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He ran and the rocky ground turned to sand beneath his feet.
The only noise was his thrumming heartbeat in his ears, the pound of his sneakers against the soft terrain. There were no more screams. No more hands on his body. No more gunshots, but now there was the fresh memory of the air condensing around him with each explosion, now there was the fear left behind.
Bucky didn’t stop running.
His chest was burning as he gasped in air and his legs tightened up with an excess build up of lactic acid, but there was nothing he could do.
It was the new scent rolling in on a heavy gust of wind that finally did it—finally stopped him in his tracks. He cocked his head, turning this way, then that, and let his burgeoning senses take over for a moment.
The sound of waves lapping at the earth.
The hush of breeze, blowing in from the sea.
The smell of brine, of creatures, of salt.
There was a smell of something sharper too, something angry and foreign. This, though, ebbed and flowed with the tide. It was new, and furious in its push to earth, but it was not human and therefore not of immediate concern.
Bucky collapsed on the sand and buried his head in his arms. His heart continued to thump against his chest, metronomic and painful. He struggled to breath, forced himself to focus and count as he inhaled, and count again with each exhale. Soon his gasps deteriorated and he huddled, a meaningless hump on an otherwise unmarred landscape.
***
He’d purchased razor blades and a fifth of whiskey that morning at the small store on the corner of the dusty main street. The clerk was a young girl, auburn hair and glowing green eyes. She smiled at him, lost in the ego and eccentricities of youth, and had rung them up without ever taking her eyes off his face.
“I’m Amy. ” she offered. “Just moved to town last week with my parents. We were from up north, where…” she dropped off, uncertain for just a moment.
He knew what she was referring to. The war against the supernatural was something that had turned dark in recent years. Something that conflated the beasts with the humans and tangled the idea so thoroughly that it became impossible to separate who was fighting who, or what was fighting what.
“What’dya all do for fun around here?” She finally said, a smile plastered on her face.
Bucky reached out his hand and left it there, waiting for his items. They were slow to come.
He shrugged. “Not much.”
“Oh,” she said and finally her eyes cast downward. “Here you are.” She pressed the bag into his hand.
He turned for the wood door, knuckles white from tension.
“I get off at ten tonight,” she called, voice still joyous and pert and full of expectation. “If you’re free of course!”
Bucky tried to smile for her, but it felt anguished and jagged. With any luck, he wouldn’t be here anymore by ten.
In the end, he didn’t have the courage to go through with it. He’d let the alcohol burn its way down his esophagus and he’d cried bitter tears because he hated this, he hated himself, he hated what was going to happen. But the desire for mortality won out; and he just slumped against his bedding pallet, exhausted and wrung out.
He was asleep when they came for him. It was the early hours of the dawn, when the cold breath of morning air had just finished whispering dew drops on every blade of grass. He’d passed out on the floor, empty bottle of whiskey rolling not far from his grasp. The full moon was coming and he hadn’t yet solved the puzzle. He hadn’t yet been cured.
And he hadn’t even found the strength to die.
***
Bucky gasped awake.
He rubbed at his eyes, scrubbing at the salty film left behind by dried sweat. He hadn’t meant to drift, but he was so tired. So thirsty.
So terrified.
The only sound surrounding him was the calm and rhythmic pulse of the water.
It was dark now, so black he could barely see the movement of his hands in front of his eyes.
The weight of the known pressed heavily on his shoulders, but still he stood, brushed off sand from his jeans, and tried to ignore the way the damp denim chafed at his skin as he started to stumble into a slow run again.
It was only a quarter of an hour later that he saw the light.
It was a ghostly thing, pushing through thick and stagnant fog to disperse unevenly over the backdrop of the ocean. For a moment, Bucky thought he was hallucinating. Instead, as he slowed down and walked towards the beacon, he soon realized that it was coming from a spindly structure in the distance—a dilapidated lighthouse. As he approached, it became obvious that the building was more than just abandoned. It was crumbling and inexorably useless from the outside.
It was also clear that there was no light coming from it, nor had their been for many, many years.
A gut-churning unease began to sneak its way up his throat, but still he pushed forward until finally stopping at the rotting wooden door. He peered blearily up at the stone archway that held the door. Carved intricately into the surface were words in Latin.
Aqua loquitur ad eos, qui digni sunt
Bucky didn’t speak Latin. He barely spoke English, at least, in a grammatically correct sense. He understood water; he thought that loquitur might possibly mean talk, or speak, or speaking.
Finally, he gave in, hot, exhausted, and full of a senseless courage of the unknown, and pushed open the door.
The winding staircase was crumbling and smelled of ancient mold and saltwater, but he trudged up the steps, only narrowly missing his footing twice. There had once been a sort of bannister, also wooden, but it too was rotted away to almost nothing—just a few husks of support beams, highlighting what might have been. By the time he stumbled onto the top platform, his body screamed its desire for collapse with a vengeance.
Keep moving, he thought. Keep moving.
There was another door here, resplendent and shiny, and unbecoming of something so old. Bucky traced his fingers along the grooves in the wood and surprised by the softness of the grain. Something deeper lived here, something warm, something liquid, something golden and exuberant.
Something alive.
The familiar fear began to worm its way back, wedging deep within his throat, but still he pushed forward. The door opened at the push of his weight with only a sigh—nothing more. No creaks, no groans, no visible struggle. As Bucky stepped inside, there was an immediate tremor of gaiety that washed through him, pulsing and friendly and excitable. He sank to his knees under it, unsure, but certain more than anything that upon stepping through that doorway he had been judged and found…
Pleasing.
He didn’t have the strength to stand again. He didn’t have the will to look further than to see that the room was clean, suspiciously free of dust and other disreputable creatures, and most notably, empty. He summoned the last of his reserves to edge back to the door and swing it closed—silent in its descent again—then he crumpled down to the floor once more and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
The ocean sang to him.
It sang of life, and of food, and of intruders, and of loneliness.
It sang of eternity, and desperate warmth, and the melody of salt.
