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Steve withheld his smile as Bucky made his way towards him, a bowl of soup in his hands. “Aww, come on, Buck, your cooking sucks,” he groaned. After setting down the bowl of soup, Bucky punched him lightly.
“Oh come on, Punk, you love my cooking,” Bucky grinned. And, really, Steve didn’t.
He just loved that it was Bucky that was cooking for him.
Bucky really couldn’t cook to save his life, if Steve was being honest. It was sweet that he tried, it really was, and Steve could laugh himself into an asthma attack watching Bucky try to do anything in the kitchen, but the food he made wasn’t that good.
He tried really hard, though, and seemed so proud of himself for making Steve food, and really Bucky couldn’t be good at everything, so Steve ate it anyways. And, he appreciated Bucky cooking for him.
And feeding him, apparently.
“I can feed myself,” he groused as Bucky lifted up the spoon full of soup towards Steve’s lips. Steve laughed lightly, pushing it away. “I’m good, Buck!”
Bucky laughed as Steve pushed against him and dropped the spoon back into the soup. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, a little grin on his face. “You keep saying that.”
“And it keeps being true.”
“Hmmm,” Bucky hummed. “If you say so.”
“I do, you jerk.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Steve sipping at his very mediocre, somehow slightly burnt soup, and Bucky picking at his fingernails, a look of contemplation on his face.
Steve knew what he was thinking of, how could he not? His best friend was off to war soon, and then Steve would be left to cook his own soup and, even if he knew it would taste better, Steve knew that the situation would make the soup actually taste worse.
It wasn’t really about the soup, though.
“Stop thinking about it,” he chided. “That won’t help anything.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Bucky asked. “I have to savor the moments I have left.”
“Stop talking like you’re going to die,” Steve told him. “You’re better than that.”
Bucky shrugged slightly. “I might die. I would die for you.”
“I’d die for you too, Buck. Doesn’t mean you’re going to, though.”
But Bucky shook his head and swallowed, looking distressed.
“No, I mean… Steve.”
Steve stopped fiddling with the blanket that he had on his lap and properly looked at Bucky.
“What is it, Buck?”
“I would die for you,” he whispered, all other sounds leaving the apartment.
“Oh.”
When Steve couldn’t find it in himself to say anything else, to give a proper reaction other than ‘oh,’ Bucky looked away.
“Buck, I–”
“—forget it. Forget I said anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He knew what Bucky meant, what he was saying when he told Steve he would die for him. Not because they were best friends (though, Steve knew that that would always be part of it), but because Bucky loved him, truly loved him, loved him with all his heart in a way that Steve knew he would never be able to reciprocate.
Because Bucky loved him like he was a dame, and Steve wasn’t a dame, and he loved Bucky but he knew that he would never love Bucky like that.
The worst part was, Steve wasn’t sure that Bucky even understood it, that he knew that he told Steve he loved him in more than a platonic way. And Steve tried to forget about it, but how could he, when his best friend was in love with him and Steve couldn’t force himself to love him that way back?
He loved Bucky, he did. He loved the way he laughed, and the way he joked, and the way he was so quick to defend Steve when he saw an opportunity to, but equally let Steve defend him as well. Bucky never made Steve feel like he was any less for all his different diagnoses and issues, and whenever something new happened in Bucky’s life, Steve was the first to know.
But he couldn’t love Bucky in another way, just like he knew that Bucky couldn’t love him in another way, either. And Bucky was willing to die for him, his entire heart belonging to Steve. And whether he died the next month in the war or the next century when they were eighty and it was all over, Bucky would die loving a man who could never properly love him back.