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They had pitched the tents close together, and lying there alone on his roll of bedding, with an unpleasant, clammy sweat on his skin and a dull pounding in his head, Zemo could hear Sam and James making love.
They were quiet, of course. He was reasonably sure it wasn’t some kind of subtle, masterfully handled psy-op they were running against him, even if he sometimes felt dangerously undone in times like these. Besides, they almost certainly thought he was asleep. But still—tents were hardly walls. It was impossible not to know what they were doing.
Under the circumstances, it was good to know that they were distracted. He made himself straighten up and was instantly thrown into an intense wave of gut-churning dizziness; he braced himself, one white-knuckled fist against the ground, and breathed in the thin, chilly air until he got his balance back. Then he went through the whole miserable process all over again when he stood up outside the tent. The queasiness was a slimy, rubbery sensation in his stomach and the back of his throat.
He worked his way through the snowy, rock-studded landscape, moving as quietly as he could. The cold was at least cutting through the fog of exhaustion that had been with him since that afternoon.
Though, given that he could use every scrap of sleep he could get right now, he wasn’t entirely sure that being more awake was what he really needed.
He made it to a scrawny, stunted pine tree—he felt a marginal empathy for it, struggling as it was against the altitude—and wrapped his hand around its skinny trunk. Flimsy support, but better than nothing. It at least kept him on his feet as he bent forward and vomited into the snow.
It didn’t give him as much relief from the nausea as he’d hoped. Somehow, between the bruising red pulse in his head and the new foul taste in his mouth, he felt essentially the same. Dammit.
He wasn’t an idiot. He knew he had altitude sickness, and he knew it could turn serious.
He also knew that the GRC wasn’t always exceptionally pleased with how he handled two of their highest-profile assets. And nothing in Sam and James’s tenuous parole agreement specified their handler’s identity.
If the three of them performed badly or inefficiently, then Zemo’s competence would come into question. And if that happened ….
If that happened, his only remaining reason for living would vanish into thin air. Perhaps he could live with that—or, well, not, more accurately, but he could accept it and take the necessary next step—but the GRC could send James and Sam anywhere, to anyone. The odds of them once again being assigned together were low. You split the troublemakers up, everyone knew that, and neither of them had ever endeared themselves to the higher-ups.
Zemo had no illusions that staying with him, specifically, mattered to them—why would it? They both had overactive consciences, so they might mind the news of his death, but it was unlikely anyone would ever give them the details of it. But they would mind being split up; even throwing them back onto the Raft, or into some vicious hellhole of a new house arrest, would be kinder.
It was his job to keep that from happening. Consequently, they needed to wrap up this mission—and all the others—in a timely fashion, and lagging behind to give him time to acclimate to these heights would make that impossible. They just needed to finish quickly and then get off this fucking mountain.
He kicked some snow over the mess he’d made.
All they had to do, he told himself, was find and disable the relay station HYDRA had built near the snowy, wind-plagued peak. Then they could come down. He could last until then.
Especially since he had to. Nothing did the trick like necessity.
He crawled back into his tent and rolled over onto his back, resting his aching head on the thin pillow. He could no longer hear Sam and James; they must have fallen asleep. Since he hadn’t wanted to hear them—since he could hardly take it—it was ridiculous that this made him feel lonely. It was all like breathing the thin air around him, with the ache in his chest telling him how little he had to survive on.
***
Sam woke up early and separated himself from a pile of warm, loose-limbed Bucky. The morning was so crisp and fresh that it reminded him of biting into an apple.
He liked it out here—up here? It’d been a while since he’d been out in nature like this. It wasn’t Louisiana, but it wasn’t bad. As far as he was concerned, this mission was almost like a vacation—and God knew they could all use one of those.
He ducked out of the tent, half-thinking about kicking the day off with a batch of pancakes, and he almost ran straight into Zemo.
“Man, when you’re in stealth mode, you’re almost as bad as Bucky.”
“I’m not in stealth mode,” Zemo said tersely. “I was just coming to tell you both that we need to get moving.”
