He’s back on the frankly, ridiculous plane, grinding his boots into the plush carpet, watching Sam and Zemo sleep, like they haven’t just committed multiple offences across numerous borders, including at least a few homicides.
The murders should be top of Bucky’s regret list, to be honest.
His therapist would be sorely disappointed.
But to be entirely blunt, he couldn’t give a fat shit at this point in time, because his skin hasn’t stopped crawling since they stepped foot in the Bronze Monkey.
**
As soon as he saw that smug Sokovian fuck sitting in his not entirely awful jail cell, reading his Machiavelli like some enlightened European dandy, he should have known he’d wind up feeling like this.
Like-shit-like-nothing-like-Hydra-scum.
Again.
Zemo had fucked with him from the beginning, trying out his old triggers.
They didn’t work, at least, not the way they used to. He wasn’t controlled.
But that didn’t stop that familiar pang of white hot, anticipatory fear shoot through him, racing through his system and setting his nerve endings on fire.
Each one of his handlers had spoken the words differently. None but Zemo took such pleasure from them. Rolling each word off his tongue like he was performing Hamlet.
Salaciously.
From there it’s been a slow descent into dubious self-control, masquerading as acting. As pretend.
“Stay in character.”
The ride into Madripoor’s High Town was like a fever dream. He’d been there before, of course, but the memories were scattered.
This time his senses had been dialled up to 20 and he was acutely aware of it all; the lights, the smells, the thump of the bass so deep and overpowering as they wound through those tight laneways that he could feel it in the marrow of his bones.
Then Zemo had uttered those words in the bar, and he was forced to “pretend” to comply, and well, from there, it was a slippery slope down the old psyche-express into attack mode.
Like it was nothing.
Like it was second fucking nature.
Like he was fully compliant.
And he didn’t want to admit it. But it felt..
Not good.
He’s not that far gone to say that it was enjoyable.
But it was a relief.
As if he’d been holding his breath as if he’d been drowning, and suddenly he was able to fill his lungs again.
To let go, give over to a higher power.
To just breathe.
The whir of the prosthetic, the impact, the kickback into his shoulder, the way he lost himself in defensive and offensive manoeuvres.
It was natural.
And then Sam stepped in, and Zemo! Who had audacity to tell him to stay in character?
Like it was an act?
Like he had any say once his fists started working? It took all his mental fortitude to step back, to leave it, to fall in line and follow them into that room.
That fucking room.
He had stood like a good little war dog, stood as Zemo used him as a bargaining chip.
The thing that got to him, that got under his skin, that made his stomach roil and churn, was the entire time, Zemo had a hand on him. On his arm, his shoulders, the broad expanse of his back as he circled around behind him, and finally, most intrusively, dragging softly down the side of his face.
“He will do anything you want.”
It pushed memories up. Memories he had once believed, due to the fractured and fragmented nature of them, to have been false.
(He had reasoned with himself, that he would remember if that had happened to him. He would know. It took years for him to come to grips with them. To accept them as real. And once he had, well he just shoved them deep down inside his fucked up brain, put them in the “too hard” basket and walked away. Every now and then one would bubble up to the surface. He would acknowledge it. And push it away again. Like an annoying mosquito.)
But in that room, with Selby, and Zemo wearing that shit-eating grin of his, the memories hadn’t just bubbled up in dribs and drabs, they were flooding his battered consciousness like a fucking tsunami. And his touch starved, traitorous body, had reacted to the other man’s hand caressing his face.
It made him hard.
It made him want to die.
**
Sitting on this plane, in silent contemplation, was his own personal hell.
He stares at Zemo, sitting across from him in the jet. Arranged in neat lines, even in sleep. Arms and legs crossed, that fucking pretentious coat wrapped neatly around him.
He wonders if he knows.
He thinks he does, probably.
He likes to needle Bucky, and the display in that room, with Selby... That was needling at its finest.
A man like him knows that all it takes to break a subject, to bring their newfound and fractious stability coming crashing down, are simple triggers.
He didn’t need trigger words.
He knew Bucky was already on edge. The fight and the adrenaline pumping though him had shaken his control.
All it took was a touch. A caress.
“.. anything you want.”
That was enough to send him back into that space, where he wasn’t just a violent killing machine, but a used man. Needy and subservient, despite all his training and weaponry.
Nowhere to put his strength and his rage.
Desperate for orders.
It was the shame of it that ate away at him now, the red-faced, burning hot shame of it.
He shuffles his boots on the carpet.
He wonders whether Sam would flip at him if he choked Zemo out now. In his sleep.
It would be so simple. So quick.
He would squeeze, with the prosthetic, or his flesh and bone hand, maybe both .. and the other man would wake, momentarily. Shock, confusion, panic.. all those little micro-emotions flashing across his face as he struggled against the Winter Soldier. Against the monster he had helped awaken.
Bucky would watch the life drain from him right there in front of him, on this jet, silently gliding above wherever the fuck they were.
It would be strangely intimate.
No.
Appropriately intimate, given their history.
Zemo’s eyes flick open, and Bucky narrows his eyes at him suspiciously.
He cocks an eyebrow at Bucky, tilts his head to the side.
“Tell me James, what are you thinking?”