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"Well I'm not just gonna leave you with my baby all alone," Bucky says stubbornly. "Am I not allowed to have a say? I can't see my kid once she's born, she just belongs to you? That's not really fair. If you're gonna...the whole thing is weird," he admits, "But I don't wanna have sex with someone who doesn't care about me and then have to leave my own kid behind. That's just not how it works."

He guesses mermaid society is really different but that's the way he was taught and he isn't gonna change that. It's wrong. The sex he guesses he could do - she is beautiful - but he isn't just gonna leave his own kid behind. That's a part of him.

She was starting to understand why her sisters didn't bother talking to their mates very much. Not if this was what they had to deal with. Natalia huffed rather than answer again, tossing her head and flicking her tail, abruptly swimming outside of her shelter to gaze around once more.

Infuriating male! She considered, briefly, tossing him back on the beach and letting him fend for himself, but she wasn't, at heart, cruel, and she...liked him, besides. Maybe they could just...not talk about things? A familiar shoal of silversides flashed by, teasing at her long hair and making her laugh; they were residents of the reef, too. They flitted around her, this way and that, considerably lightening the mermaid's sour mood.

By the time she returned to the sunken ship, she was calmer, and rather than say anything at all, she swam to her companion and put her arms around his neck, meeting his mouth with hers. Kissing was far preferable to talking, anyway.

Kissing was good. Natalia is a good kisser and Bucky lets himself sink into it even though it's a little crazy that he's underwater with a mermaid and he can still breathe. She's got her arms around his neck and he slips his around her petite waist, holding her close to him.

"I don't wanna leave," Bucky says softly. "Do you want me to just go after I give you your kid? Because that's not what I want to do." He kisses her again, so soft, and presses as close to her as he can.

"How will you stay?" she asked after they broke apart. "You have feet. No fins. Daughter will have fins. No feet for...many years." That was a skill that each mermaid had to learn, finding their feet. "I must have daughter. This is how we continue. All of my sisters have many daughters. I...have never."

She lowered her eyes, letting him go and drifting away a bit.

"Males...cannot stay, after. None ever have." Pushing her long hair aside, she looked back at Bucky. "Why do you want to stay? Give up life on land?" To her, it made no sense.

"I don't want to just...you don't leave your kids," Bucky says. "You don't leave the woman who gave birth to your kid and not help her. And I want to see her. She's gonna be a part of me, you know? I want kids. I don't want to just have to leave her and never get to know her or hold her."

This is bothering him more than it should, he guesses. Plenty of men would be happy to be absolved of responsibility and only get the fun part.

"Maybe I'm not a good mate for you, Natalia."

Her expression twisted again, realizing that he was probably right. "...no," she agreed, shaking her head. "I...and I shouldn't have told you." Now she realized why her sisters never bothered talking with their mates. Words just caused problems.

Rather than talk anymore, or even kiss, the redheaded mermaid flicked her tail in an abrupt about-face, and swam out of the shelter, veering abruptly to the left and vanishing amid the coral and sea grass. She couldn't even look at him right now, not even as pretty as he was.

A few familiar fish tried to follow her, curious, but she warned them off with a few threatening strokes of her tail. Above her, the ocean was still roiling as the storm raged, but deep in the depths, near the coral beds, the current was steady, and the unhappy mermaid settled to the sandy bottom amid a colorful bouquet of plants and creatures, blending seamlessly. She just...wanted everything to go away, right now.

Shit. Bucky doesn't know what to do, really. He looks up and while the water blocks his view, it looks turbulent and he doesn't know if he can go up on land just yet. He doesn't want to dive as deep as Natalia went because what if his enchantment wears off? He won't survive if he's that far down. Except - isn't he already if he's on this ship?

He does the next best thing and just calls out for her.

"Natalia? Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You can take me back up to the surface if you want and I'll leave you alone, okay? I'm just not gonna make it up there by myself."

Rather than answer him, the unhappy mermaid simply swam up from the bottom, grabbed him by the arm, and towed him towards the surface, speaking not a word. Nor did she bother to even look at him, the confusing creature! Once they reached the shallows, where the waves were picking up strength from the storm winds, Talia released Bucky, giving him a little shove towards the beach. That done, she flicked her tail and abruptly turned to disappear back into the depths.

One of her sisters was waiting for her when she returned to her reef. Yelena was roughly the same age, but far less tolerant, especially of the males salvaged from the sea's fury. Her bright orange and yellow fins flashed in the gloom, and she greeted her sibling with a succinct nod, followed by a wry look.

"Talia," she began, a little exasperated, no doubt having witnessed her sibling's last interaction with the human, "what have we told you about them?"

