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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He closes his hand, plates whirring, and crushes the device. The remains he drops into the trash. While leading the Red Room astray has its merits, he'd rather not subject some poor ordinary person to their scrutiny.

Then he hands over the kit, it's small but complete with antibiotic spread, surgical thread, and plenty of small bandage strips. "Because for two years, in another world. You were my family. And when I came back to this world, I couldn't leave my family with the Red Room."

"Another world," she repeats flatly. She studies him for a moment, eyes narrowed as she searches his face for any hint that he's mocking her, or otherwise lying.

The absence of any such thing is disconcerting, and she finally drops her gaze away to rummage through the kit and begin the unpleasant process of tending the wound on her thigh. It will, she decides, need stitches. She hates giving herself stitches.

"I don't know if you're a very good liar, or if you're just crazy. Maybe you went to Asgard, but I've been here. I have only ever been here."

"You haven't yet. You will in 2023." He pauses, then shrugs. "Maybe. Maybe our universes are slightly off from each other, and it is another Yelena who goes to Gloucester. They will be off from each other now, because that Yelena did not escape for almost two more years. And never met me again, that she told me."

When she goes for the thread, he offers, "Do you want me to do it? The stitches. I know how." He half-expects a refusal. She doesn't trust him yet. But he can't not offer.

"Two more years," Yelena repeats, then snorts quietly. "I didn't think it was possible to escape at all. I thought Natalia was the first and the last."

She stares down at the med kit, expression going blank for a moment, and lifts a hand to rub her temples. It does nothing to chase the headache back down.

"He could make us kill ourselves. Did she tell you that, your Yelena? If we were captured, or if we were too injured on a mission. But only then. Any other time, it was unthinkable."

Winter's mouth shuts for a moment, grim, but he finally yes, "She mentioned it. Yes." He waits on her decision for the sutures, but adds, "There is an older widow. One not controlled the same way you are. She finds a cure. A block against it. I didn't know how to find her to help, and you were my priority because I had a cure that might work for you. But together we might be able to find her. Protect her."

With the former Winter Soldier on her side, he's confident they can keep the Red Room from killing her before she can free the rest of Yelena's team. Going up against the Red Room without that cure isn't possible, even for him, but with it... he's sure they can.

"If one of us found a cure, we would have been sent to kill her. It fits Dreykov's sense of irony." Or, more accurately, his sadism. "She must not have rebelled yet."

She's silent for a moment, then offers him the medkit with a quiet admission of, "My hands are not steady right now."

Her vision isn't steady right now. Light wobbles around the edges of it, lingering effects of either the sedative, or whatever he did to break the control she's lived under for the past several years.

"He did. That's how the other Yelena got free. I know her name, a rough description, and where she'll be," Winter promises her, taking the kit and unwinding the thread and tape. "We'll find her in time. And get all the other Widows out, too."

He looks briefly at her face, before back at her wound, putting on the stabilizing tape at either end before threading the needle. "I don't want anyone to be under anyone's control. Not like that. Never again."

She studies him as he makes his preparations, brow knitting slightly.

"They did it to you, too." It's not a question. It explains too much, both his insistence on freeing her, on not just waiting for his Yelena to make an appearance, and the half-remembered oddities of her youth, things buried deep beneath the relief that here was an instructor who would not brutalize her or her sister trainees for failure, would not look for an excuse to inflict pain.

He answers anyway, voice flat and expression fading out to nothing, though his hands are steady as he starts carefully stitching her flesh together. "There are words. I know some of them. Not all of them. If someone says those words. I do what they want. Whatever it is. They took my memories, too, every few days. I only have some of them back."

He's gotten more since his return here than he ever did in Gloucester, in fact, which isn't really saying that much, considering how little he got back in that other world. He thinks it might have to do with having the serum back, healing connections, but he's sure he's still nowhere near at full recall. He doesn't think he ever will be.

And that's okay. He's got new memories. And he'll make more.

"If you hear someone yelling non-sense words at me in Russian," he adds, "you should shoot me. Or run. Or probably both."

The Russian phrase she mutters in response to that is not nonsense. It is, however, indescribably filthy, and conveys an anger that is almost enough to distract her from the feeling of needle through flesh. Almost.

"Will shooting them in the throat interrupt the sequence?" she asks, voice a little too rough for it to be purely practical concern.

Anyone who would violate another person in that manner deserves to die.

