him, and Bucky, sitting hunch-backed with his arms circled around his knees, head tipped down when he wasn't talking softly to Steve or trying to get him to eat something. Steve wasn't sure if it was for fear of catching that they stayed away, or for some other reason: instead, they would smile at the two of them sadly, for reasons Steve couldn't untangle in his fevered mind.
He looked to Bucky sitting up next to him, the one thing that never stopped making sense to him even when he was like this, and didn't worry about it too much.
Steve slept, mostly, or tried to: he'd stay up long nights, uncomfortable enough to keep him awake even as he knew he should sleep. Bucky was almost always awake when Steve was, and Steve wondered how he did that.
"Tell me a story?" Steve whispered, a few times, only when his chest hurt so bad the ache felt pointed and sharp, when even asking scraped down his throat like razorblades. It was an old ritual, back when they did this in the orphanage's infirmary and Bucky would have to bribe the nurses to even let him in at all.
So Bucky set off on a adventure tale, stolen in scraps from comic books and the movies, books Steve'd told him about and newspaper stories. They nearly all starred some skinny kid who no one ever paid any attention to until he performed some great feat, that got more ridiculous in every telling. Steve didn't mind: he sort of liked the sound of this hero, he'd joke to Bucky, if it didn't hurt too much to talk.
"Yeah?" Bucky said. "Well he had this best friend, right--very handsome, did most of the work, of course."
"Of course."
"This kid, though, he got all the credit." Bucky paused, glancing at Steve the way he did sometimes, swift and from the dark corners of his eyes. "His friend, though, he didn't really mind."
"What happened to them?" Steve asked, smiling a little, asking just because. "You know, after the bad guy was locked up and they'd met the President and everything. What did they do with all that reward money?"
"Well see, they bought this whole big hotel in Brooklyn, right?," Bucky said. "And they lived there, and got food delivered to their rooms whenever they were hungry, and went swimming in their own pool, whenever they wanted."
"Brooklyn?" Steve asked. "I thought they would move away."
"Well, they tried Chicago for a while, but it didn't stick."
"Huh." Steve paused, coughing dryly into the crook of his elbow. "Guess they just couldn't stay away."
"And, that's what they were known for right? Heroes of Brooklyn. All the kids saved up to buy their comics, and they all said they wanted to be these guys when they grew up."
Steve laughed weakly, trying not to cough again. "Now you're just crazy."
Bucky grinned down at him, wide grin that said irrevocably that it was Steve who was the crazy one, and Bucky was just here to try and keep him from doing anything too goddamn stupid. "You like me anyway," he said, and Steve could never really argue with that; he punched Bucky weakly on the leg, and muttered "Shut up" in the way that meant Bucky had obviously, transparently, won this round.
"Whatever you say, champ," Bucky said. He learned over Steve, laying his palm across Steve's forehead and saying, "Should go to sleep, you know."
"Any better?" Steve asked, though he didn't feel it.
"Oh yeah," Bucky said, "loads. I'd say give it a day, and you'll be back to beating kids up in alleys like usual."
"Think you got that the wrong way," Steve said sleepily; Bucky's hand was still heavy on his forehead, thumb brushing absently over his hairline and lulling his eyes closed. "G'night, Bucky."
"Don't die on me, 'kay?" Bucky said back, half-joking like he always did, another childhood ritual that neither of them had ever been able to let go of, not yet. "Swear on the Dodgers' win tomorrow."
"Stupid thing to swear on," Steve said, following the careful script they'd fashioned from long nights in infirmary beds and lurking and very real fears. He grinned sleepily, eyes already half-lidded and falling closed. "Promise."
"Yeah, you better," Bucky said, almost-smirk on his face but his eyes heavy with the gravity of Steve's skinny shoulders and simmering fever and awful, rasping cough. "You'd better."
*
As it turned out, Bucky never did go to California.
Late in May, the air getting warmer and stickier and the rain coming nearly every night, Bucky got a job behind the bear at a saloon down by the river. Friday and Saturday nights, and he barely got paid but was allowed to keep tips, and it all amounted to just a few dollars a week, but it felt like riches to them. The money knotted in the pocket of Bucky's jacket starting to swell, and Bucky stopped stealing food from the grocery store almost completely: Steve had the suspicion Bucky did that just because Steve didn't like it, always frowned and told Bucky off for it, until for a while it had been the only food they had and Steve quit complaining. He still didn't like it, gave him a bad prickling feeling in his chest, and now that they had money enough for some bread and last winter's apples, Bucky conceded silently and bought nearly everything lawfully.
The owner of the bar let Bucky sleep there on work nights, which meant Steve did, too. He waited for close, holed up in the back room unless someone had a game going, sketching out people he'd seen that day or the dusty-gray square of alley he could see out the high-set window or, increasingly, Bucky: Bucky's shoulders, the hard tilt of his smirk, his soft eyes when he looked at Steve just before they fell asleep, side-by-side on their worn-through blanket. Steve never showed these to Bucky, would never, a deep and panicky fear that Bucky would read the lines of them and know. He folded them into tight squares long before there was any danger of Bucky coming in and spotting them, tucked them into his jacket pocket and kept them buried there.
Steve helped Bucky clean up after close, wiping down tables and getting the work done twice as fast. Bucky'd grin, and sometimes he gave Steve a glass of something, thumping Steve on the back when choked on his sip and saying, "'s okay, champ, someday I'll figure out how to get you drunk." Steve glowered, but Bucky just raised his eyebrows and swallowed the rest of the glass in one go through his mouth still twisted up in a grin, and Steve watched his throat move as he swallowed and the arched line it made as he tipped his head back, and he kinda wanted to draw it and kinda wanted to kiss it and so he looked down at his hands and wouldn't glance up again until Bucky said, "Steve?"
"Yeah." Steve allowed himself a glance, just one, and Bucky's eyes were still bright from his fallen grin or the alcohol or both, and he said, "You tired?" and so Steve said "Yeah" again, and was disproportionately glad when Bucky let it drop.
It was good, having a solid, guaranteed sort of roof over their head two nights a week, and they started going to the bridge camp less, no need for the fire in the easy heat of early summer. It was just them again, not coming home to anyone and no one in the wide landscape of Brooklyn knowing their names. Bucky had a sort of game going at the bar, telling the regulars a different name every time they came in: Steve told him he was an idiot, but Bucky said it was nice, liberating, not letting anyone in on who he really was.
That was just like Bucky, Steve thought: he also thought he knew something of what Bucky was talking about, not letting anyone of a kind of secret, who they really were. It felt isolated, but a nice kind of isolation: an island of them skirting the edges of the undulating crowds of people that flooded the Brooklyn streets. There was a certain crazy magnetism of being the only ones to know the other, the last living members of both their families and it had been that way for years: Steve was the only person in New York to know that Bucky'd gotten that scar just under his left-side collarbone from a fence he'd climbed that one time they'd run away from the orphanage, thirteen and stupid, and Bucky knew every single thing Steve'd had since he was twelve, coughs and fevers and the flu, kept them in his head like the checklist from hell, he'd told Steve one time when he was drunk and nearly asleep with his words slurred and his eyes half-lidded. They knew all these things and more, best friends taken to an extreme that Steve had recently gotten a sneaking suspicion about. This couldn't be normal, he thought: not everyone could walk around everyday with so much useless and absolutely crucial information about another person. They'd burst, Steve thought; he knew it from experience.
Except in his case, all those pieces of Bucky, glances and facts and how Bucky was the face behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes, didn't rupture but got crushed down into this thing, a ball of hot light that showed up whenever Bucky threw his head back laughing or fell asleep with his shirt rucked up around his waist or got the back of Steve's neck fit that certain way into the crook of his elbow, the way he had for so many years now. This was not normal, Steve didn't think. Bucky was not something that could happen to just anyone.
Steve looked at Bucky, back in the bar closed for the night with shadows falling in hard-edged shapes across the room. Bucky, whose grin had returned at half its force and who was drying glasses expertly with a flick of a dingy white towel, lining them up in glinting rows on the counter. He kept glancing back at Steve, like he was gauging him for something, or else Steve's paranoia had finally taken over, and that wouldn't have been exactly unprecedented.
Steve grinned back, halfway to match Bucky's own, and knew: this couldn't just happen to anyone.
*
It was summer, which meant a lot of things in Brooklyn. It meant hot wind and asphalt like molten rock, singeing the still winter-soft soles of their bare feet. It meant sun burning the backs of their necks red and peeling, their arms tanning dark and Steve's hair going sun-scotched, a straw-like yellow color. It meant the smell of gutters cooked in the heat, cloying and rancid, and the collars of their shirts soaked through with sweat, food going rancid before grocers could sell it to people bled out from the winter and still waiting for things to get better.
Mostly, it meant baseball: sneaking in to Dodgers games with a few slithering steps and countless quick glances over their shoulders, mouths dry and dusty and throats raw from shouting themselves hoarse. When they won Bucky always said, "It'll be this year, I fuckin' know it," and when they lost he's shrug. "Next game," he said. "They'll be fine."
He'd been saying the same thing since Steve knew him, but that didn't stop Steve from saying back, "Yeah, sure, Bucky," and sort of believing it himself. Didn't matter that they hadn't won the Series since before Steve could remember, before the Crash and before his parents had died and before he'd met Bucky: the Dodgers were something to believe in, dry-mouthed in the late June sun with Bucky next to him shouting about those godamned Yankees. The Dodgers were something to believe in, and Steve collected those like bottle caps, rattling around in his pocket like the loose change he hasn't had for years now, things to trust in and trust that they will be the one to get him out. Out of this ragged scrap of the East Coast, out of this Depression and out of Brooklyn's dirty streets. Believing in things had to get him somewhere, he figured, and he was to believe in one thing why not have it be that.
