FIC: Once Upon A Tide [MCU (Captain America), Steve x Peggy x Bucky & Their Kids]
Title: Once Upon A Tide...
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Captain America: the First Avenger & The Winter Soldier.
Warnings: Standard for canon, though only in hindsight.
Characters & Relationships: Bucky x Peggy x Steve & their kids
Summary: “Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there lived a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman...” // 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.
Author’s Note: Enjoy!
Once Upon A Tide...
"Once upon a time," Bucky started -
"This better be good," Eleanor whispered to her sister. Given that said sister was in the other bed, with two nightstands and Bucky in between them, it was a bit of a sorry excuse for a whisper.
Bucky raised a pointed eyebrow.
Pearl ducked under the covers until only her eyes, a mop of thick blonde curls, and the sound of her giggles remained, while Eleanor crossed her little arms over her chest and looked back at her father defiantly.
"Something wrong with my bedtime stories, Lenore?"
"They’re always the same. The knight defeats the dragon and the princess defeats the giant, and they live happily ever after. Bo-ring."
"What, you want the dragon to eat the knight and the prince and princess to live unhappily ever after?"
Eleanor reared upright just so she could fall back onto her pillow with a dramatically despairing sigh. "You’re missing the point! No more dragons, no more giants, pleeeeaaase."
Bucky hmph-ed. "Fine. No dragons or giants."
"Tell us a story about the Hydra," Pearl stage-whispered, her chin now tucked over the edge of her blanket.
Bucky did his best not to frown. "Those aren’t very nice stories, sweetheart. I got a really good one about a giant tonight. Way better than usual."
"Tell us about the Hydra!" Eleanor repeated. "Hydra, hydra, hydra!"
"Hydra, hydra, hydra!" Pearl chanted along.
Geeze, Bucky thought, thrown a bit. He’d had a theme in mind for tonight. A moral, realistic combat tactics, the whole kit and caboodle. Size isn’t everything, and all that. No way he could make that work without a giant.
Now he’d have to come up with something on the fly.
"Hydra, hydra, hydra!"
"Alright, alright, you little monsters. I’ll tell you about the Hydra. And the Leviathan too, how about that? Two for the price of one."
"Yay!" they cheered, and settled down triumphantly.
Bucky sighed, then cleared his throat. "Once upon a time..."
Once upon a time, there was a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman. They were just young men and women, and they’d never seen real evil in their lives. The first boy was small and sickly, and the girl was never allowed to do anything exciting because she was a girl, and the second boy had a secret he wasn’t allowed to tell. But they were happy, and they were together, and mostly life was good.
But their country, the Kingdom of the Phoenix, was at war with its neighbour, the Kingdom of the Hydra. One day, the Hydra army came to the village where the fisherman and the fisherwoman and the merman -
(You, Mom and Pop again?
Yeah, yeah, you got me.)
The Hydra army came to Steve, Peggy and Bucky’s village and burned it to the ground. The townspeople fled, and the three friends were separated. A lot of people were hurt or killed in the attack, and when the three couldn’t find each other again afterwards, they assumed the others were among the ones who had died.
Steve had lost his parents along with his two best friends, and he wandered out into the wilderness, mourning and sick and all alone. He tried to find out where the Hydra army had gone so he could take revenge, but his body was too weak. He got lost and would surely have died if he hadn’t crossed paths with a kindly old wizard. The wizard asked what brought the boy so far from any villages, and Steve told him all about the Hydra army’s evil deeds and how he wanted to stop them before they could do to anyone else what they’d done to him.
The wizard was impressed by Steve’s bravery and worked a spell on him that cured his sickness and made him big and fast and strong. Stronger than anyone else in all the lands, except for one - the king of the Hydras. The wizard gave Steve a magical shield too, and he told him to use his powers for good and save the kingdom from the Hydras, because he was the only one strong enough. Steve was only too happy to obey.
Meanwhile Peggy had gathered all the survivors she could find and led them to safety in a nearby village. She told the smiths to make swords and the carpenters to make bows, and she taught everyone how to use them and how to fight, so that the next time the Hydra army came, the villagers would be able to defend themselves.
