Chapter Text
When Bucky was a boy every time it was his birthday he would close his eyes, pucker his lips, and blow out all the candles on his birthday cake. He would wish with his very being, very inch of heart in his small frame, so much so that his very being was set to the wind, flying above his crown like a bird. But when he was seven there was no cake, no party, no willful wishes, not anymore, his mother had died and there was no one to bake them anymore.
On this eighth birthday his dad was already gone for nearly two days when midnight rolled around. Bucky spent those last few seconds of his birthday counting down the moments before midnight. He wished his parents were still here.
On his ninth birthday his neighbour was found, stabbed four times in the neck, fifteen in the stomach. He saw her as they pulled her from the murky water of the marina. It was the same place that mothers took their babies in strollers, husbands with their hands clasped around their wives’ shoulder, young couples blushing and glancing at their sandy feet. He remembered that on his fourth birthday his mother brought her here and they looked for sea glass and drank Slurpees.
Three days later the police came to his building, Bucky sat with his back to the door, hearing the sirens and boots and dogs just outside his door. He wondered if his father had done something terrible. He was afraid. They were going to take him away, at least he wished.
It wasn’t his father. They dragged Mr. Angles out of his apartment. He was half dressed and had a week’s worth of stubble and his eyes had the redness of a drinker that Bucky learned to recognize. They said that he had wanted his wife to have an illegal abortion. She refused and he killed her. Case closed, cut and dry, just another domestic gone bad. Headstrong wife, unstable father, an unborn child caught in between. Textbook.
Bucky spent the night of his ninth birthday curled over the porcelain bowl of his toilet in the small bathroom in their house. The contents of his stomach painting the inside and tears streaming down his face. He fell asleep before midnight, curled up on his side on the cool, hard, white tile. Dreaming of baby shoes.
Birthdays passed by and were rarely celebrated. One his tenth he ran away from home for three days and lived on the street, sleeping in alleyways and wandering the streets. He came back when he became too hungry only to find his father passed out on the couch. Bucky ate and went to sleep and when he woke up his father was gone and the door of his bedroom still shut firm. He didn’t try to run away again after that.
On this eleventh birthday he lifted a wallet from the pocket of a wealthy man, who swaggered down Bucky’s street like he owned it, shiny shoes tapping and his cream suit in sharp contrast to the weathered grey stone and faded brick around him. It was too easy and Bucky counted luck that he didn’t try to take the man’s keys too, he would need that fancy car to get back home on the island.
The wallet was buttery leather, soft and heavy, velvety to the touch. The inside was lined with silk and a half a dozen cards were slotted into the cuts made in the carmine fabric. There was fifty dollars in cash and a photo of the man’s family, four smiling people in horrible sweaters standing together in front of a raging fire place that could have held three grown men comfortably. Bucky dumped the cards and photo in the waste basket four blocks from where he lived, because you can’t be too safe, but kept the money to himself as well as the wallet, a little gift to himself.
That night for the first time in a long time Bucky fell peacefully asleep in his bed, his stomach full and the taste of chocolate frosting still clinging to the roof of his mouth and in-between his teeth, hands clutched around the soft leather of his wallet like a vice.
On his twelfth birthday he stopped coming to school for good. He had attended only once every while ever since his mother had died, no longer there to pack his lunch, comb his hair and wish him luck. He no longer felt the need to work hard to bring home glowing report cards to a man who never read them. But what made him stop for good was Mrs. Wood. A hunched old woman back curled like a question mark and a pike of a nose in the middle of her scowling, leathery face. She spat and screamed and made the younger kids cry. But Bucky didn’t go to no prep school so he wasn’t expecting much anyways. He certainly didn’t expect on Tuesday afternoon that she would raise her hand and slap Halley Webber.
She was a waif of a girl and Bucky knew that she was a foster kid, the hollow eyes and cheeks were hard to miss along with the fact he never mentioned her parents. Maybe they had died, maybe they had left her on the steps of the church of their own violation and turned their backs and walked back into the night. Maybe her mother wanted her but her father didn’t, maybe he let her come to term and then killed her and left the baby there himself, maybe she had died on her own. He didn’t know.
Mrs. Wood was yelling again, her face red and raw and spittle flying. It wasn't anything new except that she was yelling at Halley. Mrs. Wood usually reserved only casual disdain and contempt for most of her students and only the worst offenders, like Bucky, Charlie, Mo and their ilk, got the burnt force of her anger. But Halley was a good girl; she kept quiet and didn’t talk back, did her work and colored inside the lines instead of doing obscene drawing in the margins of the practice books like Mo did.
