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samwpmarleau · 1 year ago

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fic snippet: as foam upon the sea

meant for @fleurdelouvemonth but regrettably i don’t expect that the full fic will be done within the next two days and i’m already over a week behind the mermaid au prompt day this was supposed to be for (although elements of it apply to the days this week heyo), so i’m posting a piece from the middle of it to show that i participated. i haven’t written for either of these characters before so i really hope this isn’t trash, and if you notice logistical or geographical tomfoolery no you don’t

So abruptly she nearly knocks her head into his, Barnes stops. He searches the horizon — for what, she doesn’t know — his eyes narrowing beneath a growing frown. She treads water beside him, attempting to sense what he apparently does, but all she sees is what she doesn’t see. Just gently rippling blackness meeting an equally black sky broken up only by the pinpricks of starlight and the crescent moon high above.

“What is it?” she whispers.

He had said his arm could sense electro-whatever; maybe that’s happening now, maybe there’s a shark headed their way or something. Though, she doesn’t think Barnes would be quite so on edge if it were as mundane a thing as a shark. And that’s assuming a shark would even bother with them when it could have a much easier time finding different prey.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs. With a quiet shink, he withdraws a knife and hands it to her, then reaches for the boltgun strapped across his back.

She has about a dozen questions, but the tension and alertness rolling off him in waves keeps her from voicing any of them. She nervously adjusts and readjusts her grip on the knife, thoroughly unused to wielding such a utensil for any purpose besides cutting nets, cooking, or opening boxes.

Out of nowhere, Barnes snaps his head towards a specific point, no longer having a vague sense of danger. He shoves her roughly behind him, but not soon enough, and Sarah cries out as she feels a searing pain in her side. There’s still nothing above water that she can see; the shot had come from somewhere beneath. She feels another projectile whiz by, but it ricochets off Barnes’s metal arm before it can reach her. Which is where her perception of anything beneath her stops, for Barnes ducks beneath the water. There is nowhere nearby to retreat to, not even a piece of driftwood to use as a meager defense. All Sarah can do is float where she is, not draw further attention to herself, and try not to think about how much she’s bleeding from whatever laceration had been made.

She can’t tell whether it’s a minute or an hour that passes without a single indication of Barnes returning, which brings an entirely new fear to mind: whether he will return, and what it would mean for her if he doesn’t. If he’s been shot, if he’s been killed, if he’s been captured, at best she’ll be stranded in the middle of the ocean with an inventory of a single knife. Worse, HYDRA — and it must be them, of that she has no doubt — will kill her, too.

“You’re gonna be fine,” she tells herself, as if saying it aloud will make it true. “Everything is gonna be fine. This is just your typical aquatic assassination attempt, no problem.”

While it doesn’t lessen her pessimism much, it does at least help keep her focused on something other than sheer fear. She knows all too well how paralyzing fear can be, and that is the last thing she needs right now.

Shutting her eyes, she starts to hum a lullaby Titi used to sing. She can’t remember the words anymore, but she remembers the tune.

She gets a few verses in when she jerks back with a shriek, brandishing her knife at the movement she feels by her feet.

“Watch it!” hisses the movement, whose voice she identifies as Barnes. Wisely, he plucks the knife from her hand and returns it to its sheath.

“What happened?” she asks, hit with a waterfall of relief. She wishes she could see more than vague silhouettes. “That was HYDRA?”

“Yeah,” Barnes says, “They must’ve used some kind of heat signature tracking. Or maybe they caught sight of me back at the beach and dispatched divers to the area they thought I’d go. I don’t think they know exactly where, or they’d have sent more than a few guys armed with spearguns.”

That had to have been what she was grazed with, then, a speargun arrow. She can’t say she’s ever had that before, though she knows it happens back home every now and then, usually to stupid kids not paying attention to what they’re doing.

Of course, she’s fairly certain none of those stupid kids were shot by HYDRA spearguns. She gets the dubious honor of being the first.

“So what now? Are there going to be more where they came from? Do they have beacons or something they could’ve activated?”

“Likely,” Barnes says. He refastens her rope to himself. “We have to go. Once HYDRA notices their divers aren’t moving from this spot, they’ll come. With reinforcements.”

Great.

“So how are we supposed to get out of here?”

“I’ll have to dive.”

“Not all of us can hold their breath for as long as you can. How do you expect me to —”

“I don’t have time to explain.”

“Explain what?”

Barnes answers by cupping her face in his hands and kissing her full on the mouth. Before she can ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing or push him off her, she feels an odd, though not unpleasant, tingling in her lips. A warm burn slides its way into her lungs, as though she’s taken a swig from high-shelf whiskey.

The burn lingers as Barnes drags her beneath the surface of the water. Only then does he pull away, leaving her to panic at the sensation of having no air left in her lungs. That is, until she realizes that she doesn’t need to breathe. As Barnes swims away, the rope connecting them keeping her at pace, Sarah does her best to get her bearings.