This tendency to believe in things had gotten him many places, far and wide and almost none of them good. It had also gotten him this permanent spot by Bucky's side, though, so Steve knew it couldn't be all bad: nothing that got him this, open grins and stolen drugstore pencils and an arm around his shoulders, could be all bad.
So they snuck through the oceans of people into the bench seats crowded with even more, jostling shoulders and elbows, and watched game after game on their feet and yelling loud, fingers in their mouths like how Bucky'd taught him to let out long ear-splitting whistles.
They walked back in the summer dusk after exhausting double-headers, elated when they'd won, dodging through the sidewalks of people and shouting over the roaring of trolleys bisecting the street like a hook of rusted metal, snagging in a shirt and ripping through it like the asphalt and people and scattered cars were thin as cotton. "We showed 'em," Bucky said, catching Steve in a half-Nelson that had him gasping for breath through his laughter.
"Get off me, idiot," Steve replied, but he just kept laughing and Bucky only let up on him enough so he could stand straight, both of them walking weaving and uneven as they stumbled against each other's sides and crashed through the streets, on high and believing that really anything was possible.
That didn't last long, feet coming back to the ground reluctantly, but still Steve couldn't have stopped smiling if he'd tried. Bucky kept darting looks at him, grin growing by a sliver every time he did; Steve wondered briefly if the sort of thing that was happening to Steve was also bearing down on Bucky, like the most wonderful sort of load to carry, before just as quickly stamping down the spark of that thought. This sort of thing would never happen to Bucky, with his ready smirk and his girls pressed up against walls in out-of-the-way corners. This sort of thing would never happen to Bucky, all luck and charm, the luckiest person Steve's ever known.
So Steve contented himself with watching Bucky's smile grow by degrees, riding high with him over the grimed streets of Brooklyn because the Dodgers had won and sometimes that was all they could care about, unprepared to face things like how they hadn't eaten all day and Bucky was going to have to pinch something from the corner store if they wanted to last until Friday, things like how they were nineteen (almost, in Steve's case) and hadn't lived somewhere with a honest-to-god roof for a year now. Like how Steve still got himself beaten up in back alleys because that was something he could do, like how even landing a punch or two could feel like the best thing that happened to him all day, even he was left spitting out blood onto the concrete by the end, and like how he was maybe, possibly, in love with Bucky, and how he could never say it out loud because Bucky, well, Bucky was really all that he had.
*
And then, Steve did something really, awfully, cataclysmically stupid.
It was after the bar closed down for the night, or really early morning, if you wanted to be technical about this. The bar had just closed, Bucky kicking out the last sad stragglers with a smile that matched them for sadness and raised them a firm edge that said it didn't matter if he was a kid, he wasn't going to let them off easy; Steve was just wondering how it was that Bucky had a smile for everything, whole collections of smiles like jewel collectors had precious stones laid on in velvet-lined boxes, when Bucky said, "Hey Steve, wanna get drunk?"
The soft line of Bucky's smile made this seem like a much better idea that it probably was, Bucky's smiles making most things appreciably better just by existing. So Steve didn't answer, and Bucky pulled up bottles of beer shining like gold in the half-light, and he said, "C'mon," and really what could Steve have said to that.
Bucky led the way up to the half-level above the bar where the proprietor let them sleep, made up of rough boards with the ceiling slanted so harshly Steve could only stand up straight in the very center, and Bucky had to stay always half-crouched. The bar used to be a house, and this used to be an attic: Steve wondered sometimes about that, why anyone would even bother making this awkward, shoe-horned kind of space.
He and Bucky made a life of fitting in badly-shaped spaces, though, and so they sat down with their shoulders shoved up against the angle of the ceiling and the beers Bucky had threaded between his fingers set down and bleeding rings of condensation onto the floorboards. Steve looked uncertainly at Bucky, who was already swiping the cap off one of the bottles.
"You know--" Bucky started, and let out a little ha! as the cap rattled onto the floor, rolling away to a far dark corner. "You know, if we'd ever gone to boarding school, this is exactly the type of thing we'd 've done."
Steve snorted, the idea of them going to boarding school kind of inherently funny. "How do you know?"
Bucky shrugged, the way he did when he was just making stuff up but he believed it, so you should believe it too. It had always worked on Steve, at least: Steve believed anything Bucky said without convincing, just on principle, and that, Steve considered, was perhaps the source of this problem.
"Seems like something boarding school boys would do," Bucky explained, half a grin shot Steve's way. "Sneaking into attics, drinking beer they didn't pay for--"
Steve shot a half-masted glare to answer Bucky's grin, and Bucky butted against his shoulder with his own. "Hey, seriously, Richardson said I could take some, since he doesn't pay that much." He smiled, reassuring. "Cross my heart," he said, and with one finger drew a wobbly X across his chest. "Seriously."
"I don't know why I let you talk me into stuff," Steve mumbled, handing one of the bottles to Bucky to open. He did, the decapitated top rolling away over the slivery boards, and handed it back to Steve, who choked a little on the first sip.
"Yeah, well." Bucky took a long pull off his own bottle, and Steve knew not to look, not to look, and he did anyway. "Your crazy morality is gonna get us both into trouble one day, so."
Bucky's neck was entrancing, skin smooth and taut, and Steve was so close, less than a fingerslength and he'd have his mouth--
"That doesn't even make any sense." Steve's voice came out breathily and a little gasping, and he took another swallow from his own bottle with the misguided hope that the watery, lip-curling taste would anchor his voice more firmly and solidly, so Bucky wouldn't suspect him of a thing.
"Yeah, well," Bucky said again. He finished his bottle, tipped almost vertical over his mouth, and opened another with his arm still flush against Steve's, bleeding warmth through both their shirts and onto Steve's skin. Steve could feel it like seeing ink spill onto blank white paper, ruinous and irreversible, and he's sure he can feel all the potential this has to go wrong in the air like fireflies. He should probably stop now, plead exhaustion and get himself as far away from Bucky's dark bright eyes and messy-edged smile as he possibly could.
Steve had never been good at staying away from Bucky, though, which is why he was sitting there in the first place and which is why he didn't stop smiling back and pushing their shoulders together and drinking his way through more alcohol than he'd had ever before, because he needed some way to deal with those first two things. Things seemed better three or four beers in, gone soft at the edges like the corners of Bucky's mouth and the patch of skin just behind his ear that was bared to Steve whenever Bucky twists his head away, which wasn't all that much but it still stuck stubbornly in Steve's mind. Steve wondered fuzzily if, one day, his whole would be made up of pieces and glances of Bucky, nothing else left except Steve's own reconstruction of his best friend, and Steve didn't think that would be that bad at all.
"Steve," Bucky said, "y'all right?" words mushed together and a concerned V between his eyes. Steve had a sudden thought that maybe Bucky could read minds, this sort of thing not without precedent in Bucky's long list of beautifully useful things he knew. The thought left him gasping, praying that this wasn't true and that at least this small part of Steve was still mysterious to Bucky.
He needn't have worried, as it turned out, because just then the night took a quick slamming turn towards the worse, and the stupid and the way his fingers felt too light and soft and his mouth was buzzing all came together and Steve started something really awful there in the half-dusk slant-roofed attic of a bar.
It happened like this.
Bucky turned away again, just enough to reach their last bottle of beer over to the hook of the wall where he could swipe off its cap and send it skittering across the floorboards to join the small collection now populating the attic corners, and Steve saw again that patch of skin that was so destructive to his upper brain functions. The twist of Bucky's neck, smooth planes down to where his collarbones winged out sharp and too well defined, hadn't eaten since breakfast and that wasn't rare. Steve was collecting ways to justify this like pennies, alcohol and too little food and too much of his sight taken up by Bucky's messy drunk-smile, but that was doomed before it even started. He wasn't drunk enough to make that a good reason, and Bucky had been all he could see since he was twelve years old and so that was no kind of excuse.
Bucky offered the remaining bottle to Steve, said, "Wanna split?"
Steve meant to say sure, swear to god he did, but what happened instead was that Steve leaned forward, fingerwidths, and laid his mouth against the thin skin and softly ridged bone just behind Bucky's ear.
It was too long, lips tracking down to the back corner of Bucky's jaw without ever leaving the pale skin, unevenly tanned and a good couple shades lighter than his hands and face. Smoother too, without the thick and everlasting calluses that Steve had memorized long ago off Bucky's palms, the undersides of his fingers that Steve felt now gripping just above his elbow, tight and grounding him with a sickening crash.
Steve jerked away, like Bucky's skin had suddenly heated up white-hot, which for all that it was doing to Steve could be perfectly true. Bucky was staring at him, eyes wide and big enough that Steve thought wildly and for several seconds that they had begun to eat away at the rest of his face, nothing left except a skull and those eyes that had recently begun to haunt Steve's dreams and were now large and surprisingly calm in his face.
"Steve?" Bucky asked, like he had just minutes before this debacle had occurred; y'all right? But that wasn't what Bucky said this time: he said "Steve?" again like he was testing the name out on his tongue, Steve himself gone sudden foreign and unknowable, the Steve that Bucky had known doing nothing like this even on bad days.
"I'm," Steve said, sorry feeling suddenly vastly inadequate and so dropping dead on his tongue.
Bucky said something, but Steve's hearing seemed to have suddenly dropped out like a bad radio station, and all he saw was Bucky's mouth moving in strange alien shapes that Steve had the dizzy notion that he might've once understood.