“Sure. Right after breakfast. You bitched and moaned when I asked you to pick up that pancake mix, but you’re going to be glad we’ve got it now.”
“Eat a protein bar.” Zemo thrust a bag at him. “Eat several. I really don’t care. But I’m not delaying just so we can sit around a campfire.” He began dismantling his tent, moving quickly but without his usual grace.
Well, he was clearly in a foul mood, but that might not have been all of it. Sam slung his pack over his shoulders and gave Zemo a once-over. The silvery-gold early morning light didn’t quite wash him out the way kiss-of-death fluorescents would have, but it was still hard to tell whether he looked sick or just tired and annoyed. Lumpy bedrolls and no showers weren’t exactly Zemo’s usual standard of living. He could tough out just about anything—Sam had seen enough proof of that, even if he hadn’t known the man’s reputation—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be happier sacked out on some luxurious whatever-thread-count sheets. He could just be pissy about that.
But Sam had a nagging feeling that wasn’t it.
“How are you feeling?” he said, watching Zemo struggle with the tent.
“Impatient.” Zemo gave him a look that lacked all its usual hauteur. “You could help.”
“I could also make pancakes. Relay station’s not going to disappear on us if we take half an hour to eat breakfast.”
“Sam, please.”
Before Sam could delve into that any further, Bucky emerged from the tent, sleepily rubbing his eyes.
Sam didn’t know if Zemo knew how rare it was for Bucky to be this openly relaxed, this soft around somebody. He had definitely never eased up this much on the Raft.
These days, though, there wasn’t much difference between how he was with Sam and how he was with Sam and Zemo. Lines Sam had thought were never going to blur—lines he’d thought didn’t blur, at least not for him—were getting pretty damn smudged. And he didn’t know what to do about it. What he did know was that he liked the look of sleep-rumpled, mussed-hair Bucky, and he didn’t like the look of this morning’s pale, tight-faced Zemo.
“What’s going on?” Bucky said. He looked hopefully at Sam. “Pancakes?”
“We’re not doing pancakes.” Zemo had at last conquered the tent, which was kind of disappointing, since watching him do battle with it had been pretty entertaining. “We’re doing walking.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Sam said.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” Zemo said. “It’s an order.”
Not a very snappily delivered one, interestingly enough. It had a tense edge to it.
Zemo didn’t pull rank that often—mostly, Sam suspected, because it wasn’t really rank at all. Sure, he was a colonel when Sam had only ever made captain, but in this setup of theirs, that wasn’t what mattered. They were prisoners, and he wasn’t. Reminding them of it wasn’t invoking a command structure as much as yanking a leash.
Sam was pretty sure Zemo didn’t like doing it, but that didn’t mean all that much when here he was, doing it anyway.
“All right,” Sam said, a little coolly. “Let me just grab our stuff.”
“I’ve got it,” Bucky said, vanishing back into the tent. He was back to moving like a shadow, that early trace of unguarded openness so gone it was like it had never been there.
Zemo’s gaze followed him, and Sam saw a restless misery in his eyes.
There was something going on here. He tried to shake off how fundamentally off it’d felt for Zemo to slap them back down—he was letting his feelings get the better of him there.
He said, “If something’s wrong, you can tell us.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I simply want us to complete the mission in a timely fashion. For once. Ah, here’s James.”
“Yeah,” Bucky said, passing Sam his gear belt. “Timely fashion’s my middle name.”
The mountain slope wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was cold, obviously, but they were dressed for that—Zemo had even abandoned his usual style for a more weather-resistant parka—and it wasn’t frostbite-cold. The air was a little thinner up here, but not enough that they’d needed to bring any oxygen along. The wind wasn’t even slicing into them. Sam wished he could enjoy all the surprising lack of awfulness in peace, but this morning felt like a stone in his shoe. He couldn’t shake it.
“I was in the mountains a lot in Afghanistan,” he said, once they’d been trudging along for a while. “This is more peaceful, though. Obviously.” He glanced over at Zemo, who was bending forward as he hiked up the steep slope. “You ever see a lot of action in the mountains?”
