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They gave Pepper the credit, which annoyed Natasha to no end.
“I told Steve over and over to make his move, listened to him whine and moon for literal days, and she gets all the credit?!” she had yelped when they thanked Pepper.
Bucky had just smirked and said, “Well, if Steve had made the first move, then you would get all the credit, but he didn’t, did he?” Steve had blushed and told Bucky to shut up, and Natasha had heaved a long-suffering sigh, and conceded the point.
So Pepper had taken the credit, but that wasn’t the beginning of the story.
----
It starts after Steve’s mom dies, with “til the end of the line,” and Bucky spending a few nights with Steve in his apartment to help pack stuff up so he can move in with Bucky’s family. It starts with a shared bottle of gutrot and lingering glances, and a long, sweet, sloppy kiss. The next morning they didn’t bring it up, both assuming the other was too drunk to remember. Steve moved in with the Barnes’ and every night they fell asleep back to back in Bucky’s narrow bed, and every morning they woke up tangled up together. Mrs. Barnes fell ill and passed on, Bucky was drafted and left for basic training, and little Rebecca Barnes, Bucky and Steve’s pride and joy, joined a group of her girlfriends who moved to Pittsburgh to help in steel production for the war effort. Steve had some money saved up from selling things from his mother’s apartment and from selling drawings and the occasional commission, and patiently kept the home fire burning until Bucky returned. They moved to a smaller, cheaper apartment after Steve got sick that winter, and still went to sleep back to back and woke up in each other’s arms, but still never spoke about It.
It was deserving of the capital letter in their minds, the thing they both held in some deep, sacred place in their hearts, untouched by the sharp, unrelenting anxiety of reality. Bucky set up double dates. Steve picked fights. Bucky worked double shifts to buy Steve extra sketchbooks, and Steve made dinner for them and filled the sketchbooks with page after page of Bucky. They lived happily and danced around It, until Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn. He took the girls dancing after Steve backed out, but after he dropped them off he came home to Steve, who did not tell Bucky that he had been recruited for the SSR. Again they shared a bottle of liquor, their nerves at an all-time high, and of course It happened again. Desperate kisses, full of fear and worry and tenderness, again left unacknowledged in the morning. Bucky left for war, and Steve soon left for New Jersey.
When they met again in the HYDRA factory, everything was different, and nothing had changed. Steve was healthy, tall, muscled; Bucky was malnourished, tortured, wary. But when Steve visited the medical tent where Bucky was staying after the return to base camp, when he awkwardly hovered and insisted on patching Bucky up himself; when Bucky relented for Steve like he wouldn’t for the nurses, allowed Steve’s fussing and his undivided attention, it became apparent that It was still going strong. Through secret missions and the Howling Commandos and Peggy Carter’s attentions (and boy, didn’t Bucky feel terrible for ever taking a girl out back home when he felt jealous and miserable every time Steve and Peggy made eyes at each other, because was this how Steve felt every time back then?), It kept them grounded, kept them fighting, kept them hopeful.
Then Bucky fell.
Then Steve crashed.
Steve woke up.
In this brave new world that confused and amazed him, he only wished for Bucky. It, it appeared, was not dependent on Bucky actually being around. Or alive, even. Steve threw himself into work, fighting with the Avengers, relearning his place in the world.
Then HYDRA was back. Steve found (and fought) the Winter Solider. The Winter Solider saved Steve and vanished.
Then Bucky came back.
After months of debriefings, therapy, and some cognitive recalibration, Bucky moved in to Avengers tower with Steve and the others. Despite Stark’s insistence that “dude, you can have your own floor, we can do that for you, we’ll design it exactly as you want it, no one has to share, come on, don’t you want your own floor?”, Bucky’s things found a home on Steve’s floor of the tower, where Bucky and Steve fell asleep every night back to back, and woke up every morning wrapped around each other.
So really, Pepper didn’t start anything at all, but they still give her the credit.
----
When Natasha found Steve, he was in the gym, watching Bucky and Clint spar. She paused next to him, watched their boys fight for a moment, then glanced at Steve’s face. He was grinning, not the Captain America hero smile, all gleaming and false, but an honest-to-god euphoric grin, just from watching Bucky. Natasha rolled her eyes and mentally prepped herself for the disaster this conversation was bound to be.
