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Bucky only found the notebook because the EMTs stripped Zemo’s coat off and shoved it at him, and he felt the hard edges of the book against his hand.
There was a lot going on right then, so he didn’t look at it until later, when he and Sam were crammed close together in the plastic chairs of the hospital waiting room. Sam had some of Zemo’s blood drying on his jeans. Bucky had already been to the bathroom to wash it off his hands, but he could see a dark half-circle of it under one thumbnail. He didn’t want to look at it, so he shifted the coat around on his knees and took the notebook out instead. What the hell.
Sam—still a little gray around the edges with worry and exhaustion—stirred. “What’s that?”
“No idea.”
“We shouldn’t go through his stuff,” Sam said.
“Ross is gonna wash your mouth out with soap if he hears you talking like that.” He knew Sam was right—by their standards, even if not by anybody else’s—but he couldn’t keep his hands still. If he did, he’d have to look at them, and then he’d see that dark bit of dried blood again. And then he’d think about the way Zemo had jerked when the bullets hit, and then he’d think about everything else.
Besides, this would just put him and Zemo tit-for-tat on this particular score. He opened the book.
“Tell me it’s not his diary,” Sam said.
“Not exactly. I’m pretty sure this is that recipe Sarah gave him for red beans and rice.” He flipped forwards. Zemo seemed to use the notebook as a kind of catch-all for whatever information was floating around his head. Bucky recognized the sketched-out floorplan of a HYDRA base they had raided a month ago and—as much as he hated to admit it, this was kind of adorable—the wifi password from their last hotel. Most of it was neutral like that. Impersonal. But every now and then, there would be little bits that struck him differently.
Two columns, one headed S and one J, with tally-marks down underneath. Bucky had to see the date scratched in the corner to realize what he was looking at, and he heard himself make a rough barking sound—definitely the closest thing to a laugh he’d had in the last couple of hours.
“When we got rained in at that hunting lodge—that was last October, right?”
“Oh, yeah. You know how I know? Because you used some kind of supersoldier vanishing skills to pull a disappearing act during check-in while Zemo and I got stuck listening to the old lady at the front desk tell us about a dozen times that they’d never had this wet an October before.”
“Yeah, sucks to be you. But it had that games room.”
“With the Ping Pong and the darts and everything, yeah. So?”
Bucky spun the notebook around. “Pretty sure this was Zemo keeping score of everything. I won, by the way.”
“Let me give you your prize, then. It’s gonna look a lot like my foot up your ass.”
Bucky turned another couple pages, just leafing through now.
13.04.25. C. 17.
Code? Password?
Date, he realized, with an icy wash of recognition. Day-Month-Year, the way the hunting lodge scores had been annotated with 22.10.25. This was a birthday.
His son’s birthday.
April 13, 2025. Carl seventeen. Would have been seventeen.
Yeah, this was none of his business. This was nowhere close to being any of his business. He started to close the book, but for some reason—intuition, curiosity, empathy, even bitterness—he checked the back first.
The last two pages were, as he’d half-known they would be, all names. He recognized some on each side.
On the left, a few crossed-out HYDRA agents, ones they’d come across and already left behind—mostly dead or in prison. Power Broker (unknown). An American name, vaguely familiar, that Bucky finally pegged as belonging to one of the guards on the Raft. Thinking about that made his jaw tighten up.
The people on the right were more familiar, and none of them had been stricken out yet. T’Challa, Shuri, Queen Ramonda, the whole of the Dora Milaje. Him. Sam. Some last names he recognized from the UN bombing and everything afterwards—Theo Broussard’s wife, for one. No Nagel family, no Flag Smasher connections.
Not ready to think about that yet, are you, Bucky thought, not without a little twist of compassion. He shut the book.
“You learn more than you wanted to?” Sam said.
“Probably.” He slipped the little book back in Zemo’s coat pocket, feeling protective of it. “When do you think they’ll let us in to see him?”
