📝so Zemo’s definitely got baking skills, what other talents is he hiding? 📝
Okay so this headcanon is wholly self-indulgent because I am absolutely obsessed with fountain pens and I feel like Helmut Zemo would be the type to own this pen-and-cigar-lighter-snowglobe-abomination that fills me with rage on a regular basis.
I, like a cat, would knock that over at first opportunity, and he can punish me for it but I’m not apologizing that thing is an abomination.
The pens could be weapons, if the both of you were not so scandalized by the idea of bending the tines by letting them hit bone. He writes your name beside his in wine-red ink and laughs when you show him the label — Writer’s Blood, how fitting — and the letter is delivered to the fire.
His hand is all the more practiced — a Baron knows his duties are not just kill squads and special forces — but yours carries its own charm, stuttering, learning, he draws the shapes for you to follow and it feels a little mocking save for the praise in his smile when you manage the right flourish.
He needs no feather quill, no pomp or circumstance — though he has plenty, and you eye the abalone-encrusted barrels with too-cautious suspicion, wonder if ink has ever touched those brass insides. It is an act of care, just as all he does is, measure the pressure of his wrist, the angle of his palm, remember the position of his fingers and you should have expected a Baron to know these things but a Baron and the man before you are always so different in their own way.
A tragedy the old manufacturing style has gone out of fashion, he laments as if he might have wandered those factories himself and you roll your eyes once more, at another complaint about inflexible nibs.
And your fingers are both stained red with ink by the time it is done but it is done, a hundred letters to the ghosts of your past, their remnants ashes in his fireplace and perhaps the souls will read what is left behind.
