September, 2014.

The North Sea.

I was trained for battle. I had learned to move quickly and with confidence in my tactical decisions. To trust the man or woman on my six. And I was good at all of those things. I was an accomplished marksman and soldier, trained by a former Black Widow operative (and thoroughly beaten by her several times). I could run through a dozen different scenarios in the time it took people to realize there was a Plan B. No matter the battle, I could handle it.

"Black jack!" I shouted at the same time as Bucky. We both reached for the stack of cards in the middle of the island counter, but I made it first and yanked the cards to my side.

"What the hell?" Bucky muttered. He looked at the grand total of six cards in his hand with confusion. He had been winning just four jacks ago. Now I was kicking butt and taking names, aliases included.

"Do you want to surrender now, or keep going?" I asked. He looked at the almost full deck of cards I was holding, and his features changed from confused to determined.

"Hell no," he grunted. "You said the game ends when one of us is completely out of cards. I still have six."

"Fine. It's your loss," I taunted. "You call it."

Bucky counted to three and we laid down another pair of cards. Then another. I knew where the jacks were in my hand from paying attention to all the previous rounds. Two cards later, the jack of spades was on top of the pile, but I let Bucky call it.

"You know, I'm really glad you carry a deck of cards," he told me. Now that we were tied with jacks, I purposely pushed the order of my hand out of my mind so the game could go on more fairly.

"I also have a book of sudoku puzzles somewhere in there," I told him. The strap of my backpack was looped around my calf, and Bucky checked on his regularly by looking over my shoulder.

After a few hours of complaining about Marcus and drinking a metric ton of coffee, Bucky and I began playing the sort of stupid games that only came to bored soldiers. Or stoned teenagers. Necessity wasn't the mother of invention, boredom was.

First, there was a very competitive game of I Spy that was also very short lived. Most of the boat's interior was shades of grey and blue with little spots of red and orange here and there. Our questions moved from matters of color to very creative possible usages for items we saw, and the game became more like 20 Questions after a while.

"I spy something red," Buck had begun. I searched the room quickly, even though I didn't need to after three hours. Fire extinguisher, a life preserver outside, a warning sign over the wall outlets. "That can be used as a weapon."

"You always pick things that could be a weapon. I really think you should see someone about that," I joked. Bucky laughed next to me because he knew it was true. "I guess that narrows it down to two. Well, maybe. Does it float?"

"I seriously doubt it," he informed me.

"Fire extinguisher."

"Damn it. You got it," he congratulated me lamely.

And so it went. After an interesting lunch of scavenging whatever I could find in the mini-fridge and cabinets, we started moving through every card game two people could play. And probably a few that two people normally can't play.

The few times Marcus came down from hidey-hole for food or the bathroom, he simply watched Bucky and I for a few moments and went about his business.

After dinner, it was back to card games. The sun went down again, Marcus avoided us, and we mentally prepared for Norway. Lucky for us, Marcus hadn't bothered to ask why we were moving across the North Sea or why we had chosen the Jolene to get us there.

Anything that involved slapping the table to claim the cards meant Bucky was automatically on right hand restriction again. We didn't want him to break the island or the boat. He was surprisingly competitive, and I had to quiet him down several times. It didn't really matter, though, because Bucky had his very own version of the super soldier serum coursing through his veins. He could probably sink this ship with his pinky finger, but for now he was content to try kicking my ass.

"How much longer do you think it'll be?" I asked him. I pulled the cards out of his hand and began shuffling them in with mine. I was bored of blackjack. It had been about an hour and a half since we had played Go fish. Time to switch it up.

"We've been on this stupid boat for sixteen hours. By your estimates, we should be pretty close," Bucky answered. He took the cards from me to shuffle and deal. He kept flinging cards across the table well past the standard seven-card hand needed for Go fish.

The sun had gone down not long after dinner, leaving us stranded in the middle of a dark sea. There were a handful of exterior flood lights aimed at the stern and its fishing equipment, and there were a few red and green safety lights here and there that flashed regularly. The light from the cabin and upper deck only pushed the darkness back a few feet past the port and starboard walls. I had yet to see a single light from the shore, if we were even close enough for that.

"Maybe another hours or so," I guessed. He nodded and finished sorting the cards out again. We each had half the deck, but I wasn't sure what we were playing.

"Blackjack again or war?" he asked. He readied himself to lay down the first card for either game.

"I want to kick your tail at something new. War," I said firmly.

And the battle began again.