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Before Bucky was born, the Moon never appeared above their city. All the scientists in the world couldn’t figure out why. There was no explanation, except for what the church had. The Moon didn’t want to be seen here, by them.
When Bucky was born, for the first time in their city’s history, they had a full moon.
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Bucky’s four when he wakes up screaming. His mother holds him close to her chest and tries to calm him, but he can’t stop screaming. He begs her not to let him fall.
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They get him a therapist at fourteen. Dr. Hill asks him what the dreams mean, but he doesn’t know. She asks if he’s afraid of heights, but he’s not. He has the opposite problem. Everyone used to joke that he was trying to climb into the sky when he was little.
He just agreed with them, like if he got high enough he could do it.
Dr. Hill says it sounds like a repressed memory of some kind, but none of them have any clue what memory it would be. He’s been raised in the home where he was born, just one story, modest.
The nightmares don’t stop until his mom cleans off their home altar and starts praying again.
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He reads on the roof at night, no flashlight, no candles. Just the Moon. It’s an odd way for a fifteen year old to spend their weekend, but at least he isn’t screaming anymore.
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Bucky is seventeen when he smiles to himself and quietly admits that he wants the Moon. It’s a joke at first, mostly. He makes more lewd jokes at the sky, like it’s listening. Gotta pay you back for giving me sweet dreams and all. Sometimes he almost hears a laugh back.
His friends don’t pretend to understand when it comes up during prayers (Natasha just knows things she shouldn’t), and that’s fine. Hardly a damn person worships the old nature gods anymore, but his momma raised him right. The Starks can worship clever gods with gears all they want, the Barnes family has traditions to uphold.
She used to tell him stories when they would stay in the woods during festivals, whispering like it was their secret to hold and not pure gospel from another time. Bucky remembers the light in his mother’s eyes as she spoke.
"Do you know why the Moon isn’t smooth like the Sun?" He doesn’t, though he really hasn’t bothered to look at the Sun directly. She smiles. "The Moon is a protector, Bucky. He’s bruised."
Even more than a decade later, Bucky looks up into the sky at night and wonders what sort of hit it takes to bruise the Moon.
Nat says he’s being too literal, but her family is all fiery hair and vodka. They worship a spider, and the eyes freak Bucky out a little too much to listen to her opinion as anything but that.
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He’s more devout than most, he knows that, especially to an old god. Whenever anyone asks, he just shrugs. He doesn’t really understand it himself, but he feels like he knows the Moon.
Not in the way other people know their gods. Not in impersonal prayers and carvings. Not in small gatherings or sparsely decorated altars. Bucky thinks if the Moon Himself walked out of the sky, he’d be the only one who’d know His face.
It’s a little blasphemous, admittedly.
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Bucky watches the Stars, too. He can’t remember every legend about the shapes of them, but he watches them like he could reach out and pluck them down to examine for himself. That’s when he first realizes he wants the Moon. Wants like touch on his skin, like liquor down his throat, like the bow of his spine stretching in prayer. He wants.
So he says it, his voice a little breathy. “You’re mine.”
There’s a feeling in his chest as he admits it, like an embrace that’s just shy of too tight. He flops into bed and pretends it was just wishful thinking. A nice dream.
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Direct sunlight gives him a headache the next day, starting right as the moon fades out of the sky. He can barely open his eyes, there’s a pounding inside his skull like hammers cracking the bone from the inside out. He has to go home early from work and take a lukewarm shower in his tiny, dingy bathroom. By the time the headache is gone his skin looks like a raisin, and the sky is bleeding red and purple. The Moon is faint, but getting stronger as the minutes pass.
Bucky gives a lopsided smile and raises his hands in something like surrender. “Alright, I get it, if you’re mine then I’m yours, too.”
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He remembers stories from priests when he was little. Something about humans that weren’t all human.
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Bruce jokingly says the Winter Warrior constellation has his nose. When he looks, really looks, it actually does. All the paintings, the carvings, they have something of him in them. He buries that, not ready to be that full of himself, and sleeps through the daylight hours.
