Chapter Text
waterfall + rainbow for @arsartisf
For weeks, he believes he found the waterfall by accident.
It’s a quiet little place, tucked in a hidden ravine: a small but deep pond, and cascades of clear, cool mountain water. The stream that flows out of the pond is the same one Steve follows upstream for a few hundred yards from the village when he starts his patrol, before the path forks away from it.
He’s heard the waterfall in the woods before, and wondered where the stream went after its banks got steep and unwalkable. But the sound always seems to come from several directions at once, no matter how much he searches—until he literally stumbles upon the waterfall. He missteps on a new route and tumbles into the surprisingly shallow ravine, only to come face-to-face with the most peaceful place he’s ever seen.
After that, he comes back nearly every day, because it’s a good place for a break, a meal, and a swim, especially if the day is hot. It’s sheltered and deceptively impossible to get out of, but when the afternoon sun hits just right, the spray forms a wide rainbow over the water, like something out of a fairytale—the rainbow ends right at the rock formation next to the waterfall that’s almost like a staircase, where he can climb back up to resume his patrol.
The waterfall is just far enough into the forest that the villagers don’t wander there, bound by the imaginary border their fear has carved into the woods. It’s a spirit-forest, a god-wood, after all—there are gods in the trees and between them, sapling-children nestled in the moss, and birds that are not birds, loud but always invisible. There is another forest on the other side of the village, one not inhabited by gods, and that’s where Steve’s people go to get their firewood and hunt their food, because they feel safer there, less like they’re committing a crime by stepping in. They do the prayers still, gods or no, because a forest is always a forest, and death is always death, and there should be no shortage of respect for either.
Steve walks the sacred woods, because that’s his duty as the chief: to keep the woods safe and the spirits appeased, the link between the gods and his people. That’s what the chiefs of his people have always done, and will do until the woods are cut down and gods are gone. Steve feels in his bones that it won’t be much further, only a few chiefs away in the future, and that thought plagues him throughout the spring and summer. The waterfall becomes a solace, somewhere he can forget the gloomy thoughts and lay down his worries for a moment.
Bucky’s waiting for him there once, when Steve gets down to the pond; the wolf-boy with his borrowed pelt and painted fangs, eyes golden or grey depending on the angle. Steve has heard of him, of course he has, but when he goes to bow in respect, Bucky yawns, shakes his head so hard that his deer-bone earrings clack, and tells Steve to sit down and shut up, and that’s exactly what Steve does.
They meet again, a few days later, then again and again. They talk, sometimes, Steve telling him about the life in the village; sometimes they are quiet and comfortable. Steve pretends to not look when Bucky sheds his pelts and clothes and dives into the pond, at home in his skin like only gods and animals can be; and Bucky pretends he doesn’t eye Steve like he wants to bring him into his nest as winter warmth.
Summer is long and warm that year, and it’s not until he’s already met Bucky, and the usually so elusive spirit-children are shyly starting to approach him that Steve realizes his fall might not have been an accident at all. It is a chief’s destiny to find his bride or groom in the woods, the gods giving one of theirs as a promise of good fortune and peace if the village’s side of the pact is kept, and the old ladies in the village have started to whisper nervously about Steve’s continuous solitude. There must be a reason why Steve’s been allowed in this place just now, after being chief for several years already, and he’s fairly sure he’s finally catching up.
“Bucky,” he says one afternoon, chin pillowed in his palm as he watches Bucky bask in a sunspot on the nearby rock, “will you let me court you?”
Bucky opens his eyes, golden orange and sleepy, and says, “Took you long enough.”