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The safehouse was in the city's old quarter, with its narrow cobbled streets and stone-fronted townhouses. The house had belonged to a distant cousin, making it technically part of the Zemo family holdings, and one of the many properties that had come down to him with the entire family now gone. But Zemo had spent no time there before; he had no inconvenient memories of dead people to follow him like restless ghosts through the rooms.
The ghosts he had acquired here were newer ones. They were intrusive, nagging thoughts like home and safety, crowding close as his weary, dragging footsteps finally brought him to the rain-wet front steps.
Dusk was falling over the city, and the nearly empty streets glistened in the rain. Zemo sank down and sat for a little while with his back against the door, needing to pull himself together before he went in. He didn't dare move the hand pressing a wadded-up fistful of his coat against his side. Underneath, he could feel his shirt—wet, sticky, and saturated—clinging to his ribs.
He had left a few inconvenient blood splatters on the street, but his blood would be washed away by the rain, leaving no trace. His coat hid the wreck of his shirt. He had managed to keep himself together, walking in more or less a straight line, and with dusk falling and everyone hurrying home at the end of the day, he didn't think they had seen anything other than one more pedestrian, bareheaded in the rain, with somewhere to get to.
There was light gleaming from the windows of the townhouse. He checked the app on his phone that kept him up to date on Sam and James's trackers. According to the data, they had stayed in the safehouse all afternoon. Of course, if they were going to try to give him the slip and not expect immediate pursuit, it would show that.
He leaned his head back against the wall and took a few breaths.
All he had to do was go inside, cover up his condition long enough to get past them, and make it to his bedroom with its attached master bath—located, inconveniently, at the very top of the tall, narrow house.
It seemed he had made a few bad decisions today, just the latest in a long string of them. Possibly the first stupid decision, at the start of it all, was agreeing to this parole arrangement in the first place, especially if he was just going to leave his parolees sitting in a nice warm townhouse while he went out and killed people in the rain.
He had all but been ordered to take James this time.
What's the point of having someone with the Winter Soldier's unique abilities if we never use them, Colonel? This was Ross, probably Zemo's least favorite person on the GRC oversight board who gave him his marching orders these days. International, supposedly, but when it came to picking jobs for them, the Americans on the whole called the shots. How convenient for them, having a plausibly deniable black ops squad composed of a former colonel, who no longer had a military to back him, and a pair of criminals.
I also have skills in that area, he had pointed out. I can manage a simple termination well enough on my own.
Apparently he couldn't, judging from the blood that was now seeping hot and wet down his side.
And it was foolish anyway, standing on a point of honor that made no sense. They were right: this was James's purpose. He was made by his original handlers as a perfect killing machine. And it was certainly his entire reason for not being in prison, where the Winter Soldier belonged.
It was only ...
It was only that Zemo had worked with the two of them long enough by now that he had come to notice how scrupulously James tried not to kill in the field. How hard he tried not to be that person anymore. Zemo could imagine all too well James's reaction to being ordered out on a hit operation.
Zemo had the ability to force them, James in particular. There were various ways he could think of. Threatening Sam would do it, and it was possible, as well, that some of the old code words still worked.
But if he ever did it, that would be the end of ... everything. Sharing in their friendly banter, taking turns cooking dinner in the townhouse, teaching them card games he had learned in the Sokovian military. They would probably never speak to him again. They would certainly step up their efforts to escape.
As they should. They were prisoners, after all.
It was all too comfortable sitting here in the rain, growing colder and more weary by the minute. He let the idea run through his mind—just for the sake of argument—that he might just stay here until he ... fell asleep. It was peaceful. He had seen worse deaths: today, even. He had no illusions that his end would be a kind or nonviolent one, and if he got to choose the way to go, sitting here and quietly bleeding to death in the rain was better by far than getting some other hired killer's knife in his throat.
But, as always, he found some small cold thread of purpose to hold onto. Gritting his teeth, he climbed to his feet, clinging to the stone railing. He waited out a sweeping rush of pain and lightheadedness, took a breath, and opened the door.
Inside, warmth washed over him, along with soft lamplight and cooking smells. In his current state, cold and shaky and barely staying on his feet, what might otherwise be appetizing smells made him instantly nauseous.
There were voices from the kitchen: Sam and James. Low quiet laughter that almost made Zemo smile despite himself. He knew they were together, although they were circumspect about it. Envied them that, a little. But he didn't envy the hold it gave him over both of them. Love had meant something to him once, but now it was a tool. It was one reason why Sam would make such good leverage against James, and vice versa—if he had the will to do it.
