Bucky looked down, stab of guilt and automatic recoiling from that shaky note in Steve's voice brief and dimmed, but still there. He guessed you couldn't cut everything out all at once. But it could be glossed over, ignored. It was a reflex, an echo from someone else.
When he looked up again, Bucky looked straight at Steve, but he was half looking through him, at nothing at all, at what was running sluggish and frayed in the back of his mind. Steve had always been hard to work around. Stubborn as a mule - not like Bucky had ever seen one up close, but he figured they had nothing on Steve Rogers, and prickly as hell. Bucky used to have a dozen workarounds to get things around Steve when he wanted to slide help by him. They only worked once in a while. None of them were there now, none would apply. None of them had been meant to send Steve away.
So Bucky tried to think of what he'd said without thinking that would turn his mother pale, of what made Becca recoil and he'd had to bite his tongue and remember not to say it again. All the cruel things that slipped out just because he got muddled and forgot to lie and pretend he was fine. That's why they were cruel. They were true.
So he told Steve the truth.
"Looking at you makes me remember what I want to forget." The Arena and the thing he'd become to come back out of it, because Steve never would have done it. And before the Arena, when he'd been with Steve, when he hadn't had much of anything but he'd been happy. Steve took away the numb, and that was true, even if it wasn't the whole reason, or even the real one. It was enough.