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Bucky is eight when he gets into his first fist fight, if it can even be called that. It consists more of scabby elbows thrown through air, feet kicking towards the gravel, and muddy half-smiles of exhilaration. By the time Bucky’s pa finds them, aided by Bella Barnes’s tattling pointer finger, Bucky is the proud owner of a skinned knee and a bleeding nose, mercifully unbroken. Pa Barnes yanks him from the fight by the elbow, his dark eyebrows low over his eyes and mouth a flat, lipless line.
“Sorry,” Bucky says, stumbling on his child-thin legs after his pa.
“You know Ma is going to be upset.” He looks straight ahead when he says it, and the seriousness of his voice leaves Bucky’s stomach acidic. The words are flat, his father’s hand firm in his own, and this is nothing like the quiet joviality Bucky has come to expect from him.
“Sorry,” Bucky says again. It’s a mumble this time, torn bottom lip caught between his teeth as soon as the word is out.
The rest of the walk is cold. Bucky picks his feet up, careful not to drag them. He makes as little noise as possible, and when his pa sets him on the steps outside their family’s small downtown Brooklyn house, he maintains his studied silence. It takes three hesitations before his pa wrinkles his nose and sits down next to Bucky.
“You want to tell me what happened, kiddo?”
So Bucky explains. That someone had made a bad call, and then had spat on Bucky’s shoes when he’d complained. So he’d kicked the spit-covered foot in the kid’s direction, and when that didn’t work, threw an elbow into the mix. When he gets to this part of the story, he throws his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. The rest of the fight doesn’t really matter, and Bucky’s not sure he remembers it too well anyway. So he says, “I don’t know. He was being mean.”
Pa Barnes nods once, then twice; his eyebrows haven’t budged from their stations, low and focused, since he picked Bucky up. And then, like something unknitting across his skin, they lose their tension and the rest of his face follows. He doesn’t have many wrinkles, but they collect around his eyes now, and in parentheses around the grin that builds itself across the bottom half of his face, crooked and happy. Laughter starts to shake his shoulders before he gets any words out. He nods again. Claps a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and leans in conspiratorially.
“Okay, then. If you’re going to be getting into fights now, we better teach you how to throw a real punch, huh?” He jostles Bucky’s shoulder, then offers the hand to shake.
Bucky stares at it for a moment, then at his pa, questioningly. “Okay,” he says. It’s a question, though he doesn’t frame it as one.
“You gotta shake. We’re promising not to tell your ma.”
Bucky grins, and takes his dad’s hand in his own. It’s twice the size and far more calloused, but a shade lighter than Bucky’s summer tan. Their shared shake is firm, and Bucky’s pa bends his elbow in comical exaggeration, like they’re sealing an important business deal; at least, that’s what Bucky thinks it feels like. It lacks any semblance of solemnity, and it sets Bucky to laughing until his pa rests a finger against his own lips and raises an eyebrow. Your ma’s inside, the look says. We gotta be quiet.
His pa will tell his ma later, he knows. He’ll hear them talking about it later that night, when they’re standing in the kitchen. Bucky always hears them in the evenings, sharing news of the day. Or, rather, he always hears his ma, loud voice and lilting Italian words. His pa, who always responds in his Brooklyn-accented English, is better at whispering.
But for now, they pretend that this is a secret, and they sneak to the alley next to their house, amid the trash cans, as if Bucky’s ma will sense them and catch them if they so much as step on a sidewalk crack.
The walls on each side, and the ground beneath, is grime-covered and absolutely filthy. Bucky is careful not to lean on anything while his pa goes through a laundry list of advice. Elbows in, knees bent, feet spread. Thumb outside the fist, always, or else you’ll break it. Mean face on--practice this one in the mirror, it’s important. Swing with your strong hand, if you can, but know how to do it with either.
And make sure to swing with your whole body. You get more power that way.
His pa looks him directly in the eye when he says it. “Don’t just fling your arm forward, okay? Twist your body, put that momentum in.”