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He switches to third shift at work and wonders why he doesn’t have more trouble completely changing his sleep schedule around. He also keeps his curtains closed off during the day. Even the slightest touch of sunlight bothers him, now.
Maybe he’s overreacting. Maybe he’s losing his grip on reality. Maybe the Moon has blue eyes, just a little lighter than his. Maybe the Moon has pale skin. Maybe he knows the Stars better than he thinks.
Tony doesn’t get it. Tony doesn’t get most things.
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Bruce prints out ten pages of old, old looking script that talks about the Moon and the old holy stories. Bucky buys him lunch and thanks him, because if left to his own devices he’d have been lugging home fifty pounds of books. He still doesn’t own a computer. Tony really doesn’t get that.
The Winter Warrior is a mural in the night sky. That’s what the pages say. The Moon had a friend, a demigod He made from a sick child with fair hair and fairer skin, weak bones and lungs that couldn’t breathe.
Bucky has to stop reading because he feels like he can’t breathe.
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He wonders why Bruce printed off these pages, but doesn’t ask the next time they hang out. Or ever. Natasha seems like she knows something. She almost always knows something. Something about webs woven and unbroken. At least she leaves him be.
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Another page says the Moon’s skin used to be flawless, but that the old gods went to war. Bucky has to stop again.
He has a nightmare about falling. In the morning (his version of it, anyway) there’s a cream-colored stone on his bedside table. It shimmers, faded colors threaded through. The touch of it on his skin is cool, a comfort. It makes him smile. A gift, he thinks.
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His feet itch for soft dirt and he finds himself hastily packing his tent and camping gear into the back of his beaten up little car. Driving isn’t something he’s used to just yet, but he can’t really just walk to the Adirondacks from Brooklyn. He swallows the anxious feeling and bails last-minute on weekend plans to party all night. At least it keeps Tony from embarrassing himself in another drinking contest with him and Nat.
Bruce texts him off and on, and sends pictures of Tony giving his home shrine a lap dance. Bucky barely avoids crashing into a tree.
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The country is as loud as it ever was. Bugs, birds, larger animals not bothering to be subtle. They just pass him by while he sets up camp. He bites his lip as he contemplates making a fire. His mom never did. That was why they always used to bring the MREs his dad left behind, after all, so they wouldn’t need fire for cooking. So nothing could distract from the light above.
Bucky chews on jerky and squints at the pages, the ink only slightly marred where he’d folded them into fourths. The low light of a half moon doesn’t do much to make reading more difficult. He didn’t think it would.
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He reads for an hour without actually taking anything in. The words sink into his head, but sit on the surface, just skating around and refusing to turn into actual understanding.
Of all the places to forget evening prayer. Even now, he can hear his mom scolding him.
The ground is cool under his knees as he sits on his heels. He arches his back and lets out a soft, relieved sigh as he bathes his face in pale light with his palms upturned. Normally prayer is peaceful. A trance is supposed to take hold, and the devotee can commune with their patron safely.
This is different.
The feeling of comfort and acceptance he’s craves so badly doesn’t embrace him as much as rip him up from the ground by the scruff of his neck. As soon as it takes hold, the information from the pages he scanned slams into him all at once. An hour of reading, all unfolding in his mind in an instant.
It’s enough to make him physically recoil and stumble back into the dirt, startled and feeling like he’s been punched in the throat. For a split second his vision whites out, a flash of something, he thinks he sees something, but then his vision returns. It’s blurry to the point that he feels like he’s blind. The edges are dark, his night vision is absolute shit. He hazards a look back at his tent, but it’s not there. Bucky looks up at the Moon and clutches his head as another wave of whatever this is runs him down, making him lie flat on the ground. His heart is pounding against his ribs painfully, and he feels smaller. He feels tiny, light, but strong.
He looks off to his left and meets his own eyes, then his vision goes blank again.
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Bucky doesn’t know how long he stays like that, gaping up at the sky on his back, half-passed out on some vision quest. He hears footsteps in the foliage, no effort taken to make them quiet. There’s no blur to his vision, and he can see clearly. The woods look darker than before.
