They gave him space where he needed guidance.
They gave choices and options where he needed help choosing.
They gave him everything he had ever wanted, but they weren't close, and he was alone.
They gave him bullshit about how he needs to go out and live a little, but they don't know what he needs, and he needed to open up.
(If he opened up to them, they would make fun of him or leave. If he opened up, he would be labeled, like everything else this century.)
They pretend ay sympathy, but they don't know.
Thor lost Loki, and Tony, his parents. Clint, his brother, and Bruce, his mother, and Natasha, he's not really sure, but he lost everything.
He lost everything on top of losing everyone. Nothing is the same, in more ways than one, and it's not like that with the others. Even Thor can go home if he gets homesick.
Pluto isn't a planet, and a guy landed on the moon in the '60's.
What was Mars is now M&M'S.
Money is different - he'd be able to afford the subway and still have dinner that wasn't some shitty slop that Bucky made, even if it was at Steak 'n Shakes, now.
Sugar is something in every home, along with salt and flour. He remembers going weeks without any of them, and still living to tell the tale, especially with his immune system.
Coffee and chocolate don't taste like the dirt of hell anymore, which is nice, sure. But no one, least of all him, would ever think he would miss that shitty, horrible, tasteless stuff they called good.
Maybe they don't realize that he has nothing, that everything they are used to, such as soda at command or clean air, without all the dust, is new to him.
Tony throws a laptop at him - literally throws - and if his reflexes weren't superhuman, he wouldn't have been able to keep it off the floor. Nobody explains how to use it to him. He has to ask JARVIS. Oddly, it humiliates him.
He leaves, he takes the missions, he drinks coffee in the high hopes it will keep him awake, he crashes on his couch and he skirts around his teammates as much as he can. He can't tell if he wants to be with them or as far away as possible.
He tries not to think about his past, tries to avoid everyone, and it's all because he doesn't have anything to lose in this century - he's always going to be needed.
(It seems like police are soldiers, now, and heroes like him are the one's pulling cats out of trees. The lines of everything are blurring.)
He doesn't know what to do. No, not now, not when he has so much freedom to do anything that would be expected of him.
Still, he doesn't lay in bed like he wants to, wallowing, because Captain America doesn't do that sort of thing - Captain America is up with the sun and jogging his way around the entire continent, probably, and still being on time for breakfast.
He doesn't know how to trust himself. He can't trust that he won't fly off, into the ocean, because his feet took him there. He can't trust that the water will freeze his bones and he'll sink.
He doesn't have alcohol to turn to, and he goes mission by mission, now, so he doesn't have a set time to work.
The rut he's stuck in is filling with water, and he's drowning. But no one notices.
All it takes is one reckless move.