"God..." He bowed his head, biting his lip almost hard enough to bleed and closing his eyes as though to banish the sight of the hurt. It was wrong, that loss, a wrongness that marred the otherwise indefinably warm sense of familiarity and rightness that seized him at the sight of this man, at the feel of his touch. "I'm sorry." He offered the apology out of sympathy - an emotion he was only just remembering to identify - but also out of a sense of guilt he couldn't place but that was no less raw inside him. The loss, the pain, the pieces...they were his fault. He didn't remember how, didn't remember why, but the sense of failure still made his eyes sting with the threat of tears, when they'd remained dry in the face of all the pain this place had piled onto him.

He didn't deserve these soft touches and the reassurances they conveyed as clearly as any words, but selfishly, he drank them in anyway like a dying man. And he offered his own reassurances in turn, touching gently, tracing his fingers along the edge of the bandages, soothing over bruises from restraints and ruthlessly applied needles and scabs of healing skin. All for the sake of just keeping up this newfound yet beautifully familiar and right connection between them. And he spoke, just because it had been longer than he could remember since he'd last spoken to anyone. "Shh, it's okay." It wouldn't - he wasn't sure anything would ever be okay, not least because he'd forgotten until this moment what "okay" was even like. But things were...better, now. "I'm here." He was here, they were together, and he knew in that moment that he'd do damn near anything to stay that way.

Steve didn't know where the words that he said next came from. But, with that same impulse that drove him on to touch, to connect with this man, he said them, whispered them like a prayer. They were meant only for the other man's ears, even if their captors were always listening.

"...'til the end of the line."