IC Inbox

[advanced]

This is the IC inbox for Bucky Barnes at Snowblind.

Network name: @bucky; formerly @j, @username, and @robertsmith

This is the place to contact Bucky over the Network. Contact by voice, text, or video is all perfectly acceptable, and there is no need to plot with me prior to posting in this inbox.

Any contact for @j following day 125, @username following day 190, or @robertsmith following day 224 will be met with the following message: USER NOT FOUND.

Comments

[bottledblond]

Had he turned the video on? Steve wasn't terrible with technology, he was just... All right. Pretty terrible actually. He must have hit it when he put the tablet down the first time. Either way, he hadn't expected to make anyone watch him die.

Hearing the sound of worry (was that it?) in Bucky's voice made Steve reach again for the tablet. It was more like a flailing, an aborted, mostly dead fish flop. An ugly metaphor for an ugly gesture.

It took real effort for Steve to look at Bucky and real effort for him to open his mouth. He tried to set his lips. That still hurt. Good. He was still alive. "You've always been with me. Before we met-- heck that doesn't count, Buck." He was feeling so tired now. The shivered had stopped. His hands, bare, rested in his lap.

This temperature drop at night was quick and sudden and beyond anyone's ability to live. Not even Steve Rogers'.

"Coming back, pal. Can't get rid of me so... So.. Bucky?" It was too impossible to blink, so he didn't. "Always gonna come back."

He mouthed a few other things, but Steve's crystal blue eyes glazed over. And then froze over. His lips turned blue. And froze over too. Even the bit of hair from under his ball cap seemed frosted. It was beautiful. And anything but.

[advanced]

Bucky didn't doubt that.

Steve had come back every time he had died here, and if anyone had no idea when to stay down and quit it was Steve Rogers, but which Steve would come back? He had been different every time. The first time he had lost his memories of everything after enlisting, the second time he had forgotten everything that had happened before in Norfinbury, and now-- now what would happen?

He stayed on the line until well after Steve had died, reluctant to leave him alone.

But eventually he turned off the feed; the others needed to know, and it was his duty to tell them. It's what Steve would have wanted.