Zemo either didn’t hear him or was pretending not to hear him.
“Hey,” Sam said. He couldn’t say his name to get his attention—he and Bucky never called Zemo anything, not directly. Early on, they’d played it safe: Colonel and sir. That had just sort of … faded out, somehow, and it felt beyond weird to go back to it now, even if Zemo was acting about as grim and locked-down as he had back then. He settled on a joke: “Baron Von Trapp.”
Zemo looked at him incredulously. “Von Trapp wasn’t a baron,” he said after a moment. “And he was only a captain.”
“Best rank. Anyway, you going to answer my question?”
The Sound of Music back-and-forth had been refreshingly normal (for them), but Zemo’s blank hesitation here put them firmly back in strange territory. He clearly had no idea what Sam was talking about but didn’t want to say so.
“Did you ever see a lot of action in the mountains?” Sam said again.
“Oh.” Zemo’s breathing was choppy. “No. Not really. Did either of you?”
“Yeah, that’s what I was saying. Bucky?”
“Everywhere,” Bucky said. He shaded his eyes with his hand, looking up at the snowy peak above them. The ice fractured the sunlight, sending it back at them in a thousand little mirror-bright shards. “Not sure, but I might have even put that up here. They didn’t like wasting me on grunt-work—something the GRC obviously doesn’t care about—but the serum came in handy for this kind of thing.”
Yeah, Sam could see that. As nice of a change as it was to have a mission that didn’t involve getting shot at, this was a hell of a slog, and as high up as they were—
Sam stopped dead in his tracks.
“Fuck,” he said. “The altitude’s getting to you, isn’t it?”
This time, he knew damn well Zemo heard him, because he saw his lips press together.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Do you know how serious altitude sickness can get?”
“Yes,” Zemo said tightly, at the same time as Bucky said, “I don’t,” with a sharp look at both of them.
“It can be fatal.” He was saying it to Bucky, but he kept looking at Zemo, because what the fuck. “Your brain can swell, your lungs can fill with fluid. How is anything we’re doing here worth you risking going into a coma? We need to stop climbing right now, you idiot.”
Okay, he guessed they did call Zemo something.
“There is a genuine reason to knock out HYDRA’s communication relay—”
“Shut up,” Bucky said. He cast a quick look around them, spotted a flat rock, and took Zemo by the shoulders, steering him over to it despite Zemo’s vague and somewhat flailing protests. He forcibly sat him down and held him in place.
“This is undignified,” Zemo said.
Bucky scoffed. “So’s dying, and we’ve all seen enough of it to know. Stay put. What’s he need, Sam?”
“Freedom of movement?” Zemo suggested.
“Wow, again, shut up.”
“If it’s still in the early stages, we can treat the symptoms,” Sam said. “When did you start feeling it?”
Zemo was pale—Sam trusted his judgment on that one now—and he was showing clear signs of fatigue, like exhaustion was nibbling around the edges of him, but his eyes were blazing with a frankly eerie amount of determination. “I’m fine. We need to keep going.”
“No, we don’t. It’s a relay station, it’s not going anywhere. We’ll get the job done and knock it out so nobody can use it anymore, but we can do that after you’ve acclimated a little—”
“We don’t have time,” Zemo said.
Sam strode over there, the scrim of snow crunching under his boots. “Would you—”
“Sam.” Bucky touched his arm. He shook his head. “Just—stay here and look after him. Sit on him if you have to. I’ll go handle the mission.” He looked at Zemo. “It’s an authorized mission, so my ankle monitor’s turned off until you turn it back on again, right? It’s not going to matter how far away I go.”
“We shouldn’t separate.”
“Okay, you’re not answering my actual question, so I’m guessing that means I’m right.” Bucky’s voice was oddly gentle, and he’d gone back to resting his metal hand on Zemo’s shoulder, holding him in place. “I’ll take care of it.”
Sam didn’t like letting him go off alone. And it was more than that, too—he didn’t think he’d been more than a room or two away from Bucky in the last year, and the idea of him being gone like that chilled him.
