Chapter Text
When Bucky first woke up, he didn't remember what had happened. None of it.
He just felt sore but also loose almost like he had had a hard work-out (times a hundred), aching and exhausted, but good. Relaxed. Without a worry in the world... That only started when he realized that the room he was in was Wakandan.
Bucky hadn't been welcome in Wakanda since leading the Dora Milaje to Zemo at the Sokovia Memorial, or rather since freeing him, made official at the memorial. So naturally, he freaked out. Because he didn't remember jack shit about meeting any Wakandans in person since then and certainly not moving toward the country, so either he'd had to be moved while he had been out of it - which could mean unconscious or worse: in an alternative mental state - or he had lost the memories of coming here. So yeah, he freaked the fuck out.
With no small measure of despair he tried to recall the last thing that had happened and got around to picking up Zemo from the Raft and worrying about him because he had fallen ill. Seemingly. Something felt profoundly wrong about the thought of Zemo being ill and his stomach felt cold like it was being put into cryo as scenarios raced through his head.
Like maybe Zemo had actually been poisoned to incapacitate him, they might have been attacked... Hydra would never forget the Winter Soldier and after everything he had thwarted they definitely had unfinished business with Zemo. But that also felt wrong, so he hammered on his locked door, needing to know, needing to see Zemo.
That need was almost debilitating, actually. He felt like he could barely breathe if he didn't see Zemo right this second and that might have been the most alarming part of them all. Bucky had resolved some time ago that he was not acknowledging any thoughts or feelings regarding the other alpha. Nothing good could come out of...
Wait. Alpha?
Somehow... He was confused. Zemo was an alpha. A pretty damn dominant one, too. The kind that Bucky had to consciously refuse submitting to. But at the same time that idea didn't feel right. On a visceral level. It made no sense but he could almost imagine Zemo being an omega. He'd make a good one, small and puffy-cheeked as he was. Cute. Like a squishy little ball of fluff.
...Where was that thought coming from? Bucky was definitely confused. (And suddenly very horny.) But he could imagine Zemo as an omega dripping sex so well he could practically taste it...
Sam looked at the surveillance feed and back at T'Challa and Shuri.
"He really doesn't understand what's going on... Can just a rut do that? I never... I've seen folks do shit in it that they'd never do otherwise, including some vets that were coming off long term suppressant use and went so out of their nature they might as well have been on a cocktail of meth and LSD, but that was only during the rut, not several days after."
"With strong ruts some short-term memory loss is not that out of the ordinary and his blood work was all over the place, but we can't be sure how much of that is the festering bond. Chances are, he'll remember what he did when he calms down."
When Sam looked back at the feed. It somehow looked more like an 'if', actually. Bucky was still grinding his jaws and licking his lips, swallowing excessive saliva every other minute as he pawed at the door with a look like he might try chewing his way through it. The infected bond was trying to be completed. And hell, with Zemo's state if might be best for both of them if it was. In the short term. But T'Challa was right, even fully accepting that Bucky had been under the influence of Zemo's heat pheromones and was not quite culpable, that had still been rape and they couldn't make it even worse by bonding the pair against either one's will. (Especially not against Zemo's.)
They weren't Ross. Or whatever fucked up bastard had given him the green light. Because there was no way Ross would put his neck out without insurances from above. But the Dora were on that and they had left no doubt that every single person involved would pay for what they had done.
It was almost odd, really. How they were so protective of the very man they had openly hated and hunted for getting around them and killing their king. But as Ayo had put it:
'He is not the same man. The regicide was an alpha. And he was a prisoner that they raped to his death. This is an omega, an innocent omega, and they mutilated him and all but tied him down for the painted dogs.'
He hadn't really gotten the full meaning of her disgusted curse on the first try and he was pretty sure that he was still missing like three layers of meanings, but some careful questions for T'Challa later he had a somewhat better grasp on things. For one thing, painted dogs ate their prey while it was still alive and felt every bite and tear.
