Chapter Text
Door (Puerta)
A piece of wood, glass, etc. that is opened and closed so that people can get in and out of a room, building, car, etc.; a similar thing in a cupboard.
Bucky has a notion of how it started, but details are not a hundred percent clear in his mind: It was at the beginning of lockdown, one of those merged afternoons where they were in quiet silence, warm light coming through their long tall windows.
Steve was either sketching or napping; he had just finished reading a forgettable novel and was internet hopping on his phone because he did that now: a man of his (new) century.
He might have clicked on a link with a bait title along the lines of “Top 10 underdog foreign podcasts that would break the internet if they weren’t in strange languages”: harmless mindless scrolling until the comment of a woman from Canada about one of them caught his attention:
“This one is a keeper! I wanted to improve my Spanish vocabulary, so I innocently googled ‘learning Spanish words podcast’, and ‘El Faro’ came up. It means ‘The Lighthouse’, and it’s not a grammar podcast at all! It’s a daily 1:00 am radio show from Spain with easy mechanics: the hostess proposes a topic at the end of every episode, which will become the backbone of the following program with listeners calling in to tell stories around that word or concept. Sounds silly, but it brightens my own memories and emotions. And there’s an incredible bonus in the form of a very intimate interview with a celebrity who starts talking hidden under a nickname… I don’t know who 95% of those Spanish celebrities are even after the reveal, but I can promise you I end up wanting to be the best friend of every one of them. So human. Highly recommended if you know Spanish or are the owner of a Stark insta-translator.”
The only hard fact about that afternoon that Bucky can recall is that he had nothing better to do than following the link to the latest episode whose word of the day was apparently “Door.”
“Fascinating concept,” he thought, almost ready to be bored and close the podcast as the first words in Spanish started being recognized by his brain. He felt the usual ping of momentary guilt as he did every time his brain understood a language he didn’t remember learning, like it was something that didn’t belong to him. He tried to set it aside while the hostess’s voice (Mara, she had said) introduced the program.
Well, he didn’t close the podcast.