No Tears | NR

Chapter 30

Quinjet, somewhere over Europe

The first thing Yara perceived as she slowly woke up were a few voices that were conversing agitatedly. Yara was only able to make out scraps of the conversation, but the words carried no meaning. The brunette's mind was too hazy to understand anything, so she stopped trying and instead opened her eyes, blinking violently to let them adjust to the light.

She took a quick look around and found herself in a familiar place. She was lying on the floor of a quinjet, likely the one that Natasha and she had used on their flight to Germany from Canada. Somebody had tried to make the hard metal floor softer by placing a blanket underneath her body. A backpack served as a pillow to support her head and another blanket had been spread out on top of her.

Yara tried to listen to the conversation that was going on somewhere not too far away from her again and she felt her mind become clearer as she was beginning to understand the words.

"- don't know anything about them", an unknown, female voice replied to something that has been said before.

Yara moved to get a better look at who was talking. She pushed her upper body up with a low groan and used her arms as support to stay like that.

The groan that had escaped her throat must have caught someone's attention because she heard movement where the voices had come from. Not even a second later, someone was at her side.

"You are awake." The statement radiated a sense of relief that the speaker was without a doubt feeling.

"Yeah, barely." Yara's throat was dry which made her voice raspy, but she couldn't help herself when she replied sarcastically.

She turned and finally laid eyes on the speaker. She was met with a pair of eyes that she knew to be green, but they were currently shining a pretty shade of blue in the yellowish light that came in through the window of the jet's cockpit. Blonde hair framed the woman's face that was crouched down next to her. In combination with her features, which were highlighted beautifully by the light, she looked almost surreal, too good to be true.

Maybe that was what cautioned Yara. She backed away slightly and stared at Natasha with mistrust written all over her face.

"You're not real. You're just another hallucination", she told herself and started repeating those words like a mantra. She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugged her legs, and rocked back and forth while she quietly spoke to herself.

"Hey. Hey! Yara!" Natasha tried to get the other woman's attention. "Yara! Listen to me."

The brunette didn't listen. She ignored anything that Natasha said and had her eyes closed as she kept on mumbling something to herself under her breath that the Avenger couldn't make out.

None of Natasha's attempts led anywhere so she did the only other thing that she could think of. She moved forwards and grabbed ahold of Yara's shoulders to get her to stop moving. She shook the brunette lightly to get her attention, but all she achieved with that was to get Yara to stop rocking back and forth. Instead, she was shaking now as if she was trying to get Natasha off of her. The brunette was still talking to herself, so the Avenger made a split-second decision and embraced the shaking woman as best as she could with the position that Yara was in.

That seemed to finally do something. Natasha noticed that Yara had stopped moving altogether, but she was still mumbling something. The blonde caught random words of what the brunette was saying and gathered that she was just repeating what she had exclaimed a little earlier.

"Yara, stop. I'm here. I'm real. I am not an illusion or a hallucination. I am real. Just as real as you are."

She continued trying to comfort the woman in her arms and calm her down until she noticed that Yara had stopped talking. She lifted her head and moved backward letting go of the brunette to get a better look at Yara's face.