Some people said she wasn’t allowed to what she did because she was a girl, and because they had all seen her cry for the loss of her friends and wrongfully thought that was a sign of weakness. One of them even challenged her to a duel, claiming that he was the rightful leader because he was a man. Peggy accepted his challenge and defeated the man easily. Then everyone saw she was the best and smartest of them all, and they made her their leader. She made the village as strong and safe as she could and then sent messengers to the Phoenix king’s castle to tell him what the Hydra army was up to and ask the Phoenix army for help.
A magical queen who lived between the stars saw how much Peggy had accomplished and decided to give her the same long life and great strength the old wizard had given Steve. Because she was impressed by Peggy’s dedication to her people, even when they treated her unfairly, and also because the queen knew something important about the future that Peggy didn’t.
One of the messengers found Steve after he’d saved another village from the Hydra army, and he returned to Peggy. They were so happy to be reunited, they married the very same day.
...and then there was Bucky. He wasn’t dead either, but the Hydra army had chopped off his arm and thrown him into the sea, where the mighty sea monster Leviathan captured him and let him believe his friends and family and everyone else he loved was gone. So he kinda wished he was dead.
Turns out the big secret Bucky had to keep was that he was a merman. His mother was a mermaid and his father a human man, so he could live both on land and in the water if he wanted. This was very useful to the Leviathan, who saw what the Hydra army was doing and wanted their power for itself. He wanted Bucky to give him that power, but Bucky refused. He fought the Leviathan and escaped.
Leviathan cursed him for it; instead of changing between his human and his merman forms as he pleased, the Leviathan made it so that he could only breathe the air like a human if he spilled the blood of a human every sunrise, and to go back to living in the sea, he first had to drown in it.
Bucky ran as far and as fast as he could, but he - he - when the sun came up...
Anyway, the Leviathan sent a bunch of pirates after Bucky, and they found him and dragged him back, and the Leviathan put a second curse on him. From then on, Bucky couldn’t escape anymore, so he was forced to do whatever the Leviathan wanted.
(Two curses? That’s not fair!
Of course not. He’s the bad guy, he doesn’t care about playing fair.)
While Bucky was being, uh, bullied by the Leviathan, Steve and Peggy joined up with the Phoenix army to fight the Hydras. Together, they could take on a hundred soldiers at once. The Hydra army didn’t stand a chance. At his wit’s end, the Hydra king called upon the Leviathan for help, and the Leviathan sent him Bucky. Bucky wore black armour with a helmet that hid his face, so when Peggy and Steve met him on the battlefield, they didn’t realise it was him. Bucky did recognize them, but because of the curse, he had no choice but to attack them.
Again and again the three friends fought each other, but even Steve’s shield and Peggy’s cunning combined was no match for the power given to Bucky by Leviathan’s black magic. After every battle Bucky would beg and cry on his knees for the Hydra king not to make him hurt his friends again, but the Hydra king would only drown him in the sea and send him back to the Leviathan for punishment.
(I don’t like this story.
Well, I did warn you it wouldn’t be a nice one, sweetie.
Don’t you know any better ones?
Not about the Hydra.
Then tell us about something else.
Alright. How about... pirates?)
Pirates raided the village where the merman, the fisherman and the fisherwoman lived. They took the merman away and made him their slave, while his friends thought he was dead. Steve and Peggy rebuilt the village and taught the villagers how to defend themselves. When the pirates saw how strong the village had become, they decided never to return there. So the village had peace, and Steve and Peggy became the leaders and got married, but it didn’t bring their friend back, and they never stopped missing him.
Then one day, Peggy and Steve took their fishing boat and went sailing. They met a shoal of dolphins, which they followed all day because they were so cheerful and talkative. The sky was clear and the winds were perfect. They were on their way to the fishing grounds when the dolphins told them about a merman friend of theirs, who they thought could use some friends like them...
Bucky sank down on the bedroom trunk and stared at the wall as, no longer held at bay by the distraction of effort, horror rose like a tidal wave.
"I think I just scarred our kids for life," he announced to the room at large.
Steve stuck his head around the bathroom door with a quizzical frown and a mouth full of foam, and Peggy turned in her vanity chair, where she was setting her curling pins for the night.
"I told them a bedtime story about how the ‘sea monster’ Leviathan and its buddy Hydra kidnapped me, brainwashed me, quasi-murdered me over and over, and forced me to kill innocent people every time they woke me up."
