𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝 | 𝐁.𝐁.
summary | based off a request i got where i was asked to write some "spicy best friends to lover" featuring bucky ... first time ever participating in the trope, had to add my own twist. featuring somewhat of jock!bucky/frat!bucky. inbox open, requests super appreciated
pairing | bucky barnes x reader
synopsis | modern au, mentions of physical assault, mentions of violence, fighting, arguments, hurt/comfort, dubcon if you squint, grinding, make-out session, bamf bucky, protective bucky, bicep porn, childhood friends gone adult, friends to lovers, not as dark as it sounds, aka i love tagging things as if this is ao3
“Bucky.”
You call his name as loud as you dare, fixated on the third-story awning window stapled into the brick building. It was cold in Brooklyn for the six A.M. morning it was, and standing out on the sidewalk in nothing more than a sweetheart corset and a ragged denim skirt, it felt like the air was settling over your skin in a cold, all-consuming blanket. A chill racks through your arms as you hold them tight against your chest.
No reply. “Bucky.” You hiss, louder, wondering if you should just pick up a handful of pebbles from the tree-well nearest and throw a few off the glass of his window. It would be very Romeo and Juliet.
Alas - a light switches on then from inside the Barnes residence, and the need for star-crossed hijinks dissipates. The window pops open entirely and Bucky sticks the front half of his body out onto the street, bedhead on full display for all of New York to admire. He looked tired, with those sleepy blue eyes and crazy hair. A grey shirt hugged his biceps closely.
“What?” He calls down dreamily, as if the current situation required no more interrogation than the four letter word. In response, you jerk your chin over to the fire exit expectantly.
“I need you to slide the ladder down. Come on, it’s cold out here.”
Bucky stays where he is for a moment, forearms crossed on the windowsill. He doesn’t say anything for a second, enjoying the sight of you reaping the benefits of what you’ve sown from a night of evident partying, but with a heavy sigh, he wriggles his way out onto the fire escape. You watch him toe down the stairs barefoot, before releasing the ladder to a more manageable height. It jolts as it falls, making a sharp, clunky noise.
“Shh!” You call up, instinctively. “You’ll wake the whole damn building up.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Bucky calls back down dryly. He starts to inch the ladder back up again. “Would you rather I just…”
Laughing, you reach up for the rung closest. Bucky keeps his grip tight for a second, forcing the two of you into a game of tug-of-rope, but he releases his hold after a heartbeat and watches as you climb up.
You flip the back of your skirt down as you reach the top, following Bucky as he crawled from the ledge outside into the warm burrow of his room. Bucky Barnes arguably had the best bedroom known to man. It was small, but it worked better that way; what it lacked in size it made up for in coziness. He had a double bed shoved into one corner with a mound of pillows to nest into and thick Navajo star quilts layered over the mattress, color schemes ranging from burnt orange to deep green. Posters of Radiohead and Oasis plastered the walls - typical boy stuff. A couple of snapbacks hung on nail pegs, and the floor was littered with stuff that had once been taped up but finally fallen: empty energy drinks, and wasn’t it strange, what a trend that had become; a picture of his sister, all big eyes and black hair; a torn map of some video game landscape. There was a mess of laundry creating piles next to the rug, too, mounds of dirty socks and old shirts.
“Rough night?” Pries Bucky, feigning annoyance. His voice gave away how entertained he was. Bucky was popular. But he was more the college football, sneaking a flask into a bowling alley, tagging along to a game of golf at Chelsea Piers with his rich friends type, where you were more inclined to a night of dropping acid in some back-alley club before stumbling home with the sun and nearly giving in to the temptation of the cigarette butts that littered the gutter.
“Ugh,” you articulate, peeling your high-rise boots off. “Don’t remind me. I’m going to be hung the fuck over tomrrow.”
“You mean today.” He corrects, double checking that the latch on the window was locked properly before turning around and kicking a pile of laundry out of the way. He kept his voice low - his parents were still asleep. “It’s only six. You’ll wake up around one, moan like a wounded tiger till four, pick yourself up around five, and be back at it by eight.”
Grinning, you marvel at how well he knows you. “Don’t be mean, Buchanan.”
“I’m not. I’m being factual. I’m speaking factually.”
You turn to change, almost snorting. “Let me crash here?” It’s not really a question; you’re already undoing the back laces of your top. Bucky just turns to give you privacy.
“Are you, like, asking me?” The humor is evident in his voice. Something hits the back of your neck then, and you grope around to feel he’s thrown a spare shirt your way.
