omnicat | FIC: Lots of Fish in the Sea, ch 2 [MCU, Steve x Peggy x Bucky]

Lots of Fish in the Sea - Bucky and Peggy

Against all odds and just as Peggy had – irrationally, perhaps, but no less wholeheartedly – believed he would, Steve strode into camp unharmed and trailed by hundreds of tired and bedraggled yet elated men. Late. Dreadfully late. But alive to answer for the suffocating fist that had been tightening around her insides all this time, which was the important thing.

Telling the Colonel ‘I told you so’ would be disrespectful, but Peggy was confident he could feel her thinking it.

Soldiers streamed from the tents, cheers and cries of joy and triumph rose and rose, and Peggy allowed herself a brief flight of fancy. If they both lived to see the end of this wretched war, she would convince Steve to revise the self-portrait: give the monkey a pair of angel wings as well. Perhaps even redo it entirely. She was sure he would look dashing in, say, a sculpted breastplate and leather skirt.

While Colonel Phillips moved in on him, Peggy briefly caught the eye of the man standing to Steve’s left and thought, Aha, barely surprised to be proven right. Two-legged, battered, dirt-encrusted, and far less baby-faced, but instantly recognizable: it was Steve’s merman.

That is Sergeant Barnes, then.

And the long, long legs he walked in on notwithstanding, Sergeant Barnes was an actual, literal mermaid.

Alright then.

Alright then.

Except for god’s sake, Rogers.

Peggy had taken both drawings for symbolic – hero-worshipfully, mockingly, or whatever gradation of affectionately in-between. Of course she had. The alternative was absurd. But no! In Barnes’s case the whole thing had been drawn from life, from the light and dark colors on his fish-tail flanks to the shape of his fins and the thin smattering of gleaming scales across his forearms.

"You," she said to Steve, astonishment dulling what wanted to be reprimand. "This is why –"

Barnes was falling to hysteria, babbling about vivisection and dire secrets and the safety of his family and others like them (by god, there were more), and Steve had drawn a pretty picture of the cause of his distress and left it lying around for anyone to see.

It was, perhaps, something she should talk to Steve about. But later. Not now, not when – god.

From there, it was surprisingly easy to... dismiss what she was seeing, in a way. To focus on the problems the tail presented and how to solve them, and let the mad impossibility of the tail itself rest. Just because science had taken a momentous leap forward before her very eyes and field reports of Hydra weapons that evaporated men on the spot haunted their desks, did not mean every fairytale and urban legend in the world was suddenly, retroactively real. The countless reasons why they’d been relegated to the realm of myth in the first place still held true, so no, mermaids were still not supposed to exist. But the cacophony of rejection in her head was so thick and impenetrable it pushed Peggy herself right out, like oil separating itself from water. Or, like a tub full of custard – because she could cross right over it, it was only a matter of keep walking and she wouldn’t sink an inch.

Her eyesight was impeccable, wasn’t it? And then there was Steve, freshly returned from a gamble that, by all rights but theirs, should have ended with him dead and her court-martialed; Steve, confirming the Sergeant’s claims with his every blink and breath.

Denial was unthinkable; problems were inevitable.

And problems were easy.

What to do about Barnes, in particular, was one; what to do with his existence in general was another. Knowing which took precedence? Not so much.

The next day, Peggy made notes and pursed her lips as Colonel Phillips and a medic with the right security clearance grilled Barnes.

"Do you feel any different from before?" the doctor asked after all his actual tests had told him nothing out of the ordinary.

"I feel like shit," Barnes answered frankly, then shot Peggy a look. "Sorry."

"Oh no, go right ahead."

"Ma’am." He inclined his head and repeated to the doctor, not without a bit of bite, "I feel like shit."

The doctor was not amused. "No old ailments that have mysteriously disappeared?"

"If they don’t feel even shittier than usual, they’re being eclipsed by how shitty the rest of me feels."

"We didn’t call you here for your cheek, Sergeant," the Colonel interrupted, even less amused.

"Sorry, sir," Barnes said.

Barnes did not look sorry.

"After his procedure, Captain Rogers only needed a moment to gather his bearings and hasn’t felt unwell for a moment since," Peggy explained, because Barnes looked wound tight enough to snap and the medic was proving to have rather terrible bedside manner.

Barnes’s expression mellowed minutely; the doctor had an epiphany.

"Did they use vita-rays?"

"Vita-whats?" Barnes asked.

"That’s a negative then." The doctor scribbled something on his own clipboard, the gears in his head churning altogether too eagerly.

"Were you conscious for the entirety of the proceedings, Sergeant?" Peggy asked, aiming a disapproving stare at the oblivious doctor.

"...no," Barnes said reluctantly. "I – I’m pretty sure I lost time every time they –"

Realisation penetrated what must be a nightmarish fog of memories and he looked up at Peggy for confirmation, and then joined her in making scandalized faces at the doctor.

