No Tears | NR

Chapter 6

Sæbø, Norway

An alarm went off and disrupted the tranquility in the hotel room. It also disrupted Yara's sleep who groaned loudly to voice her annoyance about having been woken up. The alarm rang a few more times until Yara who was still half-asleep realized that it wouldn't stop by itself. She sat up slowly and tried to find her phone with her fingers refusing to open her eyes. She hadn't slept much, having been woken up by a nightmare in the middle of the night. Thankfully, she hadn't woken the other woman up or at least not drawn the latter's attention to herself as far as she knew.

When the alarm suddenly stopped without her touching her phone, she opened her eyes a little in confusion. She stared at a woman that was now walking away from the bed and whom she recognized as Natasha Romanoff.

"Good morning", the redhead greeted the other woman who had finally managed to tear her gaze away from the redhead.

"Morning", Yara replied groggily.

"Sorry. I turned the alarm off", the former assassin explained herself. Yara noticed that Natasha looked tired. She suspected that the Avenger hadn't slept, but she wasn't surprised considering that the other woman had been trained to mistrust people. To be honest, she was surprised that Natasha was even still here. So, she didn't comment on it. Instead, she nodded in agreeance.

"Don't worry about it."

She got out of bed, pulled her short, brown hair into a short, messy ponytail, and noticed that the Avenger was wearing the same clothes that she had been given the night before.

"Hey, you can just take some clothes out of my suitcase, if you want."

With that, Yara walked into the bathroom while yawning several times and stretching her arms.

Yara had ordered breakfast to her room and shared it with the Avenger before she announced that she had to get going or she would be late for work. The two women had decided that Yara would drop Natasha off in town on her way to work. The latter had insisted on giving the computer scientist her number in case she ever needed to get in contact with her. While the infamous Black Widow was in hiding, she carried a prepaid phone with her for emergencies.

Yara dropped Natasha off at the store that they had met at. They didn't make a big deal out of saying goodbye and just exchanged a few last words before the Avenger turned around and walked away and Yara continued on her way to work. She didn't bother asking where the other woman was going. She didn't need to know and Natasha wouldn't tell her even if she asked.

Yara arrived at work a few minutes later. There, she met with her coworkers and they started right where they had left off the day before. Time flew by quickly and the woman was not able to find any problems with the design or the implementation of it into Python*. She was beginning to become a little frustrated and impatient. That's why she only took a ten-minute break to wolf down her cheese sandwich before she returned to work trying to find the problem. This wasn't her first rodeo and she knew that these kinds of issues oftentimes took a while to be found and fixed, but she was generally an impatient person and, on top of that, she had been easily irritated for the last week or so.

Her coworkers and basically everyone else who worked here wouldn't be back for another 40 minutes. Most of them went back home to have lunch. She was more or less the only person left in the building, or so she thought.

She was deeply immersed in a document that outlined the design for a small part of the project's code which was why she didn't notice another person entering the room at first. Her concentration was only interrupted when the door shut loudly and the disrupter's voice got too loud to blend it out. Yara looked up to see a middle-aged man standing next to her and looking at a tablet in his left hand while he held a phone to his ear with the other one.

She was about to speak up when she heard him say something.

"They sent a specialist. A woman. I guess we are not that important to them after all. Otherwise, they would have sent someone else who at least looks competent."

Yara stared at him in disbelief. She had recognized the man as the small company's CEO, Jan Gunderson, by now. This was not the first time that she heard others in her professional field speak badly about her simply because of her gender, but it usually never happened that bluntly right in front of her. She began to suspect that he hadn't noticed her presence yet.

"Either way, the product should be ready for you soon, General."

Yara heard a second voice say something on the other end of the line. It was definitely male and spoke with an accent that Yara recognized as Russian.

"I sure hope so, for your and your company's sake. Let me know when it's finished. And make little Miss America and her friends get a move on. I don't like to wait."

The call ended abruptly and Yara was desperately trying to find a way out of what was inevitably going to happen next. Her mind was blank as she heard the man behind her slide the phone into a pocket. There was no way that he was going to miss her right in front of him now. The best she could do was to quickly slip underneath the heavy wooden table and hope that he hadn't heard or seen her move.

The man must have been caught up with his thoughts somewhere in the depths of his mind. Yara couldn't think of any other reason why he still hadn't noticed her. She watched his legs as he walked up to the table and started doing something on there. It sounded like he was going through the latest notes that she had just taken. Then, he seemed to move a few things around on the table and the sound of paper sheets being turned over was audible again.

This went on for a few more minutes before he must have decided that he had seen enough and he left.

"What the hell just happened?"

Yara got out from under the table and stood frozen in place for a moment trying to get her thoughts straight and process what she had just witnessed.

Yara had been told that the artificial intelligence they were developing, was being made for a growing business that basically did the same as Amazon but was only operating within Europe. Whoever Gunderson had talked to was most definitely not part of that business. The name "General" in combination with his accent suggested that he was part of the Russian military. That would mean that Gunderson was engaging in shady business.

She wasn't particularly surprised. She had known for almost all of her life that humans were a cruel, selfish species. And yet, she hadn't been prepared to find a prime example of it here, in the middle of nowhere in Norway. Scandinavia wasn't really known for being a common home for crime and illegal business. That's at least the picture that most of the world had of Scandinavia in her personal experience. Once again, she had been let down by humans. Whenever she felt herself starting to believe that she might make humans out to be worse than they actually were, she got proven right over and over again.

So, overall the most fitting description of what she was feeling right now was probably a mixture of all of it - shock, anger, and disappointment - and she felt utterly overwhelmed. She just wanted to stay to herself and live in quiet. She knew that she was never going to be able to live in real peace. Her mind would never allow for that to happen, especially now, after she had lost her sister. She had finally gotten some quiet, though, when she had started working for her current employer and she had caught herself starting to believe that she had a realistic chance at leading a quiet life, even if it might be boring.

Helping the infamous Black Widow had definitely not been part of that plan, but it didn't seem to have any longer-lasting repercussions on her life, at least as far as she could tell at this moment. Now, however, a quiet life seemed out of her reach. She had unwillingly gotten caught in the middle of something that she knew would disrupt her current life and her future.

"Great", she groaned sarcastically.

*Python is a coding language that is commonly used for writing AI code

AN:

OK, so Natasha is gone. Again. But I promise that she'll be back very soon. I had a little bit of writer's block writing this because I wasn't sure how to get from the end of the last chapter to where I am trying to go with the plot. But I think I sort of have that worked out now. We are going to get more into the movie's plot soon too.