Originally written/posted: June 2014
Fandom: Captain America (2011)
Universe: AU: College/University
Pairing: Steve/Bucky
Rating: T
Word Count: 3,384
Warnings: Recreational Drug Use (Weed)
Notes: I was going to reread this, because I was nostalgic over this being my first Stucky fic but then I realized that was almost 12 years ago now and had a mini crisis and just slightly reformatted it, sorry. That’s wild, I can’t believe it’s been so long! LOL
The first time Bucky smokes weed he’s fifteen and he’s stuck in Barton’s grimy family kitchen, with dirty dishes and old food piled everywhere. He remembers being excited and nervous and maybe a little terrified, because even at fifteen everything seemed like a constant adventure, and there was nothing positive about his father bursting down Barton’s front door with all of his brute, military strength. Bucky still sort of worries about it whenever he lights one up, even though his father’s been dead for years, buried in a grave in Arlington that he visits with his sister on holidays.
He was nervous, too nervous, so they used a gravity bong, a medium sized bucket with an old mountain dew bottle floating around in the middle, and he remembers sucking in the smoke through a straw.
He had wanted a joint, but Steve’s asthma was too high-risk for that, back then.
Now, Bucky’s leaning against his headboard with his feet propped up on the bed. He hasn’t had a chance to do this in a while, to sit back and smoke a fat one without the finality of exams and term papers floating over his head. He’s missed this, and as he reaches for his baggie of weed resting on his thigh, he can’t help but feel the thrum of excitement that bustles through him.
Fuck, he hasn’t done this in so long.
He can blame it school, sure, because school has been fucking brutal this semester, and he hasn’t had the chance to breathe properly since his Mythological Studies professor sat them down at the beginning of the year and gave them a five page paper right off, but that’s not it. Since Steve’s asthma started getting better and then disappeared entirely, Steve hasn’t been into smoking all that much. Smoking alone is no fun unless Bucky stays up all night playing League of Legends, and he hasn’t been able to do that in months without feeling like a trigger happy pre-teen.
He’s just about to light up, because he can feel himself about to get lost in his own head before he even starts, and that’s never good, before his door slams open and Steve comes tumbling through, bright red and eyes tired.
“Uh,” Bucky stammers, and then looks down at the rolling paper between his fingers.
“Fuck art history,” Steve says passionately, and throws himself onto Bucky’s bed.
“Uh,” Bucky repeats, and then gathers his wits. “Hard day?”
Steve shrugs, laying his head by Bucky’s thighs. He blows out a breath, slow and measured and Bucky pretends he doesn’t track the way his lips wrap around it as he does. He’s so not high enough for this shit, yet. “Just frustrated,” Steve replies, and then pushes himself up onto his elbows.
He notices the bag of weed on Bucky’s thigh, and his eyes snap to his. “You haven’t done this in a while.”
Bucky shrugs, because he hasn’t, hasn’t even mentioned it to Steve since the summer of senior year of high school, when they were young and dumb and would sneak on Bucky’s roof with a haphazardly rolled joint. “I haven’t,” he agrees. “But, end of the term’s good for somethin’, right?”
Steve studies him for a while. Steve is always studying him, it seems, either with his eyes or with the sketchbook he’s been carrying around with him since they were seven, but it’s not like Bucky minds. He’s been used to the weight of Steve’s gaze since he first began drawing him, and he wraps it around himself like a blanket.
“I could, uh,” Bucky starts, “always do this later. If this bothers you, or whatever.”
“Don’t think I’m good enough for this anymore?” Steve’s eyes are light, but his tone is not, and it throws Bucky through loops.
“You stopped wanting it,” he points out, because he’s sure, positive even, that’s what happened. They used to smoke all of the time, nestled in between Bucky’s sheets or down in Barton’s disgusting basement, riding smoke until their mouths felt scratchy and dry and their eyes drooped with the high, but then Steve grew six inches seemingly overnight and got into the track team, and Bucky never questioned it.
“You never asked.”
And maybe Bucky did stop asking, because Steve changed and Bucky was still the same, wiry kid he’d been since he was fourteen. He’s stayed the same height, but Bucky’s packed on some muscle from the various stocking jobs he’s had over the years, and his hands are calloused and warm, but Steve’s always changing. His hair is never the same length as it was the semester before, and every time Bucky sees him, whether it’s been hours or days, he seems to be getting taller, always taller than Bucky and the lines around his eyes deepen the older he gets.
