Bucky stumbled a step back from the shove, and he just wanted to push again. Bucky knew what violence felt like, bubbling up and out of control. This wasn't that. He wanted to SHAKE Steve and he wanted to hit him, but he didn't want to hurt him. Not really. Bucky was just angry, freefalling with it and throwing out words that he shouldn't say, wouldn't have said.
Steve's words hit him harder than any blow would have, doused his temper and turned him cold in an instant.
Bucky had lost himself in the Arena. Not just an arm and a sense of time and place, but himself. He'd found bits and pieces again, put them together in the shape of an almost-person most of the time. But he felt like it. Bits of a broken thing glued together with parts that didn't belong, never really understanding why they all went in to the same kind of hell, but he was weak enough to break in ways they didn't. But even if he'd done it badly, even if he'd been wrong in how - he'd hung on to needing to protect Steve. It hadn't worked, and Bucky knew that - but he'd hung on to having tried.
He hadn't known that had been what drove Steve in. Bucky had thought it was the face of whatever tiny, doomed kid it had been that year, or Steve's need to DO SOMETHING when he could. He'd never even thought it might be him. Steve was that kind of important. Bucky always forgot that Steve had ever felt that way about him, just like he was always surprised when Steve still wanted to have something to do with him. That surprise had started to fade again finally. but Bucky had never thought that might be why.
With anyone else, shouted words might not have that much weight. People said shit they didn't mean. Bucky had just been doing that. But Steve was a shit liar and Bucky wasn't most of the time. Steve said it because it was true. He just wouldn't have said it if he wasn't pissed off and didn't know he was going to die.
He was going to die because Bucky left him alone and he'd fallen into the shark tank with the rest of them.
Fuck rising up. Bucky didn't care about revolution or change or anything right now except the future that was clawing at his throat.
Bucky swallowed, deflated, squared jaw and aggressive posture turned into hunched shoulders and a ducked chin. He'd find a way. He had to.
But right now, Bucky could barely look at Steve. "I can't fucking do this," Bucky said, abrupt and almost toneless after the fury of a minute ago. He jerked away from Steve's grip in his soaked sweater, turning back toward his own house and away from Steve.