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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She ponders the question for a moment, swirling her straw in her cup and listening to the faint clatter of ice against waxed cardboard.

"Hotel first," she decides. "It will give us a slightly stronger position to work from, establishing a base first, and not showing up on his doorstep with our luggage and flyaway hair."

Winter pauses with a little frown, puts his hand to his hair. It is not flying up at all (right now, anyway). "My hair is fine," he complains at her, mostly not seriously. "But it's a solid plan. We'll do that." He's perfectly happy to take a back seat to Yelena's ideas when she has them, especially when they're good ones. He might have gone straight there, just focused on getting the mission done, but she has a point.

Even if his hair is fine, thank you.

Her nose crinkles a little, even as she struggles - and fails - to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up in a little grin.

"Your hair looks very nice," she allows.

"It regularly tries to eat combs," Winter confides, which she has probably seen on the cruise ship, or at least overheard as he curses at it quietly from various bathrooms. "I work hard to keep it looking nice enough to be out in public."

She's definitely heard the cursing, and seen the bedhead. The corners of her mouth still twitch in amusement at the mental image of his hair literally devouring a comb.

"Maybe we should find you a better detangler," she suggests, only halfway teasing. It would be a nice, simple project, something more normal than trying to save the world.

"Find me what?" Winter... has not really used a lot of fancy hair things. He's never heard of detangler. His hard work to keep his hair tamed largely consists of the combing and lots of hair ties. She's probably seen him rocking a braid once or twice, too.

She blinks at him briefly, then huffs a quiet laugh. "It's something you put in your hair to make it easier to comb out and keep from snarling. We will find you some, and then it will not be quite as big a struggle to keep it nice."

"You might need to show me how modern people actually do their hair," he says, a little sheepishly. "I know about shampoo. But if there's more than that, I haven't ever tried it." And nobody had really thought about it, back in Gloucester. His hair hadn't been a total disaster all the time, so people must've just assumed he knew what he was doing.

"There is a lot more," she says, and gives him a quick little grin. "But we'll start you off easy. I don't want to overwhelm you."

The bell over the door jingles, and she looks up, watching as a small gaggle of teenagers flood into the shop, bickering amiably over the best pizza slices to pick.

"I appreciate that," he tells her gravely. This might be a joke, too. It's hard to tell. (It is. He's fairly sure he won't be overwhelmed by hair stuff. He's gotten a lot better about small choices in the past few years of freedom.)

They're distracted from both conversation and teenage girls by the arrival of their pizza, which Winter is glad for. He's hungry. Getting used to his serum's appetite had been a big problem in his first month or two back in this universe.

She may not have a supersoldier's appetite, but Yelena's hungry enough herself that the pizza does thoroughly distract her. She says nothing except to ask him to pass the chili flakes for a good fifteen minutes.

Eventually, though, the pizza's gone, and they've had a little time to relax. It's time to move on. "We should find a hotel next," she says. "More anonymous than a private rental, I think."

"I'm better at hotels anyway. Motels, even, but I don't know if they even have those in New York." They probably do, he just has a hard time imagining it somehow, putting the familiar slightly-scuzzy feel of a motel together with this city.

As they head out of the pizza shop, he has his phone out again, checking for lodging nearby. "Do you want your own room this time?" he asks. After the weeks of the cruise keeping them in such close quarters, he wouldn't blame her.

"Probably," Yelena says. "But we might need to fight a family of cockroaches for a bed, and I refuse to engage in insect warfare unless there is really no other choice."

The slight quirk of her smile suggests she's mostly joking, but only mostly. She can endure a lot, but roaches are just disgusting.

She's quiet for a moment, considering the question. A part of her does want a chance at privacy, but--

"I'm fine with sharing. We have a very long road ahead of us, enacting your plan, and there's no way to know how long it will take us to convince the wizard. And besides, your snoring isn't that bad. Spending the extra money for two rooms would be a waste."