"So we have no way to establish a negative," Peggy translated. Barnes may have gotten it, but she had her doubts about the over-excited doctor. "And how’s your grasp of German scientific jargon, Sergeant?"

"Non-existent, Ma’am."

"Even better."

The doctor gave her one of those looks that said how dare you, and what do you know, you uppity broad.

Bloody hell, please not now.

The doctor very deliberately turned his back to her. "We could stick him in the vita-ray machine, see if it activates anything lying dormant in his blood."

"Or the vita-rays could kill him if there is no serum in his blood to react with!" Peggy said. "Have you forgotten everything Doctor Erskine told us about the procedure?"

"Everybody remembers just fine," Phillips snapped. "But there’s also the matter of him effectively taking the future of our super soldier program to the grave to consider."

"And reviving the program is worth risking Sergeant Barnes’s life?"

Phillips gave her, and Barnes, a hard look. "Captain Rogers just liberated four hundred men and laid waste to a major Hydra war factory, on a solo mission. I didn’t see the point in deploying just one enhanced soldier before, but I admit it, I was wrong. Their use, even individually, is far greater than what I imagined. I don’t need an army of them, I just need more than one of them. But Rogers’s blood is all but useless to us. Every drop of serum we gave him activated and disappeared, and reverse-engineering the results is getting us nowhere fast. If there is even the slightest chance that what they pumped into the Sergeant will get us more super soldiers, even if it’s only the Sergeant himself, then yes, it’s worth it."

"Do I get a say in this?" Barnes asked.

Phillips made an impatient gesture. "Look, son, we’re not sticking you in the oven just like that. But we are going to find out if we can and whether we even should, and you will cooperate with us to that end. You will tell us everything you remember, you will let us take all the blood samples we need, and once you’ve eaten and rested and are back on your feet, you will show us everything you’ve got behind your punches these days. And that’s an order. We’ll talk about the vita-ray machine if and when there’s reason to. Understood?"

Barnes nor Peggy was stupid enough to argue.

"Yes, sir."

The worst part was that they both knew the Colonel was right.

"Ma’am, we can’t let them examine the blood they took," Barnes said under his breath as they left the medical tent, side-by-side. He looked wrecked.

Peggy did not enjoy what she was about to say, but it had to be said. "Sergeant, the last time we talked about this, you were in a state. I want you to stop and think about it again, very carefully. You can either take your chances at being exposed as a – a –"

"Merman," he supplied with a press of the lips that wasn’t quite a smile.

Surely that would sound less ridiculous with time?

"Yes." She met his eyes, her own mouth tight. "You either take the chance of being exposed as a merman, or at least a genetic deviant of some kind, and you won’t be left guessing as to the long-term effects on your health quite so much. Not to mention that you could be aiding the war effort immeasurably. Or you can forego the risks to your kind, let the side-effects of whatever happened to you play out as they will, and not add your blood to the samples we took from Captain Rogers. The choice is yours. Think carefully. Is it really worth it?"

His gaze drifted off across the camp, and beyond, to places unseen. "Before you met me, what was your impression of mermaids?"

"What’s anyone’s impression of mermaids?" she sighed impatiently. "They were made up by our ignorant ancestors. Urban legends. Like brownies, or haunted houses. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who swears they’ve seen one, but there’s never any proof."

"We work very hard to keep it that way, and we have to work harder every time humankind comes up with some new scientific innovation that might expose us someday," Barnes said. "Submarines, sonar? Amazing inventions, but they’re costing lives – especially now. There’s only a couple hundred thousand of us around the world –"

Peggy’s mouth went dry. Only – ?! She’d been thinking in terms of dozens. Maybe a hundred. Some small, manageable number that fit into a cove in Neverland.

"– so the risk of discovery is spread thin, but it’s not non-existent. And once one of us is discovered, none of us will be safe. Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives," he emphasized. "Put at the mercy of people who have feared and despised us for millennia."

A few hundred thousand hidden in the world’s oceans, versus four hundred in a night, out of two and a half billion, in a war going on three years and counting with no end in sight. Oh, the joys of a world so rife with suffering it reduced such an unfathomable choice to a mathematical equation.

And neither option offered any more guidance than ‘but what if?’ – for either of them. Had Peggy been a more devout woman, she would have been praying even then that leaving the decision entirely in his hands was the right thing to do.

"You know what the difference is between a mermaid and a siren?"

Raising her eyebrows and blowing out a breath, Peggy considered that. "Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible?"

Barnes’s nostrils flared. "Good will. One’s a pretty girl flipping her hair on a rock, ready to do unspeakable things to herself to drain the sea from her blood and gain a soul the moment she meets a good Christian man; the other’s a body-snatching, man-eating, home-wrecking, child-stealing monster descended from sinners who sold their soul to the devil during the great flood. Competition for humankind’s place at the top of the food chain."

"So Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible."