Regrettably, for all that she seems to have temporarily acquired Barnes’s breathing ability, that hasn’t affected her eyesight or cognitive processing — she can make out some shapes, but for the most part everything they pass is a complete blur.

Once she gets over the novelty of the breathing part, the unnerving part of being along for the ride settles in. She hadn’t thought much about mermaid locomotion, but if she had, she doesn’t think she’d have banked on them being able to swim this fast. Not that she has a speedometer, but she’s sat seatbelt-less in the bed of a truck barreling down the freeway plenty of times, and this feels much the same. Only more wet. Needless to say, she grips the harness like her life depends on it — which, really, it does.

She also wishes that that kiss — or whatever it was — from Barnes helped with temperature as well, for while it doesn’t seem like they’re going deeper anymore, she’s fucking cold. Solely the fear of being tracked by an evil organization keeps her from tapping Barnes on the shoulder and asking if they could possibly swim a few dozen meters higher.

She puts up with it, knowing the alternative is tempting lethal fate. After a while, she nearly manages to fall asleep, such is her adrenaline crash and the steady fluidity of Barnes’s movements. She’s groggy when finally they stop, some sort of partially enclosed outcrop whose features she can just make out in the burgeoning sunrise. Barnes sets her on the rock and triple-checks both the entrance and surroundings.

Unfortunately, she discovers, the end feels much like the beginning, complete with the sensation of having no air even though now there is plenty of it. Is it possible to suffocate when there’s air to be had? Did Barnes merely delay her death sentence?

Apparently hearing her distress, he approaches with mild concern in his expression amongst the usual cagey neutrality, but his voice is calm as he instructs, “Force it. The air, you have to force it.”

The thought feels impossible. “I — can’t —”

“You can.” He places his hands lightly on her shoulders. “Breathe, Sarah.”

It’s the first time he’s said her name, she realizes, which all by itself is nearly enough to startle her out of her predicament. The touching takes care of the rest; up until now, their only contact has been of necessity, not comfort or even friendliness.

It’s a shaky breath that she draws into her lungs but a breath nonetheless, and once she’s done it, she gulps down as much as she possibly can. The pain in her chest slowly dissipates.

“Are you okay?” Barnes asks.

“Yeah I — I think so. Did you know it was that awful to come out of it?”

“No. I’ve never been around for that part.”

Now that she no longer is suffocating and they’re out of imminent danger, she wonders about the mechanics of the whole thing. “How’d you do it?”

“Something to do with the regenerative properties of the serum, it slows hypoxia. That’s what I was told, anyway.”

“Then why did it feel like I couldn’t breathe?”

“Because,” he says, “if you hold it too long, your body wants to keep the air it has left. It doesn’t realize it doesn’t have to until you force it.”

“That was too long?” she asks. “How long did we swim?”

“Bit over two hours, I think.”

“Two —”

He’d told her he could dive for an hour and a half, two hours maybe. And while with his enhanced strength she must not weigh much, she still weighs something. She takes stock of him, seeing only now that he looks exhausted, his own breath coming in heavier than normal. Never mind the exertion from fighting the combatants and what looks like a nasty gash over his eye dripping blood down the side of his face. He doesn’t appear bothered by it, but she’s been around him enough by this point to know he’s not the kind of person to admit to injury. Who knows what else he might’ve sustained?

Ultimately, she supposes the specifics of it all don’t matter and, frankly, she doesn’t have the patience for any more of a science lesson at the moment. Barnes himself may not even know the full scope. Really, she should celebrate the fact that he’s spoken more to her in the last two minutes than he has the last few days combined.

“So, how’d you figure it out, this breath-sharing thing?” she asks instead. “Got a history of saving damsels in distress, do you?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but a shadow passes over Barnes’s face. “No.”

“Then how —”

“Let me see where you were hit,” he interrupts. “You’re bleeding pretty badly.”

She looks down to see a wide bloom of red is indeed staining her shirt. The pain has become more of a throbbing nuisance than the acute sharpness it was before, though she’s not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Sarah lifts up the hem of her shirt, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. It looks much worse than she thought it would. It still counts as a graze, she’d say, in the grand scheme of things, but an inch further and she’d have a hole straight through her abdomen.

“Seawater is healing,” she says with feeble confidence. It is, but she’s fairly certain this is too big of a wound for that to apply to.

“Stay here,” Barnes directs. “I’ll be back soon.”

He’s gone before she can ask where he’s going, disappearing under the water as quietly as always. She lets out a sigh. One of these days she’s going to make him give her an explanation before darting off.

#the full fic is approaching 20K so there's that #my google search history is very very strange let me tell you #spoiler alert: she does get to call him bucky eventually #she's just currently in the 'we haven't yet had a Moment after which i tell you my Designated Friend nickname' category atm #sarah wilson #bucky barnes #sarahbucky #buckysarah #fleurdelouve month #marvel fic #(no idea if that's even the tag)#my fic #bucky x sarah

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