Touching Steve doesn't feel right.
Not because he remembers how it felt; Bucky knows that such familiarity is forever lost to them, to him specifically, to the shifting sands of his memory. No, it doesn't feel right because it should be the best thing he's felt—perhaps not in comparison to the halcyon days of before, but at least the best since he can remember.
Sometimes the enemy inside his head would slap him, bind him in chains and brutalize him, taking every authoritarian chance to shove a boot up his ass. He's taken his share of beatings, force that would have killed anyone else, would have—well. Anyone but Steve.
And he knows, he knows, that happy endings don't mean joy in every moment. He knows that love is a choice and not just a feeling, and he knows he's chosen Steve. But he—
This is awful. He shouldn't even be thinking this, but he does: He misses them sometimes. The enemy (in his head). He finds himself thinking fondly, and he knows better, but he finds himself thinking fondly of Rollins, of his big warm hands cradling the Asset's cheeks. His—Bucky's—
But that wasn't Bucky, and that's the problem, isn't it? Bucky has never felt cradled, never felt that sunshine warmth. He's felt other things that are grand and illuminative; he's felt the clarity of seeing Steve certain about something, and the mingled gratitude and shame of knowing the something is him. He's seen vast rolling countryside out the back of a janky little warplane and ridden in a fancy private jet.
VTOL makes him sick, still. Or, not sick, but makes him go away inside his head (the enemy). Makes him take comfort, grasp at comfort, in the form of big warm hands, solid bodies and honey-smooth voices. A retreat toward the enemy (in his head). Until it was over, and Steve (always Steve) was dragging him out again, into real sunlight, cold and blue and clarifying.
Tony apologized, apparently. Bucky (the Asset) had to be told afterward. Tony was talking too quick and intricate to be anything but another memory to be endured in the moment and picked over afterward. By rights he should retreat to that, not—
He wishes Steve's hands were warm.
He's talked to his therapist about that. About how he doesn't miss the killing, not for a second; that makes him sick for real, sick with a nausea that isn't kind enough to end with release, and shouldn't—but he misses the enemy. He misses, in a sense, the lies. He misses being told he did good work. He misses believing it.
He doesn't miss the beatings, but he misses the other times, the moments when touch became something more than itself and he felt loved by everything that ever was.
His therapist talks about attachment patterns. About joy, about love as a feeling and as a choice. He tells her about love as a weapon. He tries to tell her about the other meaning of love, the one he doesn't know how to say.
The love that dare not speak its name. But not that one. A different sort of love—one that shouldn't. The love of a beaten dog for the hand that feeds it, the love of a broken man for the ones that broke him down.
She talks about schemas, about familiar patterns and habits of thought, about the correlation between growing up in an abusive home and being abused by partners in future life. As if he was a child. As if they really did reset him back to nothing.
But he gets it, sort of. He understands on an intellectual level that what he's feeling isn't real. Doesn't make it any easier to give it up. He loves the enemy in his head, automatically, unthinkingly.
He doesn't know how to love Steve.