“Steve,” she said, bumping his shoulder. He cut his eyes at her, questioning. She smirked at him. “Just ask him out already.” Steve choked. “Oh my God, Rogers,” she laughed, “you have to breathe or Bucky will kill me for killing you. Jesus.”
Steve spluttered, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and turned away from her, blushing.
“Steve,” she tried again, “the rest of us are tired of watching you two act like an old married couple, but we’re absolutely sick of watching you mope around for days after Bucky has a date.”
“I do not mope,” Steve spat, before he recollected himself, and forced “and I have no clue what you’re talking about,” through gritted teeth. Natasha rolled her eyes again.
“Do you think we’re- do you think I’m stupid? You go get dinner every Wednesday night, barring any Avengers business, and you watch movies together every Friday night he doesn’t have a date, and dammit Rogers, you sleep in the same bed.”
“We’ve always slept in the same bed,” Steve replied, not thinking. Natasha caught and held his gaze, smirking, until he realized what he said and ducked his head, flushed. “Look, Nat-” he started, but Natasha cut him off.
“What was it you said to me on the way to Jersey? Oh yeah, ‘it’s hard to find someone with similar life experiences.’ Well, you idiot, there he is.” she said, and gestured towards Bucky, who was trying to pin Clint with his metal arm. “Ask him out before he decides you’re not interested.”
She left Steve gaping at her back as she cut in to the fight, easily forcing Bucky out and working out her frustration with the oblivious old men in her life by putting Clint through his paces. Bucky, she noted absently as she blocked a punch from Clint, sidled up to Steve and grinned at him the way Steve had grinned earlier, but Steve hadn’t appeared to say anything to Bucky about going out with him. Stubborn bastard. She’d have to annoy him some more. She turned back to Barton and bared her teeth in a smile, then tackled him to the ground.
A week later, Bucky and Steve were entertaining Pepper on their floor, “for just a few minutes, guys, please, Tony hasn’t had his third cup of coffee yet and I’m just not in the mood today,” when they got into an argument (read: a minor disagreement with lots of good-natured insults thrown around) about war tactics. In retrospect, they’re not even sure how they ended up on the subject, but the “conversation” ground to a complete halt when Pepper absentmindedly threw out, “never start a land war in Asia.” Confused, they stared at her until she realized she must have said that out loud, and explained, “It’s from a movie. The Princess Bride. Have you seen the Princess Bride yet? It’s a great movie.” Bucky mumbled something disparaging under his breath, and Pepper glared at him. “There are pirates and poisons and giants and swordfights and kisses and jokes and it’s a great movie and you need to watch it. Okay? Okay. You’re watching it. On Friday. This Friday. Understood?” Unsettled, Bucky and Steve agreed to watch the movie on Friday. This Friday.
They love it. It’s hilarious. The love story is wonderful but not overdone. It doesn’t get sappy, it just gets sweet. Bucky cheers when Inigo kills the six-fingered man, Steve laughs until he can barely breathe at the R.O.U.S.s, and they both grin until their faces hurt at the bluff that rescues Buttercup. They like it so much, they watch it again. For the next week, they recite lines from the movie at each other whenever they’re alone. After they quoted Star Wars for a month after first watching it, Tony threatened terrible things would happen to them if they obsessed over every pop culture thing they liked, so they mostly kept that sort of thing to themselves now. Which is why the rest of the team is so confused when Bucky finally makes a move in the middle of the battle with the robots.
“Winter Solider, we need you on that building with Hawkeye, sniping. Hawkeye, don’t you dare jump off that building.”
Clint’s “Cap, I wasn’t gonna, honestly,” was swiftly followed by Bucky’s, “As you wish, Captain.”
As this was fairly standard mid-battle communication, no one really noticed the significance of Bucky’s choice of words until Steve – Steve Rogers, Captain America – practically yelled “DAMMIT BUCKY, ARE WE REALLY GONNA DO THIS NOW” into the com. Bucky, to everyone’s further surprise, only laughed at his apparently furious Captain, and answered “Not if you don’t wish.”
The usual “Jerk,” “Punk,” exchange seemed to signal the end of the strange conversation, but still the rest of the Avengers (minus the Hulk, of course) were left feeling as though they were missing something here.
The feeling only intensified when Captain “We Help Make The Mess So We Should Help Clean It Up These People Have Been Through Enough Already Without Doing All This By Themselves Don’t You Think” Rogers disappeared for 20 minutes in the middle of the initial cleanup. Just as Tony was about to take to the skies to find their wayward leader, he reappeared – with an eyepatch. Which he threw at Bucky’s head.
