Bucky watched him Loki off flowers. He wondered if that was something meant to mean something. Symbolic. Maybe it was just pruning before they died - fuck all he knew about gardening. Bucky was from 8, plantlife was half folkstory to him, for most of his life. Or maybe it was a show of an act - cutting down something Loki had obviously cared about while it was still thriving.
Bucky didn't know, and he wasn't the kind of guy who could tell anyway. But he wondered, a little, which it was.
"Yeah, you signed up for it," Bucky said. "But you hate it. And you didn't have a lot of fallbacks, sounded like." Loki wasn't blameless. But neither were any other Victors who'd come through alive ... well, Steve. But they'd all done terrible things to survive. Even Steve's hands weren't all the way clean anymore - he'd helped kick off the demonstration in 8 that led to someone dead. Bucky didn't blame him, but Steve blamed himself.
Bucky wasn't stupid. He'd learned enough of nuance and careful Capitol doublespeak and edging-around a topic to get by when he had to. But it wasn't where he was gifted, and it wasn't going to get him anywhere today anyway. He wasn't going to bring in anyone else's name, not now, so the worst thing that could happen was Loki turned on him. And aside from wanting to do the things people were counting on him for, Bucky didn't really have a lot of concern for what happened to him.
"I'm not gonna kill you," he said. "I think I kind of like you, much as I can." Or at least Bucky felt some kind of understanding for Loki, now. He took a moment, finding words that probably still were going to come out wrong. "They're sending everyone I give a damn about, just about, back in to die. And none of them are coming back out. And it'll keep happening. They took your mom, this time. Maybe in a few years they'll have had Thor knock up someone and it'll be your niece or nephew. They're killing off most of their crop - they'll have to invest in building up the next set of stories with who's left, right?" Bucky stopped, breathing in and letting it out slowly. "Even the people who played by the rules lost. So what's the point of still playing? You're going to lose anyway. We all are. I want to try to make it stop, even if it don't work, at least there was something. I thought you might, too, because you're facing down decades of the same bullshit, waiting for the next axe to fall. Just like the rest of us. You're ... on the other side of the game board, but you're still losing. The only ones winning are the ones who put us there to start with."