It did not sing of brothers. It did not sing of sisters. It did not sing of family, or relatives, or brethren. Those were faded memories now, drowned in blood, massacred by monsters.
Twitching his tail, Steve pressed his arms against his sides and continued his aimless drift amidst the aquamarine hues of the water. There was a time for action, he thought, and a time for heroics. Frequently there was a time for pondering.
Right now, as so many of his moments had been of late, was a time for dramatics.
Steve flicked his fingers outwards and watched the remnants of the oyster shell disperse, meaningless, along the effervescent bubbles of displaced water.
He swallowed again, the slimy meat of the thing still very much present in the back of his throat.
He despised oysters.
The ocean sang of something new tonight. Something fruitful and boundless and irresistible. And thus, Steve continued to drift, refusing to pay it any mind. He plucked another oyster from beneath the waving weeds and crushed it in his bare hand.
It had been centuries of this shallow movement, this criss crossing pattern, this inborn desperation to find another. Steve knew there was no hope. He’d been just an infant when the war had ended, and with it, the entirety of the Mer-population. Humans were ruthless in this way; they saw a place unconquered and set to desecrating it with carnage. There were no others like him, and there would be no others like him, so he would traverse the entirety of the vast and uncharted oceans on Earth before simply becoming too tired to move any longer.
Then he would dissolve into the waves, as was becoming of his kind.
Unless his heart burst from loneliness before his much deserved soft death. (It was a dramatic moment after all.)
The water pushed at him then, refusing his advances and pressing against his body in such a way that he was forced to turn. The song was frantic now, urgent in a way that made Steve drop the remaining oyster shell without so much as a petty flick. He turned and saw a light there, dancing above the surface of the waves but casting its ghostly reflection through the water with an ethereal glow.
The lighthouse.
Steve paused and held himself still against the barrage of water with enormous effort. The beacon hadn’t been lit in decades. There was no reason for it to be shining now—Steve knew that the structure was crumbling, abandoned by humanity as they were so wont to do with broken things. He also knew this: that the lighthouse was one of few remaining remnants of another time. A time of magic, of creatures, of anticipatory delights.
The time had passed, though. Dead, like so much else around him.
The water refused to give in. Instead it barreled into him with a cry of a thousand voices. Steve raised his hand to his ears and with a fick of his tail moved forward once more.
“Alright, I get it. I’m moving. Wouldn’t want to miss this once in a lifetime experience of seeing the ghost light come back to life”
He’d very much like to miss it. It was intruding on his histrionics ever so carelessly.
But there was something more there, an inexorable pull that tightened in his gut, warm and full of spontaneity.
Hope.
***
There was a rocky sea wall about fifty feet from the beach that the humans had constructed long ago when words like ‘erosion’ and ‘conservation’ were still hot topics—before the Devastation occurred, before the world began to change.
It was to this outcropping that Steve steered towards, tail flickering in the water so fast it was almost invisible. It only took him ten minutes to reach the place, and another two to climb out using his arms and perch on top of one of the larger boulders. He had a clear view now of the lighthouse, its spindly tower leaning precariously over the sand.
There was no light now; it was just as dark and devastatingly skeletal as he’d imagined, and yet still there was an air of change about it. Nothing that he could see, necessarily, just...different.
He watched for hours, letting the cold salt of the waves dry on his skin, cracking and rubbing with every breath he took. There was no change, though the breeze had turned more to a gale, picking up sand and swirling it in motes and whirls all about the beach. He listened to it, listened to the way the wind blew at his ears and yelled of change, change, change.
There was only one choice he had, though he was loathe to make it. He’d much prefer to be back in the deep, chasing the taste of disgustingly salty sludge of oysters, or throwing rocks at the tilted and decaying pillars of the underwater mer-city a few miles from here. Anything was better than this, than having that awful, flickering hope suddenly fire up again within his belly.
It had been two hundred years, and he hated more than anything that he still couldn’t let it go. Every year he swam with the current, doing another loop from continent to continent, looking for anything, and every year ended the same.
Nothing.
Still, the wind was particularly insistent tonight, so he sat up straight, extending his tail out long beneath him, fins gracefully plunging in and out of the water.
And he began to sing.
***
Bucky slept deeper than he’d intended to—drawn into dreams that were thick and oily, surrounding him and clogging his throat. He dreamed of screaming villagers, of the roar of a beast, of the inescapable brightness of the moon shining down upon him, and of pain, pain, pain.
He couldn’t escape them, no matter how hard he thrashed against the wood slats underneath him; no matter how hard he fought to scream, he couldn’t wake.
And suddenly, it stopped.
Peeling himself off the floor, Bucky rubbed the heels of his hands at his eyes, trying to scrape the sleep from them, the salt of tears and the heaviness of exhaustion thick and cloying. There was a horrible screeching sound coming through the floor, through the windows, through the door. He’d never heard anything like it, and he wondered what animal could possibly yell with so much sound.
Pressing his hands to his ears, he stood shakily. The room was still empty—only the bare carcass of a thing really. It was octagonal, and each plane of wall connected at the next with a fine stripe of golden paint.
Bucky walked to one, pressing his fingers low on the crease and letting his finger trace along that line, up as far as he could reach. They showed no signs of age, or wear. They didn’t peel, like paint so often was fond of, and his finger came away perfectly clean—no dust, no waxy residue of disuse. They were too perfect, and paired with the shrieking of noise from outdoors, he began to feel very, very nervous.
“Hello?” he whispered. He flattened his hand against the wall, the grooves of the unfinished shiplap pressing imprints into his palm. “Hello?”
Nothing happened.
“Fuck.” That was incredibly stupid, what the fuck did he think was going to happen? Bucky groaned, then moved over to the small window across the octagon.
He didn’t have a view of the ocean like he might have expected—instead, it was only a view of the beach, which stretched out as far as he could see. The morning sun hadn’t yet crept up from the horizon, but it teased at such an activity and so the sky was full of purples and dark reds with just enough moonlight left to illuminate the distance. The sand was speckled in normal whites and blacks, but there was something else, something that sparkled almost blue.
