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He looks at the ruins of the house, inhaling the smell of wet concrete and brick from the past rain, which has laid the dust to the ground. Zemo feels his hands starting to shake, so he clenches his fists. His heart is not beating; he is frozen like a ghost in the middle of a huge common grave. He can’t take his eyes off the pile of bricks and the piece of the patchwork quilt sticking out from under it. Heike sewed it during her pregnancy, and it became a beacon, a tombstone deeply etched into his memory.
Zemo turns around at the sound of a stone hitting the ground and sees himself, covered in dirt and dust, with dark circles under his eyes from two days without sleep, with disheveled hair, sitting on the ground. Young Helmut takes off his torn jacket, crumples it up, and throws it to the ground, letting out a howl of despair. Zemo looks back at the pile of rubble and knows that Helmut will soon notice the quilt and start digging there, unaware that he will find the death of his soul among the debris.
He tries to take a breath and closes his eyes, hoping to wake from a bad dream. Nightmares about that day were haunting him at night for several years, but they had never been so vivid and tangible. He had never seen himself from the outside.
At that time, he had nowhere to get help; everyone in the city was busy with their own grief and salvation. No one shared his pain, which later turned into a thirst for revenge, quietly splashing inside like burning lava.
Zemo opens his eyes, hearing his own sobs. He sees the back of young Helmut and the dust-covered back of Karl’s head – he is holding the boy in his arms. Zemo takes a step back. No, no. He’d barely stopped dreaming about it. Why now? For what? He turns away, wiping the tears from his eyes. He slaps his cheeks to wake up.
And again, the sound of a stone hitting the ground. Zemo turns around and sees himself covered in dirt, sitting on the ground. He looks at the piece of the quilt sticking out from under the rubble. He remembers cursing himself for being tired, and believing that he could have found his family sooner, when they were still breathing, when their hearts were still maintaining a rhythm, weakly, but…
Zemo rushes to the rubble, starting to clear away the debris. What if he was just a few seconds late, and this time he can fix everything? His fingers hurt, and he scratches his hands on the rebar and sharp corners of the broken tiles, but he keeps digging. He knows under which brick he will find his son’s hand. Zemo grabs the thin child’s wrist and, although he cannot feel a pulse, pulls Karl towards him.
He chokes on air and tears, again hugging and rocking the lifeless body sleeping in an eternal sleep. He rubs his thumb over boy’s pale face, which is dusty, just like porcelain, but no blush appears on it. He calls his son by his name, apologizes for not being with him during the disaster, for delaying, for not devoting more time to his family – he should have quit his job as soon as the idea first occurred to him. Perhaps this is karma – you take someone’s life, and someone takes the lives of your loved ones. But for some reason not yours, leaving you invisible bleeding. Although from that day, Zemo never felt alive again.
He looks sideways, knowing where the bodies of his wife and father lie. He doesn’t have the strength to dig any further, either mentally or physically. It’s pointless. He won’t make it.
Zemo blinks and suddenly feels that there is nothing else in his hands, there is no Karl’s body. He chokes on a sob. He turns around, seeing a young himself sitting on the ground. He looks at the rubble, from under which the piece of the blanket is sticking out…
“No,” he shakes his head, stepping back. He sees young Helmut approaching the pile of rubble and starting to dig. He’ll find the bodies soon enough. He’s going to die soon enough. Zemo takes another step back, unable to see the recurring image, and then takes off, trying to escape from the nightmare that’s driving him crazy.
The parquet boards crack under his feet at the place where the spacious living room once was in his house, and he suddenly falls through them.
Zemo lands on the top bunk of a bunk bed; the impact knocks the air out of his lungs. He lies down for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling through which he somehow has got here, and tries to catch his breath. The worst nightmare has stopped, but he still hasn’t woken up. His heart is still pounding against his chest. Zemo sits bolt straight, looking around the familiar room, where he spent a couple of years of his youth. It made him who he is. It tempered and forced him to give up his desires for higher goals. And it almost broke him. Almost. The green walls of the barracks, the endless rows of bunk beds, were like the maze of bars he went to at his father’s behest.
He hears the rustle of clothes and movements below him and, turning over, he moves closer to the edge of the bed to look. On the bottom bed, he sees himself, nineteen–year-old, with short-cut hair, a clean-shaved face, too cute – so unsuitable for the army. The boy is kissing another blond guy. His name is Leo. And it was Helmut’s first kiss with a man.
The door to the barracks opens abruptly, hitting the wall with such force that paint falls off it. The boys push off from each other and stand at attention at the bed as the lieutenant walks resolutely towards them.
Zemo remembers wanting to sink through the ground. What a shame he felt for one innocent kiss with a fellow soldier. He remembers the horrors running through his head: that the whole company and higher-ups would find out about the incident, that he and Leo would not be able to live normally until the end of their service lives, that every day would become hell not only because of ridicule, but also violence. Homosexuality was unacceptable there; Zemo would not have been accepted for service if he confessed to such inclinations. But how could he know that he would meet someone who would mean so much to him that he wouldn’t care what gender they were? Never had he before discovered such strong feelings that made him ignore the rules.
When he succumbed to his feelings, of course, he didn’t even think about his father react. He wasn’t thinking at all.
