Shades of Pleasure and Pain

by Sholio

Summary:

There are a few things the Raft didn't mention about Zemo's control collar.

Notes:

This is based off a suggestion on the Winterbaron discord for alternate ways of using Zemo's Raft collar to control him - pain with distance, pleasure with proximity ... or both. And then it got a little out of control, as these things do.

"You're joking," Sam said.

He didn't actually think so, because he was pretty sure nobody in this room had a sense of humor—except Zemo, and Zemo had been uncharacteristically quite as well as characteristically poker-faced ever since the Raft guards had brought him into the room. Above his blue prison scrubs, the collar was a dark slash across his throat.

"I thought you'd been debriefed on the operation of the collar," Ross said.

"I got that it's synced to a device Bucky and I carry, and he gets a shock if he gets too far away from us." Which Sam hated on general principles, but he had to concede that if they'd had something like this in Riga, Zemo would at the very least have had to do more to escape than simply duck down a hidden bathroom sewer tunnel. And with Sam's own reputation and, quite possibly, his own freedom riding on Zemo's adherence to the terms of their parole agreement, he couldn't be too much of a moral stickler about anything that kept Zemo from being able to just walk away.

"It's not a shock precisely, it's really more that it stimulates the pain centers of the brain," Zemo murmured. It was very nearly the first thing he'd said since walking into the room, aside from a polite greeting as if he had encountered the two of them at a cocktail party rather than in an unpainted, utilitarian waiting room. "Most unpleasant."

Sam gave him a sharp sideways glance. Zemo looked, on the whole, better than Sam had been expecting after the guy had been in an underwater prison for the past several months. He was pale, but that wasn't too surprising when he hadn't seen the sun in the better part of a year. He didn't have any visible bruises and he wasn't walking in a way that indicated pain. He was clean-shaven, and possibly looked better than he had when Sam first saw him after the prison escape in Germany.

But there was that subdued silence. Zemo could be quiet, but he wasn't subdued.

"They been using that on you in here?"

Ross cleared his throat. "You can chat about this on the mainland," he said. "Did you have a question about the collar, Wilson?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "I know there's a DNA lock on it so only I can take it off." He'd argued to have Bucky added too, but no dice. "But what's this crap about me having to hold it once a day?"

"What you call crap, I call a reasonable safety mechanism, given the prisoner's murderous tendencies," Ross said evenly. "You need to maintain skin contact with the collar for ten minutes a day. It'll read your skin temperature, pulse, and other vitals. That way he can't just cut off a hand and take it with him."

"Just touch it and hold my hand there," Sam said. "Sounds like fun all around. And if I don't, he gets pain."

"Starting at level 1 and escalating," Ross agreed.

Sam could feel his teeth grinding. Bucky had been quiet through this, but in a dangerous way.

"There's gotta be another way," Sam said. "I don't like this."

"Moral scruples? How characteristic," Zemo said in a light tone that was anything but.

"You, shut it."

"This is the deal," Ross said. "Look, it was hard enough to get the Wakandans to go for it. And I still think you're making a mistake."

Sam did too. He just wasn't sure what part of this was the mistake.

 

***

 

They had a rental house on the mainland, supplied with a set of monogrammed luggage full of Zemo's things that his butler had dropped off. Zemo, unsurprisingly, claimed the biggest bedroom and then took the entire luggage set and vanished into the bathroom. Probably the first private time he'd had in months, Sam thought.

"So how weird is this gonna be, do you think?" Bucky asked. He was making himself a sandwich.

"You're the one who broke him out of prison the first time. Aren't you an expert by now?"

Zemo emerged from the bathroom almost an hour later. His hair was wet and combed neatly, and he was wearing one of his signature dark purple turtlenecks, completely covering the collar. He smelled like a florist crossed with a bakery, and looked very put together and not at all like he just got out of a top secret prison. Then again, after he'd had time to change in Germany, he hadn't looked especially bothered about the whole thing there either.

"Shall we go over the details of the mission, gentlemen?" he asked politely.

"Look at you, taking charge already," Bucky said.

"I believe my usefulness is the key to my staying out of prison, isn't it?"

Sam did not for a minute trust this new helpfulness, but they spread out files on the coffee table, and the sun lowered outside the living room windows while they went over the new outbreak of HYDRA activity across the northern US and southern Canada. Zemo, it turned out, knew the location of HYDRA facilities that even Bucky didn't, and he marked them diligently on a map.

Sam ordered takeout and let Zemo pick, as a concession to the fact that the guy hadn't had anything but prison food in a while, and wasn't getting to sip champagne on a private jet this time.

It was full dark outside by the time they had made plans and exhausted the amount of research they could do before scouting the locations of the suspected HYDRA facilities in person.

"Road trip tomorrow," Bucky said. "I call shotgun."

Zemo smiled briefly. He had been relaxing a little more into his flirty-charming baron persona, but Sam still had a sense that he was holding back even more than he had been when they'd traveled together before—and it wasn't like Zemo had been a model of openness then. "If we're done for the night, then, I think I'll retire and read a book until bed. I'm sure tomorrow will be a pleasure."

As he got up, Sam did too. "Hey. Wait a minute. Aren't you forgetting something?"

"If you'd like to use my shampoo, you're more than welcome. Though I'm not sure if either of your hair types—"

"The collar," Sam said. "I need to touch it."

Zemo's lips tightened, compressing to a line. "I have twenty-four hours, Sam."

"Yes, but let's not push it right up to the red line this first night, all right? Look, we're both going to have to get used to this. Let's not make it weirder than it has to be. Ten minutes, right? Let's just sit on the couch, watch a little TV, and make this part of our nighttime routine."

He thought for a minute that Zemo was going to bolt for the bedroom anyway, but then, very slowly, Zemo sat back down. He was tense. In fact, he looked more like a guy expecting torture than someone who was about to have to endure ten minutes with Sam's hand on his neck.

That gave Sam a sharp stab of worry. "Is it going to hurt you when I touch your collar?"

"Hurt?" Zemo said, seeming to come back from some mental place apart from the situation. "Oh, no. It won't hurt."

"Well, let's get this over with."

"Popcorn?" Bucky said cheerfully. A little too cheerfully; Sam glared at him. Bucky went off to the kitchen with a kind of bounce in his step.

"He's enjoying this," Zemo said. His voice was flat.

"I mean, it is a pretty funny situation if you think about it." Sam turned the TV on. There was a game show playing, and he turned the volume low. "Want to uncover it?"

Zemo hesitated, then slowly undid his turtleneck-style collar. It opened with a flap that made Sam think of an old-fashioned military uniform, and the Raft collar was exposed.

It wasn't as ugly as it could have been, for whatever grim comfort that was. It was a slim band less than an inch wide, ringing Zemo's neck firmly but not too tightly. There was no visible means for locking and unlocking it, and Sam abruptly wondered how they got it on and off, or if it had been welded in place.

It wasn't ugly, but it was horrifying for what it represented. It wasn't something that should be on a human being, no matter what he had done.

Sam found that he'd stopped with his hand half raised. He didn't want to touch it. He wasn't sure how Zemo could stand having that against his skin.

"Well?" Zemo said. There was a trace of impatience in his tense voice, a flash of familiar irritation. "How long are you planning on dragging this out?"

They were going to have to do this every night, Sam thought. It would help if they didn't start out by making a big deal about it. "Yeah, keep your shirt on and pick a TV station," he said, and laid his hand on Zemo's neck.

There was no way to touch the band without touching Zemo's skin too; it just wasn't wide enough. As soon as his fingers brushed against Zemo's neck, Sam felt Zemo give a sharp, all-over shudder, as if someone had poked him with a needle.

Bucky, on the way back from the kitchen with a bag of microwave popcorn, stopped in his tracks as if his danger sense had gone off, and Sam jerked his hand back.

Zemo blinked briefly. "What?" he said. His voice was cold. "Lost your nerve?"

Sam felt a little foolish, especially with both of them staring at him. "That didn't hurt, did it?"

"I said that, didn't I?" Zemo tipped his chin up with a distinct air of Get on with it.

But there was a look in his eyes, an incongruous look, assuming he was telling the truth. He was masking well, but he was afraid.

Fear. Why? Just the vulnerability of the situation, or was it worse than that?

Sam laid his hand carefully back against Zemo's neck, working hard to touch him as little as possible. Even so, he could feel the warmth and softness of Zemo's skin under his fingers and palm, the light flutter of Zemo's pulse and the little tremors that raced through him.

Zemo turned his head, averting his eyes from Sam's worried gaze. He moved stiffly, like an automaton. When he raised his hand to use the remote, Sam realized that it was shaking a little.

"This isn't hurting?" Sam asked.

"It is not." Zemo's voice was tight, the words bitten out. "You keep asking. The answer is not going to change. And you're right about getting it over with. If you stop now, we'll just have to start again."

Sam shifted position a little, keeping his body as far away from Zemo's as he comfortably could sit with his hand resting there. Even so, his fingers slipped a little, until the side of his hand rested against Zemo's clavicle.

