"Sure," Bucky said, walking over to pull the fridge open, start scanning through. There were eggs, he spotted some peppers - little withered looking, but not bad. No spinach, but some cheese. He could make do. He wasn't that hungry either, but it felt like something to do that would keep him busy and be vaguely useful. Something other than sitting around, taking up Natasha's space.
He wasn't looking at her, taking out the stuff he needed and then poking around for a pan and butter. His shoulders stiffened as she started to talk though.
Bucky started to tell her that wasn't what he'd meant to do, how he'd meant it. But her voice was shifting, rising, upset obvious. Bucky turned to look at her, but she was faced away from him, still talking - too fast and too vehement. Not at all the calm, deliberate way she usually spoke.
Bucky didn't know how to be this for her. She'd just known how to bring him down, but Bucky wasn't the person people turned to for that anymore. He wasn't a calm center and he wasn't the one who had the right words or the right way to be.
"Natasha," he said finally, voice quiet. "I-" he stopped, feeling his way through. "There's nothing to live up to. I don't think you're fine because I don't think any of us are fine. You know I'm not. So hell, maybe that's me putting my crap on you. But you don't ... have to be, either. That's all I mean." His mouth twisted up a little before Bucky stepped forward, reaching right-handed and touching her elbow, brief and light, stopping as quickly as he'd started. "When I started ... waking up again, I watched you. I wanted to be like you," Bucky said. "Not because you were sexy or beautiful or because I thought you had it easy. You are, and you don't. But you were ... good at all this. At playing it. Playing all of them. I wasn't going to be as good as you - my head's too much of a mess. But you're who I tried to learn from ... Pretty obvious I'm not as good at it, or I'd have better things to say right now?"
Bucky watched the back of her shoulders, the line of her back. "I never thought I understood everything about you. 'slike ... somebody thinking they know what a master composer thinks because they can play some flute. But I know ... how much work goes into it? If you say you're fine, and you want to leave it there, then okay. Be fine. But ..." Bucky smiled, wry but humorless, even though she couldn't see. "I'm the guy you know's not fine. I'm the guy it's safe to not be fine around because I can't ever use it against you. I wouldn't, but you don't gotta try to believe that, because you could outplay me and I'd fall apart, and we both know it. So if you ever want to not be fine with me, you can. Otherwise we can read books about how centaurs manage to fuck human people and I'll make you eggs and leave when you think it's safe, and we can play this off however you want until it's done. You don't have to react any way."
Bucky paused again, then added quietly. "I hate lying. I hate being a lie? I do it, and I get it, but I hate it. So maybe I see shit that's not there. And I hate ... knowing my life's never gonna be how I want it to be. It's always gonna be how someone else says, and even if it wasn't, I can't even get a handle on myself half the time. It's never going to just be me saying how anything goes - if someone else doesn't get in the way, I'll do it to myself. I'm not going to tell anyone else how to react or what to do. I was just ... trying to tell you that you could be however you really were. I'm sorry. For everything. I really did just want to help when you asked, not have things get screwed up worse."