Winter looks affronted. It's about half in jest, and the other half exaggerated for the joke. "I do not snore," he sniffs at her. "Rogers would have said." He thinks. He's pretty sure. Rogers was biased as all hell, but he also liked to tease.

Hell, Yelena would probably have said. He'd shared her room more than once, too.

She grins, broad and bright, and reaches over cautiously to pat his arm, still testing the waters of what is allowed, and what they're both comfortable with. "Don't worry," she says. "It's kind of cute."

He lets her. He heaves a big, theatrical sigh at it, even, showing he's taking it in the spirit it's meant. "Well. As long as it's cute. Come on, there's a hotel down that block with vacancies that doesn't look too fancy." He doesn't think either of them wants to deal with more fancy after the cruise.

They get checked in, a single room with two double beds, even get their meager luggage tucked out of the way. Winter peers out of the heavy curtains in the direction of where he's been told Doctor Strange lives. He's... nervous, to be honest. But they should probably get moving.

She takes a little time to freshen up, to wash her face and redo her hair, fixing it up in a crown of braids that's flattering and, far more important, will keep it out of her face if it comes to a fight.

Hopefully, it won't. She has no idea whatsoever about how to fight a wizard.

She finds him at the window when she comes back out, and watches him for a moment, head canting slightly.

"Having second thoughts?"

"At this point I'd be having thirty-fifth thoughts," Winter says, and lets the curtains falls closed again, turning away and back to Yelena. "I've been going over all this in my head since I got back to this world. I don't know if any of this will work, if I can do it right. But it still needs to be tried." He doesn't want to let Steve down. Or the other Yelena. Or the people of this world.

"Well," Yelena says. "You don't have to do it alone, at least. And if it doesn't work, we'll come up with another plan. You said we have a few years, yes, before this alien is going to show up to start killing everyone?"

He doesn't. She's agreed to stay with him, to help him. If she wanted to leave, she's had lots of opportunities now, and yet, here she is. It helps. Especially since he knows she has skills he definitely does not. The mission is more likely to work, with her here.

And he feels less alone, with her here. It's been so much better, these past couple weeks. Even if it's not the same as before, it's still good.

So Winter smiles a bit, back at her. "Three and a half. A little less. And there are more stones we can get to if this one doesn't work."

This is just the first they can get to. The one with HYDRA is next. Then the ones in space. But they can't start on those until they try this. So he picks up his coat again. "Let's go see a sorcerer."

She does a quick mental weapons check - not for the first time since setting out from the cruise ship - then nods and heads toward the door.

And whistles a few bars of We're Off to See the Wizard for good measure.

He actually perks up a little, recognizing the tune, though he doesn't even try to whistle the next bit. He's not really sure he knows how to whistle. "I saw that, you know," he tells her, following in her wake. "When it first came out. In a theater. I remember it." He doesn't remember a lot, but he does remember that.

"That must have been a lot of fun," she says, with a wistful little smile over her shoulder. "I think the only thing I ever saw in the theater was The Lion King."

A brief pause, and she adds, "For movies. There were a couple of live shows."

"It was amazing," he says with a bit of a smile. "We had a couple color pictures before it came out, but going from black and white to color was a real treat. And of course I'd read the books to my sisters, so I knew the stories, or some of them." He sounds a bit more animated, there, as he closed the motel door behind them, slipping a bit more Brooklyn in accent even, though it only lasts that long and no longer, until he pokes at his memory again. "Apparently I went to the movies a lot. Not as many live shows. Those were. More expensive? Unless they were bawdy shows."

Her smile turns more of a grin, and definitely teasing. "Did you go to a lot of bawdy shows?" she asks.

It beats admitting that the live theatre she attended was very much in the realm of work-related expense, even if it was typically the non-lethal branch of her work. She's only ever assassinated one target at the opera, and then only because the person who'd commissioned the murder had wanted the induced heart attack to be very public.

Early release - for worthallthis

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