Time. That was what he kept telling himself he needed. Time, but for what? To heal? Was that what it would take? That seemed like such a simple answer to something that was so very not simple. Time for what? To reflect? He didn't want to do that. He didn't want to think about how he'd spent so many years hoping and yearning for something, believing it would always be there, to find out it wasn't. Maybe it hadn't been for a long time. But it was hard not to go there. It was hard not to reflect when he didn't have anything else to drown out what he was thinking, or distract him from what he was feeling.
Going to the party was not on his agenda, even if he and Steve hadn't engaged in their talk when they did. The last time he went he got into a confrontation that he still was actually trying to come back from and the last thing he needed was another fight. Because he wasn't in a position to just walk out like he had before. He might actually hurt someone, and he didn't want to even think about that being a possibility. Best to just omit himself from the equation entirely, which was what he was doing.
He'd told Natasha he would reach out to her after he talked to Steve, but somewhere along the way he'd kind of just not done that. Bucky didn't want to talk to anyone, because really, what could he say? How was he supposed to put into words what had even happened between him and Steve? He didn't want to put the weight of it on anyone. It was too much.
It wasn't even just Steve, though that was a huge part of what was eating away at him. Being left alone with his thoughts was always dangerous, but even more so now that he'd been stripped bare of all his defense mechanisms and the walls he normally had up. It left him vulnerable to his guilt. Why hadn't he just found Natasha and told her everything after Shuri 'fixed' his brain? He thought he'd been doing the right thing in waiting for the right moment, when she wasn't constantly on the run with missions. He'd also thought he was doing the right thing by not just assuming it would matter to her. He didn't think she would've just written off the deep lover affair they'd shared, but she definitely could've put it behind her; why bring it up if she'd buried it? That didn't mean he'd been right about that, but at the time, it was what he thought he had to do. Now, after learning his fate and what would become hers, he felt tremendous regret. It was like Steve all over again. He'd waited too long, and lost his chance with her back home.
So what did that mean about here? And Clint? That was a whole other situation and he took so much joy from it, but now he knew that Clint was in love with Natasha too, and though Nat had said she thought he might feel something back for him, Bucky wasn't going to count on that or anything right now, which meant he wasn't learning from his mistakes with Steve yet. ...He just needed time.
Even though he wasn't looking directly ahead, he heard the sounds of two people approaching. Both of them were skilled at being stealth but neither was trying to hide that they were coming to him. Bucky was pretty sure he knew without looking up who it was.
He definitely knew who it wasn't.
Natasha's voice rang through his ears and echoed between them. How long had it been since he and Steve parted ways? A few days, he guessed. The thing about having that serum in him was that he could go for lengthy periods of time without sleeping, eating, drinking. It made it easy to just sit there and stare, which was most of what had been going on in that house.
His head turned downward even more, his dark hair falling like a curtain around his features at first. Bucky owed them words, even if he hadn't asked them to come. "No," he said. His throat was dry. Underused and still hoarse from all the crying he'd done that first night, he was still kind of surprised by how broken his voice sounded. He looked up, slowly, and all the hair that had fallen forward slid back. To say he looked like shit would've probably been a kindness that he wasn't looking for. "Just didn't know what to say."