I know it’s been disappointing for the people who like to headcanon Bucky as a sad murder baby who needs Steve’s love to heal him, but his characterisation in Civil War was real and honest and respectful of his trauma in a way that I hardly dared hope for going in.
Here’s what we know about Bucky, taken straight from canon with shipper goggles off:
He’s self-reliant, emotionally detached, and works well on his own. The guy’s a sniper. By training and by natural aptitude he is the man who spends long stretches of time cut off from his team, watching the action unfold from afar, picking off targets in cold blood. The traits that allowed him to excel at that so early on his career have only been amplified by his time with Hydra.
He is violent, compulsively and instinctively. We’ve all reblogged those joke posts about him hitting a guy in the face with a cinderblock five seconds after promising Steve he wasn’t going to kill anyone, and yeah, the irony is funny, but it’s also real. Bucky means it when he says he doesn’t want to kill people anymore, but he also doesn’t want to die, and he’s not squeamish about inflicting catastrophic levels of damage on other people if that’s what it takes to protect himself.
He’s hypervigilant and mistrustful of other people. Pretty much every life experience he’s ever had supports the life-threatening necessity of keeping his guard up. Throughout the events of Civil War he barely makes an effort to defend himself against the accusations pouring in from every direction – if people don’t accept his first token denial, he gives up on verbal reasoning and punches his way out instead. He doesn’t expect anyone to believe him. He doesn’t expect anyone to care about the truth. He’s spent the past two years looking over his shoulder, wondering if the van parked on the street has a hit squad inside it or if the woman talking on the phone is passing on coded messages about him.
After the events of TWS, he doesn’t want to be too close to Steve. @yeahcoolduck has absolutely nailed that point above, so I’m not going to elaborate. We can all theorise whatever we like about his reasons for not wanting to be close to Steve, but the simple fact is that every single aspect of his behaviour throughout Civil War screams ‘keep your distance from me’.
For all those reasons, and probably dozens more as well, it would have been a disastrous move on Steve’s part to come at Bucky with anything like the kind of intimacy OP is pining for. By respecting Bucky’s signals, Steve is doing something that Stucky fandom often seems strangely resistant to – he’s treating Bucky like a normal guy, a complete person in his own right, who’s been through some shit and has his own very firm, very independent plans for how he’s going to deal with it.
Steve’s not trying to shove a sterilised feel-good recovery narrative down Bucky’s throat, and he’s not trying to force an inorganic level of intimacy for the sake of a screen-worthy reunion scene. As far as I’m concerned, those were very real strengths of the movie – they passed up a lot of cheap-but-effective tearjerker opportunities in order to stay true to their established version of the characters, and allowed self-possession and dignity to a character who until now has been notable mostly for his victimisation and complete lack of agency.
If that doesn’t hit your buttons? Fair enough. From the sheer volumes of whump fic this fandom churns out, it’s pretty clear that a whole lot of people in the world just really want to see Bucky Barnes cry and get hugged. Hell, I love a good cry-and-hug fic (is that a genre? It should probably be a genre) as much as the next bitch. That’s why I’m deeply glad that fandom exists. But when fandom starts critiquing a blockbuster movie on the grounds that it didn’t sufficiently resemble their favourite Stucky fanfic, that’s when I get a bit leery.
Oh, and just by the way – not everybody hugs. Even for people who do hug, hugging isn’t necessarily the ultimate expression of affection that transcends every other shared experience in the world. I’m pretty sure that actions such as saving a loved one heroically and repeatedly from certain death at great personal risk to life and limb – you know, just for example – is at least as good a way of showing you love someone as standing really close together and sharing three to ten seconds of skin contact.
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