Work Text:
It starts like this.
There's a streak of red in the air and Carl is twisting in his car seat. Zemo's hands are too tight on the straps, shaking like a cadet holding a grenade for the first time, he grits his teeth as Carl wiggles back and forth trying for another glimpse of the iron man and the belt's clips so very close to being secured are pulled apart again.
Their townhouse is too close to the city, too close to the rumbling and shaking earth, too close to the screaming, the panic; Zemo's orders are to regroup with EKO, to move in and do what EKO Scorpion does best, but he will not leave until he sees his family gone from the city.
Carl! He says sharp too sharp, his fear adding too much bite in his tone from the way his son stills and his wife's Helmut! warns from where she's packing bags into the back of the car. He swallows back everything he's feeling, tries to ignore the tension running like electricity through his body. He forces a smile, gentles his voice as the seat belt clip finally slides firmly closed.
Perhaps we shall see the iron man after, yes?
Carl's eyes get big with wonder, his little mouth wide.
Heike is at his side, she looks at him as if she wants to bundle him into the back of the car too.
My love you must go.
Her hands on his face, her shrewd eyes searching his, how bad is it?
He wants to lie, wants to soften the blow, but he didn't marry a wilting flower, Heike neither wants a pretty lie nor kind platitude.
The valley suburbs are being written off, if the fighting can be contained, they think we will lose only sixty per cent of the city.
She pales, her lips a thin white line, So much?
He can not say anything.
The situation is not good. No one knows what happening, the Avengers are glimpsed for moments of a second, the ground rumbles and shifts. The city will fall, Helmut is sure of this, sixty per cent is a generous estimation of casualties and destruction. Robots - Iron Men? - stalk the streets. Has Tony Stark's robot army gone rogue? There's been reports of violence from them, but there has always been reports of injuries from those corralled by Tony Stark's Iron Legion, dislocations and contusions. What does a robot know of force control against an incredibly breakable human?
But if not they are not robots controlled by Stark, then what?
He can not say any of that, so he pastes on a hard smile, makes his voice light.
Anything you forget now I will buy you again, newer, better, but you must go now.
And if it i s my husband I misplace?
Her voice is quiet. Gentle. She never demands him go against his nature, but she never fails to let him know how much she loves him.
He smiles for her, a good one, hopefully a kind one, and presses a kiss to her forehead, to her lips, then I shall buy you a better one.
A better one?
Perhaps one with blue eyes this time. A stronger chin.
One that stops drinking all my wine? She says, her hands smoothing across the rough material of his fatigues.
What can I say? My wife has fine taste in everything she loves.
She laughs and every fear she has for him is written across her face,
P lease my love, you must go, my f ather is waiting, you will be safe out of the city.
Come home, Helmut, do what you have to do and come back to me.
He nods though he shouldn't, a promise he will keep unless he can not.
(A few years from now a king he does not yet know exist will hold him with a vibranium glove beneath his chin, and severe him from the fulfillment of that promise.)
He can feel himself shifting to his soldier mindset, Heike's hands leave his face, she has to go no matter how cold he feels without her close.
He blinks and he's somewhere else. The fighting is over and gone, the city has fallen, the city has fallen.
Come home, she said.
Come home, her voice whispers as Zemo finds consciousness, slow and creeping, blinding pain keeping his eyes squeezed shut.
He's on the ground.
And that ground is not moving.
How strange that that is the strange thing.
And he is is alive.
Another strange realization.
He opens his eyes to a field, an old oak tree leans over a small country road, and a lamp post spears its way through it.
He doesn't understand what he's seeing.
He stood under that tree, sheltering, waiting for a late school bus as freezing winter winds whipped past bare knees. He'd walked to that tree from his father's place, dutiful every morning through his entire schooling years, he'd kissed Milena Petrović under that tree when he was ten and called her ugly when he was 13. He'd gotten a bloody nose from her brother under that tree and given one in turn to the next childish whim he'd considered a slight.
There's no street lamps this far out of town, and yet, one spears through the oak tree like lightning frozen in time.
There's half a house in the field.
No.
It's an apartment building, the levels stacked together like a fallen house of cards,, all around him Novi Grad lies shattered miles from her home.
He coughs, It feels like an entire city block has been crushed up and jammed down his throat, coating his lungs dry and raw. Something runs warm and tickling down the side of his face but he wipes the red away without thought.
He stumbles to his feet, falls, pushes himself back up, slips again, gathers himself, back up feels the tiles of a roof beneath his hands and stands up again. He's hurting, something is alarmingly numb in his leg, but he keeps his balance.
Such a strange dream - a nightmare? - in the first few missions after Carl had been born he'd find himself jolting awake in a cold sweat, from dreams of work, of being in the middle of a firefight while Heike stood in the open street, Carl bundled in her arms, her eyes - silent and accusing - on Zemo's as bullets flew through the air.
Now he dreams that Novi Grad Municipal Library lays scattered in the fields that lead to his childhood home.
A strange dream.
His feet lead him home, slow, much much slower than the eight year old running fast, slower even than the teen with his affected disinterest in hurrying anywhere.
There's too much debris, there's something wrong with his knee, every moment or so a wave of darkness blinds him and he stills for fear of losing the bile in his stomach. Night falls and he gets turned around, loses his way like he hasn't since he was a toddler, crying not forty metres from something familiar. Daybreak finds his feet back on the right path, his head feeling like a swollen grapefruit, the skin warm and too full of fluid.
