The Muses
Bucky and Zemo are walking in the park. They are arm in arm, debating very seriously whose turn it is to buy coffee. The sun is warm. The sky is blue. The trees whispers secrets to the flowers. A breeze lifts, not chill, not warm, just different. And the next step they take doesn’t quite land where it should.
The path beneath them shifts: gravel becomes something finer, like polished ivory or moonlit parchment. The trees surrounding them still sway, but the leaves are singing, not rustling. Actual harmonies. Golden, layered, ephemeral. There’s no sky overhead, not in the usual sense. Just a gentle, endless shimmer, like the inside of a pearl.
They stop walking. Zemo tilts his head, curious. Bucky looks around, wary.
Nine figures appear, gliding forward in a slow, circling approach. They are women, yes, but also not just women. They carry the feeling of concept, of rhythm, of form. One is draped in theatre’s velvet shadows. Another trails light and honeyed tones. One smells of ink and old maps. Another, of seafoam and stringed instruments. None of them speak just yet.
One brushes a finger across Bucky’s metal arm, and a single note echoes from it, like a harp string plucked. Another holds Zemo’s gaze just long enough for an image to flash through his mind: a quill, dipped in grief. And still, no words.
Until the youngest-seeming one, the Muse of sacred song, Polyhymnia, lifts her hand, as though inviting them into a dance neither has learned yet but both instinctively understand. And they step forward.
Calliope, Muse of epic poetry and eloquence, then steps towards them. She is carrying a writing tablet and a scroll. She doesn’t announce herself, but Zemo feels her before he sees her. The air sharpens, like the prelude to a great speech. She walks with the gravity of history, draped in gold-threaded robes, eyes like ink across parchment. Her voice is low, deliberate. “You carry tragedy like a cloak,” she murmurs to Zemo.
He tilts his head. “Don’t we all?”
She touches his chest, over his heart. And suddenly, Bucky sees not just Zemo, but a hundred versions of him: scholar, strategist, freedom fighter, war criminal, man in love. Every version epic. Every version worthy of song. Calliope smiles and steps back.
Clio, Muse of history, follows. She hums as she passes Bucky, her fingertips trailing over the pages of a floating, ever-turning book. Each page a memory. His. Zemo’s. The world’s. Bucky watches a flash of Brooklyn in summer. A train. A dusty rooftop. Zemo, barefoot in a library, reading by candlelight. Clio catches Bucky’s eye. “You remember more than you admit,” she says, gently.
“Sometimes,” he replies, “Sometimes, I don’t want to.”
“Even so,” she whispers, laying a hand to his temple. “You are history’s echo, still sounding.” She turns, and walks away.
Euterpe, Muse of music and lyric poetry, especially flute playing, twirls toward them like a summer breeze. Barefoot, wrapped in ribbons, every step she takes leaves notes floating in the air. She grins, mischievous, electric, and flicks a tune onto Bucky’s shoulder. It sticks like glitter. Suddenly he hears it: the melody of his own heartbeat. Zemo’s breath. The rhythm of their feet on the marble floor.
She loops a ribbon around Zemo’s wrist and tugs, and he actually laughs. She conducts them both, first into a waltz, then something stranger. More primal. By the time she spins away, they’re breathless and grinning.
Erato, Muse of love poetry and lyrical poetry, approaches slowly. She carries rose petals and worn paper. Her gaze settles on Zemo first, then drifts to Bucky. “You’ve already written your verses,” she says, “but I think I’d still like to read them.”
Zemo takes Bucky’s hand. Bucky squeezes back. Erato smiles, kisses them both on the cheek, and fades.
Melpomene, Muse of tragedy and tragic theatre, walks with a shadow behind her. Bucky stiffens. But she surprises him. She doesn't touch the past. Instead, she looks only forward. “There will be more sorrow,” she says softly. “But you are not bound to it.” And somehow, that is comforting.
Thalia, Muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, cartwheels past and lands beside Zemo with a loud, delighted “Ha!” He arches an eyebrow. She claps her hands. “You’ve got the driest wit this side of Olympus. A perfect match for him.” She thumbs toward Bucky. “The king of grumpy one-liners.”
Bucky smirks despite himself. Zemo snorts.
“I knew it!” she cries. “There’s a sitcom in you both!”
Terpsichore, Muse of dance and choral song, doesn’t speak. She moves. She loops their hands in hers and spins them gently until the realm becomes motion itself. Her gift is not music, not words, but flow. Connection. Bodies that understand each other. It’s in the way Bucky catches Zemo’s hand. The way Zemo falls into step without thinking. Every relationship has a rhythm. She just helps them find theirs.