"Sorry, I'm sorry," Steve gasped out, words feeling thin and not enough in his mouth but it was better than nothing, he had to make Bucky understand, he hadn't meant any of it. Steve would do anything to fix this, lying baldly included, and so he said "I didn't mean it" and "I promise" and "sorry," more times than he could count, and hoped that Bucky was counting and understood, please, that this couldn't ruin anything.
*
"C'mon," Bucky said, but that was really unnecessary: by now, it should've been known that Steve would've followed him anywhere.
Steve scrambled up the fire escape behind Bucky, the ladder beginning to weight back up before he'd gotten to the top, and Bucky laughed and said something about being skinnier than a goddamn toothpick, jeez, Stevie.
"Don't call me Stevie," Steve muttered back, taking Bucky's offered hand and pulling himself onto the lattice platform. Looking up, the zig-zagging iron grown like ivy on the brick rose alien and more than a little forbidding in the dusk; Steve briefly wished for the sun, disappeared a quarter of an hour before over the broken-tooth skyline.
Bucky climbed ahead of him, two steps at a time, making the spindly iron web of the escape shake unsteadily under their feet; Steve scampered close on his heels, the thought large in his head that if the whole thing did collapse under them, at least Bucky would be nearby. It was a strange thought, no stranger than most of Steve's thoughts these days but still one that Steve shoved quickly to a back shadowed corner of his mind that looked unmistakably like the steep-ceiled attic of three days ago, forever alcohol-blurred around the edges and much darker in Steve's mind than it ever had been in real life.
Up as far as the rickety stairs will take them, Bucky squinted up to the roof and then grinned quick and dangerous at Steve, launching himself up to wrap his fingers over the edge of the gutter. "Holy--" Steve started, and then, "Bucky!" as Bucky pulled himself up far enough to hook one knee up onto the roof, pushing himself forward in a scramble of limbs and a kicked foot that clipped Steve on the shoulder.
"C'mon, Steve, 's not hard at all," Bucky said, face reappeared over the gutter, all grin and imploring eyes. "Here, seriously, you can do it. This is the best view, c'mon." He reached a hand Steve toward Steve, which Steve marveled at, briefly, that Bucky still wanted to come near him.
"Quit staring and take it," Bucky told him, after Steve just stood there for whole seconds. "Hey, I won't let you fall. Cross my heart, and all."
cross my heart, Steve remembered, messy Xs and literal enactments, and bit his lip, wondering when this kind of retroactive thinking would stop.
He locked his hand around Bucky's wrist, feeling Bucky's close around his own and Bucky said, "Three, two--" and then Steve was pulled off his feet. His fingers scrabbled against the gutter, finding purchase and leveraging himself towards the roof, and landed sprawled next to Bucky, who was laughing up at the sky with a loose kind of abandon that Steve had always been jealous of. While he was still flickering through all the possible ways that could've gone wrong, broken bones and Bucky's injuries on his head, Bucky was laughing, saying, "You need to keep doubting that things'll turn out okay," and Steve couldn't help but think that Bucky is probably the smartest person Steve knew, but he could still be pretty goddamn dumb.
He said as much to Bucky, who sucker-punched him in the ribs, putting maybe a quarter of his force behind it and leaving Steve laughing along with him up at the fast-blackening sky. They crawl to the center of the roof--Bucky said that was the best view, and who was Steve to argue with Bucky--and laid down stretched-out on the tar paper, rough and rashing at their skin, catching little threads out of their shirts. Bucky crossed his arms behind his head, sighing and fidgeting into a comfortable position, and Steve mirrored him without a thought: now that he was considering it, he figured the warning signs were all there, and what does it say about him that he hadn't noticed at all?
It was a scant five minutes before the first shrieking whistle streaked through the quiet of twelve stories up: Steve grabbed the hem of Bucky's shirt without thinking, twisting it in his fingers and the it went off in a shower of sparks and Steve said, "Bucky, Bucky, look--" always twelve years old again when he saw fireworks.
Bucky was chuckling softly, watching Steve instead of the sky, which Steve thought was abjectly crazy because there, another one was going off and sparking through the thick dark and Bucky should've been seeing this, this was amazing.
Another and then another blossomed into spots of light over the Hudson, and Bucky didn't seem to mind Steve's fingers fisted in his shirt so Steve kept them there, feeling more reckless in the dark with bright lights exploding what felt like close enough to touch. So they stayed that way for long minutes, the fireworks coming faster as they came close to the end, and Bucky said,
"Happy birthday, Steve,"
just as the finale started in earnest, and if Steve had thought he couldn't grin any harder then he'd have been dead wrong.
"Hey, thanks," Steve said, looking over at Bucky with his vision still spotted with the lights that'd been igniting the sky. "For, you know. This. And not dropping me on my head, earlier."
Bucky laughed, said, "Anytime," and Steve wasn't strictly sure what he was replying to but it didn't matter, did it, Steve was so glad with it all that his chest felt crushed under it.
The sky seemed darker once the fireworks had left it, the last sparks fallen into the river and the blackness strangely omniscient over them. Steve didn't mind it, laying next to Bucky in the sticky heat that was weakened only a little by the dark, the scratchy fabric of his shirt still caught up in Steve's fingers, trying not to think too hard about Bucky's warm skin just fractions of an inch from his knuckles.
"Remember when you used to tell me the fireworks were for me?" Steve asked, a piece of his childhood floating to the front of his mind, and old thing that he hadn't remembered for years now.
"Yeah, but you were the one dumb enough to believe it," Bucky answered, but he was smiling too soft for it to have any real effect.
Steve grinned up at the sky. "Yeah, well. You were pretty convincing."
"You just had good timing," Bucky said. "Besides, you were always so fuckin' excited about it, it was the least I could do, y'know?"
Steve wanted to say, it was nowhere near the least you could do, Bucky, don't you understand that? Always done more than he had to, always watched out for Steve and landed punches when he had to and kept Steve fed: he'd stolen for Steve, and sometimes Steve thought that that was pretty much all you could ask for.
He didn't say any of this to Bucky, something tight in his chest that kept him from saying anything at all, but he smiled and smiled and laid his forehead against Bucky's shoulder, and hoped quietly that he understood.
*
Back in an alley, could be any alley in Brooklyn, in well over his head and blood streaming from a badly split lip but still landing punches against some boy twice as big as him, aiming for the neck and the knees, the way Bucky'd taught him. He wasn't exactly winning, but he hadn't been knocked out either: Steve was still fighting for a win, hoping for a draw.
Steve felt someone come up to his side: before he could turn his head, Bucky said, "Planning on winning this one yourself, champ?"
"Yeah, I was," Steve gasped, taking advantage of his opponent's distraction and driving his knuckles against his windpipe. The boy--man, really, Steve hadn't gotten a real good look at him--wheeled back, and Bucky stepped in, got a good shot under the jaw and left him crumpled down against the wall, Steve's usual spot by this point in the fight.
"C'mon," Bucky said then, "we don't wanna be here," and Steve agreed wholeheartedly and so they ran.
Ducking into the next alley, they wove through that and the next three until Steve bent in half with a stitch in his side, and Bucky jogged to a stop by his side. "Jesus christ, kid, could you stay out of trouble for a day maybe?" Bucky asked, out of breath and half-serious, half-laughing. Steve laughed along, and they both leaned against the brick back wall of whatever faceless store this was, and from the state of the alley it was probably bankrupt, windows boarded up like bandaged eyes. It was a good place to catch your breath, and so they flatted their back against the prickling redstone and crumbling mortar and laughed, not catching it back very well at all.
"Sorry, sorry," Steve gasped, hand still held against his side. His lip was still trickling blood, and he swiped the base of his thumb along his chin, probably smearing it more than anything. "I know, I said--but--"
"Yeah, yeah, I've heard it," Bucky said, tipping his head back, still laughing. Steve wondered if it felt the same to him, a little uncontrollable, burning high and bright on adrenaline and their pounding hearts. "I know, kiddo."
"Don't--" Steve said, and Bucky cuffed him on the side of the head before he could finish, saying "I'll call you anything I damn well want" and grinning bright and wide. Steve's lungs still felt like they had pieces missing, not allowing him take real breaths, and this was not helped by Bucky's mouth soft and busted open into the grin that Steve knows will someday get them both into trouble.
"What I still don't understand," Bucky said, his breath coming back and breathing less in gasps than staggered inhales, "is why you, Steve Rodgers, feel the personal fucking need to deal with every single bully you come across."
"Ah, well," Steve said, letting his head fall back against the brick. "If you're still asking that, I think you're doing something wrong."
"Yeah, well," he said. "Least I can do, keep asking, right?" and Steve didn't really know what he meant, but he understood the half-scared half-glad look in Bucky's eyes and so he didn't ask after it.
"Hey, let me--" Bucky said then, catching sight of the blood now smeared on the far side of Steve's face, pushing off the wall to look closer at his split lip, now bleeding only sluggishly.
"It's okay," Steve said, Bucky suddenly very close. "Really, Bucky."
Bucky disregarded him completely, stepping closer and reaching forward, dragging a thumb against Steve's lip. It came away tacky with red, and Bucky asked, "It hurt?" and Steve said, "Nah, I told you, it's fine--" and Bucky kept leaning forward and Steve choked back however he was going to end that sentence.
And then Bucky was kissing him, and Steve was pretty sure he'd lost it and was hallucinating what he'd been waiting for now for too long to count, but the brick still felt real against the back of his shirt and Bucky's mouth warm and wet and tasting like dimestore cigarettes against his, and so then Steve didn't know what to think.
"Steve?" Bucky asked then, pulled just far enough away to talk, his lips still brushing against Steve's.
"No," Steve whispered, "I mean, yes, god yes, I just--is this real?" He didn't know what he was asking, do you mean it or am i going crazy, but he figured it worked out both ways.
