These are Bucky’s favorite moments with you: the ones he can steal outside of time and reality, where you’re resting peacefully next to him and he’s awake to just breathe in time with you. The ones where he can pretend that he’s got a steel trap mind instead of a jigsaw memory, where he can pretend he’s a permanent resident in the space beside you. The version of events where he can stay.
Pale moonlight leaks through your blinds and onto your skin, creating a cage of shadow on your bare shoulders. All that can be heard in the room is the rhythmic breathing of your sleep, and the crickets outside.
The moonlight also illuminates the nightstand on your side of the bed, a picture of your husband - Steve, Bucky’s best friend - protectively watches over you as you rest (possessively glares at Bucky over your shoulder).
It makes Bucky feel sick.
He wonders about Steve a lot, in the aftermath of making love to you. Steve, with his golden hair and winning smile, his endless strength and optimism. Steve, with his betrayals and broken promises. Does Steve know how your smile lights up the whole room? Does he know the way the band of the wedding ring you still wear gleams golden in the early evening sunlight? Bucky remembers your wedding day, remembers the way the two of you beamed at each other. Does Steve know your secret smiles, the shy ones? Had he memorized your gasps and moans, the way you glittered with sweat? Had you screamed his name with the same conviction you now scream Bucky’s?
And had he forgotten it? Because, looking at your hair against the pillow and the serene expression on your sleeping face, Bucky can’t fathom leaving you. Can’t imagine that he’d be able to part from you unless HYDRA took him again.
Despite what everyone had assumed, Bucky doesn’t know why Steve left. He doesn’t know what those seventy years they spent apart had done to Steve, or how the little guy who got in alleyfights, the one he followed to his death, could ever become a man who leaves behind people who care about him for a pipedream that should’ve died at the bottom of the ocean but instead stayed frozen solid in his mind. He doesn’t know how a man who shines so bright he’s basically sunshine can’t melt away his nostalgia and see what’s right in front of him.
Bucky knows, or remembers at least, what happened in the aftermath. Remembers Sam’s rejection of the shield, and the pseudo-cap that came after. He remembers the night you showed up at his apartment, stumbling and screaming at him through slurred words, asking how he could let Steve do this to you and also how dare he make you worry by not answering your calls?
He doesn’t quite remember how you fell into bed with each other, only that he’d give anything to take it back, and he’d give everything to keep it going.
There are a lot of things Bucky doesn’t know - he’s a former amnesiac in a century he wasn’t supposed to see. But he knows one thing: he can never live up to Steve. He isn’t your sunlight, just the only other person on the planet who knows exactly what it is to lose it. You were Icarus. You had loved the sun too closely and got burned because of it, and Bucky’s arms were the vast and open sea you plummeted to in the aftermath. The two of you aren’t lovers, not really, just complementary fragments trying to find somewhere you can fit.
And really, that’s Bucky’s skillset, being not-quite. Not-quite your boyfriend, not-quite a person, not-quite a hero, not-quite dead. He can do this for you, and if he gets to love you in the meantime, that’s just a bonus.
But he doesn’t get to stay. He doesn't know a lot, but he knows that much.
He slowly, carefully, lifts the covers and crawls out of the bed. His clothes aren’t folded or anything but they’re in a pile by the door. The two of you have been doing this long enough for him to have learned how to get out quickly, the way he cases the exits on missions. He knows which floorboards to avoid because they could creak and wake you up. He knows to ignore that nagging feeling that the eyes of his friend on your bedside are watching him go.
He’s never asked you about any of this: how you feel about Steve, or him, or that movie he knows you saw on Tuesday because you tweeted about it and he has your post notifications on. He doesn’t know why you still wear your wedding ring, or why you let people talk to you like you’re Captain Rogers’s widow instead of telling them the truth. He only knows that you do, and he really doesn’t need to know any more than that.
He tries to shut your door as gently as possible, knows that you can startle awake if he does it too loud. He doesn’t look back. That’s part of it, this routine he has with you. When he leaves, he never looks back.
He wonders, sometimes, what it’s like for you to wake up in the mornings after he leaves. Wonders if you open those beautiful eyes and for a second, they’re confused (maybe even disappointed). But he doesn’t know, will never let himself ask, and he’s okay with that. There are a lot of things Bucky doesn’t know.
(For example, Bucky doesn’t know how good you are at closing your eyes and evening out your breathing to make it seem like you’re asleep. He doesn’t know that you wait, with even but bated breaths, for him to stay. Just once.
Bucky doesn’t know, because you never tell him - because he doesn’t stay long enough for you to gather the courage to say it - that he is the strongest and bravest person you’ve ever known. Doesn’t know that you trust the metal of his left arm more than you trust the metal ring Steve gave you that lives on your left hand. That when he touches you with it you feel like the gold from the crevices leaks out into your skin, turning you gold.
Bucky doesn’t know that you watch him walk away from the house everytime he leaves, and hope against reason that this time he’ll turn back.)