The closer the footsteps get, the more the peace of normal prayer soothes Bucky’s panicked body and spirit. When someone sits down next to him, he closes his eyes, both to revel in the gentle pleasure of a holy feeling, and so he won’t have to look over and acknowledge this situation he’s gotten himself into.
Gods don’t walk around anymore. Everyone knows this. Maybe he’s wrong, maybe he’s still in the vision. Maybe he did crash into that tree. He knows he didn’t.
Still, he also knows it’s not just another camper coming over to ask for a battery, or a flare. He knows. Bucky knows. He wants again.
Minutes later Bucky opens his eyes, and the moon isn’t in the sky anymore. He sits in silence. It was a half moon. The new moon isn’t due for weeks.
He tries not to startle as the person (is it a person?) next to him speaks. “I thought you remembered me.”
A rough swallow constricts his throat, not enough moisture on his tongue. It seems like his body is just sticking to itself, trying to melt. He breathes in deeply.
“I don’t…” he pauses, unsure of where the sentence is headed, then continues, “I’m human.”
An amused huff of breath stirs a soft wind that rustles through the trees. “You weren’t always.”
Bucky looks over now. It hasn’t been his voice, so he’s not too surprised when it isn’t his face, or his eyes that he finds at his side. Instead, he sees a man larger than he is, body well-sculpted, skin smooth and pale, hair soft and thick looking, lighter in color than Bucky’s own.
Maybe he fell asleep in the dirt, and he’s dreaming this up.
Maybe. Maybe there’s a god sitting next to him.
The expanse of pale skin, Bucky now notes, is completely bare. No shorts, no shirt to speak of, not even any shoes.
He frowns. “You’re gonna get eaten up by mosquitoes in some not-so-fun places if you don’t put something on.”
Their eyes meet. It’s a pale blue, like he imagined before. Almost silvery with how soft it is. Bucky’s eyes are dark, a little deeper.
A smile curls slow and sweet over the stranger’s lips. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Bucky’s frown deepens, then he digs into his bag until he finds a pair of gym shorts. He tosses them, trying not to stare too much as they’re pulled up what looks like miles of creamy thigh.
The stranger looks out at the sky, seemingly unbothered by the lack of the Moon. Bucky knows why, under the doubt, under everything. He knows more than he’s ever known anything.
For lack of anything else to say, Bucky blurts out, “I read about a war.”
His comment seems to fly right past the other man, who nods, but his eyes are elsewhere. After a moment he speaks, his deep voice quieter than before. “I remember being human.”
Bucky freezes as he sits. His brain stops. The words flash in front of his eyes again. A sick child with fair hair and fairer skin. Either the world is too fast or he’s too slow, because there’s still this huge disconnect between his head and everything else, otherwise he’s sure he’d have this figured. There’s an answer at the tip of his tongue, but also another deep in the back of his throat. He can’t make anything work to dislodge either of them.
The stranger continues when Bucky doesn’t say anything. “My name was Steve.”
“Steve,” Bucky echoes. It’s simple. It’s right, like his own name is right. A nice fit.
Steve sits cross-legged with his hands in his lap. “I prayed not to be sick anymore. That was how it started. Pneumonia in the winter. Ma told me to stay in bed, but I couldn’t. I was too stubborn.”
Bucky looks at his own hands, the lines of his palms creased with dirt. He sees smaller hands, longer fingers, bony, clutching shimmering stones like the one in his pocket. Distantly, he hears the dripping of holy water. It’s not his memory. He doesn’t understand how he knows that.
Another wind whips past them, this time Steve sighing more heavily. The pages Bucky brought are untouched, despite the force.
“I prayed not to be sick, and I got better. I prayed to be stronger, to be able to stand up to bullies, and I got bigger.” Steve smiles down at his own hands, like he’s seeing what Bucky saw moments ago. “I just kept praying to you.”
“I-I’m human,” Bucky repeats, voice faltering a bit.
Steve lays a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I was too, then you started helping me be more.”
