Early release - for worthallthis

[musicdied]

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.

Comments

[musicdied]

She catches that skip in conversation, and can guess at what might have been meant to fill that space, but since he didn't actually say it, she feels no need to run it down. She just gives him a small, crooked smile - slightly strained, though anyone who knows her (or, at least, her several-years-older self) less well than he does might be hard pressed to catch the strain.

"It is probably much bigger now," she says. "So maybe you will still feel small. Even if you are actually a giant."

[worthallthis]

"Should see Steve. He's bigger," Winter says. He doesn't actually know what to do about the strain in her smile, but he did anticipate it, at least. That she hasn't even ditched him yet is, in fact, something of a relief. She still might, in the end. "Have you been to New York before? Or are we relying on my memory and GPS to get us around?"

Yes, he has learned about GPS.

[musicdied]

"I have never been to New York," Yelena replies. "But we could find some maps of the city, probably. To help bridge what you remember, and whatever strange things the GPS tells us to do."

[worthallthis]

"Not sure if they make paper maps anymore," Winter sighs, only about half seriously. "But we can look. It'll take us a bit to get there. I can't fly commercial." He holds up the metal hand briefly in explanation. "I got this far by hiding away on a barge. Might be able to book you passage somewhere, and I can hide away in the luggage, or catch up to you later."

[musicdied]

She reaches out to gently touch his wrist, feeling the cool metal beneath her fingertips. She had, she thinks, done that as a child too, once, fascinated by this difference from all of the other grown-ups.

"We should both book passage on a cruise ship," she says. "It would take a little longer to travel that way, but they're much laxer about security because of all the rich tourists. It would not be too much trouble to alter your appearance enough that no one will recognize you, in that environment. Especially if we keep mostly to ourselves."

[worthallthis]

He keeps his hand up until she pulls hers away, maybe going a little more still, letting her touch it if she wants to. It makes him long, unexpectedly, for her to hug him again. The urge to get that close isn't a common one, but... he's missed her. And she's voluntarily touching him. It's been a while since anyone's done that, here, let alone someone he considers family.

"A cruise ship. I wouldn't have thought of that. I'm still... kind of awkward around people. Back in Glauchester, people were used to me. Here. Not so much. You wouldn't mind? Spending a week in a tiny cruise ship room with me?"

She can go out, maybe. More than him, with his metal arm and flat affect and halting speech. Give her some space. Some good food. A tan.

[musicdied]

Her fingertips trace over a few of the plates before she pulls back. "I wouldn't mind," she says. "I am used to close quarters, and you're already better company than Dreykov's men."

They were never afforded much privacy, between missions. If Dreykov could put them away in little boxes like dolls when they weren't needed without sacrificing their ability to function the way he'd like, she's fairly certain he would have.

[worthallthis]

"That is the lowest bar," he complains good-naturedly, settling his hand down on the gear-shift, within reach but not offered now that she's done with it. "Second-lowest, maybe. HYDRA goons might be a little worse." Maybe. Possibly not, though. "We'll do that, after we hide out for a day or two and make sure we have no immediate pursuit. No one will expect us to be passengers on a cruise ship."

[musicdied]

"I think being the spiritual descendants of Nazis makes HYDRA worse," Yelena allows, nose wrinkling slightly, as though at a foul smell. "But I don't have many points of comparison to put the bar higher yet. My targets were usually not much better than my handlers."

There had been one who'd had a genuine soft spot for children; that had been notable for its rarity.

[worthallthis]

"I didn't usually get close enough to my targets to know anything about them," Winter allows. "I've been told my company isn't terrible. I'm good at staying out of the way. Though. Uh. When I read, and it's not mission data, I usually do it out loud. If that bothers you, I can find somewhere else to do it."

[musicdied]

"I don't think that will bother me," Yelena says. And then hesitates, glancing away at the darkness beyond the car window. "It's been a long time since I've heard anyone read out loud."

[worthallthis]

"Some people find it distracting. Though a lot more than I expected seem to like it." He knows it didn't used to bother her, but this isn't quite his Yelena, and a lot of her affection for it before might well have come from affection for him. He also knows better than to ask when the last time she heard it was: it would surely be upsetting in some fashion for her. "I had several people I met up with just. To read to them. And kids in a library."

He kind of misses that, actually. Those were good kids.

[musicdied]

"You still like little children?" she asks, and though she doesn't look away from the space beyond the windshield, a small smile plays at the corners of her lips.