Bucky laughed then, quick and gasping, and said, "Yeah, yeah, I mean, I thought--" and if this wasn't what it was, Steve would've noticed the way Bucky's eyes went wide when he was out of his depth, a look Steve'd seen on him only once or twice before but never about Steve, Steve was always easy and open for him to read like a book.
"Yeah well, it was pretty obvious, right?" Steve said in a rush, looking at a spot off Bucky's shoulder.
"Yeah," Bucky said, "for both of us," and that surprised Steve into looking at him. "You really are pretty dumb, aren't you," Bucky told him, and Steve said "Shut up" and so Bucky kissed him again.
"Feels like we're in a movie," Steve said, voice weak and strung out, Bucky's mouth on his jaw. "You know, defeat the bad guy, run for our lives--"
"Are you capable of shutting up for one goddamn minute," Bucky said, huffing against Steve's neck, and Steve considered strongly saying something more, just because, but then Bucky was kissing him at awkward angles because they were both grinning like crazy, couldn't seem to stop.
Finally Bucky said, "No movie had an ending as good as this," and Steve couldn't really argue that, Bucky's hand on the back of his head and his mouth working at the corner of Steve's jaw, and so Steve said, "Not even close," and that was the empirical truth. Steve said again, "Not even close" and closed his eyes and thought that there was nowhere better to be than here, a grimy back alley in Brooklyn with the sun fast going down and the streetcar rattling noisily two streets over, traffic screeching and swerving nearby, and nothing in that was conducive to movie endings, Steve figured, but really, and knowing them, Steve was pretty sure they'd be all right.
steve/bucky, pg-13, 9722 words.
Steve felt cement, gritty under his cheek, and blood pooling thicker than spit and coppery behind his lip. A sharp ache had started up in his arm, and he hoped dully that it wasn't broken, thought feverishly of doctor bills and how far that would carve into the too-small pile of coins Bucky knotted into the lining of his coat pocket.
"Goddamnit, Steve--"
and that was Bucky, his pounding steps echoing off the buildings that rose up on either side of the alleyway, like a particularly shattering heartbeat that matched Steve's own too-fast and stammering one. Steve opened his eyes, the knee of Bucky's worn-down trousers a few inches from his nose as Bucky knelt, hands wide and warm on Steve's shoulders as he said, "Steve? Steve? Fuck, what happened to you?"
"Ah," Steve tried to say, but it came out wispy and cracked. "Um, the usual," he tried again, coughing a little. "You know, some guy--"
"Yeah, yeah," Bucky said distractedly, running his hands down Steve's arms and looking up sharply at the little gasp of pain Steve let past his clamped-down teeth. "That hurt?" he asked.
"No," Steve said, a transparent liar even at the best of times, and Bucky gave him a look, raised eyebrows and mouth pulled tight at the corners. "It's really not that bad," Steve amended. "I mean, no worse than usual, I guess." He winced, realizing how that sounded, and before Bucky could say it he added quickly, "I'll be more careful, okay, I won’t--overreact, I'll just--" He shrugged, honestly not really sure what he'd do.
"Yeah," Bucky said, brushing his palms off on his pants, standing up and looking up at the fast-darkening evening sky. "Yeah, I believe you. Just run away, that's the Steve Rodgers style, right?" He looked down, grinning too big for his face, the grin he only ever gave to Steve: Steve grinned back, a little rueful. "All right, kiddo. You can stand up, yeah?"
Steve scrambled to his feet, holding his aching arm carefully away from his side, and he could see Bucky track that with his eyes wary and the tightness back around his mouth. "Don't call me kiddo," Steve mumbled, half to take that wary sheen from Bucky's eyes and half because he wasn't a kid anymore, eighteen the last summer and grown two inches in as many months. Bucky, still taller than him by almost half a foot, slung an arm around Steve's shoulder and said, "Whatever you say, Stevie," and Steve groaned, drove his good elbow towards Bucky's ribs, but Bucky was too fast for him, always to fast, and he sidestepped Steve's jab and laughed at him with his head thrown back.
Steve could feel the smile flickering like candle flame around his mouth: Bucky's laugh has always done this to him, and he ducked his head so maybe Bucky wouldn't see this embarrassingly visceral response to his crinkled eyes and busted-open grin, the laugh the Steve would think about trying to fall asleep that night, that he'd dream about it the way kids nowadays dreamed about enough food and warm rooms, wallets stuffed full of gold. Bucky was everything good to Steve, it had been that ways for years now and Steve couldn't ever see it stopping, and he ducked his head down so maybe Bucky wouldn't notice this sort of diluvian devotion that had always been a trademark of Steve's knowing him.
"What?" Steve asked, vaguely aware Bucky was looking at him, that he might've said something while Steve was away in his reverie.
"Nothin'," Bucky said, his arm back around Steve, the crook of his elbow warm and jacket-rough against the back of Steve's neck. He tugged Steve into his side, careful that Steve's arm can stay un-jostled, and they started walking out toward the street.
"So, how did you find me?" Steve asked once they'd turned out onto North Street, passing a man selling apples out of a crate, mottled with brown spots and they still made Steve's mouth water.
"Aw, it was easy," Bucky told him. "Just asked people if they'd seen some skinny kid getting the shit beat outta him, I was pointed to you like that." Bucky's face dropped from it's smile, suddenly, and he added, "Though not fast enough, apparently," with a dark glance to Steve's gingerly-held arm.
"It's fine, Bucky," Steve protested. "Really, I mean it, it's just a bruise, promise."
Bucky gave him a disbelieving look, which Steve didn't think he deserved at all: he lied about this stuff sometimes, sure, but he didn't want Bucky to worry, or spend their food money on doctors Steve didn't need, and that was just common sense. Bucky lied to him all the time, Steve knew, about money and where he gets their food and about how things are going to get better, one day. It was only fair, Steve thought, that he lied about some things too.
Bucky's mouth had pulled tight again, and Steve tried to think of something that'd get it to curve back into its smile that affected Steve so disastrously, that Steve seeks out anyway, because if there was one thing that Steve'd never really gotten the hang of it was running away at danger signs.
He elbowed Bucky's side and said, "Hey, promise not to get myself beaten up if you take me to Coney Island tomorrow."
That surprised a laugh out of Bucky, and so Steve went on, "Really, I wouldn't even go on rides or anything."
"I think that's kinda missing the point of Coney Island, Steve."
"No it isn't," Steve protested. "I like it, even without the food or the rides or anything. It's nice there." He looked up at Bucky, who was watching him and shaking his head a little.
"I've been saying this for years," Bucky told him, "but you are the weirdest kid, swear to god."
Steve nudged into Bucky's side happily, knowing he'd won because Bucky was smiling again. "Yeah, yeah, you've said," and they walked Brooklyn streets down to the quick-setting sun.
*
They hadn't lived with a solid roof over their heads for about a year now, the orphanage happy to be rid of them once they'd turned eighteen. Bucky was nineteen now with Steve two months shy, and they lived on whatever they could find, no one much caring about two boys with parents long-dead when they had their own families to feed and worry over. So they were left to worry over each other, fight each others fights and take whatever they could get, live wherever they could.
Steve was just glad the winter had broken, snow slushing around their ankles and his feeble health not standing a chance against the stinging cold. Steve was just glad it hadn't rained for weeks now, that the heat hadn't gotten sweltering, glad for that a thousand bad things that hadn't happened yet.
That night they went to the camp under the bridge, where they'd left their stuff--two blankets, a few extra shirts between them--with one of the women there. "Thanks, ma'am," Bucky said, nodding and more polite than Steve could've imagined, if he hadn't seen it before. Bucky's back was stiff, neck held at a bad angle, and Steve knew he hated coming here: sleeping here was giving up, to Bucky, admitting that they were just some more outta-luck kids with no place to stay and no money to speak of. It ate at Bucky's pride like acid, chipped under his skin and gave his shoulders a solemn fixed look, like he had something to prove.
Laying that night on blankets layered futiley over the rocky ground, Steve turned his head from the grey underbelly of the bridge to whisper, "Hey Bucky?"
"Yeah, champ?" Bucky shuffled around to his back, looking at Steve with eyes that glinted faintly in the far-away city lights.
"Nothin'," Steve said, smiling. "Just wanted to see if you were awake."
"You're such a fuckin' pain in the ass, Steve," Bucky bitched half-heartedly, shoving at Steve's shoulder, the good one, his other arm still held out at a stiff angle from his body like a geometry problem. "I dunno why I even put up with you." Steve grinned.
Five minutes later, Bucky whispered back, "Steve?"
"I'm awake," Steve mumbled, crossing one arm across his chest against the creeping summer-night cold, and Bucky told him, "'s not that."
"What, then?"
"You ever think about California?" Bucky asked, and Steve could feel something hitch in his chest, a trapdoor opening and underneath it all the fear he'd buried away, always known Bucky was going to leave him someday.
"What?"
"California," Bucky said again, like the word hadn't been branded into Steve's head, flaming letters a mile high. "I heard they have jobs there, that anyone can get work picking fruit in the summer. I could go, get some money and come back here and we could live like kings, huh, Stevie? What d'you say?" Bucky had on a big shit-eating grin that Steve knew was trouble, the kind of grin that led to ill-advised adventures and some of the best times of Steve's childhood.
Steve could look Bucky in the eye again, so he did and he said, "Sounds like a great plan, just don't call me Stevie" and Bucky muffled his laugh against Steve's shoulder, breath warm and uneven flitting across Steve's collarbone. Steve fisted one hand in the blanket, thin worn cotton almost nonexistent between his fingers, and tried not to do anything rash.