There were quick footsteps on the back stairs—one of them going upstairs?—and Zemo had a moment to hope they had both just left before Sam appeared out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He was in sock feet, and the light on the anklet glowed green: prisoner within bounds. "Hey, I thought I heard you out here. Man, it's pouring buckets."
"Tell me about it," Zemo said. He had paused with his hand on the umbrella stand for support. Umbrellas: perhaps he should have taken one. He was dripping on the floor, and he hoped it was only rainwater. His side was a hot flare; the rest of him was ice cold.
"I'm not gonna ask where you went because I know you're not gonna say." A little downturn of coolness in Sam's voice. Good, Zemo thought. Remember who you are and what you are, and what I am to you, and go back to cooking and leave me alone so I can at least get to the stairs without collapsing. "But," Sam added, in a lighter tone, "it would be nice to hear that your baronial highness at least did the shopping while you were out. We're almost out of eggs and milk."
"Only because someone has the appetite of six people," Zemo said. He lifted his hand off the umbrella stand. He could do this. He was only dripping water, he was fairly sure; the blood, on the whole, was staying where it belonged. He took a careful step across the polished hardwood floor.
"I'm gonna assume you're referring to Bucky, not me," Sam said.
"Yes, where is James at the moment?" Hopefully not about to join them. Leave me alone. The stairs were right there, a thousand miles away across approximately an acre of floor.
"He just went up to the gym."
The "gym" was what they had made out of the formal parlor on the second floor. Zemo had stifled his initial objections when he realized that it actually was very practical: they could burn off energy without going outside—which they were only allowed to do in company with their handler—and he could stay in shape as well. His rank might be a mere formality these days, but he had standards to adhere to.
One of which was not passing out on the floor and letting his parolees know that the way was free and clear for an escape.
Stairs, he thought. Just needed to make it to the stairs.
"You look like hell," Sam said. Rather than going back into the kitchen, as Zemo wished he would, he was coming closer. How close, exactly, was hard to tell, because the room was wavering around him, darkening. Like being underwater. "What happened out there?"
"I don't wish to discuss it." His voice seemed to come from far away. He still had some vague ambition of making it to the stairs, which went sideways, along with everything else, when his legs decided to stop holding him up, and he folded to the floor and kept going down, down into a dark pit.
***
He fully expected to wake, if he woke at all, lying stiff and chilled on the floor with rain blowing in through the open door, and the two parolees he was responsible for long gone. He'd had the respective keys to their tracking anklets on him, as always, along with the control fob that put the anklets in safe mode when they were with him. They both knew all of that. And he was in no shape to follow.
Instead, he woke gradually to the awareness that he was somewhere warm, and wrapped in blankets, and pressed against something that felt like a furnace. He stirred a little, moving closer to it.
"Oh, you're back with us," said a voice. James's voice.
Zemo opened his eyes.
He was in his bedroom, the big one at the top of the house that he had claimed. And he was in his bed. But he wasn't alone.
The furnace was James, laying against him. It was almost chaste, even with the duvet over the top of them: James was keeping his arms and hands to himself, and he was still mostly dressed, in his usual T-shirt and jeans. Zemo, at some point, had been changed out of his wet clothes (something he tried not to think about too closely; it touched on so many other things he tried not to think about) but he was dressed again as well, in a pair of silk pajama bottoms and a loose sweater over the bulky bandages he could feel wrapped around his torso.
He was still cold, even with the sweater and the duvet and James acting like a heater under the covers. Cold, and horribly weak, and embarrassed and confused.
"Why are you here," he managed. It came out in a faint rasp.
"Because you lost a whole lot of blood," Sam said from the doorway. "And we don't have anything to replace it with because frankly, your first aid supplies suck."
He came in and sat on the end of the bed. "And you were hypothermic and in pretty bad shape. So we've been taking turns keeping you company, warming you up, and making sure you don't go and die on us."
"Which I think you can agree would leave us in a hell of a situation," James said.
Ah. Practical self-interest. Of course. He tried to push himself away from James in the bed, and was horrified to find himself very nearly too weak to move at all.
James, however, sat up, making no attempt to hold or restrain him. Zemo should have been relieved, but he was mainly aware of the chill on that side where James's warmth had been.
He mustered his strength and forced himself up on one elbow. Sam made a choked noise.
"Try not to undo all my work and bleed to death right there on the bed, would you?" Sam moved a little closer and picked up a glass of water on the nightstand. "If this is what you want, someone can hand it to you. Jeez."
What he had wanted was to get away, but it wasn't an option; if he tried to get out of bed, he would probably go down like a loose heap of laundry. As he had, apparently, already done once, in front of Sam.
Instead he submitted to Sam helping him hold the glass so he could sip from it.