(She isn't entirely sure that "still" is the right word, that he liked them rather than just having no taste for cruelty, and a gentle streak that had no other outlet. Either way, it had been significant to her. To the few of them who had survived later trials.)

[worthallthis]

"I don't know if like is the right word," he hedges, proving her thoughts at least partially true. Though he dearly loved his girls with HYDRA, with all the emotion he'd been capable of at the time, these kids were not quite that. "I am not great with kids in general. But with something structured. Like a weekly reading period." Or like lessons in killing people. "I can manage that okay. ... And I liked seeing their faces while I read."

[musicdied]

"That sounds very adorable," she says, and this time she does slant a quick glance in his direction. Her tone turns ever so slightly teasing, a faint shadow of his Yelena in one of her more gremlinish moods. "I think you might be a genuinely nice person."

[worthallthis]

He shoots her a look that, this time, shows clear emotion, and that emotion is aggrieved. "I am not a nice person. I still kill people, you know." Then, a little more reluctantly, he adds, "The reading to kids thing was your idea. The other Yelena's. There was a Christmas thing, and she talked me into it. Then I just kept going, after."

[musicdied]

She bites the inside of her lip to keep from snickering at his irritation, and widens her eyes, looking wounded. "I have been killing people since I was eight years old. Does that mean I can't be a nice person?"

Not that she has any particular interest in being nice, outside of the fact that it acts as social lubrication. She is, in her own way, testing boundaries, seeing how he reacts when pressed, needled.

After a moment, she adds, "I think she's a very different person than I am, your Yelena."

[worthallthis]

"She had more time free," he reminds her. "Years, before she met me. And then she saw me... at my worst. When I had only been free for a month or so. You've met a person. Who knows how to think more than a few days ahead at a time, and has likes and dislikes. I think having to deal with me, like that, helping me learn how to be a person again. I think that brought out some softer bits to her."

[musicdied]

Yelena considers this for a long moment, measuring it against what she knows of herself, the person she is, the person she was trained her entire life to be.

"Maybe," she says at length. "But she would have to feel safe, to let herself be soft."

[worthallthis]

He nods. "When I first saw her. I knew her, a little. And she knew me. We were the same in some ways, and very different in others, but we-- understood each other. ADI put us in the same apartment, with my other roommate Kate. She introduced me to mochas. She was my team. My family before I knew what family meant. I would've torn the world apart if it hurt her." And if the world turned her into something she would have hated, it would have killed him, but he'd have done what she needed then, too.

He looks aside at this Yelena, briefly. "You have the potential to be her. But even if you are never actually her, I will still love you, because I loved you when you were eight years old. You don't have to accept it. But it will still be true."

[musicdied]

She closes her eyes, choking back the sting of tears trying to form. It's the drug, she tells herself, or rather, the lack of it - it has her mind and emotions in a tangle, that's all. It will pass.

Still, she has to ask, "Did she feel the same way about you?"

It's hard to imagine. It's easier than imagining anyone willing to burn the world down for her. Her sister came the closest, when they were little girls - and her sister had abandoned her to weather the Red Room alone.

[worthallthis]

"She said she did. She told me she loved me, before I knew what love actually was." He breathes out a little, a soft huff of air. "I told you what I was like, at first. I didn't think of myself as a person. I didn't. Emote. I didn't understand my feelings, and thought I didn't have any. I got better. A lot of it was because of her, and how much she cared. She's the one who first made me want to be a person, because of how much she cared."

[musicdied]

"I'm sorry that you had to go away from her," Yelena says quietly. "I think she must miss you very much."

She thinks she would miss him very much, if she were this other Yelena; losing another family must have broken her heart. The thought of making herself vulnerable to that makes something tighten in her chest, and she looks away again, staring out the window as she tries to force her breathing back under control.

[worthallthis]

"She gets to do this thing I'm doing, in her own time. Her own... universe." Winter's not sure exactly how this works, only that neither of them are from quite the same "version" of their world, so his knowledge and actions now won't affect how things happen where and when she returned. "With the me from her time. So she won't be alone."

He thinks, if Steve continues on to be with his girl in the past in that universe, that James Buchanan Barnes will need her, too.

He hopes that he won't have to be alone, either. But he won't hold it against this Yelena if she has to leave, either.

[musicdied]

It won't be the same, she thinks. Just as she's a poor substitute for his Yelena, some future him wouldn't fill the hole left by someone who'd known and loved her.

"It's like something out of science fiction," she says. And then laughs, because the same could be said of supersoldiers and mind-controlled assassins, and yet here they are.