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Bucky remembered the very moment he fell in love with Steve Rogers. Bucky was ten years old and Steve was nine, and he had stumbled across the younger boy behind their school, nose to nose with a boy who had two years and five inches on him. The older boy seemed to be demanding that Steve give up his milk money, and despite the fact that it would have been easier to just hand over the three pennies, Steve was standing his ground, his little face bright red and his hands balled up tight into little fists. Bucky hung back for a moment, waiting to see what would happen, but when the bigger boy grabbed Steve and wrestled him into a headlock, Bucky felt compelled to step in. He did so neatly, using the element of surprise to step in and quickly lay out the bully with a single punch to the nose. He had been expecting at least a tiny bit of gratitude, but when he reached down to help Steve up from the ground where he had fallen after his abuser released him, Steve merely glared at him fiercely and struggled to his feet unaided, ignoring Bucky’s proffered hand.
‘What’d you do that for?’ the small boy demanded indignantly, brushing dust off of his shabby trousers. ‘I had him on the ropes!’ Bucky stared at him, taking in his determined glare, the square set of his shoulders, and the clenched jaw. This was a boy who wouldn’t give up easily, no matter the odds.
And Bucky was completely besotted.
He stuck out his hand again. ‘James Buchanan Barnes,’ he said clearly and firmly. ‘You can call me Bucky.’ The other boy stared at him for a moment, then down at his hand, before reaching out to shake it. His handshake was much firmer than his small frame might imply.
‘Steven Grant Rogers,’ came the reply. ‘Call me Steve.’
-----
‘I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal.’ Bucky hoped that Steve knew exactly how much he meant it. There wasn’t a whole awful lot Bucky wouldn’t do for Steve, but the punk was too thick-headed and stubborn to accept any kind of help. He was independent to a fault - just another thing Bucky loved about him, though he wished that just this once he would accept the offering of a place to sleep, even just for the night. The thought of leaving Steve on his own right after his mom’s funeral twisted Bucky’s gut, but he recognized the determined gleam in his best friend’s eyes, and knew there was nothing for it. He nearly offered to spend the night at Steve’s instead, but he knew him enough to know that Steve probably just wanted to be alone, and was too caring of Bucky’s feelings to say so.
Bucky walked back down the rickety stairs outside Steve’s apartment slowly, part of him wishing that Steve would call him back and ask him to stay. He didn’t, predictably, and Bucky made his way back home, feet scuffing the dirt alleyway that was his habitual shortcut from Steve’s house to his.
Bucky wouldn’t change Steve for anything, but sometimes he wished he would ask for help, just once.
-----
‘This is a bad idea, Steve.’ Bucky knew it was useless - just like it’d been useless the last twenty times he said it - but he still felt that he had to try. Again.
‘C’mon, Buck, I have to at least try!’ They were on their way to the recruitment center, despite Bucky’s protests. The US had just joined the War, and Steve’s immediate response had been the desire to fight for his country. ‘I can’t just sit back and watch everyone else go fight for me!’ Bucky sighed heavily and shook his head. He knew that Steve was right, that there was no way he’d be able to let everyone else fight while he stayed home, and he admired him immensely for it. That didn’t stop him from being worried sick, though. There was nothing that Steve couldn’t do - Bucky would be the first one to fight anyone who said anything else - but he wished that just once this would be the one thing he wouldn’t do.
But Bucky wanted to support his friend, so there he was, standing beside Steve as they stood at the desk in the recruitment center. He noticed how the receptionist gave Steve a quick once over, her perfectly manicured eyebrow raising noticeably as she took in his slight build. She gave him the paperwork anyways and gestured to the chairs against the wall. Bucky knew that he felt far more anxious than Steve did. He also felt more than a little guilty, that his smaller friend was taking this step while he (arguably physically the better choice for a soldier) was hesitant.
Steve’s name was called ten minutes after he had finished the paperwork, and Bucky gave him a mock salute - and a wish good luck, quietly - as he made his way back to where a nurse was waiting at the door back to the exam rooms.
Bucky knew something was wrong as soon as Steve walked back out of the examination room ten minutes later. His shoulders, usually so straight and proud, were hunched over, his hands shoved in his pockets, head bowed and staring at the ground. He walked right past Bucky, who stood up immediately and followed his dejected friend.
‘Too many medical problems,’ he said without prompting after a few minutes of walking silently through the streets of New York back to Steve’s home. ‘Doc said I probably wouldn’t even be recruited if there was a shortage on good fighters.’ Bucky didn’t know what to say, so he placed a sympathetic hand on Steve’s shoulder. ‘It’s fine though,’ Steve said after another moment. ‘I’ll just try again some place else.’
‘Steve-’ Bucky started, but Steve cut him off.