But the main thing Sam needed to wrap his head around was the absolute separation of Zemo before and Zemo after and that had much more to it: The vibranium in their soil, for all its advantages, somehow caused Wakandans to give birth to more than twice as many alphas as most nations but less than a quarter of the usual number of omegas.
Adding a higher risk of feralization and an apparently absolute unresponsiveness to omegafication, Wakanda seriously lacked omegas and many parts of it had come to idolize the rare subgender like a prize (and/or the price that they had had to pay for their vibranium, whose worth they consequently had to equal). Whoever wanted to court an omega better invest in vibranium courting gifts for a start.
Zemo was still Zemo as far as Sam was concerned, no matter the absolute horror they had put him through. (Shuri had hacked the Raft after the discrepancy of Zemo's official and actual gender had been joined by his castration scar - fucking hell, Sam still clenched his legs in sympathy, who even did that anymore?! - being just too fresh and then they had all but taken turns excusing themselves to go throw up as they reviewed the prison's records. So yeah, they knew. They knew how that fucker Ross had practically industrialized rape to the point where shorting Zemo's brain of nutrients and sleep with artificial 'day' cycles - that slowly grew from their twenty four to thirty and by the end almost fifty hours apiece to wear him down without letting him realize just how much time they were putting into breaking him - was almost a side-dish.)
But to the Wakandans alpha Zemo and omega Zemo were two fundamentally different people. Their worldview didn't seem to allow overlap between the subgenders. So the Zemo in their medbay right now was as innocent as a babe to them while the Zemo they had hated didn't exist anymore. Murdered in captivity by the man that they had personally delivered him to.
That had to be cause all sorts of mixed feelings... Shit, Sam felt like he might combust from the guilt of not checking how Zemo was treated. Or it would have been if not for the pure rage they all seemed to agree on feeling at Ross' somehow unproveable but still obvious combination of cloaking Zemo in absolute blockers and tampering with his suppressants to provoke an 'unforeseeable' heat.
Personally Sam wasn't sure if Bucky had been intended as the father since he himself had been around as well and he wasn't convinced that Ross as he presented himself now hadn't been hoping to provoke a gangbond to humiliate Zemo as much as he possibly could while making sure that none of the alphas who participated would feel overly possessive about the omega passed around between them.
(Which would still have been a fallacy as T'Challa had kindly corrected him. Gangbonding - or pack-bonding as the Wakandans called it - might make alphas less jealous of each other, but reduced possessiveness didn't mean reduced protectiveness for the omega. And the Wakandans should know, they practiced pack-bonding aplenty to make up for the distribution difference in their genders in ways most Western countries had outlawed as polygamy.)
But whatever Ross had been going for, it had resulted in a mutilated (yeah, Wakandans were really not okay with anyone daring to castrate an omega) Zemo and an about to be retraumatized Bucky, either of which would have been enough to spark the ire of the Dora Milaje. Both together? Man, he would have felt sorry for Ross if he didn't feel like that sick bastard deserved everything he had coming.
Unlike Bucky, who had to live with enough atrocities he had woken to remember himself committing because someone else had decided to use him for them. And unlike Zemo. Because not matter what he had done before...
He looked at the other video feed with Zemo's vitals surrounding his image on the display and realized that he might be a hypocrite. It was different. Because even if he rationally considered Zemo the same Zemo, he could still not see the insidious alpha he had feared would come to dominate them and especially Bucky with his mental tricks. He only saw a pregnant omega on life support.
It shouldn't be necessary, Wakanda's medicine was so unbelievably advanced that they had been able to heal Zemo's brain almost completely already. and none of the rest had been actively life-threatening. He was all but cured in ways no place but this miracle nation could have accomplished. But even the most futuristic technology couldn't just undo a fucked up bond.
Half his chest and face were red from the infection by now and the bite itself was swollen like a cancer and had to be lanced every few hours to drain the ichor and pus and relieve the pressure it kept putting on Zemo's carotid whenever it got bad enough. Not to mention the fever trying to cook Zemo's already vulnerable brain...
