Ok, so here’s what’s up. Starting this Monday I have a couple of evening/nighttime classes, so I’m changing the update days to Saturday. That’s all. Proceed with your day.
-Stax

Chapter 5

“What the hell!?”
Dani gulped at the yell.
“Why the heck are you changing your clothes out here!?” Bucky asked, shocked. “Nazis could be hiding out here, go back to the camp and change there!”
Dani was really having a hard time hiding her gender in the army camp. Bucky outranked her, and had made it his personal job to make sure she only used the bathroom or changed clothes where she would be more likely to be found out. She sighed and trudged back to their temporary base.
Bucky had been acting strangely ever since she had shown up that morning after the expo. He seemed to think she was always hiding something from him now.
“First you tell me you’ve had a girlfriend all along, then you just reveal that you’ve not only enlisted without telling me, but have been excepted!?” was his initial reaction. Then, disbelief that somebody as small as she could be accepted. Then he just distanced himself.
Dani felt the sting of the distance. While both Steve and Bucky tended to be fairly reserved emotionally with each other, only opening up and baring their souls when the going got tough, they had both opened up to Dani almost completely. She was their confidant. The things that they couldn’t discuss with the other, they could discuss with her. Dani knew that Bucky felt betrayed by the “secrets” she had kept from him, and wished she could do something to change it. At least he was still civil about it.
She quickly re-bound her chest and finished dressing. She was supposed to be a twenty-eight-year-old man now, she couldn’t afford any discrepancies in her appearance. In reality she was just twenty and a half, if she went by the clock on her phone. In the months since she had been enlisted and deployed, she had not time-jumped once, a fact she was very happy about. There was a head count every day and night that would be difficult to get around, not to mention Bucky suspiciously stalking her whenever he wasn’t busy.
She didn’t have time to worry about projecting her image, however, because tomorrow an attack was planned against Rosiano. In the movie this was when Bucky and the 107th got captured. So Dani knew that it would fail, and she knew that she was probably going to die or be captured. Tomorrow at this time, she would be dead or on her way to seeing Steve again.
XXX
On the way to seeing Steve it was.
The person in charge of processing prisoners figured out pretty quickly during the non-consensual strip search that she was a female. They didn’t tell the rest of the men, thank God, but they DID separate her. That could be a good or a bad thing.
They wanted to know why a woman would join the army. She rubbed her cropped, dirty-blonde hair and spouted some crud about how she wanted to protect the country and do her part, parroting phrases Steve had said time and time again.
They quickly decided to give her to Arnim Zola for his experiments. He, in turn, quickly found out that something was off with her. Strapped down to a table and drugged within an inch of her life because she wouldn’t stop fighting, the only bit of their science-talk that she caught was “Radiating an unknown energy”. In the groggy back of her mind, she remembered that on the TV show ‘Doctor Who,’ anybody who jumped through dimensions got energy on them from the void in between dimensions. If the Avenger’s universe was real, perhaps the Doctor Who universe was too…
Things were blissfully dark for a long time. When she came to her senses,she was still stretched out on her back in the same uncomfortable position, arms strapped above and feet strapped below.
It was unusually chilly, though.
She looked down at herself and gasped. They had stripped her down to her underwear and put a bra on her that she didn’t recognize. Sensors were taped to almost half of her bare legs, stomach, clavicle, and neck. Every spot without sensors had goosebumps. It was way too cold for this…
Sluggishly, she took in everything else. Nobody was in the room. Alarms were going off in the distance, which she hadn’t noticed at first. A surge of panic made her thrash against her bonds. Alarms mean that this factory is going to blow up in a few minutes! Quickly realizing that her struggles were pointless, she laid back and cried a little bit.
Past the door Steve suddenly rushed with Bucky. He stopped and lead his staggering friend into the room, noticing her on the table. Dani tried to say his name, but with the residual drugs still in her system she could only make a pained moan. She quickly realized that she actually WAS in pain. No time to worry about that now.
“Oh my- they made you into a woman!” Had Dani been fully in control of her body, she would have laughed at his assumption. “Danny! Oh no! here…” he began to remove her straps and peel the sensors and needles off of her. Bucky too looked shocked, but also very distant as if he wasn’t all there either. Dani gurgled out an involuntary chuckle at the situation. Everything was so blurry…
She found herself wrapped in a blanket and being carried quickly.
“…Feeve…” she slurred, trying to say Steve’s name to get his attention. He ignored her. Okay, I know when I’m not needed, I’ll just go to sleep then…
XXX
Waking up was like wading through a vat of maple syrup, Dani decided.
She concluded that she should keep her eyes closed until her body started being a bit more responsive.
People were arguing. She tried to listen through her mental fog.
“You can’t just change a man into a woman! She had to be a woman all along! Come on, Steve! I figured it out months ago!” That’s Bucky, she thought.
“She wouldn’t lie to us about something like that, Buck!” That one is Steve.
“It doesn’t matter, gentlemen. What matters is that she is a woman right now.” That was the Colonel.
They continued to bicker. Dani got the impression that she wouldn’t be kicked out even if they found that she had been a woman all along. They were talking about what she had done in the past. She had often recommended a plan of attack for battles that wound up saving the lives of the 107th, earning her a promotion to ‘Corporal’ and getting her a good reputation in camp. They seemed to think that her usefulness merited letting her stay. She breathed an involuntary sigh of relief that she wouldn’t be court martialed, inadvertently alerting them that she was now conscious.
“She’s awake,” Bucky concluded. Dani slowly sat up, resulting in horrible pain and vertigo. The three crowded around her, pulling up chairs.
“Tell us everything,” Bucky sternly commanded. Dani sighed. Her visions didn’t start flashing to stop her… so she decided that she was going to reveal everything that she could.
XXX
“So basically, if I tell you what’s going to happen or how to fix it, most of the time it will result in us losing the war and a lot more men,” Dani concluded. No vision had stopped her, for whatever reason it was fine to reveal her reasons for being there now. She had told them everything except for upcoming events.
All three men sighed. She had used her phone as proof in the middle of her explanation, and none seemed to doubt the truth of her statement. Nobody looked particularly happy that they believed it was true, however.
“Look, like I said, if there is anything that I can fix, I will fix it. The visions I mentioned will let me know if there is,” she commented somewhat sadly. Neither of her friends would trust her ever again.
Bucky and Steve looked at each other and then back at the Colonel.
“Go on, gentlemen, I’ll deal with things from here,” he ordered. They left, and Dani could hear them arguing outside as they walked away from the tent. “You will be allowed to stay. You will be allowed to fight. You will be given gear that is more appropriate for you,” the Colonel started, “But if you pull anything, put anyone in danger or fail to fix something that you easily could, I will court martial your ass so fast you’ll wish you didn’t have one.”
Dani just nodded. It was a start.

Notes