Betrayal - A Bucky Barnes Fanfic

Chapter 38

A/N: this story just hit 1k reads, thank you guys so much for reading and liking and commenting, I appreciate it so much!!

Day. Night. To work. Back home. Ordering food. To bed. Get up again. The world raced by, as if in a vortex. An opaque, impenetrable vortex. As if Ava were caught in a fog. Surrounded by nothing but haze and darkness. Until now. 10 days after finding out James had been using her for information, the fog seemed to be lifting, very slowly and very carefully.

Brutally, Ava's alarm clock snapped her out of yet another nightmare. Sleepily, she opened her eyes. She hadn't had a single tear left in her body to cry for several days now, but the dreams still haunted her. She dreamed of James almost every night, of his lovely smell, of his bright blue eyes, how he smiled at her so familiarly. But the next moment, he plunged a knife into her stomach. Cold and unsparing. Without batting an eyelid. On the rare nights when Ava wasn't plagued by James in her dreams, Natasha appeared in her dreams with her bright head of hair. Memories of their childhood together haunted her all night, memories of a carefree, better time when she could still call Natasha her best friend. But the worst part was waking up. For a small moment, after the alarm clock jerked Ava out of an agonising dream, she thought all was well again. Everything was all right, it was all just a dream. In a moment she would turn on her side and see James' sleeping figure lying beside her. But each time, reality came crashing down on Ava like a block weighing a tonne, and she remembered that in one day she had lost not only the man she had fallen in love with, but also her very best friend.

Mechanically, Ava made her way to work, as she had done all last week. She couldn't remember much, it felt like another person had gone to work for her. But today she felt fresher. More awake. More in tune with herself again. Time heals all wounds, Ava reminded herself, finding a spark of truth in that now. The radio silence had done her good, too. In the first two days after Ava had found out that Natasha and James both worked in the taskforce, the two of them had tried to call Ava again and again, leaving several messages that Ava had deleted immediately without even listening to them. She wanted to look forward now. Maybe she could forgive them both someday, but she was still far from that.

On her way to her desk, Ava passed Peter, who looked at her expectantly.

"Are you all right, Ava?" he asked cautiously and Ava stopped. For the first time in ten days she didn't feel like a zombie and she even managed to smile at Peter.

"Yes, I'm fine, thank you," Ava replied. The hole where her heart once was still gaped like an open wound, but the edges seemed to be slowly healing, slowly making the hole smaller.

"I'm going to Jim's today with April and some colleagues. Do you maybe ...?", Peter continued to ask, still with a certain caution in his voice, as if he was afraid that he would scare Ava away like a startled deer if he spoke too loudly or too hastily.

"Not today, maybe next time," Ava replied, still with the beginnings of a smile on her lips, and then continued to her desk. She was not yet ready to face the burning questions and penetrating stares of her colleagues. She would rather spend the evening watching Law & Order and feeling sorry for herself.

Ava had just sat down and was about to get to work on her to-do list for today when Editor-in-Chief Ranner walked past her desk with a coffee in one hand and a notepad in the other.

"Miss Summers, to my office," he said without stopping and Ava immediately stood up.

On the short walk to his office, she was already preparing to be yelled at for her absent manner and lack of participation last week, but this time something about Ranner's manner seemed different. He sat down in his oversized office chair and, for the first time since she had started her internship at The New York Times, asked Ava to sit down as well.

"Miss Summers, how's your research coming along?" asked Ranner, his hands folded together on the desk and his eyes fixed on Ava.

Ava was so surprised by his question that it took her a moment to answer. It was the first time he had asked her about her research. Already the second first that day. Was there something in the air?

"Ehm," Ava brought out stumblingly, "It's going well, I think." Her words were laced with uncertainty and Ava bit her tongue to suppress her frustration at her lack of confidence. She needed to do a good job of selling the story to Ranner so he wouldn't take it away from her.

Ranner looked at her frowning.

"What I really wanted to say," Ava said hastily, clearing her throat, "Is that I've already made good progress. There have been some new developments and information in the last few weeks that I want to follow up on. I am convinced, no, I know, that there is more to this. My research so far confirms that. But I'm sure you can understand that I can't reveal too much at this stage, partly to protect my sources."

"Good," Ranner said, nodding thoughtfully. "Nevertheless, in a week I want to see the first results of your research. You may use your working time to follow up on any important clues and information so that you can give me a first picture of this story in a week."

Ava remained sitting rooted to the spot. She didn't quite understand what Ranner had just said. Suddenly he did believe in her story and she was even allowed to use her working hours to research it, even though Ranner had doubted it from the start. She felt like Alice who suddenly found herself in an upside-down world, except that Ranner's office was anything but wonderland.

"You may go," said Ranner, who had long since turned his attention back to his computer.

The rest of the day flew by and Ava was already catching less of her thoughts drifting to James. Above all, the pressure from Ranner to give him results on her research in a week's time was now taking up a lot of space in her mind, somewhat displacing the dark cloud that was James. She firmly resolved to spend every spare minute on her research once she had made a plan to proceed. Her head was still too foggy to give any serious thought to her research.

Exhausted, Ava opened the door to her flat and there was the dense fog again, which had lifted with difficulty throughout the day. Dismayed, she stood in the hallway and a tidal wave of memories of James flooded her mind. Even the hallway reminded her of him – of the night he had pressed her passionately against the wall, littered her body with kisses, only to have divine sex with him afterwards. Ava went to the kitchen with tears in her eyes, but again she did not escape James. She saw him standing in her kitchen preparing breakfast, sitting down at her too small kitchen table. How he pushed her against the kitchen counter. He was everywhere. His smell, his face. The memory of him. But he was gone. He had used her, lied to her, taken her for a fool.

Frustrated, Ava shook her head, wiped away her tears and turned back around, out of the too small, too oppressive flat, out into the still warm evening air and on a direct route to Jim's.