None of them had ever seen an infected bond so bad, least of all so fast. And with a look like she was swallowing bile Shuri had hypothesized that the unnaturally aggressive nature of the one-sided bond was due to the serum. It had made Bucky a more dominant alpha on a visceral level, so it had definitely affected at least some of his alpha glands. That it had also affected his bonding glands and the thus enhanced bonding proteins in his saliva would affect a bitten omega more heavily was a logical conclusion.
She had still assured them that as long as Zemo lived his body would be able to break down the partial bond like any other infection and as long as he remained on the support and got his regular draining and ice baths, he would be stable and get through it. Zemo should make a full recovery.
The only complication there was the fact that his body had to multitask keeping itself alive and keeping a blastocyst alive. Or dumbed down for him to understand (as compared to Shuri): Zemo should make it but he was probably about to miscarry. And even though Sam could absolutely not imagine Bucky having a baby with Zemo and Shuri had shown him a model of what the blastocyst would look like, which was very much not a baby and closer to a bacterium to his eyes, the alpha in him was anxious to save mother and child.
He just wasn't ready to do what that might take.
Because the primary way to cure an infected mate bond was to balance it, aka making sure Zemo and Bucky bonded completely. And the secondary way, since nobody wanted to tie an omega to his sort-of rapist for life, would be to replace it. Which would mean another alpha tying Zemo to them for life. All of which required Zemo's consent. And though Sam was torn, compelled to save the child, the Wakandans refused any discussion: No bond would be placed on any omega without their consent, even if waiting for him to be lucid again meant letting the baby die.
Not-yet-baby, they reminded him. And it didn't matter what anyone thought about what was in Zemo's best interest. The omega's consent was the only factor that mattered. So they would wait until he stabilized enough to ask, cooling his fever and draining his infection as rich nutrients flushed through his veins from the IV to give his body the best chance it had to fight off what had been forced on him.
Still Sam felt utterly helpless and frankly a little alone. And like he was going crazy. Something had to give...
And it did, if not in the order of priorities: Bucky remembered before Zemo managed to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. (He was on suicide watch straight away.) But after they told him about the pregnancy, the way he muttered about waiting to hear Zemo's choice did give them the impression that the risk wasn't imminent - unless Zemo's body did lose that extra cluster of cells inside it.
When Shuri's equipment produced scans of that cluster that deviated from the model, both Bucky and him were frantic, but she calmed them both. The cells, certainly affected by the serum still, had split more harshly than they should, ripping apart from each other more than regular cellular division required, that much was true. But she promised that that happened in normal pregnancies, too. Nothing was damaged, it had just resulted in multiple inner cell masses. Or for them: There was more than one embryo in the making. (Now they only had to make it to term.)
So Bucky had even more to freak out about. Like his guilt, his regret and the alpha hormones urging him to take the omega for his own were not enough yet. They were also expecting fucking twins. (By current estimate.) That was, if they lived...
But as the days passed, Zemo's fever did lower again and the sickly build-up in his bite slowed. And miraculously, he was still pregnant. (For now.) But with his overall state as it was getting, they had reason to hope that they only had to wait a little longer now.
Zemo woke slowly.
He had a headache, a high-pitched noise in one ear, a filthy taste in his mouth and no recollection of why he would be in what looked like a hospital out of a science fiction comic. But there was a huge window replacing one wall of the room that gave him a hint: Wakanda.
Bits and pieces trickled back in before the first nurse asked him how he was feeling. The machine. Its pumps and icy cage and the never-ending thrusting. Someone's hand intruding on his belly while it was blown up like a bulb of heated glass about to blow. He didn't know who the hand belonged to, but he figured that it was the same reason his hole felt like it had been sawed apart and stitched back together the wrong way.
When a young woman of dark complexion approached him, he understood just from her eyes that the foul taste, headache and dry throat were thanks to a failed bond-bite. Another one. He remembered an overly ambitious omega digging for gold by trying to bond-bite him when he was twenty one like it was yesterday. (Except that he didn't remember yesterday.)
