For Better or for Worse (Stucky)

Together

Bucky woke up at 2 am, shaking madly as he shot up on the couch, muffling his own whimpering as he clamped his cold metal hand over his mouth. Eyes darting around the apartment, he tried to steady his breathing that didn't want to corporate, his lungs working against him as they gasped for air uncontrollably.
Squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head slowly to himself, he pulled his legs against his chest and stared at the darkness in front of him, trying to sort out his thoughts.

‚Monster...' He thought to himself, his head racing and blood throbbing in his ears as he tried to erase what he'd just seen in his sleep from his mind. He'd seen himself. Again. Most memories came back to him at night, unless there was something else that triggered them.
Like being with Steve. Having spent last night with him, he felt like he had remembered some small things that would seem irrelevant to anyone else. But not for Bucky, not when it was about Steve.
Steve... The one good memory he had at the moment. And still, he had tried to kill him.
But had he? The Winter Soldier had tried to kill him.

„What's the difference?" Bucky mumbled to himself, shaking as he rubbed his face. „I'm a monster." He tugged his hair a bit and bit his lower lip harshly, causing it to bleed once more.
Who was he even? Steve called him Bucky. Said his  actual name was James Buchanan Barnes. He'd seen his own face on a newspaper article that'd called him The Winter Soldier. His handlers called him the asset. What did that make him?
He was a machine, designed to kill. Why hadn't Steve shot him right there and then, when he'd shown up on his doorstep? He would have deserved it. Gosh, he wished he was dead. It would be so much easier for everyone. For the whole world, for Steve.

„Why didn't you just kill me?" Bucky whispered as he sipped some water and looked towards Steve's bedroom door, straining his ears and hearing heavy but calm breathing coming from within.
He sat down his water glass, ran a hand over his face and closed his eyes again, but as soon as he did, the memory flashed before his eyes again.
He didn't know who it was that he was seeing, but it was a child, maybe seven or eight years old. Wide blue eyes, filled with tears and terror as two little hands grabbed his metal wrist as he clenched it tight around the child's neck until finally it stopped moving, while the parents wailed in the background, begging the assassin -him- to stop.

Footsteps heavy on the tiled floor, he mercilessly dropped the child's lifeless body to the floor as he approached the parents, cold eyes fixed on the wailing woman as he shot her right between the eyes. Her husband had stopped crying as he'd fallen into shock, watery eyes fixed on his daughters motionless body only meters away from him, hand still holding his wife's.
The Winter Soldier stabbed a knife into the side of his neck and left his body to lay on that of his dead wife as the red liquid seeped out of both their bodies, their lifeless eyes still strained on their child's body. His mission had been finished. Another gift to mankind.

Gasping for air, Bucky opened his eyes and shook madly as he slowly got up from the couch, walking towards Steve's bedroom door before stopping right in front of it, hand on the handle. „What are you doing?" He shook his head to himself as he let his hand slide off the door handle and took a slow step back, his barefoot feet quiet on the apartments floor.

Holding his injured arm close to his chest, he looked around the dark living room and walked into the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror.
He bit his lower lip -he really needed to drop that habit-, glaring into his own blue eyes. „You should be dead." He mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut for a second before opening them again to look into his own face that was distorted with anger. „You should be GONE!" He grunted and shook his head, hands trembling as he brought them up to his temples, his dislocated shoulder aching as he paced up and down in front of the mirror, trying to calm and quiet himself to not wake up Steve.
The last thing he wanted was to drag him into his mental problems -at least not more than he could avoid- because he was certain Steve would kick him out if he saw just how unstable he was.