It was by far one of the weirdest things he'd ever done, sitting here with his hand on a paroled terrorist's neck, while Zemo sat as rigidly as if someone was pulling out his fingernails and paged steadily between channels on the TV. The look on his face suggested that he wasn't seeing it.

"I forgot to start timing it," Sam said. "Shit."

"Monitor," Zemo said. He swallowed; his throat worked against Sam's fingers. "Your monitor will show it."

Oh. Right. The device they'd given him for keeping track of the collar. He knew that; it was just that he was rattled, a lot more than he'd expected, by Zemo's rigidity and obvious discomfort with the situation, as well as the soft distraction of Zemo's skin against his fingers. Shifting himself on the couch, Sam extracted it from his pocket.

The monitor had a small screen and some buttons. The collar's pain settings could be triggered manually, although as far as Sam could see, there was no option for turning it off entirely. Right now the screen was showing an orange bar. As Sam sat holding his hand on the collar, and Bucky sat with his untouched popcorn in his lap, the orange faded into yellow and then green, and finally the screen flashed 100% and went dark.

"I think we're done," Sam said. He pulled his hand back and nothing reactivated.

Zemo sprang off the couch as if pure willpower had been the only thing keeping him there. He all but levitated halfway across the room. It was clear that he wanted to put as much distance between himself and Sam as possible, and Sam tried to suppress a surge of very irrational guilt. It was clear that Zemo hated every part of that process. He probably had earned a little discomfort, but Sam hated being the person inflicting it on him.

Rather than heading for the bedroom, Zemo grabbed his coat. "I'm going for a walk."

"You remember you can't get more than a couple hundred yards from us, right?"

"As if I could forget," Zemo snarled. He wrenched the door open with his coat still half on and slammed it.

"Want one of us to—" There was no way Zemo was still listening. "... go with you," Sam finished. "Apparently not."

Bucky, who had remained quiet throughout the collar-holding process, laid the popcorn bag aside now and looked at Sam. "It a good idea to have him running around out there?"

"No," Sam retorted.

"Think he's doing a runner?"

"I don't know."

Bucky got up to throw away the popcorn bag. Sam leaned back on the couch, drew a breath and flexed his hand, where it seemed he could still feel the warm imprint of Zemo's skin.

The monitor gave a sudden, short vibration like a phone alerting to an incoming text. Sam picked it up.

Bucky, fussing around in the kitchen, looked over. "He hit the edge of his range?"

"Yeah," Sam said, watching the screen, which showed Zemo at pain level 1.

The collar had eight levels, ranging (according to the documentation Sam had been given) from "mild discomfort" to "incapacitating," but none of them were supposed to cause permanent damage. Sam had a healthy level of skepticism about that, but Zemo wasn't just going to push on through the pain to the point of giving himself brain damage, no matter how fucked up about it he was. At least, Sam assumed not.

Bucky came to join him, watching over Sam's shoulder as Zemo went from level 1 to level 2, and from 2 to 3.

"Want me to go after him?"

"No," Sam said.

He didn't know if he could justify it, even to Bucky, but he felt that if they were going to make this thing with Zemo work—if they were going to be able to work together as a team, rather than handle him as his prison guards while Zemo tried to escape every chance he got—they had to give him the benefit of the doubt. Trust might be too much to ask, Sam thought. But at the very least, if they couldn't get through the first twenty-four hours without apprehending him in the middle of an escape attempt, this wasn't going to work.

Maybe Bucky was thinking along similar lines, because he didn't push it. They both watched the monitor flip from level 3 to level 4. It didn't show them where Zemo was or whether he was moving other than getting farther away; it just showed what level he was on.

It stopped at level 4 and hung there.

"That's gotta hurt," Bucky said under his breath.

"Yeah." Sam blew out a breath and laid the monitor on the couch by his leg. It wasn't showing any other signs of malfunction or damage; all readouts were green. The collar was still on Zemo ... presumably.

Sam turned up the volume on the TV. Bucky shook his head and went back to the kitchen. He returned with two cups of coffee.

Zemo's monitor continued to sit at level 4. They found a Hong Kong martial arts flick on TV, which at least was fast-paced enough to hold some of Sam's attention. Also, it turned out that Bucky spoke Cantonese. Who knew. Not even Bucky, apparently.

Zemo's monitor stayed on level 4 for 45 minutes.

"What the hell is he doing out there, masochist yoga in the park?" Sam muttered, just as it flipped up to level 5. "Shit."

"I could be there in just a couple of minutes," Bucky said.

"I know."

But it only stayed at level 5 for a few seconds. The monitor flicked down to level 4, then 3. A few minutes later, the door opened and Zemo came in. He was drenched in sweat and looked like he'd been working out. Or maybe just sitting on a bus stop bench suffering and sweating; it was hard to know.

"You wanna watch a movie?" Sam called.

"No," Zemo said tightly. He went into the bedroom that he had chosen for his own and shut the door.

 

***

 

The first night was probably the worst. By the second evening, which they spent in a crappy roadside motel in Ohio, Zemo appeared to have become resigned to whatever misery the process caused him. Zemo sat stiffly while Sam held a hand on the collar and studied the monitor in his lap, watching the colors change while trying to act like this was perfectly normal. Bucky was out picking up food from the cluster of fast-food chain restaurants around the freeway exit.

Zemo had undone his collar carefully, keeping one side of his face angled away from Sam, but Sam was pretty sure he'd seen what Zemo didn't want him to see: scratch marks around the collar, angry and red.

There was a part of Sam that wanted to offer to dab some disinfectant on those—and a much larger part of him that understood acknowledging them would be the worst thing he could do. So he laid his hand on the undamaged side of Zemo's neck and waited out the slow countdown on the monitor, while Zemo sat rigidly on the bed and his pulse fluttered lightly and rapidly against Sam's fingertips.

"You know, we could try to see if they could turn the contact time down," Sam said.

"What?" Zemo asked, snapping to attention.

It wasn't like him to fail to pay attention, which meant he was just sitting there dissociating from whatever trauma flashback all of this was throwing him into. "I said we can talk to the Raft, see if they can change the settings so all I have to do is just plant a fingertip on it for a couple of seconds or something."

"If you'll pardon the metaphor, I don't particularly want to rock the boat," Zemo said, the words clipped out, very careful and precise. "Asking to change the terms of the deal this early might lead to the deal being revoked, and I do not want to go back to prison."

"Yeah, but you don't have to—" Sit here with me torturing you, he was going to say, but just then the door opened and Bucky came in with a greasy takeout bag. The monitor also hit 100% at roughly the same moment, so Sam jerked his hand away. At least Zemo didn't spring up and launch himself to the opposite side of the motel room at the first opportunity: progress?

"So I hope you don't hate fish sandwiches, because it was that, burgers, or IHOP," Bucky said. "I figured we could save the pancakes for morning."

"Fish sandwiches are perfectly acceptable," Zemo said, fumbling quickly to do up the collar of his shirt.

"Perfectly acceptable. A ringing endorsement."

"I don't know what you want me to say." Zemo glanced around the motel room, looking at the narrow bed opposite the one he was sitting on, the cigarette-burned blankets and threadbare carpet. "You know, I could very easily have afforded a five-star hotel with room service."

"You can buy us a five-star hotel tomorrow night," Sam said. "I'll take one of those fish sandwiches."

Zemo didn't exactly rush out the door, but he took his takeout carton, bid them a polite good night, and went to his room next door, where they had dumped his ridiculous amount of luggage.

They'd had a debate about whether to let him have his own room, but ended up agreeing that if Zemo was going to run, he could do it anytime—at a rest stop, out of his own bedroom in a three-bedroom house, or at any other time. Having one of them there with him 24/7 was unnecessary and probably bad for team cohesion on top of that.

Still, Sam felt a twitch, watching him leave. He checked the monitor, but Zemo was staying within bounds.

"He seemed to take it better that time," Bucky said quietly.

"It'd be hard for him to take it worse." Sam opened containers until he found tartar sauce. "I wish I knew what it's doing to him when I do that."

"Maybe it's not doing anything," Bucky said. He flicked a quick glance at the wall between their rooms and kept his voice low; it was the kind of place where the walls might as well be cardboard for all the soundproofing they provided.

"Yeah, maybe it's just the touching. I thought of that, but it really doesn't help, Buck. Actually, I'd almost rather know I was causing him physical pain than suspect I'm throwing him into some kind of prison flashback every time I touch him."

"Okay, that's very you, but it's also not what I meant," Bucky said. "It could just be that he hasn't been touched in a really long time. Not like that."

"Like how?" Sam asked warily.

Bucky wasn't meeting his eyes. "Gently."

Ah. And there was a whole world of unresolved trauma in that comment, wasn't there? Sam was briefly unsure what to do, and decided to go with snark. Treating each other with kid gloves wasn't what they did.

"I'll touch you gently anytime you like."

Bucky flipped him off.

"No, seriously, come over here. Get some lovin.'"

"I know fifty ways to kill a man, Sam."

It was later, and Sam was just drifting off in his narrow motel bed, when abruptly the monitor vibrated on the bedside table.

Sam groaned and sat up. Bucky was already out of bed, or possibly had never been in it. He leaned over and picked it up.

