Run (A Bucky Barnes Recovery Story)

62 Guilt

Guilt is not like a weight. Maybe to some, but not to Steve. Guilt is like a poison. It sits like a weight, that may be true, but it destroys like an acid. It burns away everything, eats at your happiness all the time. The endless, destroying guilt that was never gone. Even when Bucky tried to tell Steve he wanted him or he forgave him or he didn't blame him, Steve still wanted to apologize for everything. And now, Bucky couldn't even tell Steve those things because they just weren't true anymore. Steve had ruined that and now for everything, he wanted to apologize to Bucky. I'm sorry I let you down. I'm sorry I let you get hurt like you would have never let me. I'm sorry I'm even here at all, to cause you so much more discomfort. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

And they weren't just words either, Steve felt the sorriness down to his feet for things he could never change and things that logic told him weren't his fault. But he had always been like that, he supposed, taking things on, assuming responsibility. It wasn't heroic. He just hated himself that much.

He deserved this, though, this new guilt, as Bucky yelled in Russian words Steve didn't know and stormed out, rightfully enraged. Somehow, Steve hadn't realized how angry Bucky would be, how hurt, but now it was so obvious. Steve had thought he might be helping, so that Bucky and Natasha could be happy, but of course he was wrong, of course!! Bucky had every right to be angry! Steve had lied to him, if at least by omission, and he had told Natasha not to say anything and it was he who had done this new horrible thing to Bucky. Could Bucky ever forgive him, ever trust him? Steve knew he didn't deserve it.

And it was the guilt, in the end, that had begun to destroy Steve Rogers. He didn't feel like sunshine anymore, he could see it in the mirror, draining out of his eyes. Sometimes, he was so far in the depths of his pain and the way he took on everyone else's pain as well, that he couldn't remember a time when he'd ever seen sparkle and life there at all.

It's difficult, sometimes, to see the life in your own eyes until you have to watch it fizzle away. Then it becomes so obvious that you had really been something in that distant Before.

And then it would grow worse, because he would catch himself in the act of thinking these things and then chastise himself for self-pity. It was almost ridiculous, he knew, when he thought about it. He would take everyone's pain, including his own, and then hate himself for feeling it all. He just didn't know how to stop.

A day or so after the falling out with Bucky, Steve got a call from Tony.

"Hey, I'm coming over, is Bucky there?" Tony said after Steve said hello.

"No," Steve said. "Why?"

"Call him over," Tony said. "I'm gonna make him a new arm."

"I thought you said you were busy," Steve replied and he could just hear the cocky grin in Tony's voice. Starks, Steve sighed.

"Not anymore!" Tony exclaimed.

Then came the hard part for Steve. He called Bucky and just prayed he'd pick up. He did, on the second or third ring. There was a hesitation and Steve waited.

"What," Bucky said after a minute, his voice dark. Steve took a deep breath.

"Tony called. He wants to meet us at my place and start thinking about a new prosthetic for you," he said. Bucky let out a breath into the phone.

"What time," he asked.

"Now, I guess," Steve said.

"Okay," Bucky said. There was another pause. This, Steve knew, would have been a logical time for Bucky to hang up or leave, but he was hanging on. Steve clung to this.