“Hey,” Tony said, “Is that Fury’s? How did you get it off him? Is that a spare? Did you just steal former Director Fury’s spare eyepatch? Guys, Captain America just stole-“
Tony spluttered and choked in the middle of his sentence as Bucky grinned, tucked the eyepatch in his pocket, walked the few steps between him and Steve, and flung his arms around the taller man, who embraced him back. “Not a princess, Buck,” Steve mumbled into the crook of Bucky’s neck, but since Bucky chose that moment to disable their coms, the team never knew that the reason Steve doubled over in laughter the next moment was Bucky’s whispered, “I know punk. But you have to admit, you do have perfect breasts.”
----
It’s been two months, and even though Natasha is still miffed that Pepper gets the credit, she’s found something better to do than pout about it: make jokes about how Bucky is a very gay pirate. Bucky is slightly annoyed, but mostly amused. He almost always serves back something about Barton needing to watch his back, because Black Widows mating and all that, and that derails those conversations nicely. Steve should be more annoyed than Bucky, but every time she starts up he just gets this look on his face, and then Bucky notices, and then they disappear for a few hours, and no one really wants to think about that too much.
Tony is still trying to figure out what the hell is going on, but he’s worked out that it has something to do with The Princess Bride and the newly minted relationship between Cap and Barnes. So just to be an ass, he tells Steve that there is no way he’s the Princess. No way.
“Cap, it’s obvious what you are – a Rodent of Unusual Size. Am I right? I think I’m right. There’s way too much of you to be a Buttercup.”
And so it goes, for a good month, until Steve is showing signs of wanting to punch Tony to get him to shut up (signs that no one but Bucky recognizes, they’re so similar to the signs that Steve was going to pick a fight with a bully in an ally over some half-starved cat, and god, sometimes he remembers Steve from Before and falls in love all over again) so Bucky steps in before Tony gets a split lip.
Tony’s about halfway through his standard spiel about Steve being unusually, abnormally huge, and he’s just gotten to the “Am I right? I think I’m right,” part when Bucky goes, “You are right Stark. One hundred percent,” which throws Tony off track and makes Steve look a little hurt. Bucky sends a reassuring wink and a mischievous smirk Steve’s way, then looks Tony in the eye and says “his unusual size is one fairly large perk to fucking Captain America. If you’re jealous, just say so, I won’t mind. I know what it’s like to want a piece of him.”
Tony gapes at him, an embarrassed flush darkening his face and neck, and when he turns to Steve to have him confirm or deny it – who knows – Steve is giving Bucky this intense, piercing look that makes it quite clear to anyone looking that Steve would really prefer at that moment to be alone and very naked with Bucky, and that seems to be the last straw. Tony makes this strangled sort of sound and flees the room, and Natasha and Clint slow clap for the two of them, “someone finally broke Stark!” For the next two weeks, the couple takes great delight in “accidentally” trapping Tony in rooms with only one exit, and leaving him alone with Steve and Bucky, who he refuses to look in the eyes.
(He gets over it eventually, but he seems to realize he shouldn’t attempt to ridicule Steve’s size.)
----
Bucky and Steve stumble through the doorway to their bedroom, kissing furiously. The fall on the bed, pulling off their remaining clothes and tangling themselves together, frantically holding on to one another as though this would be the last time for another 70 years. They had finally, after what Bruce dryly calls The Princess Bride incident, talked about It. They had both been shocked to find out that they both remembered both nights in their entirety, and then spent an entire evening having really angry sex about the fact that they could have been doing this for years, practically from the start, if one of them had just had the courage to bring it up.
(The angry sex had started when they got into a fight about who should have had that courage – they both claimed the other one should have started talking first, but really believed that the other was blameless, and were trying to punish themselves for being cowards).
(When they figured out they both blamed themselves they had very nice, sweet “I love you so much I can barely stand it” sex, which ended up resolving the problem – wasn’t anyone’s fault, was it, we still ended up here, together.)
They go to sleep every night wrapped up together and wake up every morning the same way. And as the intensity of their touches amplify, and breaths come shorter and names are whispered into the dark like benedictions, both Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes think that It has never been better.
Thanks, Pepper.