"Level 1," he said, showing it to Sam. As he did, it flicked to level 2.

"Shit," Sam said, rubbing his eyes.

"I can stop him."

"No, let him do whatever he's doing. It'll tell us if he goes off grid."

Bucky sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, and they both watched the numbers blink up to 4, and stay there.

"So I guess we can assume that's about as much pain as he can handle voluntarily, at least for any length of time," Sam said quietly. This was knowledge he didn't want; it felt like it was searing him. "What's he doing, anyway? Punishing himself?"

Or was the experience of Sam touching him so unpleasant that he was trying to physically burn it off his body? Sam's stomach roiled unpleasantly. The worst part was that it wasn't bad for him. It was the opposite of bad. He didn't get much regular touching in his life, either, and he might have learned to enjoy it, if it hadn't clearly been awful for Zemo.

"Looks like he's pushing through it," Bucky said quietly. The numbers blinked up to 5. Then it flickered between 4 and 5 for a minute, dropped to 4, and stayed there.

"Fuck me," Sam muttered. He didn't even like Zemo all that much; that was the worst part. But he was responsible for him, and that was the part he couldn't ignore. "I don't like just leaving him out there."

"There's an all-night coffee stand in the lobby, I noticed."

So they were both dressed and downstairs, sipping shitty motel coffee, when Zemo came back. He was moving slowly, dragging and looking tired, and looked like he was headed for his room, but they were both plainly visible through the glass door of the lobby. Sam saw Zemo hesitate with evident thoughts of just pretending he hadn't seen them when he knew they'd seen him, and before he could figure it out one way or another, Sam went and opened the door.

"There's coffee," he said. "It's terrible. And some little cookie things."

"Also terrible," Bucky called.

"Morning will come soon enough without giving myself additional reasons to stay up," Zemo said, but against all odds, he looked like he was trying not to smile. "Good night, both of you." He vanished in the direction of his room.

"Right," Bucky said and scooped up a handful of the dry shortbread cookies by the coffeepot. "I hope that got the mother henning out of your system, because I don't want to have to do all the driving tomorrow when you're half asleep."

"I'm not mother henning. Jesus. It's called being a responsible team leader, Bucky."

"Oh, you're the boss of me now?"

The familiar banter helped take his mind off things. But later, he lay awake under the thin, strongly disinfectant-scented motel blankets, listening to traffic on the freeway and thinking about Zemo. About the scratches on his neck, where it looked like he had tried to claw the collar off. About the way Zemo was clearly pushing the collar's pain levels as high as he could stand, and what that meant for him psychologically, as well as for all of them long-term.

Damn it, Sam thought. He rolled over and wadded the thin pillow under his head. Zemo had done terrible things. He deserved a chance to work toward restitution. He didn't deserve to live a free life outside of prison with no consequences.

But he also didn't deserve this. And there wasn't a damn thing Sam could do about it.

 

***

 

It got easier.

Or maybe they got used to it. Over the next few nights, as they pursued HYDRA rumors along the Canadian border, they settled into a nightly routine. Zemo would sit and unfasten his collar, and Sam laid his hand on Zemo's neck. Zemo was still tense, but Sam no longer got the impression that Zemo had to use all his willpower not to flee the room.

There were still daily attempts to push against the collar's boundaries. Sam let him. Whatever Zemo was getting out of that seemed to be settling him down, whether it was practicing for an actual attempt to run, or just some kind of masochistic wallowing in the physical pain.

It had been a week and they hadn't tried to kill each other yet. They were even working together fairly smoothly in the field. That was progress, right?

 

***

 

Another of the conditions of Zemo's release was a weekly report to the Raft. Sam typed it up at a ski lodge near the Canadian border where they were staying that night. He didn't even have to think about it before leaving out anything personal—Zemo's nightly testing of his pain collar's boundaries, his weird reaction to Sam's hand on his collar, Sam's reaction to it. None of that was anything that anyone else needed to know about. He kept it short and dry, with an emphasis on Zemo's helpfulness and cooperation. And then he took his laptop and wandered down to the main room of the lodge, where he had last seen Zemo sipping brandy and reading in front of the fireplace.

He was still there. Sam plunked the laptop down on a rustic end table beside the couch where Zemo had ensconced himself, next to the little bowl of nuts that Zemo was nibbling on.

Zemo looked at the laptop and then at Sam, and raised an eyebrow.

"You practice doing that in front of the mirror, don't you?"

The eyebrows smoothed out. "May I help you, Sam?" Zemo inquired pointedly.

"Yeah, I just got done writing this week's report on you, and I want you to read it and let me know if there's anything you'd like me to add or change or take out before I send it to the Raft."

He had the pleasure of seeing a genuine, unfiltered emotion on Zemo's face: pure shock, visible only for an instant before Zemo managed to slap a sloppy layer of smug unconcern on top of it. "You want me to read it—why?"

"Because you deserve to see it," Sam said bluntly. "I don't think they're wrong to ask for regular reports, given everything you've done, but I'm not going to snitch on you to them. I won't lie to them, either, but short of you actually selling us out to HYDRA or something, you get veto power over what I include in these."

He spun the laptop so it was facing Zemo.

Zemo's face was back to displaying imperfectly hidden shock. He looked at the laptop, and his eyes moved quickly, scanning the report.

"You make me out to be such a helpful guy, Sam." His voice was light, amused, casual—but there was a softness in his eyes that Sam didn't know what to do with.

"Well, you have been. Not even any collateral damage yet. Big improvement over Madripoor."

Zemo smiled.

Sam retrieved his laptop. "Anything you want me to change before I send it?"

"And if I asked," Zemo said slowly, "you would." It wasn't entirely a question; it sounded more like he was feeling out a concept that was new to him.

"Depends on what you ask for. I mean, if you want ten paragraphs describing how Bucky and me are terrible to you, absolutely terrible, make you wear rags and sleep in the cellar and scrub the floors all day and all night—"

"You did make me sleep in a roadside motel. I still have nightmares about the scratchy sheets."

This from a guy who'd been in prison for most of the last decade. But Sam was learning to speak Zemo, and he understood that these kinds of jokes were Zemo's way of clawing back a little control.

"Wait'll we make you sleep in a tent," he said lightly, and took the laptop back to his room.

He sent the message to the Raft. Then he checked the monitor and found that it was orange shading red. He had forgotten that he hadn't done the night's Zemo-touching yet, and he seriously doubted Zemo would want to do it somewhere as public as the hotel lobby.

Well, they still had a little bit of a grace period. He'd have to waylay Zemo when the guy came upstairs.

There was a soft tap on his door, which wasn't entirely closed, and it swung open.

"Zemo," Sam said, surprised. I was just thinking about you hit entirely the wrong notes.

Zemo smiled lopsidedly, and without asking permission—but when did he ever?—he came into Sam's room. He was still carrying the brandy and book. "I think you may have forgotten something in your haste to rush off and report back to the Raft on my recent cooperation."

"Yeah," Sam said. "You're overdue for a little neck-fondling."

He immediately wondered if it was still too raw to joke about, but Zemo, still smiling, closed the door behind him with his elbow. "I'd prefer not to expose myself to every passing maid and tourist," he explained.

"Get a grip, man. This is the modern-day US, not Victorian England. No one is going to be shocked by a little exposed neck."

But there was something charged, more so than Sam was expecting, about having Zemo in here with him, especially when Zemo sat on the bed, very precise and neat in his movements—and comfortable, like he thought he belonged there. He laid the book down and held the brandy glass in his off hand while he unbuttoned his collar one-handed.

Sam would have preferred to do this somewhere a little less private, all of a sudden. But he came over and sat on the bed beside Zemo.

"Damn it," he said. "I meant to ask them about changing the settings on the collar to allow for less touching. Sorry about that. I'll put it in the next report."

"I didn't realize you were serious about that," Zemo said. His voice was almost dreamy, as if he was distracted. He tugged down his shirt's neckline for maximum access, exposing part of his collarbone as well: pale, stippled with freckles. "No need. I'm growing quite used to it."

Sam's finely honed Zemo-sense was instantly alert for some sort of game, but it was honestly hard to tell the difference between times when Zemo was seriously flirting and when he was just being him; the man flirted as naturally as he breathed.

And there was no reason, at least no reason Sam could think of, why Zemo might think flirting would work on him anyway. Sam was pretty sure he'd kept his own reaction to laying his hand on Zemo's neck to himself.

Then again, it could just be reflexive manipulation, the other thing Zemo seemed to do as naturally as breathing.

But usually with a core of truth in it. One thing Sam had noticed when he and Bucky were traveling with Zemo before, and nothing had happened to change his opinion, was that Zemo didn't seem to lie to them directly. Sam had no idea if it was part of his strange code of honor, or a game he played with himself, or what. But, while Zemo might tap-dance around the truth, might play fast and loose with it, he seemed to play both of them straight, most of the time.

Honesty, lies, manipulation. Sam wondered if even Zemo knew where the lines were, most of the time.

Zemo tilted his head, exposing the soft, vulnerable hollow of his neck. "If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer if we don't sit here until that turns red."

