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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"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."

"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.

"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."

"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?"

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.

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.

"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."

"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.

"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.

"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."

"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."

"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.

"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."

"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."

She nods slightly at that - it makes perfect sense to her, both that they might have changed the passcodes once one of their operatives went rogue, and that the best way to get some that still work would be a strike on another base.

"I don't object to shooting some truly awful people."

The four days in Winter's safehouse are both less and more awkward than he would have liked, in different ways. Winter is out of practice being around people on his downtime: he has a minor meltdown in the closet once they're settled and the place is properly cleared and trapped, presumably from the stress of acting like a normal person for the extraction and the uncertainty of Yelena's reaction, then spends an hour in the bathtub before he feels remotely able to deal with another person. Yelena doesn't give him too much grief about it, at least.

Because she's still Yelena. But not his Yelena. She keeps saying and doing things that are so familiar, so her, only to turn around and remind him too hard of himself in the early days. Not with not acting like a person, she's very good at that, but the fear in her, the uncertainty, the way choices make her hesitate.

At least there's plans to make, booking a cruise and mapping a route, finding a map they can print of New York City so they can find the sorcerer. That part's easy. It's the spaces inbetween the plans that are hard. He'd expected that, and he has books and movies, as well as pages of notes about the future and his plans for her to review if she wants. There's music. It crosses his mind to show her dancing, but he's not sure if either of them are ready for that.

Then it's time to go, and the drive across Europe to the nearest port is paradoxically easier, especially when they can stop along the way to buy them both new clothes, new books, and all the little things that make someone actually look like a proper traveler. Winter stops them four different times for idle shopping. This is the last one, before they get to the coast, and while Yelena prods at the clothing, he collects them some fancy coffees and pastries from the cafe across the street.

She reviews his notes. She reviews the books and movies, too, approaching both like she's expecting to be tested, and anticipates pain as a consequence for failure. His Yelena had lost that by the time she'd met him, had relearned how to consume fiction for pleasure rather than cultural context.

The shops, at least, are familiar, almost easy - there's an ocean of choices, yes, but she can approach it like a mission, building an identity. She has the parameters for this: clothing that will make her look harmless, that she can alter to suit her needs. Things easily rumpled, so it looks like she's had them a while. The choices aren't the ones his Yelena would have made, but there are similarities enough - she'd branched out, developed her own taste, but had never quite abandoned that practical streak.

The necklace that vanishes into her pocket when the clerk's eyes are turned is a piece of pure frivolity - and a testing of limits.

She finalizes her purchases, and ducks out to meet him, carefully scanning the street beneath the guise of checking her phone. They haven't seen any sign of pursuit yet, but that's no excuse to get sloppy.

Winter offers her the paper cup of coffee as she approaches. It's whatever her favorite had been, back in Gloucester. "Trade you for the clothes bags," he offers. He can just tuck the handles onto his metal elbow and ignore them, until they head back to the car. The weight will be negligible. "Find anything good?"

She switches the bags to one hand, then holds them out for him, taking the offered cup in the other. She sniffs at it, expression showing more curiosity than wariness, followed by a hint of surprise at the sweetness of the scent. It's not off-putting - just the opposite - merely unexpected.

"A few things," she says. "And a sweater for you. It will bring out your eyes. And it gets cold on the water at night sometimes."

"Thanks. I like sweaters." Which she can probably tell, since he almost always has at least one heavy layer like that on him. Even now, he prefers to have more clothes than less. "I'll add it to the luggage before we get going again. Also got lunch. Sort of. It's a pretty measly lunch." But it will be tasty. He gives the little paper bag of pastries an inviting shake.

Her gaze follows the motion of the bag, and she cracks a small smile - she hadn't missed, over the past several days, that he has a bit of a sweet tooth.

"There's a park just down the street," she suggests. She'd noticed it more for the good sight lines than as a place to relax, but it had a couple of small tables, and had been mostly empty when they passed it by. "That would be a nice place to eat before we move on, yes?"

More than a bit of a sweet tooth, really, especially now that he has the serum back and craves calories. He doesn't have to think about what he eats, for the most part. He can just eat.

"That's a good plan. Also a nice dose of real plantlife before we're stuck on a boat for a week," he adds, knowing that the cruise ship is going to have potted trees and decorative flowers and not much else.

"Maybe someone will have a dog we can pet." It's playful, but there's a hint of genuine joy at the thought. She likes dogs. Her father had promised her one once, before--

She shies away from the memory, turning with a slight skip in her step towards the park.

"Maybe. I don't have a lot of experience with dogs," Winter admits, but he doesn't sound averse, either. He follows along amiably, letting Yelena take the lead. "Alley cats, sometimes. Never as a pet."

"I've never had a pet," Yelena says. "But I learned how to handle dogs for an assignment. They're nice. And much less likely to bite than people."

There are no dogs in the park. But the sun's shifted enough that they can find a place to sit in the shade, with good sightlines and a pair of small songbirds playing chase through the trees.

Early release - for worthallthis

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