"Yes, fine, Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible," Barnes huffed. Then he ran his hands down his face and took a deep breath to calm down. He shook his head, lips twisted in frustration. "Much as some of us wish we could – though for most of us, it’s the last thing we want – we can’t go and hide in the deep sea where no-one will ever even look for us. No more than people can go live at the top of Mount Everest. We’re creatures of the coast, we’re just not built for the kind of terrain that would let us be safe."

Barnes smiled, just barely.

"So we send out specialists, sentries, to establish human identies on land, and they dedicate their lives to obfuscating our existence. Make evidence disappear, discredit eye-witness accounts, provide reasonable alternatives to the fairytale explanation. They also make sure we have access to services that might give us away if we had to get them from outsiders."

Peggy’s eyebrows shot up. "Like doctors?"

"Like doctors," Barnes confirmed, grinning.

"A third option," she said, all the pleasure that didn’t make it to her mouth blazing in her eyes. "We switch the blood, give our doctors a batch from one of the other men in the factory, and send yours to your mermaid doctor."

"A compromise," Barnes amended. "It’ll take longer for my guy to get results – probably a lot longer – and he’d have to be made privy to at least some classified information..."

But it was better than nothing.

Peggy falsified the blood samples, slipped the real deal to Barnes, affected her usual professional distance during his examinations, and didn’t truly speak to him again until he joined her at the bar in the leave-me-alone corner of the Whip and Fiddle one night. She’d found him in this exact spot with Steve just a few days ago. He was more put-together than he’d been then: uniform straightened out, buttons shined, tie done up, hair neatly slicked, jaw smooth. It made him look younger, and it made the shadows still lingering beneath his eyes less pronounced – but the ones in his eyes all the more.

"I should probably apologize," he said without preamble.

"Whatever for?"

"Pick something. Anything." Before she could do more than furrow her brow, he shook his head and laughed to himself. "I mean for my terrible pick-up lines the other night. Steve hadn’t told me you two were..."

Peggy raised an eyebrow but otherwise restrained herself. "What?"

He studied her from the corner of his eye. "...testing the waters. I don’t usually make the moves on my best friend’s girl. Just wanna put that out there."

"Perhaps he didn’t tell you we were anything because I’m not his girl," Peggy said.

"Oh. Well, that’s up to you, of course," he said, taken aback a bit.

Not what he’d expected? Steve must have been too embarrassed to mention Private Lorraine, then.

Good.

Barnes took an ill-advised gulp from his drink, grimaced, and rubbed his eyes. "Geeze, what am I even..." Then he straightened his shoulders and looked her square in the eye. "The thing is, I’ve never seen him look at a woman the way he looks at you before, and I should have noticed it sooner."

Peggy looked away, lips pressed into a thin line.

Peggy thought, briefly, of catching Steve in the act and shooting him in the shield.

Peggy thought, even more briefly, of pulling Barnes in by the tie and sticking her tongue in his mouth the way that French resistance boy she’d blown off steam with last year had shown her, and asking in her driest voice if he’d ever seen Steve do that.

It would either make Barnes more observant, show Steve what it felt like, or both. It was also a twelve-year-old’s idea of getting even, and would leave her with no self-respect to speak of.

Pity, really. Barnes’s mouth looked like sin.

Apparently she’d been thinking longer than she thought, because suddenly Barnes spoke again, quietly:

"I was starting to think he just didn’t have it in him, to be honest. But... turns out all it took was someone just as extraordinary as himself. I’d be happy if it was you. I really would."

Peggy let out an incredulous laugh. "Did Rogers put you up to this?"

"What?" he asked, looking surprised, as if he truly did not realise how dramatic his words had been. "God no, he’d die of humiliation if he found out I ever said any of this. Please don’t tell him I said any of this."

Oh, boys.

Peggy quirked an eyebrow, not without some fondness. "More secrets?"

"Yeah, just put it on my tab along with everything else I owe you for," Barnes said with a wry smile.

"Don’t mention it. Just please stop trying to hawk Captain Rogers off on me. His good qualities don’t need selling, and his mistakes are his to correct."

He raised his glass in salute. "Gotcha."

For a while, they drank in silence. Barnes got a refill, then another, and then Peggy shook her head at the bartender and ordered him a water.

"You’ll thank me later."

Barnes leaned against the bar and smiled warm and slow, all self-deprecating charm. "I keep trying to make up for the terrible first impression I made and failing."

"In the interest of full disclosure, you didn’t make my first impression of you," Peggy said. "Captain Rogers did."

"Right, he’s been talking about me."

"A time or two."

"Lies. All lies."

Barnes smiled. Peggy smiled back.

"Pity. He said you were one of the few to ever believe in him before Doctor Erskine, even though you had more reason than anyone not to, always coming to his defence. Said you even almost drowned once trying to protect him."

Barnes snorted. "I’m afraid that wasn’t quite the brave deed it sounds like, seeing as I’m physically incapable of drowning and all."

"I can read between the lines, Sergeant. It sounds no less brave now than it did before."

He gave her a long and impenetrable look. Peggy used that time to firmly squash the urge to make this conversation All About The Tail. She was getting good at that.