"Fine," Bucky said, laughter under control but his mouth was still precipitously close to Steve's. "What d'you think, though? There's nothing like that here in Brooklyn, no one can find a job here, you know that."
Steve did know that, knew it well, and that didn't stop him from saying, "I'd miss you."
Bucky didn't say anything right away, and Steve bit down hard enough on his lip to draw up a thin line of blood. "I'd miss you too, kid," Bucky said finally, rougher and more whispering than before, like he doesn't want anyone to hear but Steve. "Why'd you think I haven't taken off already, huh? I mean, who'd be there to take care of your sorry ass if I was gone?"
"Hey, I can get along on my own," Steve protested, though secretly, he'd thought the same thing.
"Sure you can." Bucky was still close, enough that Steve could feel his breath, regular now and beating a soft feathering spot on Steve's cheek. "Sure you can."
Steve huffed a little, for appearances, and then said, "Really? Would you go?"
"Sure." Bucky shrugged. "Find a train to hop, I could get there in three days." He went quiet for a moment. "That's weird, isn't it? Three days, and I could be on the other side of this whole goddamn country."
Steve didn't say anything, but he understood Bucky, always had and always would, better than most anything. Three days away didn't sound as bad as California, and Steve didn't know why but he'd take it, Bucky's hand just above Steve's elbow and fingers slatted on bare skin. Steve had the sudden wild desire that Bucky should be that close to him, always, not to anywhere so far away as California or even the next borough, but here next to Steve with his hands dry and familiar and his breath steady as a drumbeat. Steve had started to need Bucky like air, and maybe that was misleading: maybe it had always been that way. Steve shook the thought off quickly, scared what he'd do if it was left to hurtle down that track.
"Hey," Bucky said, and he looked concerned. "I won't go if you don't want me too," and Steve felt that trapdoor slam shut again in his head, all bad things eradicated with that worrying look in Bucky's eye like he'd do anything for Steve, and that sort of scared Steve but only because he knew that these things, they worked both ways.
Then Steve felt a little awful for wishing so hard that Bucky would stay, and he said, "You could go if you want," and Bucky said, "Maybe," and they stared up together at the gray industrial cables of the bridge above them, and slowly, Steve started to fall asleep.
*
Coney Island in April was just this side of eerie, too few people to be bustling and too many for it to feel abandoned, and Steve liked it best this way. It'd just reopened for the summer, and at ten in the morning the crowd was patchy and the sun glinted crystalline off the rides, paint so bright it made your eyes ache. Steve sucked at his lip, trying to keep the smile contained, but he didn't think it worked out all that well.
His bad arm was done up in a sling fashioned out of one of Bucky's shirts, worn through and ripped in too many places to be mended again. His free hand caught the sleeve of the shirt Bucky had on that day, over and over to point out the shapes the rides arced out onto the sky, the interesting colors of women's dresses and a few gaggles of kids pooling pennies together to buy hot dogs, one for every three kids. Bucky kept laughing, and Steve loved that, taking away the worry he'd felt deep in his stomach over the subway fare here and the lean look of Bucky's stash of coins.
Bucky offered a few times to get Steve popcorn, or tickets for a ride, and Steve always said no. It was enough, he thought, that Bucky was willing, food money be damned if Steve had wanted a go on the rollercoaster, and Steve felt guilty and warm and happy, all at once. But Steve kept saying no and really, it was like he'd told Bucky last night, he hadn't been lying at all: he liked it just like this, watching something go by him, for once, instead of jumping into the middle of it. He noticed snatches of things he'd like to draw, once he had better pencils; for now, the nubs Bucky gets him from the drugstore could give an idea of the magisterial height of the rides and the ear-pounding yells of the vendors. He stayed deep in thoughts of grayscales and shading, until Bucky elbowed him in the ribs with a "Hey? Steve? You in there?"
"Sorry." Steve grinned up at him ruefully, and Bucky swiped a hand through his hair, making Steve duck and grin some more. "I was just thinking about drawing this, you know. I mean, not the colors, but the shapes and the--the people." And Bucky, Bucky with his hair run through with fairground dust and shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, but Steve didn't say that much.
Bucky looked at him funny for a second, then pulled him over to a free bench shaded by the back awning of one of the taffy stands. Steve asked, "Why--?" and Bucky said, "You look like you're gonna pass out, you've been walking around for what, three hours now?"
"I'm not an invalid," Steve muttered, though truthfully, sitting down felt pretty good. He rubbed at the back of the neck, and Bucky said, "Here, lemme see." Steve shuffled around to put his back to Bucky, who pressed cool thumbs against Steve's spine and said, "Yeah, you're burning up, Stevie. That's gonna hurt, later on."
Steve shrugged. "It's not a big deal." He turned back, and Bucky's hands dropped from his shoulders; Steve missed them briefly, before looking out over the floods of people and thinking quickly of other things.
Bucky kicked his legs out straight in front of him, digging his heels into the loose dusty dirt, and tilted his head back towards the surreally blue sky. It surprised Steve sometimes that the sky could still be this blue: sometimes he was sure he'd remember his whole life in grays and dusty browns, and maybe, if he was lucky, the better, deeper brown Bucky's eyes went in the right light. Nothing like the shining blue the sky was right then, though, that blue having no place in Steve's imagined sepia world.
"D'you ever wish you could go the school again? College? Art school?" Bucky was squinting up at the sun, head still tipped back onto the bench, and when Steve looked over he looked immobile, like he hadn't moved in hours.
"I dunno." Steve stubbed his toe into the dirt, digging a trench into the burnt, orange-ish earth. "I mean, I guess." He followed Bucky's gaze up to the skyline. "This is pretty good, though."
Bucky was broken out of his uncustomary stillness by that, turning his head to Steve and smiling like it came unexpectedly on him. "Yeah? Well, I've always said you were pretty dumb."
"You're pretty dumb," Steve muttered back, and Bucky laughed so hard at that he snorted a little.
On the subway ride back Steve dozed off with his head in Bucky's lap, still small enough to fit across the seat with his legs tented up, and still young-looking enough to get away with it. He felt worn down from the day at the Island, kind of like he'd walked whole inches off the bottoms of his feet and he's wake up tomorrow even shorter than he already was. Bucky'd probably laugh so hard he'd hurt something, if that really happened: Steve's thoughts were cut off into strange-shaped pieces, his eyes closed and his cheek on the rough material of Bucky's jeans. Around them the subway hurtled and clattered like damnation, louder than Steve remembered from the ride there: with his eyes closed, everything sounded louder and more important, like the steel car speeding and weaving under Brooklyn was the whole world, everything outside the barren fields and fiery pits Steve used to learn about in Sunday School at the orphanage. Steve was surprisingly okay with that idea, whole world in a subway seat under Brooklyn, and that's how he knew he was probably almost asleep.
The last thing he remembered before Bucky shook him awake ("Hey Steve, Stevie, c'mon, this is our stop--") was Bucky's hand in his hair, thumb rubbing circles against the crown of his head and fingers scrunched in the thin strands. Bucky's hands were familiar to him like so many things in his life, but none of them this pleasant: still thinking in potential memories, Steve was almost sure that of all the things familiar to him from these years, Bucky's hands would be one of the best. Then he sighed a little, Bucky's leg warm under his cheek, and didn't remember anything more.
*
A few weeks later Steve got sick, which just wasn't fair, Steve thought, with it being nice out with no cold or damp, and nothing to blame this on except for his own ill-faring health.
Feverish, with his throat feeling scraped red raw, Bucky took him back to the camp under the bridge with one arm under Steve's and supporting the greater part of his weight. It was an old, familiar arrangement, Steve knowing just how to lean in to Bucky so they can both walk easily down the dawn-tinted streets.
At the camp there was soup and extra blankets and people to keep an eye on Steve while Bucky was gone. Bucky flat-out refused to move from his post by Steve's side, though, even after being assured by one of the women living permanently by the side of the fire that she would look after Steve. "No, ma'am," Steve'd heard him say, voice hard-edged but polite. "I'll stay right here 'til he's better, thanks." After that, most everyone in the camp left them alone, carving a wide berth around Steve, lying curled and shivering under as many blankets as Bucky could get for him, and Bucky, sitting hunch-backed with his arms circled around his knees, head tipped down when he wasn't talking softly to Steve or trying to get him to eat something. Steve wasn't sure if it was for fear of catching that they stayed away, or for some other reason: instead, they would smile at the two of them sadly, for reasons Steve couldn't untangle in his fevered mind.
He looked to Bucky sitting up next to him, the one thing that never stopped making sense to him even when he was like this, and didn't worry about it too much.
Steve slept, mostly, or tried to: he'd stay up long nights, uncomfortable enough to keep him awake even as he knew he should sleep. Bucky was almost always awake when Steve was, and Steve wondered how he did that.
"Tell me a story?" Steve whispered, a few times, only when his chest hurt so bad the ache felt pointed and sharp, when even asking scraped down his throat like razorblades. It was an old ritual, back when they did this in the orphanage's infirmary and Bucky would have to bribe the nurses to even let him in at all.
So Bucky set off on a adventure tale, stolen in scraps from comic books and the movies, books Steve'd told him about and newspaper stories. They nearly all starred some skinny kid who no one ever paid any attention to until he performed some great feat, that got more ridiculous in every telling. Steve didn't mind: he sort of liked the sound of this hero, he'd joke to Bucky, if it didn't hurt too much to talk.
"Yeah?" Bucky said. "Well he had this best friend, right--very handsome, did most of the work, of course."
"Of course."
"This kid, though, he got all the credit." Bucky paused, glancing at Steve the way he did sometimes, swift and from the dark corners of his eyes. "His friend, though, he didn't really mind."