“It’s more of a hike than a climb,” he said, feeling out the possibility, “but it’s still a hell of a climb. And I know it’s supposed to be just a device without a guard station or anything—the mountain’s the guard station—but you never know.”
“And you’re my responsibility,” Zemo said, tilting his head back to look up at them. He half-closed his eyes, and Sam guessed the movement had hit him with a wave of dizziness.
As far as Sam could tell, Zemo had spent years being the equivalent of a burned-out building that was inexplicably still standing, held together by sheer stubbornness and will. Before right this second, the part of that Sam had tended to think about was the burned-out part, how goddamn empty and grief-razed Zemo’s life had been before they’d come into it. Now he had the chance to notice how objectively nuts this level of determination was. It all depended on what Zemo bent it to.
It was kind of impressive but also really annoying.
Whose responsibility are you, then? Sam wanted to ask him, but he knew what the answer would be.
Bucky didn’t ask either. Instead, he just pointed at Zemo—“Stay”—and took Sam aside.
“How bad does he have it?” Bucky said quietly.
Sam considered it. “He was still walking on his own, so that’s a good sign. He’s not coughing anything up, so I’m not too worried about his lungs, but his brain—”
“I’m always worried about his brain.”
“Yeah, ha, but seriously. HACE looks a lot like regular altitude sickness, at least at first glance. I’ll have to check him out. Now that I think about it, it’s gotta already be worse than mild, if we’re picking up on it—you know how he is. So if it’s moderate but not into any complications yet, then we can rest first and then start getting him down the mountain. If he’s halfway to cerebral edema already, we need to get him down fast and get him some oxygen plus some steroids for the swelling. But I don’t get why you can’t come down with us. We can tackle this together once we’ve got him all fixed up.”
Bucky looked over Sam’s shoulder, back at Zemo. “I don’t know either, but he’s scared. So.” He shrugged. “I want to get it done.”
It was a matter-of-fact kind of answer to the question neither one of them had put to Zemo. Their answer.
Sam exhaled. “Yeah. Me too.”
“I’ll be careful,” Bucky said. He clasped Sam’s hand, gloved fingers on gloved fingers. “The two of you get down safe.”
“Fuss, fuss,” Sam said.
“I could’ve told you to wear warm socks. I’m a big believer in warm socks, Sam.”
“Yeah, and darning your own because people today replace things way too easily, and whatever happened to egg creams, and you’re a hundred years old.” He leaned in impulsively—they usually kept anything obviously couple-y out of sight, part of a long and unwanted hangover from the Raft and their first handler—and kissed Bucky at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t know why we love you.”
It took him a second to realize what he’d said, and he saw Bucky’s expression change from startled to … considering and warm.
“One of life’s great mysteries,” he said lightly. He brushed his thumb against Sam’s chin, and it was one of the times Sam saw clear as day what a heartbreaker Bucky must have been back in the forties. “See you in a bit.”
He headed for the summit, and Sam headed back to Zemo.
“You shouldn’t let him go alone,” Zemo said, looking after Bucky.
“Bucky?” Sam said, like it was no big deal. “He’ll be fine. He’s made out of rubber and Teflon. And he’s not going to make a break for it, by the way.”
“I know that. He wouldn’t leave you.”
“Nope,” Sam said, because he had zero doubts about how he and Bucky felt about each other—life had done its best to strip away a lot of his bedrock, but it hadn’t gotten at that, and he didn’t think it ever could. He was starting to think it could lead to some more solid ground, too. “Now, we both know Bucky can handle himself, and we both know you can’t right now. Don’t even look at me like that.” He put two fingers to Zemo’s throat, feeling his pulse; it wasn’t exactly necessary, but it was reassuring. “When did you start feeling sick?”
He felt warm breath against his wrist as Zemo sighed. “Yesterday evening. But it’s supposed to be worse at night.”
“You know, I was pararescue and I told you five minutes ago that I did a lot of work in the mountains, but yeah, tell me about what you looked up on Google.”
Zemo tilted his head a little in a point taken kind of way, and Sam could tell the movement made him dizzy.
