Chapter 22

My footsteps were oddly muted as I slowly took in my surroundings, passing through what looked for all the world like an Impressionist painting of a lightly forested suburban street. Late afternoon yellows and oranges were dappled across the scenery as the light from an unseen sun filtered through the branches of the trees surrounding the few houses I could see. Unidentifiable ambient noises tickled at the periphery of my hearing, suggesting the laughter of children intermingled with other sounds of quiet, suburban life like the bark of dog or the passage of the occasional car.

If I turned my head too quickly, the colours and shapes smeared together like wet paint. It was odd, the seemingly extreme contrast between the two mental landscapes I'd explored thus far—Bucky's had been solid, oppressive, and constricted, whereas Yelena's was open and impermanent, my surroundings constantly shifting in small ways. Looking up, the sky eventually faded away into an empty white void, and peering down the street I could see that everything eventually just blended together into an unrecognisable blob of colour.

The house in front of me was the realest-seeming one I could see; a homely two-storey affair with a driveway sloping down to a lock-up garage under the house. A pair of child-sized bicycles lay discarded on the front lawn, near a path that led down the side… something about it drew me forward. The manicured lawn gave way to hard-packed earth scattered with fallen leaves. I ducked past a large, ivy-covered tree and came to a backyard sheltered by the surrounding forest. Around the periphery of the area were some scattered garden furnishings, stacked high with empty pots, and a large, aged wooden slide and swing set.

Sitting in the swing was a small blonde girl, seemingly no more than five or six years old, wearing a pair of grubby pink shorts and a pink-and-white striped top—she was the only thing I'd seen since entering that was as solid-looking as I was. She was kicking listlessly at the dirt below her, her shoes caked with dirt and dust, but perked up when she saw me, eyes wide.

"Hello!" I said, giving her a little wave and a tentative smile.

The girl clutched the chains of the swing tightly, leaning back to hide her face behind one of them. "Hi."

"Is your name Yelena?"

She nodded slowly, looking unsure. "…I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

"That's okay, I'm not a stranger. I'm one of Natasha's friends." Pursing my lips, I whistled in a long call.

Little Yelena's face lit up instantly and she whistled a response. Taken together, the whistles were the sisters' secret signal to each other. I didn't know the full significance of it, but I knew it was important to the two of them. "You know where Natasha is?!" she asked excitedly, dropping from the swing. "I miss her so much!" As she spoke, dozens of fireflies lit up behind her, threading and bobbing lazily through the trees at the back of the yard, leaving momentary afterimages in the air like streaks of paint.

"She's waiting for us. I can take you to her, but there's something I need to do here first," I said, looking around. I wasn't really sure how to proceed from here. In Bucky's mental landscape, the confined space had actually worked to my advantage, presenting only very limited ways forward. Here, though, my options were less clear.

Out in the real world, Nat was standing by vigilantly over us, in case I triggered an incident like I did with the Winter Soldier and the captive Widow was able to circumvent her restraints. Several of the other Avengers were close by, monitoring from another room, but I'd warned them that Yelena might be psychologically fragile coming out of the mind control and that it would be better to minimise our direct audience for her comfort.

The second the portal to abduct Yelena had opened beneath her, Stark had hit her with a pulse of electromagnetic energy, frying her comms and the tracking chip implanted in her leg. After she was restrained and I'd put her to sleep, the chip had been quickly removed and Tony was busy spoofing a signal to make it look like she'd been incapacitated and captured, so that anyone Dreykov sent after her would be going on a long and fruitless wild goose chase.

Bruce was running tests to see if they could reverse the effects of the chemical subjugation and create a counteragent, but that would take time—days at the very least, and Natasha had concerns about leaving it too long before going after Dreykov. He was extremely paranoid, and while a single Widow disappearing might not send him into a complete lockdown, he'd investigate and the longer we left the more likely he'd pick up on something. If the man got even the slightest whiff of actual danger, who knew what contingencies he'd invoke?

