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POV: Bucky
Gunfire ripped through the air—short bursts, high-caliber, echoing off stone like a war drum with no rhythm.
Another round punched into the barricade behind him. Concrete sprayed sideways, kicking up dust and shrapnel.
Bucky raised his arm, vibranium catching the worst of it. His eyes were already on the next muzzle flash—three o’clock, second floor, low angle.
It didn’t matter.
None of it mattered except the sound of Zemo’s voice, half a breath away, smug and unbothered, like they weren’t three seconds from getting turned into viscera inside an old warehouse in Prague.
“Do you always get this excited under fire, James?”
He said it like it was a pillow talk secret, like the hiss of bullets around them was foreplay and not, technically, an ambush.
Bucky’s lip curled—not at the bullets, but at the fucking smile in Zemo’s tone. He didn’t even need to look to know the bastard was enjoying this.
Which wasn’t the problem. The problem was, Bucky was enjoying it too.
“Only when you’re around,” Bucky growled, breath sharp, mechanical hand clamped around his gun like it was the only thing keeping him from pinning Zemo against the rust-stained barricade and shutting him up the hard way.
Zemo gave him a sideways glance—lazy, heated. The kind of look Bucky could fall into like a grave and call it sanctuary.
Bucky jerked him sideways by the arm just as another round shredded the concrete behind them. Zemo didn’t flinch. Didn’t thank him either—just let himself be manhandled, the curve of a smirk riding his mouth like a well-trained lie.
“Is this the part where you throw me over your shoulder, darling?” he asked, ducking as Bucky hauled them both behind the mangled husk of a steel column.
“You wish,” Bucky muttered, gun already back up. “Too much dead weight.”
“A burden you seem oddly eager to bear.”
From above, Sam’s voice cut through the gunfire, laced with exhausted irritation and a healthy dose of what the actual fuck.
“Can you two maybe save the post-apocalyptic honeymoon shit for later? We’re getting lit up down here.”
Bucky fired twice, clipped a shooter on the catwalk. “I am saving it. If I wasn’t, he’d already be bent over this barricade.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sam snapped over comms. “I’m in your ear, Barnes. Have some goddamn respect.”
Zemo’s chuckle was low and unrepentant. “He just does not want to admit how much he likes it when I flirt with him under threat of death.”
“You don’t flirt,” Sam retorted. “You—haunt. With cheekbones. There’s a difference.”
“Semantics.”
Another explosion split the air and Bucky slammed into Zemo, shoulder-first, pinning them both against the scorched concrete. His arm locked tight around Zemo’s ribs.
Zemo’s chest heaved against his with something close to panic, or laughter. Possibly both.
Bucky didn’t move. Didn’t let up.
“You good?” he murmured, the words ghosted into the space just behind Zemo’s ear. Not a question. A promise disguised as one.
Zemo’s breath caught. Just once.
“Of course,” he whispered. “You’re here.”
There wasn’t time to answer, not with more hostiles moving in from the west stairwell—but Bucky kissed him anyway.
Quick. Dirty. Gun oil and blood and smoke on both their tongues like a spark thrown into gunpowder.
Sam made a strangled noise over comms.
“Okay! That’s it. I’m pulling the plug. Next time I’m teaming up with actual professionals.”
Bucky pulled back just far enough to grin into Zemo’s mouth. “You hear that?”
Zemo’s eyes flickered with something sharp, hungry. “Loud and clear.”
They moved in tandem after that—smooth, precise, a two-man wrecking ball laced with heat and something older, deeper. Bucky covered the left flank while Zemo rigged the detonator, fingers too elegant for war but too quick for anything else.
Behind them, Sam was still swearing.
POV: Sam
It was like babysitting two cats in heat. Two heavily armed, emotionally repressed, casually homicidal cats.
He ducked under a hail of rounds, wings snapping out just in time to slam a shooter against the wall with enough force to break something important. Didn’t stop the irritation grinding under his molars.
“Hey, just a thought,” Sam panted into comms as he dropped back behind a service beam, “maybe next time you two wanna exchange body fluids, you could do it before we’re dodging sniper fire?”
Static crackled. Then Zemo’s voice—silken, patient. The exact damn tone Sarah used when one of the kids threw a tantrum in public.
“We were multitasking.”
Sam snorted. “You were dry-humping behind a dumpster.”
“Incorrect. It was a barricade. And there was no humping.”
“You’re not helping your case, man.”
“I was not trying to.”
There was a pause, and then Bucky’s voice— low and unapologetic. “He moaned.”
“I did not,” Zemo snapped, and Jesus, that was actual indignation. The kind that only shows up when someone’s been caught doing something deeply compromising.
“Oh, he definitely moaned,” Bucky continued, utterly fucking merciless. “One of those quiet ones, like he didn’t mean to. Right when I—”
“Okay! Muting you. Muting both of you before I have to bleach my brain.”
Sam thumbed off their channel with the kind of deliberate violence that came from deep moral injury and kept moving. The layout of the old industrial yard had gone to shit—rusted scaffolds, half-collapsed corridors, stairwells that dropped off into black. At least two tangos unaccounted for, plus whatever the hell backup Zemo had forgotten to mention in the briefing.
Somewhere in the belly of the compound, a charge went off. Not the big one—that one was still on a timer—but enough to jolt the earth like a warning.
Sam flicked his comms back on. “What was that?”
