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He wished he were a dog.
Buckey felt more like a cat.
Plenty of things felt like mice he entangled in between the toes of his paw—claws out stretched and curled downward menacingly toward the living, struggling thing which dangled from its tail at his mercy. His open mouth, his tongue poking out from the side view, his fangs white spots against the shadow. Bucky wished he were a dog, but he had been a mouser.
Now he wished he were Steve's dog.
You can only do something so long before it becomes second nature. When they first sealed themselves up in the snow and wilderness, Bucky was still absently holding butter knives in reverse grip like a real wetworks sort of operative (ready to stab the shit out of anyone, ready to kill anything, ready to—) until Steve would come over and gently guide him to holding it like a civilian boy who wasn't about to make mincemeat of the toast he was making. Steve had no use for a military dog. It was there in the way he smiled (and at other points, the times which he did not smile.) Bucky could wish he were Steve's dogs until hell froze over and chilled the Earth into a spinning ball of ice (as cold as the snow and wilderness outside, as cold as the place Steve thought the dog should stay) and he would never be Steve's dog.
Bucky dreamed dangerous things in shades of blood and vertigo that he knew better than to tell Steve about. There are so many shades blood can come in. Vibrant blood oozing from a fresh cut is not the same as the kind you mix with mud or feces to make something smearable (and none of that looks the same as dried blood puddles on hard floors, or the way blood looks as it seeps into fabric... There was an ever extending list, and Bucky's dreams liked to pick from them the way he imagined middle class white families picked paint swatches for redoing their living rooms or kitchens. He wasn't sure. That life seemed like the sort of thing that only exists in the movies, at least to him.)
Steve thought it was progress when Bucky ate on his own; the only thing that compelled him to throw butter and boiled ramen noodles into a bowl was the knowledge Steve would do it anyway if he didn't. The efficiency was in the name of avoidance. If Steve were not a factor, Bucky would not eat until his body told him to. His body seldom told him to. The same could really be said of drinking or bathing. Bucky learned there was a rhythm to Steve's promptings, and he followed it to remove the awkwardness of it all.
Did Bucky like Steve? He supposed (even from where he was now) that he must in some regard. Why else would the daymares where he killed Steve in gruesome, personal fashion make him startle like he does? It's not helpful. If all Bucky wants is for Steve to stop looking at him like he's the most pitiful thing alive, it's not a good idea to stare off (entranced by visions of Steve's organs in Bucky's hands, pulled free of his stomach in clenched and bloodied fists) and actively jump so badly you bump the table (rattling the plates, making silverware clatter loudly.) Such miscalculations only begin to make sense much less, be justifiable, if Bucky at least likes Steve a little.
And besides. Bucky wished he were Steve's dog.
Even like this, hands and face and middle covered in Steve's blood (spew from his cut jugular finally no longer a spray) he wished to be Steve's dog. One must at least passingly like someone to be bothered to think maybe this wouldn't have happened if I were your dog.
This could be another daymare he told himself, smearing warm blood over his face that did not remotely belong there. I could wake up, and find him staring past his dinner at me again.
Bucky licked his pointer and middle fingers, tasting iron. Or not, he admit down at the paling corpse. Or I finally did it.
Dogs do like tearing each other's guts out with their teeth, after all.