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sholiofic · 3 years

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Hi! Idk if you're taking prompts but one of your fic gave me this idea: Sam notices symptoms of touch-deprivation in Zemo and, Sam being Sam, he wants to help in any way he can. So he starts by touching Zemo whenever there's and opportunity and Zemo goes from being deeply weirded out to secretly looking forward to a familiar touch.

Also posted on AO3: Hands On.

This lovely prompt set off my latest prompt fest, so I hope you're still around, anon, and feel free to leave another!

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The first time Sam touches Zemo—just a casual hand on his back, propelling him forward in Madripoor, nothing special about it—he feels Zemo flinch.

It's not that big of a thing. They were just shot at. Anyone's gonna be a little jumpy, even their resident hyper-controlled fur-collar-coat asshole.

But it's a recurring thing. Zemo doesn't really have a problem touching people, although he doesn't go out of his way to do it. But people touching him is something that he ... reacts to. Sometimes he jerks away, sometimes he just kind of goes with it with an almost hedonistic sort of pleasure, even if it's something like Walker handcuffing him to a piece of machinery.

Man's been in solitary for years, Sam thinks. And before that, his entire family died, and he built a whole new life around a single-minded revenge quest. It must be like going cold turkey on human touch, from a wife and son and the military camaraderie of squadmates and friends, to being completely and utterly isolated, physically and otherwise.

And he's already figured out that Zemo is kind of a people person, in certain ways. Not a complete extrovert. Zemo is a private person who plays his cards close to the vest. But you can't be around him for long without noticing that he tends to gravitate towards people. He likes an audience. He likes doing things for people, feeding them and that kind of thing. There's a sort of old-world noblesse oblige attitude about it that grates on Sam, but on some level, he's pretty sure it's genuine. There's no telling what Zemo was like in the old days, but these days, he likes to be around people.

Or, more simply: he's lonely.

He's lonely and touch-starved and there's no way Sam can not feel sympathy for that.

It's not until the second time they get Zemo out of prison—on a semi-official sort of work release this time, with a tracker that they all pretend Zemo can't disable anytime he wants to, and a second, secret one that they're pretty sure he doesn't know about, of Wakandan make—that Sam actually finds himself doing something about it. Or trying to. It's not like Zemo's touch-starvation hell isn't of his own making, but by this point, Sam actually kind of reluctantly likes the guy, and—well, he wants to.

So he does.

It's casual, just a touch here, a hand on the shoulder there; if nothing else, he can at least get Zemo past that startle reflex. Sam is a hands-on person anyway, and he's already done something kind of like this with Bucky. Very different circumstances, of course, and it was really more ... accidental, with Bucky. But maybe that's just proof of concept.

He's pretty sure that Zemo notices something, but it's hard to say what, exactly, Zemo thinks is going on. Initially, at least, Zemo seems to treat it as a slight infringement on his personal autonomy, sort of like a cat being petted without permission. When Sam puts a friendly hand on his arm or shoulder, Zemo glances down at it with a slightly affronted expression and then ignores it.

There is a very interesting week in which Sam gets the general impression that he and Zemo have somehow become involved in an escalating series of tiny acts of combative friendship: Zemo tries to feed them enough tea to float the Paul & Darlene, paired with small shortbread cookies, while Sam brings coffee every day and pats Zemo's shoulder a lot, and Bucky looks like he's one more shortbread cookie away from pitching them both into the Gulf of Mexico.

But somehow they settle into a sort of ... truce isn't quite the right word, probably, but it's a situation where Sam treats Zemo exactly as he would, say, one of his dad's old fishing buddies, with a casual, everyday sort of hands-on camaraderie, and Zemo at the very least doesn't try to stab or poison him, so he's going to call it a win.

Despite all the good intentions in the world, the Paul & Darlene is an absolutely terrible pursuit vessel for going after a suspected HYDRA smuggling speedboat. But they do actually catch up to them through Sam's insider knowledge of currents in the Gulf, which turns into a pitched battle on the fishing boat's deck, and the end result of that is Sam getting brained with a gaff hook while trying to get a HYDRA goon off Bucky's back, and falling over the railing into the clear silvergreen waters of the Gulf.

It's Zemo, he hazily understands afterwards, who dives in after him—Zemo who hands him up to Bucky on the deck, and Zemo who holds onto him while he coughs up about five gallons of seawater and Bucky steers them back toward the coast. (The speedboat, he gathers later is, is left bobbing with a GPS tracker and a handful of HYDRA operatives tied up on deck for SHIELD to come collect.)

"How is he?" Bucky asks from above Sam, a shadow cast across the painfully bright sky. Sam submits to being manhandled down into the boat's single small berth, and collapses in dizzy misery as his head injury combines with the rocking of the boat to produce a highly unpleasant mix of sensory input. Also, his throat and the back of his nose still feels like they were cored out with salt, and he has the mother of all headaches. Someone—he's really not sure which of them, honestly—gets some water and painkillers into him, and then he turns his face to the bulkhead and pulls the scratchy wool blanket over him and finds some solace in the boat's steady rocking, a callback to his childhood.

He wakes an unknown time later to the rhythmic jarring of the boat skipping over waves. They're moving at a good clip; he can almost read the speedometer from the rhythm of their thumping impacts on the ocean's slow, rolling wavetops. He tries to move, but there's a drag on his arm. He turns his aching head sluggishly to find Zemo sitting beside the bed, reading a book by a bedside lamp in the shadowed interior of the Paul & Darlene's cabin. Clear gold sunshine comes down through the steps leading up to the pilothouse, where there's a shadow that is probably Bucky, piloting the boat as Sam taught him.

Sam tries to raise his hand to his face, and that's when he realizes that Zemo's hand is wrapped loosely around his wrist. And Sam suddenly gets where Zemo is coming from; it is actually kind of strange having Zemo holding onto him like that.

"What?" Zemo says, all innocence, when Sam looks at him. "Do you need anything? Water? Tea? A trip to the head, perhaps?"

"No, I'm fine," Sam mutters, and slouches down in the bed.

Zemo goes back to reading, but his hand stays on Sam's arm, fingers lightly curled over his pulse point, until Sam drifts back to sleep.

#tfatws #the falcon and the winter soldier #sam wilson #helmut zemo #bucky barnes

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