"You could have said something, you know, rather than just sneak upstairs and bleed to death in privacy," Sam pointed out. He still sounded mildly angry. "We've all patched each other up in the field before."
Yes—small wounds, a taped ankle here, a reset dislocation there. Nothing that had ever left him truly vulnerable.
They couldn't possibly be completely oblivious to the opportunity they had passed up; they weren't stupid. The fact that he wanted so badly to point it out could probably be attributed to the state he was in, his physical weakness loosening up his inhibitions—or making him reckless. Maybe he just wanted to break things.
"You could have escaped," he said when Sam took the glass away.
James made a faint snort. Sam said, "And leave you to bleed out on the floor?"
"It's what I would do," Zemo said. "If the positions were reversed."
There was another small noise from James's direction.
"Like you left us under heavy fire last week in the job on the Turkish border?" Sam said. "Drink." He put the glass back to Zemo's mouth, making it impossible to answer until he'd had a few more sips.
When Sam took the glass away, Zemo said, glaring at him, "It's different. I'm responsible for you. I can assure you, if our positions were the other way around, I would miss no opportunity to take my freedom."
"Even if that isn't obvious bullshit, we can still enjoy the warm fuzzy sense of knowing we're better people than you, then," Sam said smoothly. He replaced the glass on the bedside table. "Okay, so I know I said I wouldn't ask, but that was before you collapsed in a pool of blood on the floor, so now I'm asking. Where were you today?"
"Today," Zemo said blankly, realizing he had no idea how much time had passed.
James somehow parsed this. "You've only been out for a few hours."
"Ah."
"I notice you've sidestepped the question," Sam said.
"I'm not liable to report my movements to either of you. It's the other way around," he said, unable to quite understand how this situation had gone off the rails to this extent. "I had an assignment. I went and I did it. That's all there is to it."
"And got knifed in the ribs," Sam said.
"I survived stab wounds before I met either one of you."
"Yeah, that doesn't actually improve things as much as you seem to think."
"And what's the point of having us out on these if you go and do it all your goddamn self anyway?" James demanded. Zemo glanced at him; with his knees drawn up, James had made a fist with his metal hand and tapped it against the tracking anklet. "You just going to let us rot in a brand new prison instead?"
"Hey," Sam said. "It is better than the Raft."
Zemo was suddenly too exhausted to lie. They might as well know. "They wanted you to kill two men, James. As my tame killer on a leash."
"Oh." James looked blank, as if that had derailed his anger and he had no idea what to replace it with.
"What'd you tell them?" Sam asked softly.
"That I'd handle it. Which I did. There's no point in wasting a trained asset like the Winter Soldier on such a simple job."
"Oh, is that why," Sam said. He looked up, across Zemo, to meet James's eyes briefly.
"So what are you saving me for, exactly?" James said in a bland tone.
"Something worth your formidable skills. And now I think I'm going to sleep, if only to escape your incessant questions."
As he slid back down in the bed, he wished he had used a word other than "escape." Okay, so maybe leaving him to bleed out on the floor was a bit much, but they had to know they could leave now, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
Instead, he was startled by the feeling of James lying down against him again, and this time putting an arm very carefully across his chest.
"What are you doing," he managed to ask.
"Making sure you don't do anything stupid like try to get up."
Sam collected the glass from the bedside table. "You need anything? More painkillers?"
"No," he said faintly. None of this made sense. They were prisoners. They couldn't possibly have missed that aspect of the arrangement; they were confined to the townhouse unless he was with them. Maybe they had made some deal with someone else, he thought; it was the only thing that fit. Some kind of back-door secondary arrangement to betray him later.
"If it makes you feel better, we could escape for a while," James said drowsily.
"Actually, I could unlock the anklet, go to the store and get eggs," Sam added. "That's a good idea. If we have to wait for him to do it, we're all gonna starve."
They were definitely plotting against him. There was no other option that made sense. He should probably do something about it, but he was too weak to move, and if he got into a tussle with James, he knew he'd lose.
His eyes were closed, but he jerked a little as Sam's hand rested on his forehead, lightly testing for fever, and then rested there for a minute, until he relaxed.
"You are an idiot," Sam said, brushing his hair back from his forehead with a gentle thumb.
He could have objected, if he'd had the energy, but ... the hell of it was, he couldn't disagree. And the most idiotic thing was that all he wanted to do was stay here with James's arm over him.
It was temporary; they'd come to their senses soon enough, get over whatever irrational tenderness resulted from having him too kitten-weak to do anything about whatever they might be planning. But as lousy as he felt right now, he was cocooned in warmth, with both of them touching him, and it had almost been worth getting stabbed for this.