In no mood to be lectured, definitely not chastised, Talia just returned a darker look at her sister before heading into her shelter, moody and sullen. Yelena followed, not at all daunted, and paused just in the entrance, arms crossed and head tilted, long blond hair floating behind her.

"They cannot understand, sister," she told the redhead, who was lying prone on the faded divan, facing away from the ocean view. "Better just to take them and say naught of it. Words just bring problems, you know this."

Unceremoniously dumped back on the beach, Bucky can see the clouds rolling in and the rain and wind are starting up. It's a hurricane and while he doesn't know much about them, he knows enough that he's not going to survive out on this beach. He needs to find a cave, he thinks, and he heads inland to do that. He finds one after what feels like miles and it's just in time, too, because the storm's really coming in now.

He doesn't have food or water but he can drink water from the rain and he'll just go hungry until it's safe again. Maybe that little grove Natalia set up will still be there when the storm's gone and he'll have something to eat without having to look for it.

He tries to sleep but he can't; the storm's too loud. When it's over, it feels like days, and he heads back to the beach to see if he can get back to where the food was.

The little redheaded mermaid was lounging unhappily in the lagoon near her shelter, absently toying with a ripe mango, rolling it back and forth between her hands as she propped on the pool's edge. Her sister had been right, as usual, and Natalia had sulked through quite a scolding before Yelena finally gave up and left her to her own reef.

Disconsolate beneath the waves, out of sorts with everything down below, the petite siren had swam here, to what remained of her perfectly structured shelter, realizing how stupid she'd been to even think a male would even appreciate her effort. That one surely hadn't, she thought sourly, slapping the fruit sharply and watching it roll out of reach. She gave an irate flick of her tail and swam to the opposite side of the freshwater pool, huffing as she filched a few pebbles out of the sandy bank.

Then she sank back into the water again, perched atop a smooth stone just beneath the surface, and began to irritably toss the pebbles into the clear water, watching them sink one by one. A rustle caught her ear and she glanced up with a gasp, instinctively ducking beneath the surface as the crashing came closer.

Bucky doesn't see Natalia in the shelter but he does see that it managed to survive the storm so he goes back in and tries to see if the food survived too. Luckily, it did, and he sighs in relief. The last thing he needs is to be starving to death while he figures out how to get home.

"There's got to be a shipping lane really close by," he mutters to himself. "Since I'm not the first guy to get shipwrecked here. If I can manage to get the attention of someone, maybe I won't be beached for long and I can get back. Natalia's probably gone for good so I need to figure out how to get home as my first priority."

Maybe it's strange to talk to himself but who is gonna hear him? No one.

Even though he was above the water and she wasn't, Natalia nevertheless heard his muttering quite clearly. And she snorted through her nose, bubbles emerging from the pocketed air. Crossing her arms mulishly, the mermaid briefly considered lobbing a rock at his stubborn head, but couldn't find one to her liking light enough to lift.

Idiot male.

The longer she listened to his prattling, the more irritated she became, and finally she broke the surface to retort, "There aren't any ships this time of year. The storms are too bad and they always get wrecked. So they stop coming until the monsoons move on."

Arms crossed under her breasts, she floated at the back of the clear lagoon, giving him dark looks beneath equally dark lashes, green eyes almost glowing in the cloudy gloom.

Oh. The last person he expected to see (Really, was he expecting anyone on a deserted island? No.) but he's glad she's here anyway. Bucky thinks he'd be very lonely if he had no one to talk to until he got rescued. Besides, maybe they can patch things up.

"I guess that makes sense. I didn't think you would come back."

Bucky is too hungry not to eat so he bites into a mango without waiting for her reply. If they're talking, he's going to eat at the same time, and his manners will suffer for it.

She didn't give a single whit about his table manners. She ate her own food raw, after all. "I built this shelter," Natalia told him crisply, turning to give him her profile, arms still crossed. She crankily flopped wet scarlet hair over a naked shoulder. "Why wouldn't I come back to it?"

Yelena had told her to just let this one go, that talking to a human male was pointless. They were only good for breeding, her older sister had said. Well, Natalia hadn't even gotten that far, unfortunately. She'd tried to do things the nice way and not just take what she needed, but it had, alas, backfired.

And now, she had no idea what to do.

"Why did you?"

"I haven't eaten in three days," Bucky says, managing to swallow before he says anything so he's at least not talking with his mouth full. "Storm was too bad for me to go looking for anything. I had to go inland to a cave because I didn't know if the shelter would be safe."

He's quiet for a moment, though, and just looks at her profile.