"That explains a lot. Better get back in shape then." He cast his eyes down to his water, and his lips quirked into an almost-smile. "In my defence, that day back in Austria? Part of me was still convinced I was either dead, dying, or hallucinating. ...don’t tell Steve I said that either."

She gave him a look he didn’t meet. "If you want. For what it’s worth, though, I really don’t think he would think any less of you."

"Probably not. But I’d be one ungrateful bastard if I told him that him showing up and saving my life like that started feeling like a nightmare halfway through." He sighed, suddenly looking bone-tired. "All my life there’s only been two things I was ever afraid of, and those forty-eight hours had both."

"I thought you said there was only one thing."

He let out a huff of a laugh. "Yeah, well, you try telling a guy like Steve that you lie awake at night worrying about his health, wondering if this is the year he’ll finally catch something that will take him away from you."

"I should think you’d be dancing with relief, then," she said, voice carefully neutral.

"I didn’t mean it like that." He sighed again, running a hand through his hair and leaning his elbows on the bar. "It’s weird as hell that it happened so fast, but I’m happy for him. He’s finally getting to be the man he always wanted to be. Deserved to be. But... I could never keep him from getting into trouble, but at least I could help get him out of it. Buy medicine and beat up the guys beating on him. Smooth things over when a beautiful woman got him tongue-tied and he said something stupid because of it. You know? But I don’t know what to do about –"

His mouth twisted and his nose scrunched up. All seriousness aside, Peggy had to take a moment to appreciate how adorably ridiculous Barnes looked when he got cranky.

"– demon Nazis. And guns that burn you to dust like that," he said, snapping his fingers. "I’m not a super soldier, that much is obvious. How do I get Steve out of trouble if I can’t even keep up with him?"

"You’ll find a way," Peggy said. "We all will. That’s what the lot of us are here for."

"I’m damn well going to try, alright," Barnes said, and raised his water to her with a smirk like a challenge. "To the impossible –"

"– made possible," Peggy finished, clinking.

The answer, for Barnes, was many things, from his marksmanship and experience as an NCO to, one day – and gosh, whoever would have guessed – his gills.

No, really, Peggy had been waiting for this. Not actively, granted, but for a subconscious expectation it was a very forceful one. Perhaps Steve and Barnes were so used to the fact that he was a merman that they had grown out of feeling like something would surely come of sooner or later, but for her it had been only a few months, and a few months of enforced silence to boot.

It was funny, really. In the past few years she’d gone from the WAAF to the SOE to the SSR, gathering and analysing and transporting intel, encrypting and decrypting messages between allies and enemies both, infiltrating Hydra strongholds, supervising top-secrets projects. But only now, when the secrets were personal, did she feel anything close to that sitting-on-a-bomb sensation she remembered from a memorable month or so of boarding school, exchanging awkward glances with Mary and Ethel across the classroom after walking in on them passionately snogging against a toilet stall.

At present, the Howling Commandos, Stark, Phillips and Peggy were studying the same maps and facts for the umpteenth time – the enemy base, the numbers stationed inside, the miles of flat, barren fields surrounding it on three sides, the armed watchtowers, the landmines, the steep plunge off a cliff and into the ocean on the fourth side...

"Sure is a shame," Barnes said slowly. "that those are occupied waters."

There was a decision in his voice, clear as day. Peggy was instantly and inappropriately excited.

"We’re not getting any submarines down there, that’s for sure," she said with utmost restraint.

"And according to surveillance, the search lights on those towers scan the water just as thoroughly as the land, so even a rowboat is out," Steve added, his voice just a smidgeon higher than normal.

"I could bring half that factory down into the ocean if I had a dozen heavy charges and the opportunity to place them in the right spots," Dernier muttered in French, running his gaze and his fingers across photographs of the cliffside as if in a trance. "Even easier if I could use that blue Hydra boomsh."

Jones translated for the monolinguals in the room.

They’d confiscated so much blue Hydra boomsh from the last factory they took. The self-destruct mechanism had failed. Stark had cried and treated the entire division to the kind of drink only the filthy rich still had access to in this time of rationing.

Barnes planted an elbow on the table and his face in his hand, and looked at Steve and Peggy from beneath his eyelashes. Crossing his arms, Steve covered his mouth with his hand, half-mimicking Barnes, and Peggy picked up her empty teacup and bit down on the tin rim.

Steve and Barnes were already busily plotting when she slipped into Steve’s private quarters later that night. Barnes’s face was alight with the giddy nerves of someone about to do something utterly foolish yet incredibly exhilarating; Steve looked alternately worried and love-struck with awe. Peggy recognized the look. Usually she was the one on the other end of it.

Peggy knew it was at least in part her alacrity speaking, but god help her, she had never been more charmed by either of them.

"The hardest thing about this," she said by way of greeting. "will be coming up with an excuse that doesn’t boil down to ‘magic’."