Dropping the corset to the floor, you give the bodice a swift kick under the bed in case Winnifred does any paraphernalia checks soon. You doubt she will - she wasn’t the type - but you were imposing enough already as it was; it was best not to leave Bucky with anything that might frame him in a bad light. His shirt feels deliciously cold as you slide it on over your head. The act made you nearly dizzy; you were halfway drunk yet, and sudden motions seemed to tip the equilibrium of things off.
You crane your head over your shoulder. “Can I have a pair of boxers too, please?” It was human nature for a girl of your age to be incapable of practical underwear. The kind you had on currently was a lacy thong that covered about as much as a leotard would, and the current palette of options was to either sleep in those bare next to your friend or with the skirt on. Neither seemed feasible. Besides, Bucky owned boxers that bordered on lethally comfortable, some knockoff Tom Ford silk brand that stretched over the thighs.
“Can you give me a second? I’m...looking for a clean pair.”
You stifled a gag as Bucky rooted through one of his dresser drawers. He was your best friend: a stand-up guy, a gentleman of the truest sense, even when the rest of Brooklyn seemed to prove incompetent, but sometimes it was blindingly clear he was such a guy. It was a biological imperative. Exhibit A: the all too convenient box of kleenex perched on his nightstand table. Hell, he even had a couple girls from newer Playboy covers taped to his ceiling. Sometimes when you spent the night and couldn’t sleep, their judgemental eyes stared down at you from above, all baseball tits and leather skin that suggested melanoma in ten years, tops.
“Here.” He says, finally, handing you an older blue gingham pair without meeting your eyes. “Are you decent?”
You roll your own. “Yes, Bucky. You can look.”
For someone who loved to stare at naked bodies, he sure put up one hell of a fuss when it came to potentially catching a glimpse of yours. Once, he accidentally walked in on you using the bathroom, and by the way he fell to the ground stomach-down and pretended to be stung by acid - complete with fake wails and cries of nonsense - you’d think he was a drama major at the college both of you went to.
He wasn’t. He was studying Physical Fitness, to become a therapist.
You just called him a dumbass and shut the door with your toe. He had a sister, for god sake; Lord knows he had to be all too used to hormones and tampons and having to deal with seeing her training bra fresh out of the laundry.
“That’s different,” he said once, after you brought it up. “But walking in on Rebecca taking a piss would be just as gross. You’re both like my sisters.”
With as much as he liked to play jester, there was truth in his words. Afterall, he was the one to teach you how to throw a proper punch; the one who stressed the difference between six cylinders in a vehicle’s engine and eight; the one who would glance disapprovingly at your outfits and comment “it’s like they get shorter each time,” but pinch at the bare expanse of your thighs anyways and always keep an ear out incase you came round his and needed a place to stay after a night out.
It was probably why sharing a bed and, generally, being in such close proximity while half naked wasn’t weird. There was never any stunted, awkward conversation as you’d crawl under the sheets together; never any prolonged eye contact and lapses of “experimentation.” At most, all you had to deal with was morning wood, and you did so by providing an appropriate laugh and polite ignorance as Bucky would shuffle out of sight down the hallway for a good twenty minutes until things settled.
You had been each other's first kisses, but that was more a measure of research than anything else. “Was that, like, really gross for you, too?” Bucky had asked as he pulled away from where the two of you had been sitting cross-legged in the library. It was. It was all warm spit and adolescent sloppiness and ew. It had been an act conducted with the severity of two brain surgeons poking around, and in all honesty, it sort of led to the two year arc where you didn’t exactly believe Bucky liked girls. Years later, and here he was making it a habit to shack up with Natasha Romanoff in the backseat of her Bentley.
“Hey,” he says suddenly, back in the present, as he peels the topmost layer of his bed more open to make space for two. There was still a warm divot in the mattress where he must have slept. “What would you do if, like, you were in the airport, and your flight got delayed to, like, the point of having to be imbursed one of those hotel waivers. And you’d have to spend the night.”
“Why?” You ask, stretching into the spot closest to the wall. Bucky once said if zombies ever got in, he’d be the first to die because of it and you wouldn’t care.
He ignores you. “I’d probably cry.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“No.” Bucky shoots a dirty look out of the corner of his eye, like it’s your fault you don’t have his extended schedule memorized. “I was having a dream about it when you woke me up. For the record, it would be very masculine crying. Tears of frustration.”
“I’d refuse.” You retort.
“Refuse what?”
“Being deferred. If I make it halfway through a connecting flight and they try to strand me somewhere, I’d...I don’t know. I’d fly the plane myself.”
