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I.
Not for nothing, but it really doesn’t worry Bucky much when he’s fifteen and he realizes that he loves his best friend. It’s not like it comes flying out of left field, and anyway, when he’s fifteen he’s determined not to worry much about anything.
When he’s fifteen it’s 1932, after all, and whatever future’s ahead doesn’t seem like something to kill himself over. So today it’s 1932 and his mother’s at home staring down a single can of beans, and Bucky Barnes is on the street staring down the sky. The sky, at 7 o’clock, is lit up like a movie screen—In twelve years The Glass Menagerie will premier in Chicago, but because Bucky will be too busy killing in Europe to catch a showing, it’ll be 84 years before he sees it on TV and thinks of Steve Rogers, as he used to be. Steve Rogers, in 1932, was drawing on the lids of shoeboxes and killing himself for not being the man on the silver screen.
So: the sky’s a silver screen and the street smells like cold and wet, and Bucky can’t feel bad about it when he takes it all into his lungs. He’s walking out of A Farewell to Arms, and Steve’s walking beside him—fists in his pockets, glaring at his too-big shoes. Bucky called him a clown once and Steve tried to shove a loafer down his throat, and Bucky was almost weak enough from laughing to let him. Steve’s fucked up about the movie and sways into him, every few steps, because he wasn’t built for balance. His heart’s too big for the rest of him.
And so what, right, if Bucky wants to grab him and hold him close all the time? Steve doesn’t seem to mind when he does it then—He does mind when Bucky huffs a cloud of stale breath into his face, fog in the cold, so he’ll scrunch his nose up and make Bucky laugh—
So if he loves his best friend today, what’s it hurt? Since he knows not to worry about tomorrow when he’s fifteen, he lets himself love Steve, and sitting on the sofa in Mrs. Rogers’s apartment later he’ll set his head on Steve’s skinny shoulder and watch him draw girls on the pier, men in baseball uniforms, men pretending to be Ernest Hemingway, Bucky himself—because Steve is fifteen, staring down these little portraits feels like looking into a funhouse mirror but more uncomfortable, because a funhouse mirror doesn’t make you look slightly older, wrinkled in the wrong places, your lines exaggerated and mangled in the strangest ways, and you don’t have to worry about hurting a funhouse mirror’s feelings—and those attempts at capturing Bucky happened more than Steve wanted him to know.
When Bucky throws himself down and catches him at work on one of these, Steve always goes tense, pencil off the paper, and Bucky is always trying to find ways to tell him that he doesn’t have to take everything as hard as he does.
You don’t just say something like that to Steve Rogers. The shoe in his mouth attests to that.
That’s what he wants to say, though. It’s 1932, Steve, it’s the Great Depression! It’s the iceberg tip of the Great Depression, and if America is the Titanic we’re definitely in steerage—We don’t know that the war’s gonna take us out of this yet, Steve, and we’re staring down the death of the world for all we know! Yes, and Steve, what we do know is that it’s getting cold and you and your mother are running out of ways to keep you warm and fed and you’re getting bad again, and you and I both know that sooner or later we’re going to meet the winter you can’t beat.
So, yeah, Bucky Barnes doesn’t put much stock in the future.
Bucky Barnes doesn’t believe in the future until its knuckles meet him at the jaw.
II.
When Steve’s twenty-four his only friend is Bucky Barnes because his only other friend died six years ago, and that’s just the way life’s been for him. He’s just fine with it. People don’t like him because he won’t make himself smaller than he already is.
So Bucky tells him that sometimes you’ve just gotta let them think that they’re right, but Steve can’t. Because Bucky tells him he can’t treat everything like a fight, but everything is a fight, because you can put your dukes up or you can cover your head, but they’re gonna hit you either way—
This is how Steve understands both self-defense and foreign policy. And that’s why Steve’s going to war.
Steve went to art school for the same reason Tennessee Williams will soon write a play about a man who goes to movies because he can’t move.
Bucky went to art school because he says it’s better than the army.
Then, he joins the army.
III.
He’s in Steve’s apartment, because if anyone but Steve’s there, it’s Bucky. He forgets to lock the door behind him and immediately, turning on his heel and humming as he walks, turns the radio on and starts picking things up and putting them in different places—The care and keeping of Steve Rogers. Whenever he goes to Bucky’s place it looks like Bucky moved out and forgot to tell him, all the chairs and pictures and everything shifted, disappeared, or replaced, not because Bucky’s an indecisive decorator but because people are always coming into his apartment, bringing things with them and carrying things away, shifting his life around. The perfect stasis of Steve’s, in comparison, must make him itch like fleabites.