Nobody stepped up as Mrs. Wood tore into the small girl, her eyes already red and streaming, pulling herself close and down as if she wanted to vanish completely. Over the din of harsh words Halley said something, her lips moved, trembled but Bucky couldn’t hear what she was saying. But clearly Mrs. Wood did. Her eyes became manic for a moment, wild with misplaced fury. Everyone knew that you should talk back to Mrs. Wood, just stand there and take whatever she had to give, anything you said was interpreted as back talk and sass and Bucky learned the hard way that she wasn’t shy of using the ruler as she saw fit.
Bucky was just starting to get up, Charlie too when Bucky gave him a look from across the room, this was getting out of hand. They were just about to create some sort of distraction when Mrs. Wood raised her hand, not even bothering with the stick. Her palm made contact with Halley Webber’s hollow cheek and the sound was loud and violent and rang through the silent class. Halley’s eyes were wide and bugged out, mouth open. A brilliant red hand print upon her pallid skin and staring up at that woman who already had her hand raised again. Bucky got to her before the hit could connect.
Throwing his arms around Mrs. Wood’s waist, his weight knocking her to the ground and the crack of head on the ground rang loudly in his ears. All at once the classroom erupted into chaos, students screaming, crying and hands all around him, pulling him up, pushing him to the ground, tearing at this hair, his clothes. Around the storm of seeking palms he saw a familiar freckly hand. He gripped it tight as Charlie pulled him from the fray. They ran down the empty hall and out the doors and into the yard. They ran and ran before they collapsed on some dirty curbside in Brooklyn.
Charlie was laughing and Bucky was crying. They sat and talked for hours before Charlie had to go home and Bucky wandered the streets until it was full dark before going home. He was dreading what was coming next. But it turned out he didn’t need to worry. The phone calls came of course, the next day when Bucky lay in his bed until high noon, the shrill sound from the black dial front that sat on a table in the entry way piecing the silence of Bucky’s mind. It rang the next day as well but nobody but Bucky was there to hear it. It rang the next day to, and the next but Bucky could tell they were getting more and more infrequent. On the third day his father came home.
Dirty and stinking of liquor, smokes and gutter water he stumbled in after dark. The phone rang. He didn’t pick it up. The next morning he was gone and the phone fell silent.
That night, when he sat on the steps of the apartment he lived in, just wasting time and counting clouds when Halley Webber came to see him. Her hair was in plaits and she was wearing a soft pink dress, the black eye vivid violet and blue on her pale skin. She sat down on the step and she thanked him, told him that Mrs. Wood was okay but wasn’t teaching at their school anymore, things had calmed down, the police weren’t looking for his as he had feared, like they did with his neighbour, like they do with bad people, and that the students at Macabee school thought he was a hero. She kissed him, her breath smelling like strawberry sorbet before waving goodbye and walking off, the fabric of her dress bright in the coming darkness.
A few hours later when Charlie came he was still sitting on the steps. He told Bucky the same thing as Halley but he made him laugh at how Mrs. Wood looked in her neck brace, how red the principal’s face had gotten and how the kids had made Bucky’s old cubby into something of a shrine. When Charlie leaned forward and kissed him, he tasted like mint, toffee sweets and that rambunctious laughter that Bucky had learned to love. After he had said goodbye and left Bucky went upstairs and lay in bed awake for hours.
He spent his twelfth birthday on his back, in his now too small bed, staring at the ceiling of his room and tracing his lips with his fingertips. He wondered why Charlie’s kiss had tasted better than Halley’s.
For Bucky’s thirteenth birthday Bucky dreamed of Steve for the first time. One moment his back was pressed into the scratchy cotton of his sheets and the next he was laying on a bed of soft grass, the wind ruffling his hair and the verdant strands swayed and tickled his face in the breeze. The hair had the scent of turned earth and fading winter in the crystal air. He knew he was dreaming immediately.
He just lay there for a moment, basking in the sunshine that was so rare in the real world, when it was currently in the throes of the longest winter in decades. Some spring, Bucky thought, was long overdue.
Just as he was starting to doze off he heard a loud, sharp noise at his side. Bucky shot up in an instant, blades of grass still trapped between the stands of his dark hair and he shook his head to dislodge them and stared over at is right at the source of the sound.
It was a boy, he was thin and pale, clad in a thin sheaf of blue cotton, a hospital gown. The source of the sound was a blade of grass pinned between two boney thumbs, a grass whistle. The boy started at his movement but relaxed again. He turned, discarding the blade of grass among the thousands beneath them and held out a hand to Bucky.
“Hi, I’m Steve” Bucky reached forward to grip the hand with his own. It was surprisingly large, larger than Bucky’s own, with cool dry fingers and a firm hold. Bucky smiled, the boy was no waif.
“James Buchanan Barnes, but you can call me Bucky.”