Peggy and Steve exchanged a look.
"That’s a new low, I must admit," Peggy said, as Steve’s head disappeared back into the bathroom to spit out the tooth paste.
"Pfft, that’s all you’ve got to say?"
"Children are tough," she said flippantly. "They’ll be fine."
"They probably won’t even realise you were talking about yourself for years," Steve added more consolingly, and turned off the bathroom light.
Bucky dragged a hand down his face. "I basically opened with ‘your mom, your pop and your dad walked into a Hydra raid...’"
"Oh," Steve said.
"Oh," Peggy said.
There, finally, was the appropriate level of awkward his actions required from a reaction.
"Well, the other point still stands," Steve declared in his most commander-y voice. "They’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’ll talk to them about it in the morning."
They didn’t make it to morning; Pearl woke up crying around four. Bucky, having woken in a cold sweat of his own not ten minutes earlier, rushed out of bed and closed their door before Steve or Peggy heard it too.
Good job, soldier, that took you exactly one night, he thought. Isn’t it nice to know you still haven’t lost your touch of terror after all these years?
But, to his utter astonishment - no. This hadn’t been his doing at all.
"C-crabs," Pearl sobbed. "The size of trash cans! They really exist. My teacher talked about it in school!"
Bucky stared, slack-jawed and pathetically relieved.
"You know what?" he said eventually, rubbing his daughter’s back. "I bet those things taste great."
Pearl gaped at him.
"How about we ask Grandma about it this Sunday, huh? She knows merfolk from all around the world, there’s no way she doesn’t know someone who’s tried it."
Half an hour later, Pearl had dozed off curled up into her father’s side. Bucky let his own mind drift in the warm and the dark, focussed on the soothing sound of her breathing.
"Daddy?" Eleanor asked quietly.
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"How did the Hydra story end?"
"Well," he whispered, calmer now. "Eventually, while Bucky was fighting Peggy and Steve, they knocked his helmet off, and after fifteen years they finally realised Hydra hadn’t killed him. They saw how he cried over being made to hurt them, and then the most extraordinary thing happened."
"What?"
"After all that time, and after everything he’d done, Steve and Peggy still loved Bucky. And the power of their love was so strong it broke the curse."
"Oooooh," Eleanore sighed, clearly pleased. "Wait, which curse? There were two."
"The one that made him obey Leviathan."
"And the other one? You can’t keep being cursed!" she hissed.
Bucky’s nose stung. He rubbed at it, and his mouth twisted in what he choose to classify as a smile.
"Peggy and Steve took Bucky home, where he belonged, and waiting for them there were the star queen and her husband, the thunder king, who had travelled through time to help them. Hydra and the Leviathan were very powerful, but their healers undid all the black magic they could, until there was only his great strength and long life and one little dark thing left. Every sunrise, Steve or Peggy had to prick their finger with a needle, and Bucky had to kiss it better. Peggy and Steve were both very brave and very strong, and they loved Bucky very much, so they said yes, we’ll do that. And so they lived happily ever after."
When he finally emerged from the girls’ room, Peggy was waiting for him, sleepy-faced and wrapped in her evening gown.
"You told it wrong," she murmured.
"Oh?"
"It wasn’t the power of our love that broke the curse, it was the power of yours."
Bucky groaned. "Peg, come on, at this hour?"
"Every hour of every day, if that’s what it takes, James," she said with a seriousness belied by her drooping eyes and her head lolling against the wall. "I may have married twice, but I intend to divorce never. Now come back to bed. It’s not warm enough without you."
He let her take his hand and put him in the middle of the bed, her arm around his waist.
"I just talked myself into a corner, that’s all," Bucky whispered after a while. "I was making shit up on the fly, said I recognized you from the start. That’s all."
"Shush."
Steve groaned, tried to pull Bucky into him only to get a crotch full of his knees, and settled for groping for his hand instead.
"Kidzokay?" he slurred.
"Yeah. The school teacher’s the real culprit."
"We’ll catch’em."
"Go to sleep, Steve."
Steve hmmm-ed goodnight, and Peggy hmmm-ed goodnight, and Bucky dutifully hmmm-ed back.
