Steve couldn't tell you how it began. Maybe it was when he was 16, watching Bucky flirt his way through half of the orphanage and then eventually Brooklyn; maybe it was when he was 8, scuffed and beaten but not broken, Bucky's hand tight in his own, pulling him up off the ground and smiling with a cut across his cheek from another (bigger, stronger) boy. Perhaps it was inevitable, like the push and pull of tides or the opposite, a product of the sheer bull-headed determinedness that characterised them both. But the fact remained that Steve couldn't remember when the thought of Bucky didn't make him feel warm and six kinds of stupid (according to Bucky, though, he was always six kinds of stupid so it didn't really count).
What wasn't hard to remember was their first time, the awkward, fumbling hands in a too small room filled with too many other boys. Bucky's palm, large and warm, muffling his cries, stroking his back, his cock. Bucky's eyes, black ringed by a hazy shade of blue-green that he'd never been able to replicate in any of his paintings. It was quick, dirty and confusing but so right that it was almost unquestionable that it would continue. And it had, no matter how many girls Bucky danced with or boys he drank with, he came home to Steve.
They never directly talked about it in the early days, they let their desperation communicate the things they couldn't yet speak aloud, entwined their fingers when Steve got too sick or hurt and stared at each other when they could do nothing else. It was only after Steve's Ma died, when he'd moved in, sad-eyed and with his singular box of belongings, that he asked whether what they had was some kind of permanent – that night they fucked and as the sweat cooled on their bodies, as Steve struggled to catch his breath, Bucky leaned over and whispered, "I'm with you till the end of the line."
Steve fell in love with him all over again.
That was not to say it was all easy, they fought like hellions. They heard the old fire and brimstone sermons from the old pastor with the screeching voice and the eyes filled with hate and they believed him too, for a time. Until they realised that love wasn't really controllable, and fuck, they'd never been the good boys you took to meet your parents, they were too rough and tumble, too stubborn for that. Why did they need God when they had each other? (Steve slapped Bucky upside the head when he said that, called him a no-good blasphemer, but Bucky could see the faint twitch of a smile on his lips and the blush that painted his cheeks and too-big ears.)
And then, inevitably, the war came and left Steve waiting for Bucky like some anxious military wife, alone and fucking incapable of doing anything to help Bucky. He'd gone somewhere that Steve couldn't follow, left him high and dry in their shitty apartment. It's not that Steve resented Bucky for leaving, it's that he reminded Steve of all the things he couldn't do but wanted to. Of his inadequacies. Steve had never felt like less of man than he did when he saw a 4F glaring at him on his file. The day Erskine accepted him into the programme, he felt validated in a way that no one since Bucky could ever make him feel, as though deserved the space he occupied and more. Steve knew he was insecure, felt that his heart was too large for his chest, that his dreams were too big for the body they were in – just a second away from bursting out into oblivion.
The promise he could be more, that he was more, was a boon. He dreamt each night of a taller, stronger, better version of himself. Someone who could protect those he cared about, someone that commanded respect, someone who… mattered. He knew at any moment he could die, that the tests they were performing on him might kill him. He knew Bucky might not even look at him anymore if all went according to plan, somehow that was the most frightening thought of all. But in the end, keeping Bucky safe was more important than having his love.
It was with that thought that kept him sane during the friggin' red-hot pain of the vita-ray as it molded his body into the perfect soldier.
It was that thought that broke him when Bucky fell.
