He held Bucky closer, knees bent so that he could cradle him, and Steve wanted to lift him up against him and bury his face in Bucky's shoulder and rock him slowly like a child who'd woken out of a nightmare, only Steve felt as though the nightmare was his and it was clinging to him still with all the horror of what had been done to his best friend. His soulmate now, in a way that went beyond love songs and words that could only touch the edge of expressing such a bond. He didn't know any words for it himself, though Bucky was looking to him to explain it. It made him sorry, made him feel as though he was failing him, though Bucky's fingers stroking the bare skin under his shirt kept distracting him, sweet, soft caresses that went higher and higher; Steve shivered when his touch brushed over his nipples. It was intimate, and it felt as though Bucky was trying to learn every inch of him, map his body like a terrain that was his to make his home in.

Steve licked his lips as he searched for an answer. "We weren't before," he acknowledged, his voice still husky and low. "I don't know why it happened now, Buck, I--when I saw you that first time, when I unmasked you, after I thought you were dead all those years--" He couldn't speak. There was a burning in his eyes and a tightness in his throat; he was remembering and flinching from the memory of the enormous, rending pain he had felt at that moment, like something inside of him was tearing in two. He remembered falling to his knees with rifles aimed at his skull and barely knowing it, numbness taking over. If he'd been shot in the head right then he was sure his dying thought would have been gratitude for the release.