His dirty hands close into fists, the answers are all still just outside of his grasp. Just where he can’t touch. “I don’t remember.”
The trees sway as Steve’s shoulders sag, his hand falling away from Bucky. The woods are quieter now than they were before. Bucky can almost hear his own heart beat.
They sit in silence for a moment, looking and looking. Bucky wills himself to fall back into the trance, to see what he’d been seeing before. He knows he won’t be able to. There’s something about them, the way they sit together, the way they breathe. It’s right in some fundamental way.
He sighs, he can’t get the answers any closer. Maybe Steve’s keeping them from him, just for now. More talking, then.
“You gave me a migraine.” Bucky doesn’t mean to sound so amused, but the less he thinks the more things begin to click into place.
It does fit. Somewhere.
Steve shakes his head, a smile playing at his lips. “Technically the sun gave you the migraine.”
Bucky scoffs. “Technically I never got migraines in sunlight before, so I’m pinning it on you.”
They sit for a moment, smiling, looking sidelong but not completely at one another. Steve laughs under his breath, the leaves rustle. “Guess I should say I’m sorry, huh?”
Bucky shrugs casually as he can manage. “I just wanna know why I had to move to third shift.”
For a moment it’s just silence, then a hushed tone, like the secrets Bucky’s mom used to tell him. “You said I was yours.”
“So that was you being possessive?” Bucky’s brow furrows, his lips twitching.
Steve makes a slight pained face and chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “I know how it sounds I just,” he pauses, licking his lips, “I couldn’t touch you. I know you don’t remember, Buck, but…”
The sentence falls, and Bucky turns his body, angling it toward Steve. “I read about a war.”
This time Steve doesn’t ignore the statement. His eyes are downcast, and he nods. “We fought. You and I fought together.”
Bucky remembers falling. He doesn’t remember anything about it, just that he was falling for such a long time, he never thought he’d land.
Steve’s voice pulls him back. “There used to be more gods. Some of them decided that they had a right to use humans like slaves or toys, and they thought they could take power from the other gods. They were bullies, so we fought. And you—”
“I fell.” Bucky watches Steve’s face, the subtle shift of his features, a realization maybe.
Then Steve shakes his head, eyes flicking up at Bucky’s, then falling back down to the ground. “Buck. You died.”
An old, aching coldness fills Bucky’s chest, his heart skipping beats. He looks away from Steve, back up at the sky, the blank spot where the Moon should be. His lungs hurt when he breathes in as deeply as he can.
He licks his lips, chewing on the bottom one, then turns back to catch Steve’s eyes. They stare for a minute, studying one another. The trees shake again.
Steve exhales sharply, his eyes soft like he’s broken on the inside in every way Bucky’s ever felt he was, too. “You look the same.”
Each crack inside Bucky, each wound, feels like it’s ripping open and being made to bleed. The nightmares he had as a little boy make so much sense, now. Freezing, alone, falling. He thinks he hit water when he died. He thinks Steve watched him die. He thinks he died screaming.
Bucky closes his eyes tight, grinds his jaw until he can draw in another breath. Steve looks just as miserable. Part of him is screaming that this just isn’t fair. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. They weren’t supposed to hurt this much. He wasn’t supposed to leave Steve alone. He still can’t remember clearly, but he knows that much. They were supposed to be together to the end.
He sags a bit. “What were we?”
One corner of Steve’s mouth twitches in a smile, he looks back down at his hands. “Everything. Best friends, brothers, warriors. When I had nothing, even as a human, I had you.”
Bucky gestures with loosely with one hand. “How did this… you said I made you more?”
Steve nods. “The shortest version is that I prayed and you answered. But, uh, the story you gave me is that you gave up a little of your power so I could make my own.”
“I made you a demigod?” Bucky tries to remember, but the most he ever sees is the same vision of Steve’s hands with the pale stones.
“And when you died, I took your place.” There’s no pride in the statement, and as he speaks his eyes fill with something heavy. Like rising to godhood was more of a tragedy than it had any right to be.
