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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"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.

"Yes. They're in the car with the luggage." The sparse luggage, but it will be enough to get them across the ocean, even without laundry on board. There's probably laundry on board, anyway. "We can check again when we get to the dock," he promises, and motions for her to head that way.

Getting on board is refreshingly easy. There's no metal detector, thank god, or they'd be in trouble, but that's one reason he'd chosen this particular cruise line: it didn't advertise it's obsessive security measures. Their documents pass muster, and Winter manages to act like a completely normal human being, a middle aged father bringing his mostly-grown daughter on a cruise to celebrate her graduating college. It's not even as hard as he'd expected it to be.

Though it's still a relief to get to their cabin where he can drop the smile and his ass onto one of the twin beds.

Yelena remains standing, quickly surveying the cabin in a manner that is absolutely familiar, one of the things she unquestionably shares with the Yelena he knows.

Only one entrance. Not a lot of cover, but they could barricade if necessary, and she makes a note to collect supplies over the next few days, just in case something goes catastrophically wrong.

"Do you need to rest?" she asks. "I can keep watch." It may not be necessary, but it will make her feel better. Will make both of them feel better, she thinks, at least until they learn the rhythm of the ship, which sounds and shifts can be ignored as background noise, and which need to be paid attention to.

"I need to not have to fake being a normal social person," Winter says, a little dryly. "I doubt I could sleep right now, though I should. We should, so we can case the boat after dark." There will still be people about, but there will be fewer people, and easier to avoid.

"We would not be noticed poking around even in daylight, I think," Yelena says, but the patterns of obedience are still ingrained enough that she drops onto the other bed, not laying down, but stretching out with her back against the wall.

"Tourists are supposed to be annoying, and get into everything."

"Maybe I can manage to act annoyingly concerned about my daughter's safety, and ask very stupid questions about security and locks on the doors," Winter suggests, not particularly seriously, reaching over to touch her outstretched foot and give the tip of her shoe a joking little wiggle before letting his hand fall. He's trying small, careful, fully-telegraphed touches like that fairly often, trying to get her accustomed without making her uncomfortable.

Her nose scrunches a little when he wiggles her foot, amusement not even veiled by a pretense of annoyance.

"You'll have to glare at stupid boys if they come to bother me," she says. "For verisimilitude." She's only mostly joking. She can take care of unwanted attention herself, without any difficulty. But a part of her thinks it might be nice not to have to.

"I can do that," Winter says with a mostly-joking earnestness. "I am very good at that. My glare is very fierce." Probably too fierce for even a protective father. He'd tone it down to more normal levels of glaring.

Then he settles back a little against the wall, which the bed is up against. Both beds butt up against the wall, with space at the foot of his for clothes storage, and space at the foot of hers to lead into the bathroom. "There are two different dinners. The fancy one and the regular one. I thought we'd start with the regular one. Might be easier to sneak food out of that one."

"You might be surprised," Yelena says. She twists briefly to prop the pillow on her bed between her back and the wall, then toes her shoes off and pulls herself into a crosslegged position.

"Fancy people can get away with a lot of shit, just by being accepted as fancy people. Everyone assumes that of course they won't be stealing food, so they don't look for it. But the regular people dinner will probably be less annoying. Rich people are terrible."

Most people are terrible, in her experience. But the wealthy are invariably worse.

Early release - for worthallthis

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