"Right," Sam murmured. He laid his hand across the collar and Zemo's skin. This time, he made no particular effort to keep his hand from full contact with Zemo's neck. It wasn't like he'd been doing a great job of that anyway.

There was the usual little shudder that he'd come to expect, but this time, Zemo wasn't rigid. This time, Zemo leaned.

The difference was startling. Before, Sam had assumed that Zemo was keeping himself from fleeing through sheer willpower. Now he felt Zemo start to relax, and instead of leaping off the bed, Zemo leaned into Sam's touch, as if he had refocused the balance of his entire body into Sam's palm.

Before he knew exactly what he was doing, Sam brushed a thumb lightly across the soft skin above Zemo's collarbone—and felt Zemo give another full-body shudder.

That wasn't a shiver of trauma or displeasure, and Sam felt it down to his core.

This time, he was the one who had to stop himself from jerking his hand away, as if the soft touch of Zemo's skin had burned him.

Well, he did keep saying it didn't hurt ...

Sam didn't pull away. There was some chain of thought beating at the back of his mind, telling him this was a terrible idea—whatever he thought he was doing here, whatever they were doing here.

But he kept his thumb brushing slowly across Zemo's neck, and he curled his fingers a little, palming the collar so that his fingers curled lightly around Zemo's nape.

Zemo's eyes were half closed. Always before, he had spent these sessions staring off into the middle distance, looking distracted. Sam had guessed that Zemo was trying not to feel anything in those moments. The part he'd guessed wrong about was what, exactly, Zemo was trying not to feel.

It was a shock to look down and see that the monitor had turned green. He hadn't even been aware of the passage of time, had no idea it had been ten minutes already.

Zemo looked so comfortable, so peaceful, that Sam had to force himself to pull his hand away. Zemo jerked, coming back to himself with a start, and straightened up so abruptly that he nearly spilled his brandy. Not meeting Sam's eyes, he started to reach with his other hand to fasten his collar.

"Wait." Sam caught Zemo's hand, a purely instinctive move that didn't register until he felt the warmth of Zemo's skin. "Not yet. I want to look at those scratches." He felt Zemo tense up, and kept going, hoping that he wasn't blowing apart everything that somehow hadn't been blown apart by Zemo all but falling asleep on him like a petted cat. "Look, I don't care what you do on your own time, and nothing about this is going in any report. I just want to make sure they aren't getting infected."

"They're not," Zemo said quietly, but he didn't resist as Sam touched his chin with two fingers, allowing his head to be tilted back effortlessly to expose the side of his neck that he tried to keep hidden.

The scratches, seen full on, told the story that Sam had already guessed. They were healing now, so it had just been that first day, maybe the first day or two. He could see the spacing of Zemo's fingers, the places where Zemo had dug at the collar in a frantic attempt to tear it off.

"I've got some antiseptic in my luggage. You mind if I put it on?"

"It's nothing but closing the gate after the cow gets out," Zemo said. But he stayed there, sipping his brandy, while Sam found the first-aid kit, and presented his neck again for doctoring.

Honestly, without the trauma of the collar lying between them, this was how Sam would have expected Zemo to react to some minor injury: by presenting himself to be fussed over, as if it was only his due. The fact that he had tried to hide it was vividly telling.

Zemo was right, though, that the scratches were healed enough that there was little to be done. Sam cleaned them anyway with antiseptic-dipped cotton balls, and rubbed painkilling ointment over them with light sweeps of his fingertips.

Zemo's eyes were closed again by the end of it all, and he came back only slowly afterward, touching his neck lightly before he started buttoning up his collar.

"You're probably going to get a little grease on the fabric," Sam said. "Didn't think of that."

"It's all right, I don't mind."

"Yeah, because you have another half dozen identical purple shirts to go with that one."

"Don't be absurd, Sam," Zemo said with a trace of a smile. "I travel light. There are only three."

With the shirt tucked once more over the Raft collar, he got up in a swift, graceful movement. "I'll see you and James in the restaurant downstairs," he said, and left the room with an easiness to his stride that Sam would swear hadn't been there before.

He left the door open.

Sam sat back on the bed and let out a full-body release of breath. Then he said to himself, quietly, "What the fuck."

 

***

 

Whatever that had been, whatever was going on here, it didn't seem to change things ... much. He couldn't identify any difference in the way Bucky interacted with either of them, so there wasn't anything that showed on the outside, at least nothing Sam was aware of.

But the nightly collar sessions had become—charged.

They always did it in private now. They'd been getting into the habit anyway, with Bucky either stepping out of the room to give them a few minutes alone, or the two of them simply waiting for a time when Bucky wasn't around. It was obvious that Bucky had correctly osmosed that Zemo preferred not to have other people around. But, like Sam misreading the source of Zemo's tension, Bucky was right about the desire for privacy but wrong about the reason.

All it would have taken Bucky was one look at them now to see that things had changed.

It seemed, after that first night when Zemo gave in, that he no longer bothered to pretend he wasn't enjoying it. As soon as Sam touched his neck, he could feel relaxation flow through Zemo's entire body. Zemo's eyes fluttered half shut and his weight began to lean into Sam's hand.

It was unbelievably, unbearably hot.

Which was definitely not a thought that Sam wanted to be having about someone that he had this much power over, with a freaking control collar with a pain button.

But he couldn't deny that he was having those thoughts, and those feelings. And he found himself leaning into it too, rubbing Zemo's neck and even sliding his fingertips under the edges of the collar to massage the skin where the collar rested. The instructions just said that he had to be in contact with it, not what part of it he needed to be touching.

And ... he really liked watching Zemo melt, going from his usual prickly defensiveness to pliant and soft. When Sam took his hand away at the end of the session, there was a painful twinge to watching Zemo put himself back together, pulling back behind his walls—even though something of his soft pliancy remained, a looseness to him that lingered for hours afterwards.

Sam was pretty sure that if he kept his hand there for a while after the monitor turned green, Zemo wasn't going to stop him. They were already ignoring the time limit anyway; it was easy for ten minutes to become twenty.

And he was pretty sure if he pushed Zemo down on the bed, Zemo would have let him.

Which was why he wasn't going to.

But what bothered him even more than his growing attraction to a terrorist, parolee, and—this could not be overstated—his prisoner, was the fact that Zemo continued to push the pain setting of the collar. Typically, on any given evening when they weren't out in the field, Zemo spent part of the evening alone in his room reading, and the other part of it outside, pushing the edges of the pain boundary as hard as he could.

He was regularly getting it up into the 5's now, sometimes even the 6's. Sam wasn't trying to pay attention, he really wasn't, but he couldn't help noticing how often Zemo came back pale and shivering, drenched in sweat.

"If you have any idea why he's doing this, I'd appreciate the insight," he said to Bucky while Zemo was out on one of these excursions. The monitor had been flickering between 5 and 6, suggesting that Zemo was once again pushing a boundary that he couldn't seem to get beyond.

"I don't think it's that hard to understand," Bucky said. "And I'll tell you what I think if you tell me what's going on with you two."

"Nothing's going on with us!" Sam snapped.

He realized only as the words left his mouth—and Bucky looked smug—that vehement denials weren't really the best way to alleviate suspicion.

"Yeah," Bucky said. He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. "Definitely nothing going on."

"There isn't," Sam said more softly. "He's a prisoner."

"You think he cares about that?"

"I care about it," Sam said, this time pushing some intensity into his voice. "I care about it a lot."

Bucky ran his metal hand through his hair, making it stick up in hedgehog spikes. "Yeah, you do. I get that. So what is happening, exactly?"

"I have no fucking idea," Sam said.

But even as he said it, he experienced the visceral sense-memory of Zemo's skin under his fingers. The way Zemo leaned into his caress, whole body going boneless. The intensity of the combination of pleasure and affection that went along with getting Zemo to do that for him.

"Uh-huh," Bucky said. He sounded skeptical.

"Look, you said you knew what was going on with Zemo and the collar. So share. What's he doing out there?"

"Understanding it," Bucky said immediately. "Controlling it. Getting a little of his own back."

"By hurting himself."

Bucky shrugged a little. "I said I got it. I didn't say you'd like it."

He got up and went into the kitchen. Sam rubbed a hand across his face.

 

***

 

So Bucky wasn't as unaware of the entire situation as Sam had assumed, and things were definitely getting increasingly weird.

What was making it weirder was that designated Zemo-petting time had started to spill out into normal safehouse time, and Zemo was the one who kept initiating it.

Like a stray cat that, once it had decided to let someone pet it, started nudging its head up under its designated person's hand, Zemo had started cozying up to Sam.

He was looser and more relaxed, which in the normal run of things would be good, probably, but it led to him doing things like dropping onto the couch next to Sam when he was wearing nothing but a bathrobe (very evidently nothing but a bathrobe) and leaning on him.

Zemo seemed a lot less bothered, now, about having them see the collar when it was just the three of them. Unlike those early days, when he carefully covered it up even when they were alone, now he didn't seem to mind if it showed above the neck of a bathrobe or a half-buttoned shirt.