I love you too, he thought, smiling into the dark. I love you too, and slept.
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.
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Captain America: the First Avenger & The Winter Soldier.
Warnings: Standard for canon, though only in hindsight.
Characters & Relationships: Bucky x Peggy x Steve & their kids
Summary: “Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there lived a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman...” // 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.
Author’s Note: Enjoy!
Once Upon A Tide...
"Once upon a time," Bucky started -
"This better be good," Eleanor whispered to her sister. Given that said sister was in the other bed, with two nightstands and Bucky in between them, it was a bit of a sorry excuse for a whisper.
Bucky raised a pointed eyebrow.
Pearl ducked under the covers until only her eyes, a mop of thick blonde curls, and the sound of her giggles remained, while Eleanor crossed her little arms over her chest and looked back at her father defiantly.
"Something wrong with my bedtime stories, Lenore?"
"They’re always the same. The knight defeats the dragon and the princess defeats the giant, and they live happily ever after. Bo-ring."
"What, you want the dragon to eat the knight and the prince and princess to live unhappily ever after?"
Eleanor reared upright just so she could fall back onto her pillow with a dramatically despairing sigh. "You’re missing the point! No more dragons, no more giants, pleeeeaaase."
Bucky hmph-ed. "Fine. No dragons or giants."
"Tell us a story about the Hydra," Pearl stage-whispered, her chin now tucked over the edge of her blanket.
Bucky did his best not to frown. "Those aren’t very nice stories, sweetheart. I got a really good one about a giant tonight. Way better than usual."
"Tell us about the Hydra!" Eleanor repeated. "Hydra, hydra, hydra!"
"Hydra, hydra, hydra!" Pearl chanted along.
Geeze, Bucky thought, thrown a bit. He’d had a theme in mind for tonight. A moral, realistic combat tactics, the whole kit and caboodle. Size isn’t everything, and all that. No way he could make that work without a giant.
Now he’d have to come up with something on the fly.
"Hydra, hydra, hydra!"
"Alright, alright, you little monsters. I’ll tell you about the Hydra. And the Leviathan too, how about that? Two for the price of one."
"Yay!" they cheered, and settled down triumphantly.
Bucky sighed, then cleared his throat. "Once upon a time..."
Once upon a time, there was a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman. They were just young men and women, and they’d never seen real evil in their lives. The first boy was small and sickly, and the girl was never allowed to do anything exciting because she was a girl, and the second boy had a secret he wasn’t allowed to tell. But they were happy, and they were together, and mostly life was good.
But their country, the Kingdom of the Phoenix, was at war with its neighbour, the Kingdom of the Hydra. One day, the Hydra army came to the village where the fisherman and the fisherwoman and the merman -
(You, Mom and Pop again?
Yeah, yeah, you got me.)
The Hydra army came to Steve, Peggy and Bucky’s village and burned it to the ground. The townspeople fled, and the three friends were separated. A lot of people were hurt or killed in the attack, and when the three couldn’t find each other again afterwards, they assumed the others were among the ones who had died.
Steve had lost his parents along with his two best friends, and he wandered out into the wilderness, mourning and sick and all alone. He tried to find out where the Hydra army had gone so he could take revenge, but his body was too weak. He got lost and would surely have died if he hadn’t crossed paths with a kindly old wizard. The wizard asked what brought the boy so far from any villages, and Steve told him all about the Hydra army’s evil deeds and how he wanted to stop them before they could do to anyone else what they’d done to him.
The wizard was impressed by Steve’s bravery and worked a spell on him that cured his sickness and made him big and fast and strong. Stronger than anyone else in all the lands, except for one - the king of the Hydras. The wizard gave Steve a magical shield too, and he told him to use his powers for good and save the kingdom from the Hydras, because he was the only one strong enough. Steve was only too happy to obey.
Meanwhile Peggy had gathered all the survivors she could find and led them to safety in a nearby village. She told the smiths to make swords and the carpenters to make bows, and she taught everyone how to use them and how to fight, so that the next time the Hydra army came, the villagers would be able to defend themselves.
