Stucky ➳ Oneshots

Hold Still

written by bopeep on ao3 [https://archiveofourown.org/users/bopeep]
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Sarah Rogers knows her boy inside and out, for better and for worse, and she doesn't suggest he spend his afternoons studying Bucky Barnes' handsome face just for practice.

A mother knows things, even if her son and his angsty childhood friend haven't quite figured it out.
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Sarah was used to her boy Steven coming home wearing colors she preferred to reserve for the workplace: blood, bruise, blush, tears. She would mend his slacks, wrap his breaks, talk him through it all as best as she could between shifts at the hospital as if she never clocked out. No tussle was ever quite the same. She came to know the ins and outs of every push and shove from the way he would recount them, blow by blow. Sarah would sigh heavily; of course he was never in the wrong. Steve, furious and infinite for such a small frame, was dangerously right, just like his father: cemented into his ways and moving for no one. Sarah had loved him for it, still loved her son for it, and was grateful the other girls looked the other way once in a while when she tucked away a bandage roll or box of Curity cotton in the pocket of her smock. Waiting at home was a personal triage. They knew about Sarah's boy.

Because while Steve fought a lot of other boys, it was his own breaking body that he fought with the most wrenching vehemence; he was no stranger to the children's ward. Sarah knew God gave her this child on purpose. His heart fluttered like a bird against his cage of brittle bones and he was never without a cough or cold somewhere nipping at him. On nights when he shook with fever she held him close to her, swaddled like an infant in those early days alone without Joe. It was a blessing and a constant source of worry that she worked as a ward nurse; the stolen goods she brought home in her pockets would never be enough to fight what contagions she brought home to him that she could not see, any creeping infection or stowaway virus.

Heavens forfend.

But all at once there were two of them, these bright and true-hearted boys, and they split the quota of hurt. Sarah felt her prayers had been answered when James Barnes showed up one afternoon, and Steve had someone to shoulder all that righteousness too big for his frame. For that, Sarah loved him with her whole heart, because he was there when she could not be. She thought of Bucky like a jar for pennies; she invested in him the love she knew he gave back to Steve in spades, and would, when she was gone. Because one day she would be gone, and Steven's fight wouldn't stop for the world, and who would be there to wash the worst colors away then?

When she prayed, she never pictured a boy like Bucky for a guardian angel; there was enough of that pomade in his hair to slick a city sidewalk in a drought and he had a smile that could undo crime. Sarah was perfectly aware that teamed up with Steve's uncanny ability to find or make trouble they would get on in all ways like a house on fire, but above all else he was there and his whole heart was open when others had snuffed theirs out like streetlamps in these hard times. She couldn't hold it against them, those doused lights. Folks seemed to respond to hardship in one of two ways: they either let it make them cold and hard, or dug their heels in and stuck closer together with the rest of their suffering brothers.

It felt every day that Steve was getting stronger at Bucky's side as they grew together (Bucky faster than Steve, though he rarely mentioned it.) Bucky spent many days sitting on the edge of Steve's bed, both of them nose deep in little novels and reading the exciting bits aloud (those days when Steve could not go out.) Sarah would beg for extra shifts then, when she knew someone would be around. Saint Bucky, to her mind.

But teenage years are tough, even on soulmates. Overnight they became aware of odd sensations and complicated feelings that accompanied the stretching of limbs, maturity somewhere on the horizon, and something began to itch beneath their skin, grinding gears and setting the two on edge and ready to lash out at each other whenever the pressure of hormones built too far.