"And I didn't want to never see you again. I didn't want the last time I saw you to be a fight."

She gave him a flick of her lashes. "What does it matter? When the storms leave, so will you." She snorted softly, muttering, "...no one ever stays."

A moment or so later, Natalia turned only her head to look at him, briefly, then straightened. "There's more food in the back of the shelter. Cans, bags of things. Hopefully they didn't all get wet." Supplies she'd salvaged from those wrecked ships. Flour, beans; food she had no idea what to do with, but humans could probably figure it out.

"...and there's fish, if you have any skill in catching them."

"I thought you didn't want me to stay," Bucky says, confused. "That I was just supposed to...give you the kid and leave. If we have a baby together, I want to stay. I want to be a family. I wouldn't leave you behind, Natalia, and I know I couldn't take you back home with me. I'd make the choice to stay if there were children involved."

When she mentions fish, he nods. "I think I can figure out how to fish eventually. I'll need a line and a hook but I guess shipwrecks might have those things on board. Maybe a net would be better, actually. Would be less effort. Or a trap? Yeah, building a trap would be the best option. I don't know. I just thought you didn't want me to stay after I did what you wanted."

"That is what makes no sense!" she suddenly flared, twisting around in the water to glower at him. "Why do you want to stay? I don't understand!"

Her society had little concept of "family". Her sisters were only tolerant with each other, and fights were prone to occur between them, especially when it came to preferred breeding stock or shelter locations. Mermaids were vicious, at times.

"Explain," she suddenly demanded, swimming to the near edge and slapping bare arms down on the soft sand. "Explain this to me. What is 'family' and why is it so important?!"

"Well...family is when you take care of one another," Bucky explains. "When you care about each other and make sure you're safe. I couldn't leave you. You'd need someone to help you with the baby, someone to hold you when you need comfort, someone to love you when things are good and bad. And we might want more kids, too, and we'd raise them together, you know? Watch them grow up."

It hadn't occurred to him that they didn't even have families.

"Don't you do that with your sisters? Take care of each other?"

The mermaid simply...stared at him, utterly confused. "...no," she finally managed to answer, shaking her head lightly. "That is...does not happen. Here. There." Under the water.

"My sisters..." Natalia found herself saying, slowly, as if she didn't really want to share the information, because all of this was just so strange, "...my sisters...they eat their mates, after mating. Humans...are food, for them."

And comfort? What was that? "What is...'comfort'? What does it mean?"

"You're not planning to eat me, are you?" Bucky asks, giving her a cautious look. "Because I probably need to fatten up first anyway. I'd be all stringy right now and it wouldn't taste any good."

He sobers at her question, though, and nods his head. "Well, like, when you're upset, I'd hold you and stroke your hair and do anything I could to make it better. Hell, I want to do that right now. I don't want to fight with you, you know?"

He'd much rather be comforting her than fighting, that's for damn sure.

Natalia scoffed. "No. Humans are disgusting." At least, those pieces of meat her sisters had forced her to choke down. "Fish and squid taste much better, thank you."

But her brows furrowed when he answered her demand, and she shook her head, still confused. "That makes no sense. What is the point?" There wasn't much room in her world for anything like "comfort". The ocean was harsh, those who lived within it harsher still.

"You're supposed to want to breed with me," the mermaid huffed, crossing her arms again. "Not...pet me, or whatever it means."

"You know how you like kissing?" Bucky says, trying to come at it from a different angle that maybe she has reference for. "Well, if I was kissing you, I'd want to touch your cheeks and stroke your hair and stuff like that, right? When you comfort someone, you do those things but you're not kissing. You just hold each other close and make each other feel wanted and cared about when they're going through something difficult."

He doesn't know if that explains it very well.

"So that's different than sex. Sex is great, don't get me wrong, but I like the other parts too."

Oh. Well, when he put it that way... "Oh. Humans...do this a lot? It is part of your culture?" Because Poseidon knew, humans had so many strange customs. "What purpose does it serve? Does it help you to breed? Do you do it after, too?" She had so many questions.

"Wait," she added as a thought occurred. "Do humans...do they breed with these families?" Because that was just odd. "My sisters sometimes share their mates, when one doesn't perform correctly." When the mermaid failed to conceive. "Is that...is that the same thing?"

"No, it doesn't help you breed. It just feels good," Bucky says. "And if I was with you, I'd want to do it before and after we...bred, if we're going to use that word."

When she brings up families though, he shakes his head vehemently.

"Oh, God no. You just care about each other and love one another. I would only ever be with you like that. I wouldn't be with anyone else, ever. Our girls could make their own choices about who they wanted to be with and how but for me, it would only ever be you."

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