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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She beams at him as she takes the offered pastry, with a heartfelt, "Thank you."

She may not, in either incarnation he's met, nearly match his sweet tooth, but that doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy a treat.

It's a moment before she answers his question, because sampling the pastry takes precedence. She doesn't get this sort of luxury often, and so she's going to appreciate it while she can.

"I was sent to get close to a low-level embassy functionary, in order to get access to their system to pull some intel," she says. "He had a taste for blondes, a history of sleeping with the help, and loved his dogs more than life itself. I would be happy to have pushed him of a building, but the dogs were very nice. And smelled much better."

Better get used to it, Yelena. Winter is likely to try to spoil you, the way Meredith and Kate and the other Yelena did their level best to spoil him with nice things. His methods just mostly involve food, at this point, because that's what he knows best.

"Sounds like an ass," is what he says. "Did you get to spend a lot of time with the dogs instead of him?"

Yelena nods, both in agreement and in confirmation. "The cover was caring for the dogs. I was just sad that when the mission was over, I couldn't take them with me."

"Well. Maybe later," he offers, "once we've dealt with the genocidal alien and the Red Room. You can get a dog or two. There's nobody to say you can't." She's free. The only thing stopping her right now is the mission he's offered her, which frankly he thinks she would do even without him once freed regardless.

Hell, even if she wanted to get a dog right this minute, he'd find a way to make it work.

Her head jerks up, and for a moment, she just looks at him, blank-eyed and uncertain.

"No," she says slowly, and there's a hint of trepidation in her voice - she hasn't fully considered what it really means to be free, not yet. Not in more than bits and pieces, immediate choices interspersed between the things she can treat as mission prep, as building an identity. "I suppose there isn't."

A brief pause, and then she huffs a brittle sort of laugh. "I will hold you to that. Dogs. Big fluffy ones, that look scary but really will just love you to death."

"Whatever you want," Winter promises easily. He's sure he won't have anything in him to tell her no to anything. Especially if in this hypothetical future with dogs in it, she's still sticking with him. "You have to name them, though," he adds. "I am terrible at naming things."

"I don't know if I am any better at naming things," Yelena admits, nose crinkling slightly in amusement that, while muted, is a little less fragile than her laughter had been.

"But I can try. They will maybe just have to live with having people names. Or being all flowers."

There is, in fact, a fluffy creamsicle cat that's probably still visiting the backyard of the house on Lark Street, hoping to be fed by the woman who had insisted on calling him "Daisy".

Edited 2023-07-23 20:10 (UTC)

Yeah, Winter might be thinking about that cat, now. Though he does know that cat is getting fed elsewhere, too. They didn't leave him to starve.

"I let a teenage girl name me," Winter admits with half a smile. "I was going around calling myself the asset. And the Winter Soldier. This kid shortened it to Winter, and it just. Became my name."

"It's a good name," Yelena says. "I like it. It's like..."

She pauses, fingertips of her free hand drumming idly against her thigh as she tries to put it into words.

"Like taking something they tried to use to make you theirs, and making it yours instead."

It feels a little like what her sister's doing, far away on the other side of the ocean, making the title the Red Room forced on her into a symbol of heroism, something that promises little girls they can be more than what other people would make of them. She turns that thought over in her head for a few seconds, then pushes it firmly out of her mind.

Winter tilts his head thoughtfully. "Never actually considered it like that. Kinda like it." It's an interesting angle. Maybe Steve would have appreciated that. "Mostly I think, at the time. I wanted to be me, not the. The person I was before. Especially since at the time I hardly remembered what that person was like. It was very important that I be myself."

It still is, frankly, but he's secure enough in who that is now to not be prickly about it.

"Also I think HYDRA maybe did something so that when I heard my old name. It freaked me out," Winter adds. He's pretty much over that now, though.

"Operant conditioning," Yelena says, nodding slightly, as though it makes perfect sense. Which it does - it's an effective enough tool, if you don't care for the well-being of your subject.

"I think I will enjoy the blowing up HYDRA parts of your plans almost as much as the blowing up the Red Room parts."

Honestly, Winter never cared to learn the name of whatever was done to him. So he just shrugs at that, and then gives her knee a gentle little pat for the sentiment. "I know I'll enjoy it. But then, I am more fond of explosions than I probably should be."

He has a bite of his pastry, finally, and then suggests, "You can be whoever you want, too, now."

