one of my favorite genres of marvel angst is endgame/post-endgame bucky with a side of unrequited stucky. it kills me and yet i eat it up.
"if he was wrong about you, then he was wrong about me" is the tip of the iceburg, but imagine how much deeper that goes beneath the surface that marvel showed us.
bucky getting angry at steve for leaving and then being angry at himself for being angry at steve. going back and forth between blaming steve for lying to his face about sticking with him till the end of the line and then blaming himself for thinking it was possible.
i like to think that one of bucky's shame rooms in the void was steve going back in time and showing up on that bench with a wedding ring and no apparent regrets. steve was perfectly happy living a life without him-- so why would bucky, even for a second, consider otherwise? were then finish your mission because i'm with you till the end of the line, what you did all those years wasn't you merely misunderstood and meaningless sweet nothings?
steve saved him so easily but he left him so easily too. maybe it was just damage control, an attempt to keep an old friend from going rogue and snapping back into a globally-feared murderer. it didn't really mean anything. steve didn't want bucky, he just wanted to fix him.
the guilt, bucky calls it self-pity, spirals deeper. how on earth could bucky think that he was worth more to steve than a comfortable, normal life with the lovely peggy carter, where he could raise a family instead of dealing with the mess that's years of scrambled memories and trauma from being a bloodthirsty nazi-prideful emotionless and therefore regretless killer who murdered, along with so many others, the innocent parents of steve's friend? who in their right mind would want that?
of course steve would pick kids and a wife over waking up to bucky sobbing because of some nightmare he's already had hundreds of times but can't get over. the bad days outnumber the good days and they always will. bucky doesn't blame steve, because he deserves to be happy and to have some sense of normal if that's what he wants. bucky doesn't blame steve because maybe he was a losing dog from the beginning, so of course steve didn't want to put money on him. bucky doesn't blame steve because gosh, he wouldn't pick himself either. so why is he in bitter shock? why does it still hurt? he'll probably never know, no matter how many times he picks the memory apart in his head until it hurts worse than any physical scar ever did.
the spiral goes deeper and deeper and deeper and bucky knows the only person who can fix this is himself, but he won't, can't, doesn't know how, who really cares anyway? it doesn't even seem worth a shot at this point, the pit he's dug himself into is too deep and the light at the end of the tunnel gets dimmer every day. if the most stubborn person bucky knew, the one determined to right every wrong, had no faith in bucky being better, then nobody should. not even himself. the law might have let him off the hook, but the suffering of his own mind is his well-deserved punishment.
oh and here's some lyrics from the great divide by noah kahan because his new album is so endgame stucky coded and i want everyone to suffer it/appreciate it with me!! sharing is caring :)
and there's so many more songs from said album that fit them, but i'mma put them all in a different post for the sake of not making this too long.