What the Water Gave Me

Chapter Eight

A few hours later, Bucky was still lying alone on the sand. He stared up at the sky and blinked slowly, tiredly. He couldn’t really feel the pain anymore. He was fading in and out of consciousness.

Then, in between his black spells, he saw Steve’s face above his own and he made a weak grumbling in the back of his throat and tried to reach up with his hand and then went black again. He felt Steve’s hands on his tail, pulling something around the wound over and over and over. He heard Steve beg him to sit up, felt his hands on his arm and his yanking and Bucky tried dizzily to sit and ended up slumping over his tail. Steve’s lips were on his head and his cheek and his neck near his gills and he blinked, trying to remember where he was. Then, there was white hot pain in his left shoulder, even more intense than before and Bucky jumped, screeched, spasmed.

“I have to get it out Bucky, I have to get it out!” Steve was saying and after a few minutes, the pain settled and Steve was wrapping something else around his torso, under his arm, again and again and again. Bucky slumped against Steve and whimpered and Steve wrapped his arms around him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Shh, it’s okay, you can rest now. I’m so, so sorry.”

Bucky remembered more hands on him and the feeling of being dragged, feeling grains of sand scrape against his scales, and then he didn’t remember anything else.

When he woke, he wasn’t in the ocean or on the beach and he froze, panicked. He looked around him, trying to figure out what was happening. He was lying down, on something like a human bed, he thought, and he was stretched across it at an angle and even then, his tail hung uncomfortably off the end. He looked down at himself and saw strips of white tied around his tail and his chest and he was surrounded by… Towels? Bucky picked one up off his tail to find it cold and dripping wet. They were everywhere.

He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know why he wasn’t dead. There was no water anywhere, no where he could go, and he was stuck with one arm and a tail on dry land until someone helped him. He shuddered, sending waves of pain through the bullet wound in his shoulder, and then started to cry out. He didn’t know who might answer him, but he prayed it would be Steve.

And luckily, it was Steve who burst through the door at the first sound of his awakening, looking relieved to see him. Bucky started to try and pull himself up and Steve ran over to his side.

“No, stop, don’t strain yourself,” he instructed and put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and gently pushed him back down. Bucky looked up at him and whimpered again, frightened. “I know, I know,” Steve said. “But it’s okay; you’re with me and no one’s gonna hurt you again, alright?”

Bucky looked around the room for his pen and board and looked desperately at Steve, mimicking writing in the air with his hand and Steve grabbed a pad of paper and pencil off the bedside table and handed it to him. He braced the pad against his wet tail and wrote.

“I’m afraid!” He scrawled. “It hurts! What happened!”

“People from behind us,” Steve said. “Up on the ridge. They saw you when you sat up on the shore and thought they’d be saving me if they killed you.”

Still distressed, Bucky covered his face with his hand and whined.

“But it’s okay now,” Steve tried to say. “I patched you up and no one else knows about you but me. You’re completely safe.”

Bucky took the pencil and wrote again.

“I don’t want to be here,” he wrote. “Want to go back.”

“You have to rest for a while,” Steve told him and he shook his head, blinking away panicked tears. He underlined his words again and tore the paper off the top of the pad and flung it at Steve. “I know, I get it!” Steve said, dodging the balled up paper. “But this will just be better for you, alright?”

“No water,” Bucky wrote with his shaking hand on the next sheet of paper. “No food.”

“I’ll take care of you!” Steve cried and Bucky just shook his head fiercely. Steve’s shoulders slumped. “Look, I know this isn’t ideal and I know you’re afraid, but… But if I let you go, you could die. These are bad wounds, Bucky, and you’re the one who told me that if you can’t hunt or fight, that’s it.” Bucky looked at him with watering eyes. “I’m protecting you,” Steve said weakly.

Then, Bucky’s stomach grumbled loudly and Bucky threw his arm over his face and moaned.