What the Water Gave Me

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Do you ever wonder why you are who you are?” Bucky wrote cautiously in the morning, showing his board to Steve. Steve glanced at it and answered nonchalantly.

“Why would I?” He said.

“I dunno. I wonder sometimes,” Bucky replied and stopped writing for a moment, deep in thought. A few minutes later, he continued. “What do you think the difference between mermen and sirens is?” Steve looked over at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I don’t know. You’re-” Steve’s pen hesitated and Bucky thought he could finish the sentence for him in his head. Did he mean to write evil? Did he mean to write vicious? Or ugly? Bucky listed a number of adjectives he thought Steve might answer with. “More scaly?” Steve finally finished out awkwardly. “And you eat people??”

Bucky supposed that Steve wasn’t wrong.

“You know, given that the ocean could have done anything to you, why do you think it made you a merman?” Bucky asked another question and Steve was starting to glare at him now.

“I don’t know!! Why do you think about these things??” He scrawled and threw up his hands.

“Cause they’re important! I just want to know why, there has to be a reason!” Bucky wrote back quickly. Steve huffed a breath.

“Why is a fish a fish? Why is a human a human? Why is a siren a bloody friggin siren Bucky, I don’t know!!” He wrote and ended his exclamation points with hard bashes to the board. Ink drifted away in the water.

Bucky put his board down and looked away. His pen started to float and he grabbed it out of the water and held it on his lap with both hands.

Steve continued after a few minutes and he held the board up under his unamused expression. “Why do you even care. It’s not like you can do anything about it.” Bucky looked down at his pen and sighed.

“I just wanna know what’s so wrong with me that I-” Bucky wrote and then stopped himself. He wasn’t sure how to go on. Steve watched him write and then looked back down at his own board. He wrote slowly, like he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

“Well, who says anything’s necessarily, you know, wrong with you? It’s not like you picked being a siren. Right?” Steve wrote.

“Right,” Bucky conceded weakly.

“You just… Are one. Yeah?” Steve continued.

Bucky stared at his board miserably. “Yeah.”

“So that’s that.” Steve said as though this solved everything.

“You don’t understand!!” Bucky wrote. “The ocean made you beautiful. It made you harmless. It made you as human as it possibly could and you don’t have to live like me. You’re like a tropical fish and I’m like a shark. I want to know why I’m the shark!”

“That’s how you feel?” Steve said. He was looking at Bucky with an almost concerned expression, which wasn’t one Bucky had seen on his face in a while. Was Steve actually concerned about him?

“The ocean must love you, Bucky,” Steve continued. “It must want you.” Then he rolled his eyes. “Given that it is some sort of magical, sentient thing like you seem think it is.”

“What is that even supposed to mean??” Bucky wrote. Steve huffed, like he was admitting something he didn’t want to, and began to scrawl out his answer.

“I’m a tropical fish, sure,” Steve said. “I’m pretty, you said, and human-like and I don’t have filed teeth in my mouth. But do you know what my chance for survival are? Almost nil. The ocean gave me glittery scales, but it gave that to me knowing they could be the death of me one day.” Bucky looked at him, listening, uneasy. “You were loved and so the ocean gave you claws and fangs to take care of yourself and poison to defend yourself and took away as much of your humanity as it could because it wanted you to be a part of it. It gave you a strong tail so you could swim faster than anything else and a replacement arm so you could be comfortable and have an easier life.” Steve looked at him and shook his head. “You’re the top of the food chain, Bucky, and you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Not big fish, not your own kind, not even humans! You can live comfortably knowing that if anything attacks you, taking it out will be a cinch, and even if you can’t, you know you can swim away fast enough to escape. No part of the ocean is unavailable to you because it’s unsafe. You can do virtually anything you want because no one’s going to stop you. We live different lives Bucky, sure. But don’t hate yourself so much. I’d give anything to be like you.”

“You would?” Bucky wrote back incredulously. Steve frowned and huffed for a second time, his shoulders going up and down, and then he answered.

“Sure.”

“Well I’d give anything to be like you!” Bucky wrote and Steve looked at him and shook his head, something of a smile starting on his face.

“Weirdest siren I ever met,” he replied playfully and Bucky just smiled back at him.