"What happened to them?" Steve asked, smiling a little, asking just because. "You know, after the bad guy was locked up and they'd met the President and everything. What did they do with all that reward money?"
"Well see, they bought this whole big hotel in Brooklyn, right?," Bucky said. "And they lived there, and got food delivered to their rooms whenever they were hungry, and went swimming in their own pool, whenever they wanted."
"Brooklyn?" Steve asked. "I thought they would move away."
"Well, they tried Chicago for a while, but it didn't stick."
"Huh." Steve paused, coughing dryly into the crook of his elbow. "Guess they just couldn't stay away."
"And, that's what they were known for right? Heroes of Brooklyn. All the kids saved up to buy their comics, and they all said they wanted to be these guys when they grew up."
Steve laughed weakly, trying not to cough again. "Now you're just crazy."
Bucky grinned down at him, wide grin that said irrevocably that it was Steve who was the crazy one, and Bucky was just here to try and keep him from doing anything too goddamn stupid. "You like me anyway," he said, and Steve could never really argue with that; he punched Bucky weakly on the leg, and muttered "Shut up" in the way that meant Bucky had obviously, transparently, won this round.
"Whatever you say, champ," Bucky said. He learned over Steve, laying his palm across Steve's forehead and saying, "Should go to sleep, you know."
"Any better?" Steve asked, though he didn't feel it.
"Oh yeah," Bucky said, "loads. I'd say give it a day, and you'll be back to beating kids up in alleys like usual."
"Think you got that the wrong way," Steve said sleepily; Bucky's hand was still heavy on his forehead, thumb brushing absently over his hairline and lulling his eyes closed. "G'night, Bucky."
"Don't die on me, 'kay?" Bucky said back, half-joking like he always did, another childhood ritual that neither of them had ever been able to let go of, not yet. "Swear on the Dodgers' win tomorrow."
"Stupid thing to swear on," Steve said, following the careful script they'd fashioned from long nights in infirmary beds and lurking and very real fears. He grinned sleepily, eyes already half-lidded and falling closed. "Promise."
"Yeah, you better," Bucky said, almost-smirk on his face but his eyes heavy with the gravity of Steve's skinny shoulders and simmering fever and awful, rasping cough. "You'd better."
*
As it turned out, Bucky never did go to California.
Late in May, the air getting warmer and stickier and the rain coming nearly every night, Bucky got a job behind the bear at a saloon down by the river. Friday and Saturday nights, and he barely got paid but was allowed to keep tips, and it all amounted to just a few dollars a week, but it felt like riches to them. The money knotted in the pocket of Bucky's jacket starting to swell, and Bucky stopped stealing food from the grocery store almost completely: Steve had the suspicion Bucky did that just because Steve didn't like it, always frowned and told Bucky off for it, until for a while it had been the only food they had and Steve quit complaining. He still didn't like it, gave him a bad prickling feeling in his chest, and now that they had money enough for some bread and last winter's apples, Bucky conceded silently and bought nearly everything lawfully.
The owner of the bar let Bucky sleep there on work nights, which meant Steve did, too. He waited for close, holed up in the back room unless someone had a game going, sketching out people he'd seen that day or the dusty-gray square of alley he could see out the high-set window or, increasingly, Bucky: Bucky's shoulders, the hard tilt of his smirk, his soft eyes when he looked at Steve just before they fell asleep, side-by-side on their worn-through blanket. Steve never showed these to Bucky, would never, a deep and panicky fear that Bucky would read the lines of them and know. He folded them into tight squares long before there was any danger of Bucky coming in and spotting them, tucked them into his jacket pocket and kept them buried there.
Steve helped Bucky clean up after close, wiping down tables and getting the work done twice as fast. Bucky'd grin, and sometimes he gave Steve a glass of something, thumping Steve on the back when choked on his sip and saying, "'s okay, champ, someday I'll figure out how to get you drunk." Steve glowered, but Bucky just raised his eyebrows and swallowed the rest of the glass in one go through his mouth still twisted up in a grin, and Steve watched his throat move as he swallowed and the arched line it made as he tipped his head back, and he kinda wanted to draw it and kinda wanted to kiss it and so he looked down at his hands and wouldn't glance up again until Bucky said, "Steve?"
"Yeah." Steve allowed himself a glance, just one, and Bucky's eyes were still bright from his fallen grin or the alcohol or both, and he said, "You tired?" and so Steve said "Yeah" again, and was disproportionately glad when Bucky let it drop.
It was good, having a solid, guaranteed sort of roof over their head two nights a week, and they started going to the bridge camp less, no need for the fire in the easy heat of early summer. It was just them again, not coming home to anyone and no one in the wide landscape of Brooklyn knowing their names. Bucky had a sort of game going at the bar, telling the regulars a different name every time they came in: Steve told him he was an idiot, but Bucky said it was nice, liberating, not letting anyone in on who he really was.
That was just like Bucky, Steve thought: he also thought he knew something of what Bucky was talking about, not letting anyone of a kind of secret, who they really were. It felt isolated, but a nice kind of isolation: an island of them skirting the edges of the undulating crowds of people that flooded the Brooklyn streets. There was a certain crazy magnetism of being the only ones to know the other, the last living members of both their families and it had been that way for years: Steve was the only person in New York to know that Bucky'd gotten that scar just under his left-side collarbone from a fence he'd climbed that one time they'd run away from the orphanage, thirteen and stupid, and Bucky knew every single thing Steve'd had since he was twelve, coughs and fevers and the flu, kept them in his head like the checklist from hell, he'd told Steve one time when he was drunk and nearly asleep with his words slurred and his eyes half-lidded. They knew all these things and more, best friends taken to an extreme that Steve had recently gotten a sneaking suspicion about. This couldn't be normal, he thought: not everyone could walk around everyday with so much useless and absolutely crucial information about another person. They'd burst, Steve thought; he knew it from experience.
Except in his case, all those pieces of Bucky, glances and facts and how Bucky was the face behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes, didn't rupture but got crushed down into this thing, a ball of hot light that showed up whenever Bucky threw his head back laughing or fell asleep with his shirt rucked up around his waist or got the back of Steve's neck fit that certain way into the crook of his elbow, the way he had for so many years now. This was not normal, Steve didn't think. Bucky was not something that could happen to just anyone.
Steve looked at Bucky, back in the bar closed for the night with shadows falling in hard-edged shapes across the room. Bucky, whose grin had returned at half its force and who was drying glasses expertly with a flick of a dingy white towel, lining them up in glinting rows on the counter. He kept glancing back at Steve, like he was gauging him for something, or else Steve's paranoia had finally taken over, and that wouldn't have been exactly unprecedented.
Steve grinned back, halfway to match Bucky's own, and knew: this couldn't just happen to anyone.
*
It was summer, which meant a lot of things in Brooklyn. It meant hot wind and asphalt like molten rock, singeing the still winter-soft soles of their bare feet. It meant sun burning the backs of their necks red and peeling, their arms tanning dark and Steve's hair going sun-scotched, a straw-like yellow color. It meant the smell of gutters cooked in the heat, cloying and rancid, and the collars of their shirts soaked through with sweat, food going rancid before grocers could sell it to people bled out from the winter and still waiting for things to get better.
Mostly, it meant baseball: sneaking in to Dodgers games with a few slithering steps and countless quick glances over their shoulders, mouths dry and dusty and throats raw from shouting themselves hoarse. When they won Bucky always said, "It'll be this year, I fuckin' know it," and when they lost he's shrug. "Next game," he said. "They'll be fine."
He'd been saying the same thing since Steve knew him, but that didn't stop Steve from saying back, "Yeah, sure, Bucky," and sort of believing it himself. Didn't matter that they hadn't won the Series since before Steve could remember, before the Crash and before his parents had died and before he'd met Bucky: the Dodgers were something to believe in, dry-mouthed in the late June sun with Bucky next to him shouting about those godamned Yankees. The Dodgers were something to believe in, and Steve collected those like bottle caps, rattling around in his pocket like the loose change he hasn't had for years now, things to trust in and trust that they will be the one to get him out. Out of this ragged scrap of the East Coast, out of this Depression and out of Brooklyn's dirty streets. Believing in things had to get him somewhere, he figured, and he was to believe in one thing why not have it be that.
This tendency to believe in things had gotten him many places, far and wide and almost none of them good. It had also gotten him this permanent spot by Bucky's side, though, so Steve knew it couldn't be all bad: nothing that got him this, open grins and stolen drugstore pencils and an arm around his shoulders, could be all bad.
So they snuck through the oceans of people into the bench seats crowded with even more, jostling shoulders and elbows, and watched game after game on their feet and yelling loud, fingers in their mouths like how Bucky'd taught him to let out long ear-splitting whistles.
They walked back in the summer dusk after exhausting double-headers, elated when they'd won, dodging through the sidewalks of people and shouting over the roaring of trolleys bisecting the street like a hook of rusted metal, snagging in a shirt and ripping through it like the asphalt and people and scattered cars were thin as cotton. "We showed 'em," Bucky said, catching Steve in a half-Nelson that had him gasping for breath through his laughter.
"Get off me, idiot," Steve replied, but he just kept laughing and Bucky only let up on him enough so he could stand straight, both of them walking weaving and uneven as they stumbled against each other's sides and crashed through the streets, on high and believing that really anything was possible.
That didn't last long, feet coming back to the ground reluctantly, but still Steve couldn't have stopped smiling if he'd tried. Bucky kept darting looks at him, grin growing by a sliver every time he did; Steve wondered briefly if the sort of thing that was happening to Steve was also bearing down on Bucky, like the most wonderful sort of load to carry, before just as quickly stamping down the spark of that thought. This sort of thing would never happen to Bucky, with his ready smirk and his girls pressed up against walls in out-of-the-way corners. This sort of thing would never happen to Bucky, all luck and charm, the luckiest person Steve's ever known.
