Bucky just nods and lowers his gaze. He's had Steve's friends come into his life in recent years, with whom he could get a coffee and just talk if he felt inclined to talk, and he'd just be 'Bucky' to them. Bucky, the out of place, out of time vet, with all his human struggles and crippling guilt. It wasn't like his time in Hydra, where he was just 'soldat' if he was spoken to. One of many soldiers, and not really amounting to anything else. And nobody was expecting him to talk, either.

He had never begged, but he had starved, and he had been kicked while he was down, and he had whimpered. Well they hosed him down and beat the whimpering out of him too, but even when they'd finally broken him in just the way they wanted him, suggestible and mercurially docile and violent and eager to please, they never gave him the validation of being anything more than their soldier.

So, he understands, that kind of objectification and the loneliness, the craving and yearning for that kind of validation. What the damaged heart wants is a simple thing - to be Bucky or Helmut to be somebody. Sometimes, anybody.

"You are." More than just the ugly, demonised thing everyone is projecting onto him. And Bucky feels inadequate, being the one to give Zemo that lifeline out of a very private, very personal, very internalised hell when there are Those Mornings he can't even get his own shit together.

But it seems that for now, he might be the only one who can be here for Zemo. And he wants to be. So Zemo will just have to settle for what damaged, refurbished goods he has sitting in front of him.

"I'll call you anything you like. For as long as you need to hear it," Bucky promises quietly.