What the Water Gave Me

Chapter Thirty-One

BOOK THREE

Bucky tore through the rocks as fast as he could, digging frantically. His mind was filled with panic and Steve’s name, but he wasn’t finding anything. He sobbed and screamed into the water and clawed at the rocks until his hands were bloody, but he never found Steve’s body. It was as though he’d disappeared.

Bucky had heard Steve talk about grief, but he supposed he’d never understood it until now. Now maybe he knew a little more about what Steve had gone through, what he had felt every time he had to let Bucky go. Maybe now Bucky understood why Steve was so afraid of losing him again, of loving him again. Grief was destructive and it was tearing Bucky to pieces.

Bucky felt as though he screamed for days.

When he could think clearly, hours later, slumped in the sand beside the heap of rubble and dirty water where he’d last left Steve, Bucky made a list of possible outcomes. It was possible, of course, that Steve had made it. It was possible that he’d made it to the surface in time and hadn’t been hit by any rocks, but where would he have gone? He’d need Bucky’s help to make it all the way back to shore, which was a long way away, and there was no where else for him to be except treading water just yards above Bucky’s head, which he wasn’t. And even if he had somehow made it, who was to say he hadn’t been attacked and killed by something on the way back? Bucky supposed he could have been picked up by a ship, but that seemed pretty unlikely.

And of course, there was the possibility that the falling rocks had crushed and killed him, but Bucky had been digging all day and couldn’t even find his body. All he had was the taste of blood in the water and a bad feeling in his gut.

There was a third possibility that Bucky entertained for a minute or so and that was that Steve might have been saved by the ocean in the same way that Bucky had, and that he’d turn around one day and find Steve there with him again, but with a tail and fangs and scales. Bucky longed for it, he wished with all his heart, but he knew this was the least possible fate of all of them. He was dreaming of legends that might not even be true because Bucky himself was hardly any proof and a magical life-saving ocean was much harder to believe in than the apparent reality of Steve’s death. Especially while that taste and smell of blood and flesh lingered in the water, turning Bucky’s stomach sickly.

His Steve was dead and he’d never see him again.

He dug halfheartedly at the pile for a few more days, digging out his now-broken whiteboard and a few markers, and when he reached the sand at the bottom, he finally gave up. He hugged the pieces of his board to his chest, his only momento of his time with Steve, and left, unable to look anymore at the place his beautiful, wonderful, perfect Steve had died.