“A rumpled bedspread in the middle of the day. Zemo, you get a week of extra duties in the kitchen. Bloom, you get a week of extra duties in the medical unit,” the lieutenant shouts so loud that Helmut’s ears pop. Helmut tries to keep his eyes open to face the punishment with courage.
Contrary to his fears, the lieutenant did not tell any of their company about the true reason for the punishment of the two private soldiers. Zemo was sure that he understood perfectly well what was happening in the barracks, but for some reason, he took pity on them. Unfortunately, their relationship with Leo ended as soon as it began – they didn’t even look at each other for the next year. Shame was eating them alive. They couldn’t take a risk anymore. After the service ended, they did not meet. But he missed Leo so much, and it took him a lot of effort to suppress those feelings and let go of him.
Zemo startles when the front door bangs, turns around, and sees the lieutenant. He goes to the careless young men who have forgotten all about being careful. Zemo buries his face in the pillow, not seeing what’s going on, but he can hear the springs squeaking as the boys jump up. He’s not ready to relive that moment again and replay in his head for the thousandth time the thought that he should have stood up for himself and answered the lieutenant instead of just staring at the floor in shame. Maybe if he had done that, Leo wouldn’t think of him as a coward and would still be talking to him... maybe, maybe, maybe. But it’s too late now.
Zemo jumps out of the bunk bed and, after looking back just once at his young and stupid self, hurries to the door of the barracks. The lieutenant opens it, and Zemo dives through the doorway.
The door slams shut behind him, and Zemo freezes. In a dark room with no windows, only an emergency red light flickers, dancing on the glass walls of a cage in which the sullen man is imprisoned, half-heartedly answering the questions of the impostor doctor.
Zemo had already forgotten the prisoner correcting him and asking him to call him “Bucky”. He stands behind his past “self” and looks ahead, feeling his heart sink at the haggard voice of someone who will turn into a Winter Soldier in a minute. Bucky looks up when Helmut shows him the red book. Zemo sees the frozen horror in Bucky’s eyes that he had ignored at that time. Helmut gets up from his seat and ruthlessly reads out the code, holding a flashlight over the written pages.
Zemo sees Bucky’s lips tremble when he begs him to stop. Soon, he breaks down, crumpling the metal of the shackles like paper, and then pounces on the glass, trying to break it to strangle the man who intends to return him to the endless nightmares from which he escaped with such difficulty.
Zemo thinks about letting him strangle himself now. He doesn’t care about the consequences. He doesn’t care about the super-soldiers in the Siberian bunker, whom he shot while they were sleeping in their cryo chambers. Maybe he should have let other people fight this war. They will eventually destroy themselves and all of humanity anyway. After all, he already knows that little will change from the actions of the vengeful Helmut, the wrong people will die, and nothing will stop the perpetrators from continuing to bring destruction. Why did he get involved in this vicious circle? He wanted justice to prevail. He only wanted to put a mirror in front of the Avengers so that they could face the ugly truth. Together with them, he involuntarily looked at himself and was horrified.
The Winter Soldier knocks the glass out of his cage and freezes for a few seconds, hunched on the floor, actually on his knees in front of his “handler”. Zemo takes a few steps forward and stops in front of him. Helmut stands behind him. The Soldier straightens up, staring unseeingly ahead, somewhere over his shoulder. Zemo takes the man’s face in his hands and tries to look into his eyes. But he finds nothing but emptiness there.
The Soldier should look at him with hatred and not stand still waiting for orders. Zemo runs his hands over the Soldier’s unshaven cheeks and asks him to wake up. Bucky needs to recognize him. Let Bucky treat him however he likes, in order to recognize him, in order to talk to him. Zemo is not able to slap him on the cheeks in an attempt to bring him back to his senses; it will not help – the Soldier will tolerate everything.
Zemo can’t leave. He doesn’t want to leave this room. It seems to him that, unlike other events, the consequences of this can still be fixed. And even if the shame of his act devours him completely, he doesn’t care. He was too cruel to Bucky, knowing nothing about him, seeing him only as an instrument of revenge without feelings or thoughts, who does not suffer and does not know how to regret. Because all the years before Zemo’s eyes, there was a continuous veil of blood, before the sound of the failed shot to his head. But he can’t do that anymore.
He blinks, and the surroundings suddenly change. The feeling of another man’s face disappears from his hands. His fingers catch the emptiness, and his heart is uncomfortably compressed, causing him to gasp for breath. Zemo stands in his bedroom, unable to remember what he was going to do. But what does it matter? He looks around and catches his reflection in the mirrored surface of the closet. The Helmut he saw in his visions no longer exists, but there is still something left. The consequences.
Zemo purses his lips and takes out his phone. He knows Bucky is on a mission right now, but he wants to make sure he’s not making this up. That the past is really in the past. That he has been able to fix something after all.
“I’m a little busy,” Bucky grumbles at the other end of the line.
“I’ll be quick,” Zemo takes a deep breath, intending to ask a question that is striking in its stupidity. “Tell me, please, do you still want to strangle me?”
There is a tense silence for a few seconds.
“Are you out of your mind?” Bucky finally asks.
“To be honest, I think so,” Zemo admits.
“Then you’d better find someone else to fulfill your sexual fantasies. I won’t indulge them.”
Zemo squints and laughs with relief. Whatever you say, Bucky, whatever you say.