Russian Irish 'French' French translations are mine, Irish translations are NOT, so beware google translations
All Bucky knows about his new roommate is that he's Irish. It's bad enough going to America alone, but having to live with someone who also was clueless about where they were? It was kind of ridiculous.
Natalia tells him how stupid he's being a few days before he has to leave. Apparently, he's been complaining about leaving and his new roommate and America and school for several days, and she's no no reprieve.
"I'll be happy to see you go, James," she tells him. He flails around, acting offended, and making her smile.
"Don't call me James," he says after he's stopped complaining some more.
He gets on a plane a few days later, all of the clothes and junk he could fit into three bags with him. He sits in between an older woman who pinches his cheek and a ten year old who's much too interested in his tattoo.
In his last few days in Russia, Natalia had followed him around and then complained about how he made her be with him at all times. She'd made fun of him, poked around in his stuff, gave her opinion every five seconds, forced makeup on his face, and bullied him into buying her a going away present.
He loved her, but Jesus Christ. He was happy to go, too.
The point of that was, though, Natalia added to the long plane ride had frayed his patience to a nub.
Opening the door to his dorm room, seeing a walking stick-figure drawing on the walls with a sharpie marker, and finding that he'd been left with the bed on the right, had him less than pleased.
His roommate, however, smiled and said, "dia duit."
Bucky ignored him, dropped his stuff onto the bed, and texted Nat.
"Hello?" His roommate tried, accent mangling the word.
Bucky raised his head, said, "hey," and went back to complaining to his friend.
There wasn't much talk for the rest of the day, or even until classes started.
Bucky spent his days going to class, and his nights sightseeing. He was an insomniac, so sleep didn't come easy to him. It didn't matter, though, not really, because he was on top of his homework.
His roommate - who he found out was named Steve, was a catholic who prayed every night, and an art student - slept all night and into the day. His classes were few and far between, but he spent most of his day away from the dorm.
He never seemed to have homework, but he was perpetually covered in paint and constantly mildly ticked off, so Bucky didn't question him.
It was actually homework that forced them into interacting with each other.
Bucky's knowledge of the French language wasn't small, but he was a writer and a reader, not a talker.
"Good God," he said to himself, sitting on his bed and pulling at his hair, "why do there have to be so many exceptions?"
"What word?" Steve asked him, making Bucky jump and manage to fling his pencil across the room.
He tried to reach it without getting off the bed, but the comfortable position he'd been in had already been lost, so he gave up and got to his feet to retrieve it. "Have a list of words I have to conjugate into 'nous' form."
"'Nous,'" Steve corrected, saying the word without the obvious 's'. He was drawing on the wall again. This time, it was a pair of red lips. "And why are you doing that? That's stuff you learn in the first year you're taught it."
"Got a comprehension test coming up, it sees what you remember." He paused, then asked, "you know how 'voyager' is supposed to be spelled?"
"'Voyageons,'" was his response. "Words with 'g' before the '-er' keep the 'e'."
"Thanks, I guess."
"Aon fhadhb," Steve tells him. Bucky's fluent in Russian, English, and German. He can understand Spanish, French and basic Japanese, but Irish goes right over his head. Steve laughs at him, and says, "no problem."
"Hey," Bucky says, fake-sharp, "I don't understand that language. If you were, like, German, we could be having full conversations."
"You speak German?" He looks interested, and Bucky thinks that maybe Steve had wanted to be friends from day one. If that was the case, then Bucky had been an asshole for a month.
"Yeah. Got cousins there, you know? Drove there, once, just to punch him in the face."
"I knew you Russians hated Germany."
"We do! I had to punch him, you don't understand. He told me he was going to kill me, and he seriously meant it, okay, so I went and drove over there, and told him to, and he chickened out. So I punched him." He looked down to his page, then paused, and squinted. "What the hell? I was supposed to conjugate these all into 'vous'?"
"'Vous,'" Steve corrected again, giggling. "And speaking of stereotypes, I had a girlfriend who was British."
Bucky raised his head and looked over to him. "'Was?'"
Steve nodded, going back to his drawing. "Died last year, brain injury. Made her slowly lose her mind," he spoke with a blank tone.
Bucky swallowed, not responding. Steve was looking away from him, clearly reining himself in. After a while of silence, he said, "thanks for the help. I know it ended up being moot, but, yeah…."
Steve just waved him off, not appearing to want to further the conversation.
They spoke more after that first connection, becoming friends. Bucky started to take lessons in Irish, and ASL, since Steve was partially deaf (not that he'd been told that. He'd found out on his own, after almost stepping on one of his transparent hearing aids.) Steve tried speaking Russian, Bucky laughed at his pronunciations, and told him he was better at writing it.
And through all of this, Bucky kept Natalia updated. She was the first to find out about his crush.