Chapter 16
XVI
Zemo had been leafing through one of his old notebooks when someone knocked at the main door.
Immediately, he reached for his gun and sent Sam a preset alert message as a precautionary measure.
He positioned himself beside the door, wishing he had installed some sort of video security system in the house (but he’d been so sure nobody would think of looking for him here, how had they—), before calling out: “Who is it?”
A moment of silence.
“Just me.”
He opened the door, his finger still on the trigger.
“Hi,” Bucky said, almost bashfully.
Zemo watched him.
“Hello, James.”
Bucky had wanted to reach Zemo immediately after the long talk he’d had with (or rather, the scolding he’d received from) Livia, their old neighbor. The blunt but well-meaning woman had come knocking to ask for salt, and before Bucky had known it he’d found himself recounting to her what had happened, only leaving out his and Steve’s identities, in a broken mix of English and Italian. (He didn’t think Natasha’s intelligence-gathering methods were quite rivaled by the old woman’s, but it was a close thing.)
The signora had been very vocal with her thoughts on the whole matter — especially on the subject of how much of an idiot she deemed Bucky to be. Bucky had understood, then, why Zemo seemed to like and respect her so much, and it was clear the sentiment was reciprocal in the way she spoke of the Sokovian. By the end of it he’d been ready to call Sam again to finally obtain Zemo’s location, but he had stopped a second before pressing the call button.
There was something he needed to do before seeing Zemo again — but he’d decided not to be impulsive.
So for the next few days he stayed at home. He cooked a little. He kept up with the news on criminals, remaining on alert for further attacks, expecting some kind of retaliation from Hydra. Mainly though, he had followed Sam’s advice: he would do some self-reflection — and think about what it was he truly needed.
On the third day, he left the house.
Steve had been staying at a low-cost hotel not too far from Zemo’s apartment. When he’d opened the door of his small room, a hopeful light brightening his gaze, it was clear he’d been waiting for Bucky.
“Hey. Come in.”
Bucky decided to cut straight to the point. “Look, what you’ve done for me in the past — I can never repay you for it.”
“Bucky, you don’t have to—” Steve started, but Bucky glared at him until he quieted down.
“Steve. Please. Just listen.”
For once, he knew what he wanted to say. He would never stop being grateful to Steve for all he’d done for him before and after he’d become the Winter Soldier. However, he would not let that determine his future. Because, without Bucky noticing, like water gradually seeping into a room until he was in over his head, he had let Steve’s return dictate his actions and feelings, turning him back into someone he’d used to be, but didn’t want to be anymore.
“You’ve done a lot for me as a friend. I recognise it, and I love you for it, but you want too much, Steve. Something I can’t give you. You want the man you knew before the war.”
Steve’s shoulders sagged. “That’s not true,” he protested, uncomprehending.
“It is, pal, even if you don’t realize it.” Even when he didn’t mean to, Steve always pushed his expectations on him. “In Wakanda I could see how your face changed whenever you learned something about me that didn’t match with what you knew from before. How you tried to hide the pain when I said I liked some kind of marmalade I hadn’t used to before the war, or that I didn’t know how to dance anymore.”
“But that isn’t a — an issue, I’ll get over it, in time. Please, Buck, give me a chance,” Steve urged, leaning forward. “We can stay here, or we can find a way back to the forties, whatever you want, but at least we’ll finally be together, and it’ll be as if nothing’s changed between us, like we were in Brooklyn. We’ll live together, sleep together, we could — I’ll just have to get used to — to your small changes, I can —” A choked noise fell out of his throat, and it made Bucky simultaneously want to sigh, and to hold him. He still wasn’t understanding.
“Steve. You have no idea how much I’d like to go back to how things were when we lived in Brooklyn too. Well, apart from you always being sick. But that’s not what I need now, because that — fuck, that would mean erasing everything that happened to the both of us after that, can’t you see? And what happened to me, it was shitty, it was awful and it was inhuman and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, but it made me who I am today. I’m not that happy-go-lucky boy from Brooklyn anymore. I’m — slightly less broken than I was a coupla years ago, but I’ll never be him again, Stevie. And I’m okay with that. At some point, one has to accept that you can’t just — you can’t repeat the past.”
“Of course you can.” Steve’s eyes were bright with contained desperation.
Bucky felt something aching in his chest looking at them and painfully shook his head.
Steve faltered for the first time, and the silence between them became almost unbearable.
When he spoke again, Steve’s voice was a sharp accusation. “So you just plan to forget me?”
Bucky released a sigh. “Never, Steve. I could never forget you. But I have to start over — begin a new life in which I’m not just Captain America’s old friend, or a formerly brainwashed Hydra assassin. I need something of my own. Please Steve, you’ve got to let me go. Like I let you go when you told me you wanted to go back to Peggy, because I thought it would make you happier to have that life. Can you do that for me?”
He held his breath, but Steve’s stubborn gaze was fixated on the floor, his arms folded.
“C’mon, Steve. The other day, before leaving, you said you just wanted for me to be happy.”
“It’s the truth,” Steve replied begrudgingly, still staring somewhere to his right.
“Well, I think this is my chance at happiness — or the closest thing to it I can aspire to. You believed you still could have yours, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but I am not gonna pass on mine.” He didn’t say, I love him. It was something too intimate to share with anyone that wasn’t Zemo.
Steve had been his safe place, once. But he wasn’t that for him anymore. He probably would never be again. And perhaps this meant that Bucky would become yet another future that got stolen out from under Steve, and as much as it pained him to hurt Steve, Bucky was okay with that. He had to be selfish, this time.
“Okay,” Steve muttered, finally raising his gaze to him, something not quite like resignation in his expression. “So… where does that leave us?”
Since his return to the forties after Thanos’ defeat, in Bucky’s mind Steve had become an idealized memory, a dream of what could have been — and even now that he was back it was as if with his departure he’d turned into an immaterial hypothetical that would remain permanently stuck in a different, unattainable dimension, like the reflection of a mirror. But Zemo was real and solid and impossible to ignore even in his absence, and after years spent considering his desires as irrelevant to the point of not desiring anything at all, Bucky wanted to keep him.
Steve was the past. He was comfort, New York, the sounds and smells he’d known growing up and the home he’d had and the person he’d been; a person he wasn’t anymore.
He wasn’t the Bucky Barnes of Brooklyn.
He wasn’t the Winter Soldier either, mostly because he didn’t want to be. He was… someone else. And he was still trying to understand who, exactly, that was. But he wouldn’t go back. It would’ve been easy to fall into the old patterns, the old jokes, everything his relationship with Steve had been and meant. The memories were all there.
But he couldn’t, he wouldn’t — it wouldn’t be fair. Not to Zemo, and not to the person he was now. He wasn’t Bucky, and he wasn’t the Soldier, but he was a combination of the two, and something more.
James. Just James.
He went back to the apartment and closed his suitcase.
He left the house, left Rome.
He went to Zemo.