So Steve contented himself with watching Bucky's smile grow by degrees, riding high with him over the grimed streets of Brooklyn because the Dodgers had won and sometimes that was all they could care about, unprepared to face things like how they hadn't eaten all day and Bucky was going to have to pinch something from the corner store if they wanted to last until Friday, things like how they were nineteen (almost, in Steve's case) and hadn't lived somewhere with a honest-to-god roof for a year now. Like how Steve still got himself beaten up in back alleys because that was something he could do, like how even landing a punch or two could feel like the best thing that happened to him all day, even he was left spitting out blood onto the concrete by the end, and like how he was maybe, possibly, in love with Bucky, and how he could never say it out loud because Bucky, well, Bucky was really all that he had.
*
And then, Steve did something really, awfully, cataclysmically stupid.
It was after the bar closed down for the night, or really early morning, if you wanted to be technical about this. The bar had just closed, Bucky kicking out the last sad stragglers with a smile that matched them for sadness and raised them a firm edge that said it didn't matter if he was a kid, he wasn't going to let them off easy; Steve was just wondering how it was that Bucky had a smile for everything, whole collections of smiles like jewel collectors had precious stones laid on in velvet-lined boxes, when Bucky said, "Hey Steve, wanna get drunk?"
The soft line of Bucky's smile made this seem like a much better idea that it probably was, Bucky's smiles making most things appreciably better just by existing. So Steve didn't answer, and Bucky pulled up bottles of beer shining like gold in the half-light, and he said, "C'mon," and really what could Steve have said to that.
Bucky led the way up to the half-level above the bar where the proprietor let them sleep, made up of rough boards with the ceiling slanted so harshly Steve could only stand up straight in the very center, and Bucky had to stay always half-crouched. The bar used to be a house, and this used to be an attic: Steve wondered sometimes about that, why anyone would even bother making this awkward, shoe-horned kind of space.
He and Bucky made a life of fitting in badly-shaped spaces, though, and so they sat down with their shoulders shoved up against the angle of the ceiling and the beers Bucky had threaded between his fingers set down and bleeding rings of condensation onto the floorboards. Steve looked uncertainly at Bucky, who was already swiping the cap off one of the bottles.
"You know--" Bucky started, and let out a little ha! as the cap rattled onto the floor, rolling away to a far dark corner. "You know, if we'd ever gone to boarding school, this is exactly the type of thing we'd 've done."
Steve snorted, the idea of them going to boarding school kind of inherently funny. "How do you know?"
Bucky shrugged, the way he did when he was just making stuff up but he believed it, so you should believe it too. It had always worked on Steve, at least: Steve believed anything Bucky said without convincing, just on principle, and that, Steve considered, was perhaps the source of this problem.
"Seems like something boarding school boys would do," Bucky explained, half a grin shot Steve's way. "Sneaking into attics, drinking beer they didn't pay for--"
Steve shot a half-masted glare to answer Bucky's grin, and Bucky butted against his shoulder with his own. "Hey, seriously, Richardson said I could take some, since he doesn't pay that much." He smiled, reassuring. "Cross my heart," he said, and with one finger drew a wobbly X across his chest. "Seriously."
"I don't know why I let you talk me into stuff," Steve mumbled, handing one of the bottles to Bucky to open. He did, the decapitated top rolling away over the slivery boards, and handed it back to Steve, who choked a little on the first sip.
"Yeah, well." Bucky took a long pull off his own bottle, and Steve knew not to look, not to look, and he did anyway. "Your crazy morality is gonna get us both into trouble one day, so."
Bucky's neck was entrancing, skin smooth and taut, and Steve was so close, less than a fingerslength and he'd have his mouth--
"That doesn't even make any sense." Steve's voice came out breathily and a little gasping, and he took another swallow from his own bottle with the misguided hope that the watery, lip-curling taste would anchor his voice more firmly and solidly, so Bucky wouldn't suspect him of a thing.
"Yeah, well," Bucky said again. He finished his bottle, tipped almost vertical over his mouth, and opened another with his arm still flush against Steve's, bleeding warmth through both their shirts and onto Steve's skin. Steve could feel it like seeing ink spill onto blank white paper, ruinous and irreversible, and he's sure he can feel all the potential this has to go wrong in the air like fireflies. He should probably stop now, plead exhaustion and get himself as far away from Bucky's dark bright eyes and messy-edged smile as he possibly could.
Steve had never been good at staying away from Bucky, though, which is why he was sitting there in the first place and which is why he didn't stop smiling back and pushing their shoulders together and drinking his way through more alcohol than he'd had ever before, because he needed some way to deal with those first two things. Things seemed better three or four beers in, gone soft at the edges like the corners of Bucky's mouth and the patch of skin just behind his ear that was bared to Steve whenever Bucky twists his head away, which wasn't all that much but it still stuck stubbornly in Steve's mind. Steve wondered fuzzily if, one day, his whole would be made up of pieces and glances of Bucky, nothing else left except Steve's own reconstruction of his best friend, and Steve didn't think that would be that bad at all.
"Steve," Bucky said, "y'all right?" words mushed together and a concerned V between his eyes. Steve had a sudden thought that maybe Bucky could read minds, this sort of thing not without precedent in Bucky's long list of beautifully useful things he knew. The thought left him gasping, praying that this wasn't true and that at least this small part of Steve was still mysterious to Bucky.
He needn't have worried, as it turned out, because just then the night took a quick slamming turn towards the worse, and the stupid and the way his fingers felt too light and soft and his mouth was buzzing all came together and Steve started something really awful there in the half-dusk slant-roofed attic of a bar.
It happened like this.
Bucky turned away again, just enough to reach their last bottle of beer over to the hook of the wall where he could swipe off its cap and send it skittering across the floorboards to join the small collection now populating the attic corners, and Steve saw again that patch of skin that was so destructive to his upper brain functions. The twist of Bucky's neck, smooth planes down to where his collarbones winged out sharp and too well defined, hadn't eaten since breakfast and that wasn't rare. Steve was collecting ways to justify this like pennies, alcohol and too little food and too much of his sight taken up by Bucky's messy drunk-smile, but that was doomed before it even started. He wasn't drunk enough to make that a good reason, and Bucky had been all he could see since he was twelve years old and so that was no kind of excuse.
Bucky offered the remaining bottle to Steve, said, "Wanna split?"
Steve meant to say sure, swear to god he did, but what happened instead was that Steve leaned forward, fingerwidths, and laid his mouth against the thin skin and softly ridged bone just behind Bucky's ear.
It was too long, lips tracking down to the back corner of Bucky's jaw without ever leaving the pale skin, unevenly tanned and a good couple shades lighter than his hands and face. Smoother too, without the thick and everlasting calluses that Steve had memorized long ago off Bucky's palms, the undersides of his fingers that Steve felt now gripping just above his elbow, tight and grounding him with a sickening crash.
Steve jerked away, like Bucky's skin had suddenly heated up white-hot, which for all that it was doing to Steve could be perfectly true. Bucky was staring at him, eyes wide and big enough that Steve thought wildly and for several seconds that they had begun to eat away at the rest of his face, nothing left except a skull and those eyes that had recently begun to haunt Steve's dreams and were now large and surprisingly calm in his face.
"Steve?" Bucky asked, like he had just minutes before this debacle had occurred; y'all right? But that wasn't what Bucky said this time: he said "Steve?" again like he was testing the name out on his tongue, Steve himself gone sudden foreign and unknowable, the Steve that Bucky had known doing nothing like this even on bad days.
"I'm," Steve said, sorry feeling suddenly vastly inadequate and so dropping dead on his tongue.
Bucky said something, but Steve's hearing seemed to have suddenly dropped out like a bad radio station, and all he saw was Bucky's mouth moving in strange alien shapes that Steve had the dizzy notion that he might've once understood.
"Sorry, I'm sorry," Steve gasped out, words feeling thin and not enough in his mouth but it was better than nothing, he had to make Bucky understand, he hadn't meant any of it. Steve would do anything to fix this, lying baldly included, and so he said "I didn't mean it" and "I promise" and "sorry," more times than he could count, and hoped that Bucky was counting and understood, please, that this couldn't ruin anything.
*
"C'mon," Bucky said, but that was really unnecessary: by now, it should've been known that Steve would've followed him anywhere.
Steve scrambled up the fire escape behind Bucky, the ladder beginning to weight back up before he'd gotten to the top, and Bucky laughed and said something about being skinnier than a goddamn toothpick, jeez, Stevie.
"Don't call me Stevie," Steve muttered back, taking Bucky's offered hand and pulling himself onto the lattice platform. Looking up, the zig-zagging iron grown like ivy on the brick rose alien and more than a little forbidding in the dusk; Steve briefly wished for the sun, disappeared a quarter of an hour before over the broken-tooth skyline.
Bucky climbed ahead of him, two steps at a time, making the spindly iron web of the escape shake unsteadily under their feet; Steve scampered close on his heels, the thought large in his head that if the whole thing did collapse under them, at least Bucky would be nearby. It was a strange thought, no stranger than most of Steve's thoughts these days but still one that Steve shoved quickly to a back shadowed corner of his mind that looked unmistakably like the steep-ceiled attic of three days ago, forever alcohol-blurred around the edges and much darker in Steve's mind than it ever had been in real life.
Up as far as the rickety stairs will take them, Bucky squinted up to the roof and then grinned quick and dangerous at Steve, launching himself up to wrap his fingers over the edge of the gutter. "Holy--" Steve started, and then, "Bucky!" as Bucky pulled himself up far enough to hook one knee up onto the roof, pushing himself forward in a scramble of limbs and a kicked foot that clipped Steve on the shoulder.
