despite everything, it's still you

Ummmm a fic prompt. I am very into dragons lately, especially the idea of a love interest being part of a dragon’s hoard, so I would like dragon shifter Steve hoarding Bucky for a stucky prompt? (It could work with poly too, just give Steve more people to hoard 😂)

Well, Z2, as you are the only contestant, you win by default. I confess, I could hardly have hoped for a more True Fan than my fandom NOK.

(Y'all can check my AO3 profile, this is a true fact.)

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WARNING: Steve eats bugs in this one. Well, spiders. It makes sense in context.

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Bucky knew Steve was a dragon. He was not sure what kind of dragon, but Bucky was scarcely a dragon expert, and even though they'd known each other for-fucking-ever, he'd never actually seen him turn into a dragon, or really, as a dragon, in anything but the dark.

And goddamn it, like any normal human person, Bucky was colorblind in the dark.

Also, Steve refused to use whatever his magic was when he was around Bucky, because it would give him a hint, probably. Steve was very secretive about the whole "Oh, by the way, I'm actually a dragon" business. Which was suspicious, from Bucky's perspective.

"I am otherwise an open book," Steve drawled laconically when Bucky was poking him about it once again. "Let me have one mystery."

"I'll be satisfied with an element," Bucky tried again. "Just the element, so I can narrow it down."

"Mm. No." Steve stretched until his neck made a soft cracking noise, and then shook his head. "I may have overdone it last night."

"Overdone what?" Bucky demanded. "Flying? Swimming?"

"Not telling," Steve said, beaming smugly.

He was infuriating when he was like this. He did it on purpose, Bucky was absolutely certain.

And then, after the war, after the ice- of course Steve survived the ice raw, while Bucky had to be drugged to Hell and back and it hurt every time- the flowers started.

It was Sam's compost bin. Steve poked at it a few times- Bucky was still watching him like a hawk for draconic behavior- and then one day it was overrun with fucking spiders, and Sam hated it.

Sam was seriously contemplating setting the whole thing on fire, and Steve looked absolutely wounded to the core.

Bucky pursed his lips and squinted his eyes.

"Steve," he said. "Did you fill Sam's bin with spiders?"

"Yes and no," Steve said, carefully scooping spiders into glass jars with his naked fingers.

The spiders were remarkably calm about this.

Sam was not. Sam had gone inside with several bad words muttered under his breath and a touch paler than usual.

"Your dragon power is not spiders."

"Sometimes," Steve said. "Not just spiders, though. And not always spiders."

"Steve, how can manifesting piles of spiders be a dragon power?"

Steve tipped his head to one side and then the other, letting a few of the spiders skitter along his hand before gently shaking them into a fresh jar. "I didn't manifest the spiders. I don't think I did, anyway. Spiders do like me, but it was the bugs in the compost heap they were after, and I did accelerate the breeding of the bugs. Which brought the spiders."

"Steven. That is an unacceptable response." Bucky was very firm about this.

He didn't mind spiders, but he did mind that Sam was upset. Not an arachnophobic kind of upset, but a why are there seventeen million spiders in my compost bin upset. Though Bucky was pretty sure it was closer to seventeen hundred than seventeen million.

"Okay, so, you made a comment," Steve said, still scooping spiders. "When we were looking at arms."

"That is one of the finer parts of having a missing arm and a dragon for a paramour," Bucky said. "You get to look at limbs like they're fashion accessories and not worry about how much they cost."

"Paramour?" Steve was pleased, but a quick evaluation of his facial expression indicated it was at the spiders.

"Boyfriend is a word for teenagers and children, not hundred year old men or their dragons."

"Am I your dragon?" Steve glanced at him. The humor was distressingly absent for a moment, though there wasn't hostility, but that was- not the response Bucky expected.

"Aren't you?" Bucky asked.

"Not how dragons work," Steve said, going back to his spiders. "That is most definitely not how dragons work."

"I don't know how dragons work because you won't tell me," said Bucky. "I am left to conject."

"I don't think that's a word," Steve said, starting a fourth jar of spiders.

"Then why do you know what it means?" Bucky asked.

"Touche," Steve said. "I'll allow it."

"I made a comment about arms."

"You made a comment about arms that was in the neighborhood of my draconic origin," Steve said. "But I don't feel like giving you hints or letting you guess. I'm not a sphinx."

"So I'm just not going to know."

"That's the idea."

"Another unacceptable response."

"Leave me my mysteries. Oh! Good, they did it."

"They did what?" Bucky finally ventured closer. The spiders did not make his skin itch. He was unflappable. Seventy years of assassin training. He had no flinches left. (He told himself this. The goosebumps on his arm disagreed. He ignored them.)

"They laid a layer of web over the dirt that will help keep the baby worms extra moist," Steve said, pleased.

"Why couldn't you just use a net or something? They make breathable tarps for this kind of thing."

"Because spiderwebs are brilliant executions of natural geometry and fine detail, and I love them."

"I've never seen you this excited about gardening."

"Composting isn't exactly gardening," Steve demurred. "It's cultivated rot."

A light came on in Bucky's head.

"Oh, you son of a bitch," he said.

"Hm?" Steve grinned. For a moment, it looked like his teeth were too big and too many for his mouth.

"You dirty rotten bastard," Bucky huffed. "That explains so much."

"Do tell," Steve said.

"You're a fucking swamp dragon," Bucky said.

"Bog dragon," Steve corrected. "Although the proper term is worm."

"We spent the entire goddamn war in the mud and you always came out of it clean. You only ever got ashes on you."

"Blood, periodically," Steve said.

He did not eat one of the spiders off the back of his wrist. Bucky unsaw that.

"Was any of it yours?"

"Not much," Steve said. He did it again.

"Stop eating the spiders." Even Bucky could only take so much. He had to kiss that mouth later.

"You should try it." Steve offered Bucky the back of his hand. Said spider was the size of a dime and seemed to be looking back at Bucky with all eight(?) eyes.

"I will not."

"Your loss," Steve said, but he did go back to putting them back in the jar rather than nibbling them off his wrist like crumbs on one's fingers. "You're getting the silver one."

"The silver arm? I had a silver arm. I was thinking-"

"Silver," Steve said, light but with surprising firmness. "To stay on theme."

"Fuck's sake," Bucky grumbled, shaking his head. "How old are you?"

"We're the same age," Steve said. "Even if I measure myself in actual human years. I was born in Brooklyn in 1920."

"To bog worms," Bucky said.

"Immigrant Irish bog worms, yes."

"And I'm your person," Bucky said.

"That is how dragons work," Steve agreed. He looked at another escaping spider, and then out of the corner of his eye at Bucky.

"Do not." Bucky warned.

"Spoilsport," Steve said. He shook the spider into the current jar.

"Do you have any other people?"

"Not successfully, not yet," Steve said. "But I think Sam is going to give me his compost bin. I'll take it, for now."

There was a long pause.

"Wait, are the other myths real?"

"All myths are real to somebody," Steve said. "Oh, eggs!"