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]

"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.

[worthallthis]

Winter wouldn't call her a poor substitute. He wasn't lying when he said he'd loved her at eight years old, and he can still see the person she might become inside who she is now. It will be a journey to see her get there-- or get somewhere new. As long as she lets him watch where she grows, he'll be happy.

His Yelena may not feel the same way, he doesn't know. But her version of him will need her, anyway, he knows.

The laugh earns her a smile. "I know. It all is. It's crazy to think I'm over a hundred years old. And was in another universe. And now I know the future. If it were in a book, I wouldn't believe it."

[musicdied]

"What's the saying - truth is stranger than fiction? I guess they aren't completely wrong with that one."

She tilts her head slightly, enough to see him out of the corner of her eye. "Do you ever wonder," she says, then cuts off, hesitating before she picks up again. "Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if you had escaped with us when we were tiny? I'm not saying you should have. Just...if I am the only one who sometimes imagines a different life."

[worthallthis]

"Yes," he says, sounding a little sad. "It took me a while to have that kind of. Of flexibility in my imagination, again. But once I did... I thought about it pretty often. Actually. We probably would have been caught. And I would have been terrible at keeping you all fed and clothed, anyway." He knows this. And he knows it would never have occurred to him, back then. "But I can imagine it was nice, too."

[musicdied]

"We would probably have been caught," she agrees. "But we were terrible little thieves even then. We could have probably managed food and clothing with a dozen tiny pickpockets. I think it would have been nice, for a while."

Even knowing that if they had been caught, the entire batch of girls would have been decommissioned. Most of them had been anyway - the failure rate for Widows-in-training had been horrifying, year over year.

[worthallthis]

Winter still doesn't have enough memories to know for certain just how many were killed during training, but he has enough, and knows Yelena well enough, to guess at the truth. "I probably would have loved it, once I woke up enough to be of actual use to you kids," he says, a little wistful. "I woulda killed anybody who hurt you all, when I had even a little bit of free will."

[musicdied]

She's quiet for a long moment, then says quietly, "If there is at least one other timeline out there, with a different version of me and a different version of you, then maybe there is one where you did break us free when we were small. It's nice to think, at least."

[worthallthis]

"Could be there's dozens of timelines out there," Winter says, thinking of what Steve told him about time travel. "Hundreds. I'm gonna believe that there is at least one where I have a gaggle of little sisters who helped me be a person again."

He glances over at her again. "We'll free the rest of them, too. I promise."

[musicdied]

"Once it's the right time for there to be a cure," she says, and tries very hard not to think of how many dead girls there will be between then and now. Fully-trained Widows sent on missions they won't come back from, half-trained Widows not vicious enough or fast enough or clever enough to pass their training.

"And kill Dreykov. For good this time, so that fucking cockroach does not have a chance to rebuild anything."