Who Am I? » [Stucky]

41. Fall Out

Bucky stared at him, gobsmacked and alarmed by Steve's knee-jerk reaction. Then he shook his head at Steve, and looked down at the bed beneath him. Steve clearly wasn't the man he thought he was; what a complete miscalculation.

Bucky shuffled across the bed and stormed out in a huff, slamming the door brutally behind him with a loud rattling noise, of a magnitude big enough to burst an ear drum as he walked out. He had complete disregard for anything but hiding.

Bucky ran to the bathroom and locked himself securely in there. He shook the handle and pulled at the hopefully locked door just to make sure. Then he plummeted to his knees and cried his eyes out, bawling his eyes out unrelentingly, bent over with his hands to the ground, broken by the heartache he felt. He had been downed by his emotion. A bullet wound would be less painful than this, and he would know. He felt like a part of him had just died.

He couldn't hide it and he had no reason to. He let it all out and broke down into flood of tears, unable to control it or stop it. He was shattered by the earth-splitting realisation that Steve would never return his feelings.

He suffered all by himself, with no one to comfort him.

He had so many questions going around his mind:

What if Steve never spoke to him again?

What if Steve kicked him out?

What if their friendship ended because Bucky had made one stupid move? One fucking mistake.

Meanwhile, Steve was sat in the other room, deeply thinking about what had just happened. He was in contemplative stupor, lost deep within his own mind. He couldn't quite conceive the events that had just occurred.

Was Bucky gay? How long had he been gay for? When had he developed feelings for him? Why had he developed feelings for him?

So many questions was trapped in his head and the noise in his mind just wouldn't go away.

Steve was not only questioning Bucky's sexuality, but immediately questions had been raised about his own. He couldn't exactly say that he hated the kiss, or even minded - he was just completely stunned by the sudden action. His lips were assaulted brutally, but skilfully.

He wasn't gay. Surely not? He'd only ever kissed women, not that there were many. He'd never thought about dating someone of the same sex and he saw absolutely nothing against it; it wasn't exactly an uncommon thing in this day and age.

He was full of such unnerving unrelenting doubt, puzzled beyond all belief, his mind all over the place. He didn't know what to do, or what even to say. He just sat there, with his head in his hands trying to make sense of the unravelled strings of his mind. He was vexed and frozen in amazement.

Bucky was still crying restlessly in the other room.

What a fucking stupid decision. He had messed up everything. He had fucked up everything. He could have lost Steve forever.

He stood and looked at himself in the mirror. He took a good long hard look and stared in hatred at the image he saw before him. The reflection he'd come to love, accept and respect had become unrespectable and trashed. He was no longer the faultless changed man he really thought he was. He liked to have thought that he was some kind of irreproachable perfect reformed figure - someone who could leave behind their messy and dreadful past, someone who could move on and recover, someone who was good now; but he was far from it.

He had fucked up again. He was always fucking up: always far too weak to make the right decision, always had a bad judgement, always said the wrong thing and done the wrong thing in the heat of the moment.