Silence.
Then Zemo again, slightly out of breath, voice edged with something disturbingly close to joy. “A surprise.”
“You’re not allowed surprises.”
“Everyone is allowed surprises.”
“I hate you.”
“And yet you keep coming back.”
A second blast tore through the upper floors, then—this one deliberate, precision-placed, structural. The overhead catwalk shuddered and tilted, and Sam leapt sideways just as it came down in a choking gout of smoke and metal. Concrete splinters sliced his arm, didn’t stop him. He hit the ground rolling, came up on one knee, wings shielding his flank from falling debris.
And then— Bucky landed, hard, in a crouch beside him. Alive. Smeared in soot and blood and grinning like someone who’d just gotten off twice and wanted to go for a third.
“He missed you,” Bucky said, deadpan, like they were in the middle of a conversation Sam definitely didn’t want to be having.
Sam scowled. “Who?”
“Zemo.”
“He said that?”
“No.”
“Then how the hell do you—”
Bucky shrugged. “He kept asking if you were alright. Between the moaning.”
Sam stood up, very slowly, and turned to face him. “You realize I will kill you someday.”
Bucky side eyed him, a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth. “That’s fair.”
They took the stairs together, clearing the path toward the blast site. Bucky moved like a man wired too tight—every step a hair-trigger, every glance toward the shadows a dare. But there was something else coiled under his skin too, something not-quite-contained.
Sam didn’t ask. He didn’t have to.
Because ten feet ahead, Zemo stood at the center of the wreckage, coat flared like a crow’s wing, smoke curling around his legs, watching Bucky with the kind of look that started wars and ended them in the same breath.
Bucky didn’t stop walking.
Didn’t even slow down.
Zemo tilted his head. “I saved you the last charge.”
Bucky reached him, took the detonator, didn’t break eye contact.
“Next time,” he said, low and rough, “we do it my way.”
Zemo’s smile was slow. Sharp. “Promise?”
Sam groaned. “I hate both of you.”
POV: Zemo
Afterward, the blood dried stiff in the folds of his collar.
It smelled like old iron and scorched metal. Something sweeter under that—the kind of scent you only get from a man who had brushed up against death and decided to fuck it instead.
Zemo rolled his shoulder until it cracked, slow and indulgent, letting the pain open across his spine. They were back in the safehouse—one of the forgettable ones, no art, no piano, only cracked tile and filtered light through dirty glass.
Bucky hadn’t said a word since they’d gotten in.
He’d peeled off his jacket like he meant to tear it, And thrown it across a chair like it had personally offended him. There was blood on his shirt. Zemo didn’t mention it.
He just watched.
Watched the slow prowl of a man trying not to lose it. The tension in every movement that said not yet, that said hold, that said don’t give him the fucking satisfaction.
Which was, of course, why Zemo moved.
He crossed the room with the same calm he carried through warzones— controlled, eyes steady, breathing slow, every step deliberate like he was pacing through wreckage that knew better than to slow him down.
Bucky turned to face him.
Fast. Like a snap of a trap. Like the only thing between stillness and violence was permission.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” Bucky asked, voice gravel ground against restraint.
Zemo tilted his head. “Immensely.”
The punch wasn’t thrown.
It lived behind Bucky’s eyes though—cocked and loaded, waiting for an excuse. Zemo stood close enough to be hit. Didn’t move back. Let him make the decision.
“You think this is funny?” Bucky’s voice was low now. Hoarse. “The flirting, the kissing, during a mission—”
“No,” Zemo murmured. “I think it’s necessary.”
That got a reaction.
Bucky stared at him, jaw tight, something flaring under the surface—confusion, disbelief, maybe even betrayal. All of it soaked in the scent of smoke and skin and adrenaline that still clung to them both like residue.
“You said yourself,” Zemo continued, softer now. “You only feel alive when everything else is about to collapse.”
The words landed, soft as ash. Bucky’s expression didn’t change—until it did. And then he moved. One step, two—close enough that Zemo could feel the heat coming off him in waves. Not anger. Not exactly. More like— pressure. Like something tectonic.
Zemo let it break.
“I hate how you do that,” Bucky muttered. “Say things I didn’t say out loud.”
“Because you’ve already said them,” Zemo said, fingers brushing his chest, light as a whisper. “Every time you touch me like a weapon.”
He waited.
Waited for the inevitable recoil. The step back. The sharp word, the hand shoved in his chest. That’s how it usually went.
But Bucky didn’t retreat. He surged forward. Teeth. Tongue. Hands like they were built to bruise and sanctify in the same motion, and Zemo opened to it, breathless, vicious, alive.
Their mouths crashed with the violence of something stolen. Not tender. Not gentle. Just necessary. The way Zemo had said it. Like the world had already ended and this was the last thing worth remembering.
Bucky pushed him against the wall hard enough to rattle the plaster.
“I should be furious with you,” he said, forehead pressed to Zemo’s, eyes dark and hungry and cruel in all the right ways.
“You are.”
Bucky’s hands found his belt.
Zemo’s smile was sharp, pleased. “Don’t stop.”
Outside, the city sighed. Sirens somewhere far off. The smell of oil. Of dust. Of inevitability.
Inside, Zemo let himself fall. Not into safety. Into fire.
Into the battle he’d chosen— kept choosing.
And the man who knew exactly how to win it.