Winter glances up at her face for a beat, blinks once, then looks back down at his work. "It would. I'd probably be disoriented, depending on how far they got, but. Pretty sure it takes the full sequence for full control." Disoriented, or just plain freaking out.

He ties the stitches off and leaves the tape, adding a square of gauze on top and taping that down, too. "With luck. There's no one left alive who remembers them. HYDRA hasn't used them since I was sold to the American branch. I'm pretty sure."

"Then I will shoot them first," Yelena decides, and the clear resolve in her voice is, at least, familiar. "Even if I have to shoot you or run after, at least they'll be dead. It's the least that I owe you."

She glances down, gaze focusing on his hand and the square of gauze. "I don't think people like us have any luck except for the bad kind."

Despite the subject, he has to smile a bit at her, for that. That's the Yelena he knows and loves, all right. She might not love him yet-- she might never. But even if she never does, he won't stop.

"You don't owe me anything," he promises her. "I decided to try to be a person, because of you. I'm just glad I could get you free. That's enough like luck, for me."

He tapes the last edge of the gauze down. "I have a change of clothes for you. I'll get them."

"That wasn't me," she says quietly. Foolish, perhaps, to feel envious of herself - but for some other her to be able to inspire that much loyalty when she feels like little more than a broken, string-cut doll aches in ways she doesn't have any words for.

She keeps her gaze averted, counting the threads in the gauze and tucking her hands beneath her thighs so he can't see them shaking. Belatedly, she adds, "Thank you."

For the clothes. For patching her up. She isn't entirely certain herself.

"You're still you," Winter says with absolute faith. Even if this version of Yelena hadn't done those things, he trusts that she would, given the same choices in the same situation. She's already gotten her back up over his own treatment, and she's only known him as he is now for an hour.

He packs up the first aid kit and gets up. "You're welcome. You're welcome to anything I have and can do, or to make your own way if you'd rather do that. But I've got a lot of potential plans, and I think we could do well working together."

"I'll listen to your plans," she says. There's a long moment's hesitation before she admits, "I don't know how I would even start making my own way. Not walking away in the parking lot is the first choice I've really made for myself since I was six years old."

She'd figure it out - she's sure of that much - but the enormity of possibility is daunting enough to shorten her breath. It still pricks her pride a little to admit to it, but if anyone would understand...

... it would certainly be this guy. He nods, then heads out of the room to collect her clothes. He keeps talking, as he does. "I used to lock up when picking out a meal. In the cafeteria. I still have trouble, sometimes, with choices aren't in the middle of a fight, or aren't tied to something I've already decided. But it's easier than it was."

She's quiet for a moment, then asks, almost tentatively, "Did she have trouble too? The Yelena you knew."

She isn't sure she wants the answer. She is sure she needs it, though even if asked, she doesn't think she can articulate why.

"Not that I saw," he admits, "but she'd been free for a few years before I met her, so she might have and I just didn't see her grow past it."

He comes back in with a t-shirt, jeans, underwear, and socks in pretty close to her size, and offers them to her. "And she did seem to... understand. Me. My problems." Enough that he could see her having similar trouble, herself, in the past.

She nods slightly, careful of her still-throbbing head, and reaches out to take the clothing before carefully levering herself to her feet.

"We were trained to understand people," she says thoughtfully. "But not to help them."

She's quiet for a moment before adding, "I'm glad you had each other."

"Me, too." He steps back to let her get changed without his direct attention. It's easier to look away, to be digging into the bag again, when he offers, "And now we can have each other. If that's something you want. If it isn't, I'll still help you take down the Red Room."

She's silent for a moment, but for the rustle of fabric as she dresses, lips pressed tight to keep from wincing when the motion tugs a little at the fresh stitches.

"I don't know how to be the Yelena you know," she finally says. "I'll take your help stopping other little girls from being made into killers. But I'm not the kind or person anyone wants to stick around for."

"I'll leave when you ask me to," Winter says, sounding like this is a fact more than an opinion. He can't think of anything that would make him leave without her deciding she didn't want him around.

Then, a little more wry, "You will find I am very stubborn."

She makes a small sound that might be a choked-off laugh. Certainly her dignity would prefer that they both pretend that's what it is.

"You would have to be," she says. "To have found me, and brought me all this way."

He doesn't challenge her on it, at least. He's made his point. If she wants to have an emotional reaction to it, he'll let her.

What he says instead is: "I am ordering pizza. Because I am tired of protein bars." Which might be what he's been eating since he found her and had to start stalking her and her handler. "What do you want on your half?"

Early release - for worthallthis

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