They stay silent, the wind dying down as Steve breathes evenly and calmly. Eventually he speaks again, shaking his head like he’s confused with himself. “When you died, I almost…”
He stops, mouth open.
Bucky lays a hand on his knee, skin burning with the contact. “What?”
“I just wanted to wipe everything clean. Use the oceans, maybe. Those are ours, too.” Each word is flat, emotion purposefully carved out to leave them hollow. The grief of a god, and it’s for Bucky.
“So why didn’t you?” The longer his hand stays on Steve’s skin, the more it starts feeling like he’s too far away.
A distant familiarity, different than memory, more like an instinct, wants to pull him closer. Steve is the Moon and Bucky feels like the oceans, swelling with tide, ready to roll across the shore and drag back with them what they can. He feels the want like an ache, like he was carved out.
Steve smiles ruefully. “A friend said you’d be reborn as a human. I never really thought… but I couldn’t risk it. If there was a chance to get you back, I had to wait.”
Bucky gives a shallow, lopsided smile and scoots closer, until his hand is on Steve’s thigh and their legs are touching. He knows it won’t be enough for very long, but there’s a brightness it brings to Steve’s skin that almost makes him want to drag it out as long as he can. Does Steve glow down here, too? Will Bucky be able to see the bruises—the scars of the war that killed him?
He startles when Steve’s hand cups his jaw, some of the weight from his grief lifting. “She was right. You’re here now.”
Bucky nods, then opens his mouth, unsure if he wants the answer to the question he’s about to ask. “How long did it take?”
The touch on his cheek shakes a bit, a trembling that Steve quickly buckles down and ceases, but Bucky feels it on his skin nonetheless.
Far off the wind howls, and it nearly sounds like wolves, like more screaming. “Seven-hundred years.”
Bucky chokes, eyes bugging out of his head. He gets to his knees and scrambles forward as fast as he can. Fuck drawing it out.
Steve sounds so wounded when Bucky crawls into his lap, his hands hovering just above Bucky’s body, like he still thinks he can’t touch.
He can see it, the way they used to do this. He used to crawl out of the sky, like Steve has. He used to be this. They used to—
“What the fuck do you mean seven-hundred years?” He grabs Steve’s face between his hands and keeps their eyes locked.
Steve grabs his sides, a shuddering breath passing from his lips. Bucky remembers putting his head on Steve’s chest when he was smaller, so fucking small. He would listen, wait for the rattling and wheezing to stop. He remembers just shaking his head gotta fix that, buddy.
The words in the back of his throat come closer now, he can almost say them. There’s something important, something Steve isn’t telling him. What is he hiding? What… wait.
Bucky relaxes into Steve’s hold, his dirty thumbs brushing along Steve’s clean cheeks. “That’s why the Moon never showed up in the sky around here, isn’t it? Not until I was born.”
Steve smiles for a second, still miserable at the edges. He shrugs. “I couldn’t stand looking at this place.”
A slow tensions bleeds out of Steve’s frame, like he’s been holding that admission, that guilt, for seven centuries. Just waiting.
Buck whispers, “is this where I died?”
Steve nods. “You fell into one of the lakes. I don’t know which one, but I looked, Buck. I looked for you, but you weren’t anywhere.”
The hands on his sides squeeze, testing the reality between them. Bucky presses their foreheads together and breathes. He can remember now, how he used to breathe and the wind would move.
An image flashes in his mind. A young boy wading in frigid water, nothing but his shorts on. Bucky clucks his tongue and sighs, tries to put on the air of being disapproving.
He speaks aloud as he speaks in the memory. “You’re gonna get cold sick, Stevie.”
Steve’s arms wrap around him, pulling them flush together. The response is as warm as it was then. “You wouldn’t let me.”
Bucky shakes his head, then leans forward and presses a kiss to the bridge of Steve’s nose.
“Seven-hundred years, Stevie.” Bucky’s lips brush Steve’s skin with every word, and he remembers a time when they spent days tracing each other’s bodies, just like this. “You got me back, Buddy. Til the end of the line.”
Steve shakes and nods. “Til the end of the line.”