Ready Set Breathe (A Steve Rogers Destruction Story)

13.5 ---

It was a sick sort of symmetry that Steve considered because he thought to himself often about how the cold had always been his enemy. It had so nearly been the death of him time and time again during frigid Brooklyn winters when he and Bucky were kids and he had always hated it, so it seemed especially cruel that it was ice that he laid in for seventy years and ice that had grabbed at his very insides for two dark, horrifying, hazy days before he slipped away and under and opened his eyes again to a new century. And he never thought about the ice as having saved his life. He couldn’t afford it that sort of kindness, no, the ice had hurt him. He could still feel it, could still feel his fingers stop moving, could still feel the fear as he lost the feeling in his face. And sometimes even beyond that, Steve thought that on the spiteful side of saving his life, the ice had instead simply prolonged his death and he really didn’t appreciate that.