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.
"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."
Natalia slowly bobbed up and down in the water, brows crinkled as she tried to assimilate all of this. So, this "comforting" didn't assist in breeding, but it was something to do before and after. And it felt good. How very odd.
The idea that he wouldn't want to breed with any of her sisters was startling, though. Although, given his oddness in general, Natalia supposed that wasn't as farfetched as she might have first thought. Granted, her sisters might try and take him from her, and Bucky would get himself killed trying to escape, but... Well, an argument for later, that.
"Show me," she suddenly demanded, swimming to the near edge and coming up out of the water, her tail and fins once more melding together to reveal smooth, pale legs and small, dainty feet.
"Show you comfort? Yeah, of course," Bucky says. He reaches for her and guides her into his lap and while he's only wearing his shorts and she's not wearing anything, he's not particularly worked up right now. It's more about being soft, he thinks, and if Natalia's never had it he wants to give it to her.
He has one arm around her waist but he takes the other to stroke the soft skin of her cheek and down the smooth, pale skin of her neck and shoulder. He doesn't go lower but, instead, makes his way back up the same path before kissing her forehead lightly.
"Is there somewhere we can go that's softer? Somewhere you planned to...breed with me at?"
It was at first a little disconcerting, and strange, but Natalia stiffly allowed Bucky to put her where he wanted. Then she felt his hands begin to stroke her skin, making little prickles stand up in his wake, and it wasn't...altogether unpleasant.
In answer to his question, she pointed over his shoulder, further inside the shelter. "In there. There's fuel for a fire, a grass pallet, and other human things, too." Although she didn't really know what was required for a human to mate, she'd done the best that she could.
Bucky looks back further in the shelter and he sees what she's talking about and that's perfect, honestly. It's better than he thought he'd get on a deserted tropical island, for sure, and he kisses her forehead again before giving her a quick nod.
"Okay, yeah. Let me light us a fire so we can see a little and then I can show you a little more about...well, you're not as upset so now it's just cuddling. I like cuddling."
The mermaid didn't object when the human moved them further into her shelter, setting her down on the pallet she'd made, the grasses still smelling fresh and fragrant. She watched without comment as Bucky started the fire, though at first she shied away from the bright and the heat of it, as she'd never really seen it so close before.
But soon enough, he returned to sit beside her, and Natalia just blinked at him, more than a little out of her depth. She knew how to kiss, of course; she'd seen her sisters do it all the time, but this "cuddling" business was something she'd never even heard about.
"Lay down with me," Bucky says, guiding her to lay down on her back so he can prop on his hip beside her. He just wants to touch right now, and kiss, because he thinks that Natalia deserves that. Besides, he's not having sex without this part so she's going to have to get used to it.
Bucky just strokes his fingertips along her skin, from neck to shoulders to breasts and back up. This is good for him, just touching her, and he hopes she likes it as much as he does.
"Tell me if there's a place that feels good, all right?"
Reclining on the pallet, Natalia flinched slightly when she felt his hands return to her skin, but relaxed right after, realizing what he was doing was only touching. It felt...nice, she supposed, and she told him so, a little curious that this was all there was to it.
It seemed only natural to reciprocate, so she slipped a hand upwards along his own arm, sensitive fingertips learning the definition of muscle beneath warm skin. "Like...this?" Natalia felt her skin begin to tingle slightly, a curious sensation, and she turned slightly, the better to face him, eyes curious but growing in interest.
"Mmmhmm," Bucky says, enjoying the touch. It feels really good to be touched because he's been in the Army for way too long and he hasn't been with a woman since he deployed. "And you can kiss, too, when you're doing this, but it's about being soft."
To that end, he leans in and kisses her forehead, then the slope of her nose, then softly against plush lips.
God, it's been so long since he's kissed anyone other than Natalia and these kisses are different.
Kisses, she could do. But she remembered him saying that this 'cuddling' didn't have anything to do with breeding, but now it was okay to kiss? Humans were so confusing. Rather than try and muddle it out, Natalia simply closed her eyes and kissed him back, parting her lips beneath his.
