In Their Hands ✧･ BARNES ✔

twenty

   Zola had been studying sign language alone in the kitchen. No one made her do it, but she wanted to so that she could communicate better with her Dad. It seemed interesting, too. Clint and Natasha were upstairs talking to each other about something. Zola couldn't tell if they were arguing or not just because Clint couldn't really yell. She wondered what a deaf argument might look like.

   Zola played with her pencil by swinging it in between her fingers and spinning it around. She rested her head in her hand while she tried to understand what some of the ASL terms on the computer screen meant. 

   Her weakest area with learning English was currently reading. She was still struggling to sound words out when she first read them. She could say some words, but reading them was a different level of difficulty for her. She tried to connect the letters of the English alphabet to the letters of the Russian alphabet, which probably made it even harder for her. 

  She sighed and continued to play around with her pencil. This was kind of wearing her out. 

   She lifted her eyes back to the computer screen. She might as well give it another try. 

   Zola watched the way that the middle and ring finger folded over in the photo. The pinky, index, and thumb were still out stretched. She tried to mimic the same expression with her own small hands. 

   "uh- eyyye. I laaf you," She says in a whisper. She was trying to sound out the words that she saw on the screen. She would have been nervous to do it if someone else was listening, but since she was alone, she wasn't afraid to practice out loud. She was still having a lot of trouble with her strong Russian accent. 

   She lifted her pencil again and drew out the hand motion onto her paper. Once she was done, she rested her head back in her hand and she began to scroll through the important phrases to know. 

   For some reason, she felt like she was being watched. She didn't know what this weird feeling meant, but she felt it. It was the feeling you have when someone's eyes are on you.

   Zola stopped moving completely. She tried to see if she could still hear her mom talking aloud upstairs. When she heard Natasha's faint voice above her, she knew that neither of her parent's were down here with her. She assumed that she must have been hearing things. 

   Then, she picked her pencil up again and looked back at her dad's computer. She must have been over thinking. She was a paranoid little girl. Just like her mother. Natasha just happened to handle it much better.

   "What's your name" was the next common phrase on screen. She read over the words a few times and she opened her lips to sound it out, but she paused just moments after. She held her body still and held her mouth agape. 

   She could see a shadow on her screen. It wasn't her. There was someone behind her. 

   Her eyes filled with tears immediately. She was built to be stronger than this, but after months without the KGB, she was started to become more of her own person. They taught her to be fearless, but she was a very fearful girl. She was paranoid and afraid, she would back down from a fight, she would cry and run away, she would never fight back, If she had those choices.

   She stared at the shadow that she could still see on her computer screen. She looked at the face that stared straight into the screen. She wanted to cry aloud and she wanted to run away. They would catch her, though. She wouldn't be able to run fast enough.