Bucky has a bowl on his head like a helmet and a spoon balanced on his clean-shaven upper lip, and he hasn’t said a word about it but Steve knows he signed his enlistment contract.
(Bucky wasn’t there the first time Steve went to a recruitment office, but he was there when Steve got thrown out. After a bad joke, then an argument that got so vicious so fast it left Steve shaking on the sidewalk, he watched Bucky flip him off as the recruitment office’s front door swung shut behind him.)
In the army, first in Wisconsin but mainly in Italy, Bucky’s going to learn how serious Regulation and The Law and Nazis Trying to Kill You AND Innocents, how serious all those things are and how even a casually nihilistic disregard for death and tomorrow somehow can’t make it easier, and he will completely abandon the last lingering notes of the adolescent fancies that still, now, hum him calm in the back of his mind.
That hasn’t happened yet, because it’s only Saturday.
Bucky pops his shirt collar, takes a book off Steve’s table which is also Steve’s bathtub, and he drops it on the floor at the same time he drops himself into Steve’s chair. He takes the bowl off his head and, mussing his hair till it sticks up like the hair he’ll see on streetkids in 1989, he considers Sarah Rogers’s china, empty in his lap, a moment—the forget-me-nots painted on the bottom—before dropping it back onto his head. Chunks of hair pressed down over his eyes, he tries to spin the bowl on his skull like a plate on a stick, but his hair’s too tacky with pomade. He grins at Steve and asks him, How’s your day been, what’re you doing over there, why’re you always acting that way, yeah, that way.
Steve, this entire time, is standing on the other side of the room with his arms crossed over his chest.
Some love song is wailing on the radio.
Steve’s eyes linger on Bucky’s wrist. His sister Rebecca’s hair ribbon is tied around it. It’s pink, and he probably found it lying around and forgot about it, or promised to fix her hair up and forgot about it. He uses that hand to scrub his eyes awake, and Steve has to brace himself against his stomach twisting like a dishrag.
Steve has not told Bucky anything about the mindbending mix of jealousy, guilt, and terror that’s suffocating him now, but he feels it’s implied.
Steve is on his feet, because that’s the safest place to be when you’re scared. As long as he’s not flat on his back, he’s got a fighting chance.
That’s not what he meant.
Steve says, “I saw Dolores at the movies.”
Bucky tips the bowl back and says, “Who?”
“Dolores. That brunette you like.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bucky says, and growls for effect.
Steve tries to smile, but he’s never been good at lying.
—Time makes for the craziest friendships, see, because Bucky has two of Steve’s teeth in a drawer in his mother’s parlor room, and Steve is the only person in the world, probably, who still has a copy of that deliriously bad short story Bucky wrote for Arnie Roth’s little newspaper during junior year, and even in the weeks and months through the years when they weren’t talking they held onto these things; and Bucky was the first—only, so far—person to put his lips flush against Steve’s, when they were 13, because, Bucky said, Steve seemed like the kind of guy who’d like that. Steve asked him what kind of guy that was, and Bucky was the first person to call him a queer.
(If Steve read more Virginia Woolf, fewer comic books, he might think something about how they managed to find each other so early and hold on so tight, the two men time would lose its grip on. As it was, Steve preferred practical thinking and stories about punching, and he was never able to see it from any angle but linear, cause and effect, sin and guilt: Steve and Bucky both got frozen because Steve was telling both of them what they should do.)
This entire time, Steve is staring grimly into the two square feet of blank wallspace in his tenement, two feet to Bucky’s left. Bucky, soup spoon in his breastpocket, ankle crossed over his knee, watches him with the same sharp attention that he watches men in boxing gloves with, that he will soon stare down the scope of a sniper rifle with, but here without the anger. Here, it is anticipation.
His instinct is to strike first.
He gets up, finally sets the cereal bowl aside, and affects an easy smile. Crossing to the radio, turning it up, he says there’s something about this song that always makes him feel like acting stupid. So he turns to Steve and, flourishing Steve’s mother’s china like a top hat, bows like a man in a movie.
When he straightens, Steve isn’t glazed over but his arms are still crossed, that suspicious squint, so Bucky goes to him and takes his hand.
Setting his free hand on Steve’s waist, he quirks an eyebrow. “Dancing? You know about dancing, right, Stevie?”
“No,” Steve says. “Is it a French thing?”
