Itâs Hard Being Casual.
‷ Brotherâs best friend!Bucky x female!reader {College AU}
.á Warnings/tags : College AU, Childhood Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Emotional Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Shared History, Yearning, Happy Ending (maybe), Bad grammar or spelling mistakes.
ê° Summary ê± : Youâve always known Bucky Barnes. Heâs your older brotherâs best friend, your first crush, and the one person youâve never quite been able to let go of. College changes everything. Suddenly the lingering looks last too long, the touches mean too much, and youâre left wondering if youâve imagined it all⊠or if heâs finally looking back.
ê° Word count ê± : 1k (give or take..)
ê° Notes ê± : Hi everyone! This is my first ever fanfic, so any advice is appreciated, thank you and I wish you all the best. <3 (also chapter 1 coming soon..)
ê° Credits ê± : Dividers, Casual by Chappell Roan (more specifically the tiny desk version).
There are people who arrive in your life with a grand entrance. A beginning you can point to years later and say, thatâs where it all started. Then there are people you canât remember meeting. The kind who become so woven into the fabric of your childhood that separating them from your memories feels impossible, like trying to remember your first breath or the first time you heard your own name. James Buchanan Barnes belonged to the second kind. You couldnât tell anyone when he became part of your story because, as far as you were concerned, heâd always been there. Before you knew what missing someone felt like. Before you understood that growing up meant leaving pieces of yourself behind. Before you learned that sometimes loving somebody was less like falling, and more like quietly becoming.
If someone asked you about your childhood, youâd probably tell them about summers. Not because they were extraordinary, but because they seemed endless. The sun never disappeared before nine, someoneâs radio was always drifting through an open kitchen window, and the pavement outside your house stayed stained with faded chalk drawings no matter how many times it rained. Your mom was forever shouting that the screen door would break if it kept being slammed every five minutes, though nobody ever listened.
It was always the three of you.
Not in that order, of course. You always came trailing behind, your shoes untied, convinced your legs were just as long as theirs. They were three years older, which when youâre six and theyâre nine, feels less like an age gap and more like an entirely different lifetime. They spent afternoons turning the neighbourhood into battlefields while you struggled to keep up, every stick transformed into a sword, every tree a watchtower, every scraped knee proof that youâd fought just as hard as they had. You were forever chasing after them, determined not to be left behind.
The truth was, they always looked back.
Somewhere along the way, Bucky stopped calling you by your name. There wasnât a reason for it, not one either of you could remember anyway. One day he called you Bug, and from then on, that was simply who you were to him. Youâd asked where it came from more times than you could count, usually after Steve rolled his eyes and complained that it didnât even make sense. Every single time, Bucky would just shrug, that familiar crooked grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. âJust suits you,â heâd say, like that was explanation enough. Eventually, you stopped asking. It became one of those things that had always existed, like the creaky step outside your bedroom or the scratch on his bike that heâd sworn heâd fix one day. Nobody else ever called you Bug. Not Steve, not your parents, not your teachers. Somehow, it belonged to Bucky alone, and hearing it in anyone elseâs voice wouldâve sounded wrong. You canât remember the last time he called you Bug. There wasnât a final goodbye to the nickname, no moment where either of you decided youâd outgrown it. It simply disappeared somewhere between childhood and growing up, so quietly that neither of you noticed until it had already become another one of those things that only existed in memory.
Maybe thatâs why the things that stayed with you were never the important ones. They were the quiet things. The overlooked things. The kind that shouldâve disappeared with time but somehow never did. His shoes abandoned by the front door because sooner or later heâd be back for them anyway. The sound of his laugh carrying across the garden before you were old enough to understand the joke. The way heâd steady the back of your bike when you insisted you didnât need help anymore, jogging behind you until you found your balance.
You couldnât have been older than eight the first time he said it. Maybe heâd said it a hundred times after that. Funny how memory works. It never keeps the things you expect it to. It forgets birthdays and school lessons and what you had for dinner last Tuesday, but it remembers the exact way someone looked at you after you fell over. It remembers the sound of laughter drifting upstairs long after your parents thought youâd gone to sleep.
Mostly, it remembers people.
You think thatâs the cruelest part about growing up. Nobody tells you that one day youâll start mourning things that never felt important while they were happening. The last summer everyone was home at the same time. The last movie night in your parentsâ living room before somebody had work in the morning. The last time Bucky wandered into your house without knocking because heâd long since become family. You never recognise the last time while youâre living it. You only realise years later, when youâre packing your childhood into cardboard boxes, and you find an old photograph tucked inside the back of a drawer.
Steveâs missing his front tooth.
Youâre standing in the middle because youâd cried until they let you join the picture.
Buckyâs looking somewhere off camera, laughing at something youâll never remember.
You stare at it for longer than you mean to.
Not because you miss being a child.
Because you miss how uncomplicated love used to be before you knew there were some people you werenât supposed to fall for. Before your heart started keeping secrets from the people who knew it best.
The strange thing is, there was never a moment you could point to. No lightning strike. No single conversation. No day that split your life into before and after. Whatever changed between the two of you did so quietly, disguising itself as another ordinary afternoon until one day it was impossible to remember a version of your life where he hadnât already become something more.
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