Last night, as he’d sat there feeling woefully sorry for himself and wishing he’d had the courage to just fucking use the razorblades, he hadn’t notice the different colors. He’d just assumed he was sitting on any normal beach—full of tan sparkling sand. Now, he wrinkled his nose, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks.
The shrieking sound got even louder.
“For fuck’s sake,” he groaned, covering his ears again.
He seemed to be at one of those so called crossroads of life where there were two options presented, and a decision needed to be made.
Option One: He could curl up on the wood floor, cover his ears, and rock himself back and forth until he finally, inevitably, went insane.
Option Two: He could leave the lighthouse, inspect the curiously blue sand, and look for whatever animal it was that was making that hideous noise and put it out of its misery. Then, he could retreat back into the lighthouse, curl up on the wood floor, and rock himself back and forth until he finally, inevitably, went insane. (The key difference here was that he didn’t need to cover his ears anymore and this meant that his hands were free for other activities—like clutching his knees to his chest while rocking.)
There was nothing for it: Option Two was the clear winner, if only because it put off the insanity bit for a few hours more.
Bucky made for the door, opening it with a quick tug, then taking the stairs two at a time to the very bottom of the structure.
Outside, the sound grew even louder. He threw his hands up, pressing fingers into his ear canals as far as they would go, and tried to keep his eyes open through it all, to see straight, despite the noise that had him desperate to squint them closed. His innards were shaking, ready to explode, and every step he took was jarring and painful.
“Fuck!” he yelled, trying desperately to see.
The ocean rolled, waves crashing to the beach with enormous booms of sound. Squinting, Bucky could barely make out a line of rock out in the distance—some sort of man-made barrier. The sound was loudest in that direction, so he pressed on, ignoring the sting of sand in his eyes, and the chill of the wind at his skin.
He toed off his sneakers near the water, still pushing forward, wetting his feet. He was committed now; nothing could keep him from this; there was some irrististible pull in his chest that he couldn’t disobey, and it kept drawing him forward.
His feet were wet, and then his shins were wet, and then his knees were wet and the water was surprisingly warm, surprisingly soft against his skin, and still he pressed forward.
Now he could make out one boulder that was larger than the rest, and on top of it sat a man—except he wasn’t...he couldn’t…
He wasn’t a man. A long seaweed green tail extended from his waist and looped around the boulder.
A merman?
He’d scoff at that, but given his current situation, it wasn’t so much a surprise as something to be met with an inevitable shrug of his shoulders.
The sound was coming from the creature—louder and louder with ever step Bucky took, and he wanted to scream against it, or maybe he was screaming against it. His mouth was open, the spray of the waves salty and bitter against his tongue.Somehow he was still walking, despite the ocean around him being at eye level. He only spared the barest look down, trying not to lose sight of the merman ahead, but the water leeched out from under his bare feet, spreading to the sides and then washing upwards.
He was carving a path through the ocean.
With that realization, everything seemed to click into place. He was meant to be here. He was meant to find this creature, he was meant to find the lighthouse, he was meant to be seen.
He was meant to live.
He scoffed a laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, but still that something pulled at him and finally, after what seemed hours of pushing through ocean, he reached the base of the boulder where the scream went on and on and on.
Cupping his hands at his mouth, he yelled up, “Would you kindly shut the fuck up?”
The merman opened his mouth wider, scream growing impossibly louder for just a second, then he closed it with a snap.
“Jesus fucking christ, that’s obnoxious,” Bucky swore.
“I...excuse me?”
The merman looked down at him now, confusion lined across his face. His blond hair—thick with salt and briny ocean water—tangled at his brow and over his ears, and his eyes were a deep blue, darker than the water around them, yet flickering with an ethereal light.
His chest and arms were muscled, his skin golden tan as though he’d spent a life lying on beaches rather than doing...well...whatever it is that mermen do.
He’d be beautiful, Bucky thought, if it weren’t for the drooping layer of kelp that had attached itself to his body, mucky and brown and...slimy.
And for some reason, perhaps because of exhaustion, perhaps because of that piercing scream that was responsible for his current growing migraine, perhaps because, quite frankly, he’d had enough of supernatural creatures to last him a lifetime, he told the merman this.
“You seem to be covered in gross...ocean shit,” Bucky said. It wasn’t the most articulate sentence that had ever escaped his mouth, but he figured the gist of it was clear.
“I’m sorry...what?” The merman had cocked his head now, and his stare was pointed enough to pickle a sea cucumber. Then he shook his head, as though attempting to dislodge sea water from his ears, opened his mouth, and started screeching again.
“Oh fuck no you don’t,” Bucky yelled, covering his ears once more. “Fucking cut it out!”
Once again, the merman closed his mouth, once again the silence was sudden and cutting, and once again he looked terribly confused. “I...who are you, exactly?”
“A random traveler, who was attempting to actually sleep, and was woken up by whatever the fuck that sound is. Jesus. That’s just awful.”
“Interesting,” the merman said. He opened his mouth, a yawning, gaping ‘o’ forming, and drew in a breath.
“Don’t you dare!” Bucky yelled. Then he bent down, picked up a rather solid rock from the sand between his toes, and chucked it with all his might.
It hit, right on the shoulder of the thing, bouncing off but leaving a very red mark.
“Why?” the merman cried out. “That was just petty!”
“So was continuing to deafen me when I’ve repeatedly asked you to stop!”
“I see.”
They stared at each other for more than a few moments then, the raging ocean beating against the sides of the invisible walls that protected Bucky.
Finally, the merman sighed, his shoulders relaxing, his tail flicking against the front of the rock. “You aren’t human,” he said.
The truth of this was heavy, a kernel of heat against his ribcage that suddenly dislodged, clattering down to his stomach, heavy and thick with despair.
“No,” he said, trying very hard not to look away from those glowing eyes. “No, I’m definitely not.”
“Huh.” The merman scooched forward ever so slightly, just enough for the base of his tail to scrape the water. His nose scrunched, an surprisingly human expression. “Okay. Okay fine, yeah, I get it.” He looked back to Bucky. “I’m Steve.”