“Knowing hospitals, I’d say about an hour and a half after whenever they start telling us it’ll be any minute.” Sam sighed, resting his head on his steepled fingers for a few seconds. “He’ll be fine. We got him here in time. I know the criteria, and he’s going to be fine, and I just—I could use a cup of coffee and a candy bar. And a walk. You?”
“Coffee and candy yeah, walk no.”
“I’ll bring you back something.” Sam stood up and squeezed Bucky’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine,” he said again. “And knowing Zemo, he’ll probably be able to tell you opened his book, so you can look forward to that fun little conversation.”
Bucky exhaled sharply again, another almost-laugh, and then let Sam go stretch his legs. He sat there for a while in his uncomfortable chair, breathing in the hospital smell of antiseptic and sickness and old magazines. Then he went up to the duty nurse, gave her his best smile, and asked for a pen.
***
Zemo was looking at two weeks in the hospital, so in the end, Bucky gave him back his notebook before he gave him back his coat.
The hospital didn’t really work with Zemo’s carefully cultivated mystique. In the bulky plastic-framed bed with all its dials and beeping lights, in his flimsy hospital gown, he looked smaller, less in control. His features were still a little washed-out, a little pinched with pain. Getting pissed about Bucky invading his privacy would probably only do him good; it might put some color in his face.
But Zemo looked more irritated than outright angry. “Turnabout is fair play, then, James?”
“Fair, maybe.” He shrugged. He couldn’t figure out how apologies between the two of them were supposed to work. “Not really right, though. Sam told me not to look, for the record.”
Zemo thumbed through the pages, and Bucky wondered what he was seeing. What the book was to him, in the end.
Zemo shut the book again and turned it over on his lap, looking down at it and drumming his fingers lightly against the back cover.
“Did you look back here?”
Bucky nodded. “I noticed you’re stealing my bit, if that’s what you mean.”
He hadn’t really planned out how this conversation would go—doing that with Zemo usually turned out to be futile anyway—and he didn’t know what to say next. He didn’t even know if Zemo wanted to talk about it at all.
He said finally, “The ones you have on the right—sometimes there’s no way to cross them off.” He’d carried around Nakajima for a long time, let the name eat into him like acid, and telling Yori had—helped, he guessed. Helped both of them. But he didn’t know that it was really that simple. And God, there were so many names. Ones he couldn’t even remember. Ones that couldn’t even get touched by amends, let alone forgiveness. He just had to live with them.
He’d gotten rid of his book, in the end, but those names were all still written down on him somewhere. Sometimes he felt like they were carved into his bones.
“That occurred to me,” Zemo said softly. Some of the annoyance had seeped out of his expression. “But the record can be useful nonetheless.”
“Sometimes. On the left side, too, at least until some presumptuous asshole comes along and thinks he gets to decide when you’re square. Crosses his name out.”
The corner of Zemo’s mouth twitched. “You could have simply written it back in.”
“I didn’t,” Bucky said. “But I figured—like you said. Turnabout’s fair play.”
He nodded at the book, and Zemo opened it again, turning to the last two pages.
Saw James Barnes crossed out, a blue slash of ink across the black letters.
Zemo rested his fingertips against the page, like he was trying to read it in Braille. “Why?”
Anger on one side of that book and responsibility on the other, and Bucky didn’t know how well it would all shake out in the long run. And he knew there were names Zemo had left out. But still.
“You have a lot you’re carrying around,” Bucky said. “I don’t have to be part of it anymore. And I don’t feel like it. Let’s just let that part be easy.”
He didn’t want Zemo’s thoughts about him weighed down with guilt or obligation—or however Zemo processed it, with whatever feelings or even excuses.
They were okay. There was no reason for them to be, but they were, and Bucky liked it that way. He was choosing that.
“I did ask the nurse for a different color pen for it, though,” he said. “Just to bug you.”
“Very petty,” Zemo said. It didn’t exactly sound like he meant it. He shut the notebook with unbelievable gentleness, like it was some fragile antique. “But all things considered, I suppose I can forgive you.”