Work Text:
I.
The second most memorable thing about the day Bucky met Steve is that it is also the first time he has ever been punched in the face.
Six years old, walking to school, Bucky spots a bigger kid pushing around two smaller kids, and his brother and sister stop to watch. Bucky tries to get them to get going, move on, he's going to be late- why his mother has allowed them to walk him on his first day, he doesn't know, but it has made his life a sight more hard.
His sister is wide-eyed and staring, pointing at where a boy who is hardly bigger than she is is struggling with a kid three times his size while a little girl from Bucky's class watches, crying. "Why?" his sister asks.
Bucky doesn't know. "Bigger kids do that sometimes," he offers, and tugs on her hand. "C'mon, before it's us."
"Can't you help him?" This from his brother, who thinks that because Bucky can monkey his way to steal hard candy from the top shelf in their apartment, he can do anything.
The bigger kid has sat on the smaller kid's chest, and has started pushing his head into the concrete. The little guy's face is bleeding and his eyes are glazed, but he isn't crying. His little stick arms are still swinging up at the bigger kid, hands curled into small fists that pound at the big gorilla's chest.
The last thing Bucky wants is to get involved in this. He's fallen down on the sidewalk before, jumping out of his apartment's window because he thought he could fly like a bird. He'd cracked a tooth and been scolded that he was lucky it wasn't his neck, and it's not an experience he's eager to repeat, least of all half a dozen times in succession, like what's happened to this little kid just since they've been standing there.
But he looks at his brother and sister, at their total faith in their big brother's abilities, and finds himself thinking about what he would do if it was one of them.
Before he knows it, he's across the street and diving on top of the big bully with his eyes closed so he doesn't have to see his own beatdown coming, lashing out blindly in his general direction. He feels his own small knuckles come away bloody, and he doesn't know until afterwards whose blood it is.
The bigger kid belts him, hard as a piece of concrete, right in the eye, throws him on the ground and gives him one good kick before he runs away, deciding- Bucky thinks- that five kids is more trouble than two and whatever he wanted isn't worth the effort.
The breath comes back into Bucky's body before the smaller kid recovers his, so he helps him up- squirming in discomfort when the kid leans on him, red-faced and gasping.
"What were you doing?" Bucky asks him, when the kid finally lets go of him to brace himself on the nearest wall.
"He was trying to take Pam's lunch," the kid gasps, clutching his skinny chest like his heart will burst if he lets go. "I gave him mine, but he still wouldn't leave her alone."
Bucky looks at the kid, and can't believe that someone in this shape would ever give away food without a beating first, let alone fight so hard for someone else's that he takes the beating anyway. He casts a look at the girl named Pam, who is holding her lunch like a bomb that might go off at any second. "Your brother?" he asks.
She shakes her head. "I never met him before."
Bucky looks back at the kid. "Serious?"
The kid nods. His breathing is starting to calm, but his face is starting to go from red to bruised, and there's blood dripping from a cut on his head. Bucky wipes at it with his sleeve. "I'm Bucky," he says.
"Steve," the kid answers.
When they get to school, Bucky finds out that Steve is actually his own age, and this year will be in his same class. He finds this out when taking Steve to a teacher to get cleaned up gets him assigned to look after him for the day, make sure he's all right, since Steve insists that he's okay and doesn't need to go home.
Bucky guesses he got the job because- bruised and bloody and holding onto each other so Steve doesn't faint- they look like friends.
Bucky gives him half of his own lunch.
II.
Bucky pokes his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he positions the ice pick over the block of ice, concentrating hard so he doesn't accidentally hammer his fingers trying to chip some off. He misses with the hammer twice, leaving little scratches in its surface, before he strikes home, knocking a chunk the size of his fist onto the floor. He has to chase it around the kitchen floor for a bit before he manages to scoop it up in a towel and holds it to Steve's fat, bleeding lip.
"What happened this time?" he asks. He doesn't know why he bothers. The answer is nearly always Iggy Gillespie picking on some girl. That's been the answer since they were six. Bucky doesn't know if it's girls or Iggy that makes Steve forget every time that he's barely the size of a ten-year-old even at fourteen, or that the whole four times he's won a fight with Iggy were all when Bucky was there to step in and finish it.
Predictably, Steve says, "Iggy grabbed Ruthie Miller's--" He can't seem to find a word for it he's comfortable saying, so he mimes a breast instead, his face flushing with heat all the way to his neck.
Bucky presses the inside of his wrist against his own forehead with a sigh. "And it makes no never mind to you that he's bigger than you?" he asks. "You know he's bigger than you, right? He doesn't, say, look smaller than he is with your glasses off?" Steve's glasses were broken by Iggy in the first week of school this year, and another pair hasn't managed to materialize.