There had been no guarantee that I'd be able to undo whatever the chemical agent had done to Yelena, but after some discussion it had been agreed that it was worth trying despite the doubts that some of the Avengers still had around my mental powers. It had been Steve and Bucky that had clinched it, with Natasha willing to extend me the benefit of the doubt because of the trust they were willing to show me. I had suspected that Nat would bring the team in on this… While I was working on reuniting her with her old 'fake' family, she had a new family now. We'd had a team briefing where I'd laid out what I remembered—there wasn't anything I felt like I needed to tiptoe around with this, so I just gave all the details I could recall. Natasha was satisfied with my suggested approach, so we agreed to just refine it as needed on the fly. And now I was here, in Yelena's mind.

I hunkered down, bringing myself to eye level with the little girl so I could talk to her more easily. "I need to find something. Some bad people came and took over everything and I need to find them or what they did. Can you help me?"

Yelena squeaked in surprise and nodded. "I think I know where they are!" Without waiting for a response, she shot past me to the back door of the house, flinging it open and disappearing inside.

I lost sight of her as I made to follow, entering the house. It was homey and warm inside, packed with the detritus and accumulations of what outwardly appeared to be a generic, ordinary loving family. The details remained indistinct, giving me only impressions as they smeared and warped, so I shook my head and continued on, following the sounds of Yelena's passage. An open door in the kitchen had a set of stairs leading down and I followed the girl's footsteps down into the basement.

The stairs led down to a small, empty room with concrete walls, lit with an artist's impression of a bare bulb hanging from a cord. Yelena stood opposite me, standing on a chair from the dining room—it wasn't clear how it had gotten down here—so she could peer through a dirty glass window in a massive, bunker-like steel security door that was set into the wall. She glanced over at me as I approached. "They won't let me in," she said. "I'm only allowed up here. Everything else is in there."

I looked at the door carefully. There was no handle on this side, no lock to open… nothing but bare sealed steel. Frowning, I walked right up to it, next to Yelena, and joined her in peering through the window. There were moving shapes on the other side, but I couldn't see exactly what they were—the glass wasn't clean and the figures beyond it were smeared beyond recognition.

Stepping back, I tapped my chin, looking between Yelena and the door. This was just a straightforward metaphor for mind control, right? Yelena was locked out, kept up here where she couldn't affect anything. It wasn't clear what the regression to childhood signified, but kids were generally seen as powerless, and in Yelena's case this was also probably representative of the last time she was actually happy, before she was taken by the Red Room. There was no handle because this wasn't something she could open herself, just as she couldn't resist the chemical subjugation. Simple.

I held up a hand and Yelena gasped as I called forth wisps of red energy and sent them creeping across the surface of the door, probing it for weaknesses. The little girl backed away slightly, watching me with wide-eyed awe and a touch of fear. "It's okay," I said absently as I focused on the door. "I'm… I'm a fairy. I'm going to use my magic to get this open for you."

"A fairy?!" Yelena breathed, her eyes round with wonder.

I frowned. I couldn't find any gaps, any mechanisms that I could leverage. Could I brute force it? I started applying a steady pressure to the door, increasing it a bit at a time until I was almost shaking with effort. The door remained completely, annoyingly unmoved. I knew it was just a mental construct rather than representative of a real substance, but I had enough power at my disposal that not even vibranium could withstand me for long—this door was no joke. Absently, I touched the locket at my neck containing the Mind Stone, thinking my options through.

Bruce had said something about the chemical working by isolating neural pathways. It was all medical technobabble to me really, but, looking at the door… what was this representative of, if not an 'isolated neural pathway'?

I was the Scarlet Witch, potentially the most powerful magic-user in the world, and my already potent abilities were being enhanced by an Infinity Stone. Why wouldn't I be able to do this? Why couldn't I just bypass the effects of some crappy Earth-science chemical agent? When Ultron had used Loki's sceptre to control the mind of Dr Helen Cho, Wanda had freed her with just a gesture and that was the freaking Mind Stone itself she was countering. This is my element. This is where I'm strongest.

I didn't need to overwhelm the door with brute force. If the agent worked by isolating her neural pathways, then all I needed to do was make new pathways.

