After She Left

I promise to leave

"You always saw the best in me

Although I know I could make it hard

But you could always make me laugh

You'd take the good, you'd take the good from all the bad"

Dean Lewis's "Time To Go"

Bucky did everything in his power to get a moment alone with Zemo. Though Sam didn't want things to go on behind his back, it was clear that his guilt of riffling up the ugliness with Ophelia's death got the better of him, and he relented. As Bucky was given permission to speak with Zemo, he walked down the long-winded, labyrinth-like halls. With his hands balled into fists, each step felt as though he were entirely made of lead. It weighed him down, breaking his bones, crushing his spirit.

Because he was going to come face to face with the reason Ophelia was dead. And it pained him to know that they needed him. They needed him for his knowledge on the super soldier serum. Moments before he stopped at the cell he knew contained Zemo, Bucky paused. Standing before him was Ophelia.

Clad in a sundress she wore a long time ago, when things were easier. He had a photo of her in that dress, one of the only photos he had. It ripped him apart to look at them, but would utterly decimate him to lose them.

"Do you really think you'll find what you're looking for by doing this?" she asked.

He blinked, unable to respond. Not only would someone, possibly, hear him, but he did not want to engage with this version of her. The version his mind manifested, filling her with the thoughts of his own head.

"I was always able to know what was running through your mind, Bucky," she said with a soft smile, but a look in her eyes that was unnatural to her usual soft demeanour.

"No," he said to her. "I won't find what I'm looking for, because I'm not looking for anything."

"Is that so?" Her thick eyebrow arched. "You're not looking to make amends?"

"Not with him," Bucky responded through gritted teeth. He continued down the hall, with only a brief glance over his shoulder to ensure that no one was following him. Ophelia disappeared like a wisp as she neared, and then before he knew it, he was standing outside Zemo's cell.

The man was seated on his bunk, a far nicer cell then Bucky had been given in this place. He shuddered at the vague memory. How he had been put in a glass cage, and Zemo had used his trigger words. How he had nearly killed Ophelia.

That it had been Zemo who stopped him from doing it.

When he looked up, eyes stinging, he was filled with an old, tired hatred.

"Longing. Rusted. Seventeen." Zemo walked walking up to the door between them, staring him down, a playful look in his dead eyes.

"Those days are over," Bucky told Zemo, knowing it in his bones that what HYDRA put in him, those in Wakanda were able to get out of him. He suffered so much to have that part of him ripped out, and it had been a moment of pure relief, something he didn't experience often.

"I know," Zemo said, his voice dripping with condescension. "I just wanted to see how the new you reacted to the old words."

They stood on either side of a glass wall – one that Bucky could easily get through, but one Zemo could not. For now, he was nothing but words. Harmless unless Bucky did what he was planning. Breaking out one of the worst criminals, and one who cleaved Bucky's heart in half when he caused Ophelia's death at that, made his skin crawl.

"Something is still in there." Zemo cocked his head to the side, a wickedness in the glint of his eyes. "Hunt. Twenty-Two. Winter. Dweller. Lie. Chrysalid. Nine. Idle. Prey. Relinquish."

Bucky's body turned to ice at these words. Though he both knew and did not know them, they sent his body into a total panic. Torn between rage and desperation, two things he was very familiar with, he settled with shutting his eyes for a moment. Thinking of her smiling face. She used to do yoga to keep herself calm. God he loved her.

"Those were her words," Zemo said, confirming what Bucky suspected. He hadn't known her trigger words. Now, they were branded onto his soul.

Zemo looked at him, sensing his placidity as a reason to continue to taunt him. "She was never supposed to get hurt. But... anything that tarnished by HYDRA..."

"Don't. You don't get to say that. You knew nothing about her," Bucky spat. From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of her, and he refused to look. But she lingered. The sweet scene of bargain shampoo filling Bucky's senses.

Zemo drew him back in. "I knew everything about her. More, it seems, than you."

"If she were still here," he faltered only a second, "I wouldn't need you. And trust me, she did more for this world than you ever did," Bucky said, eyes dead pan. He saw her manifest beside him now, she too was looking at Zemo.

"I rid the world of monstrosities like you. What did she ever do?" Zemo asked, not aware of the fact Bucky was seeing her ghost.

Zemo waited for the answer, but it was Ophelia's head cocked to the side, big green eyes ever eager for knowledge, that gave him the words. "She saved the world from me."

"Did she?" he asked in that tone.

That tone that made Bucky question every damn thing he knew, every thing he thought, that question made him doubt it all. But then Ophelia smiled. Until now, every single thing her ghost did had been a fragment of Bucky's mind, the torment he endured, the guilt he reaped, she was the voice for all those horrid thoughts that lived inside of him. The moment his words danced off his tongue, he knew he was making peace with her ghost.

He repeated the words, "She saved the world from me."

Hey, all! Thanks for reading! 

I'll be doing a time skip after this chapter - I have no desire to write the show in full, and so I'm going to jump ahead to another pivotal moment in the following chapter, and continue that for a bit. Only a couple more chapters left.