clandestinement | Early release

Early release - for worthallthis

They survive, in the end. That much is a miracle in and of itself. They survive, mostly intact, still themselves. And then comes the parting. There is no option to stay, to make a real life - so long as they remain, the connection to the place they came from remains, a flaw in the walls of reality that could be pried open or slipped along, the whole cycle restarted on new ground. There is no option to choose a new world to settle on. It's home, or death.

They promise to find each other on their own worlds, so like one another as to be nearly indistinguishable. It will not be the same. It's the best they can do with the hand they've been dealt. Yelena, the one who had walked two years in another world, who had faced monsters and the awful temptation of power, has the easier task in 2023.

Yelena, the one in his time, is still a tool of the Red Room, still under the thrall of a poison that will not have a certain cure for years. The serum distilled from her older counterpart's blood and cerebral fluid may work. There had been no sure way to test it. "It will take years for the neural pathways to repair themselves, if this doesn't work," the older Yelena had warned. "At least two, probably closer to three."

But even before that comes the problem of tracking her down. There is no intel on where the Red Room is, in his time. It moves, and the Widows are drugged both coming and going, aware only of their entry and extraction sites. The older Yelena can only tell him where she will be. It's nearly three months between his date of return and the date on which a suitable mission will present itself - one on which she will be alone, without the risk of other Widows, victims all of the Red Room's poison, interfering. Without the red dust, there is no guarantee of freeing them, and she's not willing to sacrifice them to secure her own early release.

And so: Bern. Yelena, younger, still the Red Room's plaything, is set up in a small apartment, paid for under the alias of one of her handlers, under the pretense of being a young mistress. One with a minor admin role at a scientific institution that is hosting a large conference, at which - regrettably - one of the speakers will suffer a fatal heart attack tomorrow. Tonight, she is running through the plan one last time, accounting for last-minute scheduling changes - nothing that speaks to any interference. Her target's schedule remains the same. Her exit window will just be a little tighter than she'd prefer.

In the living room, her handler is watching television. He'll have nothing to do tomorrow; it's two days before she'll be extracted, if all goes to plan, time built in to go to ground and take down the trappings of this identity.

No one is expecting any visitors.

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Winter nods to himself, in understanding. "I can't drink orange juice anymore," he admits. "Or citrus anything. Actually. Not sure if it was all the drugs or the brain-frying but it all tastes like battery acid now." Don't ask how he knows what that tastes like. "So we can get you strong flavors."

He pauses, then adds, another attempt at a joke, "So long as they aren't citrus. Or I don't have to share them."

There's a quiet huff of breath, the barest edge of a laugh. Her sense of humour is, apparently, intact - just muffled by the control she'd been under, and the side effects of breaking it.

"I think we can avoid that," she says. Then pauses, considering, before asking more seriously, "Is it just the flavour, or does the smell bother you?"

"Just the taste. Though lemon-scented cleaning fluid is kind of gross," he says, leaning back a little on the bed and watching the curtained window. "Mostly because it's so strong. I have enhanced senses as well as strength." And that had taken some getting used to again, too.

"All of your senses?" Yelena asks. She peers out through the bathroom door, leaning against the frame and studying him with the critical eye of a cell captain evaluating the state of one of her people.

"You must hate nightclubs."

"I really do," he agrees, catching sight of her out of the corner of his eye and turning just enough to keep her more fully in his field of vision. "I can manage if there's a mission, I can focus past it, but it's not. Comfortable. It's not a place I'd go for fun."

"It can be a good place to lose a tail," she notes, almost absently. "Especially if you can get onto the dance floor."

She emerges finally, step cautious, as though she's not yet entirely certain she's on steady ground. She settles beside him, close, head tilting slightly as she studies him. "How long have you been going?"

"Two years in the other world," Winter answers, resisting the urge to lean over a little and rest their shoulders together. It's the metal one on that side; it'll be cold. Also, he's afraid she'll run away if he tries. "Three months and a few days, back in this one. We were dumped back here in the exact moment we left. Only we got to remember the time that passed."

And thank horrifying fear entities for that. He doesn't ever want to go back to what he was in those early days.

"I meant on this op," she clarifies. "It shows, that you didn't have any backup. But it's good to know the timeline."

Two years. A long time for him to get to know a her that isn't really her. Or isn't really her yet.

"I got into the country four days ago," he says. "I knew the dates you'd be here, and I gave myself enough time to work out your schedule." He shrugs just a little. "And I don't have anyone to be my backup here. Not unless I turn myself in to the Avengers." And he's... not ready for that, yet.

"Which is the same as turning yourself in to whatever is left of SHIELD, which is probably a very bad idea." She eyes him sidelong for a moment, nose crinkling. "I could probably get you out of a secret American prison, but it might involve a lot of explosions."

That makes him smile a bit. "Fun as that would be to see. Let's try to keep from having to go that far. I'm not going to the Avengers yet, unless you want to contact anyone. I have two goals for the next few years, and we don't need the Avengers to complete them, but they probably wouldn't hurt, either."

Yelena tenses slightly, and looks away.

"No," she says, after a long moment of silence, voice gone slightly rough. "There is no one I want to contact."

She pops to her feet, lips thinning slightly as the motion tugs at her stitches. At least the headache is abating slowly - she no longer feels like her skull might rupture if she moves at anything more than a crawl.

