I'm Here | ✓

43 - Crystalline

My leg bounces up and down nervously. My eyes are locked on all the little metal sections making up my arm, and I unconsciously bend it, testing out the flexibility. In reality, my mind is elsewhere. Should I do this? What if Steve hates me? What if he doesn't want to talk to me? I've had fewer nightmares since I've been here, but what if he thinks this is because of him?

I'm distracted by Steve stepping out from the bathroom, tugging down the sleeves of his T-shirt as he wanders towards the counter. Shit. It's now or never, Barnes.

Can I choose never?

But I know I have to do it. I clear my throat. "H-hey, Steve?" My voice wavers, and I mentally chide myself. This is not how I expected this to start.

He spins to look at me, and I feel so small, sitting hunched over on the couch. "Yeah, Buck?" His eyes flick to my bouncing leg, and his eyebrows draw together in confusion. "What's wrong?"

Everything. Everything and nothing. My whole past is wrong, a shattered history covered in red tape and stamps that read classified. A lot of shit happened to me that I can't undo, but I thought I could just keep it to myself. I'm a super-soldier, right? That's the whole thing, is that I'm strong. But I trust Steve completely, and maybe a little transparency is good sometimes.

I slide my notebook out from under my leg and hold it out to him wordlessly. I can't imagine what he's going to think of what's in there. He takes it from my hand cautiously and flips to the first page. There's no going back now.

I scrutinize his body language intently, but the longer I look at him and the more he reads, he just looks... hollow. Like there's no emotion inside him at all. He keeps flipping pages, staring at words scribbled in ink that might as well have been blood, detailing all my nightmares and memories and things I don't necessarily want to remember, but I know I have to. I moved too many times to count in those two years after D.C. with nothing but a change of clothes and those notebooks. I was prepared to walk away from everything I had made for myself with nothing but those memories, and I lost those, but they're here now, and Steve's reading them, and why did I let Steve read them, that was so stupid of me! I stare at my hands, wringing them anxiously in my lap, twisting my right thumb until it burns. Steve can't possibly feel nothing reading those... right?

He clutches a hand over his mouth as his eyes scan the pages, and I realize I'm tearing him apart. He thinks it's his fault that this all happened to me, and I let him read exactly what he sacrificed. While he thought I was dead, and while he was sitting frozen in a glacier somewhere after not going back for me, I was murdering hundreds of the world's best people, being broken and tortured and pieced back together again, and he blames it all on himself. Stupid, stupid Bucky Barnes. Why would you ruin him like this?

Steve closes the journal gently, tears streaming silently down his cheeks. He stares at me with watery eyes, not saying a word, not making a sound except for the occasional strained intake of breath. Just watching him stand there, sobbing over all that, makes me start to cry a little too. I don't know how much he read, but apparently, I sabotaged our relationship again.

It's only after a moment that I realize Steve's not really looking at me, per se. He's staring at my chest, his eyes glazed and glossy, staring through me like a piece of glass. He's not present, and that becomes obvious when his legs give out. He falls to his knees on the kitchen floor, shaking violently, imagining, imagining, imagining.

I push off the couch and race over to him, sliding to my knees next to his shivering figure. He starts to sob harder, his breath coming quickly, and he wheezes in between whimpers of mental agony. I put my right hand on his back, rubbing in small circles like I used to, murmuring to him quietly. I want to tear my hair out. This was supposed to be such a nice day, I was supposed to just be building a bridge between our feelings, but apparently mine are so savage and wrong that I started a fire and burned the bridge between us instead. I suppose that doesn't mean I can't comfort him, but I feel illegitimate, sitting here on the floor. Sam would've known what to do. I'm just the wrong person from the wrong timeline with a mind overflowing with poisonous memories.