Barnes took the folder she produced from inside her jacket and flipped it open. "Oh, that’s easy. I dared Steve to do it and he did it. Who needs ‘magic’ when we have ‘super soldier’?"

"I don’t wanna walk away with the credit for something you did, Buck," Steve said, his face all scrunched up.

"Look at it this way: I take the credit, I get court-martialled. You take the credit, you get off with a slap on the wrist."

"Nobody is getting court-martialled," Peggy clucked. "We’re clearing this with the Colonel up front. We’ll just be lying fit to burst about what we’re clearing."

"But then we’ll actually have to think of an explanation," Steve groaned. "Can’t I just risk it? I’ve changed my mind, martyrdom sounds like fun."

Barnes’s longsuffering look was a work of art.

"Have a seat," he told Peggy, vacating the room’s only chair and settling opposite Steve on the bed instead. "This could take a while."

It took all night, as it turned out. Though admittedly, by the time Bigfoot came up as the perfect scapegoat, they’d long since abandoned all pretence of professionalism.

They waited until the moon was new. Steve manned the oars of a little rowboat they’d stashed away miles out of Hydra’s detection range, and Barnes stuck his head into the water for a bit so that, with the night vision that let his kind see in the dark depths of the ocean, he could give Steve directions. Peggy fastened their lone thermographic device prototype over her eyes to watch their rear.

Once Steve stopped the boat, safely out of range of the factory lights, Barnes stripped down and geared up.

Peggy studied his silhouette from the corner of her eyes. Her own hands were an orange-tinged golden glow, while Steve’s face and hands were warmer, gold inching towards white. Barnes had been orange where bare and dark gold where clothed, but as she watched him strap on the airtight pack – containing the explosives (all too willingly donated by Stark), a diagram of the cliff (commissioned from Dernier, vengeful boomsh enthusiast that he was, with equal ease), a towel, a spare pair of boots and trousers, a flare, and a pistol – his chest and arms slowly cooled to red.

Then Barnes reached for his belt, and Peggy turned away entirely.

The boat rocked. There was a splash. When Peggy looked again, she frowned.

"Barnes?" She grabbed the edge of the boat and leaned over. "Barnes, where are you?"

"Right here."

A cold, wet hand wrapped around her wrist, and she sucked in a startled breath.

He was entirely blue, so dim and dark he was nearly invisible against the black of the night.

"What’s the matter?" Steve asked.

"So cold," Peggy said wonderingly, turning her hand to clasp Barnes’s wrist, fingers brushing alternating textures of skin and scales. It hadn’t occurred to her until now. And she certainly hadn’t expected the transformation to be over so quickly.

"What, you mean his toes?"

Barnes splashed Steve in the face.

"Incredible," Peggy dryly, squeezing Barnes’s hand once before pulling back. "But let’s get to business, shall we?"

"Right."

"One last time for luck: Barnes, you swim over underwater, dry yourself off on one of the rocks where the search lights don’t reach, climb the cliff to plant the charges where Dernier indicated, swim back to us, and once you’re safely in the boat we detonate the charges from here. If you encounter trouble, you light the flare and Steve will swim after you while I radio for reinforcements. No dawdling, no heroics."

"Other than what you’re already doing," Steve said.

"Butter me up some more, I’ll slip-n-slide right off that cliff."

"Ahem. No dawdling, no heroics. In the unlikely event that you encounter something that casts doubt on the desirability of this mission’s completion or the means of its completion, you have the last call on how to proceed while you’re there. Clear?"

"Clear," Steve and Barnes echoed.

"Go get ’em," Peggy said.

She could just make out Barnes’s head turn toward Steve. Thermographic vision didn’t let her make out their expressions, and Steve was as good as blind in this level of darkness even with his enhanced vision, but she could imagine their faces in that moment. They even looked at each other like Mary and Ethel had; joint keepers of a beautiful and terrible secret, and bound together all the tighter for it.

(The one big difference was that with Mary and Ethel, Peggy had at least known beforehand that such things really happened. Nobody liked to talk about uncle Freddie, but uncle Freddie loved talking about ‘uncle’ John.)

"See you in a jiffy," Barnes said, and disappeared underwater.

And Peggy and Steve were left behind to wait.

"So, how does a merman end up on the streets of Brooklyn?" Peggy asked after about thirty seconds of silent bobbing.

The golden blob of light that was Steve (she would not think of that as fitting, no sir) turned to face her. "Shouldn’t you be asking him that?"

"My mother taught me it’s rude to pry."

He cocked his head and said, a smile in his voice, "It’s rude to pry Bucky, but not me?"

"Is it as sensitive a subject for you as it is for him?"

She saw his body shake with silent laughter. "Devious."

Peggy smiled into the dark. "Devious implies unsavoury intent. I think I prefer ‘tactful’."

"Don’t worry about prying," Steve said. "Worry about how to shut him up once you’ve got him started. He loves getting to talk about it, and showing it off. He rarely ever gets to be himself that way, so..."

He shrugged.

