Work Text:
The first time Bucky touched Zemo's daemon was on the plane to Madripoor. It wasn't planned; in fact, if he'd thought about it for half a second, he would never have done it. It was pure instinct. Zemo was being a dick as usual, pushing and goading him, and something in Bucky snapped. He reached out and picked up Norka by her long, slinky middle.
The mink—who, up to this point, had been alternately hissing at people and making sarcastic comments from her perch on Zemo's shoulders—went immediately as limp as a loose sock stuffed with rice, swinging from Bucky's hand. At the same time, Zemo collapsed back in his seat, his eyes wide and dark, a strange slackness to his face.
What recalled Bucky to himself wasn't even that. It was Sam's shocked hiss of "Bucky!" along with a warning cry from Sam's Lenya.
Bucky was shocked at himself, his anger crumbling. He dropped Norka onto the seat beside Zemo. She fell like a limp rolled-up towel, and lay panting for a moment. Zemo was also breathing in deep gulps. Just as Sam had started to lean forward to make sure they were both all right, Norka hopped to her stubby legs, hissed at Bucky, and made a slightly tottering climb to her usual perch on Zemo's shoulders.
Zemo sat forward and dabbed at his face with a neatly folded pocket square. "James," he said. His voice was slightly hoarse. "How very forward."
"Shut up," Bucky muttered. He leaned back in his seat and folded his arms, trying to ignore Sam looking at him with a baffled mix of anger and concern. He did spare a glance for Trina, but the big shaggy wolf-dog was lying on the floor with her ears pricked and her gaze straight in front of her, interacting with no one, as usual.
Bucky tried not to think about the fact that he had violated the greatest taboo that existed regarding someone else's daemon, and he had done it without a second thought.
He tried not to think about the fact that he had enjoyed the feeling of Norka dangling limp in his hand, the quick breathing and the flutter of her racing pulse, and Zemo's accompanying limp surrender.
*
No one in HYDRA ever had the slightest hesitation about touching Trina. That was probably, Bucky thought in retrospect, a big part of the problem.
They had not tried to separate his daemon from him; maybe they couldn't see a way to do it without killing him or turning him into a useless, drooling husk. Instead, they had treated her as an object, just as they treated him as an object. They manhandled her, muzzled her, shoved her in cages. After a while, the filthy, unwanted touches were just another source of pain and misery that faded into the background blur of misery that was his life.
It had clearly affected Trina. Bucky's old therapist used to tell him that Trina's near catatonia would never heal until he healed. Bucky could front (also her word); Trina couldn't. Her silent, traumatized, sleepless vigilance was an outward reflection of the state of Bucky's soul. Et cetera and so on, thanks Doc, really appreciate it, totally worth the hour we just spent, glad we had this chat, see you next week.
But what Bucky had never really considered was that all those years of HYDRA misusing his soul might have given him a completely messed-up relationship with other people's souls.
It had never occurred to him because it had never happened before. He certainly had no desire to inflict unwanted touches on the fox bat tucked up in Sam's collar, even though Lenya was actually reasonably friendly with him, more so than most people's daemons were. And he had never laid a hand on anyone's daemon in Wakanda, or even wanted to.
No ... it was just Zemo and Norka, and sometimes it was so strong that it bordered on compulsion. It wasn't even that he wanted to pet her. He wasn't a pervert who went around creeping on other people's daemons. He just wanted to squish her a bit to get Zemo to stop talking, since it was the only thing that seemed to work. It was as if Zemo's soul was one of those squeezy stress balls, and Bucky had started eyeing her with guilty yet persistent thoughts of squeezing her furry middle and triggering another of those weirdly satisfying collapses from the persistent baronial thorn in his side.
He actually did it a couple of times at the safehouse in Riga, both times when Sam wasn't around and Zemo's grating, intrusive personal comments were getting to be too much to bear. Each time got the same uncomfortably gratifying response: Norka going limp like a weighted furry sock in his hands, and Zemo wilting like a houseplant that hadn't been watered. Both of them bounced back immediately afterwards—Bucky could at least reassure himself that he wasn't hurting them—but Zemo seemed weirdly relaxed for a couple of hours after, and Norka rode limply on his shoulders as if she was exhausted.
If Bucky didn't know better, he'd think Zemo was trying to goad him into it.
*
And then Zemo went back to prison. He came out with an ankle tracking monitor and a new, pale quietness to him that Bucky found strangely unsettling. Zemo being an unrepentant asshole was less unnerving than Zemo being polite and quiet and only being an asshole occasionally. Things being what they were, Bucky couldn't exactly add messing around with Zemo's daemon on top of whatever else he was obviously dealing with.
However, what eventually ended up pushing Bucky beyond the point of no return was Norka trying to get on top of Bucky's book. It was a good book, lots of action, picked up from a Little Free Library up the street from their safehouse just that evening. And now he had a mink trying to climb on top of it and poke her whiskery little nose between the pages, while Zemo sipped whiskey on the sofa across from Bucky and made no move to stop her.
It was too much. Bucky picked her up to remove her. As before, she went completely limp in his grasp, her head and hindquarters swinging like two loosely connected ends of a slinky.
There was a crash as Zemo's glass of whiskey hit the floor.
Sam appeared out of the kitchen, where he had been microwaving takeout leftovers. "What's going on? Buck—" He was just in time to see Bucky set Norka down on the couch. Zemo woozily sat up. Sam threw his hands up in the air and went back to the kitchen.
"I think he thinks we're weird," Bucky said.
"Speak for yourself," Zemo said, slightly out of breath.
"Are you gonna clean that up?"
"Are you?" Zemo asked, challenging.
"No," Bucky said. He slouched with his book.
Zemo stretched out on the couch. Norka climbed onto his chest and sprawled there. Bucky ended up cleaning up the broken glass, because in some sense it really was his fault, and also, Zemo looked more relaxed than he had at any point since they got him out of prison again.
The weird thing was, Bucky felt a little less wound up, too.
Maybe there was something to this stress ball daemon thing.
*
"Do you two want to get a room?"
Sam spoke up, distracting Bucky from the movie they were all halfheartedly watching while waiting for word from the informant who was supposed to be calling at some point to let them know the location of the HYDRA facility they were trying to track down.
"What?" Bucky said. He genuinely didn't know what Sam was talking about, until he looked down and realized that Norka had crawled over against his leg, and he was idly squeezing her while he watched TV. Not hard, just enough to manipulate the soft furry length of her, playing his fingertips down her supple spine, while she flopped limply on the chair cushion and allowed herself to be manhandled.
Zemo was a boneless puddle on the couch. Bucky knew by now that as soon as he took his hand off Norka, Zemo would slowly recover and sit up, but lately his smart mouth had been making a comeback. So really, if they wanted to watch the movie in peace, squeezing Norka was the only way to make it happen.
Bucky had also seen her bite a HYDRA goon the other day in twelve different places, making him realize just how much she had been letting him get away with since the very first day he picked her up.
"Nah, we're good," Bucky said.
Sam gave them both a look, and poured himself another drink.
Zemo oozed a little deeper into the couch, and Bucky felt some of the tension unwind from the base of his spine. Trina leaned her head against his leg and sighed deeply, her pricked ears mere inches from Norka's limply dangling tail.