Urania, Muse of astronomy and celestial bodies, stands apart. Not distant, just other. She points toward the skies. Skies not of Earth, but of possibility. “You were both made of stars once,” she says. Later, they’ll remember the way she looked at them, not as mortals, not as men, but as patterns worth charting. Constellations all their own.
And last, Polyhymnia again, soft, still, serene. The Muse of sacred poetry, hymns, and dance. She brings them to a place of quiet. A space to breathe. She kneels, and they kneel with her. No words. Just shared stillness. Reverence.
And then she says, “You were not summoned. You were invited.” She looks at each of them. “You may go. Or stay. You may ask. Or create.”
They look at each other and smile.
*
The air in this realm has a kind of golden softness to it now, like the hour just before dusk. Zemo walks a little ahead, hands clasped behind his back. Introspective. He’s clearly thinking, clearly moved. But he hasn’t said much.
Bucky trails behind, not out of disinterest, just a different kind of thoughtfulness. His fingers graze over the surface of things: a curve of marble that wasn't there before, a vine strung with glass chimes that sings when he breathes near it. He lets it all wash over him. He’s letting himself feel before trying to understand.
And then, a little space opens up in the world. No instruction. No push. Just the feeling: you can make something here.
Zemo feels it first. A quiet itch behind his ribs. The weight of potential. He steps away, finds a corner where the air feels a bit like old wood and fresh ink, and sits. Just sits. The realm listens. Zemo exhales and begins. Not with grandeur. Not some grand thesis of memory or a divine poem. No, he tears a strip of blank parchment from the air itself, because that’s what it feels like, and he begins folding.
A shape takes form. A bird. Then another. A dozen tiny birds made of thought and breath and paper-thin memory. Some are clumsy. One has a crumpled wing. He keeps it anyway. They gather beside him in a quiet flock, and he smiles, for no one but himself.
Bucky doesn’t notice at first. He’s followed a path that wasn’t there a moment ago, down a slope of light toward what looks like driftwood. It is driftwood. And broken tools. Bits of metal, stone, glass. One of the Muses, or all of them, has left him scraps. Not junk. Materials. And he grins, because it’s like a challenge.
He gets to work. He doesn’t think of symbolism or metaphors. He just wants to make something that feels good in his hands. Something solid. Maybe a slingshot, or a weird little sculpture that balances just right. Maybe he’ll bend some of the metal around a smooth stone to make a spinning thing that hums in the air.
It's not useful. But it’s his. And when he’s finished, he sits back on his heels and laughs softly.
They come back to each other wordlessly, each carrying their strange little objects. Zemo with arms full of his flock of fragile birds, Bucky with his kinetic sculpture-thing.
Zemo raises an eyebrow. “Is it meant to do that?”
Bucky shrugs. “I dunno. It just did.”
Zemo chuckles, then holds out one of the crumpled birds. “He’s a bit off-balance.”
Bucky looks at it like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen.
They don’t make a big deal of it. No grand declarations. Just a nod. A shared quiet. And the realm around them hums in agreement. Maybe this is the moment the Muses wanted to see. Not art born of performance or divine inspiration. Just creation for its own sake. Unadorned. Un-precious. Human.
Art for art’s sake, to let the hands move whilst the mind drifts.
They settle cross-legged on the grassless floor, where the air smells faintly of honey and stone. It’s not warm or cold, but it is just the right kind of ambient peace to keep the limbs limber and the heart soft.
Bucky holds a little origami bird between two fingers, turning it slowly. The paper’s so fine it feels like breath, but folded with such precision. He studies it, then looks over at the rest of Zemo’s flock. Neat rows, each bird unique but held to a quiet standard. Self-contained. Like Zemo himself.
“You folded all these?” he asks, voice soft with curiosity, not surprise.
Zemo, seated nearby, nods once. “It quiets the mind. The repetition. The fragility.”
Bucky smiles faintly. “You always liked things done well.” He picks up the bird with the crumpled wing and holds it in the cradle of one palm. The paper is impossibly fine, almost translucent, like memory caught mid-fold. He brushes a thumb along the edge, careful not to tear it. “This one’s my favourite,” he says.
Zemo, sitting across from him, glances over. “Because it’s broken?”
“No,” Bucky replies. “Because it’s still flying.”
