Drawing Lessons

Hands

"Here, I'll hold my hand out like this," Steve placed his hand gently on the table in a way that he hoped was picturesque, "And I'll use my other hand to show you how to draw it." Bucky smiled, looking at Steve's bony hand lying on the table. "First we're gonna draw the top of it, right here," Steve brushed his finger along the top edge of his hand, before placing the tip of his pencil on the blank page of his sketchbook and perfectly replicating the curves and ridges along the top of his hand. Bucky looked at Steve's hand for a second before placing his pencil on the paper and drawing his own line. This time Steve smiled.

"Great. Now, right in the middle here, we're gonna draw where the thumb comes out." Steve pointed the sharpened tip of his pencil toward the center of his hand.

"Right here, you mean?" Bucky asked, pointing just slightly higher than what Steve had in mind.

"No. Right... there" Steve held Bucky's wrist gently, moving Bucky's hand until it was just brushing against the base of Steve's thumb. Steve's hands were really warm. Bucky's hands were really soft. "Draw that."

Slowly, Steve showed Bucky how to draw his hand, line by line. Often (probably more than was absolutely necessary) Bucky traced the edges of Steve's fingers before he drew them. It sent electric chills up Steve's spine.

"There, see? We're done." Steve found himself saying all too soon. They were finished drawing the lines of Steve's hand, and he had even taken the time to show Bucky how to shade and blend the pencil to make it look more realistic. He could now finally move his hand, and was discovering that it was rather sore from resting in such an odd position for so long. Bucky watched as Steve slowly rotated his wrist around in circles, opening and closing his fist.

"Hey, Steve?" Steve looked up at the sound of Bucky's soft voice. Bucky hadn't intended to speak, and yet words had slipped out of his mouth. "Wanna hang out tomorrow? We could... see a movie or something. Maybe you could spend the night, I don't know..." Bucky trailed off. He wasn't sure where he was going with this.

"Yeah, sounds great." Steve replied casually, shrugging his bony shoulders. Bucky broke into a grin, his teeth showing through his lips as his eyes crinkled slightly at the corners. Steve cocked a half-smile back at him.

"Meet here tomorrow at... oh... let's say seven? After dinner? Then we can catch a movie and head back here. You can spend the night. Sound good?" Bucky thought out loud, glancing up at the ceiling contemplatively as he pursed his lips ever so slightly.

"Sounds good to me. See ya tomorrow!" Steve called with a one-handed wave directed behind him as he sauntered out of Bucky's room. Three seconds later Bucky heard his front door open and close. Just like that, Steve had vanished into the evening. Bucky remained seated for a minute or two, frozen. Slowly, he began to collect himself, picking up his pencil and putting it away. As he reached to pick up his paper from the table, he saw that Steve had left his sketchbook resting there.

For a moment, Bucky thought of running out onto the street to catch up with Steve and return his sketchbook, but Steve would be coming over tomorrow anyway, so why bother? Bucky moved the sketchbook and his own drawing of Steve's hand onto his bed and put away the table. Once done, he turned on his small radio and sat down on his bed, one leg folded under the other.

Bucky found himself humming along to Fred Astaire's rich voice that was crackling out of his little radio.

"Just the way you look tonight..." Bucky sang gently to himself, closing his eyes for a moment and swaying to the rhythm of the song. Opening his eyes once more, he picked up Steve's sketchbook. He'd only seen snippets of Steve's drawings before, and he knew this might not be the most honest thing he'd ever done, but he was curious, and opened the sketchbook to the first page and began to take in the beautiful details of Steve' black and white masterpieces.

The first page of the book was a drawing of a small kitten: black, with two white splotches on one ear and one paw. Individual hairs had been drawn over the kitten's face and paws, as well as all down its back. That must have taken Steve forever to draw. Bucky could just picture Steve, hunched over his sketchbook for hours, pausing only to sharpen his pencils. He pictured the determined look on Steve's face, focus intent on the drawing pad in front of him. His eyebrows would be slightly pulled together in concentration, but other than that, his face would be relaxed, serene. Perhaps Steve would even have a slight smile playing at his lips as his drawing came to life before his eyes.

"'Cause I love you, just the way you look tonight..." Bucky sang absentmindedly as he flipped to the next page, which contained a drawing of Steve himself. In the drawing, Steve's loose clothes were rumpled, a part of his shirt torn as his face bled in several spots. The back of the page dated the drawing to almost two months ago. In this particular drawing, Steve looked just as he had the day he taught Bucky how to draw irises: beat up and used to it. Worry snuck into Bucky's facial features, his eyebrows knotting together and his lips turning downward slightly. Steve was clearly a tough, punk little kid, but that didn't stop someone like Bucky from worrying about him. How often was Steve beat up like that?

Bucky continued to flip slowly through the pages of Steve's sketchbook. He stopped to admire each picture he came across in detail, noting the level of skill Steve possessed. As he began to reach dates closer to the current day, he noticed that Steve had begun to obsessively draw birds. A week ago, he'd drawn a blue jay, a robin, a raven, a pigeon, and a cardinal, all in extreme detail. He'd never drawn a single bird up until that point, but he had suddenly grown quite fond of them.

Then Bucky came to a drawing from the day before. Bucky had only just met Steve that day, though he felt like he'd known him for his whole life. The drawing was of Bucky himself. He studied it, mesmerized. Steve had definitely drawn it well, carefully making it look exactly like Bucky did in real life. In the drawing, his left hand was reaching upward to the sky, a small sparrow resting on his pointer finger. The drawing of Bucky was smiling delicately, looking at the tiny creature on his finger. The background was drawn with almost no detail at all: Bucky could tell that it was the inside of his high school, but only by the rough outline of lockers. For the most part, it was just shaded blurs. Bucky looked at Steve's drawing carefully, noting how long Steve must have spent drawing the detail work in Bucky's hair, face and clothing. It would have taken him hours of focus.

Bucky flipped the page over, seeing that Steve had written some sentences on the back of the drawing in his wild, loopy handwriting: Here's a drawing of this sweet jerk I literally crashed into earlier today. He was actually nice to me and helped me pick up my stuff. I just needed to draw him immediately, so I went down to the nurse's office to lie down (which I can do any time without questions due to my circumstances) and spent almost the rest of the school day drawing him. James Barnes. Bucky. The school's track star. He's got no business talking to someone like me, and yet he struck up a conversation anyway. I'd love to get to know him. Steve had written quite a bit on the back of the drawing. He wrote on the backs of other drawings, Bucky had seen, but never quite this much information. Bucky didn't realize he was smiling until he snapped out of it, which was quite likely a good few minutes after he'd first read the passage. He'd zoned out after he'd seen that Steve had drawn a small heart next to his name. What the heck?

Closing the sketchbook, he stood up and stretched. Bucky reached over and turned off his radio. Though a few songs had now cycled through since it had played, he still had 'The Way You Look Tonight' stuck in his head. He hummed a few lines, before giving in to his own wishes and singing the entire last verse while slow dancing around his bedroom with a phantom partner. All he could think of was that little bird on the tip of his finger in Steve's drawing. That tiny, trifling little bird that meant so much to him for no reason at all.