Some people said she wasn’t allowed to what she did because she was a girl, and because they had all seen her cry for the loss of her friends and wrongfully thought that was a sign of weakness. One of them even challenged her to a duel, claiming that he was the rightful leader because he was a man. Peggy accepted his challenge and defeated the man easily. Then everyone saw she was the best and smartest of them all, and they made her their leader. She made the village as strong and safe as she could and then sent messengers to the Phoenix king’s castle to tell him what the Hydra army was up to and ask the Phoenix army for help.
A magical queen who lived between the stars saw how much Peggy had accomplished and decided to give her the same long life and great strength the old wizard had given Steve. Because she was impressed by Peggy’s dedication to her people, even when they treated her unfairly, and also because the queen knew something important about the future that Peggy didn’t.
One of the messengers found Steve after he’d saved another village from the Hydra army, and he returned to Peggy. They were so happy to be reunited, they married the very same day.
...and then there was Bucky. He wasn’t dead either, but the Hydra army had chopped off his arm and thrown him into the sea, where the mighty sea monster Leviathan captured him and let him believe his friends and family and everyone else he loved was gone. So he kinda wished he was dead.
Turns out the big secret Bucky had to keep was that he was a merman. His mother was a mermaid and his father a human man, so he could live both on land and in the water if he wanted. This was very useful to the Leviathan, who saw what the Hydra army was doing and wanted their power for itself. He wanted Bucky to give him that power, but Bucky refused. He fought the Leviathan and escaped.
Leviathan cursed him for it; instead of changing between his human and his merman forms as he pleased, the Leviathan made it so that he could only breathe the air like a human if he spilled the blood of a human every sunrise, and to go back to living in the sea, he first had to drown in it.
Bucky ran as far and as fast as he could, but he - he - when the sun came up...
Anyway, the Leviathan sent a bunch of pirates after Bucky, and they found him and dragged him back, and the Leviathan put a second curse on him. From then on, Bucky couldn’t escape anymore, so he was forced to do whatever the Leviathan wanted.
(Two curses? That’s not fair!
Of course not. He’s the bad guy, he doesn’t care about playing fair.)
While Bucky was being, uh, bullied by the Leviathan, Steve and Peggy joined up with the Phoenix army to fight the Hydras. Together, they could take on a hundred soldiers at once. The Hydra army didn’t stand a chance. At his wit’s end, the Hydra king called upon the Leviathan for help, and the Leviathan sent him Bucky. Bucky wore black armour with a helmet that hid his face, so when Peggy and Steve met him on the battlefield, they didn’t realise it was him. Bucky did recognize them, but because of the curse, he had no choice but to attack them.
Again and again the three friends fought each other, but even Steve’s shield and Peggy’s cunning combined was no match for the power given to Bucky by Leviathan’s black magic. After every battle Bucky would beg and cry on his knees for the Hydra king not to make him hurt his friends again, but the Hydra king would only drown him in the sea and send him back to the Leviathan for punishment.
(I don’t like this story.
Well, I did warn you it wouldn’t be a nice one, sweetie.
Don’t you know any better ones?
Not about the Hydra.
Then tell us about something else.
Alright. How about... pirates?)
Pirates raided the village where the merman, the fisherman and the fisherwoman lived. They took the merman away and made him their slave, while his friends thought he was dead. Steve and Peggy rebuilt the village and taught the villagers how to defend themselves. When the pirates saw how strong the village had become, they decided never to return there. So the village had peace, and Steve and Peggy became the leaders and got married, but it didn’t bring their friend back, and they never stopped missing him.
Then one day, Peggy and Steve took their fishing boat and went sailing. They met a shoal of dolphins, which they followed all day because they were so cheerful and talkative. The sky was clear and the winds were perfect. They were on their way to the fishing grounds when the dolphins told them about a merman friend of theirs, who they thought could use some friends like them...
Bucky sank down on the bedroom trunk and stared at the wall as, no longer held at bay by the distraction of effort, horror rose like a tidal wave.
"I think I just scarred our kids for life," he announced to the room at large.
Steve stuck his head around the bathroom door with a quizzical frown and a mouth full of foam, and Peggy turned in her vanity chair, where she was setting her curling pins for the night.
"I told them a bedtime story about how the ‘sea monster’ Leviathan and its buddy Hydra kidnapped me, brainwashed me, quasi-murdered me over and over, and forced me to kill innocent people every time they woke me up."