Bucky makes a face. “Oh, so that’s how it is, huh?”
“Hmm?”
“Hmm,” and Bucky steps forward, forcing Steve to stumble back, and swinging them side-to-side, he generally does his best to lead badly. Complaining, trying to keep his feet out from under Bucky’s, Steve finally laughs.
They never manage to act romantic with each other. Bucky tries, for pride’s sake if nothing else, because he does have a reputation to uphold, but Steve won’t suffer him. He does, after all, have his own reputation as a buzzkill to think about.
“Why don’t you go find Dolores and act stupid with her?” Steve says, and Bucky tells him to shut it, leaning down to mumble in his ear.
“You’re such a spitfire,” he says. “No one’s gonna be able to live with you,” and his mouth falls on Steve’s neck.
Not really breathing, Steve tries to regain control of the situation.
(A secret: it was less that women didn’t want to dance with Steve Rogers and more that Steve Rogers didn’t want anyone to dance with him. He’ll love Peggy Carter, but even if there was never a plane or a crash, there would have been an excuse.)
Steve says, “You should be with your girl tonight.”
“Nah,” Bucky says. “I’m with my best guy, I’m doing fine.”
It dawns on Steve that Bucky is not only buzzed but completely sloshed, and Bucky smiles into his skin.
“Now, you’ve gotta promise me, Steve,” he says, affecting seriousness. “You’re not gonna take any jobs drawing war bonds comics, no matter how hard up for cash you get—Because,” he says. “If I see your name in the corner of some Uncle Sam thing I’m gonna die laughing.”
He runs his thumb over the back of Steve’s hand. Steve is too confused to say anything.
“You should draw me a pin-up, though,” Bucky decides, and while the radio hums along and while Steve steps, confused, on his feet, he slides his hand up Steve’s back and rambles on about his friend the artist, he’s just so fuckin’ glad Steve’s an artist in Brooklyn in 1941, because you know? He can’t imagine him as anything else, anything but right now.
Steve stops being confused.
“You’re an artist, too.”
Bucky says, “Sure.”
“Look,” Steve snaps. “You’re not going in front of a firing squad.”
“Sure,” Bucky says.
For exactly one second, regret hits Steve Rogers so strong he could whine like a child.
He has his friend in his arms and for a blink Steve swears he’s in the room where his mother died. Her hand was so frail and she said, Stevie, there’s nothing you could do. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but he was there for four hours two weeks before she let go. She was pretty doped up and kept slipping out of consciousness; he sat in a chair by her bed listening to plays on the radio.
“You should make me into a cartoon,” Bucky says.
And that is why Steven Grant Rogers, asthmatic queer who makes vague threats toward anarchism at the slightest provocation, keeps storming into recruitment offices—Because movies are for people who can’t move, anesthetics are for people whose pain you can’t stop, and Steve isn’t going to save anyone with a picture of a monkey on a bike.
A cartoon wasn’t going to stop the genocide and 80 million deaths that were going to take place over the next four years.
“I’m not your anesthetic,” Steve says, and the song ends.
The transition from “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” to whatever big band thing starts playing puts Bucky out of sorts, just as classic rock stations will put him out of sorts in 1994 and the poster for the Captain America documentary that will come out in 1976 will put him out of sorts. Pulling Steve closer to the window sill, where the radio sits, he twists the dial and exhales. The worry lines that cryogenic frost won’t let time mark on his face make an appearance now.
“You can make a fight out of anything,” he says, and affects a laugh, badly. “You can make a metaphor a fight. What the hell do anesthetics have to do with anything?”
Steve almost blurts out, Art is an anesthetic! But he gets a hold of himself at the last second.
“Why’d you go to art school?”
“Less draining than office work,” Bucky says. “Ask me something sensible.”
“What’s sensible?”
“Ask me why I’m in your apartment necking you tonight.”
Steve laughs despite himself, not really because anything strikes him as funny.
“I’m here,” Bucky says, turning the radio off with his left hand and pausing to trace the shell of Steve’s ear with his tongue. “I’m here because I got to thinkin’, while I was drinkin’—“
—He kills his own attempt at romance by snorting in Steve’s ear and making him cringe—
“No, I was thinking about my father.”
(Bucky’s father would’ve been a career armyman after the war if he wasn’t a career alcoholic.)
“He kept this picture of my ma all through the war, right? And so, I was thinking about him, I was thinking about him and me, and Steve. I wouldn’t look at Dolores’s picture every night.”