She knew what to do with her arms, they wound nicely around his neck, but her lower half was a different story; she very seldom went about on two legs. So she wiggled a little haphazardly, not really sure of herself, but determined to do it correctly.
Bucky shifts a little so he can work his thigh between Natalia's and since he still has his underwear on, he figures that will keep them from going too far too soon. He's got plenty of control right now and he wants to take his time kissing and touching and then seeing if it leads to something else.
"You should spend some time up here with me," he murmurs. "It's easier for me to hold you and touch you when we're up here than it is down there."
He frowns though. "Unless...it doesn't hurt you being up here for too long, does it?"
They stopped kissing and he started talking, which brought a brief frown to the mermaid's forehead, but she blinked her eyes open at what he actually said.
"I...don't know," she confessed. "I never stayed out of the water for very long." None of her sisters had. The only time they really came ashore was to set traps, or shelter, in her case, for their prospective breeders.
"It...feels strange, in the air. I feel so...heavy, out of the ocean." And she didn't really like it, either. "Sand is raspy." She glanced over his shoulder at the beach outside of the small shelter. "Storms are very scary."
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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.
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"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.
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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?"
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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?!"
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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?"
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"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?"
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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.
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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."
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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."
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"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?"
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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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The idea that he wouldn't want to breed with any of her sisters was startling, though. Although, given his oddness in general, Natalia supposed that wasn't as farfetched as she might have first thought. Granted, her sisters might try and take him from her, and Bucky would get himself killed trying to escape, but... Well, an argument for later, that.
"Show me," she suddenly demanded, swimming to the near edge and coming up out of the water, her tail and fins once more melding together to reveal smooth, pale legs and small, dainty feet.
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He has one arm around her waist but he takes the other to stroke the soft skin of her cheek and down the smooth, pale skin of her neck and shoulder. He doesn't go lower but, instead, makes his way back up the same path before kissing her forehead lightly.
"Is there somewhere we can go that's softer? Somewhere you planned to...breed with me at?"
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In answer to his question, she pointed over his shoulder, further inside the shelter. "In there. There's fuel for a fire, a grass pallet, and other human things, too." Although she didn't really know what was required for a human to mate, she'd done the best that she could.
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"Okay, yeah. Let me light us a fire so we can see a little and then I can show you a little more about...well, you're not as upset so now it's just cuddling. I like cuddling."
Bucky grins at her. "I love cuddling."
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But soon enough, he returned to sit beside her, and Natalia just blinked at him, more than a little out of her depth. She knew how to kiss, of course; she'd seen her sisters do it all the time, but this "cuddling" business was something she'd never even heard about.
"...now what?"
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Bucky just strokes his fingertips along her skin, from neck to shoulders to breasts and back up. This is good for him, just touching her, and he hopes she likes it as much as he does.
"Tell me if there's a place that feels good, all right?"
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It seemed only natural to reciprocate, so she slipped a hand upwards along his own arm, sensitive fingertips learning the definition of muscle beneath warm skin. "Like...this?" Natalia felt her skin begin to tingle slightly, a curious sensation, and she turned slightly, the better to face him, eyes curious but growing in interest.
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To that end, he leans in and kisses her forehead, then the slope of her nose, then softly against plush lips.
God, it's been so long since he's kissed anyone other than Natalia and these kisses are different.
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She knew what to do with her arms, they wound nicely around his neck, but her lower half was a different story; she very seldom went about on two legs. So she wiggled a little haphazardly, not really sure of herself, but determined to do it correctly.
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"You should spend some time up here with me," he murmurs. "It's easier for me to hold you and touch you when we're up here than it is down there."
He frowns though. "Unless...it doesn't hurt you being up here for too long, does it?"
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"I...don't know," she confessed. "I never stayed out of the water for very long." None of her sisters had. The only time they really came ashore was to set traps, or shelter, in her case, for their prospective breeders.
"It...feels strange, in the air. I feel so...heavy, out of the ocean." And she didn't really like it, either. "Sand is raspy." She glanced over his shoulder at the beach outside of the small shelter. "Storms are very scary."
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