"It must be difficult," Peggy mused. "And for what? I only got a glimpse before, but it was..."

"Beautiful," Steve finished simply. "And I’m not ashamed to say so. But not everybody sees it that way. One of Bucky’s sisters, Rebecca, had a fella a couple years back, and he asked her to marry him. She’d’ve loved to, but she wanted him to know the truth before they did. At first he seemed fine with it, but eventually he started acting... weird. Nasty and paranoid. He stopped listening to her and started sending letters to occultists and exorcists. Rebecca thought –"

Steve looked away, and even through the thermographic device Peggy could see his face twist.

"What did they do to him?" Peggy asked.

Steve’s head shot up. As if he hadn’t expected her to see exactly where this was going.

"Rebecca and the others convinced him he’d imagined the whole thing. His friends and family had noticed his change in behaviour too, so it was... relatively easy... to convince them he was headed for a psychological breakdown. They’d invite him over to Sunday dinner at the family home and all compliment Mrs Barnes on her carrot soup when she’d served pea soup to confuse him. That sort of thing. And with everyone telling him the mermaid thing was crazy, he eventually started believing it himself. They broke off the engagement and he went to stay with family in another state. Work on the farm for a while. ‘Clear his head.’"

"Charming."

"It wasn’t pretty," Steve agreed grimly. "And that’s one of the better outcomes when things to south. You should hear the stories Bucky’s mom can tell. When she told her future husband, she set him up to be suspected of her murder if he tried anything funny."

What would James Barnes have done to her, Peggy wondered, if she had presented herself as a threat?

"Bucky says most mermaids, whether they grew up on land or in the water, just don’t bother with humans who don’t already know. Who would voluntarily want to put themselves in that position? Especially with someone they love?"

What would Steve have done?

"I don’t mean to frighten you, Peggy," Steve said softly. "Or to imply that Bucky and his family are –"

"You have neither frightened me nor implied a thing, Steve," Peggy said with perfect honesty. "I understand completely."

In weary, bloodied moments, she sometimes looked at the undercurrent of perpetual caution, of hostility, and even of physical force running through her own life and relationships – with peers and superiors and subordinates, with friends and family – and had a hard time remembering why she thought it was worth it. Wondered when she’d come to think of punching an ally in the nose for some crass words as a perfectly reasonable and unremarkable course of action. What it said about her that discovering an exceptional aptitude for all manner of violence and dishonesty was the best thing that had ever happened to her. But Peggy’s struggle was a decision she had made, and her ambitions, her desire for respect, were things she could – or so she kept being told – give up if she ever felt the price had become too steep. For Barnes, the choice wasn’t so simple.

It might be unfair to call it a choice at all.

"I –" Steve started. "Wait, where are the binoculars? I think he’s reached the cliff."

Watching Barnes from afar, trying to spot him in the faint, fleeting, infrequent illumination of close-passing search lights, was nerve-wracking. Nothing like the threat of death or (re)capture to drive home how attached you’ve grown to a man.

"If we pull this off he deserves a medal," Steve said grimly. He seemed very keen on that general sentiment.

"We’ll bake him a cake," Peggy muttered.

"You bake?"

"Badly."

"So I’ll bake him a cake while you supervise, is what you’re saying."

"Exactly."

Steve grumbled something unintelligible.

"He doesn’t like your cooking?" Peggy guessed.

"I’m pretty sure he just pretends to. I don’t like my cooking."

"If public recognition is what you’re after, covert operations are not the way to go, Steve."

"I know that," Steve sighed.

"And so does he."

"It’s just not fair. I blow up a Hydra base, they give me a Medal of Honor. He blows up a Hydra base, he gets more lies to keep track of."

Peggy only murmured an absent, "Hell of a way to live." She might have engaged or looked over at him, but it was her turn with the binoculars and she was starting to grow concerned with how long it had been since she’d last glimpsed Barnes.

Steve was silent for a while.

"It’s all backwards," he said eventually. "It used to be Bucky who was... just... better at everything. At first it was great to feel like I imagined he always did, but you get used to it surprisingly quickly. Now it’s just weird. I know it’s selfish to think of it that way when I was given the serum for the sake of the war effort, but every now and then it just... I never wanted to be better than Bucky. Only as good as."

Steve paused.

"I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I?"

"A bit." Peggy smiled into the dark. "But I think I speak for the both of us when I say you’re forgiven."

"You do," Barnes’s voice came from behind them.

Peggy and Steve jumped a mile.

And screamed. Let’s not forget the screaming.

"For god’s sake, Barnes!" Peggy hissed furiously. The binoculars were gone. She hoped they’d fallen in the boat.

"Bucky, we are right under Hydra’s nose, what the hell are you thinking?!" Steve added.

Barnes wasn’t thinking; he was wheezing with suppressed laughter. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry!"

He never did sound sorry when he said that.

"How long have you been here?" Peggy demanded.