‘I’m going to get in, Buck,’ he declared, stopping and turning to look up into Bucky’s face. His eyes were so full of fierce determination that Bucky felt a surge of pride rush through his whole body, and he wanted to grab the shorter man’s face and kiss him right there. But he held himself back, instead just shaking his head and throwing his arm around Steve’s shoulders.
‘All right, punk,’ he conceded, turning them around and walking them back home. ‘But if you get yourself in some kinda trouble for, I dunno, being a pest to the US Army, don’t think I’ll bail you out of jail.’ They both laughed, but they both knew it wasn’t true - Bucky would help Steve out of any kind of trouble.
-----
Bucky stood on Steve’s doorstep, clutching the letter in his hands. He had received it the day before, and had spent a sleepless night agonizing over how he was going to tell his best friend that he was being sent to war, while Steve - who wanted to join the fight more than anything - had been rejected from the army for the third time. He hesitated for several long minutes before finally reaching up to knock on Steve’s door. Steve answered a minute later, and Bucky wordlessly shoved the letter at him, hanging back on the doormat while Steve read it. Steve’s face was a blank mask as he read the letter addressed to James Buchanan Barnes, informing him that he was being sent to Wisconsin for training, and then to Europe to help with the war effort.
‘I’ll be in Wisconsin for two weeks,’ Bucky said after a moment. Steve had finished reading the letter, but was still staring at it. ‘I leave on Thursday. Then I’ll be back here for a week then they’re sending me to England.’ Steve still didn’t say anything. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.’ Bucky was getting nervous now, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Steve-’
‘Well, shit, Bucky. At least one of us will get to do some fighting.’ Steve looked up from the paper finally, a smile on his face. It seemed genuine enough, but Bucky examined him anxiously for a moment before smiling in return with a rush of relief. Steve’s approval meant more to him than anything else, and this was the first time he thought that approval might come in to question.
They didn’t talk about it for the rest of the night, but Bucky knew that it was hovering in the back of both of their minds, a weight where previously there had been none.
-----
Bucky wrote a letter every day he was in England. Every day he would write out what was happening to him, what his fellow soldiers were doing, what he was thinking, and how he felt about the war. In them, he said everything he’d always wanted to say in person, everything that he felt he couldn’t tell Steve to his face.
As he lay strapped to an experimentation table in a Hydra base in God-Knew-Where, Austria, he wished more than anything that he’d sent any of them.
He knew, as he’d known when he and the 107th had been captured, that he would probably die in there. He’d never heard of a Nazi prisoner of war being released.
If only he could have seen Steve one more time, he thought hazily as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
And then Steve was there. Bucky at first thought he was a hallucination, something his fevered mind had conjured up to torment or soothe him. But the hands tugging at his bonds were real enough, and the arms pulling him off the table were solid. But something was off. Steve wasn’t this...muscled. Little Steve Rogers, who was 95 pounds soaking wet, couldn’t be the same person now pulling him through the halls of the enemy base.
“Steve?” he mumbled, his thoughts fighting through the fog. “Steve.”
“I thought you were dead,” Steve breathed, his arms warm around Bucky’s waist and his shoulders solid beneath Bucky’s arm.
“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky mumbled, still trying to catch up. At the moment all that mattered, all that was real, was Steve. Steve had come for him, there at the end of the line.
When Steve asked him to join the Commandos, Bucky had agreed without hesitation. He was tired - so tired, far more tired from everything he’d already endured than he would ever tell Steve - but he agreed. He would agree to anything, so long as Steve was there with him.
“You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” Steve had asked, clinking their whiskey glasses together.
“Hell, no,” Bucky had responded, taking a generous swig. Steve’s face had fallen for a fraction of a second, and Bucky smirked. “That little guy from Brooklyn, who was too dumb to run away from a fight? I’m following him.”
Steve’s smile lit up the whole bar.
-----
Bucky had a bad feeling about the entire mission.
They had done dangerous things before, sure - it was part of what the Howling Commandos signed up for, doing the dirty stuff so no one else had to. But ziplining from a mountain down to a moving train?
“Remember when I made you ride the cyclone at Coney Island?” Bucky asked.
“Yeah, and I threw up?”
“This isn’t payback is it?”
“Now, why would I do that?” Steve smirked, their eyes met, and he said, “You’re with me on this, right?”
“Til the end of the line.”
-----
Steve was yelling. He couldn’t hear the words, couldn’t hear anything except the train roaring in his ears and the metal screeching as it gave way. All he knew was his hands were slipping, and it was too late. Time seemed to slow down, and every detail of Steve’s face imprinted on Bucky’s mind. Those blue eyes, that crooked smile. The scar on his cheek from when he’d stood up to Dick Collins in the 8th grade. That face was all that mattered to him. As the metal shrieked and gave way, pulling away from the ruined train wall, that face was all he saw.
And as he fell, Steve’s face falling away, he thought, End of the line .