Mermay!!

[pursuitofcappiness]

WHO: Steve Rogers
WHERE: all around
WHAT: MERMAY
WHEN: MERMAY
WARNINGS: ....MERMAY

darling it's better

Steve can be found on his now early-morning swim around town, zipping past anyone. He'll happily deliver anything to anyone within the confines of Temba, for any reason, in the early morning, since he makes a whole loop around. He's faster than a shark, but he's got a rather ostentatious blue tail, with red and white striped fins.

He seems to be in a decent mood, if only because he's having trouble with a lot of his memories of the past that don't reconcile with his ones of being a merman. Anytime he tries too hard to wonder why there's a lack of water if he thinks too hard, the memory disappears like seafoam.

He's having one of those such moments, paused mid-fin flip, eyes in concentration as he starts to sink, but then, he shakes his head, and keeps swimming. That was weird!

down where it's wetter

Sitting on a rock somewhere, Steve's drawing things into the sand. If you ask, he could make a whole series of drawings, each of them replacing the last, ephemeral in nature, washed away by the waves.

"I can try drawing you next," he offers. He's not sure how portraits will work out in the sand, but he'll give it a good college try.

take it from me!

[ cw: injury ]

Having swum through a whole nest of sea urchins in order to grab one, somehow Steve'd accidentally loosened a whole bunch of them, and they'd fallen, mostly on his tail.

He swims out of there quickly, but he has lots of barbs sticking out. He pauses to pull one out, only to manage to accidentally shatter a few of the ones in a cluster and leave them further embedded into his tail. Trying to violently flip it doesn't really help, either. He needs to swim somewhere he can sit down and address this as best as he can.

"Tell me you have tweezers on you," he requests of the nearest He-Row that he finds.

Comments

[sinistral]

"Maybe you got hurt." He waves one of the metal tentacles. Without them he'd be distinctly lopsided. "Maybe something got you so bad it's hard to move."

He makes a noncommittal noise in response to that supposition. Even a bad army could win on numbers, right?

[pursuitofcappiness]

"That's a lot to hope for when facing an army, pal," he says, continuing to think about it. But, honestly, this whole thing kind of didn't make that much sense to him in the first place. Surely a bigger wall and some trebuchets would suffice?

[sinistral]

"Suppose so." And the Soldier doesn't really believe too much in hope; it had failed him too many times. He can't remember most of those times, but the feeling rings true so it has to be the way of things.

"Maybe a castle isn't a good thing to draw," he muses.

[pursuitofcappiness]

Steve shakes his head. "A castle's a great thing to draw," he says. "But now I have to draw it a moat. But - I guess everything fills with water, so the whole thing's a moat." How does he convey that it's not a ring or another wall?

[sinistral]

"You don't have to draw a moat," he argues. "Maybe this castle has a pit of spikes instead. We can find some bits in the sand to be the spikes." C'mon Steve, you're supposed to be the creative one!

[pursuitofcappiness]

"A pit of spikes," Steve says. "Well that's silly - shouldn't we just swim over them?" It's very odd thinking why go through all this trouble to assume that the army is full of terrible swimmers!

[sinistral]

A pit of spikes does make sense! He doesn't know why, but it does. Same as knowing without a doubt that not being able to swim makes sense. But he can't say that without sounding crazier. Better to just give up.

"Dunno. Moat's a better idea. Or not a castle."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"How's the moat a better idea?" he asks, confused. "I don't know. I just feel like, it'd also be easy to just swim to the castle," he says. Because surely you can swim in air.

[sinistral]

Steve does have a point: why not just swim over any obstacle? Moat, spiked pit, whatever. Somehow it felt right to just swim but someone he also knew that moats were a thing. It made the Soldier's head hurt when he tried to reconcile it all to himself.

"Aesthetics," he finally says. "It just has a certain look."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Sure, but why is that what castles look like?" he asks, shrugging. "Also - there's always a lack of things in the air," he says. "In all the pictures." Of castles, which he totally has. But since he hasn't spent a lot of time in the surface, he hasn't figured out why there's not stuff floating around everywhere.