Bucky just scoffs. “Okay, Sully.”
“Wait,” you backtrack. “Why do you have nightmares about air travel?”
He flips off the overhead light then and darkness falls while the two of you whisper about potential symbolism. Mutually, it’s agreed upon that Bucky probably has some weird shit going on representing an emotional journey.
Rebecca bangs on the wall around seven to tell you both to shut the fuck up. She did it so often that she had to put up a poster of the drummer from 5 Seconds of Summer to hide the indentation it made into the wall. Bucky just flips off the air before rolling onto his stomach. “Let me know if you need any water, okay?” He whispers. “Or a bucket. There’s a spare toothbrush in the top left drawer in the bathroom, too, if you do end up throwing up.”
You grunt, flexing your toes underneath the waistband of his joggers to invade the warm skin there. Watery sunlight was starting to leak in through the heavy blinds, casting the room into a cycle of soft renewal. Letting your eyes shut softly, you could only hope the same would be said of your liver come morning.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: a too handsy, too rowdy asshole not understanding the concept of no, and slapping you straight across the face in bed after a half-drunken meeting by chance. It left you with a bright red mark square over the cheek, the etching of each finger discernible, and Bucky absolutely livid.
“Just tell me his name.” He spoke eerily calm, but loud, as he paced the carpet of his bedroom. It had been nearly a week since you’d last spent the night. The broad stretch of Bucky’s shoulders looked borderline menacing as each tendon flexed itself taut in anger. He was in a black muscle tee, and the cutouts of his arms made his biceps look huge. “Seriously, Y/N. I don’t think this is funny. Just tell me his name.”
“Nobody is laughing, Bucky.” You complain, sitting on the very edge of his bed with your hands folded into your own lap like some sort of little schoolgirl. You were too frightened to make any sudden movements. Bucky furious = a terrifying entity. Once he had knocked some guy’s front teeth out in a game of hockey after being cross-checked in the throat with the stick. The coach had refused to penalize the other kid for doing so and you remember the in-sync gasps you and Wanda Maximoff had given as Bucky threw his helmet off onto the rink’s ice and grabbed the boy by the jersey before nailing him across the face so hard that scarlet trails splattered everywhere onto the white surroundings. He was madder now than he had been then. He was mad, mad at the guy who had hurt you, mad at you for what he dubbed “trying to protect the asshole’s undeserved privacy,” mad at the entire world, it seemed like.
He stops pacing then, and it’s almost scarier. “I just don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand.” You argue back. “Just drop it, alright? I made it out fine enough. Jesus, the last thing I want to do is think about what happened. It’s all I’m going to be able to do everytime I look into the mirror for the next week already.”
“You think I’m going to just let him get away with this?”
“You think I’m going to let you go to jail for aggravated assault?” You counter. “Get expelled from school for fighting? Besides, I don’t...know his name. I was drunk off Hennessy. It’s Connor...something, I think. Maybe Cole.”
Bucky nods slowly, pulling his phone out. “First thing tomorrow, I’m having Sam and the other guys meet me at Brower so we can hunt this freak down and knock his fucking lights out. Won’t even see it coming. Then, we’re going to the fucking police.”
“You’re taking this too far.” You explode off the bed and angrily start to snatch your things - your jacket, your phone. “I told you, I just want to forget it happened.”
“Don’t expect me to just be cool with some guy laying his hands on you.” Bucky seethes. “I’m not. I don’t exactly know why you are, but shit is not flying.”
Fuming, you try and search for the words that could provide even a sliver of an explanation that would make Bucky understand, but it’s futile. Women always get asked questions there are no good answers to - why didn’t you report it? Why didn’t you fight back?
Bucky would never understand that you did fight back. You did, and the worst you walked away with was a bruise on both your face and ego, and now you just wanted to close the chapter. It wasn’t worth it. People don’t seem to get that it’s just easier to burrow into blank nothingness for a while and let the shame and humiliation eat you whole until things smoothed over. Deep down, you knew it wasn’t your fault, but still, it felt like a layer of grime was climbing over your entire body like poison. The more the incident was acknowledged, the more the ick spread.
“This is fucking crazy.” Bucky accused, before forcing himself to calm down with a deep breath. “Look, I’m not mad at you, okay? Of course I’m not. I’m sorry for yelling. But you’re just trying to run away from everything right now. I’m not going to let some prick get away with hurting you, Y/N. He could’ve done worse. You hear about that shit all the time in these parts.”