A pause.
“That’s an anesthetic,” Steve points out, and Bucky groans.
A hand on either of Steve’s shoulders, he looks him in the eye. “Make art about anesthesia,” he says. “Stop trying to enlist.”
“No,” Steve says.
“Steve.”
“I will break both my hands and never draw again. I swear.”
“The army doesn’t take guys with no hands,” Bucky reminds him.
Steve draws a sharp breath. It takes him a moment to recover.
“It’s a metaphor,” he quips.
“You’d swear on a metaphor?”
“Yeah, ‘cause I’m an artist.”
Bucky nods, unfazed and not taking his eyes of Steve for a second. “You’re a ninety-nine pound asthmatic artist with a deaf ear and a bad heart. That’s what you are, not Superman, not even Average Joe, and nothing’s gonna change that. And nothing should. Stay home.”
“Stand down, little guy,” Steve sneers. “That’s just what the fascists want us little guys to do.”
“Alright,” Bucky says. “Call me a damn fascist.”
“If you were a fascist, I wouldn’t be letting you make your hands so familiar with my ass right now. I’d be introducing my knuckles to your jaw—“
—Like the future will soon.
“Re-introducing,” Bucky corrects.
“What?”
“You punched me in tenth grade, that time I got you drunk.”
“Oh, shit?”
“Yeah, I was calling FDR funny-looking or something and you took it personal.”
“Well—“
“Holy shit, Steve, I said!” Bucky widens his eyes, sways in. “You broke my fucking jaw! You wouldn’t apologize, though, or get me ice or anything. You just stood there with your arms crossed, kinda unsteady, you said—“ Holding up a finger, deepening his voice: “Your words have an impact, Buck boy.”
“I did not call you that.”
“Buck boy, you said,” Bucky says through laughing tears. “You—you better fucking watch what you say about Franklin! From now on, you hear me? Listen, Buck—Buck—oh, shit—“
“Jim,” Steve says.
Bucky loses it.
He clings to Steve for support, face pressed into his shoulder. Steve stares solemnly on.
“Bucky.”
“Who the hell’s that? I only—The only name I answer to—Well, mister, all my friends, all them call me—fucking—Jimmy—“
Steve sets a hand firmly on either of Bucky’s shoulders. He waits till he gets his laugh out and looks him in the eye.
But before Steve has the chance to say something like,
Just because I could stop breathing tonight doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about tomorrow, or,
If I stand by and watch a bully do what he wants, I might as well be throwing punches right along with him,
Or any of those folksy, dignified slogans Captain America will be famous for, any of that plain-stated moral sensibility that, this afternoon, sent Bucky Barnes, who until that moment had shamelessly declared that he would draft-dodge over the border before he let them put a uniform on him, stumbling dazed into an army recruitment center—Before Steve can say that, Bucky sobers and says,
“Some people are going to die, no matter what. Sometimes anesthesia’s the best you can give.”
A head below, Steve watches his eyes flick to the left.
“What I’m saying is,” Bucky continues, looking down at Steve again. “I’d really like to get my hands on some ether.”
He kisses Steve’s nose and turns the radio back on. It’s just noise.
“Where are they sending you?”
“Now? Nowhere. Soon, basic training. After that, who knows? La-dee-da. What I’m trying to get across is that I’m gonna need a picture of you I can fit in a compass. And a compass. And ether!”
Steve grabs him by the hair and yanks him down to stick his tongue in his mouth. He’s unable to be subtler than that. Bucky ends up grinning against his lips: surprised, but happily so.
As enjoyable as having a fistful of his best friend’s hair and a mouthful of his tongue is, Steve will never completely be able, when he gets it, to get the memory out of his mind—15 years old, Bucky’s eating a raw onion on Steve’s stoop, for reason’s he’s never been able to justify, and he says—onion juice all over his face—Steve, you know about frenching?
Like the fries? And Bucky shoves his face into Steve’s face, shoves his tongue into Steve’s mouth, Steve yells for hours and pukes.
Now, though, 24, Bucky’s hands are up the back of Steve’s shirt and Steve likes the smell of bourbon on him just fine. Still a little pissed about the onion.
He pries himself off his friend’s face. Struggling for breath. He sandwiches Bucky’s face between his hands; Bucky looks at him, waiting for the next argument, expectant, flushed.
—In that moment, he couldn’t guess all the ways he wouldn’t die in war over the next 75 years.
Steve could not even fathom being six feet tall.
“You’re going to be fine.”
