Chapter 5
V
Bucky hadn’t done this with anyone in almost a century, he deliriously thought, kissing Zemo against the wall of the decadent Moscow hotel room he’d just slammed him into. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He’d had to fuck targets and allies aplenty during his time as the Winter Soldier, but he preferred to think of those situations purely as missions he’d had to accomplish as the asset, nothing more. The last time he’d actually done this as a person he’d been in the middle of a war, still coming to terms with the fact that his little, scrawny, self-sacrificing idiot of a friend was now a six-foot tall army captain with more muscle than him.
When they’d met again, seventy years later, he’d sensed Steve was hoping to recover that aspect of their bond, but the asset– Bucky couldn’t bring himself to. He’d felt filthy, broken, scarred, and unattractive on the inside as much as the outside when compared against the shining Captain America. Unable to bear it, but not wanting to hurt Steve further by leaving, he’d pretended not to notice his old friend’s longing and hopeful looks, and he’d faked disinterest or confusion whenever Steve tried to bring up certain memories of their past. Bucky had remained firm in his belief that Steve deserved better than a half-human, brainwashed assassin as his companion.
Then, when Steve had left, Bucky had tried to find someone else to ward off the loneliness, even if it was just for the night, but even that hadn’t been successful. He couldn’t stop feeling he was a danger to anyone around him, and like his mind was a double-locked door he couldn’t open for anyone: he went out with boys and girls who would talk to him about parties, and office work, and groceries, and it all seemed so meaningless, and he certainly couldn’t tell them about the recurring dreams (memories) he had of strangling a young woman to death during the Korean War.
Zemo was different, though. Zemo understood his silences, his controlled paranoia, his apparently unpredictable shifts in mood, his bitter humor. Zemo had been part of EKO Scorpion, he’d killed innocents, he’d lost loved ones. If there was one person alive in the world who could fathom–
“You need to focus, soldat,” Zemo said in that moment, his voice deep and seductive and a little amused, and full of dark promises and oh God – He stopped thinking for a while.
So they’d had dinner, which consisted mostly of Steve asking questions about what he’d missed out on during the years he’d been gone and Bucky answering, sometimes with the help of Zemo when he wasn’t sure about something. Whenever Zemo spoke up, though, Steve didn’t answer directly to him, looking instead at Bucky as if to confirm that the Sokovian was saying the truth. Bucky chose not to bring it up for the moment, even if it nagged at him, and clearly at Zemo too. He told himself it was normal, and that it would take Steve some time to accept the new status quo.
They’d had to tell him about T’Challa’s death and Shuri’s succession to the throne. The grief had been evident on Steve’s expression, but he’d still asked to talk with Shuri as soon as possible. They’d told him Sam was beloved as the new Captain America, which had made Steve smile proudly, and they had also briefly discussed John Walker’s story. Steve had looked sympathetic through the retelling, which really Bucky should’ve expected of him.
Bucky recounted some of their missions from the last few years, and made a point to try and put Zemo in a good light as he did, but with little success. Steve continued to regard the Sokovian with a suspicion that bordered on hostility, even in the following days. That night they contacted Ayo and organized a video meeting with Shuri for the morning after. Strangely, however, Steve requested that Bucky let him attend it on his own.
“Are you sure, Steve?” he asked, uncertain.
“Yeah Buck, I’d like to pay my respects properly, and ask her about a couple of things too, that’s all. Don’t worry about it,” Steve had reassured him with a smile, laying a hand on his shoulder and squeezing briefly. “And when I’m done you can show me around a bit, yeah? I haven’t been in Italy since the war.”
Bucky nodded, although an uneasy feeling about the reason Steve didn’t want him to be present lingered.
Bucky had many conversations behind closed doors during the next few days, both with Steve and with Zemo (well, not so much conversations as something else where Zemo was concerned). The two were constantly at each other’s throats, Zemo (although he denied it to Bucky) was plainly trying to wind Steve up with his sarcasm and cutting remarks, and Steve, snapping and scowling, was clearly trying to find some kind of proof that Zemo couldn’t be trusted. Bucky felt stuck in the middle, constantly holding them back from killing each other, and wanting more and more to just go back to the US alone and leave them to their own devices.
“He still thinks you’re fucking with my head,” he told Zemo one morning. Steve had decided to go explore the historical centre on his own, after boasting a sense of direction he’d never actually had. “And the way you act around him isn’t helping, I’ll let you know.”
