If given a choice, Bucky would keep Steve alive, and he wasn't going to lie about it. If he had a real choice, a real chance, he'd keep them all alive, but they didn't get that, either. All their choices were really just illusions, and had been since their Arenas. Probably even before that, but they hadn't known to understand that the same way. Bucky wanted to be kind, and on his own he might have swung away from the ugliness, sidestepped the full truth of it. He didn't like the lies any more than she did, was tired of them, however used to them he was, however much he just expected to be steeped in them - but he was still the same kid who'd tried to sugarcoat the bitterness of things when he was young and play it down for his sister, for Steve, for the other kids he took under his wing. Cracked and brittle they might be, but the bones of that person were still there.
But right now, this was what Bucky saw as kind - being the kind of honest she wanted. If she'd seemed to want a polite bullshit, he'd have done that. But he didn't think she did, so he just said what was true. He didn't want the choice, he didn't want the death. He didn't believe there was any way out for Steve unless they managed to pull them all out. But if there were some miracle and Bucky got the call, he'd pick Steve.
Steve would probably never thank him or forgive him for it, but it was Bucky's brand of selfish.
He didn't even disagree with her, if she had argued, Bucky just knew that Steve would, and that he was stubborn as shit. Bucky thought they should all have a shot, that the only real plan was one that gave them a chance along with the District uprising, that they deserved that too. But Steve was Steve. Bucky would fight with him about in private. (And probably lose.)
He just walked beside her, quiet. It wasn't quite comfortable, but for Bucky at least, it was almost companionable. There was something about Natasha that he found calming - she'd brought him down in the car, had made him smile before the Arena. Bullshit and complex lives aside, she was ... better to be around than most people, when Bucky wasn't busy working himself in circles around it. He really did think they could have been friends, in another time. Or at least that he'd have wanted to be.
Her comment drew Bucky's eyes to her again, and then he barked a laugh, sudden and sharp. "Pretty sure none of you count as lucky," he said dryly. Bucky tilted his head. "You know, it's a weird thing to hear people talk about something I never said out loud until a coupla weeks ago." Clint caught on to it, Peggy. Natasha could have meant just as a friend, and Bucky probably could have played it off like that's all she meant and she wouldn't have called him on. Hell, that part was true too, so wasn't like it was a lie. But he'd been honest about the rest, so he figured this was just one more notch of truth. What the fuck did it matter anyway? "He was a good kid, it was an easy habit to start." Bucky paused and then admitted. "Well, he was a little shit. But still a good kid." He thought of Clint, curled up against him on the sofa, the Avox - Jarvis - at the table none of them had known about. He thought of Scott with Cassie drifting out of his reach and Sam's dead Riley. "I don't think he's the only one who had someone love him," Bucky said. "But I don't think whether or not someone does makes a whole hell of a lot of difference when it comes down to it, not for any of us anyway." He smiled thinly and then corrected. "Any of you." Because it was presumptuous as fuck to put himself in the same category as them now. He'd lived through one Arena, but he wasn't in the same boat this time.