“Steve?” Bucky repeated with a hint of disbelief. “Uh...Steve. Steve the merman. Yeah, that doesn’t sound ridiculous or anything.”
“What’s your problem, non-human?” Steve hissed, rising up again and seeming to grow even taller.
His teeth were extremely sharp, and extremely pointed, and Bucky most decidedly did not want to be the recipient of that bite. “Right,” he said, slowly backing up ever so slightly so that he might not be in the direct line of fire should ‘Steve’ decide to flop down on top of him. “Uh...what exactly where you doing?”
“The lighthouse was lit.”
“Okay…”
“That lighthouse hasn’t been lit for over a hundred years. I thought that humans had returned to the soil here. And so I was singing.”
At this, Bucky let out a very large guffaw, then clapped a hand to his mouth as Steve glowered down. “Sorry,” he sputtered. “Okay, sorry, go on.”
“I was singing the humans to their deaths. Luring them to the waves, just far enough that I could release the ocean atop of them and watch their bodies break and bleed against the rocky sea wall.”
“Well, gosh. You’re a happy sort.”
Steve pinned him with those flashing blue eyes and for a moment, Bucky was absolutely certain that he couldn’t move.
“They killed my people. They kill everything. They destroy, and destroy, and destroy, and when all that is done, and the blood is running thick at their feet, and the screams of children have died out completely? They seek their next victim. They are predators. They are evil. They are–”
“Okay!” Bucky held up his hands in defeat. “Okay, so no humans. Got it.”
“What are you?”
This question was burning in its intensity—as fierce as the diatribe over humanity. There was no refusing him.
“I...well...I was bitten.”
“Werewolf.”
The way Steve said this, the way the beat of the word fell from his tongue and muddied the water beneath him sent a shiver up Bucky’s spine. Werewolf. He’d thought it, of course. It had played games with his subconscious, roiling deep within his gut and threading tendrils of fear through his nerves. Werewolf.
He closed his eyes and whispered, “I was bitten two weeks ago. Outside of my town.”
He could barely walk with the pain from the bite; his arm was shredded completely, laying useless at his side, and his steps were jolting, sickly things. The blood loss made him dizzy, unable to think, to concentrate, to understand what had just happened.
When he finally made it back to the village, he collapsed as people surrounded him, calling for the medic.
“Wolf,” he managed. “There was a wolf.”
He knew about the supernatural stories they told to keep children away from the woods. To lure them back to the safety of the high walls of lumber that surrounded the town. Within those walls was normalcy—stores, and shops, farms and markets. There was love, and there was family, and there was a medic and there was everything.
They’d backed away as soon as he said it, the whispers starting, the looks of fear passed between the adults.
“It was just a wolf,” he struggled to say, the pain quickly becoming unbearable. “Just an animal. Please help me.”
They didn’t.
He crawled back to his home, the dirt clinging to him, mixing with the blood of his injuries to form a dusky mud. He passed out as soon as he was there, unable to keep going, ready to die.
But he didn’t.
Die, that is.
He woke up the next morning, dried mud cracking as he moved, falling to the ground below. There was no more pain, no more shortness of breath, no more dizziness. He showered, watching the coppery red mix with dirt at his feet, swirling in waves and eddies from the pressure of the water.
His arm was healed.
There was nothing wrong with him—nothing at all except a hotness that burned deep within him.
And as soon as he stepped from the house, bleary with the knowledge that something wasn’t right, something was terribly, terribly wrong, he saw them.
Rows of townspeople lined up fifty feet from his house. Crosses extended, heads bowed, lips murmuring prayers to the Gods above.
“I ran,” he said to Steve, looking up at him once more. “They came for me, and I ran.”
“Humans,” Steve replied, poisonous and wicked all at once.
“No. No, they aren’t that bad. They’re trying to protect themselves. They think I’m a threat, they know no other way–”
“Once they knew. Once they dealt with the supernatural, making deals, spreading lies. They’re killers.”
Bucky couldn’t deny this, necessarily. He’d grown up hearing about the Oceanic Wars, and the evil beings that lurked within the waters. It was recent history for him still—there were people in his town whose grandparents had died in the war, whose parents were left orphans.
“It was just a wolf,” he muttered.
“No,” Steve said. “No. It wasn’t. Otherwise, you’d have been lured to my song and I’d have let the ocean crash atop you and then I would watch as you struggled to draw in your last breath.”
Bucky laughed. “Okay. Okay, it wasn’t a wolf. But I haven’t changed, I’m still...me.”
“The full moon is in two weeks.”
Shivering again, Bucky crossed his arms against his chest. He’d known it was coming. Deep down, even as he tried to deny it, there were already changes taking place. That heat within him had only been stoked, the pads of his fingers were hot against his skin. His eyes were different too—his vision sometimes swimming, causing him to stumble. It was happening.
It was happening, and he had no choice.
He shook his head, ignoring his fears. “Well, I suppose you can swim away now. No wandering, lost little human here for you to kill.”
“Hardly,” Steve said. His tail flicked against the rock once more, and the scales started to shimmer and change, the color leaching out and draining to the sea below.
“What…”
“You’re interesting. Different. The first thing of reasonable intelligence that I’ve spoken with in a hundred years.”
“How perfectly complementary,” Bucky stated, his nose wrinkling.
“I will watch you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I will come with you to the lighthouse. I will watch your change, and I will guard you.”
“No offense, but I’m fairly certain in the general predatorial line-up, werewolf exceeds mermaid by a large margin.”
“Merman,” Steve corrected primly. “And no, it doesn’t.” Then he flashed his fangs once more, glimmering and white.
“Point taken.”
He watched as Steve’s tail greyed out, into nothingness really—no more sparkle, no more scales, just a flat sort of emptiness against the rock that Bucky’ couldn’t really make out. And then, incredibly, the nothingness split and drew up color that seemed to come directly from the rock he was sitting on as two legs appeared.
“Shit!” Bucky said, as Steve casually jumped down from his perch. “What the fuck, you can walk?”