His father had had her killed as soon as he had sweated the infection out. But it hadn't felt this bad. And still, the girl here and now said that he was on the mend. She said that Ross had been summoned by the Dora Milaje to answer for his crimes and Zemo could picture that summoning as being stuffed in a black sack in the night even though he couldn't picture a Ross or what his crimes might have been. (But he didn't mention that part. Or much of anything at all.)
The whole situation made more sense when she started a row of questions he instantly identified as a test for his mental capacities, though it put him on edge and the increasing beeping of a machine made his headache worse. An unfortunate give-away that hardened his suspicions: He had also had his last mind tests in close correlation to torture - and his body certainly felt like that was what had happened. The tests had been of different natures, however. Gauging his recovery or whether he had broken and talked – performed by his own side. Or to make him think that he was rescued while he was actually being more subtly interrogated – performed by the enemy.
Vaguely he thought that he even remembered the question. He wanted EKO Scorpion. (He?)
Well, they wouldn't have it, whoever they were.
He shut down as best he could and sent his mind away, ignoring the girl to his fullest. He ignored the food offer some time later, too. But he noticed the IV, so he knew that they could still drug him to their hearts' content. Unfortunately, however, he didn't see the camera's they had doubtlessly placed in the room, so he couldn't determine any dead angles to extract the IV unseen.
Admittedly, he didn't feel unduly drugged. No more than his rotten physical state required. (A great excuse, really.) Not from what he could feel anyway. Or maybe he was more drugged than he realized, because he could swear that there were bumps on his chest that looked almost like breasts. Ridiculous. But then, sleep deprivation alone would cause hallucinations, no drugs required.
Or so he thought. One time while his bandages were changed and he was not far enough away, he saw his chest. There were breasts. They were lacerated with deep bites and neatly stitched. And real... It took days for him to realize how he had breasts and when he did it broke something in him. The festering bond was from an alpha, not an omega this time. He was the omega this time. He had been bitched and neutered...
The hand on his belly was back in his mind and he said nothing at all. When a hand touched his face he bit his tongue to suppress a noise and after that they made him wear a bite guard. (At least for a little while, eyeing him with suspicion.) Vaguely he did remember choking, but not on a piece of tongue. He remembered a belt. Hot breath in his aching neck calling him a fucking slut. And thrusting that never stopped.
At some point the girl stopped coming to question him. A vaguely familiar man replaced her. He made Zemo think of a cat, but unlike an actual cat, he talked and tried to make Zemo talk, too. So Zemo clamped his jaw as shut as he could. Another black man replaced him some time later. This one made him think of a pimp, though he didn't know why. Ah, wait, an American accent. He almost rolled his eyes.
There was a hand on his arm and he felt the phantom touch on his belly along with it. It made his skin crawl.
He was missing something. His head felt... porous. They might have overdone it with him this time. More incompetence than malice, he snorted in his mind, and still couldn't place it. But when he thought about what that meant for him, he remembered that he had nobody left to go home to anyway.
All he could do was to protect his secrets by taking them to his grave. But sadly, their cameras were good. And now he was packaged in padded restraints with everything sharp enough to cut or long enough to sling well out of his reach. (He almost felt the stirrups holding him open and in place for their machine.) They also tried talking through his defenses again, though no one was actively hurting him - right now.
That didn't fool him. They could tie him down and invade of his body however they wanted, but nobody would get into his mind. He kept his guard well up.
Until he suddenly didn't anymore: He knew that noise...
He let himself see through his eyes and they widened so far they teared up when they caught on the ultrasound. It was gurgling with the blurry sound of a fetal heartbeat. Something was off about it. And not just the interference of his own cacophony. But there was a baby. Well, it looked like it still had gills and a tail, but that was normal for all vertebrate embryos at an early stage... Grundgütiger, there was an embyo...
But why would they show him... and then he realized that the ultrasound wand was on his belly. He viscerally hated a touch on his belly, it felt vile and invasive and disgusting even without the slick of the wand, but there was an embryo...