Peggy and Steve exchanged a look.
"That’s a new low, I must admit," Peggy said, as Steve’s head disappeared back into the bathroom to spit out the tooth paste.
"Pfft, that’s all you’ve got to say?"
"Children are tough," she said flippantly. "They’ll be fine."
"They probably won’t even realise you were talking about yourself for years," Steve added more consolingly, and turned off the bathroom light.
Bucky dragged a hand down his face. "I basically opened with ‘your mom, your pop and your dad walked into a Hydra raid...’"
"Oh," Steve said.
"Oh," Peggy said.
There, finally, was the appropriate level of awkward his actions required from a reaction.
"Well, the other point still stands," Steve declared in his most commander-y voice. "They’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’ll talk to them about it in the morning."
They didn’t make it to morning; Pearl woke up crying around four. Bucky, having woken in a cold sweat of his own not ten minutes earlier, rushed out of bed and closed their door before Steve or Peggy heard it too.
Good job, soldier, that took you exactly one night, he thought. Isn’t it nice to know you still haven’t lost your touch of terror after all these years?
But, to his utter astonishment - no. This hadn’t been his doing at all.
"C-crabs," Pearl sobbed. "The size of trash cans! They really exist. My teacher talked about it in school!"
Bucky stared, slack-jawed and pathetically relieved.
"You know what?" he said eventually, rubbing his daughter’s back. "I bet those things taste great."
Pearl gaped at him.
"How about we ask Grandma about it this Sunday, huh? She knows merfolk from all around the world, there’s no way she doesn’t know someone who’s tried it."
Half an hour later, Pearl had dozed off curled up into her father’s side. Bucky let his own mind drift in the warm and the dark, focussed on the soothing sound of her breathing.
"Daddy?" Eleanor asked quietly.
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"How did the Hydra story end?"
"Well," he whispered, calmer now. "Eventually, while Bucky was fighting Peggy and Steve, they knocked his helmet off, and after fifteen years they finally realised Hydra hadn’t killed him. They saw how he cried over being made to hurt them, and then the most extraordinary thing happened."
"What?"
"After all that time, and after everything he’d done, Steve and Peggy still loved Bucky. And the power of their love was so strong it broke the curse."
"Oooooh," Eleanore sighed, clearly pleased. "Wait, which curse? There were two."
"The one that made him obey Leviathan."
"And the other one? You can’t keep being cursed!" she hissed.
Bucky’s nose stung. He rubbed at it, and his mouth twisted in what he choose to classify as a smile.
"Peggy and Steve took Bucky home, where he belonged, and waiting for them there were the star queen and her husband, the thunder king, who had travelled through time to help them. Hydra and the Leviathan were very powerful, but their healers undid all the black magic they could, until there was only his great strength and long life and one little dark thing left. Every sunrise, Steve or Peggy had to prick their finger with a needle, and Bucky had to kiss it better. Peggy and Steve were both very brave and very strong, and they loved Bucky very much, so they said yes, we’ll do that. And so they lived happily ever after."
When he finally emerged from the girls’ room, Peggy was waiting for him, sleepy-faced and wrapped in her evening gown.
"You told it wrong," she murmured.
"Oh?"
"It wasn’t the power of our love that broke the curse, it was the power of yours."
Bucky groaned. "Peg, come on, at this hour?"
"Every hour of every day, if that’s what it takes, James," she said with a seriousness belied by her drooping eyes and her head lolling against the wall. "I may have married twice, but I intend to divorce never. Now come back to bed. It’s not warm enough without you."
He let her take his hand and put him in the middle of the bed, her arm around his waist.
"I just talked myself into a corner, that’s all," Bucky whispered after a while. "I was making shit up on the fly, said I recognized you from the start. That’s all."
"Shush."
Steve groaned, tried to pull Bucky into him only to get a crotch full of his knees, and settled for groping for his hand instead.
"Kidzokay?" he slurred.
"Yeah. The school teacher’s the real culprit."
"We’ll catch’em."
"Go to sleep, Steve."
Steve hmmm-ed goodnight, and Peggy hmmm-ed goodnight, and Bucky dutifully hmmm-ed back.
I love you too, he thought, smiling into the dark. I love you too, and slept.
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.