“You’re breakin’ my heart,” Bucky murmurs, terribly raw. “You know that? It breaks my heart just looking at you.”

Steve watches him, the pull of his jacket across his big shoulders, his dirty boots muddying up Steve’s floor, the dark head of hair, and suddenly he can’t do anything but wonder at it, at all of it: the entirety of his wholly fantastic and stupendously unbelievable life. What did he ever do to deserve all this — him, Steve Rogers, the son of an immigrant and a vanishing man, any other boy in an alleyway with scraped-up knees? Who is he? Who is he but any other man off the street? And to be here, on this unlikely day, looking at Bucky now.

Time is so funny. Life is so strange.

“I’ve loved you,” says Steve, “Since the beginning of time, Buck.”

Bucky stares at him, silent and still.

“You know, I been to all fifty states? I went everywhere you ever told me you wanted to go and then some. I drew a hundred portraits of you, but they hurt too bad, and so I burned them, every one. They never looked right. Maybe it was because I could never do them in color.” Even at the Grand Canyon — holding it out so he might see it, that incredible, lonely, cold desert view, and then feeding it into the fire: watching the paper blacken and smoke and curl.

Bucky lets him speak.

“And you know, it’s funny: for the longest time I felt like I was looking for something. I think,” Steve says, “That I was looking for the truth. But I couldn’t find it anywhere, and that didn’t make sense. I even dug down deep inside myself, but there was nothing in there, either. I turned into the Tin Man without you: knock on my chest, you heard it echo for miles. So I looked and looked, but no matter where I did, I kept turning up you, finding you, over and over again, each decade of this life. But I think I get it now — I think I finally understand. I don’t know how it took me so long. It’s because you’re the truth, Buck. You’re the truest thing I’ve ever known.”

“Is that so?” Bucky asks, after a long, long pause.

Steve shrugs — what can you do? — and says, “It looks like. Sorry. Now I’m done. That’s all I had to say. It was so long and I never said. And then, well. All this time, I never thought I’d —“ and now he’s gasping, shocked by it, his throat closing up. He says, “Oh, Christ. You know, Buck, I never thought I’d get the chance to.”

Bucky leaves his coffee at the counter and turns the chair closest to Steve and sits before him. Their knees wedge together: Steve’s knee, Bucky’s knee, Steve’s knee, Bucky’s knee, and after a moment Bucky reaches out his right index finger and runs it down the bridge of Steve’s big and bumpy nose.

“Look at that beak,” he says. “You break it a time or twelve?” In one moment Steve is giving a laugh and in the next he goes silent, and Bucky’s hand is on the back of his neck, warm, heavy. For the first time in his entire life Steve reaches up his hand and presses him thumb into the little dimple in Bucky’s chin.

“I never felt you leave,” he confesses in a whisper, and all of a sudden his vision blurs. “I never felt you die, Buck. You were always there. You were always there. I thought I had lost my mind. I couldn’t shake you. I never shook you. I felt you out there in the world: some part of me. So I spent my whole life looking back. I spent my whole life hoping I’d see you in my rearview. Just a glimpse. Anything. I waited. I’ve been waiting.”

Bucky kisses him, very softly, very quietly, and simple: simple as though it hasn’t been a hundred years in the making. “Sorry,” he mumbles into Steve’s mouth, even as he does it. “M’sorry, I shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t —oh,” Steve realizes, and it makes him laugh; after all this, what a ridiculous thing to say. “Oh, no, Buck.”

“Got yourself a family.”

“And now I got you.”

“You can’t act like it’s so simple.”

“Watch me, motherfucker,” Steve says, and Bucky gives a laugh that’s wet and bloody as a newborn. “I was so quiet for so long,” Steve tells him, and it hurts again so badly he can’t breathe from it. With Bucky it comes and goes: this tightness in his throat, like pain from a sickness. All he can do is hold on and weather it through. “You never knew. I know you thought I didn’t. It hurt you.”

“Yeah it hurt me,” Bucky says, and kisses him viciously, and bites; but Steve bends for him, and lets him take whatever he wants. He owes it; he likes it. “Yeah it hurt me,” Bucky repeats, though now he kisses him in a way that says he isn’t so angry anymore. Steve pulls himself away to look, but then he sees it: five, six strands of hair at Bucky’s temple that are unlike any of the others.

Like Steve, he’s just now beginning to gray.

“Look at that,” says Steve, pressing his fingers there; and he realizes that he is unspeakably, deliriously relieved. Finally: someone like him. Someone like him, and of course, of course, of course it’s Bucky — who else could it ever be but Bucky? ”Look at that,” he repeats, in wonder. “We match.”

Bucky says, “Of course we match,” and murmurs, “Of course we do.” He looks at Steve’s face: his nose, his chin, his eyes.