For the first time he looked up and found the girl back at his side, though the men were looking over at him from behind her. A part of him felt like he had just lost... Threatening children was a perfidious way to interrogate someone. (But that didn't mean that it didn't work.) If anyone hurt his Carl he-
"Zemo, do you know where you are?"
His mind raced like his heart. His men or his child? What a choice... He didn't want to have to make it! Maybe there was still a way out... He should comply - for now.
"The Raft."
Now their eyes widened almost comically and he frowned at himself, because something felt wrong about that, but then all three were already talking over each other to say that he wasn't there anymore and he would never have to go back there, either. The girl even claimed that nobody would ever go back there with a slightly maniacally grin that made him wonder if the Raft was still standing or if it had accidentally suffered some kind of catastrophic system failure that had forced its evacuation before the entire complex had irrecoverably flooded and become just another man-made habitat for fish.
It made him squirm with uncertainty. Any half-decent interrogator trying to goad him into a false sense of security would act like that, but it didn't really ping on his mental radar for deception. They seemed genuine enough and the girl appeared too young for the training required to trick him. (But the Red Room's little spiders were trained younger than that.)
Undecided on their honesty, he resigned himself to actively listening to them from now on. At least for a while. And he wanted to keep his little boy's heartbeat... One of the men then decided that he should rest some more and the girl with the matching accent mumbled something about it being too early to tell the sex and it being four by current count, but both men seemed to agree that they could talk about all that later and just herded her out to leave Zemo to his heartbeat.
He listened to it for hours as it nothing else existed in the world. It took hours for him to realize that it wasn't Carl's. He hadn't payed much attention to anyone's parting words, but he'd caught them. They just took a while to sink in. Carl was a ghost of his past. This- these were different babies. (But they were his.) They were growing in his inverted body, put there no doubt by his rapist. (...But they were also still his.)
Straining his aching head he tried to figure out who had ruined him. Who could have? Who had put these babies inside him? (Did it matter? They were also still his.) But it might matter if the alpha who had proven strong enough to subjugate him decided to take his babies away from him. Laws differed wildly, some countries favoring that children remain with their mother, some (many) favoring the rights of the father. After all, a capable provider could get a nanny in a blink, a stay-at-home-omega however was often without prospects or any means to support the child.
They could even be taken away from him and the father both, seeing as he was unmated and imprisoned. Either tended to be justification enough. God, he wanted to ask. But the first rule of being interrogated was always to not show your weak spots. And this was definitely his.
So instead he tried to collect himself, to recover physically and mentally, to remember who the father was... But he didn't remember being bitched. He just remembered being tied down, poked and pumped and flooded and penetrated with no face attached. He remembered the voice in his neck calling him a wanton bitch, just begging for a knot, a lying little slut, gonna ruin your hole, stuff you like a turkey and breed you full till you pop, gon-
No, he didn't want to go there. His mind couldn't put all the pieces together, some didn't even seem to exist as more than shadows that he couldn't hope to catch. But he remembered enough, he thought. Not pelmeni or pierogi, Maultaschen or Knödel, ravioli or tortellini, empanada or enchilada, or any form of dumpling, not goose or chicken, squid, stomach or pig's feet and certainly no vegetable. The alpha had said 'turkey'.
And only an American would associate filling most with a turkey of all things. (Who else would serve such an ashenly dry sort of poultry whole? Its heart fried in slices with those of its peers, its necks cooked until the meat melted off the bones and you could pull out the marrow, its legs baked in bacon-wraps, its breasts for the dogs or at best in a strong goulash with boar fat and seared pickle strips, that was how the stupid bird could be made palatable, not in one piece. Not if it should have any taste or texture at all.)
The foul taste of decay hardened in his mouth with the association and he eyed the American who had once again come to visit him with sharp distrust, but he was not likely to be the father. The man wasn't nearly dominant enough to have bitched him and his bite didn't throb more at this stranger's proximity than it did any other time.
His children's father didn't seem to be around...
