Chapter Text
Summer Storm
And in the end
I’d do it all again
I think you’re my best friend
Don’t you know that the kids aren’t alright?
I’ll be yours
When it rains it pours
Stay thirsty like before
Don’t you know that the kids aren’t alright?
- Fall out boy: The Kids Aren’t Alright
It was the end of a July like a switchblade, hot and slick and over too fast, when you finally found the courage to kiss him for the first time. You remember: you were lying side by side behind the couch in his Mama’s apartment after another day that'd started with a ‘gee Steve, you gotta see this’, and ended gently with an ever tactful ‘let’s take it easy, huh? I’m beat anyhow’.
You were twelve years old and already half in love and the building was breathing around you in fractured conversation as you leaned in and pressed a chapped, closed kiss to the flushed skin of his cheek. You were giddy with it. You remember that too, tingling in the very ends of your small fingers.
He’d crinkled his nose gently and said: ‘whatcha wanna be doin’ that for?’ in that way that he had back then, loose and easy.
And you’d lain back down on the cool hardwood floor and tugged at your shirt, pulling it away from the hot tacky skin of your stomach, and shrugged and breathed and said:
‘Just tryin’ it out is all’.
You remember thinking, in the slow seconds that followed, that maybe he didn’t know what your Ma told you: that kisses were like little thank yous that you gave to people. Ones they could carry around with them. Special people. People like him.
But then he’d rolled over onto his stomach until your whole bodies were flush and turned his face into your shoulder and closed his eyes and said:
‘S’kinda nice’.
You remember how he'd looked then, hands behind his head, elbows stuck out like a little kid's. Scrawny, but filling out in ways that you weren’t. Ways you'd thought you might never. And how you'd noticed the way his shirt was darker under the arms; saltwater in the afternoon air. You’d been thinking maybe it would be nice to touch him, press the backs of your fingers to the damp, tapered triangle at the front of his shirt.
He’d always been tactile: two fingers resting against the soft inside of your elbow, an arm thrown over your shoulders.
And later, his nose against the tacky hollow of your throat, his cheek warm against the inside of your thigh, his hand, his hands-
At fourteen Bucky’d kissed you up against the sink in your Ma’s kitchen, full on the mouth and like he meant it. The summers seemed longer then, weeks and weeks when your lungs were as full as your heart.
He’d had a damp dishcloth over one shoulder and two buttons missing on his shirt. You’d still been holding a scuffed-up dish, fingers wet and webbed with pearlescent bubbles.
You’d said: ‘What’re you doin’?’ Because he was always taking you by surprise, and felt his mouth curl against your cheek: a smile. He’d waited for a moment, for the drowsy hum of insects just beyond the lip of the window, the whisper of running water, the muffled sound of kids playing in the street:
‘Just tryin’ it out’
Your heart’d thrummed hummingbird-crazy in your paper-thin chest, skin flushed right down through your collar to the place where his hands rested against your lower back.
And you could’t breathe - metaphorically speaking, breathless at the sight of Bucky’s plush smile curling at the soft creased corners of his mouth, at the feel of his fingers sliding down your arm to the place where you were still clutching the plate with tremulous fingers.
‘Gotta finish this first, huh’, he’d said, or something like it, real quiet, real easy, and still smiling, taking the dish from you to dry.
‘Promised your ma’.
He used to promise your Ma all sorts of things.
You remember: you’d get beat up behind the corner drugstore; two teeth, three teeth, loose and wet with blood. And once, a loss: a grotesque pearl in the palm of your hand.
You'd showed him and he didn’t smile. You remember.
Dirt; brick-dust; chain-link; your sorry, cut-up face in pools of oily standing-water.
And what else? Bucky: a bleary corona of dark hair blotting out a bright white sky.
And ‘…these days-’ spoken in exasperation as your eyes rolled back into your head, ‘…moutha yours is gonna get you…’
It'd taken you far too long to realize that Bucky knew your body far better than you did; you'd just ignored it.
It was Bucky who knew and loved the crooked shape of your spine, the limp, bruised flowers of your lungs, the asymmetry of your senses: sight, sound.
Knew what was too much, what wasn’t enough.
You’d spent days curled on your side in bed, always the same side in favour of your good ear and never given a thought to the fact that, by the time you were eleven, you already had a side of the bed, and Bucky had his.
At fifteen you were still young, and always fighting something and Bucky’d say: ‘Steve’. Short and sharp like he wasn’t surprised.
And you’d grin broadly, as per usual, and then broader still when he’d wince at the blood bright between your teeth:
‘I said wait up’
‘Didn’t wanna’ you’d say, because when your lungs were working you felt like you could do anything.
‘I’m gonna die young’ he’d groan theatrically, clutching his chest. ‘And it’s gonna be all your fault’.
And back then- before. Before he-
Back then you’d laugh and wipe your bloody nose on the back of your hand because it was you who was gonna die first.
It was always gonna be you.