driftfleet | Video/Action- First Pirate Transmission

Who: Panem!Bucky
Broadcast: Yes
Action: The Bridge of the Wonderduck
When: Now

[The video opens with a view of Bucky's face, hair short, face scruffy and a steel determination in his expression as though challenging the very fleet to suddenly do something and prove all his paranoid assumptions correct.]

The last time I was on a show for other's entertainment, we were made to fight and kill each other until only one person was left. Supposedly that's not the case here. Yet.

I assume some of you have been making attempts to learn more about this place and the people behind it.

[A pause. 'What do you know' was on the tip of his tongue, but he was the offworlder now. He didn't hold a single damn card in his hand he knew it too well. He hated it. He'd have to change that.]

What do we know?

[Anyone on the ship itself for any reason will find Bucky at the comms station, waiting for responses and seeing exactly how far the system would allow him to hack until the firewalls caught him. Sometimes you had to test the strength of the bars when you were in a cage.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[As far as Bucky's concerned, Justice's expression doesn't change much and what he does notice gets filed away as unremarkable.

He wants to comment about 'his virtue' and what that even means, but he keeps going and Bucky has to bite back the anger in his voice.]

No. Justice gives a feeling of satisfaction, of feeling like you did what you could to make right what was wrong. There's no justice in Panem. You weren't there so don't presume to know what was happening in my own homeworld. It isn't justice that Snow was killed and his system torn down. It isn't justice that the woman who should have been president after him ended up being just as corrupt and willing to continue the same suffering for the safety of the people who'd suffered before. It isn't Justice that there's too many dead for each to have a grave. It isn't Justice that the whole of Panem might simply fall apart for all of this because no one knows what the hell to do now and there's no infrastructure for anything else. Things could so simply go back to how they were because things are already set that way and I don't know if anyone will see it before it's too late because I'm here.

Justice is not always satisfying, and not everyone can be satisfied with it. Justice does not erase the pain suffered nor the consequences that come of it.

[Justice is still more unmoving than he was before. He's irritated, but he's keeping his patience. Part of being a spirit is dealing with it when a mortal doesn't understand one's virtue.]

Many people committed wrongs, or at least were complicit in it. Many innocents died. All that is unjust. The justice is punishing the wrongdoers, honoring the innocent dead, and having the opportunity to make the world better. You will return to the time and place you left after you are released by Atroma, and you will be given the chance to see to it that this wrongdoing does not happen again.

You don't know that.

[They could argue about their feelings on justice all day, it wouldn't change either of their minds, but that last part should have been something comforting and, instead, it just twists Bucky into knots.]

Back home, the device used to pull people to Panem was a one-way ticket. When people 'left' they didn't go home, they were murdered and an exact replica from the same time and place was pulled again and the implant used to 'restore' their memories. You don't know that this isn't the same.

[They'd managed to reverse engineer the portal in the end, but it nearly tore everything apart and it was a one-way trip 'back' to somewhere. Supposedly home, but it was anyone's guess. And that had been years after people had started being pulled, who could say time hadn't passed by the time they did get back? Those few who had even bothered to leave in the end.]

I can't sit here and hope they'll send me back.

[Well, there's a disturbing thought. The perpetual frown on Justice's face gets a little deeper.]

You are welcome to investigate Atroma as you like. You will find no resistance from the others here. We have made little progress, ourselves.

But one man does not make or break the recovery of a world. Even if you never go home, your absence does not spell doom for your home. [But that's still worth investigating, whether people really go home or not. Come to think of it, Justice doesn't think he's seen much evidence that proves one way or another where they go, and he of all people knows how easy it is to tamper with memory.]

[And now Bucky's the one stumbling, though it's far more external. There's a pause from him and somethign shifts through his expression too quick for a human eye to catch, but it's a mix of doubt and a hesitated doubt as he hears the words he's already thought but doesn't know how to process.

How does he stop doing what he's been doing for almost a decade? When he made the rebellion his life, he never thought he'd out live it far enough to question what would be after it.

But that wasn't something to talk to a complete stranger about, especially one who didn't seem to even try to understand.]

I know that, but I can help and Panem needs all the help it can get right now.
I'll figure it out. [Said more to himself than to the man he was supposed to be talking to.]