“Mixed blood,” Steve said, as though that were a perfectly acceptable answer that needed no more explaining whatsoever. He reached out and grabbed Bucky’s arm, pulling him back down the path made by the splitting of the water.
His grip was oily and wet and so, so cold. It reminded Bucky of fish, of the disgusting way they flapped against you as you tried to reel them in, and he cringed with the very idea.
“It takes a bit for my blood to warm,” Steve said, offering up that tidbit almost as an apology.
“You smell like fish,” Bucky retorted.
“You’ll get used to it.”
They walked in silence all the way back to the lighthouse. Steve seemed to almost float on top of the grains of sand—his feet skimming them, but never pressing deep enough for a footprint to imprint.
Bucky, on the other hand, trudged along, kicking up giant swathes of beach, feet sinking in plenty for the both of them.
By the time they reached the lighthouse door, Bucky was very out of breath, very flushed, and very irritable from the entire experience.
“Aqua loquitur ad eos, qui digni sunt,” Steve read aloud.
The language sounded magical, coming from him. It sounded of the sea, and of the moonlight, and of the sparkle of the waves as they emerged from the depths.
“Hmm,” Steve grunted. “It’s not working.”
“What do you mean?” Bucky pushed past him and laid a hand on the wood, pushing the door open with minimal resistance. “Come on.”
“Well,” Steve sputtered indignantly. “That is rather rude, don’t you think?”
He seemed to be speaking to the doorframe, and so Bucky ignored him, taking the stairs two at a time and winding his way back up to the top room. Steve eventually fell in behind him—and there was no other way to describe the sound of him ascending than to call it a slurp.
The sound of it was jarring and foreign and Bucky looked over his shoulder a few times, just to make sure he was okay. Steve looked to be moving completely normally—human even—but with every step came a sloshing sound as though the wood beneath his feet was intent on sucking him in.
“Fuck you, too!” he yelled, once they finally reached the top. “I’m not going to eat him, back off!”
“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, opening the door to the top room and stepping inside. “Could you please tell me who you’re yelling at?”
“The lighthouse.” The slurping sound had stopped now that Steve was fully inside the octagonal room. He combed fingers through his hair, wrinkling his nose at the strands of kelp that came out.
“A little more explanation would be...fantastic.”
“The lighthouse!” Steve repeated, flashing an irritated look. “It’s alive. Can’t you feel it? You’re supernatural. You should be able to feel it.”
Bucky tried very hard not to curl his hands into fists at his sides. “I don’t. Okay?”
“Hmm.” With this omission of sound, Steve turned his back to Bucky and set about studying the room, running his fingers up and down the creases where wall met wall. The gold paint there shimmered behind him, as though his flesh was leaving magic behind.
Or maybe he was simply the catalyst, releasing the rooms own magic.
“You really can’t feel it?” he asked, confusion coloring his words.
“Really, truly.”
“He’s speaking, you know. He likes you. He wants to protect you and keep you safe. That’s why he wouldn’t open the bottom door for me. That’s why he was trying to suck me down on the way up—trying to keep me from following you. Impressive, really. It usually takes him a bit more time than that to warm up to someone.”
“Uhh…” He supposed, in the grand scheme of events that had happened over the last two weeks, this really shouldn’t come as a shock. Still, he couldn’t help asking the obvious. “How do you know that?”
Laughing, Steve continued his course round the room, lighting up every seam. “Because I came here once. Seeking refuge. And it took a good three days before he opened this room to me.”
“Well maybe, he just doesn’t like assholes.” That was petulant, but Bucky was tired, and when tired, he had a propensity for stating the obvious.
Steve glowered at him, then went back to lighting everything up. The entire room was starting to glow under his ministrations—a golden, foggy light seeping from every corner. “Do you even know what the inscription above the door meant?”
“Uhh...something about water?” Bucky tried.
Steve heaved a very large, and very human, sounding sigh. “Aqua loquitur ad eos, qui digni sunt,” he repeated. “The water speaks to those who are worthy.”
“Ah. Yes. That just clears everything right up.”
Turning suddenly, Steve flashed his fangs and grabbed Bucky by the throat. “Appreciate this, you pretentious human. You’ve been given a gift. You’ve been judged and he likes you. He wants you here. And you have no idea how rare that is.”
“Back the fuck off, Steve,” Bucky grated out. Then he smacked a fist down on Steve’s wrist.
It did nothing. There was a pause, a moment out of time, where Bucky was no longer sure if he was breathing, or if Steve was breathing, or if there were anything that existed beyond this very room. Steve’s eyes didn’t leave his—they flashed that insidious blue color and Bucky was being drawn in, inexorable and painless, no way to escape.
“Steve,” he whispered. Even the act of speaking was treacherous, like each syllable was pulled from his mouth, thick and stretched out.
“I assume you need to eat.”
Bucky gasped in air as Steve let go, rubbing at his throat. Steve had already turned, back to the seam of the wall, stroking fingers down as though searching for something.
“Fuck,” Bucky groaned. “Yes. Yes, I need to eat.”
“Mmm.”
Bucky watched him intently, the way his fingernails scratched down the surface of the wall, leaving light streaks in their wake. And then they caught on something.
“There.” Steve pushed in, and suddenly the room began to spin.
Not quickly, in fact, so slow it was almost imperceptible, but Bucky kept his gaze on his feet as the circular grain moved. The walls were closing in on them, folding inwards and with the clockwise spin, and then, suddenly, they dropped backwards, becoming the floor, and in their space, items lined the walls.
A bed. A small kitchenette. A rocking chair. A shower cubicle.
“What the hell?” Bucky asked, rubbing at his eyes as though they were the problem.
“Stupid,” Steve muttered petulantly. “I’m sorry?”
“You should have asked. He would have revealed it to you if you had only asked.”
There was no answer that would even come close to representing the irritation that Bucky felt and so he just kept his mouth shut on the matter, walking over to the bed and sitting down.