And there were light little brushes across Sam's arm or shoulder, a hand dropping briefly to the small of his back to guide him somewhere and then slipping off.

It was small comfort, in fact the opposite of comfort, that Zemo was loosening up around Bucky too. Flirty Zemo was a hell of a drug, all loose and soft and friendly. It was easy to forget sometimes that he was a manipulator and a murderer, and also a convicted prisoner whose release paperwork Sam had tucked into a pocket of his suitcase.

And there was a pattern Sam was starting to notice now, which was that Zemo didn't do his boundary-pushing thing with the collar at the end of the evening as much anymore. He did it early, and then spent the evening in what Sam could only think of as a sort of heady endorphin haze.

Bucky was right, Sam thought—but not all right. Bucky didn't get off on pain. Zemo clearly did. It wasn't just about control, although that was probably part of it. But also, Sam thought that Zemo trusted them enough now to actually drop his guard a little, and let them see the part of him that was loose and shaky and undeniably cuddly after wringing himself out with collar-induced pain.

It must be a very particular hell to be a masochist in prison.

Sam kept sending his tidy little Raft reports with brief, bloodless descriptions of their HYDRA-hunting activities, their small setbacks and successes, and Zemo's useful contributions to it. He had continued to make a habit of letting Zemo read the reports before sending them. Actually, it had turned into a group activity, with Sam typing while Bucky heckled and Zemo threw in occasional contributions. ("Please point out that I was extremely useful in our infiltration of the HYDRA bunker in Minnesota. I twisted my knee badly providing your backup.")

Sam dutifully sent his reports, and petted Zemo's neck in the evenings, while Zemo melted into a disturbingly cuddly pile of endorphin-drugged terrorist and Bucky looked faintly jealous until Sam had enough of it.

"Look, his collar is coded to me, but there's no reason why you can't do it too," he said during one Zemo-petting session while they were technically watching TV.

Bucky immediately looked like he was prepared to flee the room. "I'm good where I am, thanks."

"Your choice," Sam said, running his fingers down the side of Zemo's neck. Zemo was sitting, or more accurately drooping, next to him on the couch.

The next thing he knew, Bucky had moved in on Zemo's other side, and very carefully put his right hand on the back of Zemo's neck, just below the collar, skin to skin.

Zemo, who had been in a kind of blissed-out stupor, jerked and seemed to wake up a little.

Bucky made a move as if to draw back.

"Okay?" Sam said, and Zemo, on a few seconds' delay, murmured, "Fine."

So Bucky stayed, running his hand down Zemo's nape under the neck of the bathrobe while Zemo slowly melted into a human puddle between them. And whenever Bucky's fingers brushed across Sam's, there was a light thrill that Sam didn't quite know what to do with.

 

***

 

"It's interesting," Zemo said the next morning while he and Sam geared up, checking weapons and tucking them into various holsters. Bucky, who could gear up faster than any human being Sam had ever met, was outside in a frosty-crisp morning, loading the car.

"What is?" Sam asked idly, checking Redwing's optics.

"James. He isn't geared to the collar, so he doesn't engage its pleasure function, but the touch is pleasurable nevertheless."

Sam stopped in the middle of running through Redwing's preflight checklist.

"What," he said.

Zemo looked up from tucking a knife into a boot sheath. "I like James's touch," he said. "Does that excite you, or make you jealous?"

"Neither," Sam said, distracted. "The collar does what?"

"It gives pleasure and pain," Zemo said. "You know that."

"I knew about the pain part," Sam said. His brain was spinning in circles, recalibrating and putting a whole lot of things into a sudden, horrible context.

"Oh," Zemo said. It was a little, soft noise.

Sam abruptly and sharply looked at him.

"Every time I touch it?" he asked.

Zemo looked like he was deliberating on how to answer. In fact, Sam thought in a clear and distant part of his mind, Zemo looked guarded in a way he really hadn't since their first couple of weeks working together.

"Yes," Zemo said finally. "It triggers on the touch of my handler."

Sam swallowed a couple of times. There were horrible dimensions to this situation that he felt as if he had finally been handed the key to. And he didn't want it.

God, but he didn't want it.

"The guards," he said. "They used it on you."

There was a silence before Zemo answered. "It's easier to get compliance that way than with pain, sometimes. Especially for someone who's wired as I am," he added, as if it was an afterthought instead of something he'd thought about frequently.

Sam couldn't speak. All he could think of was Zemo's rigid submission to his touch those first few times. The way he'd gone out afterward and dialed the pain up as high as he could bear.

The way he'd tried to claw the collar off his neck.

For a moment Sam thought he was going to be sick.

"I ...." Zemo began. He took a breath. "I like it when—"

"I'm going to kill those Raft fucks," Sam said. He was only starting to work through a haze of passionate hate, some of it directed at himself, but most of it at those assholes for fucking up something that he had thought, up until this moment, was about the most gentle and pure thing that could come out of something as messed-up as his and Zemo's and Bucky's shared history.

He should have known that anything growing in that poison soil would be just as poisonous.

"I think killing HYDRA is really more what we're here for," Zemo murmured. He was looking at Sam with a strange intensity and a softness that Sam still could feel himself responding to, even now that he knew how little a choice Zemo had in any of it.

"Them too," Sam said. He cut Redwing's checklist short and slammed his gun into its holster. "Let's go do this."

He brushed past Zemo. He still felt the urge to reach out and touch him—he hadn't realized how habitual those little touches had become, for both of them—but at least he could stop himself from the actual action, now that he knew what was going on here.

What was all of this, some kind of fucked-up, technologically enhanced Stockholm syndrome? The original syndrome was largely myth, Sam had read somewhere, but there were aspects to the general phenomenon that were real. Especially with someone who threw out strands of sexual attraction for both manipulation and desire, the way Zemo did.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

"Wow," Bucky said as Sam all but threw himself into the driver's seat. "I see this is going to be a really fun leg of our road trip."

"Shut it."

Zemo came out a few minutes later and mutely took the backseat.

"What the fuck," Bucky said, looking between them. "Did you two have a big fight in there, or—"

"We cleared the air about a few things," Zemo said from the backseat.

"We sure did," Sam said. It was all he could say; his jaw was tight, fighting nausea.

When it came right down to it, he had ended up being all the things he had feared to become when he first heard the terms of their arrangement. And there was nothing he could do about it, except try to do better moving forward.

"Must have been some talk," Bucky said after a minute. "Can I pick the music, or—"

"Suit yourself," Sam said, and cranked the steering wheel, pulling out onto the road.

He really had only himself to blame for having to listen to 1940s showtunes all the way to Edmonton.

 

***

 

So there was a HYDRA base in Banff National Park, because of course there was. And because a kazillion square kilometers of unspoiled Canadian Rockies wasn't good enough for HYDRA, it was right underneath the visitor's center.

They cleared out some park staff and a few late-season tourists, locked the doors, and then searched the vaguely Swiss-chalet-looking building for the entrance to the underground base their intel had told them about. Zemo was all business, gun in hand. Sam sent Redwing to circle the perimeter.

"Found it!" Bucky sang out. He was wrestling open a trap door in a storeroom crowded with boxes of souvenirs and T-shirts.

Once they had it open, the stairs below them lit up automatically. Sam called back Redwing with a mental command and set it to watching the top of the stairs. Bucky took point. Sam gestured Zemo in ahead of him.

"Don't trust me?" Zemo asked, with a quick, cool look back.

"Just go after him," Sam said, swallowing his feelings. He liked them both where he could keep an eye on them, something he wasn't prepared to examine—but Zemo fell wordlessly into place between them, like he fit there.

Sam followed them down.

They went deep, and then deeper yet, down a concrete shaft plunging into the earth. HYDRA hadn't skimped on the infrastructure here. So far, most of what they'd found were shallow bunkers near the surface, many of them destroyed when their occupants had cleared out in the earlier SHIELD purge, leaving little for the SHIELD analysts to pore over. This had the promise of a much bigger find.

"I need an entry code," Bucky called back up the shaft. He'd outdistanced them and reached some kind of bunker door beneath.

"Let me see." Zemo pattered down the last flight of stairs, unable to resist showing off even under these circumstances.

They were really far underground, and during the pause, Sam realized that he was out of communication with Redwing; he couldn't pick up anything. This gave him a worrying thought about the collar. He dug out the monitor and looked, for a moment, at its red-pulsing screen.

"Zemo," he said.

"Busy," Zemo said brightly, with the same cheerful glibness that he'd been deploying in Sam's direction ever since the safehouse that morning.

Sam closed the distance between them, descending the last flight of stairs to where Zemo was entering codes on a keypad while Bucky hovered. "You have to get back up to the surface."

"Why?" Zemo asked, looking up sharply. "All of us?"

"No, just you."

"Ah," he said, and looked back down to his work as if he didn't care all that much. "And why is that?"

Sam tilted the monitor so Zemo could see.

"Ah," Zemo said again. "No, that won't be a problem."

"We're so far underground it can't get a signal. It doesn't know we're with you."

"I'm not worried. Aha!"