“Oh,” Bucky says, and then, grins, because maybe he’s been reading this wrong. Bucky’s been known to read things wrong, or read things way too fucking closely, and he’s been walking around on tiptoes around Steve since he discovered what his dick was made for—luckily, Steve hasn’t seemed to notice this, and hopefully, if Bucky has anything to do with it, he never will. “Wanna get high with me, Stevie?”
Steve smiles, bright and warm and happy like the sun, and says, “Sure, Buck.”
Bucky loves getting high.
He loves how time seems to blend into itself, how hours seem like minutes and minutes seem like years, how nothing outside the dryness of his mouth and the lightness of his head seem to matter. It’s heady, the rush of getting high gives him, and having Steve sitting next to him, sucking down the smoke like a champ does nothing to negate that. He only furthers Bucky’s haze, seeing his too-pink, too distracting lips wrapped around the hand-rolled joint in his hands, and fuck, Bucky wants.
“This is weird,” Bucky says, and the words taste heavy.
Steve throws his head back, smoke rushing out of his mouth. “Yeah,” he says. “Missed this,” He adds on, but what Bucky hears instead is ‘missed you’.
Bucky is done for, utterly and completely done for, has been since he was six-years-old and stopped a boy twice Steve’s size from pummeling his face into the ground with his tiny fists, and he can hear Barton’s relentless teasing grating on the edges of his skull. Maybe this is why he stopped smoking with Steve, because it’s hard to ignore how brightly he lights Bucky up, shining a glow on Bucky’s insides.
“Me too,” Bucky whispers.
Steve leans back against Bucky’s pillows, burrowing himself into Bucky’s bed, and Bucky knows that he’ll fall into sleep tonight with a tight hand wrapped around his cock and his nose pressed against the spot Steve will leave behind. It’s embarrassing, how much of a pattern this has become, Bucky spending time with Steve, pitifully and unconvincingly pretending he’s doesn’t fucking love his dumb face, and spending that night with his hand down his boxer shorts, thinking about the slope of Steve’s lips and the width of his shoulders, and how nice Steve looks when he smiles.
Bucky takes another hit to cope, and isn’t surprised when it does nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.
They’re drifting, Bucky tracing patterns on his ceiling when Steve jostles his shoulder with a small grin.
“What ya lookin’ up at, Buck?”
Bucky shrugs, and feels like his limbs are moving through syrup. It’s nice, and he’s missed this a lot. He loves Steve loads, has for years, but instead of a problem looming over his head, it now settles in his bones like a seed, blooming into something that he thinks he’s on the edge of dealing with. It doesn’t seem so scary now, the depth of his fondness. The daze amplifies his feelings but not to the point where it destroys the buzz.
“Dunno,” Bucky says, and then, a little manically, points up at the ceiling. “S’fun tracing patterns, y’know?”
Steve sees the beauty in everything, Bucky knows. Whether it’s the artist in him, or something that is just undeniably there at Steve’s core, he’s not sure, can’t be sure, because Steve is Steve and he’s unlike anyone he’s ever known. You can sit a beaten kitten in front of Steve and he’d find the strength in it’s will to survive, could sit a rotten apple in front of Steve and he’d think the worm who caused it was just doing what it had to do, and Bucky can’t help but find it endlessly endearing.
At least, if Bucky royally screws up, he thinks Steve would still manage to see the good in him. He would point a finger at Bucky’s center, trace a line to his heart and still see something worth clinging onto.
“Look,” Steve murmurs, breaking Bucky out of his head —and Steve’s always had this ability to break Bucky away from his thoughts with a hand on his shoulder or a poke to the ribs, the only person in the world who Bucky trusts enough to let him —with a soft, inviting smile. It takes all of Bucky’s hard-wired self control not to lean over and taste the seam of his lips. But, Jesus, does he want to. “There’s some constellations.”
Bucky blinks, slow and languid. “It’s not night time, Stevie.”
“On your ceiling,” Steve clarifies with a laugh.
“Oh,” Bucky says, and looks up. He doesn’t see what Steve sees, not really, but he doesn’t believe Steve isn’t actually seeing it. He makes a mental note to look at it later, when the high has worn off and sighs. “S’nice.”
“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky feels calloused fingers curl around his wrist. Bucky panics, absolutely certain that Steve can feel the rapid beating of his heart, but if Steve does, he doesn’t say anything on it. “It is.”
“I got high with Peggy, once,” Steve says, when the ceiling has become boring and Bucky’s eyes feel scratchy.
He pushes himself up into a sitting position and fixes Steve with what he hopes is a curious look. “What.”
