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The letters had started off benign. The first time Bucky received one, he was more surprised by the fact that Zemo knew his personal address than the contents of the letter itself. Of which was fragranced with something expensive he couldn’t quite place.
Book recommendations, clever quips about the lovely accommodations they offer at the raft. Like a change of bedsheets every week, a spritz of lavender around bedtime, sawdust tea. And a friendly assurance that Zemo had only been beaten up by the guards a grand total of twice. That last bit made Bucky smile more than it should have. Zemo could hold his own, Bucky had seen it personally.
He didn’t respond. Not for a long while. Though every moment he didn’t felt like a moment Zemo waited. As if he were haunting every room Bucky entered, as if he were an unfinished sentence. Or an ellipses.
So he caved. And back then, with America’s shiniest new toy (as Zemo so often put it) on the job with that flighty pretty boy (that’s not a way Zemo ever described him, that was just objective observation,) it didn’t take much for Bucky to cave.
Hence the back and forth began. Regular letters, like clockwork. They became more intimate, more probing.
You claim the soldier is gone, perhaps you are right. But I sense you still seek that submission, the precipice of belonging to yourself, and belonging to another. I saw the look on your face in Madripoor, while you stood at the edge of the void, staring into the soldier’s eyes, like leaning over a cliff side. I wonder when you’ll finally let yourself fall. I’ll be there to catch you.
Bucky had almost burned that one. He instead tucked it neatly beneath his pillow and hoped that spicy fragrance would cling to the sheets. He didn’t reply for a while after that. Weeks, in fact. And he could sense the tension even from Brooklyn to the raft, pulling tighter and tighter like a rubber band strung taut. It snapped.
He wrote of simple things. His cat, Alpine. A new recipe he’d picked up during his campaigns from a Sokovian immigrant. Music he didn’t quite understand but didn’t dislike. Art he thought his sister would have enjoyed. And then, inevitably, loss. It always circled back to that, didn’t it? This intrinsic chain of events that linked he and Zemo, always loss, always emptiness, always a shared understanding of what it feels like to be a human arsenal.
It isn’t like Steve couldn’t understand. Or that Sam doesn’t try to. But neither of them know what it feels like to be forged in the fires of circumstance, to be held and handled, to lead a taskforce like Zemo had, the lawnmowers of war. To blindly follow orders as Bucky so often sought, even now. It’s a cruel thing, to be understood so keenly by someone so wrong. Even worse when you want them to be right.
He often gets the sudden, biting urge to sting Zemo, just the way he always bore his fangs and scraped just delicately enough to draw blood.
Sometimes I write a list of things I’d recommend to my sister. Do you ever hear something and feel the urge to turn on that crappy little cot to tell your wife, only to find she isn’t there? You ever wanna go back to that time, when she was? Just to touch her again?
That was mean, admittedly. And when Bucky slots it into the mail he doesn’t expect Zemo to write back. In fact he hopes he won’t. Because the more they write to one another the more he realizes that he takes the letters with him when he travels, he rereads them every night. Or when the loneliness bubbles and he feels like sinking into the corner of a dark, empty room and sobbing until the day passes into night, and so on and so forth.
Of course, that isn’t what happened. When he got their last correspondence, he stared at it for hours in passing. It lingered there on the kitchen counter like an unwanted visitor. The name “Helmut Zemo,” constantly in his periphery.
He promised himself he wouldn’t open it. But self control was the soldier’s strong suit, not his. And of course, like every letter Zemo sends him, it begins with, “My dearest James,” and it ends with, “your’s, truly, Helmut Zemo.”
The man I was then died in the rubble of Sokovia, with his wife and his son. The man I am now does not belong there, and if I were, under some mystical circumstance, returned to them, they would not recognize me. The only person I think of turning to, on my “crappy” little cot, is you. More often than not, when I shut my eyes, it’s you who I see behind my eyelids. Is abandonment so deeply conditioned into your subconscious that you’d be so brazen as to inadvertently ask if I’d leave you behind? The answer is no, James. Given the option, my choice would be you. Every single time.
And just like that, Bucky’s resolve shrivels like a grape in the sun and crumbles to dust. Is it inadvisable on a psychological level? Absolutely. But has anyone else in the world ever made him feel so kept, understood, wanted, even from a place as far from civilization as the raft? No. Even tucked away in a high security prison, miles beneath the ocean, Zemo makes him feel sought, pursued, wanted.
And naturally, when Zemo’s departure from the raft is negotiated and they’re finally occupying the same space, breathing the same air, Bucky tells himself he’ll take this slow. He’ll let it simmer. Zemo might not even want him that way. He shouldn’t rush into things. Shouldn’t make assumptions. Zemo is his last handler, after all, and that complicates things, makes it impossible not to gravitate towards the Baron.
“James.”
Oh shit.
Zemo eyes him from across the debriefing table. Yelena’s voice fades. She’s talking to Alexie about something that suddenly doesn’t matter. His lips part, tongue darting out. Zemo’s eyes follow the movement. Bucky feels himself stiffen, locking up where he stands.
“…James?” Zemo echoes, a tang of Sokovian accenting the shape of his own name on Zemo’s lips.
Oh shit.
Cool, glacial blue meets honey whiskey and he’s lost. He only arches his brows in notion, expectant. The corner of his lips slowly rises. Not quite smug, but not exactly innocent either.
“You’ve yet to say hello to me, James…”
Bucky thrums four fingers in time against the tabletop. He studies Zemo’s face, the handsome stubble that’s grown. The bow of his devilish smirk, the way it reaches the corners of his eyes casually, knowingly. Like he can peer into Bucky’s mind. No. Like he’s undressing Bucky with them. Every flutter of his lashes feels like fire licking closer to him.
