One Star Shining
Bucky x Clint
Warnings: Implications of comics-canon-typical child abuse, but nothing on-screen. One innocent kiss when they’re thirteen. Less-innocent kisses when they’re twenty-three, but it’s all pretty PG-13.
A/N: For my “childhood friends” square in Winterhawk Bingo. This was supposed to be a ~500 word Hump Day ficlet, but… here we are! Do me a favor and pretend to be shocked by this turn of events?
Title/inspiration from “Grapefruit Moon” by Tom Waits. Header image features Rudy Pankow, who I have casted to play The Clint Who Lives In My Head, because of reasons.
It’s been a decade since Bucky last saw Clint, but there are some faces you just don’t forget.
When Clint moved in next door, he was a scrawny, scrappy twelve-year-old in jeans that were a couple sizes too big, with curious eyes and perpetually scraped knees. They spent most of their time together that summer, skipping stones in the neighbor’s muddy pond and stealing peaches from their tree, or making up names for new constellations.
Bucky taught him how to ride a bike. He told Clint to be careful about pedaling too fast down the big hill; Bucky made that mistake exactly once, years ago. He warned Clint about the risk, but Clint did it anyway, laughing the whole way, smiling so wide that for one thrilling second Bucky almost believed that he’d beaten gravity and wouldn’t ever crash.
Clint did crash, of course. He crashed spectacularly, but he never screamed like Bucky did; he was silent, smiling through the tears, as Bucky bandaged his skinned knees and bleeding palms with hands that shook from the secondhand adrenaline.
“Worth it,” Clint said, with a fierce grin, and as soon as his skin scabbed over, he tried it again.
When Bucky remembered him later, he tried to think about the night they went out after midnight to watch the Perseids. Clint’s foster parents had stopped letting him have sleepovers, but he snuck out the window anyway. They spent the night in Bucky’s backyard, lying in the grass, close enough that their arms sometimes brushed.