Steve grins. “Freshman year of college,” Steve starts, and Bucky’s heart pangs in his chest. Steve met Peggy and things seemed to shift between them. It’s not that Bucky was jealous —he was —or that he didn’t think Peggy was deserving of someone like Steve, because she was, she was, and that was the entire problem. She was fiery and smart and fucking beautiful and maybe he did feel threatened by that, because Bucky was all hard lines and a clever mouth, and she was soft curves and red lips, and they were so, so different. Bucky never had to compete for Steve’s affection before, and then came Peggy, and Bucky started spending most of his nights alone in his cramped dorm room with the neck of a bottle in his hands.
But then Peggy moved back to England and Steve lost the light in his step and Bucky drowned in guilt for ever wishing her to be gone in the first place. He still hasn’t told Steve, but he was angry back then, and it wasn’t hard to read that. He wonders if Steve already knows (Steve isn’t stupid, so he probably does).
“Didn’t take Peggy Carter to do that.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” Steve says, and his voice is wistful. He misses her, Bucky knows. Even when they weren’t dating, he knew Peggy was the only person aside from Bucky himself that Steve felt completely comfortable around. “We were at this party and someone brought out this bag of weed and instead of denying it like I thought she would, she took the rolling paper on the table and sucked it down with the best of ’em.”
Bucky blinks, and then lets out a stuttering laugh. “Sounds like you almost peed yourself, pal.”
Steve doesn’t answer him, instead says, “I think even Natasha was impressed.” That’s a feat, really. Natasha isn’t impressed by anything, certainly not by the way Bucky pines after Steve, like all of the time.
The joint is still in Bucky’s fingers, and he’s already high enough, but he takes a hit anyway, and passes it to Steve. Steve doesn’t deny it, either, and it makes Bucky smile.
He’s considerably high, limbs loose and head cloudy, which is why he doesn’t think twice about suggesting it. “Hey, Stevie. Can I try somethin’?”
Steve blinks at home. “Sure, Buck.”
“Okay,” Bucky laughs, breathlessly, and then bites on his lips. “Just, don’t give me a shiner, okay?”
Steve’s eyebrows furrow, and instead of reaching out his thumb to smooth the skin like he desperately wants to, Bucky takes a hit off the joint in his hand and clamors onto Steve’s lap. He’s practically radiating warmth like a mobile furnace, and he can’t help the noise he makes when their bodies press together, close and tight.
“Bucky, what are you —” Bucky doesn’t give him time to answer, just traces the freckles dotting Steve’s cheeks with the tips of his fingers and presses their lips together. The smoke is full in Bucky’s lungs, filling him up with a warmth that only weed can create, and it’s easy to push it into Steve’s mouth when his lips open up on a gasp.
It’s getting warmer in the room, Bucky’s skin heating up nicely, and he pulls back, eyes right on Steve.
“What was that, Buck?” Steve stutters, the smoke leaving him in bursts. Bucky looks down at him, sees the way Steve’s eyes are roaming Bucky’s face, searching for answers, takes in the way Steve’s spreading his legs, slightly, to accommodate Bucky’s weight, and can’t recall a time that he’s ever been more in love with Steve fucking Rogers.
Steve doesn’t say anything, just keeps on watching him wordlessly, and Bucky panics, a little, not enough to start affecting his high, but enough that his fingers slip where they’re resting on Steve’s shoulders, and his thighs shake with the possibility that maybe he overstepped some boundaries, today, and he probably did. For all that Bucky can read Steve like a book, he’s never been able to read him here, where Steve has always kept the cards with Bucky on ’em held close to his chest.
Bucky blinks, and is just about to crawl off his lap, when Steve’s hands settle like brands on his hips. “Don’t,” Steve whispers. “Do it again.”
Bucky can’t help the slow, pleased grin that takes over his face, and he nods, reaching for the joint precariously set in the ash tray beside them, and breathes it in, deliriously slow. He wonders if Steve is watching the way his lips are cradling it, and then shoves the thought away. He’s pretty sure Steve hasn’t even once thought about his lips in an unartistic sort of way, and there’s no use on dwelling on it now.
For all of the hesitation before, Steve surges to meet him halfway, this time, mouth opening immediately as Bucky pushes the smoke into his mouth. Bucky’s about to pull away, but Steve’s hand slides behind his head and holds him in place, and fuck, he must’ve temporarily blacked out or something, because shit like this doesn’t happen to him. Bucky doesn’t get to kiss the best friend he’s been pining over for years, doesn’t get to sit in his lap with his hands locked on his shoulders like a vice.