“You should have told us last night,” Sam said evenly.
“I was handling it.”
“You were spacey and about to fall off the side of a mountain. You weren’t handling shit.”
“The richness of your expertise,” Zemo said, in a way that clearly would’ve been outright snotty if he hadn’t felt like death warmed-over, “means you know rest is often the cure. I rested.”
“And then in the morning, when you were still like this, you decided we couldn’t even sit around long enough to have breakfast. I know campfire pancakes aren’t exactly up to your highness’s standards—”
“The GRC thinks we’re a pain in the ass.” Zemo had shut his eyes again, either to relieve the dizziness or half-exit the conversation. “If we don’t perform up to their standards—if we bungle or delay missions—then they could easily reassign you and James to another handler. Or handlers.”
Sam hadn’t known they were anywhere close to anything like that. He breathed in some of that cold, thin air and fought off his own kind of vertigo, like a wave threatening to turn his whole life over and send the pieces scattering off the board. He sat down on another of the flat rocks, the damp cold of it leaching through his jeans.
He didn’t like not knowing what was going on. He could survive taking orders—he’d dealt with it in the Air Force, so he could deal with it now, especially since Zemo really wasn’t too much of a pain in the ass about it normally. But he couldn’t deal with having this little control over his own life. Fuck it, this little control over their lives, Zemo’s included.
“You should’ve told us,” he said finally.
“What difference would it make?”
“Maybe a lot. For starters, we could have split up this morning and not put you through the first stage of another hike.”
Zemo looked up, following the line of ascent—not that there was anything to see, with the sun bright on the snow. “James shouldn’t be on his own.”
“You said that already. You shouldn’t be on your own. You’re sick. Bucky’s capable of climbing a mountain.” He was saying it partly to reassure himself, but it was true, too. He found the medical pack and got out the ibuprofen—Zemo’s head had to be killing him—and some promethazine for the nausea. He unscrewed the cap on his canteen and handed it all over. “Take these.”
Zemo didn’t even ask him what they were. He just swallowed everything and passed Sam’s canteen back to him.
Sam didn’t want to say what he probably needed to. It took a while for him to gear himself up for it. “If we need to push the line a little to get them to back off—”
“They want James to kill, and he doesn’t want to. And you don’t want him to.” Zemo rubbed at his forehead. “Isn’t that line rather unmovable?”
“Do you want him to?” He was honestly curious. It was enough for him, he guessed, that Zemo had never tried to make Bucky kill. He hadn’t needed to know where Zemo’s own scruples were on it for him to appreciate that. But he wondered—not about the practicalities of Zemo as a handler, but about Zemo as a person. Their person.
“I did,” Zemo said after a moment. “I thought he would be a machine. A weapon only good for what weapons have always been good for.”
“But then you spent time with him.”
“But then I spent time with him. And I saw him with you.” There was a twitch of a smile. “You make his humanity hard to miss, and he’s—riveting. As are you, for that matter.”
“Yeah, we find you pretty interesting too.” He gave Zemo his canteen again.
Zemo drank, but then he tipped the canteen, sloshing the water back and forth, and said, “I have one of these too, for the record.”
He sure did, but Sam liked Zemo drinking out of his anyway. He brushed his thumb across the wet metal threads as he screwed the cap back on again, and he felt the warmth of Zemo’s mouth lingering there before he covered it up.
He said, “If it comes down to some hit they want carried out, if it’s not safe for you to go it alone—we can leave Bucky out of it. Handle it on our own, just the two of us.”
Zemo actually snorted with laughter and then winced at the excruciating pain it must have sent through his head. “You’re not a killer, Sam.”
“I wish that were true, but it’s not.”
“Fundamentally.”
“Nobody’s fundamentally a killer or not a killer. It’s just something you do and gotta stop doing.”
“You have a very nice idea of the world.”
“I’ve seen a lot of it,” Sam said levelly. “Don’t forget that, and don’t turn down me offering to make your life easier just because you think I’m too precious for words. I know what I’m saying here, and—if it honest-to-God comes down to either you getting killed doing this crap or me getting my hands dirty, or me getting my hands dirty vs. Bucky stepping right back into all this—I can make my choices there and deal with my own conscience.”