The door in front of them slid open. Cold, dry, musty air breathed out of the passage ahead, and a string of cold blue lights lit up in the ceiling.

"You're going to be when it starts tweaking your brain's pain centers," Sam said between his teeth.

"But it hasn't even started yet," Zemo said, and then his face flashed with a terribly familiar distant look.

"It just started, didn't it?" Sam said grimly. "Zemo—" It was stupid, but he did it anyway, shoving the monitor toward Zemo. "Take this and go up and wait for us there." He didn't stop to examine his conviction that Zemo would wait, monitor and all.

Zemo looked at the monitor, and at Sam—and didn't take it. "It's not bothering me all that much," he said. His face was slightly tight, but not particularly distressed. "You read the documentation, didn't you? How long does it take to ratchet up when the recipient of the collar is separated from his handler, Sam?" His tone was not that of someone genuinely wanting to know, but rather, a professor challenging a pupil.

"Ten minutes per level," Sam said between his teeth.

"Well, then. And we have seven levels yet to go," Zemo said brightly. He turned. Bucky was watching them quarrel, looking upset. "Shall we?"

Sam followed them into the tunnel, cursing under his breath, fingers curled around the monitor.

He looked at his watch. Level 4 was where Zemo's excursions usually stopped. Maybe 5, on a good day.

So. They were on a clock. Half an hour until they needed to get back up to the surface, where the monitor would once again relay that it was back in communication and the prisoner was near his handlers. Less than that, actually, because they needed to get back up the stairs. Say twenty minutes for exploration and then a fast retreat.

Sam took their six, hating every minute of this.

 

***

 

They looked into abandoned rooms, some still full of equipment, as if its makers were expected back at any moment. This place was a treasure trove for SHIELD's analysts to pore over. Sam took some pictures and swiped a couple of files.

Zemo was quiet, a little twitchy, but no more so than the rest of them, given the circumstances. Sam checked his watch and realized that Zemo was now at level 2.

"What's it doing?" he asked quietly.

"Do I need to spell it out?" Zemo asked with that artificial brightness that was almost painfully out of place now that Sam had gotten used to a different Zemo—a relaxed and playful Zemo, who liked draping on Sam's arm and trailing flirtatious fingers down his wrist. This was like dealing with a stranger.

"You're in pain, I know that. How bad is it, though? How is it affecting you?" And he should have tried to stop himself from sounding clinical, he realized as he saw Zemo's face lock down. I don't want this to hurt you was a very different feeling from I don't like how this is affecting your performance in the field, but it was clear that he had said one thing and Zemo had heard the other.

"It's like a headache, Sam," Zemo said. "A headache and sore muscles. I'm sure you've worked through worse."

He had, but someone else hadn't been causing it at the time.

Zemo brushed on past him, and Sam had the sense of something important slipping out of his fingers. Bucky was up ahead, struggling to pry open a pair of metal doors. As they joined Bucky inside the room he'd just managed to open, Zemo stumbled a little, and something inside Sam snapped.

"Okay, fuck this," he said. "Fuck it. We've found out what we needed to find out, which is that SHIELD's going to want to see this place. There's absolutely nothing down here that's worth looking at while you're in pain."

"Thank Christ," Bucky said, slamming the door on a filing cabinet he was poking around in. "I was about to just pick him up and head for the door. 'Course, I'd still need to get the monitor off you."

"Excuse me, what are we doing?" Zemo wanted to know as they flanked him. He didn't seem to be tracking fully, which was understandable, Sam thought, when he was trying to keep himself impassive in the grip of increasingly severe pain. There was a trickle of sweat visible under his hairline, and Sam kicked himself mentally. He couldn't believe they'd let it go on that long. They were all going to have a good long talk about this when they got back up to the surface, even if they had to lie on Zemo to make him hold still for it.

"We are leaving, because we don't just stroll around seeing the sights while one of us is in excruciating pain." Sam prodded him. "Door. Now."

Which of course was when things went to hell.

Things had been fine when they were headed down, but now that they'd turned around, lights flashed and a calm female voice overhead said, "Intruders detected in this facility." There was a grinding noise from somewhere in the walls.

Bucky looked, for an instant, flat-out terrified, in a way Sam had never seen from him before. "Go!" Sam yelled at him—at both of them, actually, but if doors were going to start slamming down here, Bucky was the one who had the most chance of getting out, and was also the one of the three of them who was going to be the most traumatized by being trapped in a HYDRA facility he couldn't get out of.

There was a massive metal blast door coming down in the hall. Bucky lunged at it, rolled under, and then twisted back and tried to hold it up for them. It was no use; Sam glimpsed him through the narrowing sliver of empty space under the door as he jerked his hands back just in time to avoid having the fingers of his metal hand sheared off.

Sam's radio activated abruptly. The radios were useless for talking to the surface down here, but still worked person-to-person. "Are you all right?" Bucky asked.

"Yes, we're fine. Get out, go! Get back topside and call SHIELD."

"I can't just leave you both down here!"

"And you can't get us out if you're trapped here too!" Sam snapped back. He could hear more grinding and thuds that shook the floor underfoot. God help them all if it was already too late; if Bucky's way out was blocked, they might be down here for days. "Go call in backup, and then come back down and help."

Bucky cursed, but Sam heard him take off running. He turned to Zemo.

Zemo ... who had already snapped into action, running one gloved hand down the wall beside the door. But Sam couldn't help noticing he was shaking a little.

Fuck this day.

"Find anything?" he asked.

Zemo gave his head a brief snap side to side. "Sometimes these places have failsafes or a secondary set of controls, in case a lockdown is accidentally triggered. I don't see anything that might raise the door, unfortunately."

The grinding and thudding seemed to have stopped. Sam touched his radio. "Bucky? You read me? You okay?"

Bucky's reply was distorted by static, barely comprehensible. "I'm fine, but I'm one door from out, I think. That last door before—" The rest of it vanished in static, then came back. "—code you entered, Zemo?"

"220345," Zemo said promptly. "The date of HYDRA's last major battle in WWII. It's one of their standard unlock codes."

"And my computer prompts me to change my password every six months," Sam muttered. "Here they've been using the same one for eighty years."

There was a soft snort from Zemo. "That's HYDRA for you." Weirdly, for a guy who was trapped underground with an incrementally escalating pain collar, he actually looked a lot more relaxed now that he had something to do and a problem to solve. "It got us in, but it may not get you out. James, I can walk you through some codes to try if you can get to a point where you can input data."

"Yeah, that's the—" More static, then: "—try to get the door up. Check back in a minute."

"Gotcha," Sam said. He breathed out slowly and turned to Zemo.

They had to be into pain level 3 by now, although Sam had been a little too distracted to pay attention to the time. As Zemo prodded at the wall beside the door, the tremor in his hands had grown worse.

"I never should've let you stay down here like this," Sam said.

"Let me. Ah, I see."

"Can you stop taking everything I say in the worst possible way?" Sam forced himself to stop, and ran a hand over his face, startled to find that his skin was damp with sweat, too. He wasn't claustrophobic under normal circumstances, but normally he wasn't trapped under untold tons of rock with a thick metal door between him and the exit—and, okay, time to stop thinking about that now. Especially with the team separated, which was also twisting his insides in bitter and visceral ways.

"So if we can't get the door up from here, what other options do we have?" he asked Zemo.

Zemo jerked a little; he had been either thinking or zoning out. "There may be a secondary control room. We can look."

"I guess it does tend to inhibit your evil plans if your goons keep getting trapped in your secret underground supervillain lair."

"Indeed."

There was nowhere to go from here except back through the doors Bucky had forced open, so they went back in. The lights in here were dim and flickering. Sam got out his flashlight and tried not to consider the possibility of the lights going out and leaving them trapped in darkness.

Zemo's breathing was harsh. Sam glanced at him and then took out the monitor.

Shit. It was worse than he'd thought. Zemo was already at level 4.

"This is about as bad as you could take it before, isn't it?" he asked quietly.

Zemo gave him a sharp sideways glance. In the dim light, his eyes were dilated. "It's been worse," he said shortly.

"But not for very long."

"Yes, well, I don't have a choice, do I?" He snapped out a little penlight and started checking the walls.

"What are we looking for?" Sam asked, reluctantly turning back to the topic of escape.

"There may or may not be a hidden panel giving access to controls or to a secret control room. Some of these places have such a thing."

"It's handy that we have our top HYDRA expert with us," Sam said.

"Very," Zemo agreed, his voice dry as dust.

It was very quiet down here, the air stale and metallic-smelling. There was no sign of any hidden panel or door, but there was a door at the far end of the room that opened into another hallway. This place was a maze, Sam thought.

"I fucked up," he said quietly as they went through the door. Zemo was moving carefully, tightly controlled. "I fucked up and you're the one paying for it, and I'm sorry."

"You didn't—you—" Zemo abruptly slammed a fist into the wall and cursed in what Sam assumed was Sokovian. "Everything is not your fault, Sam," he said, his voice tense.

"I know, but I also knew what you were having to put up with, and I brought us in here anyway. That's on me. I know you made your choice and I wanted to respect that, but I shouldn't have let it go that far."

