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Longing.
The blood in his veins is on fire, but the chill in his left shoulder is unmeltable. It would be painful, if he were not always numb.
Rusted.
This arm will never rust. Never creak. Never do anything but remind him of who he once was. What he once was. All that was lost, and everything that was reborn since.
Furnace.
Madripoor is humid, and hot enough that the air over the asphalt shimmers even at night. The crush of the crowd inside the Princess Bar is neon and smells of sweat, expensive perfume, and alcohol too expensive to be spilled. Perfect bodies and perfect faces and perfect wallets pulse to the LED beat, all bare shoulders and coy, cunning eyes.
Daybreak.
"Attack," Zemo says, without looking at him, and something inside Bucky freezes despite the hot trembling that he's come to guard as more than his life. The cold of his shoulder spreads and there's no time, notime, notime— bone crunches under his grip and Bucky has to bite the inside of his cheek to avoid wincing. The Winter Soldier is nothing but his orders, so Bucky hopes his eyes look glazed when he launches a second man across the room.
Seventeen.
James Buchanan Barnes was born in 1917, and he died in 1945. The Winter Soldier never died. He just went under. Sam catches Bucky's eye, claps him on the shoulder in a way that's all American, hard and heavy and almost enough to help.
Zemo doesn't turn around. Bucky doesn't know why he wants him to.
Benign.
This one always hurt a little. What he wanted to be, what he couldn't be.... Zemo's hand flexes behind his back and the motion is an anchor; Bucky sucks in a breath through his teeth and the world slams back into gritty clear clarity.
"You good?"
The Winter Soldier never speaks.
But Bucky grunts something that sounds like "yeah, m'fine" if you listen close enough, and Sam (annoyingly) always listens close, even if he doesn't listen.
Nine.
They don't work anymore. Like the painkillers, like the white noise, like the mattress that he donated after two nights of sinking into sleeplessness and downy suffocation.
He and Zemo both know it's over. He's free.
But there's a hint of something in Zemo's voice when he recites the Words like some forgotten Orthodox evensong, a roll to the Russian that makes Bucky's spine tingle in a most terrible, horrible, effervescent way.
He feels the distance between them acutely, every deadened nerve prickling like frostbite.
“Something is still in there ,” Zemo had said, from the other side of the bars, book tossed aside like an old plaything. It had felt good then, giving the orders for once, holding the leash in his own hands instead of being collared. But not for James—for him , the man without a name, known only by what he was. What he could do. What he had done.
Homecoming.
James came home to Wakanda and firelight outside a hut and goats that didn't think him a monster. It had all felt so new and strange and dizzying, sitting there by the fire, hearing the Words crash against his ears like waves before falling away. Powerless.
Zemo sips on his drink, looking into the pane of turquoise left on the floor by the stained glass window. Bucky wonders, idly, how much it hurts to be back here, in the house that was once his family's home.
There are no pictures here, nothing to suggest that Zemo is anything but a bachelor of old money.
Bucky can understand that, too well. The fingers of his right hand slide over one another, an old habit from when offering a light was impressive. Zemo's eyes flicker to the movement and their gazes cross, locking mid-air.
His lips part, and Bucky almost moves for his pocket before remembering that he hasn't carried smokes since 1944, he doesn't have a lighter (although he's pretty sure he could scrape a spark off his left side), and most importantly, he is not going to offer Helmut Zemo a goddamn cigarette, let alone light it for him.
One.
Bucky has flashes of memory from the Winter Soldier. Just glimpses, snatches of sensation through static in the rare instants between awakening and obedience. They're confused, blurred with pain and oily residue of nameless faces, voices smeared across his mind.
For so long, hearing the Words shoved him into those flashes, sending him spiraling into a space between man and machine, mind and weapon.
Zemo gives him something different. Insufferably sycophantic and cocky, with his little head tilts and fur trim, hand equally ready to pull Turkish delight or a pistol from his pocket—whatever he is, Zemo is different .
A memory flares behind Bucky’s eyes, but this time he’s taken back to the cushy private plane, their ride to Madripoor. Cream leather seats, cool conditioned air, and no taste of iron in his mouth.
“I’m sorry.” Zemo’s voice is soft, raspy and deliberately gentle, his touch light as he strokes his thumb over the open face of his book. His gaze flits to Sam for an instant, but Bucky knows that he knows he’s listening. That he’s listening, from wherever deep in Bucky’s mind he’s buried and locked down. “I was just fascinated by this.”