“Well, maybe we should tell him I’m fucking with the rest of you too, then,” replied the suave bastard as he started to unbutton his shirt. “Especially with your–”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Bucky said, and proceeded to shut him the fuck up with his mouth.
Bucky had decided to go to sleep in another spare bedroom on the same floor as his and Zemo’s one to keep up the charade – just for a couple of days, until I decide how to tell him, Bucky had assured him again. Zemo didn’t openly complain, but he didn’t look too thrilled either. Feeling like a motherfuckin’ asshole, Bucky spent every rare minute Steve wasn’t with him trying to make it up to Zemo. When he couldn’t do that, he was trying to appeal to (ex?) Captain America’s sense of forgiveness, compassion, charity etcetera.
“I know you only got to know him under terrible circumstances,” he quietly told Steve after another impossible, terrible lunch with both of them that had ended with Steve rising to his feet and stalking upstairs, followed by the distinct sound of a hand punching through the wall. Bucky had drank his espresso, giving his friend the time to collect himself, before he went up to join him. “But Steve– He’s not just another psycho, he’s so much more than what he did in Siberia. His family, his whole country, had just been destroyed, turned to ashes and ruins, and I’m not justifying it, I know he did an awful thing, but– I can understand. Can relate.”
“Bucky, don’t you even start—”
“I did horrible things too, and just because—”
“Christ, Bucky, you were brainwashed, how can you think that’s the same—”
It was a discussion they had already had several times, mainly during the first months of his recovery. Not wanting to rehash it again, he changed tactics. “Alright, what about Natasha then? She killed dozens, hundreds of people in cold blood as the Black Widow, before the American government thought of recruiting her. And you can be certain of that, cause I saw her doing it.”
“But she regretted her actions afterwards,” Steve retorted fiercely.
“Are you so sure? Most of the guys she murdered weren’t nice people. I would have liked to have the pleasure to kill some of them myself, in fact.”
“Buck, this doesn’t–”
“Steve,” Bucky interrupted, persistent. “I… I don’t know if he’s sorry about what he did, maybe he isn’t, but at the same time I don’t think he would do it again now. What he did then was a desperate man’s last act. He’d planned to–” He cut himself off. Zemo’s suicidal attempts weren’t his to tell. “I honestly believe he’s changed now,” he started again after clearing his throat. “T’Challa himself forgave him for organizing the death of his father. He saw potential in Zemo, and I don’t think he was wrong. Give him a chance, that’s all I’m asking, pal. I swear he’s not that bad, if you get to know him.”
Steve was silent, looking at him seriously. “Fine,” he finally said in a solemn voice. “I can’t make any promises, Buck. If he provokes me or gives me any reason to mistrust him, I won’t back down. But I’ll try. For you,” he conceded, his hand going to rest against Bucky’s on the mahogany desk.
“Okay,” Bucky said. That was enough for now, he supposed.
“You really know how to wear down a guy when you want to, by the way,” Steve said in a lighter tone after a moment. “Like that time you didn’t want me to go to the fair with that new kid I’d met, Mikey, 'cause you were scared he'd steal your place as my best friend, and you complained so much about it and were such a nuisance that in the end you convinced me to stay home with you.”
Bucky blinked, then grinned. That had been one of the few times when it had been Bucky who’d been bedridden because he’d been sick and Steve had remained to take care of him as their parents worked. He remembered how much he had loved to be pampered and tended to by Steve at the time. You make such a fine wifey for me, Stevie, he’d told him the next time it had happened, delighted by the ruffled up way Steve had reacted to that, without realizing how it sounded.
“I was ten, pal, that’s unfair.”
“You felt threatened by a kid I’d literally got to know the day before, Buck,” Steve kept teasing good-naturedly as he picked up the travel guide he’d insisted on buying.
“Oh fuck off.”
“Language,” Steve chided without raising his head from the small book, an amused smirk on his lips.
“Thought you’d be used to me swearing all the time after almost a hundred years of knowing me.”
Steve looked up at him then.
“Yeah, maybe I can get used to it again now.” His expression was so warm and hopeful Bucky had to look away after a second of basking in it, his throat suddenly tight.