“I’m going to get wrecked,” Bucky corrects.
Steve shakes his head, Bucky nods vigorously; one says, “no, no,” while the other says, “yes, yes!”
“But it’s okay.” Bucky almost has to yell over Steve. Hands off, he steps back, and Steve’s next protest catches in his throat. “I want to be doing this,” he says. “It’s the right thing, right?”
It was not, probably, meant to feel like a punch in Steve’s stomach.
And Bucky, a little surprised by the recoil, the sudden rush of Bad Feelings—which he’d decided, for sure, he was completely immune to sometime around the fourth shot of the night—He swallows and, smiling his no-hard-feelings, claps Steve on the shoulder: warmly, he thinks, but actually a little hard.
(He’s surprised every time he’s bitter that he’ll never be good enough for Steve Rogers.)
He turns away, wanders into the kitchen to search the cabinets for nothing.
“It’s funny,” he says. His back is to Steve. As always, Steve sees his back and its strength and breadth and does not understand how Bucky Barnes could know, without a doubt, that he doesn’t stand a chance of measuring up. “I never expected I’d become a soldier, but when I think about it, I never imagined doing anything else, either. I don’t know, I guess I just don’t believe in the future.” He means to follow this with the cliché, I live in the moment, but surprises himself again by leaving it strange.
It doesn’t strike Steve as strange at all. “I believe in the future,” he says.
For half a breath, the anger surges again. Bucky closes his eyes, and when he breaths out, the anger all falls away. He closes the empty cabinet, turns around, and takes in another long look at Steve.
Bucky Barnes, many times in his life, has seen Steve Rogers losing astonishing amounts of blood and unable to breath in every dark corner of Brooklyn, and so Bucky Barnes will always have the unique ability to look at Steve Rogers and see a mayfly flinging its tiny body unrelentingly at a light bulb.
He will also be able to see Captain America for the first time, broad and strong and completely different, and be completely unshocked; only surprised by his unsurprise.
The hard truth is that they’ll always be very different people.
Both of them, unable to understand where love and envy break apart, decide at the same time to forget the next seventy years for the night.
“I’ll believe for you,” Bucky promises. “But only if you promise to be just like this when I get there.”
Steve won’t be, of course. That’s just how the future works.
He promises anyway.
IV.
Before Bucky goes, there is a moment where Steve is ruled by guilt.
For a moment he would change himself to take it all back: he wants, in the same way Bucky will soon want for food that isn’t crackers, for Bucky to take his shoes off. He wants to cook something, even though Bucky, if he had his way, would never let Steve cook again because Steve makes water taste soggy; and he wants Bucky’s shirt undone and his head in Steve’s lap, eyes closed while they talk or something, and Steve watches his chest fall: he wants to repent, like he’d repent for a kick in the shin or being so goddamn relentless when they fought outside the recruitment center, but there’s no making better here.
This is not the last time Steve Rogers will not be the one biting the bullet. It is the first.
So for one second, Steve could say, forget it. He could put down the fight and walk away.
(But it wouldn’t matter.)
And Steve will never stop wanting this, exactly the way he wants it now. Steve will be one hundred years old and he will want this moment back. He can’t have it.
Things will be different in Europe and neither of them will really be recognizable, and then it will be 2016. In 2016, Steve will be 97 or thirty, and a man who knows his name is James Buchanan Barnes will have his head in Steve’s lap, but instead of feeling restored, both of them will feel tired. They'll both be running a low fever, their bodies trying to recover, and James Buchanan Barnes will stare at the ceiling while Steve stares out the window, disconnected from his fingers working out a tangle in Bucky’s hair.
As it is, in 1941, Bucky does not take off his shoes or put his head anywhere near Steve’s crotch, although those are both things he wanted when he came in, and after he leaves Steve does not see him again until Monday morning.
V.
The last time Steve sees Bucky is Monday morning. Bucky Barnes is clean, when he knocks on the door, and smells like laundry and aftershave—When Steve opens the door, he only has to draw a breath to know that Bucky is a man who is leaving. When Steve opens his door, Bucky only tries to smile for half a beat before he comes in and turns the lock.
He kisses him so hard Steve feels like a cartoon, stars whirling around his head and like an anvil out of the sky, crushed. Bucky steps back and musses his hair, and he says something light-hearted but Steve will have to wrack his brain for what exactly it was. He won’t remember. It rushed past his ears like the air must rush past the fighter pilots he’s seen on newsreels.
Then, he’s gone.