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, because maybe it’s the weed, or maybe it’s the stress of finals, or maybe it’s a mixture of both, but he knows that Steve could never possibly want this. “You don’t want this.”
He pulls away. When Bucky finally meets his eyes, again, they’re hard, and he braces himself for the rejection that’s about to come. “You think I don’t want this.”
Bucky snorts. “Stop pullin’ my balls, Stevie,” Bucky says, but it lacks any bite. He knows Steve doesn’t mean any harm. He never does. “It’s obvious.”
Steve is quiet for a long time, and it’s then that Bucky realizes that he’s still in his best friend’s lap. He’s not sure what it says about him, but he’s trying his damnedest not to curl up and beg to be allowed to stay. “You’re an idiot, Buck.”
“Huh?”
“I said,” Steve clarifies, and it might be the weed, but Bucky’s sure his grip tightens on Bucky’s hips. “You’re an idiot. Impossibly oblivious, more so than Natasha says.”
“Huh?” He repeats, because what.
Instead of answering him, Steve’s fingers stutter across Bucky’s cheekbones, touch gentle and light and not nearly enough. He can’t help but press into it like the sap he is, and in between one breath and the next, Steve is kissing him, firm and determined, like he has something to prove. He makes a surprised noise in the back of his throat, and his mind hasn’t caught up other than the litany of kisskisskissSteve’skissingyouyouidiot that’s running on playback in his head, but his body knows what to do, so he curls his fingers in the lapel of Steve’s jacket, sliding his tongue into Steve’s mouth.
Steve kisses like he does everything else, with a bone-headed drive that Bucky fucking adores. It’s dirty and hot and Bucky finds himself melting into it, knees turning to jello.
“Fuck,” Bucky says, and rolls his hips into Steve’s, because he’s feeling reckless and there’s a mischievousness he hasn’t felt in a while. Steve doesn’t disappoint, making a broken sound in the back of his throat, hips jerking up into Bucky’s own. “Fuck. Why haven’t we been doing this for years?”
And Steve laughs, glorious and like the sun. “‘Cause we deserve each other, apparently,” He sounds like he’s quoting someone again, whether it’s Natasha or it’s Barton, Bucky isn’t sure, but he doesn’t care, either.
“Sounds like,” he starts, pressing his hips down into Steve’s own. “We got a helluva lot of time to make up for, then.”
“Uh huh,” Steve grunts, and Bucky can’t help it, he can’t, because he’s always been weak for Steve, and finally tasting him has only made that worse. He leans in to mouth at his neck, teeth biting and teasing at the pale skin. Steve tastes like sunshine, as weird as it sounds, like sunshine and the saltiness of his sweat and like the apple scented body wash he uses.
Bucky’s addicted instantly.
He wakes up slowly.
The pot clings pleasantly to his bones, the joint long since forgotten on his nightstand, and he loves mornings like this, when he wakes up and the haze hasn’t completely faded, completely unlike a hangover or waking up drunk. He’s warm, too-warm almost, and there’s a weight pressing him down into his mattress, grounding him there.
He peeks over his shoulder and sees Steve staring back at him. His eyes are impossibly blue, impossibly wide, and focused on him.
Bucky smiles at him. “Mornin’, Stevie.”
Steve returns the smile, his fingers grazing down the sides of Bucky’s ribs. “G’morning.”
They lay there for a while, dopily smiling at each other like a bunch of fucking nerds, and Bucky hasn’t felt this slapstick happy in a while. Steve’s touch on his skin is like a constant anchor, and Bucky slips an ankle between Steve’s legs, because he’s cold and Steve hasn’t been since high school.
Bucky spends a few minutes counting the eyelashes that fan over Steve’s pale cheeks, before something occurs to him. “Hey.”
Steve’s eyes don’t open, but his mouth quirks. “Hm?”
“Go out with me,” Bucky says, heart stuttering in his chest. He doesn’t think Steve would say no, not after last night, but his heart isn’t as easy to convince.
Steve’s smile grows, now. “Askin’ me out on a date, Buck? Isn’t that sort of backwards?”
Bucky shrugs, and the movement shakes the bed. He’s always been backwards; they’ve always been backwards. “Not like we’d do things right, huh?”
“Good point,” Steve agrees, and his eyes open. They’re happy. Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever seen Steve so happy, and he has no idea what he did to have Steve look at him like that, but he’d like to keep doing it. “Yeah.”
Bucky grins, his hand squeezing the skin on Steve’s bare him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
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