No Tears | NR

Chapter 42

Quinjet over the Atlantic Ocean

Yara hadn't spoken a single word since they had left Edinburgh. There had been a few conversations between various members of the Avengers, but even those were very quiet and rather short. She felt guilty for listening to them, but she couldn't help herself. There wasn't anything else to do and to distract herself with other than her thoughts and she really didn't want to deal with those at the moment.

After a while, all conversations died down and a heavy silence fell upon them. It was one of those foreboding silences that were usually followed by something bad; the calm before the storm.

The lack of things to distract Yara from the chaos in her head was getting to her. She used to be in better control of herself, particularly her head. Perhaps, control was the wrong word. Technically, she had just kept her thoughts under lock and key, metaphorically speaking. Even before the death of her sister, she had just ignored everything, including her emotions. She had pushed them back and kept everything there in the hopes that she would never have to deal with them again.

Then, after the loss of her sister, it had gotten worse to the point where she was numb to pretty much everything around her. It wasn't a healthy way to cope, but she had never had anyone to help her with it or show her a better way of dealing with everything that was going on in her head.

It probably would have stayed that way if Yara wouldn't have crossed paths with Natasha, a woman who had her own share of problems and wasn't any better at showing her emotions. Natasha seemed to be an unlikely candidate to help her with the constant numbness. Nonetheless, Yara had found someone to trust and lean onto; someone to let in and show the person that Yara really was - the one she liked to keep hidden and locked away from the outside world. It had taken less time than she would have expected. Turns out that sometimes, all it takes is meeting the right people to change.

Despite all of that growth, some things would need more time to change or improve. That chaos in Yara's head was one of those things that she hadn't been able to sort out yet. The jumble of thoughts made it difficult to find a single, clear one. Instead, she would jump from one thought to the next one without actually finishing one properly and getting to the bottom of it.

Maybe that was one of the reasons, why she had difficulties remembering certain things, like names and numbers. Dates and times were terrible. A long time ago, she had started saving all events in a calendar as soon as she was told about them. Otherwise, she knew that she would very likely forget about them almost instantly. In the beginning, she had used old-fashioned, physical calendars. Later on, she had switched to a digital calendar after creating the software for it herself.

Yara smirked at the thought of the first calendar that she had gotten from her sister and used regularly. It had been a small pocket calendar with a black cover and the year printed on it in big letters: 1955. By the end of the year, the little book had been in terrible condition, because Yara had carried it with her everywhere she went. It hadn't actually been used a lot though and many of the pages had been almost completely empty since there hadn't been many events that Yara had needed to attend at that time. She had just gotten a job that hadn't paid well, and she hadn't had a lot of responsibilities at and outside of work.

Yara shook her head lightly and noticed with annoyance that she had given in to her head again. It fascinated and annoyed her how she always managed to get from one topic to a completely different one in a matter of seconds. The silence, or more specifically the lack of distractions, added to that and made it even worse.

Yara grabbed a headset and plugged it into her MP3 player. The device was one of her sister's last presents to her. Aside from the emotional value that it had to Yara, it was also very useful if one wanted to avoid carrying a phone around.