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

[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."

[worthallthis]

"Bullet to the brain," Winter promises. He'll even let her do it, if she needs to, though him with a sniper rifle would be easiest, probably. Even if he's up on a flying station thing, he bets he could manage.

He knows there will be Widows lost between then and now... but they should be able to get to him sooner than in her timeline, too. Save the chemist who creates the dust. Get to the scientist in Russia sooner. Get them all into the sky sooner. They can do it, he's sure of it.

[musicdied]

"That is a thought that will keep me warm at night," Yelena says, though there's no warmth at all to her smile.

For a moment, at least, and then it softens a little. "You know, I am not the only girl you trained who's survived. You may be stuck with that gaggle of little sisters in this timeline, too. Just a little bit later."

[worthallthis]

"Oh no," he says, utterly flat and deadpan, so much so that it must be intentional. "Whatever will I do. More people to love." Then he drops the act and adds, "We'll make sure they get looked after, too. Do you." He pauses, hesitates. This isn't something his Yelena told him, because in her time, it hadn't mattered. They'd all been free already, and he'd had nothing to do with it.

But it matters now. So he asks, "Do you know which ones?"

[musicdied]

She rattles off a short list of names - too short, less than a quarter of the girls he'd trained.

"Ekaterina was still alive the last I heard," she adds after a moment. "But she was on an extended assignment." The last two words are thick with distaste - a euphemism for a plaything of one of Dreykov's more temperamental supporters, reward and threat in one pretty package.

[worthallthis]

He can guess what that means, too, and wrinkles his nose at it. "Doesn't this drug need regular applications? Is there a handler to administer it that we can quietly remove, let it wear off?" Freeing one more Widow a little bit ahead of time might actually help, if she isn't being monitored too closely so it doesn't tip their hand.

Not too early, there's too much risk in that, and they still need to deal with the stones, that's the first order of business. But to help with squirreling away the scientist, maybe.

[musicdied]

"It needs reapplication, but it's not so regular that it would be easy to disrupt the process. My last dose was before I left for my mission, and if you hadn't had an antidote for the drug, you would have still needed to keep me confined and alive for days before it wore off."

She pauses, grimacing slightly. "At least. They are very cautious not to let us up, even for a minute. We would need to be very clever with out timing."

[worthallthis]

"We can think about it," Winter says, shaking his head. "See what we can do. When we're closer to the cure being ready." First, laying low. Then, New York. Then, Sokovia. Then they can worry about Widows.

He turns them off the main highway into a smaller mountain road. It's still well up into said mountains, on the other side of them technically, but taking the long way rather than the most direct way is safer for avoiding potential tracking. Also means less people to look at them through the windows of their non-descript little sedan, which Winter always prefers.

"Do you have other questions for me?" he asks.

[musicdied]

"Are you planning to hunt down the people who took you?" she asks. HYDRA's fallen - the whole world witnessed at least a part of that - but there must still be cells out there. They're not like the Red Room - they're sprawling, not centralized.

[worthallthis]

"That's the third goal. Yes. Those plans are... more nebulous." He's thought about it, of course he has, he's maybe dreamed about it. Made a couple inroads on jogging some useful, if awful, memories loose while he waited for Yelena to become available. But the Red Room was for Yelena, and fixing the Blip was for everyone (and maybe for Steve), and destroying the remains of HYDRA is for him, and that automatically makes it slightly less important than the other two.

He rallies after the hesitation, adding, "But taking the mind stone and getting Wanda and Pietro out will hurt them, too."

[musicdied]

"That's a start," Yelena says. She considers him sidelong for a moment before suggesting, "If it wouldn't completely break the timeline, burning the entire facility to the ground would probably hurt them even more."

[worthallthis]

"I have considered it," Winter says with a grim sort of smile. "If it's possible to do so after the extractions. There may be some explosions. I do like explosions." He's rather more liberal with them than he probably should be, even now.

[musicdied]

"Anyone worth listening to likes explosions," Yelena says - though her opinion might indeed be different if she knew just how fond he is of them. "They're very pretty, if you get to the right distance."

[worthallthis]

"Right? Also very final." Hey, he's had a lot of luck with blowing things up. Grenades are great. C4 is useful. Things that are blown up can't be rebuilt easily. (Unless they're magic. Fucking magic.) "So yes, we might blow up the castle. I'm definitely bringing explosives. We might have to hit a few HYDRA bases on the way, to get the passcodes if mine don't work anymore."