Perhaps they were indeed serious about having gotten him out of that situation. About him being safe. But he didn't feel that way and even though they claimed only to care for him as he recovered from his ordeal, asking no questions about EKO Scorpion or anyone else, he didn't fall for it.
Unfortunately, that didn't make it any less of a gut punch when they did show their hand. Not by bombarding him with what they wanted to know or anything amateur like that, no, they started off with a carefully neutral tone from a well-masked face, showing no preference for either answer as they ripped his heart right out in words:
"Do you want terminate or continue your pregnancy?"
In other words: We have your unborn children for hostages, so play nice or they're dead. (And then we can rape some more into you until you become attached and do the whole thing all over again.) The bitter thing was: If the last attempt to bitch him had worked, back in his youth, and he had ended up pregnant then, he would have ASKED to get it ended and done with so he could continue his life with only his subgender lost. But after everything? After Carl and Heike and his papa and whole country?)
He would try to protect his men and hope for the best, knowing as little as he did for reasons just like this. But he couldn't lose another child.
"I want to keep them."
Bucky spent the next hour near heaving with need.
His doctor cursed up a storm - mostly cursing Bucky's puppy eyes for getting them to give him access to the surveillance of Zemo's room. But honestly, his hormones probably wouldn't have calmed in the first place if he had not been allowed to see for himself that his the omega was alright. Only the certainty that his omega was fine, breathing and sleeping so peacefully, had been able to settle him. Sort of.
In all fairness his need to be close to Zemo hadn't abated nearly as fast as Zemo's subconscious searching behaviors for his alpha, but the nervous check-up Shuri had insisted on after his need stayed beyond Zemo's had given them a clear enough message: Bucky's hormone levels trying to complete the bond had returned to near-normal just as fast (equally slowly, more like) as Zemo's. So the continued urge hadn't been caused by his body's reaction to the incomplete bond. There was no biochemical reason of stimulus meeting receptors in his brain. It was him. Just him, wanting to be near Zemo.
Maybe the heat and bite had just brought to the surface what Sam had been saying long before: Bucky wanted that baron. (And not just physically. He had... feelings. Undetermined ones!) Even when they had both been alphas, he had been drawn to him. Now he was past denying it. Although they were pretty certainly also past any chance of that happening now that Bucky had all but raped the man... (God, he had been so wrong. They had fucking BITCHED HIM?!?! But why hadn't he said anything? No, it was not his fault. He had probably been too traumatized.)
So Bucky might or might not have been obsessively hanging over the camera feeds to watch Zemo day and night and hear his voice and every breath. But they had both been getting better, blood-work-wise. Until Zemo had responded to the ultrasound and Bucky had been on the edge of his seat, praying that the staring meant that Zemo wouldn't choose the termination.
But Zemo hadn't been in any state to choose at first, no matter how awake he had been. He had technically passed the cognitive tests for his brain damage and certainly displayed more suspicion than confusion when anyone talked to him, but Shuri had remained worried ever since Zemo hadn't realized - if only for a moment - that he was not on the Raft anymore.
They had tried to test him more unconventionally so he couldn't just recite long familiar answers and actually had to think. And finally, she had asked THE question. And Zemo... oh, god, he actually wanted to carry Bucky's babies. To KEEP them! Like he didn't just mean until birth, but after as well! Like raising them... Like a family...!
The alpha in Bucky almost gasped with the need to claim his omega - properly this time - so they could be that family.
So his doc could complain all he wanted about sympathetic hormone effusions or whatever ('fresh daddy hormones' in Sam's words), he honestly couldn't be bothered to care. Even if he had to stay apart. Even if he could only ever be part of Zemo's life as an observer from afar, he felt high with happiness that Zemo wanted his babies.
He felt high like that for weeks as Zemo got more talkative. They were still taking things easy and chatting more than asking him anything - questions always made his heart rate monitor blip and it was a stab in all their guts to guess that he might have PTSD from being questioned (aka tortured) on the Raft. But even that lessened (slightly) with time.
Only the bond was still a stubborn little bitch, clinging to them like a fungus well past the time it would have taken for any non-superalpha bite to have faded away. (Bucky wasn't actually sad about that, but guilty about the fact that he wasn't.)