“Look, Bucky, I appreciate you caring, you know I do, but at the end of the day, it’s not your fucking business if I don’t want it to be.”
He raises his arms to the air. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know!” You cry out, exasperated. “Home.”
“Are you going to press charges?” He prompts, following you as you stomped for the door. “Because you should.”
You swivel to face him, voice deadly serious. “Just leave it alone.”
“Who’s going to take care of you then if you’re so obviously against doing it yourself?”
That’s then you prove you can take care of yourself by throwing a punch for his jaw. You can feel it as if in slow motion - your elbow tightening, your knuckles breezing through the air. And then, in the blink of an eye, Bucky catches your fist in his own hand and slams you back against the wall by both wrists.
“Thought I taught you to throw a better one than that.” He spits.
“Let me go.” You writhe under his hold. “I will break your fucking nose with my forehead and scream till the neighbors call the cops.”
This wasn’t your first fight. Hardly. You knew him enough to know which buttons to push. Which threats worked, which didn’t. For the most part.
Bucky just leans in close, close enough that you can feel his hot breath bait across your face. There wasn’t a single doubt in your mind that he wouldn’t hurt you, but right now, he had you physically immobilized, and it made you almost madder than if he would try to wrestle you to the ground and catch your face with an elbow. “You want to scream? Fine. Go ahead. No one’s home. My parents aren’t, Rebecca isn’t, and I’m willing to bet anyone who lives close enough to hear isn’t either. It’s a Tuesday morning.”
Bucky keeps speaking, jerking his chin back by just a hair’s width. “Your manic-ass is not going to go wander the streets of Brooklyn right now. I’ll call a fucking cab if you want to go home so bad.”
“This is just like you.” You struggle, trying to angle your foot up at the right spot to nail him in the crotch. “Fighting everyone’s battles. I don’t care what you say, I’m not your sister.”
Bucky doesn’t let a beat pass. “Yeah, but you’re my best friend, and right now, you’re being an asshole.”
There’s silence then, no sound curling through the apartment except for two sets of labored breathing. Bucky’s arms remained as forceful as stone. You heave, lips curled down into a grimace, caught up in everything, in the adrenaline, and then you do something you haven’t done since you were eleven years old: you kiss him.
It’s messy, almost as messy as it was in the fifth grade. It’s more of a jerky slam of your chin hitting his as you catch Bucky’s mouth with your own than anything solid. More blunt contact than anything else. You pull back as fast as you came in, breathing even heavier as your eyes rake over his face. Poor boy, he looks absolutely startled, like a dog on the brink of both attack and breed.
“Don’t do that.” He mused, voice a soft wisp of a thing. His mouth: ruby red and shaped like a flat heart. “Don’t…” And then, he bridges the gap himself and aligns your mouths properly, making a sharp, hurt noise at the back of his throat as it happens.
Slowly, his hands relinquish the grip they had on your wrists - instead, they ghost up your arms, choosing to settle on either shoulder with a bruising squeeze. You felt an animal power course through you, and you surge Bucky backwards without breaking the kiss until the back of his knees hit the lip of his bed and the both of you went down. He took control back by rolling the two of you around on the mattress with his stockier frame until you were splayed under him, breathless, parallel with the ceiling. All at once, Bucky grinds down with his hips, a fluid roll of a movement that has you gasping. It was something you’d see straight out of a porno where the actors sort of just forget they have an audience.
He breaks off then, and it leaves you shuddering. The tips of Bucky’s fingers spider over the mark on your face and you wince, more from the soreness of your own flesh and blood versus any recoil based in fear.
“What are we doing right now?” He breathes, legs tangled between yours. One of his knees was brought up between your thighs, and you had to stop yourself from curling up against the sweet, hot pressure of it all.
“I don’t know.” You answer honestly. It was truthful; you had been acting off of instinct alone.
Bucky hesitates. “I don’t want you to think I kissed you back because I felt bad for you, or something. After what happened. Or that I think it would be...easy to take advantage right now.”
You swallow heavily. “I don’t think that.”
There’s a lapse of silence then. “But it doesn’t feel wrong, does it?” Bucky whispers, as if confessing something. And then, god, he slides his knee in tighter, just like you imagined he would.
“No.” You choke, daring to breach your fingers under the hem of his shirt, where you had never touched before, running your knuckles up his spine. It made him squeeze his eyes shut. “It doesn’t.”
Deep down, you knew it was the wrong answer. Friends don’t kiss each other like that and like it. It was breaking some sort of strictly instated, yet unspoken boundary. If Rebecca were to walk in, she’d probably scream.