"My choices are free up to a point, is it?"

"That's not what I'm saying and you know it."

Instead of resistance, Zemo capitulated. "I know," he said, his voice tired. Then he cursed again, more profoundly.

They had just come around a turn to be confronted with another blast door.

Nowhere to go, Sam thought. The barriers had been lowered on the rats in the maze. They had a couple short sections of hallway and a room with some old equipment and filing cabinets, but nothing helpful. And that was it.

Zemo's thoughts seemed to be running along similar lines. He checked both sides of the blast door with his penlight, and then sat down with his back against it, his coat sprawling around him on the dusty floor.

Not really sure what else to do, Sam sat next to him. He surreptitiously checked the monitor. It was still at 4, but it wouldn't be for long.

Zemo was shivering a little. His face was damp, hair sticking to it.

"There's got to be something I can do," Sam said quietly. "Some way to get that damn thing off you."

"It won't kill me," Zemo said. He drew in a harsh breath. "At least that's what they reassure me. For whatever that's worth."

"When we get out of here, I'm getting that thing taken off," Sam said viciously. "They might replace it with some kind of tracker, I don't know, but I think we've just proven that it's too dangerous to go out in the field with it like this. Too many things that can go wrong. This is only one of them. What if we're separated? What if the monitor's lost or broken? It's shit, is what it is. This is a shitty, shitty situation and it was a bad idea in the first place and I can't believe I fucking agreed to it."

Without his conscious awareness, his fingers had clenched on the monitor and he'd raised his hand as if to throw it. Then Zemo's hand caught his, gloved fingers curling lightly around Sam's.

"As much as the current situation is less than ideal, I'd appreciate it if you didn't make it worse," Zemo said.

"Right," Sam murmured. He pried his fingers open. Somewhat to his surprise, Zemo's hand remained on his, touching the back of it lightly while they both looked at the monitor. It was still on 4; it must have just changed when Sam had noticed it before.

There were little quivers running through Zemo's fingers.

"When you've been setting it off on purpose," Sam began. He paused. He wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to ask—or how much he wanted to know. "Is that ... because of me? Some kind of—counterbalance to the other ... thing the collar does—"

"Sam." Zemo's hand curled around Sam's now, just holding it. He was smiling a little. "Not everything is about you."

"That's really rich, coming from someone who does seem to think the world revolves around him."

Zemo smiled briefly, and then jerked, a shudder rolling through him.

Shit. Sam didn't have to look at the monitor to know they were now at level 5.

"Will it help if I touch the collar?" he asked, the words tumbling out. All he knew was, he couldn't sit here and watch this without trying to do something about it. It was going to tear him apart. "The ... pleasure function, or whatever it is that it does. Could that counteract the pain?"

Zemo had closed his eyes; now he opened them again. He looked a little surprised, as if that thought genuinely hadn't occurred to him. "I am open to trying."

His hands were clumsy enough now that he fumbled with the turtleneck flap. He pulled off his gloves with his teeth, but it didn't really seem to help. Sam reached over and did it for him, noticing as he did so that Zemo's hands were ice cold.

He laid his hand over the collar, and then his other one, cupping the hated thing between both palms and touching Zemo's neck with as much of his skin as he could. He wasn't sure exactly how it worked, but he wanted to give Zemo the maximum benefit of—whatever the hell it was. They could deal with the emotional ramifications of it all once they were back on the surface and Zemo wasn't in agony anymore.

Zemo's skin was cool and tacky with sweat, but at Sam's touch he leaned back, leaning in. It seemed that some of the rigidity left him and he relaxed a little.

"Better?" Sam asked.

In order to reach the collar, he'd had roll over onto his knees, one knee between Zemo's legs and his other leg cocked up next to it, Zemo's neck cradled between his hands. In this position, he had a view of Zemo that would, under other circumstances, have been hot as hell: Zemo's head cupped between his hands and lolling back against the metal door, Sam's fingertips framing his jawline.

It was actually difficult to tell what Zemo was feeling right now. His eyes were half closed, his lips parted. He was still shivering a little.

"Zemo. I need a check-in here. Tell me this isn't making it worse."

Zemo blinked, and Sam could see the focus coming back to his eyes from their hazy distance. "It's not," he said after a pause. "Worse, that is."

"What are you feeling?"

"A lot," Zemo said after another moment. "I'm feeling a lot." He blinked again, and then he abruptly started speaking in a sudden, uncharacteristic rush of words. "You asked me why I go out at night and push the collar's limits. I think you already know some of it. Yes, I'm feeling out how much I can handle and how far I ... can go, before I have to come back. I just like to know. But I also like the way it is when I've—when I experience your touch, when I've been—It's more that way, Sam, and I like it."

God, just how badly, exactly, had he fucked things up here? "I didn't know the collar was doing anything to you when I touched it," Sam said.

"I believe we've established that," Zemo murmured.

"I'm sorry."

Zemo's eyes had drifted shut. Now they opened again. "Will you stop apologizing? Did you think about asking me what I want? I like to feel good, Sam. I can distinguish between the touch of someone who enjoys my discomfort and someone who doesn't. I don't need to be—"

The words broke off in an incoherent sound, not exactly a cry, but a hurting, animal sound. They'd just gone up another level. This was the point where Zemo had broken before and come back, every time.

More skin contact, Sam thought, half frantic. Take his mind off it. Give him something else to focus on. He wasn't even sure what he was doing as he leaned forward, toward Zemo's parted lips, and closed his mouth over Zemo's, while he curled his hands around Zemo's neck and touched him everywhere he could.

It was half kiss and half rescue breathing, a desperate close of lips over a drowning man's mouth. And Zemo kissed back with a similar fervency. Their teeth clashed, and Sam tasted blood. He was vaguely aware of Zemo's hands coming up and closing over each of his wrists, not to push him away but to hold him closer.

He kept his palms over the collar, pressing so hard that it must be leaving indentations in Zemo's skin, and ran his fingers up the back of Zemo's neck, combing through his hair, stroking and rubbing. Just trying to give him something else, anything else to think about.

The kiss broke eventually because they both needed to breath, but Sam kept his lips against the corner of Zemo's mouth, kissed him lightly there as Zemo panted harshly through the spasms wringing him. There were tears at the corners of Zemo's eyes.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," Sam said into Zemo's skin.

"Don't stop," Zemo gasped out.

Sam kissed him again and then turned his head to press the side of his face against Zemo's, brush his lips against Zemo's jaw. It felt as if the collar should be hot under his hands, from the effect it was having, but it wasn't; it was merely skin-warm, and slightly cool where Sam hadn't warmed it in his own hands.

He wanted to kill whoever had invented this thing. He wanted to tear it off with his bare hands.

He was so intently focused on Zemo—the touch of Zemo's skin, the sound of Zemo's harsh breathing in his ear—that it took him a moment to realize that someone was saying his name.

"—am—Sam?"

"Bucky," he breathed out. He raised his head. "Hey, Buck. You get out?"

"—to the keypad," Bucky said through the static. "Tried the combo I got from—" More static. "—dn't work. Zemo—talk me through?"

Sam pulled back a little and looked down at Zemo, wet-eyed and shaking in his grasp, apparently completely out of it. "I don't know if he can, Buck."

"I'm here," Zemo said through gritted teeth. He sucked in a shuddering breath and pushed himself up a little more from where he had slumped loosely against the wall. Sam tried to help and ended up supporting him with an elbow planted in his chest while still maintaining his grip on Zemo's neck, fingers stroking steadily across his damp skin. "James, can you hear me? I'm going to have you try a series of—" He had to pause as a shudder rolled through him. Sam didn't dare look at the monitor. "—Override codes."

"Gotta say you're the guy I want on my team the next time I'm trapped in a super-secret enemy base," Bucky said through the static. "I'm ready. Go."

"Do you know the Fibonacci sequence?" Zemo asked. His eyes fluttered open, gazing up at the ceiling. "Try it backward starting from 233."

"The what now?"

"233," Zemo said. "144. 89." He paused to breath. "55. 34." And so on; Sam was tuning out the numbers, focused mainly on the rapid jumping of Zemo's pulse under his hands.

"That didn't do anything," Bucky reported.

"It'll be either math or a significant date. Their codes usually are. Try the digits of pi."

"For fuck's sake," Bucky muttered, and whatever else he said was lost in static.

Sam was impressed despite himself when Zemo rattled off pi to ten digits, even while he was shivering, wracked by uncontrollable spasms of pain.

"No," Bucky said. His voice was tight. Sam didn't know how much of Zemo's pain was coming across over the radio, but it was plain that Bucky recognized that their clock was rapidly ticking down.

"Significant dates," Zemo breathed out. He touched his tongue to his lips to wet them. There was a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth from a bitten lip or tongue. "The founding of HYDRA. Your capture, James, if you'll forgive me for ..." He gasped briefly. "... for mentioning it. Director Carter's retirement date. These are some they've used in the past. You both know as many as I do."

What Bucky said in return was mostly lost in static, but Sam caught, "—damn many options!"