As it turned out, however, they all might end up glad that some of it remained. Because when Zemo entered the next trimester and the little ones started to grow, they all came to understand a different problem:
Zemo's risk of a miscarriage had gone near zero, with all embryos clinging to his womb as stubbornly as ticks through his infection and certainly now after his body had mostly recovered. The problem was just that they sucked him dry like ticks as well. A nurse now had to exchange his IV bag every few hours to give him the needed nutrients to support his pregnancy. Despite the fact that he was eating normally by this point.
And at first it was easy to ignore, especially when every look at his baby tiny little baby bump could make Bucky tear up with fatherly bliss. And loss at the fact that he couldn't touch it. His inner alpha was maliciously glad that Zemo seemed viscerally uncomfortable with anyone (else) touching his belly, but he still wanted to feel it. So much...
The bump was early, too. Likely due to the fact that there were now FOUR mini-Buckies in there. (Shuri had seemed relieved that they hadn't split and become even more, but four was still a LOT.) But that as well was a problem. They were not just four, they were also very much mini-Buckies. Each one, genetically identical as the monozygotic quartet was, had a metabolism like a supersoldier.
Shuri ordered the bags exchanged every other hour now, then hourly. And Zemo got switched from real food to smoothies full of easy to process calories and building materials for the growing supersoldiers in his belly. The bump still seemed to grow even faster than it actually did through the sharpening contrast to all the rest of Zemo's body as it thinned down.
The alpha in him rejoiced as the plumpness it saw, three already big and ever bigger bulges of promise... (Zemo's breasts were swelling early, though Shuri couldn't tell if that was also because of the serum in his womb and neck or a complication from his omegafication.)
But there was a good kind of obscene, like in pornos, and the bad kind also called grotesque. The lecherous part of his brain didn't care if it got to see an omega it wanted with huge tits and a belly round from his pups. But the other part that he had denied for too long became increasing agitated as they ran more tests and then others with grim and soon anxious faces.
In the end, they cut him off from the displays and Ayo stuck to his side with two more of the Dora Milaje in case he tried to do something stupid.
Ever since admitting his weakness, Zemo had been careful to indulge them.
They still hadn't revealed their final goal, but after the Raft's failure to break him and these people's clear distaste for its methods, he should not be shocked that they would play the long game. Their questions were easy at first. Harmless. So harmless amid their care that he would have no trouble answering.
That kept him present and chafed at his defenses. In the Sokovian Military Intelligence, this method was referred to as cold smoking, in his German training they had gone with sous vide and a crooked CIA agent his scorpions had captured once had called it slow-burning. Either way, there were two ways to torture people, just like they were two ways to tenderize meat: A ton of heat in a short time or little heat for a long while. Both got the meat soft in the end.
When pressed for time or simply lacking finesse, people often hot smoked their targets with intense pain. That risked killing the target or its brain shutting down. It was also what torture training protected against the best, but cold smoking worked on a different level.
It was psychological, pervasive and so powerful a target could be turned and used against its own former masters. Zemo had been a great cold smoker in his day, convincing captives little by little that they wanted to help him, actually. He'd set more than a handful free to go back to their organizations as moles, to gather even more, fresh intel for him even after he had already squeezed them for everything they'd had.
Now, being asked only about how he felt, about what flavors he liked, about whether he had thought about baby names yet, he could feel them building a relationship, building trust - the key ingredients to any good cold smoking. He could practically see the baby steps they were leading him on.
Soon they would start asking things he was uncomfortable with but that would still seem relatively harmless. Then they would push for things that would have been critical but might be outdated already and thus arguably also still not the most vital to protect. Perhaps about secret bases and safe houses in Sokovia that everyone knew were destroyed and thus useless. Then the questions would start creeping toward more important things, but each question he answered would subconsciously make him more ready to answer the next.