I stepped over to the wall next to the door, placing both hands upon it and focusing my power through the Mind Stone, applying pressure. The wall trembled and I pulled back slightly, weighing the risks in my mind. Okay, so, what was the worst-case scenario if I tried this and it didn't work? Well, I could do irreparable brain damage and accidentally kill her.

As I turned my head to glance over at Yelena to check on her, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned back to the blank wall. There was nothing. Or was there? I turned my head this way and that, deliberately letting the concrete smear in my vision. There. I felt it shift, beneath my fingertips. This place was malleable. Could I just…? I sent ripples of red power across the surface of the wall, using a steady, gentle rhythm to massage it into shape. It moved slowly at first, but quickened as I realised it was working and, as my focus crystallised, I started to shape the wall like it was raw clay or putty in my hands.

After a minute, I was sweeping hands wreathed with crimson power through the once-solid-seeming concrete as easily as water, refining and changing and shaping it until I was left with a natural-looking corridor connecting the room we were in to the one beyond it, bypassing the sealed steel door.

Yelena darted past me, running into a spacious training room with red and black flooring, a rack of modern melee weapons along one wall. Open doors lined the other walls, leading to further rooms. Whatever moving figures we'd been able to see through the dirty glass window were absent now. As I stepped up behind her, I blinked and she was suddenly different—a grown woman once more, wearing the sleek black tactical gear of a Widow. She turned and looked at me, a shocked expression on her face.

"Yelena?" I asked cautiously.

She was breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating, looking around wildly as though she was only now seeing where she was. She looked from me to the door, then around again, spinning almost in a full circle. "You… how… what?!"

"It's okay, you're good, you're safe," I reassured her, holding both hands out in a placating gesture. A storm of emotions was playing out across Yelena's face and I was pretty sure I'd actually managed to successfully circumvent the chemical mind control. "Okay, hold that thought, I'm going to try waking you up now."

She looked at me like I'd said something crazy and started to speak, but I was already withdrawing from her mind. Opening my eyes, I found myself back where I'd started—in the Avengers Tower medical room, Yelena's unconscious body reclining on a full-body patient chair in front of me, Natasha standing vigilantly to one side. Nat perked up as she noticed me stir, looking at me questioningly, and I shot her a hopeful grin.

"Did you…?"

"I think so. Hang on a sec." I gestured toward Yelena's prone form, wisps of red energy extending from my fingertips to her temple. A moment later, her eyes flew open and she tried to jerk upwards, held back by the restraints around her wrists and ankles.

"Hey! Hey, easy," Nat was at Yelena's side, one hand on her shoulder, scanning her features for any sign that she was herself rather than the Widow she'd been programmed to be.

Yelena was breathing in short, sharp gasps, looking around in confusion, much as she had been inside her mental landscape. After a moment, her eyes fixed on Nat. "…Natasha?" she croaked, hope and fear warring in her voice.

At this point I was fairly certain my job was done and it felt like it would be intrusive for me to stay. I didn't need to be here for what came next. Slipping from my chair, I quickly snuck out of the room, closing the door behind me. On the other side, Bucky and Steve looked at me questioningly, hope and faint anxiety written on their faces. I beamed at them and nodded, feeling immensely satisfied with myself.

--

I rapped on the door to the briefing room, waited a beat, then pushed it open. Natasha and Yelena had already seen my approach through the glass wall, so I wasn't too worried about interrupting as I stepped inside. The two of them had relocated here as a comfortable place to talk a little more privately, once everyone had been satisfied that I had indeed countered the effects of the Red Room's chemical subjugation.

I'd been surreptitiously observing them while we made the next set of preparations, peering from the lounge all the way through Tony's lab to the briefing room—I really did not agree with Tony's architectural choices, but was willing to take advantage of the fact that, from the right spot, you could peek through the entire building. It had gotten quite animated between the two of them at one point, but they'd settled down a bit a few minutes ago and I figured it was safe to intrude.

"Hey." I lifted my hand in a small wave. "We're ready when you are. How are things here? Do you need some more time?"