“If you were someone else, I’d let you. But it would break you.”
Sam nodded. “I’ve broken before.”
Zemo looked at him, and he obviously believed him and got it. And then turned it down anyway, his voice harsh: “I don’t need a broken man on my team.”
Sam wasn’t fooled by the tone. You’re not the boss of me, and you know it, he thought with a deep, funny kind of tenderness, meeting Zemo’s defiant and slightly muddled gaze head-on.
“Fine,” he said. “Then if you’re gonna be that way about it, we’ll just have to run if they try any of this reassignment bullshit.”
Zemo’s lips twitched. “You’re not supposed to tell me that.”
“You’re not getting me.” He checked Zemo’s pulse again, and it was even less necessary now than it had been the first time; he kept his hand in place, palm resting lightly against Zemo’s throat, while he went on. “Reassignment bullshit includes the brass trying to make me and Bucky work with anybody else. That still counts as splitting us up. So if they pull any of that, the three of us run.” Zemo’s pulse leapt against him, but Sam just held him like that until it slowed down again. “You don’t have to say anything right now—”
“Why?” Zemo said. There was a little crack in his voice.
“But apparently you’re going to anyway.”
It was easy to joke around, hard to give a straight answer. Too many things were true.
He settled for: “Because that’s how we work. You said it too, we’re a team. Pills kicking in yet? How are you feeling?”
Zemo touched his head, like he could assess his headache from the outside-in. “Improving. We should go after James.”
“Nope, we’re resting until you actually feel better. Tomorrow, if you’re good and Bucky’s not back, we’ll start up. If you’re still off your game, we’ll start down.” Sam changed rocks, moving over to Zemo’s. He stretched out slowly, like he was trying not to scare a stray cat, and put one arm around Zemo.
Who instantly stiffened. “What are you doing?”
“Warming you up. It’s one of the treatments for altitude sickness.”
“Is it,” Zemo murmured. He didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I don’t remember that from Google.”
“You gotta improve your Google-fu, then.”
The best bluffs were the ones that were half-true: “keep them warm” did come up in discussions of treating early-stage altitude sickness. Just … not a lot, and not very high up on the list of priorities. He curled his gloved fingers into Zemo’s arm and felt Zemo relax by degrees, until five minutes had passed and he was sagging sleepily against Sam’s side. Now this was rest, Sam thought smugly, unlike whatever Zemo had probably gotten last night.
He'd been married for a long time, hadn’t he? Maybe he didn’t sleep too well without somebody next to him.
Well, Sam thought with hot prickling along the back of his neck—he was warming up pretty nicely now too, wasn’t he?—they could do something about that.
He leaned against Zemo, the two of them holding each other up, and he must have drifted off, because when he opened his eyes again, the sun was high and Bucky was back. He was stirring something in a pot.
“Damn,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes with his free, non-Zemo-pinned hand. “Already?”
“Putting the super in supersoldier,” Bucky said.
“Okay, never say that again. We might slow you down, but when you’re all by yourself, you’ve got no one to cuddle. I think that’s the title of a country song.”
Bucky looked down at the fire. “I don’t really like it, you know,” he said, his voice almost too low for Sam to hear him. “Working alone. Comes in handy sometimes, sure, but I’ll take slow and steady any day.” He forced a smile that softened into something genuine. “And cuddling.” He nodded at Zemo, and none of the tenderness left his face when he did it. Yeah, Sam thought arranging a new way for them all to sleep wasn’t going to be a problem. “How’s he doing?”
“Better, I think, but we may want to stay here tonight. I gave him something for the headache and the nausea, and I had to make a judgment call about what would have a better payoff—lower altitude or lack of exertion.” He chafed Zemo’s arm a little, wondering if Zemo could even feel it through the layers. Zemo was still too pale, but the pinched look of pain had receded. “You can tell I went with the most adorable option.”
“Always a good rule of thumb.”