He took to bringing Steve outside whenever he could, in order to separate the two bickering men he lived with and at the same time show Steve the city and catch him up on the last years. They mainly visited the centre of the capital, which boasted magnificent attractions around every corner. No one seemed to recognize Steve, but Bucky had made him wear sunglasses and dress as a tourist for good measure. As they walked, Steve listened raptly to Bucky’s explanations on the latest technological inventions, even if it had always been Bucky who’d loved futuristic stories as a child, and then on the history of Bucky’s favorite Renaissance buildings and Ancient Rome monuments and ruins around the city. He’d forgotten how it felt to be on the receiving end of Steve Roger’s undivided attention, how he could look at you like you were the only damn thing on Earth worth paying attention to. Meanwhile, they traversed the river and the Tiber Island, arriving after a time to Vatican City.
“This is the largest church in the world, and the second biggest one in Europe is also in Italy,” Bucky said when they visited St. Peter’s Basilica, and he realized that was what Zemo had told him just a few days earlier. He felt a pang of guilt as he remembered this was supposed to be their first couples vacation. Then Steve gave a few euros to a clochard sitting under the colonnade embracing the square, and wait, where the hell had he found the money?
“Okay, don’t laugh. I brought my credit card to the past, and it still seems to work. I exchanged the dollars at the airport when I arrived.”
Bucky laughed. “And why the hell did you bring it with you in the first place? You were thinking of usin’ it at one of the famous ATMs from the forties?”
“Cute. I don’t know, Buck, it was in my wallet and I didn’t throw it away, call it sentimental value if ya want.”
“The credit card had sentimental value? God, you’ve really started to speak like a swell guy, and here I thought living in the forties again, in contact with war and poverty for a bit, would’ve done you some good.”
“Oh, cut it out,” Steve chuckled.
“Wait, so you’ve been stealing money from your older self?”
Steve shrugged. “So what?”
“Doesn’t seem like something a national icon would do to me, Stevie. It has to be a crime of some sort, circumvention of an incapable, self-theft, I dunno. Where’s your moral code gone, Captain America? Should I report you to the police?”
Steve’s smile widened, crinkling up the corners of his eyes a little. “Since when are you so law-abiding, Buck? You used to be a rebel, back in the day.”
I used to be many things, buddy, he thought. God, he hated his mind sometimes. What he said instead was, “Somebody had to be the responsible one once you were gone, pal.”
“And that’d be you?” Steve arched an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, okay, it felt ridiculous even as I said it. Obviously, Sam is the responsible one out of us,” Bucky said, grinning back at him.
“Poor guy. Don’t know how he put up with you all this time.”
“Me neither, I feel really sorry for him.”
“I’m sure you do.” Steve’s eyes were glinting.
That night, they came home a little late to a Zemo who had finished cooking what looked like a yellow, spicy risotto and was watching the Italian newscast on TV as he waited for them to return.
“Hey,” Bucky murmured, approaching the sofa he was sitting in from behind as Steve went to take a shower. He put a hand on the nape of his neck, intending to give the man a small massage, but Zemo turned and stared up at him intently, expressionless and silent.
“Zemo?”
After a second, Zemo rose up with a knee on the sofa cushions, and still with that cold and emotionless gaze he grabbed the lapel of Bucky’s shirt in a quick, startling movement, and pulled him close. He was exuding a quiet dangerousness that Bucky hadn’t seen in months. Zemo looked him long and hard in the eye for another few heartbeats, as if he were searching for something, then yanked him even closer, crashing their mouths together. A hand went to hold his head possessively, pulling his hair viciously, but Bucky almost didn’t notice as he was claimed by the other man’s rough, biting kisses. Zemo continued his ruthless assault for a while, and Bucky started to contemplate just climbing over the back of the sofa to the other side to make things more comfortable, when suddenly a voice interrupted them.
“Buck, can you come up here for a moment?” called Steve. Damn. Bucky took a step back, panting. Zemo, looking only slightly less disheveled than him, rolled his eyes, but Bucky ignored him. “Comin’,” he answered loudly, in a hoarse, raspy voice. Zemo’s hand was still fisted tightly in the fabric of Bucky’s shirt. He took it in both his hands and squeezed it lightly before detaching himself: a promise for later.
He looked at Zemo one last time before going upstairs. He seemed to be in a slightly better mood now, steadier, less inscrutable. Less feral.
Steve wasn’t in his room. Where– oh. With some dread, he climbed up to the second floor, trying to smooth his hair back so that he wouldn’t look completely ravaged, and there Steve was, at the threshold of his new, solitary bedroom.
“What is it, Steve?” he asked, attempting to feign nonchalance.
Steve turned and asked in the saddest, most pitying tone ever: “Buck. Why is your room so empty?”
Oh fuckin’ hell, Bucky thought.