"I'm going to find drinks to have with dinner. Do you have any preferences, aside from not citrus?"

"Nothing with bubbles," Winter answers easily enough, letting the idea of the Avengers go without a fight. Someday she'll want to talk to Natasha again, but they have time. "There's a vending machine at the other end of the building and your wallet is in my duffel." Though what she might find without carbonation or lemon in it, he doesn't know. They'll figure something out.

Yelena doesn't last much longer than it takes to eat her couple slices of pizza. Winter finishes off a full half of his, then settles in to doze and keep watch, sitting against the wall with Yelena on the bed, the door, and the window all in his sight lines.

He wakes her again before dawn, if she doesn't wake herself before then, by giving the end of the bed a gentle shake, not touching her. "Time to go," he says once she's at least got her eyes open. "We can have a real rest once we're away from the last tracker site."

She sleeps hard, leaden and unmoving save for the faint rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, and doesn't wake until he jostles the bed. Then she starts upright, gaze darting warily until she remembers where she is, who he is, and his words filter through the clinging edge of headache.

"Did you sleep at all?" she asks, as she searches for her boots - the only thing she'd removed before dropping like a stone. At least that makes it easier to get going.

She'd found apple juice last night, the only thing neither citrus nor fizzy, and bought a couple bottles more than they would need for dinner. She grabs one now, and downs half of it before picking up a piece of cold pizza to shove in her mouth on the way down to the car. It makes her feel a little bit more human, less disjointed.

"A little, now and then. I don't need as much as actual people." He's mostly in the habit of considering himself a person. Mostly. Every now and then he slips, mostly in regards to highlighting differences between himself and the unenhanced. "I'll be fine until we stop again."

He carries the duffel over one shoulder and the pizza box in one hand, loaded up with the remains of both pizzas and the last of the cinnamon bread things, while the other digs out the car keys. "I've got a destination planned. Already scoped and secured. We can hide out there for a few days to regroup and make sure we lost direct pursuit."

"You are actual people," she says sternly, though it's undercut by the slightly owlish cast to her glare. She's normally a morning person. All of this is far from normal.

"How far? The Widows are persistent."

The statement makes him pause and blink at her, then smile a little. Just like Yelena, really. "Sorry. Old habits," he explains.

Then he unlocks the car and tosses his things in the back seat before dropping into the driver's seat. "It will take us until dark to get there, so it's a ways. And they might be persistent, but we will be safe. And even if they do somehow find us, I have faith that you and I could stop them."

"We will have to kill them if we do," she says as she slides into the passenger's seat, tugging the door shut and fussing with her seatbelt. "Kill or evade."

It hadn't bothered her at the time, watching her fellow Widows die rather than submit to capture. It hadn't been allowed to bother her. Failure meant death; there would always be other girls.

It bothers her now. Better a clean death at the hand of an enemy than forced suicide, ugly and inevitable.

"I can do whichever is necessary. I'm aiming for evade for now, though. Since we can't free them yet," he agrees. He'd rather free them. But the remedy he had they were pretty sure would only for for Yelena.

It's okay. He has a plan. They'll get them free eventually. "I am planning on freeing them," he adds as he starts the car up. "That's one of my sets of plans."

"How many do you have?" she asks. She shifts slightly, so that her shoulder rests against the door and she can study him in the strange, patchy light of the parking lot.

She sounds curious. Evaluating, maybe. The trust isn't there, but he's managed to catch and keep her interest, and for the moment, that's nearly as good.

"Three broad ones. I'm still working on the details of two of them. I have the fall of the Red Room pretty well planned out, though, provided I have you to help me. I have backup plans if you aren't interested, but I have the best chance of success with you."

He pulls out of the parking lot and points them towards the highway. "The other two are destroying the remains of HYDRA. And preventing something called the Blip." Yelena's future self wasn't the only person he pummeled for intel before coming back here.

Ironically, rooting out HYDRA is actually his least solid plan right now.

It's a good incentive to stay. For someone so blunt, she thinks, he's surprisingly good at manipulation. Or perhaps her other self had just told him exactly where to apply leverage to best effect.

(Or maybe, some small and barely-formed part of her whispers, they had just been friends, and he knew what would be important to her.)

"Those are some very ambitious plans," she says. Then, "What the fuck is the Blip?"

It is true that he knows stopping the Red Room is important to her, but mostly he'd just being honest. He wants her to stay with him, sure, but he has backup plans for if she doesn't. This is him giving her an out if she feels she needs one.

"In 2018 an alien uses the infinity stones to destroy half of the population of every planet everywhere," Winter explains. "Including you and me. Then five years later, the remaining Avengers gather the infinity stones again to bring them back. I don't know why that call it that. It is a very dumb name."

"It is the worst name," Yelena agrees, nose wrinkling slightly. It makes it sound trivial, like whoever came up with it was trying to downplay the mass death it apparently refers to.

She can barely wrap her head around the thought of half the planet being suddenly gone, around how many other people must have died, immediately or slowly, as a direct result. Applying that to countless other planets - she retreats from the notion, shuddering slightly.

"Are you planning to blow up the alien?" She could get behind that, possibly.

"I am planning to blow up an infinity stone. Maybe two," he answers. "I can't get to the alien from here, and the whole Avengers team couldn't blow him up when he gets here. But there are two infinity stones on Earth right now. Without those, the alien can't do his thing."

Early release - for worthallthis

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