[sinistral]

"I don't know." It's quiet, because he doesn't like not having the answer. He especially doesn't like the way it feels like he should know.

"Maybe don't draw a castle anymore. Do something else instead." The Soldier's lost the desire to see the picture.

[pursuitofcappiness]

He nods. For some reason, the thought of doing things above the surface seem to make him feel antsy.

"How about a stingray? Even you could do one of those."

[sinistral]

Surface is weird! Air is weird! Maybe it's best they don't think about those things — and don't think about why they don't want to think about those things.

"You really overestimate my art skills." But at least they're off the castle thing. A stingray is much more normal, he can handle that.

[pursuitofcappiness]

The thing about sting rays is that he doesn't need to have any sort of artistic skills in order to draw one. It's basically just a square and a tail.

He'll demonstrate it, by offering Buck the stick so he can draw one and see.

[sinistral]

What follows is the most wonky looking stingray ever seen; instead of dragging the stick around each corner his tentacles pass it off, one to the next, for each side of the square. The tail is added by another appendage entirely. All in all it's not horrible. But it is the equivalent of a stick figure, not the Mona Lisa.

"There you go, smart guy."

[pursuitofcappiness]

...How Bucky managed to mess up a stingray is beyond Steve, but he looks at it and shakes his head.

"I'm gonna fix it," he says, as he holds his hand out for the stick back.

[sinistral]

It was simple really: of the two of them Steve was the artist. Bucky's artistic talents lay in calculating bullet trajectories, making impossible shots. They lay in the physical, knife passing back and forth between deft hands. They lay in the arts of violence, not in art itself.

"It's abstract art," he tries, but passes the stick to Steve anyway. "Artistic license."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Uh-huh," he says, shaking his head a little. "Well, if you say so." He replicates Bucky's ray, but then adds nuances to it, gives it a little better shape, mounds the sand, and by the time he's done and when it starts washing away, it almost looks like a stingray could've been hiding under there.

"Your foundation's... not bad," he says. It's a compliment. He tried.

[sinistral]

Now this is art, both in Steve's eye and in his skill in working with the sand to make something that's more than just a sketch. His stingray comes almost to life, an attestation to his skill. And the Soldier finds that he enjoys watching the process.

"Yes it is," he counters, because it's the truth. "But yours is actually good."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Well, I learned," he says. He thinks he learned. He can't actually remember if he did or not, but the harder he thinks about it, the more the memories start to dissipate.

"You can too." He distinctly remembers Bucky was there with him, one class, at least. That's ludicrous, though. He pushes that memory away.

[sinistral]

"But then you'd have competition. Not the only artist on the block anymore." Do they even have blocks underwater? Probably not, but it's fine. The Soldier knows his strength doesn't lie in this, and he's fine with that fact. Perhaps it's because Steve is so good. He's got it covered. And that's comfortable, somehow.

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Oh, you think you draw a stingray and now you're competition?" Steve answers, smiling. "Come on, if I could teach you everything that I can do in an hour, then I wasn't that good of an artist in the first place."

[sinistral]

"I don't know. Am I?" The grease flows out of him so naturally, the kind of rubbing that comes with a smile at the end and the Soldier looks surprised by his own words. It felt — old. Ingrained. Something learned over time, not newly discovered.

Maybe even something remembered.

"No, you're... a good artist. Great," he answers belatedly, still trying to chase that whisper or memory and totally distracted by it.

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Am I? You've only seen one thing," he says, but that doesn't sound right. "Have we had this conversation before?" It's so strange. He knows he had a whole life before this - he's a merman, not a merboy. But he can't for the life of him remember more than bits and pieces.

Omg what was my phone doing up there

[sinistral]

"Yes," he answers quickly, because the conversation is uncomfortable. The Soldier feels the edges of a headache starting to creep in, the kind of headache he gets when he tries to remember things and they're just slightly out of reach.

"I don't know," he replies, quiet and a little forlorn. He doesn't like confronting missing memories like this, with an audience. "It feels like we did but I can't remember."