It was comfortable, as small beds go. It even had a quilted comforter and soft cottony sheets. “Amazing,” he whispered, running his finger along the fabric of the quilt. “It looks like my mother’s.”
“Well, yes. It creates things from your memory.”
“Of course.” Sighing, Bucky turned back to Steve and motioned toward the stove. “I assume it’s too much to expect it to make some food as well?”
“He,” Steve corrected. “And yes. I’ll go catch some fish. You? Shower. You smell of sweat and dust and human.”
At this he bared his fangs once more, but it no longer seemed the threat it had mere moments ago. Bucky would have liked to come up with a clever retort, but the truth was, he was exhausted, and hungry, and yes. Yes, he very much smelled of sweat.
“Yep,” he nodded, pushing himself off the bed. “You got it.”
And then Steve left, presumably heading back to the ocean, to catch them a meal.
They lived like this, for a time. Steve would disappear to the ocean most nights, and Bucky would sleep on the comfortable mattress, with the twin of his mother’s quilt thrown over him. Occasionally, Steve stayed the night. Then they would share the bed, and though it was small, it was somehow still comfortable as their bodies warmed against each other.
Steve would catch fish, or crab, or sometimes even lobster, and Bucky would cook, listening to the sizzling of seafood and thinking about the village, about the people who would inevitably come for him.
He asked Steve about this, once—asked why it was that no one had crossed that wooded barrier about two miles out from the beach. It seemed unreasonable to him that no person had managed to track him this far.
“It is unreasonable,” Steve said. “They’ve certainly found you. But werewolves and mermaids aren’t the only supernatural beings in this part of the country.”
He didn’t seem keen to elaborate on such details, and so Bucky put it from his mind, choosing instead to relax in the quiet and still company of the lighthouse.
The full moon was due tonight, and though he hadn’t had any physical symptoms yet, his anxiety was beginning to ratchet. With each passing day, his grip on reality had loosened, and his willingness to accept the inevitable turn of himself to beast grew unbearable.
“I can’t do it.”
They were sitting cross-legged on the floor, munching on dried seaweed (a favorite of Steve’s it seemed) and playing a game of chess.
The lighthouse had revealed a small cupboard of games on the first week, and Steve took to chess immediately—picking it up so quickly that Bucky had to wonder if he’d lied about never playing it in the first place.
“You’ll have to,” Steve replied, moving a pawn to capture Bucky’s bishop. “It doesn’t do you any good to imagine it. It will come to pass, as everything else does, and you will live.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Because I’ll be watching you. Nothing is going to happen besides you going feral for a night and then coming back to your senses. Hardly different from your usual, wouldn’t you say?”
Bucky pursed his lips and shot a very meaningful glare in Steve’s direction, but of course it went unnoticed.
“Besides. It will do you good to run. You get snippy when you’re cooped up too long.”
“I...excuse me?” Bucky asked, his voice rising an octave. “Snippy?”
“My point exactly.” And then Steve moved his rook, cornering the king. “Checkmate,” he said. “Again.”
There was nothing more obnoxious than an egotistical merman who insisted on sticking around to watch you transform into a ravaging, wild beast, while beating you enormously at chess in the interim and bragging about it.
Bucky pushed his pieces across the board and stood up.
“Aw, are you done already? I wanted to beat you again!”
“I need to walk.”
“Buck–”
“Sorry. I just need space.” As if to punctuate this, he strode across the room in four long steps, threw open the door, and let it slam aggressively behind him. He made quick work of the stairs, finally pushing out to the beach below. And then he took a deep breath in, air filled with the briney smell of the sea, and fish, and he started to scream.
No one noticed.
The seagulls kept circling above, continuing their daily, tedious survey of the land.
The ocean kept up its lapping at the beach—wave after wave cresting with endless crashing sounds.
Somewhere, far in the distance, he thought he could make out that single rock that Steve had perched upon during their first meeting. It seemed too far away to be true though—patently false that he might have walked out in the middle of the sea, and that it might have parted for him, and that he might have come away with...a friend? Another supernatural creature?
Certainly not an enemy, though Steve did try his best to needle and annoy with every single syllable.
Bucky thought of Steve’s fangs—how sharp they were, how they glittered in the moonlight when they walked the beach together.
He thought of his body—of the way it seemed to grow ever more human with each day he stayed away from the sea. He’d started out looking a sickly green color, despite having human legs and human arms and human features all around. Now though, his skin was a soft pink. His cheeks flushed with color when he spoke of things he enjoyed. The knuckles of his hands grew white when he clenched his fists in frustration.
He’d even stayed the night the last three evenings in a row. He tucked himself behind Bucky on the twin bed, and they lay together—breaths coming in even strides, heartbeats matching, skin warm against skin.
“Fuck.” Bucky shook his head, then ran a hand through his hair, irritated at the way the salt clung to the strands, making it heavy against his brow.
He knew Steve was able to protect himself. In the very worst case scenario sort of ideal, Steve would just throw himself into the water, and swim far away. The beast within Bucky couldn’t hurt Steve, and yet...the thought of him disappearing? The thought of him giving up and going back to the ocean, obeying its ever-present call?
It made Bucky’s heart ache.
He trudged along the wet coast line for a long while, picking up a stick at one point and letting it drag behind him, leaving a softly curling trail in its wake.
The wind was picking up, howling around him.
It knew.
He shuddered with this knowledge, gritting his teeth and turning back toward the lighthouse. “Beast,” the wind seemed to chant around him. “Beast, beast, beast.”
“Bucky!”
Looking up, he saw Steve running towards him—salt shimmering in his long hair, but somehow all the more romantic for it.
“Bucky, where were you? It’s almost time!”
Bucky slowed to a stop, looking up at the sky.
Steve was right. The sun was only the smallest glimmering line on the horizon, and darkness had begun to fall. Stars were beginning to show, twinkling against the hazy blue. And the moon.
The moon.
She was glorious in her emergence—a queen of darkness—whole and healthy and bursting with hot, white light.
He began to shudder, stomach roiling. He was hot, a sort of heat that wouldn’t die, that just grew and grew and grew, like he was being forged, like he’d been bathed in molten earth.
