Secretive - Bucky Barnes

25 || Highway to Hell

Looking down into these aquamarine eyes, eyes filled with a crazy mixture of hope and anxiety, I'm glad for the first time since my evolution that I don't need to breathe, because sure as hell, my lungs would have collapsed.

Specks of gold blur my vision, and not just the frame of it due to tears filling my sight to the brim. No, James's words, his little monologue had an effect on me that goes beyond the mind, an effect that's an impact on my physique, making my palms cold and sweaty, my fingers and knees tremble, my heart light with delight and heavy with remorse at the same time.

When I sacrificed the world for this man, years ago, I begged him to use this chance. I prayed day and night for him, for him to understand and start to live and maybe even enjoy life for his trigger was gone. Nobody would ever summon the Winter Soldier ever again; he was on free foot, and hell, I would've done anything in my might for Hydra to lose interest in the little bomb planted into his brain. If they asked me to, I would've taken over the world in just a snap and let eight billion people play marionette.

But I wished for more than that, so much more. For him. And one thing is sticking out like a black sheep right now, sometimes just a whisper back in my mind and sometimes a hot inferno consuming me from head to toe.
Right now, it's definitely the inferno.

In sole nights, I slowly but steadily started praying for him to find someone else. Find someone springy and happy, a bouncing good around his ever-dooming moodiness and pulling him upwards oh so easy. I wished for him to find someone to spend his life with, someone to give his life meaning, and dared even to wish for him someone that is not involved with any brutality, that has no experience with any violence and any guilt at all. I wished for someone innocent, someone who is able to show him the beauty of life as it is, to revive him, to draw his black-and-white world in all colors of the rainbow.

It started after I realized I'm none of these things. If at all, I brought his demise on him in that dark May, brought it from the outside straight through his guard and let it gnaw him slowly from the inside. Night for night, I counted all of my wrongdoings and honestly, Hannah Baker has had a lot less to decide to end her life. I got more than thirteen reasons and all of them in the context of ruining the life of the person I love.

Every night, I wished for him someone I can never be.
Never will be.

How? I forced him into immortality. I forced him into having children with names he didn't get to choose, forced him to sex with a version of me that died hundreds of days ago. I told him once he was a pedophile, told him I'd shoot him if he didn't leave. I wretched his soul, drained it of any will to continue when I left him by wrapping him around my finger like a bitch. I slept with his fucking best friend as a sort of coping mechanism and it has gone wrong in more ways than imaginable.

And the guilt. The voices whispering into my ears when it's dark, the same choir that almost drove me insane once if it wouldn't have been for him, little lullabies of the devil, nestling in my brain and letting it corride a tiny bit more night for night, day for day. The blood of a lot more than two-thousand people killed bare-handedly dropping down wherever I go, their death-cries an echo of my steps. And that's just in this life. This background story that is pure madness, that I wouldn't want to rest upon his shoulders but have to, and once again there's me dragging him into a war that's not his, never meant to be his. God, can't this man have some rest?

I'm everything and nothing he ever wanted. Why is he still here? He claims that he can't go through eternity without me, but what if he can't do it even with me? Maybe even because of me? I swore a long time ago I'd protect him from everything and anything in our way, but what if I don't have to? What if I just kill him slowly myself, accidentally and unknowingly? A little scratch day for day until he's bleeding from the inside out, until there's not an inch of his skin left that isn't soaked in crimson?