"The last time I wanted to be someone, I was still a little girl," Yelena says. It isn't, strictly speaking, true - but those bright childhood daydreams hurt far less than her later imaginings, that in some other life she might be someone who was loved, and safe, and worth saving.

That parts of that are true, or at least were true of some future self who might now never come to be, is its own kind of pain.

"I think probably the dinosaur parts of who I wanted to be are impossible, and I'm a little old to be a prima ballerina."

"The dinosaur parts?" Winter asks, squinting over at her. "Digging them up or being one?"

Because if she actually likes dinosaur bones, too, they're gonna have to hit a museum once they're stateside again. For sure.

"Being one," Yelena replies. She rolls one hand in a complicated little shrug. "Paleontology is very cool, but when you're six years old, growing up to be a velociraptor sounds even cooler."

In truth, even at twenty-six years old, if offered the choice between being a paleontologist and being a velociraptor, she'd choose the velociraptor every time.

"No contest," Winter agrees, amused. "A little tricky. Though back in that other world, we had a guy turn into a weasel once." So not entirely unheard of, either. Not that he'd actually wish that on anybody, yet alone Yelena, who he intends to keep alive and whatever passes for sane for people like them as long as super-humanly possible.

She blinks once in surprise, then regards him through narrow eyes, as though trying to figure out whether he's joking or not. What little she's seen of his sense of humour has tended toward the dry rather than the outlandish, but still...

"On purpose?" she asks after a long moment, deciding that given everything, it's not too much to believe. Probably.

"No, it was a magic thing. There was a game at a museum." He frowns. "It was very stupid, how it happened," he adds. "And I didn't like the man it happened to, but I still wouldn't have wanted that for him. He never did change back. Some people who changed did change back, but not him. Maybe because he went further than anyone else."

"Did he get turned into a weasel by losing the game?" Yelena asks. She is, apparently, invested in the story now - or at the very least curious about it. There may be superheroes and alien invasions now, but people don't typically turn into mustelids. "Or by winning?"

She takes another nibble of her pastry. "Or did it bring out the inherent weaseliness of the people who were transformed? Is that a word? Weaseliness?"

Winter can't help the short snort of amusement. "He was a little weaselly. He was dating one of my team. And lying to her and to me about who exactly he was. So I was not pleased with him. But it hurt Kate to have him turn into a weasel like that."

He chews pastry meditatively for a second, then says, "I do not know if he won or lost the game. It was about evolution. Some people got partially turned into crabs, too, but mostly that wore off."

"If he was also from another world, maybe he just didn't want to be the person he was any more," Yelena says quietly, expression gone a little distant. It's certainly something she would find tempting, the ability to disappear completely into some other person with a slightly less fucked up life.

"But that sounds like a very stupid game. And a very stupid universe."

That makes him pause, tilt his head and frown in thought. He'd never considered it that way. He'd just thought about the potential danger, the certainty that the man had an entity tied to him and refused to admit it even to the person he claimed to be closest to, and that was still a problem. But. He does also understand wanting to be a new person. Your own person.

He finally shakes his head a little. "Maybe. If he had said so, I would have understood. But he didn't say so. So I was just mad at him."

He does bump her shoulder gently with his, leaning over a little to do so. "It was a very stupid universe, though. Yes. At least here I mostly understand how to fight what we're up against."

She huffs a quiet little laugh, and nudges him back, cautiously, as though testing the water. She's come to accept, over the days since he'd pulled her out of her mission and snapped the chains that had been stifling her for years, that he does care for her, even if she's only a shadow of his Yelena. That he doesn't want to do her harm.

She's still not entirely certain of her own physical boundaries, where they need to be, and who she's willing to let in beneath them.

"Explosives are a good first step."

Lucky for her, she's with someone who still has some physical contact issues, himself. He's worlds better than he was, but... he knows how to keep it slow and careful, for both their sakes. Which is why she gets shoulder bumps and not arms tossed around her shoulders.

He nods more firmly at that. "Yeah. They are." And he's done thinking about Adam now, he thinks. He pops the last of his pastry into his mouth and crumples up the bad. "C'mon, it's going to be boarding time soon. We should get going."

She swings around on the bench and hops to her feet, brushing a few entirely imaginary crumbs from her shirt, then fixes him with a bright smile that's half genuine excitement, and half trepidation. This is it - they haven't been tracked down, surrounded. After this, it will be much, much harder for the Red Room to find them.

She still doesn't quite know what to do with that.

"We have all of our travel documents?" she asks, triple-checking, though they'd both made sure of that well in advance.

Early release - for worthallthis

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