They started asking him about Sokovia even earlier than he had predicted. All 'harmless' things for now. Things about his family. His hobbies, his living conditions, edging answers about his former home security out of him as if by coincidence... It was always a bit like a train derailing in slow motion. And even seeing it happen couldn't completely stop it.
Not when the one doing it knew their psychology and how to provoke trust on a biological level.
But then, they didn't even have to wait as long as a normal cold smoking to soften up a tough target would take: All too soon it started with little frowns where he could see them, making him worried for his children - boons for any interrogator - and then there came the tests and the withholding what was going on from him until he burned to know... before the inevitable choice:
His body wasn't strong enough to support his babies. It held out for now, but at the rate they were going, he might not survive the pregnancy.
Well, the joke was on them: He didn't mind if he died! (He only worried what they might do to his children once they became useless as hostages...) But no, they wouldn't actually let him die. They still wanted something from him. Only... he really felt weak. Lethargic and aching, disproportinate with his skin stretched tight over the obscene distortions of his changing body... And with his defenses crumbling, the mostly but never completely gone infection ultimately flared up again, weakening him further in a vicious cycle.
When that happened, the 'might' became a 'would'. He would not survive this pregnancy. Not without some drastic measures...
But that was okay. He had nothing else planned but to bring these wonders into the world. It was okay... right until the girl told him that it increasingly looked like he wouldn't even live long enough to give birth. Perhaps not even long enough for the fetuses to be viable outside the womb. So they would die with him.
An abortion could save his life, she told him. They would do it in a heartbeat, too. He trusted that without second-guessing.
The other option was a full bond, so the infection would be out of the equation and he could leech off his alpha to share the burden draining him dry. The girl even assured him that the bite seemed faded enough for an alpha of his choice (emphasis on the choice) to overbite it, replacing the incomplete bond to his rapist (though she skirted around that word) with a healthy one to someone else.
Neither was a good option, but an abortion was no option for him at all. Not anymore. But another alpha? The girl assured him that he could have a hundred volunteers in a day, happy to undergo any application process to make sure that he felt safe and cared for as he should be.
That sounded odd to him. Where he came from, a used slut knocked up by another didn't have many suitors. But she seemed sure. The American also offered, if in a confusing manner, mumbling about knowing that they didn't really have this type of relationship, promising to never touch him again once it was done, to never abuse his power and so on and on.
He said that he blamed himself for letting it happen. That Bucky was beside himself with guilt and regret as well...
And that name wrung through him like a church bell dropping from its tower. Just not quite Bucky. No, James. Storm gray eyes that lit up bright blue like the open sky when the light hit them right. The former Winter Soldier. The man to whom had offered his life once. An alpha full of power yet so ready to submit in Madripoor. An alpha who actually cared about him, before any of this happened. An alpha he almost remembered his twisted body yearning for...
It had, hadn't it? It had wanted him like a slut, fucking bitch luring him in 'cause he's so desperate for his knot, hating on supersoldiers just to pull one into his bed to fuck him like the whore he was an-
…That was James' voice. James was the father of his children. (No wonder a human wasn't enough to feed them.) And with that thought there was a spark of distance between him and them. But they were also still his children, no matter what else they were. And no matter who might have used James (once again) to break him down like this - he shouldn't be surprised, what greater alpha was there who could have done it? - he knew the former prisoner of war well enough to know that no stranger would care better for his children. (Or even could, with what they were.)
So there was no question at all.
“Zemo? You still with me? If you have any wishes, conditions or-”
“James.”
“What?”
“Does he not want me anymore? Or does- Is he unwell?”
The darker American gaped at him. Perhaps he had been rude not to politely decline his offer first.
“He's sick with worry but nothing else. We're all worried for you, man.”
“Don't be. I'll be fine if he completes the bond. Unless he doesn't want to?”
'Now that he has already had me' went unspoken. But it didn't have to be said. The American – a captain of some sort? - vaguely nodded and swallowed hard.
“He sure would. But are you sure that he is the one you want? After... everything.”
...Wanting? No, this was not about him wanting. It was about his children. What was best for them.
And that was James.
"Yes."