“Oh shit,” he moaned, and then promptly leaned over and puked into the sand at his feet.
“Fuck, Bucky! Bucky, listen to me. You’ve gotta come with me, okay? You’ve gotta come this way. This way, alright?”
Steve was wavering in his vision, and Bucky curled over himself, bracing his hands on his knees and trying desperately not to vomit again.
“Steve?” he choked out.
“Hey, bud. You’ve got time, okay? It’s not happening yet. Can you walk with me?”
“Why?” Bucky managed. His throat was burning, his body was on fire, he couldn’t think. He pulled off his shirt, then kicked off his shoes so he could get rid of the pants also. “Oh, fuck, it hurts,” he moaned.
Then Steve was there, throwing an arm around his shoulders, and hugging him tight. “Hey. It’s alright, okay? We’re just going to walk back to the lighthouse. Just one step at a time.”
“I can’t,” Bucky ground out.
“You sure as fuck better, you weakling,” Steve commanded.
And Bucky actually laughed at that. It was a shallow, grating thing, but laughter made him feel human, made him feel incrementally better about this clusterfuck of a situation.
He let Steve pull him along the beach, following the line of the waves hitting the beach. It might have taken five minutes; it might have taken five hours, but Bucky was no longer coherent enough to have any sort of grasp on time.All he knew was the beauty of the moonlight, and the heat that raged unbearably within him.
They were just to the lighthouse steps when he jerked, a sudden and furious motion.
“Oh fuck,” he cried out, pushing himself away from Steve and falling to the sand. It was ripping through him now, something awful, something not human, and he couldn’t breathe. “Help me!” he cried, but he no longer knew if he was speaking aloud or if it was something in his brain, pushing, warping, trying to be heard.
“Help me!”
This cry was out loud. It punctuated the landscape. If he’d been fully conscious, he’d have noticed the way the seagulls flew faster, away from them. He’d have noticed the roll of the ocean and how it stopped, sudden, and nervous. He’d have noticed the way that Steve bared his fangs and hissed, loud and angry.
Instead his vision narrowed, his ears began to ring, and his entire body ripped apart.
***
The horrible screeching was back—loud and obnoxious—grating at his every nerve and flaying him alive.
“Stop,” he muttered, but his mouth was in sand and hardly any sound came out. He pushed himself over, but his muscles were weak and everything hurt. “Fuck, stop, please just stop.”
It continued for a minute, maybe two longer, and then suddenly cut off—a straight, jagged slice straight through it—leaving only the memory of the sound behind.
“Stop,” Bucky groaned, louder this time.
“I did.”
“Steve?”
The merman was standing above him, his skin reflecting the greens and blues and dark purples of the ocean as though it were churned up by a storm.
“You lived.”
Bucky tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. “What the fuck?” he asked instead, pushing up on his hands and knees. The inside of his mouth tasted of copper, and when he spit, it was flecked with blood.
“You turned, and you lived. We should celebrate. I will cook you fish.” Steve was looking at him seriously, his mouth a straight line, lips pursed.
Still, Bucky smiled. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Hmmph.” Turning, Steve walked back to the lighthouse, pushed open the door, and disappeared within.
“Right,” Bucky said. The waves were lapping at the beach, and he had a strange moment in time where he remembered them pausing, remembered them stopped, but it was layered over the current moment.
He shook his head, and very shakily stood up.
It was as though he had new legs, and new arms, and a new body that he had no idea how to work. Each step was like a newborn foal—shaky, and unsure. Still, he managed to get himself to the lighthouse and in the front door.
The stairs were going to be a problem though, and so he sat at the base them, massaging his temples, and trying to figure out why there was a werewolf sized hole in his memories.
“I’m glad you’re okay.”
This warmed him, sparking something deep within that began to pulse with anticipation. Bucky looked up to see Steve just fifteen steps up, also sitting with his knees pulled to his chest. “I don’t remember anything.”
“You probably won’t. That’s how it works.”
“But you remember...you remember the water when you are in it, and the land when you are not?”
Steve barked a laugh. “I’m a half-breed. I’m not normal.”
“Normal?” This set something off within him, and Bucky couldn’t help the giggle that erupted from his mouth. “You sure as fuck aren’t normal. And neither am I.”
“Neither are you,” Steve echoed.
He seemed to be in a strange sort of mood, pensive, but aggravated and on edge. Bucky wrinkled his nose, feeling very unsure about how to proceed. “Can you...can you tell me what I did?”
“You turned into a monster. You tore across the beach, looking for anything to feed on. You don’t like fish when you are that way.”
“No offense to you of course, but I don’t like fish anytime!”
Steve gave him a curious look. “But you eat it? You cook it here?”
“Well I don’t exactly see anything else making an appearance and I think we’ve already established the fact that I’m trying to live.”
“Perhaps we should ask the lighthouse for a cow…”
“Steve. What happened?”
Sighing, Steve began to scooch himself down each step, one at a time, until he was right next to Bucky. “You turned. You were mean. For some reason when I sang, it calmed you. So I sang all night.”
“Oh.” For some reason, this sparked something within Bucky—the echo of a memory, where the softness of Steve’s lips met his neck. “Did...did you…”
Steve turned a brilliant shade of red and looked, very pointedly, at the wall behind Bucky’s head. “You were very soft,” he murmured. “I liked your fur.”
“Aww.” Bucky smiled.
There was more to it than that though. That electricity in the air, that change in Steve’s movements from graceful to stuttering and quick. Before he could consider what he was doing, he reached out, cupping a hand against Steve’s jaw.
He turned, blue eyes sparkling, gazing into Bucky’s deep brown. “What?” Steve whispered, swallowing hard.
The movement rippled through Bucky’s palm. Thank you for staying with me, he wanted to say. Thank you for not leaving. Thank you for…
It was a warping of time, an instant where everything stopped, where even their breaths curled visibly and froze. He could see three futures reflected in the dark blue of Steve’s eyes:
The first was being alone, hunted, tired and hungry and desperately afraid.