"So let's think it through," Sam said desperately. It was hard to think at all, with his fingers sunk in Zemo's sweat-damp hairline and Zemo clinging to his wrists as if Sam was his lifeline. "We gotta narrow it down somehow, so what would this corner of HYDRA care about? What are their significant dates? The day they broke ground for the visitor center? The day they opened it?"

"And we don't know any of that," Bucky snapped back.

"Yeah, we do, though. Some of it was in the intel that brought us here." Sam tried to cast back his mind, visualize the paperwork that they had pored over in a Manitoba hotel room. "Anyone got any of those dates on hand? Come on, people."

Zemo opened his eyes abruptly and rattled off a string of numbers. "The opening date of the visitor center," he added. "It was on the—display on wall—" He broke off, grimacing.

"Bucky, you get that?"

"Holy shit," Bucky said. "Holy shit, I think that might'a been it. Everything just turned green. Do you see any sign of—"

Whatever else he said was lost in a sudden, terrific grinding and shuddering. The blast door they were leaning against ground its way up into the ceiling with the same unnerving speed as it had come down, and Sam and Zemo fell over, with Sam on top.

"That got it," Sam breathed out. "We got it." He was half-laughing, but what stopped the laughter was the realization that this was only part of it; they still had to get Zemo out. "Bucky, I'm gonna need your help."

"On my way."

"Can you stand up?" Sam asked Zemo. It was impossible to get him up with both hands on the collar, so he tried keeping one hand in contact with it and planting the other in the middle of Zemo's back, trying to help him to his feet.

They got about halfway, and then Zemo jerked in a kind of full-body seizure, and went completely limp.

"Zemo!" Sam gave him a sharp shake. Zemo lolled limply, not responding.

Looking down at the monitor, he saw that the screen was all red, and on a full 8.

 

***

 

Bucky carried him out, and Sam went alongside, one hand holding the monitor so he could stare at it, and the other pressed to Zemo's neck. He had no idea if the touch was doing anything anymore, but he couldn't seem to stop.

Bucky held Zemo very gently, with Zemo's head tucked against his shoulder.

They were almost all the way to the surface before the monitor screen abruptly blinked green again. There were no transitional downward steps this time, just straight to green, and by the time they reached the surface, Zemo was already twitching and stirring in a semi-coherent, uncoordinated way.

They still had the visitor center all to themselves, for the time being.

"See if there's some kind of first-aid station in here," Sam said.

They found an employee break room instead, where Bucky laid Zemo out on a couch—Zemo was now feebly protesting about being carried—and Sam crouched beside him and gave him a quick vitals check, while Bucky went back to secure the trap door.

Zemo was shaky and still chilly to the touch, but as far as Sam could tell, it was true that there was no lasting damage; this was nothing more than the adrenaline-crash aftermath of pain and distress. Sam very scrupulously did not touch the collar.

"I can sit up," Zemo said weakly.

"I'm sure you can, but I'd feel better if you just stay flat for a few minutes. Looks like there's tea things here. You want a cup?"

"If you're offering," Zemo said, somehow managing to sound baronial even while flat on his back.

Sam made him a cup of tea and stirred a heaping spoonful of sugar into it. By this point Zemo was sitting up on the couch, resting his elbows on his knees. "Here," Sam said, pressing the cup into his hands.

"I appear to have lost my gloves," Zemo said, flexing first one hand and then the other.

"They're probably still down in the tunnel. We had other concerns at the time than checking around for lost personal items."

"I liked those gloves very much."

"If it really bothers you that much, I can send Bucky down for 'em. Oh hi," Sam said, as Bucky picked that moment to come in. "Zemo lost his gloves down there."

"I heard that, and I'm not going into a HYDRA base just to get your gloves," Bucky said to Zemo. "Sorry not sorry."

For all the flippancy of Bucky's tone, he was tense. This day had been a whole triple-scoop trauma sundae for everybody. Sam poured two cups of coffee and handed Bucky one.

Bucky gave him a grateful little nod. "I haven't called SHIELD," he said as he went to lean against the wall next to Zemo's couch. "I was too busy trying to get the doors open, and then, well—busy." He didn't look at Zemo. "So I figure we can take the time we need to decide what we're telling them and what we're not."

"Sam kissed me," Zemo said, and Sam nearly spilled coffee down his arm. "I suppose that's the sort of material that should be left out."

"You know, on second thought, maybe I should leave you two alone to discuss this," Bucky said.

"No, you stay right there. Wherever this goes from here, we're all involved. And I think we've all had enough of people not telling people things." Sam looked at Zemo. "First things first, I don't care who I have to yell at, because I'm sure they'll deserve it, but we're getting that collar off you."

The corner of Zemo's mouth quirked up. "It has its compensations."

"Okay, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. We're a team, all right? I know there are a lot of things about this whole situation that are less than ideal, or kind of weird, or a lot weird, but let's at least try to level with each other. At least in this conversation. We can go back to obfuscating and being mysterious and obtuse later."

"I'm not," Zemo said. There was a seriousness to his tone, and his gaze, turned first to Bucky and then to Sam, was level. "I wasn't lying to you, Sam. Not back at our last safehouse and not in the tunnels. I wouldn't mind doing what we did down there again, but with a little more control and intentionality to it this time."

"You want to get zapped into a pain coma?" Sam said in disbelief.

"I wasn't lying to you about the heightened sensations. That was a bit beyond my usual tolerances, but up to a point, Sam, and leaving aside the aspect of being involuntarily trapped, I might even say that was the nicest thing that's happened to me since I left the Raft."

His gaze was still fixed on Sam, still level and matter-of-fact, but there was a trace of uncertainty in it, too. Sam had the feeling that it would be all too easy to break things at this phase too; he suspected very strongly that this was an aspect of himself that Zemo didn't discuss with most people. Maybe not with anyone since his wife.

"Are you guys sure I should be hearing all of this?" Bucky said.

"I don't mind if Zemo doesn't mind," Sam said, not taking his eyes off Zemo.

"Zemo doesn't mind," Zemo said, smiling a little.

"What about if Bucky minds?" Bucky said. But he stayed where he was.

"Okay, so you like the collar," Sam said slowly.

Zemo shuddered a little. "I do not like the collar. Not as things stand. But I don't think I would mind a version of it that came off. One that doesn't have the—history that this one does."

"Something tells me getting the collar taken off for good is going to be easier than getting SHIELD to authorize a sex collar," Bucky said. Sam glared at him. He was smirking. "Hey, you guys wanted me here for this."

"Yet another decision I've come to regret," Sam muttered.

He went over and sat beside Zemo on the couch. He did it carefully, not wanting Zemo to feel boxed in by both of them, telegraphing his movements and giving Zemo time to move away.

Zemo didn't; instead he moved a little closer, within easy touching distance. The invitation was obvious.

"You know something like this can create a really fucked-up kind of dependency, right?" Sam said. "I mean, it's basically like they gave you a drug and made me your supplier. And no one told me about it. That's messed up."

"I know," Zemo said. His face was soft, and more open than Sam was used to seeing it. There was still a little smudge of blood at the corner of his mouth, and tear-tracks beside his eyes—the only remaining traces of a form of torture that left no marks. "But trust me when I say that I'm fairly clear-eyed about my own emotions and motives—"

There was a soft snort from Bucky.

"So this is new, or ..." Sam said.

Zemo narrowed his eyes slightly, but didn't walk it back. "I know when I'm being manipulated. I know this collar is designed to manipulate me. But I still have an element of choice in all of this. I know what I want."

"And what do you want?" Sam asked quietly.

"I want you to touch my collar right now. I think I've earned a little petting, don't you?"

Sam looked up helplessly at Bucky, who looked both amused and also weirdly soft.

"At least let me do this first," Sam said, and carefully used the ball of his thumb to wipe the blood away from the edge of Zemo's mouth. Zemo sat perfectly still. Expectant.

Sam lowered his hand to rest it lightly against the collar. He couldn't suppress a shiver of his own, and not a pleasant one. It was all too easy to remember the way it had felt down in the tunnels, where there was little pleasure to be had, for him at least—only panic and desperation.

To his surprise, Zemo raised a hand to cover Sam's with his own. "You're not hurting me, Sam."

Sam curled his fingers around Zemo's neck, where the sweat of pain and fear was drying to a slight stickiness, and rubbed his fingertips along Zemo's hairline.

Zemo closed his eyes and sank into it with a blissed-out look that tingled down to the ends of Sam's toes.

It was captivating to simply enjoy the look of Zemo sinking into zoned-out bliss, but there was another person in the room who couldn't be ignored. Sam looked up at Bucky, and saw that he was watching both of them with a "last kid picked for the soccer team" look.

"Get over here," Sam said. "There's plenty of room on this couch." And then he added, "If you want to."

Bucky rolled his eyes and set his untouched coffee on the end of the counter. "Fine, twist my arm," he said, and sat carefully on Zemo's other side. Zemo, clearly not as out of it as he looked, shuffled over a little to make room.

Bucky laid his hand across the back of Zemo's neck. Zemo's hand was still curled over Sam's, and now, as Bucky wrapped his hand across Zemo's nape, their fingertips laced together—all three of them.