What the Water Gave Me

Chapter Twenty-Four

One of the following days, Bucky returned to Steve with gore in his claws, wiping blood away from his mouth. He looked up at Steve with an unreadable expression and Steve peered back down at him from where he lay on one of the highest rocks.

“You look like you just got back from something delicious,” Steve said dryly. Bucky picked up his board slowly.

“I just killed and ate a person,” he wrote. Steve recognized the battle in his eyes.

“I assumed,” he replied. “Satisfying?”

“You remember the person on the pirate ship,” Bucky wrote. “The one who was about to kill you a week or so ago?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“It was him,” Bucky said.

“That’s real good to know,” Steve said back. He was being purposely disinterested. He wasn’t sure why they were talking about this, when Steve so obviously didn’t care and Bucky was so obviously uncomfortable. He frowned so deeply when he talked about it.

“They were killing more people,” Bucky added. “They were plundering a ship.”

“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Steve said.

“I want you to know,” Bucky said and when he held the board up and looked up at Steve, he looked pleading. “I want you to know I’m not bad.”

“I didn’t think you were, Buck,” Steve replied.

“I snapped his neck first and he didn’t even suffer at all,” Bucky continued.

“Maybe he should have suffered,” Steve said. “Heaven knows a guy like that never spared anyone else any suffering.”

“You wouldn’t have made him suffer, Steve,” Bucky wrote and Steve stopped at looked at him.

“Who cares what I would do,” he said.

“You wouldn’t have,” Bucky wrote and shrugged. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, so maybe I wouldn’t have,” Steve said. “All I’m saying is you shouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.” He rolled over and crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the ceiling where slivers of sunlight broke through. “It works like this, Bucky. Little fish eat plants and big fish eat little fish and people eat big fish and sirens eat people. No person ever cries over a salmon they’re eating, right? Well, except for maybe the most sensitive people. You’re sort of a sensitive kind of person, Buck.”

“It’s not like that,” Bucky had written once Steve turned just enough to see his response.

“Oh yeah?” Steve said. “Then what’s it like?”

“People aren’t like salmon,” Bucky wrote.

“Maybe to you, they are,” Steve said.

“But they aren’t!” Bucky wrote back.

“Pfft,” Steve said.

“People don’t fall in love with salmon, Steve,” Bucky wrote.

“No, I guess not,” Steve said.

“Even if they cry over them,” Bucky added.

“Sure,” Steve replied.

“So people aren’t like salmon. That may be your ‘food chain’, but it doesn’t make it better. Cause people aren’t salmon,” Bucky finished. Steve watched his face, watched him set his board back up and start to clean his hands underneath the water, and sighed. Bucky was like goodness. It was like he was on a different plane of expectation. He was a ray of golden frigging sunshine, he was like the siren equivalent of getting a star sticker on a paper in school or enjoying a first kiss. He was all that and more. Steve didn’t think he could have fallen in love more deeply, but studying his face then, contemplating his words, he found he did. Bucky made him feel overwhelming love. He didn’t want to give him up when the time came. He didn’t want to say goodbye.

“I think you and me see the world from completely different perspectives,” Steve mused quietly and Bucky looked up at him. He smiled a little and shrugged and Steve rolled himself over on his stomach and considered this. He thought maybe his resolve to tell himself to stop loving Bucky was growing weaker and weaker.