A quick, polite intake of breath, lips parted in the manner of a man used to making sharp, intelligent comments. He knew many men like this, before. Casting judgement from their ivory towers, sitting atop vaults of money they didn’t know how to spend. Some of them had been good, the ones he met in the service—naive, sure, but willing to have their innocent ignorance shredded by his Brooklyn banter and the things they saw together. But those men were dead, and the unnamed man with Bucky’s face—with his body—had been the reason behind a lot of them.
Bucky’s distaste coils in his gut, heavy and hot. Distaste, yes. That is what burns bitter at the back of his throat, what drives him to turn his disinterested gaze from the window and to Zemo. Distaste.
“I don’t know what to call it, but this part...seems to be important. ”
Zemo’s thumb makes a soft scraping noise when it slides down the page and Bucky scans the title. He nearly scoffs aloud—German psychoanalysis of erotic relationships has Helmut Zemo fascinated—but the sudden drip of dread down his spine stops him. Something is wrong. Something is different .
Sam looks concerned and more than a little fed-up, like he’s considering calling back Zemo’s butler-steward-whatever and asking for some of whatever amber liquid he’d poured out into the crystal glass sitting neatly at Zemo’s side. But Sam doesn’t look like Bucky feels—this shivering restlessness that can’t decide if it burns or freezes, tightening his jaw so he’s ready to tear someone’s throat out—
And Zemo speaks, and Bucky’s world condenses into one crystal clear razor point before shattering around him.
Freight car.
“Who is...Nakajima? ”
Bucky moves before the final ‘ah’ is fully past Zemo’s lips, before the man can finish casually turning to Sam and lifting the pocket-sized red moleskine to show him—his pulse thuds in his ears, deafening, and his left hand has Zemo’s crushable little throat tight in its grasp.
“If you touch that again, I’ll kill you. ”
The Winter Soldier never speaks, but even so, Bucky feels a sting of relief behind his eyes at the familiar roll of Brooklyn drawl pulling at the last syllable. He’s still himself. The thing snarling inside him stays down.
Zemo’s eyes never met Sam’s. They’ve been fixed on his, as though...he knew, expected Bucky to do this even before Bucky knew himself. Bucky tightens his grip, feels Zemo’s larynx give ever so slightly, trying to keep his eyes burning cold instead of hot. Zemo’s gaze flickers down, rests in the vicinity of Bucky’s mouth—
He nods, a terse, tiny motion—not that he could do anything grandiose, pinned back against the seat so tight that the leather of Bucky’s glove creaks—and something floods Bucky’s brain as he yanks his hand away. The weapon buried in his brain purrs, drinks up the shocked little noise of Zemo’s gasp when his hand rips away, the slight lift of his eyebrows at the glimmer of pain.
He holds Zemo’s gaze as he leans back, almost up to his full height before the low dome of the plane ceiling stops him. Bucky’s blood is burning, but his arm and his stomach do so with frost, and the collision feels like being ripped apart--no. Like being reborn. Born again, into a whole new form made of everything that he’s known before: both worlds, both pasts. Both halves. Monster and man made one.
Bucky settles back into his seat without breaking his shared gaze with Zemo. The former baron shapes his next words carefully, the polite lacquer on his words diluted just enough to show the grain beneath.
“I’m sorry. I understand.”
And Bucky knows he does—not, perhaps, in a healthy way, but Helmut Zemo looks at him and sees beyond his scars and sutures to the thing he buried inside himself. And he knows that it’s clawing at the chains keeping it there.
“That list of names,” Zemo continues, dipping his head like a fisherman luring in a prize catch. “People you’ve wronged as the Winter Soldier.”
And Bucky’s heart stops, but his blood burns with frost and fire, and he can’t tell which one is winning. Zemo had to have seen himself on the page, scrawled dark and firm in unwavering hand. He knows, sees the nameless, confusing things that haunt Bucky, coil up and writhe in his belly until they can eat their way out. Sam might as well have vanished into thin air; Bucky zeroes in on Zemo, hands steady as phantom crosshairs lock onto his calm, knowing face.
“Don’t push it,” he says, torn between wanting to growl it out and speak softly, to kill one side or another dead for good, just to be done with it all.
Bucky knows Zemo is going to cock his head to the side, the precise angle that lifts his eyebrow to advantage and lets his mouth quirk up wordlessly before Zemo so much as moves a muscle. He knows it without thinking, as naturally as he knows that if he had squeezed just a little bit harder, Zemo’s resolve would have broken, a spluttering noise would have fluttered out from his thin lips, and the chains and packed earth inside the deepest part of Bucky’s mind would have burst apart like glass.
But it would have been different. The leash would have been in his own hand, along with Zemo’s throat. The monster would not be alone.
As Bucky clenches his hand in his lap and looks staunchly out the window, Zemo’s eyes heavy on him, he tries not to think about whether he wishes he hadn’t let go.