The second was death. Darkness, pain, and death.
The third was Steve.
And as the seconds began to turn again, pushing the moment forward in perfect, circular fashion, Bucky leaned in and kissed him.
Steve tasted ever so slightly of salt, and the sea, but mostly he tasted human. He froze for the first second, but then his lips parted and Bucky smiled against him.
It was a slow thing. Careful, cautious as it began to bloom. Bucky leaned in and Steve shifted so that his palm lay on Bucky’s thigh, and the minutes stretched on so they felt like something new, something entirely outside of human time.
Eventually Bucky drew back, breathless and giddy with the electric silence. He watched Steve carefully—watched as he drew in a breath, then exhaled, lips plump and red. Then his eyes flickered back open.
“What…” Steve started, raising his hand to his lips. “What was–”
“Can I kiss you again?”
Steve started. “I...why?”
He sounded so genuine, so confused and so child-like. Bucky wanted to laugh, but he held onto it, not wanting to destroy the moment. “Because...you stayed with me. Because you taste good? Because the end of the world came and you survived and I was changed and none of it matters because when I look at you, I’m warm.”
He didn’t know if anything he’d just said made even a lick of sense but it didn’t seem to matter. Steve smiled at him, then looped his fingers around the back of Bucky’s neck and drew him in, kissing him once more.
This was more erratic—frantic even. It was as though Steve had gotten a taste of something he liked and now was drowning in it, was terrified that it would be pulled away.
They fumbled against each other, every touch the first touch, every taste new, full of anticipation. Steve was trembling against Bucky and Bucky was whimpering against Steve and still he needed more, he wanted more.
The lighthouse moaned against them, wind buffeting the sides, the ocean roaring in the distance. Bucky finally stood, pulling Steve with him, and Steve pushed him against the wall, kissing and tasting, letting his lips brush across every point from Bucky’s collarbone to his neck.
“Steve,” Bucky breathed, voice hitching. “Steve, wait, we need to–”
“Upstairs,” Steve answered, his tongue at Bucky’s throat.
“Upstairs.”
And somehow they stumbled up the steps, to an octagonal room framed in golden light, the wind whispering Latin all around:
Aqua loquitur ad eos, qui digni sunt
The water speaks to those who are considered worthy…
** 2 years later **
The wind brushed the long curls from his face, coating them in sea salt and lifting them freely from the back of his neck before laying down again and brushing against his skin. He smiled with the sensation. Bucky had grown his hair long over the past few years, because that’s the way that Steve liked it, and Steve had cut his short, because that’s the way that Bucky liked it, and both of these decisions were good decisions because they were both still warm with the memory of each other changing.
He toed at the wet sand as he walked, tracing lines into the beach and looking for shells. This never got old, despite Steve insisting that he could bring back enormous things from the bottom of the ocean–shells that had no splits in them, hollowed out coral that was tinged with pink, homes that animals had left that weren’t already half destroyed.
“I like them this way,” Bucky had told him, time and time again. And he did. The small cracks, the pieces missing–they were damaged and yet still strong enough to wash up on the beach without disintegrating completely.
(He supposed that there was a metaphor for his life, or even Steve’s somewhere in this, but he wasn’t as prone to dramatics these days and instead let the sharp edges of his finds ground him, rather than inspire comparison.)
There was a swirling in the water—far enough away that Bucky could just barely make out the colors of the ocean as they changed. He smiled, then sat down to wait.
It didn’t take long. It never really did, once he spotted Steve from the distance. Steve would perch on the very same rock that he sat upon the day they met, and he’d let the water sluice from his skin, pull the kelp and seaweed from his hair, and wait for his land legs to appear. Then he’d hop down, and walk the rest of the way to the beach.
Sometimes the sea was turbid and strange, and it would cover him completely. Others it relaxed, lay so placid that Bucky could swear it was a solid sheet, firm enough to walk on.
Either way, Steve would make his way forward and they would hug, and they would smile, and they would always, always kiss.
“I missed you,” Bucky would say.
“I missed you more,” Steve would reply.
Today was no different, and after the requisite greetings, Bucky looped his hand in Steve’s and pulled him along the sand, back to the lighthouse.
“I found a new village this time,” he said, excited all over again at the idea of it.
“Oh?”
“Yes. It’s about eight miles southeast. It’s small—really nothing more than a fishing outpost. But there is a market and they had red meat!”
“Your favorite,” Steve replied with a grin.
Flashing his fangs in a wolfish grin, Bucky shoved Steve, hard enough that he tumbled into the sand. He sprung back up fast enough, spitting and hissing and extremely green at the gills.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Everything is still spinning. You’re going to make me puke!”
“Mmm,” Bucky mumbled, reaching his hand out and helping Steve back up again. “But you’re so adorable when you’re angry!”
Steve hissed at him again, nose wrinkling.
“Oh!” Bucky said. “There were humans at the edge a few nights ago.”
Swiveling around to look at him, Steve’s frown grew. “Excuse me?”
“Just a few really. I saw them looking. I saw one attempt to step on the beach, but it was as though he were hitting a wall, he couldn’t move any further. Then their lights bobbed for a bit, confused, before they turned and headed back into the woods.”
“It’s too close,” Steve said.
“I don’t really think so, though,” Bucky mused. “They couldn’t get through, they left, and no one has been back. And when I went to inspect the edge of the forest, there wasn’t a single path left that led to this place. I think it grew over them. I think it’s protecting us!”
“I think you hold far too much stock in magic,” Steve replied.
“I think that it’s been two years and not a soul has stepped on this beach. I think that I keep watch while you are gone, because I have nothing better to do, and so I know this to be true. And I think, that we are perfectly, wonderfully, safe.”
He grabbed Steve’s shoulders, turning him so that their eyes met. “And I think...no...I know. That I love you.”
They kissed again, at the base of the lighthouse steps, the sea breeze whispering around them.
Steve tasted faintly of fish.
Bucky tasted of sand.
And the water crashed against the sand, deeming them worthy of it all.