"You’ll never know." He threw his pack into the boat, and they listed slightly to the side as he put his weigh on the edge. "Charges planted. Let’s light ’em up."

"If we weren’t accomplices, I would write you up myself," Peggy promised, one hand pressed to her racing hart as she felt around for the detonator with the other.

Steve exhaled noisily. "Get in the boat, Buck."

"Actually, I think I’ll stay here and swim to shore alongside you. Stretch my fins while I can."

Fine. Saved her the trouble of trying not to kick him.

The detonation was deafening, blinding, and even more effective than Stark and Dernier had predicted. Bye bye, Hydra airborne division. They cheered, they clapped each other on the back, and then they departed the scene in silence, because ‘deafening’ was not hyperbole.

While Peggy and Steve moored their little boat by the light of a single lantern, Barnes hoisted himself onto the landing pier.

"My mother..." he started, and Peggy, over her shoulder, got her first glimpse of his aquatic form since that day in the woods; gleaming and shadow-cast, eyes lit up like a cat’s with the light of fire on the horizon. "– is this weird blend of a pessimist and an idealist. She believes that discovery is gonna get us all killed, but she also taught me and my sisters that if one of us ever comes across a human in need of our help, we should always save them from the sea."

("Bucky took after his mom most," Steve would tell Peggy one day. "Soldiering was his father’s thing. Career military. Mr Barnes would’ve been so proud of him for coming here, if he’d lived to see it. But Bucky was always his mother’s son through and through.")

"They must be drowning by the dozens out there," Barnes said. "And I just don’t care."

War: one moment you celebrated like the explosions were fireworks, the next, reality snapped back into place to remind you that in any other place, at any other time, what you’d done would be called a massacre.

Then you remembered the special brand of despicable fanatics that made up the Hydra ranks, all the air raids you’d prevented, all the ground your forces would be able to reclaim now, and celebrating sounded pretty damn good again. At least for a while. (Just a while.) They told their lies and paid their dues and played their parts through the aftermath, and later, in London, they all stepped out to get jolly sloshed together.

When they raised their first drink in a toast to Barnes, he asked, "So, Margaret, are you gonna start calling me Bucky yet or what?"

"But James, that’s such a silly name," Peggy lamented with a smile.

"James who? I’d like to think you were talking to me, but for every ten guys in a room there’s always three Jameses, so I never know."

"She meant Monty," Steve assured him.

"Morita, actually."

Bucky it was, then. She wasn’t honestly sure why she’d held off thinking of him that way for so long in the first place.

When they called it a night, Steve led them through the SSR corridors with Bucky’s arm around his shoulders on one side and Peggy’s around his waist on the other. Because Peggy and Bucky were wobbly-drunk and Steve was not. (He couldn’t get drunk anymore. Poor dear. They’d toasted his loss liberally.) Because Peggy and Steve were in love and Bucky and Steve were like brothers, and Steve’s hugs were divine. Because there was no-one watching. Because why the hell not?

"I jus’ had the greadest idea," Bucky slurred, and swung himself around to face Steve and throw his other arm around Peggy’s shoulders. "We make a goo’team, right? The tree ov us?"

"Yeah, Buck," Steve said. "The best."

His smile was soft and wistful, and his arm tightened around Peggy’s waist. Melting into the contours of Steve’s body, she hummed her own agreement as well.

"Thought so," Bucky murmured.

And he reached up higher, weaving his fingers into Steve’s hair. Pulled him in to press a lingering kiss to his cheek.

Peggy let out a trembling breath.

A single chaste, sloppy display of Bucky’s mouth working, and her mind went blank and her flared body hot with desire. Right. That was why she’d held off thinking in first name terms for so long.

Then he turned toward her, and tilted her face up to his, and when the distance between his lips and her cheek was mere inches yet something clicked, and Peggy stiffened and thought oh no. But Bucky’s eyes had already slipped shut, blind to her alarm. Peggy was really rather drunk, so the only thing that came to mind was to raise her hand and let him plant his face in that instead of – judging from his ill-plotted trajectory – her ear.

And he did.

Bucky jerked back, sputtering and wide-eyed with confused surprise.

"No!" Peggy squawked.

Bucky froze.

Bucky looked at her, at Steve, at her, at Steve again. If there had been any doubt in her mind as to the nature of his 'great idea', it was obliterated by the stricken look Barnes sent Steve as he yanked his hands away from both of them and launched himself backwards.

And suddenly they were all staring at one another in horrified realisation.

Bucky and Steve, close as brothers.

Peggy and Steve, in love.

And Peggy and Bucky...

Oh no.

"Right," Barnes said thickly. "No. Right. I should. Leave."

He pointed a finger in the direction of his quarters, then his feet, then –

"Wait," Steve croaked, looking frantically between Barnes and Peggy, his face twisted in pained, wide-eyed disbelief. "Wait, we –"

Barnes fled.

"Bucky!"

Peggy grabbed the hand Steve raised, halting his pursuit in its tracks.

