Pushing. Why did Steve always have to push? Why couldn't he ever stay down, let someone else take a hit? Why couldn't he just believe it and walk away when he'd seen someone covered in blood and screaming at nothing on a screen the size of a building? Wasn't that reason enough to walk away when they gave you an excuse not to have to care?
Bucky wondered all of that dimly, old frustrations that had been as familiar and fond as they were irritating, but fading out of reach too.
He didn't want to explain. There weren't explanations to give, and his eyes were distant and dull when they met Steve's, what was left behind them getting locked back behind a wall of drugs and distance that Bucky was half building himself. "You'll want too much from me," Bucky said.
The Bucky who grew up with Steve, who looked after him and always wanted him around would never have told Steve there was a tipping point of too much, because there hadn't been. It had always been Steve who insisted he didn't need things, that he could do it himself, that Bucky didn't have to look after him, and Bucky who waved it off and worked around it. Bucky had needed Steve to be looked after too, Steve had just never seemed to believe that. Even now, Bucky didn't mean it the way it sounded, didn't think it through the way he would have. He just thought of things that would make this end, so Steve was safe and Bucky could be not here anymore.