“So, we should probably stop, right?” He says, even as he lets his mouth dip under your jaw and down your throat. The burn of his stubble left you raw and reeling.
“Yeah.” You agree, breathing out. It took all of your focus to do so. Bucky smelled like white tea and honey body wash - a sweet, fresh smell. It enveloped you. You could imagine crawling into his chest and staking a claim there.
Slowly - so slow it seemed like it physically pained him to do so - Bucky slides off from where he was straddled and falls to your side. For what feels like the first time ever, neither of you seem to know what to say, how to approach what, exactly, just happened. You’re still touching head to toe: Bucky’s knees were curled against your own, one of his arms lay trapped under yours, and your chests were rising and falling as if in tandem. There was a sudden warm stickiness between your thighs that felt wetly uncomfortable, and you squirm.
“I don’t really want to.” He admits. Then, he sighs. “We also can’t just pretend like that didn’t happen.”
Halfheartedly, you slam your head back into his pillow, once. “I feel like we just broke a list of rules in some sort of handbook. So much for girls and boys being able to get along without biology getting in the way, right?”
Bucky laughs, and the noise trails off. “I mean, I hope this doesn’t change anything. We’re still us, right?”
He shifts then, tucking his arms differently and swallowing. “Remember in high school when that one sub got mad because we would never separate? And that was just…us. People knew us. No matter what, I want that, still.”
“Maybe we’re still us, only now…we do other stuff, too?” You suggest, feeling somewhat juvenile as you bite your lip and pointedly glance downwards to your body to cue him in. Bucky only swallows harder, flashing a grin that bordered on frat house.
“That’s a good idea. Let’s go with that.”
You strike him with a soft backhand, and he relents. “Okay.” Bucky treads slowly. “Let me ask you something: are you doing this because you want to, or because you’re bored and worked up?”
You take a minute to try and piece together your own thoughts. “I don’t know. I think maybe this has been coming on for a while now.”
Bucky thinks, and then he shrugs. “We’ve always just felt like each other's. Guess I’ve just never really put much thought into it.”
You shift onto your side to study his face, reaching a finger out to poke the very tip of his nose. You could see every pore, every freckle, each flash of silver in his blue eyes. “Alright, let me ask you something.” You challenge. You were so close that even staring into his eyes, it was hard to focus, like everything was slightly blurry and out of shot. “Are you doing this because you’re just horny?”
You lean in to kiss him again without letting yourself think about it too much, lest a sudden shyness were to fall, and it’s not like before - it’s lazy, slow. Something meant for three A.M. and Sunday mornings. You could imagine peeling Bucky’s shirt off and sculpting your hands down and his bare skin, and suddenly, the fact that you could was exciting. It bit at your stomach like a bug.
Bucky rolls himself back on top and takes either of your wrists again, in a looser, more gentle hold. He kisses you once on the mouth, twice then, before pulling back. A thin line of spit connected you by the lips. “Yes, I am very horny right now. But I’m also thinking straight. Well, pretty straight.”
He takes a second to catch his breath. “I think...that things like this aren’t gradual. You don’t see them coming. It’s a free fall. Everything sort of hits you at once.” He takes his hands back, links his fingers through yours. He pulls your wrists up ever so slightly then, so they’re poised and connected to his by each knuckle. You were holding hands. “So, yes, I think we’re both caught up in everything, but...I don’t really want to stop. I don’t think I’ll want to stop.”
He stares down at you. He wore a chain around his neck sometimes, and the fantasy of it dangling over your face made you suddenly dizzy. “You are so fuckin’ pretty.” Bucky mumbles.
You wanted to bite his spine. Bite his cheek, his throat, any sliver of skin you could get your teeth on to claim. The feeling was very new and, frankly, very startling. Instead, you just turn your neck to the side, feeling a sort of heat flood your face. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” He laughs.
“Don’t start saying some cutesy shit because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do now”
“Okay, fine.” He counters, a hint of amusement in his voice. “So sorry for calling you pretty. My apologies; it won’t happen again.”
“Asshole.” You laugh, a surprised bray of noise. The two of you are roughhousing now, leisurely, barging each other across the mattress and knocking limbs around like Tony Ferguson. The quilts burn against your skin as your bare leg runs down one.
Bucky stops you then, rearing back and holding his hand out as if to command heel with a poised look of fake seriousness on his face. He blinks, once. “You’re still going to wear my clothes, right?”
“Depends." You say, arching an eyebrow. "Are you still going to wear mine?"