Bucky nods, as if this has all made sense to him. His body is arranged carefully according to each piece of advice his pa has given him, and he’s throwing practice blows at the heavy air.
“Good. Now, try it on me.”
Bucky laughs. His pa doesn’t join him, so Bucky narrows his eyes and tilts his head, letting his fists fall to his sides. “What?”
“You have to learn somehow. I’m not letting any kid of mine go into a fight unprepared. Bella’ll learn in a few years, too.” He smiles, bends his arm at the elbow, and offers the side of his arm as a punching bag. “Now, come on! Give it your best swing.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
So Bucky scrunches up his face, arranges his body into the correct angles, and sends his bony knuckles into his pa’s slightly-soft arm. It connects solidly, with a satisfying sound, and Bucky lets his eyes open.
His pa grins and throws an arm around Bucky’s shoulder. “Good job. Could use a little more practice, but you’ve got time, huh?” He leads Bucky back towards the steps of their house, his feet slapping against the pavement. “Now let’s go inside and face the music, huh? That nose of yours needs some cleaning up.”
Bucky’s groaning when they walk in the front door, and he keeps his mouth carefully shut while his ma chews him out and his pa scrapes the blood gently from Bucky’s knee and face.
---
During the impromptu alleyway fist-fighting lesson with his pa, Bucky would never have guessed how often he’d use the advice in years to come. Of course, he hadn’t known then about the boy a few blocks away, with the stubborn will and the easy fists; he hadn’t known he’d fall in love with a boy like this, and he hadn’t known that he’d be forever joining the fray for him.
---
He meets Steve Rogers in an alleyway.
Something about the defensive set of Steve’s shoulders tells Bucky that it won’t be an unusual occurrence. He asks his pa that night to pick up the lessons they left behind three years earlier.
---
When they’re fifteen and sixteen and Steve comes to pick Bucky up from Sunday Mass, Bucky can feel Steve tensing at the sound of the crude comments coming from the group of boys walking behind them. It’s all crass, and with each new sentence, Steve’s shoulders inch closer to his ears.
“Steve,” Bucky says, not sure whether he’s trying to sound warning or pleading. Maybe both. Probably both.
“It’s disgusting, Buck,” Steve mutters.
“I know, but--”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, instead cringing when one of the boys begins to detail his opinions on a woman he’d seen at the store the other day.
Steve stops walking, turning and already saying, “Oh my God, shut up ,” before Bucky can even get his feet to quit their forward movement.
“Oh yeah? Why should I?”
“Because you’re being disgusting,” Steve says, as if this is obvious. It should be, of course, Bucky knows, but he also knows that the statement isn’t going to go over particularly well with this crowd.
So he turns around, already balling his fists inside his thin jacket pockets, and putting on the mean face his pa taught him to use in situations like this. Eyebrows relaxed and low, mouth slightly downturned, eyes hard and dead. He is trying to say that he isn’t scared of these idiots. And he’s not, but they are considerably bigger than Steve, and a little more so than Bucky, and he knows that they’ll be pulling out the first aid kit at Mrs. Rogers’s house tonight.
“Listen, fellas,” Bucky says. “Just shut up and move along, huh?”
Of course, they don’t.
Probably Steve’s ready and visible fists have something to do with it, but Bucky can’t exactly say that he blames Steve for wanting to slug these guys.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not a particularly long fight. It ends sometime around when Steve’s nose gives the crack of breaking for the third time since Bucky met him. That isn’t to say that they don’t get a few good swings in, though.
Thumb outside the fist, always, or else you’ll break it.
Bucky’s knuckles are bloody when he brings his hand up to probe at Steve’s face, carefully, before he’s yanking Steve away from the fray.
“Hey,” he says. Steve, eyes closed in pain, is still swinging his fists. “ Hey, ” Bucky repeats, louder this time. “Quit it, Steve. We’re leaving. You got your nose broken again, and I promised your ma that last time would be the last one.”