“What’re you making?”
Bucky grinned. “Hot chocolate.”
“Oh, man, I love you. Do we have any of those little marshmallows?”
“Yeah, Sam, I brought a whole bag of little marshmallows on our HYDRA-fighting camping trip.”
“You brought hot chocolate. I don’t know how your mind works.”
“You and me both, but—”
“But he didn’t bring the hot chocolate,” Zemo said, stirring against Sam’s arm. He surprised Sam by not immediately putting a gap between the two of them. He had a sleepy softness to him, even now, a kind of warm, fuzzy pliancy. “I did. And there are no little marshmallows because those are an abomination—”
“Fighting words,” Sam said.
“—but there are proper-sized ones in the side compartment of my pack, James. With vanilla bean and bourbon; the bourbon ones are a shade darker.”
“I should’ve known you’d buy gourmet marshmallows,” Bucky said. He said to Sam, “The hot chocolate was fancy too. I think it’s got cinnamon in it. It’s kind of a waste of all this to make it without milk, but I guess that’s how you can tell we’re roughing it.” He stirred the cocoa a little more and then moved the pot off the fire, banking it in the coals instead, and started rummaging through Zemo’s bag.
Zemo was still half-leaning against him. “Mission done and dusted, right on time,” Sam said to him, and he felt Zemo’s nod against his shoulder as much as he saw it.
Reassignment plan’s still in place, though, he almost added. He thought Zemo needed to know that—but the odds were good that Zemo wouldn’t believe him anymore now than he had before, and bringing it up would just break the fragile, peaceful comfort the three of them had right now. And he didn’t want to just drop the possibility of even more goddamn upheaval on an unprepared Bucky, either.
For right now: hot chocolate. And staying warm—which was kind of the plan in the long run, too.
“Bourbon or vanilla?” Bucky called over his shoulder.
“Vanilla,” Sam said.
“Bourbon,” Zemo said at the same time.
“I’m taking half of each of them,” Bucky said.
“So you’re just leaving two mauled marshmallows behind,” Sam said. “Classy.”
“Nope, I’m gonna eat them. It’s my payment for spending all day mountaineering while you two stayed here and snuggled.”
Sam squinted at his watch. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, Buck.”
Bucky handed him a tin cup of hot chocolate with a gooey vanilla marshmallow already starting to melt into it. “So what?”
“So ‘all day’ my ass, is what.”
Bucky crammed the two torn halves of marshmallows into his mouth like an animal and grinned at Sam, his teeth sticky and white. “Sorry, did you want some?”
“You know, every time somebody talks about the Greatest Generation, you’re the reason I know they’re full of shit.”
“Happy to help.” Bucky passed the bourbon-marshmallow-topped cup over to Zemo and tipped his own against it and then against Sam’s. He met Sam’s eyes, and there was a rush of sincerity there, sweeter than any damn hot chocolate in the world. “Here’s to us.”
“Us,” Sam said, and drank.
Zemo said nothing, but he sipped politely at his hot chocolate and played nice when Sam told him to use it to wash down some more ibuprofen and promethazine. A little color was coming back into his face, slowly but surely.
Getting altitude sickness didn’t mean you couldn’t ever acclimate to these kinds of heights, Sam thought. He looked at the snowy quiet all around them—no threats, nobody to give them orders they couldn’t follow and still stay whole. Not too many bad memories. If they had to run, this wouldn’t be too bad a place to run to.
He’d wanted a different kind of life once, one with color and purpose and travel and adventure, and he’d probably get back to wanting it someday, when he was a little less tired and they were all a little more healed. He wasn’t the kind who could stay out of the fight forever. But everybody needed a pause.
His grandfather had built his grandmother a house—taught himself what he needed to know and done all of it with his own two hands. So it was in his blood, Sam thought, sipping his vanilla-marshmallow-infused cocoa, watching Bucky duck his head and smile at something Zemo had just said, feeling how Zemo’s body was still pressed up against him. As much as he’d always liked moving around, he could make a home if he needed to. He knew who he wanted to make it with.