Bucky swallows hard, unrelenting despite the way his heart thrums so hard and so fast that he’d be mildly concerned if he wasn’t a super soldier.
“…hello, Helmut.”
Zemo’s smirk falls, eyes glazed with a blink of heat that has Bucky wanting to shed his jacket on the spot. He purses his lips, chewing at the inside of his cheek until he can taste blood as the two of them pretend to be invested in the casual debriefing. Valentina doesn’t pause once in her speaking. But she looks between them and Bucky can only hope it’s not obvious how little of a fight he’s putting up.
Given the option, my choice would be you. Every single time.
He breathes a stuttering sound, and they both know where they’ll be headed once this meeting ends.
“You should lock that.” Bucky breathes as Zemo’s hands grapple beneath his thighs and yank him up onto the desk. His door’s shut. The office space is mostly empty beyond it. Mostly.
“I should.” Zemo agrees. But that doesn’t stop his warm breath, spiced with rum, from trickling down Bucky’s throat in heat waves before he’s sucking slow, hungry kisses into his flesh. The drawl of his words plummets into the core of Bucky’s stomach like hot cider.
“Y-You should.” Bucky repeats, hands darting out for purchase, clinging to the back of Zemo’s soft, ostentatious coat as he arches his back and feels the thick, hard shape of Zemo against him.
“Certainly.” Fingers card through Bucky’s hair, feather-like and reverent before a sharp tug has him looking up at the ceiling with a gasp, the curve of his neck exposed, electricity jolting through him. “I will get right to it…” he whispers words like syrup and Bucky laps them up like he’s not tasted sugar in a hundred years. “Although…that would require…” he bites and Bucky only narrowly stifles the trembling moan that kicks its way out of him, “…stopping, even momentarily.”
Bucky shakes his head fast, “don’t stop. Don’t stop, or I’ll f-fucking kill you.” he threatens, but he reaches up and he dares to fuss with his neatly styled hair and the back of his neck and his broad, muscled shoulders. He’s got a pleasant softness to him, but Bucky can tell he’s been working out, that all of the strength of a colonel rests beneath the skin. It stokes a flame within him that had barely been more than an ember for decades. His legs tentatively clasp around Zemo’s waist, pulling him closer, until the space between them can only be measured in centimeters.
Oh to be coveted. To be desired, even from behind the four highly secured walls of a prison cell, by a man who dedicated his life to hunting people like him. To be an exception. To be accepted.
The need to kiss him becomes overwhelming. To chase the remnants of liquor on his tongue, to leave him gasping for breath while Bucky feels the beat of his heart against his lips, his teeth, trails down to kiss his navel and his hips all the while Zemo guides him with a hand to his eager-
There’s a knock at the door and they collapse. Zemo moves so swiftly that Bucky hardly processes it, only catching the flare of his coat in his periphery as the door opens and Yelena struts in without a second thought.
His chest rises and falls, heaving out breath that he struggles to contain. Whereas Zemo (the bastard) seems almost unbothered, aside from kiss stained lips and the faintest flush.
“Valentina wanted me to drop these off before I get the hell out of here. I guess I’ve been reduced to her little errand girl. Whatever, it’s your homework, not mine.” Yelena says begrudgingly as she tosses files onto the round table in the center of the room, pausing to look between them, chewing idly at a piece of gum and blowing a slow bubble.
A loaded silence follows. Her expression tactically impassive. She’s got an irritatingly good poker face.
The bubble pops.
She smirks, “was I interrupting something?”
“No.” Bucky says, all too quickly.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all.” Zemo confirms with an amicable smile.
“Mmhm…” Yelena slowly inches back towards the door, nodding once, then again, lips pulled into a thin, awkward line. “…You should consider locking this.”
The door shuts before Bucky can protest, and though he steps forward to do just that, Zemo yanks him back, throwing everything off the desk. A stapler hits the ground and there’s absolutely no way Yelena can’t hear it from the other side, but that doesn’t matter, because Zemo’s kissing him. Zemo’s kissing him. Zemo’s kissing him.
And he really can taste the rum, the complex, distinguished notes. It’s like arrogance is in his very biology, and Bucky’s quick to submit, panting urgently as Zemo’s skilled fingers pluck away buttons, unzip his trousers, hold him through his briefs, squeezing him tenderly and drawing a noise from him that sounds like biblical sin even to his own ears.
Bucky cradles either side of Zemo’s face as their lips knock clumsily together, foreheads pressed, bodies rolling into one another like waves. They should lock the door. But by the time Zemo is inside of him, still fully clothed aside from the way his pants drape at his thighs, he can’t be bothered to suggest it, let alone think.
Bucky’s ankles slot together at Zemo’s back, even as Zemo splays him down against the desk and knocks into him so hard it protests against the wall, chips at the paint, creaks as he reaches above him to grasp at it for some semblance of stability, hands crushing the wood and splintering it around himself.
“Helmut…helm…just…” his lips hang open, the music of his bliss barely contained. And only because he wants to hear the bated breaths, the Baron undone as he rocks into Bucky’s tight heat.
“There? There, darling?”
“There, there, fuck, right there”
Bucky has to be discreet about getting a new desk the following day. He blames the “old wood,” mentions termites, even the god damn humidity. Tells himself it wont happen again.
It happens again. Typically at the office, but more often late at night, when he comes home and finds Zemo looming in some dark corner of his apartment. And thus commenced The Thunderbolt’s worst kept secret.