Gold to Airy Thinness Beat

Chapter Eleven

Stepping outside the tent felt strange. The day was too bright, the chatter of the men too loud, and she couldn't understand how it all just kept...going. She'd just been told Bucky might be dead and the world simply continued as if the news didn't affect it at all. Surely that was all the evidence she needed that he was still alive, right? The world couldn't continue to move if he were gone. It just...couldn't, so he had to be alive. It was the only possibility she was willing to accept.

Still, Phillips' words, telling her Bucky was undoubtedly gone...that soul crushing letter in his hand...it all refused to stop running in an undercurrent through her mind. She felt removed from the world around her, like she was in a movie theater, waiting for Bucky to join her, watching a news reel of day to day army life on the front lines. Her emotions felt...dulled, as if smothered in cotton or pushed somewhere deep inside her.

He was probably dead, part of her mind informed her coldly, and she shook her head as if she could physically dislodge the thought.

He wasn't.

He wasn't dead because she couldn't stand him being dead. She didn't know how to face the rest of her life without him in it. She was barely in her twenties. If she lived to her eighties it would mean sixty years without Bucky compared to twenty with him. He'd become a footnote in her personal history, faded with time, a long lost childhood friend who'd once meant the world to her...back when her world had barely started.

She didn't want that. She didn't want him to fade with the passage of time. She didn't want to have to listen to people telling her to move on and leave him behind.

She didn't want to move on.

She wouldn't.

Because he damn well wasn't dead.

The pessimistic voice in her mind, that sounded suspiciously like Phillips, finally shut the hell up and she started to walk with a renewed purpose. She got all of five feet before she stumbled to a stop with the realization that she didn't know where she was going. She shut her eyes and focused on breathing, clenching and unclenching her hands as she forced herself to think. Bucky wasn't going to be helped by her running off into the woods like a crazed lunatic.

First things first. She was wearing her Lady Liberty costume. Clearly she couldn't march behind enemy lines dressed like that. For one thing, nylons were rationed and if she destroyed the ones she had on the powers that be would probably make her pay for them. Her civilian clothes weren't made for blending into the landscape so they wouldn't work either. She briefly considered Tony's clothing but ended up dismissing that idea as well. Tony was built like an ox and even with her serum enhanced body she wasn't going to be able to fit anything he owned. She'd look like a child playing dress up in in her father's clothing.

Her eyes opened and she frowned as she watched soldiers walk past her, some nodding at her, others seeming to understand she needed her space and giving it to her. For not the first time she felt frustration at the Army's refusal to give her a uniform of her own, preferring instead to pretend she didn't actually belong to them. The pants and long sleeved sweaters many of the men were wearing would be perfect, warm and easy to move in and dark enough to blend into the landscape, but she highly doubted any of them would be willing to share their spares with her. Even the dress uniforms a few were wearing, identical to the one Bucky had worn when he shipped out, would work, possibly even better as it had a heavy wool jacket that went with it.

A thought occurred to her and she felt her eyes widen. Bucky...she had to be about his size now, right? She doubted her body was shaped quite like his was but surely she'd be close enough to be able to wear his clothes. Her eyes turned to the rows and rows of tent serving as makeshift barracks for the men.