There's a building on his father's home. Or parts of one. Like a cartoon, one dropped atop the other. There's a noise in the air, a whining keening noise that follows him as he barely keeps his feet tripping over chunks of concrete and scraping his shins on shattered pieces of metal piping. Infrastructure usually hidden in the ground now scattered and strewn like pick up sticks.
There's no door. There's no windows, bricks that no longer hold their shape bar his way at every turn, but he pays blood, tears his hands to pieces, to gain access. The beautiful blue Turkish tiles his mother had laid in the kitchen the year they in turn had laid her to rest cuts sharp, carving deep furrows in his skin when he comes across it.
An admonishment from beyond the grave.
A curse, perhaps.
A warning, telling him to stop, to turn back, that there is nothing beneath the rubble that he will want to see.
And yet.
He must.
He digs.
And he digs.
His hands touch flesh and he recoils even as his grip tries to find purchase on too cold skin.
His father, he knows already, from the cut of his coat, from some innate knowledge that tells him the body at his knees is his father. Tears mix with blood, both sliding freely down his face, as he digs his father's body free. There's something in his grasp, he's holding someone, arms wrapped tightly around someone. And Zemo knows.
and beneath.
and beneath.
and beneath.
The ground caves in on him as it never did the day Sokovia died. The space he'd dug now presses him down into the earth. Its dark and its cold; he can't move, he can't breathe, skeletal hands claw at him, drawing him further into the rubble, further into the dark.
He can't move.
He can't breathe.
He gasps himself awake, choking on non-existent dust and dirt.
A dream.
No.
A memory. Warped by the bitterness in his heart perhaps, but a memory nonetheless.
There's no relief in waking, cold sweat chilling his skin, the stark relief of being free from the rubble, from the stench of death, from the mortifying corpses of loved ones being slowly warped by nature and time (natural and utterly unnatural, hand in hand)
His hands and arms ache and cramp from how he's been clenching them in his sleep.
The light of the television casts the cheap motel room in a dull glow.
On the screen Captain America looks very sincere and speaks hollow words about loss, not one hair out of place as the poor TV reception distorts his perfect face, his voice sounds heartbroken as he speaks words of remorse for a new city the Avengers have visited and once again left in ruins, for the lives that no longer lived because their paths crossed with the greater good. The same words they used for Johannesburg, the same platitudes they used for Novi Grad.
A newsreader replaces Steve Rogers perfectly symmetrical face, her serious voice explaining a new law named after his dead country. She seems to think a leash will somehow solve the problems of the past.
They seek to police where the only true answer is to disband them, how the world can't see the constant trail of destruction caused by men who think themselves above humanity is beyond him.
Anger swells up in his chest and he can't breathe for the knife fury plants in his throat, his fists shake, his lungs burn with breath held as the emotions threaten to overwhelm him, to drown him in the feelings that rip and tear in his chest demanding him do something, desperate for the pain to be shared, to explode out of him. The plastic remote in his hand creaks, just like him it's on the edge of shattering.
As fast as it comes, the rage wanes, swamped by the memory of the feeling of Heike's hands on him, of her face, determined and lovely. By the joy in his son's voice, six years old and seeing his favorite super hero in the sky; red, bright and brilliant like nothing in nature.
The fire of anger swamped by despair, banked by the blanket of depression that has dogged him since the clarity of his situation was realized two very long years ago.
Outside his room the shapes of people become shadows passing by his window, the sounds of American voices soft and garbled.
His soul aches for home so suddenly he's left breathless. Home sick for a crater in the earth and the monument erected by the country that devoured the largest portion of Sokovia.
It had taken him a frustrating amount of time, translating and decoding the Hydra files that Black Widow had released into the world. He wonders if anyone else had poured over them so much, the sheer amount of files, of superfluous information all encoded, most useless, studied them til all the little gems of information came into focus.
It's how he finds himself in Cleveland, hunting one of the last surviving commanders of The Winter Soldier Program.
He wonders at the amount of Russian ex-operatives, of Hydra ex-operatives that found themselves in sleepy American cities, living out hermit lives in a society at war with theirs. Did it gall them everyday? Or did they live out their capitalist desires while believing themselves above those around them. From Zemo's surveillance, Karpov barely left his home at all, paranoid and shady, in neighborhood that looked the other way if strange noises sounded from behind windows blocked by black out curtains. What was the point of him remaining alive? Was he bitter from the shame? To go from holding the leash of the most effective assassin in the last seventy years, reduced to glaring out from behind curtains in a country where few spoke his tongue, and even less cared for his so called achievements?
It didn't matter.
In the end nothing really mattered much.
Perhaps watching a man slowly drown in his basement sink was not in the spirit of Heike's words - do what you have to do then come home - but he has a mission and Zemo is nothing if not persistent. He's good at thinking on his feet, he will find the proof that will pull the Avengers apart from within. He will watch them tear each other apart, and then finally he will be able to go home.
Not to the quiet solemn crater lake that holds the remnants of Novi Grad.
Not to the soviet bloc era esque statue, its happy family set in stone making mockery of all those that had been separated forever.
He knows there is only one way to truly be home again.
In his dreams his family lay beneath familiar bricks and the rubble of a city torn to literal shreds by super humans, they do not rest peaceful, and there can be no peace until his war is over.