"Leave him," she said. "He’s drunk, he’s saying nonsense. He’s drunk. And so am I. Walk me to my room, Steve."

She felt stone-cold sober.

"Look, it was inappropriate and I ap –"

"I don’t want your apologies," Peggy interrupted, both her hangover and her other throbbing source of misery locked down under inches of steel. "You were drunk. But I think we both know you were also honest."

He didn’t deny it.

"Listen carefully, Barnes, because I will say this only once. I am not some whore available to every man in this division. I am not a piece of meat to be passed around between a man and his best mate whenever they fancy a tryst. And I will not be the object of a love triangle."

Barnes’s face emptied of all emotion.

"I am off-limits to you. I don’t care what’s gotten into you, what insecurities or growing pains or territorial disputes between yourself and Steve you thought to relieve with this. You do not jeopardize my position here. You do not compromise the functioning of our division. Meaning, you do not make the moves on your best friend’s girl."

Or else hung in the air between them, unspoken but unmistakable.

What would James Barnes do to her if she presented herself as a threat?

What would Margaret Carter do to him if he presented himself as a threat?

(And they called Steve dramatic.)

"Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"Then the remainder of our acquaintance should be perfectly pleasant," Peggy said with a sharp, pointed smile. And she turned on her heel, leaving him to stare stonily into the shadows of the empty office.

After all the risks she’d taken on his behalf –

I took a chance with you, Agent Carter, and now America’s golden boy and a lot of other good men are dead. ’Cause you had a crush.

A lot of good men dead because you had a crush.

Captain America and lot of other good men dead because you had a crush.

Barnes was as good as his word, though. Thank god.

("I didn’t puke on your shoes or something, did I?" he’d groaned, lowering himself ever so gingerly into his seat. "I don’t remember going home last night."

Steve had looked pained for just a moment before he could muster up a strained smile. "Nah, worst you did was drool.")

Thank god.

Peggy found the second drawing, too, by accident. There was a map she needed stuck in Steve’s sketchbook and, since he might have been using the map to mark a spot, she opened the book some, intent on finding something else to stick in it.

Her eye immediately fell on a pair of cartoony little wings. Then a pair of fins waving through the air.

Steve had been drawing them again. Both of them.

That’s where things got interesting, and not in a good way. The drawing was signed and dated – dated to almost a month before Barnes’s drunken slip.

Betrayal spread like fire from the roots of Peggy’s hair to the tips of her fingers.

Exactly whose dirty little fantasy had Barnes spilled that night?

She threw the little book down, acutely disgusted, and –

Wait.

She picked it back up.

The ape in the middle. The merman over one shoulder and the angel over the other.

The ape in the middle.

A hundred little details turned sideways all at once, and suddenly the picture they painted was something else entirely. The young girl or the old crone? The faces or the vase? The duck or the rabbit?

From this angle, the love triangle looked to be configured very differently.

From this angle it looked so much worse.

Hook, Line, and Sinker (WORK IN PROGRESS)
The lives and loves of Bucky Barnes, shapeshifting merman.
Guppy Love
Bucky can’t sing or swim, except that he totally can. It’s complicated.
aka the one where Bucky Barnes is a merman and the greatest tragedy in a child’s life is not being able to go swimming with your friends // Steve x Bucky
Lots of Fish in the Sea
     Chapter: Bucky and Steve
     Chapter: Bucky and Peggy
     Chapter: Bucky and Steve and Peggy
     Chapter: Steve and Peggy
     Chapter: Bucky
Hydra had Bucky on a lab table for god knows how long and never discovered his secret. Cue Agent Carter walking in on it pretty much the moment he and Steve make it back to camp.
aka the one where Bucky Barnes is a merman and once you’ve lived through your single worst nightmare, ‘chasing tail’ puns are a close second // Steve x Peggy x Bucky
Plankton
Canon-divergent AU branching off from the more or less canon-compliant Hook, Line, and Sinker. Steve walks away from the wreckage of the Valkyrie and returns home in time to propose to Peggy on V-E day, and some fifteen years later, the Winter Soldier's handlers make the grave mistake of sending Bucky Barnes after his best guy and girl's young children.
It's all domestic fluff and hurt/comfort and suburban absurdity from there. :D The mermaid thing may or may not be relevant or even visibly present in any given installment. Fics with "fish" theme titles contain overt mermaid stuff, fics with "bird" themed titles don't.
Heaven
A man may take himself out of the war, and the war out of himself, but what does he put back in?
Early Birds
They have a lot of options. Not least of which: going back to sleep while the grown-ups do their thing.
The Christmas Cookie Caper
What's a brainwashed assassin turned suburban dad supposed to do to keep his homemade baked goods safe around here?
Once Upon A Tide
     Once Upon A Tide...
     Ten Years Later
“Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there lived a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman...” // standalone / sidestory
aka the one where Bucky Barnes is a shapeshifting merman, and his children are deeply unimpressed with the lack of imagination that goes into their bedtime stories. The alternative is... unfortunate, though.