That earns him a rare, unguarded smile. One that doesn’t rise to perform, doesn’t sharpen with irony. Just simple warmth, blooming slow.
Zemo tilts his head, considers the strange beautiful kinetic sculpture in his own hands: Bucky’s curious tangle of wire, stone, driftwood, and what might once have been part of a lyre string. He lifts it gently, watching how the balance shifts. It sings, softly, when he nudges it. Not a song as such, just a resonance. Like breath meeting bronze.
There’s a long pause. Then Bucky gestures to the piece. “I was thinking. If one of your birds wanted to fly,” he says, “I could make space.”
Zemo glances at him, something warming behind his eyes. After a moment, he reaches forward and touches the paper bird in Bucky’s palm. The one with the slightly crooked wing. “This one first,” he says, smiling.
Bucky grins. He begins disassembling part of the support beam of his structure with his multitool. “We could use this piece. Brace it here.” He threads it gently into the mobile, lets it swing once before steadying it with a fingertip. It fits. Perfectly imperfect. Like it was always meant to be there.
Zemo watches a moment longer, then selects another bird. Bucky shifts the wires, makes room. Slowly, deliberately, he threads Zemo’s delicate flock into the gaps between his heavier pieces. The wire bends and dips to accommodate the weight, but doesn’t break. The sculpture grows, takes new shape. An interweaving of two expressions, two instincts, held aloft by balance and wind.
Another bird, another wire. They rise slowly, a chorus of memory and stillness suspended mid-flight. Zemo kneels beside Bucky, smoothing the paper tails, adjusting a counterweight, retrieving a pale scrap of silk from his coat pocket to wrap around the central beam. He ties a tiny stone to one end of the wire to balance the lightness of the paper. Bucky wedges a softened shard of amber to catch the light.
Soon the whole thing begins to take shape: a sculptural mobile, birds suspended mid-flight in swooping arcs. They find they have built a whole cascade. A spiral of birds in gentle motion, each one balanced and tethered, yet moving freely. When the air shifts, just so, the thin wires hum faintly against each other, a soft kind of accidental music.
They stand back. Bucky wipes his hands on his pants. Zemo wipes his fingers on a handkerchief, then clasps his behind his back, tilting his head to one side.
“It’s unbalanced,” he says, but there’s something fond in it. “And not terribly precise.”
Bucky grins. “Yeah. That’s why it’s good.”
They sit again, side by side. Watching the sculpture turn slowly, casting shadows like wings across the floor. The air hums. Not from the Muses now, but from something quieter, something chosen. A shared act of making. Not to impress. Not to offer. Just because.
Zemo folds his hands in his lap. “Do you think they’ll take it?”
“The Muses?” Bucky murmurs.
Zemo looks at him. “They’re collectors, aren’t they?”
Bucky shrugs. “Maybe. But I kinda want to keep it.”
“I also,” Zemo admits.
And far off, though neither of them see it, something in the realm shifts. Just slightly. As if acknowledging their small refusal to make an offering of themselves. The Muses, for once, take nothing. They simply let them be.
*
They don’t notice at first when the light changes. One moment they’re walking through golden air that hums with creative possibility, and the next, they’re back in the world they know. Less radiant, perhaps, but not lacking for comfort.
The air is cooler. Real. Earth-scented. There’s the faint creak of their floorboards, the sigh of wind through the window left open just a little. The sculpture is still between them, Zemo’s hands careful on the base, Bucky keeping the wires from tangling. The birds chime faintly as they move, like breath caught in crystal.
They stop in the middle of the room. Their flat isn’t grand, but it’s theirs. There’s a narrow shelf by the window where the light pools in soft stripes during the morning. Bucky gestures to it silently. Zemo nods. They place the sculpture there together.
For a moment, they just look at it. The glint of wires, the delicate paper wings, the way each bird seems to be caught mid-flight, suspended in some invisible current. A piece of both of them. A memory of silence, of hands that knew what they were doing, of time that wasn’t rushed.
Then Bucky murmurs, “You think it’ll catch the breeze?”
“Mmmm,” Zemo says. “If the window’s open just enough. It will sing, a little, I think.”
“Good.”
They leave it there. They don’t talk about where they’ve been, or how long they were gone. The tea’s still warm in the pot on the table. There’s a cat curled up in the sunbeam, tail flicking. The world has continued. But now, there is a sculpture that wasn’t there before. And every time it sings, faint and sweet and strange, they’ll remember. They’ll smile. And that will be enough.
***