Not The Only One - A Winter Soldier Story

Chapter 25

June 30, 2016

     The early morning felt eternal as Bucky and I had to spend yet another day stuck together in the apartment.

     It was almost as if I could feel the quietness itself crawling on my skin and digging deep inside my brain. My thoughts squirmed underneath the silent touch, but I could not escape. Something vital was missing from my life here, I knew it.

     "How do you say 'Ready Teacher' in French?" Bucky asked when he came out of the bathroom after getting a shower.

     I thought for a moment before answering, "Enseignante prête."

     "En-sei-gna-nte prê-te," Bucky enunciated each sound.

     "So how do you say 'Ready Teacher' in German?" I asked him in return.

     He told me, "Bereit Lehrer."

     "Ber-eit Leh-rer," I repeated.

     "Je suis prêt Enseignante."

     I smiled before replying, "Ich bin bereit Lehrer."

     Our lessons continued. We began by reviewing the words that we had learned the day before. Surprisingly, both of us remembered nearly all of the new foreign words we had been taught.

     Bucky and I both wrote down all of the words we had learned in our new notebooks. Steve had also brought us both children's picture books and full-length novels in our desired languages when he returned last night.

     First, we simply went through the picture books and pronounced the foreign word for the other, then they would write it down in their notebook.

     Once this was done, we went through the picture books again and shared the alternate names that an object could have, if there were any.

     Since these books held mostly nouns, we went through a third time teaching each other verbs related to the nouns. You "throw" a "ball", you "boil" things in a "pot", you "drive" a "car", and so on.

     One of the books was a Barbie picture book to teach German to Ukrainian speaking kids. Bucky and I both learned to read some basic Ukrainian words because of it. But since neither of us had any idea how to pronounce the words in Ukrainian, our knowledge was limited to reading and writing the language.

     Both of us had hundreds of new words in our vocabularies and could now string together basic sentences. I would speak German to Bucky and he would speak to me in French.

     "Ich will Sandwiches," I told him.

     Bucky replied, "J'aime manger des sandwichs."

     While we were making ourselves lunch, Steve burst into the apartment unexpectedly.

     "I heard back from Nat! Apparently she has been on the run for the last several days and has just now been able to hole up somewhere!" he exclaimed.

     "Good to hear!" Bucky congratulated his best friend.

     I looked up from my large plate of sandwiches and smiled.

     "Steve, that's wonderful!"

     "She wants to help us free the others from the Raft."

     Bucky and I looked at each other instinctively; both of us knew the weight that those words carried.

     "Do you really think we can do it?" I asked Steve.

      He replied with confidence, "I know we can. It will take some time to create a plan and gather what resources we need, but we will set them free."