“It’s fine,” Steve says, his words muddled and muffled. “I’m fine.”
Bucky takes his hand to pull him in Mrs. Rogers’s apartment, and Steve gives in after a few steps, though his insistent claims to health don’t stop. The group of boys call out a few pointed comments about the two of them that Bucky ignores and Steve doesn’t seem to hear, or at least doesn’t choose to acknowledge.
When Steve’s nose is finally set, it’s still trickling blood and Steve is still on about how those boys needed a good punch. His nose has a new bump in it, and though Bucky is sorry for how much it must hurt, he’s tempted, almost, to run his index finger along it. To learn this newness, earned from street scraps and Steve’s stubborn, loud mouth.
---
There are fights he doesn’t tell Steve about. Ones that happen behind the school, or on the baseball diamond; when Steve inevitably asks, Bucky says the bruises and scratches are from baseball practice, because it’s not technically a lie. He never did much care for lying to Steve, if it could be helped.
It happens again towards the end of second year of high school, when he can almost feel the diploma brushing his fingertips, and he can almost wrap his mind around the freedom that will change essentially nothing about his life. He’s lacing up his cleats, worn and muddy, on the bench when one of his teammates sits down next to him. Something about the way the air shifts, something about the gnawing feeling in his gut, it gives Bucky the feeling that this isn’t going to be a good conversation.
“Hey, John,” Bucky says. He stays focused on his laces, tightening them one row at a time until he can feel the tongue of his shoe press down against the top of his foot.
“That Rogers kid coming to the game on Saturday?”
“Yep,” Bucky says, yanking the laces into a knotted bow, uneven and ugly. “Why?”
“Just wondering, is all.”
Bucky sighs, adjusts his dirt-stained sock, and straightens his back. He looks John in the eye when he says, “If you’re going to make some fucking comment, just make it now.”
And he does, and so Bucky gathers the material of John’s jersey in his right fist and swings with the left--his better hand, careening at a curve towards anywhere Bucky can hit that will hurt.
Swing with your strong hand, if you can, but know how to do it with either.
He breaks three of the five fingers on his left hand that afternoon. Even if he hadn’t been suspended from playing, he wouldn’t have been able to pitch. As is, he and John sit on the bench, Bucky silent and John complaining, for the entirety of the game.
Steve is still in the stands, and he still walks home with Bucky after. He tells Bucky every moment that would have gone better if Bucky had been playing, and Bucky finds himself smiling.
---
The day before Bucky ships out, he finds Steve struggling in an alley. Same as always.
They were supposed to meet in the movie theater, but he’d seen the way Steve had looked the night before, in their apartment--mouth downturned and disappointed, somehow angrier now than he’d been a year and a half ago when he’d first been rejected.
There’s a small stack of enlistment forms in the bedside table drawer, Bucky knows; he found them the first time he got a short leave. He imagines it’s grown by now, but he doesn’t check. He knows Steve is pretending that it’s still a secret, and he figures it’s better to let him.
But today, he finds Steve laying on the ground, struggling his way back to standing, another rejected enlistment form trampled next to him, and he knows he should be sighing, exhausted, the way he usually is when he pulls Steve away from these fights. Today, though, he feels terror settling deep in his body.
He asks Steve again, one final time before he leaves, not to do anything stupid while he’s away.
He’d meant not to get into any dumb alleyway fights; he’d never dreamed Steve would think up something as stupid as what he actually does. But then, Steve never was one to play it safe.
---
Bucky spends his whole life following Steve into fights. He spends his whole life trying to talk Steve out of these hopeless arguments, and then pulling Steve away at the last minute, when things turn too far south.
So it makes sense to follow him into a war.
When Steve asks Bucky to join the Howling Commandos, Bucky has to laugh, because he’s the one who was telling Steve, only months earlier, that this war wasn’t a back alley, that things were different. But he’d been wrong, hadn’t he?
It’s the same, in the end. There’s a fight, and Steve is going to fight it, and so Bucky will, too.