"No, I know he's bigger," Steve says. "That doesn't make it okay to walk on by."
And that's Steve all over, Bucky thinks, with exasperated fondness.
"Does it make it okay to get me first before you jump in next time?" Bucky asks.
Steve does his best to smile at him around the towel. Smiling must hurt, though, because he drops it with a wince. "You were too far away," Steve says.
Bucky shakes his head. "So I'm just going to have to watch you all the time. I see how it is."
"I don't have to be watched all the time," Steve says, frowning at him with disapproval. Somewhere up there with Steve's notions of chivalry is Steve's sense of pride, rankled by the idea of his best friend being his babysitter.
Sometimes, Bucky will prod him on this, tease Steve until he actually gets mad, but he's learned that all that accomplishes is making Steve avoid him for a few days, and get into more fights without any help.
He makes a joke of it instead. "No, just any time Iggy Gillespie's on the same city block as a girl."
Steve smiles again, no matter how much it must hurt. "Maybe someone should be watching him."
Bucky laughs. "Maybe."
(Iggy Gillespie dies of the typhoid in 1932. Bucky's mother slaps him for saying he's thankful, and then God gets his licks in, too: new big dumb galoots spring up jockeying for position of Bully-In-Chief, and Steve just manages to shoot up to the same height as Bucky's sister in one go before he stops growing all together.)
III.
Bucky has hit Steve once, and only once, in the entire course of their friendship.
On a day so hot, it feels like you could cook an egg on the pavement, Steve gets into another battle for the honor of a girl he barely knows, a girl he will only barely talk to afterwards because for reasons beyond Bucky, Steve doesn't seem to actually be in it for the girls. He doesn't want their admiration of his bravery and honor, despite his obvious disadvantages. He wants the bravery and honor itself. To be the kind of person who will do such things as try to turn the tide in an unfair fight, just because somebody should. Maybe it's his way of dealing with the fact that he's small and (Bucky hates the word) weak, of trying to find something in himself that's bold and strong, or maybe it's because being small and weak has made him particularly sensitive to the agonies of the persecuted, Bucky doesn't know.
What he does know is that, after he's managed to punch out three guys that Steve stupidly took on at once, years of frustration get the better of him. He lets fly and gives Steve one for good measure, knocking him down to the ground in one shot.
Steve stares up at him, just as shocked to have received the blow as Bucky is to have given it, and Bucky feels sick with himself just looking at it.
In a burst of pain and guilt and nausea and old anger all welling to the surface at once, Bucky lets go of words he's held back for years: "You're not some noble knight on a mission to defend fair Brooklyn from her enemies, Steve. You're five feet tall and a buck soaking wet! I'm not always going to be there to bail you out!"
"I know," Steve says. "I know."
Bucky stands still, seething, but out of anything else to say. What more could there be? You're not a hero. I know. Case closed. Conversation over.
Bucky reaches down and helps Steve to his feet for the millionth time in sixteen years, but this time receives a punch to the shoulder for his trouble. He's so surprised by it that he's knocked off the pavement, stumbling into the street. A taxi blares its horn at him, and Bucky has to leap back up, startled and shaken.
Steve gives him a little smile. "You know you deserved that, right?"
The combined impact of the last twenty minutes hits Bucky all at once, so that all he can do is surrender, go limp, and laugh. "Yeah," he says. "I know."
Steve squeezes him around the shoulders and walks him down the street. Bucky wonders, rhetorically, what he's going to do with him.
IV.
Bucky joins the army.
He hadn't planned to. If he was drafted, he wouldn't whine, because he's not a complaining type, but if he managed not to be, then so much the better for him. Damn shame, so sorry for everyone who had to go, but Bucky's not the type to get stars in his eyes over Uncle Sam wanting him, and he's even less the type to get shot at voluntarily.
At least, that's what he tells himself, and everyone who asks, until it turns out that's not true.
They're bigger than him and it's not his fight, and there's no reason to subject himself to this if he doesn't have to.
Except.
Except he's been friends with Steve for too long, been in far too many fights now where they were bigger than him, and it wasn't his battle, and there wasn't any reason to subject himself to it if he didn't have to. Except there's something inside him that stopped him on the sidewalk one day to protect a skinny kid, and it's been fed and nurtured by that skinny kid ever since. Except that maybe being stupidly noble is contagious, he guesses, because with every practical reason he can give himself for not joining up, there's still that small voice in his head that says the same thing every time-
That doesn't make it okay to just walk on by.
In the end, he signs the next six years of his life away just to get Steve's voice in his head to stop nagging about right and wrong.
(It will be so many more than just six.)