Chapter Nine

Steve helped Bucky sit up and rushed out of the room and when he came back, he was carrying a box. Bucky sniffed and made a face, smelling long-dead fish, and Steve dropped the box on the floor next to Bucky's bed.

"I don't have anything else to give you," he admitted. "I got this at the market cheap." Bucky took his pencil up.

"Cheap because it's rotting, Steve," he wrote and Steve ran both his hands over his hair again and let out a heavy breath.

"What else do you want?" Steve asked, looking as though he was bracing himself for Bucky to demand human flesh, but Bucky just looked down from Steve's face to the box of fish and imitated Steve's heavy sigh. He didn't respond on paper and instead, reached down into the box and pulled out a fish, skewering it on the tip of his claws. He made a face and sniffed it and felt his stomach revolt, but he pushed back the bile and closed his eyes and forced himself to take a bite.

"Uh, you don't want that cut up or, um, cooked or…," Steve offered weakly and the only response was the squishing and crunching sounds the dead fish made in Bucky's mouth. Steve turned a little green and started inching for the door, and he would have made it out had Bucky not dropped the fish and leaned over the bed and started vomiting on the floor.

Steve ran back over and Bucky was still hacking and coughing. He wiped his bloody fingers off on Steve's bed and then vomited again violently.

"I-It was that bad?" Steve asked. "They said they were only a day old and I thought…"

Bucky took the pencil up shakily, smearing fish gore all over the paper as he wrote.

"Not supposed to eat fish," he wrote and then he felt bile rise in his throat again and covered his mouth, forcing himself to choke it down and started writing again. "Supposed to eat humans."

"Well, I can't get you humans!" Steve cried, but Bucky wasn't finished writing.

"Haven't killed and eaten a human in a long time, Steve. Since just before I met you," he finished and pushed the pad to Steve. Steve picked it up and read it and his mouth opened in surprise. He looked over at Bucky and Bucky reached for the paper back. "I've been eating fish. It's making me sick." Steve took the paper slowly and after he read it, he looked back up at Bucky, his mouth open in surprise.

"What?" He breathed. "Really?" Bucky nodded. "Why?" Bucky looked down at the paper and wrote again.

"Couldn't anymore. Kept seeing your face and I-" Bucky stopped and the pencil traveled down the paper in a shaky, directionless scribble. He swallowed and tried again. "-couldn't force myself."

"Really?" Steve cried and he sounded angry. Bucky hadn't expected him to be angry. "So it's my fault you're starving yourself to death."

"Not starving to death," Bucky wrote, although that was, admittedly, a lie. "Just-" he stopped writing.

"Just, what?" Steve said and Bucky shrugged. "Yeah, uhuh, great," Steve said sharply and Bucky watched him lean backwards and press his lips together and run his hands over his hair.

"You should be glad," Bucky wrote. "Shouldn't you?"

"That you're making yourself sick?" Steve retorted and Bucky glared at him.

"That I'm not killing your people," he wrote and shoved the paper in Steve's face. Steve batted him away frustratedly and Bucky took the paper back and wrote more. "Human life is more important," he scrawled. "Isn't that what all you people think?"

"Is that what you think?" Steve asked and Bucky wasn't exactly sure. He hesitated before writing.

"I'm just-," he wrote and stopped and fiercely scribbled it out. Under it, he wrote, "it doesn't matter."

"It does matter," Steve said. He was looking at Bucky with those hard eyes, like Bucky had said something very wrong. Bucky looked up at him and back down at the paper.

"I'll keep eating fish," he wrote after a silent minute of Steve's staring.

He didn't like the other things like him, the other sirens, Steve called them. He wouldn't care if they all starved to death. They seemed evil, and heartless. He didn't want to be like them. At least, not anymore.

A few minutes passed in quiet and Bucky held up his pad again. "Am I evil?" He wrote in letters so small Steve had to squint to see them. His eyes traveled back from the paper up to Bucky's face.

"What?" He breathed.

"You," Bucky wrote. "Are good. You are perfect. But I kill you. I'm the opposite. So am I bad?"

"I, uh," Steve sputtered. "I-it doesn't work like that, Buck."

Bucky only dropped his head back onto his pillow.

"Well, come on now Bucky, what else were you supposed to do? Starve?" Steve exclaimed.
Bucky glanced over at Steve tiredly and Steve swallowed.
"Oh," he said. "Yeah. Cause, uh, that's what you're doing now."

Duh, Bucky thought.

"So is that what this is?" Steve asked. "You're trying to make it better somehow, trying to make up for it by not eating people?"

Bucky shrugged.

"What else are you supposed to do?" Steve said and Bucky shrugged again desperately. "Well we'd better figure out soon," Steve continued. "Before you vomit all over my carpet again."