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Steve is seven and Bucky is eight, and here is how it goes: alphas are tall and broad-shouldered with a trick of looking at you straight in the eye, and omegas like to beg.
Steve is not begging. Steve is on his knees with blood on his teeth, and Bucky protests with his fists first and his mouth not at all. It is not a long fight.
Steve is not impressed.
“I didn’t need help,” he says. He gets up without taking Bucky’s hand and dusts gravel from his knees with his mouth in a twist.
“That’s stupid,” Bucky says, with all the conviction of an eight-year-old. “And I wasn’t helping, I was fighting.”
“You’re not supposed to do that, either,” Steve points out primly.
“You were fighting first,” Bucky says, undeterred, and after a moment Steve cracks him a still-red smile. Bucky smiles back.
———
When Bucky’s fifteen he shoots up half a foot, putting on muscle and filling out almost in front of Steve’s eyes. He’s perpetually hungry but refuses the food Steve tries to share, and sometimes he hooks his arm around Steve’s shoulders and presses his thumb to the skin of Steve’s neck, pulls him close until their hips are pressed flush. Steve’s sense of smell has never been great but he’s not stupid: he knows how this goes.
He thinks it might not be so bad if it’s Bucky. He thinks he might like it.
———
Steve’s first heat hits when he’s eighteen. He calls off work and doesn’t call Bucky, instead sets himself down in a corner with Bucky’s pillow and a bucket of cold water. Bucky comes home to find Steve’s clothes in a neat pile on the kitchen table and Steve with his hair still damp and curled around his ears.
“Jesus,” Bucky says, and locks the door. “You should’ve said — you should’ve told me, Steve —”
“I didn’t want —” Steve says blurrily, “don’t fuss, Buck,” but Bucky’s touching him, pulling him in, and it’s like fire against Steve’s skin. Steve shudders and closes his eyes, and when he opens them back up his head is tucked against Bucky’s chest.
“I’ll get your shirt wet,” Steve says, and Bucky laughs.
“You are so stupid,” Bucky says, and pushes Steve’s hair out of his eyes. “What were you gonna do, ride it out with your fingers and your teeth —”
Steve’s voice sounds very small when he says, “You could.”
Bucky reels back, lets go of him completely, and it’s a shock, having cold air hit skin. “Steve, I —” Bucky says, and Steve doesn’t want to hear it so he pushes.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he says, sitting back with his best smile. “I’m not — you don’t gotta marry me, it’s just sex.”
“Steve,” Bucky says, sounding very ragged, “I can’t.”
“Oh,” Steve says dumbly, and then again when he realizes what Bucky means. “But — you —”
“I know,” Bucky says, “I tried, I wanted — god,” and Steve’s never seen Bucky cracked open like this, words spilling from him like he couldn’t stop them even if he tried. “I practiced,” he says, muffled, into his knees, “I pretended, because you — you know what they say.”
The whole neighborhood’s been thinking Bucky Steve’s alpha for years. It didn’t matter that Steve hadn’t presented — they looked at the thin line of his wrists and the way he ducked his head under Bucky’s touch and assumed. Yeah, he knows how it goes.
“I would’ve been good for you,” Bucky confesses miserably, “I would’ve been so good,” and Steve —
Steve snaps.
He pulls Bucky in by the front of his shirt, crashes their mouths together. Bucky makes a noise like a wounded animal; his teeth are sharp against Steve’s bottom lip.
“I want it to be you,” Steve says, panting, when he pulls away, “I want — I don’t care, Buck, I don’t need a stranger.”
“How would we even —” Bucky looks dazed. “How would it work —”
“It’ll work,” Steve says, in the same way he plunges into everything else: with unshaken conviction. “If you want.”
“Yeah, Steve,” Bucky says, pressing his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. “I — I want.”
———
Bucky’s pillow has long lost its scent. It doesn’t matter. Steve comes with his nose buried in the collar of Bucky’s shirt and three of Bucky’s fingers inside him, and Bucky doesn’t bite him afterwards but he does pinch, softly, the tightly drawn skin at the back of Steve’s neck.
———
Steve asks, sleepily, “How did I not know,” and Bucky presses his forearm over his eyes.
“There are ways,” he says, and he’s tired but he’s known it was coming since the moment the smell of Steve, hot and desperate, hit his nose.
———
Bucky lies on his enlistment form, and it would never work except that he knows a nurse and she knows a doctor, and it’s not like they’re not sending shipments of suppressants overseas, anyway. Wartime aid, for their cousins across the Atlantic.
Steve doesn’t bother, just sits with his back straight and his jaw set, daring them to laugh him out of the office.
———
There are facts everyone knows about Captain America:
Captain America was born in 1942, out of a box of steel and glass.
Captain America was the invention of a man named Dr. Erskine and another called Howard Stark.
In 1944, Captain America set out on a suicide mission to save his omega.
