Chapter Text
‘This is way better than that showy dance anyway,’ It’s nearing midnight but the night is yet to dip below a sweltering temperature.
The annual summer fling at the community hall was all anyone had talked about for weeks but for some reason, Bucky couldn’t find it in himself to get excited. A night spent making vapid conversations with girls whose names he can never remember doesn’t seem appealing anymore. He tries not to be concerned by that fact, or the way the last two hours on this bird-shit covered roof have passed like minutes.
‘It’s your turn.’ Steve doesn’t look up from his notebook; pocket-sized, but with a whole art gallery of graphite masterpieces inside. The view of the Hudson from the roof tonight is too precious to be omitted from the collection.
‘Go on then,’ Bucky sits up, slightly regretting lying back to look at the stars when he feels the dust in the back of his hair.
‘Truth or dare?’ Steve and Bucky have played this game at least a hundred times before; the pressure to come up with new and innovative ways to embarrass each other is now pretty big.
‘Dare.’ Bucky is fifteen and restless and the heat is making his clothes feel too tight. Or maybe they are a little too tight. Music from the street below drifts like smoke up to them.
‘Oh shit I don’t know,’ Steve stops drawing and looks at Bucky, chewing his lip. Truthfully, he’d had far more questions lined up than dumb pranks.
‘Come on, just give me something stupid to do,’ Bucky grins, his eyes sparkling, lit up only by lamps in windows and the streetlights a few stories below them. For a second, Steve feels as though they’re the only people in the universe, ‘I want to have fun!’
‘Oh so you’re not having fun?’ Steve laughs and pushes his shirt sleeves further up, ignoring the graphite smudges on his fingers almost certainly adding more stains,
‘Well come on you’re not even using me as your muse anymore!’ Their combined laughter soundtracks every day for the last ten years and tonight it lingers in the stillness of the summer. It is true that, on the page opposite, various tiny pencil drawings of Bucky reflect an earlier point in the night.
‘Fine.’ Steve shuts the notebook completely and puts it on the ledge beside them. His legs swing over the edge in a fantasy breeze, ‘do something stupid then.’
Bucky drops his head and chuckles. He knows exactly what he’s about to do and it occurs to him that maybe he’s known for quite some time. Maybe every day of his life has been pre-determined to get him to this point, when he’d know, for sure. His heart feels full and loud and huge and for the first time, he lets himself feel it. When he looks up and Steve is staring right back, his brow slightly furrowed in waiting, Bucky isn’t scared. There isn’t a future or a past, so when he puts one hand on the side of Steve’s cheek and kisses him, there cannot be anything else.
Steve feels himself kiss back before he can contemplate pulling away. Because how long has he thought about this moment? If he were truthful, which it’s hard to be most of the time, the answer would be a long, long time. They are the sun and the moon and the stars and the whole of Brooklyn holds them up to the sky where they belong.
‘I’ll use that dare again.’ Steve says when they’re walking home, blaming the blasted heat for the pink on their cheeks and the sweat on their collars. It’s all Bucky can do to not kiss him again in the middle of the street.