Bucky held on to the edge of things. Himself. Sometimes he forgot how precarious that could be because it was easier than it used to be. But in the beginning it had happened all the time. He didn't just lose time, he lost hold of everything.
The drugs had held him together, and held him down, and now he did it himself, but it was work. Effort. It didn't always hold up and his head was spinning with too many things that had been too public and everything just felt like it was going.
He made it into the car, climbed in with a numb sort of distance, sandwiched in between Steve and Natasha.
In the Arena, nothing had seemed real, whether or not it was. Things faded in and out. Things that had a shiny dream-edge could lunge out of a dream and still kill you. Someone holding a knife to your throat so close you could feel the cold of the blade would somehow pass right through you. There had been hours when he'd heard voices, and they'd been real, but not. Talking about him, to him, through him. Years later he'd figured out it had been a live feed from a viewing party - voices of Capitolites piped in and around him. They'd been delighted to hear themselves on the screens, trying to speak to him. Some had even been encouraging, but it hadn't mattered. He'd been so far off in his own head that it all stacked up, turned into other voices, other faces saying it. He'd started to pinch himself to try to jar back to reality, and when that had stopped working, he'd bang his head back against the rock or wall behind him. In the Arena, he'd done it until there were dried spots of blood in his hair until he'd finally come out.
When he'd come out, he'd kept doing it when things were bad or close or too much. They'd drug him to stop it, or strap him down so he didn't bang his head bloody trying to find reality again. When people got close Bucky had lashed out more than once with the new metal arm, throwing medics or stylists across the room. He hadn't meant to, hadn't even really been aware. But they'd learned to be careful and gone for the restraints and the drugs. Peggy could talk him back without them, Tony if he wasn't busy. A counselor named Sam they'd made him see sometimes, who somehow knew what to say to talk him around. People he knew or had some connection to. But the Capitol strangers just turned into more noises from a room he didn't see, and someone touching him while they talked turned into a threat in his head when his head was nothing but noise and mess.
There was nothing behind him but the padded headrest of the car, but Bucky still thudded his head back in a futile effort to stop the noise. Stop himself. He was losing where he was. Why he was. All he knew was that he was a killer and he was-
The hand on his face was unexpected, and Natasha and Steve could both hear the shift of the metal as Bucky's arm came up defensive and fast. He wasn't gone though, and Bucky stopped himself, trying to hold on to why he was stopping.
Some part of him expected Peggy, maybe, and it wasn't Peggy. But it was still two familiar bodies, not foreign and unwanted. Bucky's arm lowered, tremble in the parts of him that weren't metal, expression still too blank and a million miles away.
The voice connected back. Real voice. Real person. She'd always been real. "Natasha," he said finally, struggling back from wherever he'd gone. Bucky didn't even really know where it was. An Arena, maybe, but not, too. He hadn't been all the way there in the Arena, either. He got locked somewhere in his own head. "I'm sorry," he said, because he didn't remember what he'd done yet, but he was probably sorry. It was reflexive.
It came back a little then, and he drew in a breath that still felt like pulling in through water. "I wanted to hurt someone," he said. "I could. That's why you picked me. Because I can. Tony knows," he said, forgetting the other half of the lie, and what Steve didn't know, because he'd forgotten to register that Steve next to him meant Steve was there. Things didn't always come back together all at once.