———
“I’m looking for someone,” Steve says. “Sergeant James Barnes, has anyone —”
The men look at each other. They shift uncomfortably, like none of them want to be the one to deliver bad news, and then a man with a beret perched on his head squares his shoulders.
“They had no idea,” he tells Steve, kindly. “They thought he was ace, like the rest.”
Steve blinks at him, baffled.
“He’s saying,” a wildly-mustachioed man breaks in, “your fella went into heat three days ago.”
———
Bucky is —
Steve finds Bucky naked and strapped to a table, mumbling his name-rank-serial number, and he —
“Bucky,” he says, frantic, “Bucky, it’s me,” and Bucky’s eyes focus on his face, slowly.
“Steve,” he says, and then more sharply, “Steve, what’re you —”
“Did they touch you,” Steve says, “Bucky, did they touch you,” and his hands are shaking so hard he can barely undo the straps. He looks at the bruised shadows mottling Bucky’s body under the leather and he wants to — he wants to —
“Steve, no,” Bucky says, and squeezes at Steve’s hands, “they didn’t touch — they didn’t touch me, will you look at me —”
Steve looks, and then Bucky is kissing him. It’s hungry and full of teeth, and Steve feels Bucky’s hands moving in long strokes down his back, trying to soothe all the trembles out of him.
“I thought you were dead,” Steve says, quietly, into Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky, the bastard, actually barks out a laugh.
“Well, I thought you were smaller,” he says, yanking Steve’s head down, “so looks like we were both wrong, yeah?”
———
Colonel Phillips is a man who cuts straight to the point. Steve appreciates that.
“Barnes is a damn fine sniper,” Phillips says, “but you know what people are gonna say.”
“That he’s a damn fine sniper, I’d imagine,” Steve says. “Sir.”
“Do not get smart-mouthed with me,” Phillips scowls. “They’re gonna say that he earned his way into the team in your bed, that he’s only there to keep you warm at night. It ain’t gonna be nice for either of you.”
Steve tries, very hard, to keep his voice calm. “I’d be happy to stop sleeping in beds for the duration of the war,” he says. “Bucky deserves to be on the team.”
Phillips closes his eyes and mouths a prayer. “All right,” he says finally, “on your head be it,” and he irritably waves Steve out the door.
———
Bucky says, “You’re a fucking idiot.”
Bucky says, “I don’t wanna make this hard for you.”
“Everyone else can go fuck themselves,” Steve says, and Bucky swallows a shout of delight.
“You’re crazy, you know that,” he says fondly, pulling Steve on top of him, and he arches and tips his head back as Steve licks along his jawline.
“I told you,” Steve mumbles into the hollow of Bucky’s throat, “it’ll work. We’ll make it work.”
———
Peggy Carter walks tall and looks Steve straight in the eye. She doesn’t even glance at Bucky.
Bucky doesn’t say it until after, when Carter’s long gone and Bucky’s had one too many shots to stand up quite straight.
“You could,” he says, quietly, like an offering. “With Carter. Dame’s got alpha stamped all over her, I know you’re interested.”
“Bucky —” Steve says.
“‘s what you want, isn’t it?” Bucky goes on, thoughtful. “Your kids’d be adorable. Bit feisty, maybe.”
He’s not expecting Steve’s hand on his wrist, the other one braced against his shoulder. He lets Steve crowd him against the alley wall, looks up into Steve’s furious face.
“You know what I want,” Steve tells him, very low. “It’s always been you.”
When Steve kisses him, Bucky closes his eyes, digs his nails into the soft skin of Steve’s inner wrist. Steve bites at his mouth and slips his knee between Bucky’s thighs until Bucky suggests, breathless, that they go elsewhere.
———
“Are you sure?” Steve says.
Bucky raises an eyebrow at him. “I gotta teach you some manners,” he says. “That’s what you say when a man asks you to stick your dick in him?”
Steve blushes, high up on his cheeks. “I just didn’t know,” he says, “if it’d work for you.”
Bucky shrugs. “It might not,” he says. “But I wanna know how long you can last, like that.”
Steve reaches for his belt. Bucky laughs.
———
“Bite me,” Bucky says. Steve’s been inside him for hours, rocking slowly with his hips, and Bucky’s hair is soaked with sweat.
“Do you want —” Steve says, “What if the others —”
“Let ‘em see,” Bucky spits out. “I wanna know, Steve, I wanna feel it, I want it, please, Christ —”
Steve mouths at the juncture of Bucky’s neck and shoulder, licks the salt from the skin, and then he sinks his teeth into the muscle, sharp and all at once. His teeth break skin; he feels blood welling up against his tongue.
Bucky buries his face into his pillow. His face is wet.
———
There are facts no one knows about the Winter Soldier.
The Winter Soldier was born James Buchanan Barnes, 1917.
His arm was the invention of Arnim Zola, but Steve Rogers is the name etched deep into his bones, worn into his muscles like a habit.
He fell off a train with the perfect circle of a bite mark still set into his skin like a brand.