"C'mon, Steve, 's not hard at all," Bucky said, face reappeared over the gutter, all grin and imploring eyes. "Here, seriously, you can do it. This is the best view, c'mon." He reached a hand Steve toward Steve, which Steve marveled at, briefly, that Bucky still wanted to come near him.
"Quit staring and take it," Bucky told him, after Steve just stood there for whole seconds. "Hey, I won't let you fall. Cross my heart, and all."
cross my heart, Steve remembered, messy Xs and literal enactments, and bit his lip, wondering when this kind of retroactive thinking would stop.
He locked his hand around Bucky's wrist, feeling Bucky's close around his own and Bucky said, "Three, two--" and then Steve was pulled off his feet. His fingers scrabbled against the gutter, finding purchase and leveraging himself towards the roof, and landed sprawled next to Bucky, who was laughing up at the sky with a loose kind of abandon that Steve had always been jealous of. While he was still flickering through all the possible ways that could've gone wrong, broken bones and Bucky's injuries on his head, Bucky was laughing, saying, "You need to keep doubting that things'll turn out okay," and Steve couldn't help but think that Bucky is probably the smartest person Steve knew, but he could still be pretty goddamn dumb.
He said as much to Bucky, who sucker-punched him in the ribs, putting maybe a quarter of his force behind it and leaving Steve laughing along with him up at the fast-blackening sky. They crawl to the center of the roof--Bucky said that was the best view, and who was Steve to argue with Bucky--and laid down stretched-out on the tar paper, rough and rashing at their skin, catching little threads out of their shirts. Bucky crossed his arms behind his head, sighing and fidgeting into a comfortable position, and Steve mirrored him without a thought: now that he was considering it, he figured the warning signs were all there, and what does it say about him that he hadn't noticed at all?
It was a scant five minutes before the first shrieking whistle streaked through the quiet of twelve stories up: Steve grabbed the hem of Bucky's shirt without thinking, twisting it in his fingers and the it went off in a shower of sparks and Steve said, "Bucky, Bucky, look--" always twelve years old again when he saw fireworks.
Bucky was chuckling softly, watching Steve instead of the sky, which Steve thought was abjectly crazy because there, another one was going off and sparking through the thick dark and Bucky should've been seeing this, this was amazing.
Another and then another blossomed into spots of light over the Hudson, and Bucky didn't seem to mind Steve's fingers fisted in his shirt so Steve kept them there, feeling more reckless in the dark with bright lights exploding what felt like close enough to touch. So they stayed that way for long minutes, the fireworks coming faster as they came close to the end, and Bucky said,
"Happy birthday, Steve,"
just as the finale started in earnest, and if Steve had thought he couldn't grin any harder then he'd have been dead wrong.
"Hey, thanks," Steve said, looking over at Bucky with his vision still spotted with the lights that'd been igniting the sky. "For, you know. This. And not dropping me on my head, earlier."
Bucky laughed, said, "Anytime," and Steve wasn't strictly sure what he was replying to but it didn't matter, did it, Steve was so glad with it all that his chest felt crushed under it.
The sky seemed darker once the fireworks had left it, the last sparks fallen into the river and the blackness strangely omniscient over them. Steve didn't mind it, laying next to Bucky in the sticky heat that was weakened only a little by the dark, the scratchy fabric of his shirt still caught up in Steve's fingers, trying not to think too hard about Bucky's warm skin just fractions of an inch from his knuckles.
"Remember when you used to tell me the fireworks were for me?" Steve asked, a piece of his childhood floating to the front of his mind, and old thing that he hadn't remembered for years now.
"Yeah, but you were the one dumb enough to believe it," Bucky answered, but he was smiling too soft for it to have any real effect.
Steve grinned up at the sky. "Yeah, well. You were pretty convincing."
"You just had good timing," Bucky said. "Besides, you were always so fuckin' excited about it, it was the least I could do, y'know?"
Steve wanted to say, it was nowhere near the least you could do, Bucky, don't you understand that? Always done more than he had to, always watched out for Steve and landed punches when he had to and kept Steve fed: he'd stolen for Steve, and sometimes Steve thought that that was pretty much all you could ask for.
He didn't say any of this to Bucky, something tight in his chest that kept him from saying anything at all, but he smiled and smiled and laid his forehead against Bucky's shoulder, and hoped quietly that he understood.
*
Back in an alley, could be any alley in Brooklyn, in well over his head and blood streaming from a badly split lip but still landing punches against some boy twice as big as him, aiming for the neck and the knees, the way Bucky'd taught him. He wasn't exactly winning, but he hadn't been knocked out either: Steve was still fighting for a win, hoping for a draw.
Steve felt someone come up to his side: before he could turn his head, Bucky said, "Planning on winning this one yourself, champ?"
"Yeah, I was," Steve gasped, taking advantage of his opponent's distraction and driving his knuckles against his windpipe. The boy--man, really, Steve hadn't gotten a real good look at him--wheeled back, and Bucky stepped in, got a good shot under the jaw and left him crumpled down against the wall, Steve's usual spot by this point in the fight.
"C'mon," Bucky said then, "we don't wanna be here," and Steve agreed wholeheartedly and so they ran.
Ducking into the next alley, they wove through that and the next three until Steve bent in half with a stitch in his side, and Bucky jogged to a stop by his side. "Jesus christ, kid, could you stay out of trouble for a day maybe?" Bucky asked, out of breath and half-serious, half-laughing. Steve laughed along, and they both leaned against the brick back wall of whatever faceless store this was, and from the state of the alley it was probably bankrupt, windows boarded up like bandaged eyes. It was a good place to catch your breath, and so they flatted their back against the prickling redstone and crumbling mortar and laughed, not catching it back very well at all.
"Sorry, sorry," Steve gasped, hand still held against his side. His lip was still trickling blood, and he swiped the base of his thumb along his chin, probably smearing it more than anything. "I know, I said--but--"
"Yeah, yeah, I've heard it," Bucky said, tipping his head back, still laughing. Steve wondered if it felt the same to him, a little uncontrollable, burning high and bright on adrenaline and their pounding hearts. "I know, kiddo."
"Don't--" Steve said, and Bucky cuffed him on the side of the head before he could finish, saying "I'll call you anything I damn well want" and grinning bright and wide. Steve's lungs still felt like they had pieces missing, not allowing him take real breaths, and this was not helped by Bucky's mouth soft and busted open into the grin that Steve knows will someday get them both into trouble.
"What I still don't understand," Bucky said, his breath coming back and breathing less in gasps than staggered inhales, "is why you, Steve Rodgers, feel the personal fucking need to deal with every single bully you come across."
"Ah, well," Steve said, letting his head fall back against the brick. "If you're still asking that, I think you're doing something wrong."
"Yeah, well," he said. "Least I can do, keep asking, right?" and Steve didn't really know what he meant, but he understood the half-scared half-glad look in Bucky's eyes and so he didn't ask after it.
"Hey, let me--" Bucky said then, catching sight of the blood now smeared on the far side of Steve's face, pushing off the wall to look closer at his split lip, now bleeding only sluggishly.
"It's okay," Steve said, Bucky suddenly very close. "Really, Bucky."
Bucky disregarded him completely, stepping closer and reaching forward, dragging a thumb against Steve's lip. It came away tacky with red, and Bucky asked, "It hurt?" and Steve said, "Nah, I told you, it's fine--" and Bucky kept leaning forward and Steve choked back however he was going to end that sentence.
And then Bucky was kissing him, and Steve was pretty sure he'd lost it and was hallucinating what he'd been waiting for now for too long to count, but the brick still felt real against the back of his shirt and Bucky's mouth warm and wet and tasting like dimestore cigarettes against his, and so then Steve didn't know what to think.
"Steve?" Bucky asked then, pulled just far enough away to talk, his lips still brushing against Steve's.
"No," Steve whispered, "I mean, yes, god yes, I just--is this real?" He didn't know what he was asking, do you mean it or am i going crazy, but he figured it worked out both ways.
Bucky laughed then, quick and gasping, and said, "Yeah, yeah, I mean, I thought--" and if this wasn't what it was, Steve would've noticed the way Bucky's eyes went wide when he was out of his depth, a look Steve'd seen on him only once or twice before but never about Steve, Steve was always easy and open for him to read like a book.
"Yeah well, it was pretty obvious, right?" Steve said in a rush, looking at a spot off Bucky's shoulder.
"Yeah," Bucky said, "for both of us," and that surprised Steve into looking at him. "You really are pretty dumb, aren't you," Bucky told him, and Steve said "Shut up" and so Bucky kissed him again.
"Feels like we're in a movie," Steve said, voice weak and strung out, Bucky's mouth on his jaw. "You know, defeat the bad guy, run for our lives--"
"Are you capable of shutting up for one goddamn minute," Bucky said, huffing against Steve's neck, and Steve considered strongly saying something more, just because, but then Bucky was kissing him at awkward angles because they were both grinning like crazy, couldn't seem to stop.
Finally Bucky said, "No movie had an ending as good as this," and Steve couldn't really argue that, Bucky's hand on the back of his head and his mouth working at the corner of Steve's jaw, and so Steve said, "Not even close," and that was the empirical truth. Steve said again, "Not even close" and closed his eyes and thought that there was nowhere better to be than here, a grimy back alley in Brooklyn with the sun fast going down and the streetcar rattling noisily two streets over, traffic screeching and swerving nearby, and nothing in that was conducive to movie endings, Steve figured, but really, and knowing them, Steve was pretty sure they'd be all right.