When Zemo was locked away, Bucky just walked away from everything.
Disillusioned. Tired. Maybe a little heartbroken, but mostly tired. He didn’t know how to keep going. So, he did what any sensible person would do when the world lost its meaning: he became a monk.
Bucky retreated to a remote Tibetan monastery. High in the mountains, far from the world he knew. The isolation was thick and deep, like the stillness of snow on a quiet night.
Bucky embraced it. Meditation. Silence. Discipline. The perfect way to withdraw from the chaos of his former life. No more missions. No more heartache. Just peace.
Or so he thought.
Zemo, meanwhile, had a different idea of retreat. After a long stint in prison, where he learned all the ways to indulge in luxury while still wearing the same unperturbable face he’d had when he entered, Zemo emerged from his incarceration a changed man.
Not reformed, mind you. No. He became a hedonist of the highest order. If the world could offer him pleasure, he was going to take it, and then take it again, just to make sure. He didn’t believe in limits. Why should he? He was rich, free, and he had a lot of time to kill.
But curiosity gnawed at him. He’d never really figured out what had gone wrong with him and James. They’d been so close, so very close.
Zemo found out where Bucky had gone. And now, the thought of him in that remote monastery, silently meditating away his regrets, made Zemo’s heart ache.
*
Bucky had traded tactical gear for simple robes, whispered secrets for silent prayer, and the metallic taste of espionage for the faint tang of butter tea. The monastery perched high above the world, carved into the cold embrace of the Himalayas, where enlightenment was meant to be found.
Bucky wasn’t sure if he’d reached enlightenment yet, but he had, at the very least, lost himself in something quieter than grief.
And then Zemo arrived.
Zemo did not do quiet.
He landed in a chartered helicopter, disgorging himself onto the ancient stones with the confidence of a man who had never known self-doubt.
Bucky was deep in the monastery's secluded halls when Zemo made his entrance. He heard the copter. Glanced through the vaulted windows. Saw a face from his past.
Zemo had, at his side, seven designer suitcases, two monogrammed trunks, and, Bucky noted, aghast, one espresso machine.
He had that same head tilt, that same smug grin, the one that only Zemo could pull off in the middle of a mountain range. But Bucky almost didn’t recognise him. Gone was the polished spy, replaced by something more dangerous: a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain by stirring the pot.
He wondered whether he should go to meet him. He should be meditating, but instead he watched Zemo commandeer a dozen of the younger monks to take his luggage inside. He watched his understated swagger. He found himself looking for his moles, especially that one tucked behind his earlobe.
Bucky stood up, brushing dust off his robes, a hidden smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. A few minutes later, he heard familiar footsteps striding down the corridor, getting closer.
He turned to face the doorway, just as Zemo strode in. He could smell his cologne immediately, and it did things to his heart that he couldn’t explain.
"You’re not supposed to be here,” he grunted.
"And yet, here I am," Zemo said, with that laconic air of insouciance. “You didn’t strike me as the ascetic type,” he observed, putting away his mirrored sunglasses with the casual grace of a man who had once seduced a prime minister’s wife mid-car chase. “The things you miss when you’re in prison.”
Bucky inhaled through his nose, exhaled through his mouth. He was a monk now. He had patience. He swung his arm around. "Not all of us need distractions, Zemo. Some of us find clarity in retreat."
Zemo raised an eyebrow. "Clarity is overrated, James.”
“Zemo,” Bucky said, measuring his words like a man diffusing a bomb. “Why are you here?”
Zemo grinned, flashing teeth too white for a man who had spent the last decade in a cell. “Oh, you know,” he drawled, sitting on a stone bench like a very expensive, very smug cat. He crossed one long leg over the other. “I was in the neighbourhood.”
Bucky looked pointedly through the high arched window at the vast, desolate expanse of snow-capped nothingness that surrounded them.
Zemo merely smirked. “Did you miss me, James?” he purred.
Bucky had spent years training his mind to be a still pond, undisturbed by ripples of want, but Zemo was a rock thrown into the depths. Bucky remembered how it felt to be chased, and he knew, he just knew, he was being hunted now.
“You can’t stay here,” Bucky said, but his voice lacked conviction, and Zemo, ever the consummate spy, heard it immediately.
“Oh, but I can.” He waved a long-fingered hand in the direction of the doorway he had just come through. “I have with me all the essentials. Custom cashmere. Bluetooth speaker. Some very fine whiskey.” He tilted his head. In this light, his eyes were clear amber. “Don’t monks drink?”
Bucky’s eye twitched. “No.”
Zemo grinned wider. “Even for an old friend?”
Bucky turned on his heel and walked away, because there were battles a man could win, and then there was Zemo.
*
For the first few days, the atmosphere in the monastery was unsettled to say the least.
Zemo was many things, but unobtrusive he was not. He flirted with the abbot. He taught the younger monks how to play poker. He attempted to install a hot tub. (“It’s about spiritual wellness, James.”) And he followed Bucky with the dogged determination of a man who had once extracted nuclear codes from a Swiss banker using nothing but charm and a well-placed hand on the thigh.
Bucky resisted.
Of course, he resisted. But resistance, he had learned, was futile where Zemo was concerned.
He had spent years with that knowledge simmering beneath his skin, locked in the quiet longing of glances not held long enough, brushes of fingers that lingered just a fraction too long. And now, Zemo was here, in his world, a grinning devil in bespoke leather boots, and Bucky was not a good enough man to ignore it forever.
He thought he had put aside thoughts of sex, love, attachment. He’d been content to lead a celibate life. Until now.
Now, Zemo was here.
Now, the scent of his cologne was everywhere.
Now, his voice echoed through the halls, and its soft cadence found Bucky wherever he was. He hadn’t realised how much he had missed that voice. How much he had missed the way Zemo said his name, said James.
On the third night, he started to dream of Zemo. Of counting his freckles. Of drowning in his sweet accented voice. Of feeling Zemo’s elegant hands on his skin, in his hair, running over his vibranium arm. Of whispering Helmut, Hel.
On the seventh night, Bucky caught up with him, in the dim hush of a candlelit hallway. “You don’t belong here,” he said.
Zemo’s gaze was steady. “Neither do you.”
Bucky swallowed. His heart rate spiked, and for once, he didn’t know how to control it.
Zemo stepped closer, slow and deliberate, and Bucky felt it, the end of something, or maybe the beginning.
“I spent ten years in a cage,” Zemo murmured. “You spent ten years running from yourself. Maybe it’s time we both stop.”
Bucky had spent years training his heart to be a fortress, but fortresses, he knew, were meant to be breached.
When Zemo kissed him, it was not a surprise.
It was, finally, an inevitability.
***