Nat's eyes flicked back toward Yelena for a moment. "I think we're good."

"Yeah. We're good." The younger Widow nodded in confirmation, though her tone still seemed a little shaky. To be fair, she'd had less than two hours to come to grips with her new situation.

"Are you in or out?"

"In. All the way in," Yelena said, a note of anger entering her voice. "No way I'm letting you do this without me."

"Alright, let's do this."

The two Widows followed me back out to the space we'd prepared in the main lounge. We'd cleared out the furniture from the centre, moving it to the sides to give us plenty of room—we'd wanted a larger area to do this in, just on the off chance that a fight broke out, and we didn't have a lot of other options when it came to spaces that were both large enough and controlled enough. Thor had put off his return to Asgard to stay and help, and he was currently standing with Steve and Bucky just off to one side, alert and prepped for a fight, but the plan was for Natasha and Yelena to handle talking to Alexei. Pietro observed with feigned nonchalance from a distance, electing to watch from his apparently favourite spot on the balcony.

Tony was with Bruce in the lab—the two of them were rather excitedly going over data from the latest scans of Yelena's brain. Apparently, I'd actually rewired her brain somehow, forging new neural pathways that bypassed the connections that had been hijacked by the Red Room's chemical subjugation. Bruce was utterly fascinated and had suggested that the same method could be used to treat or even cure some currently-incurable neurological conditions. It was cool, I guess, but there was only one of me and I rather selfishly didn't really want to spend the rest of my life tinkering with people's brains.

"Ready?" I asked.

Yelena pulled a face. "Ugh, yes. Do we really need Alexei?"

"It'll be fine. We'll just get what we need from him and then we never have to deal with him again," Natasha said with a sigh.

"Maybe it won't be that bad?" I suggested. "It could be nice to see him again."

They both shot me matching flat looks. "Sure," Yelena said, sarcasm dripping from each word. "It'll be super nice to see the asshole who handed us over to Dreykov."

"And here I was just starting to believe that you actually had seen the future," Nat said, shaking her head, the ghost of a smile flitting across her features.

"Let's just get this over with."

"Okay," I said. "Give me a moment."

I slipped my sling ring back onto my fingers and concentrated on my target. Alexei hadn't had a lot of screen time overall, but he was a pretty distinctive-looking guy and had been played by an actor I knew pretty well. I took a few minutes, trying to build as complete a picture as I could in my mind—the better my mental image, the faster I could open a portal, and I wanted it to open as quickly as possible.

When I was ready, I held out my hands and focused on a point in space directly in front of me as I gestured, five feet in the air. The sparks took almost immediately, rapidly opening into a flat, horizontal portal, and a heaveyset bear of a man fell through, hitting the ground in an undignified belly-flop accompanied by a stream of Russian-sounding invectives. I dismissed the portal the second he cleared it, glancing over at Nat.

Alexei Shostakov, the former Soviet super soldier known as the Red Guardian, pulled himself to his feet, grumbling and swearing the whole way. He was shaggy and unkempt, his scraggly beard streaked with grey. Dozens of prison tattoos of varying levels of quality peeking out and around his disgustingly sweat-stained grey singlet, which I imagined must have been white at one point. His eyes almost immediately fixed on Natasha and Yelena and widened in surprise, putting an end to his tirade. "Natasha?!" he asked incredulously. "Yelena!"

"Alexei." Nat's tone and body language were standoffish, her arms folded defensively in front of her chest.

"Oh, oh my, I'm so happy to see you, girls." Alexei was seemingly completely oblivious to the hostility, his face splitting into a wide grin as he shook his head in disbelief. "Wow… It means so much to me that you came for me."

Yelena rolled her eyes. "You're only here because we need you, dipshit."

"You're going to tell us how to find Melina," Nat said firmly.

Alexei paused for a moment, looking at them. "Huh. Look at you, all business."

"Trust me, this isn't pleasure."

He scoffed and shook his head, starting to pace and look around. "Little Natasha, all indoctrinated into the Western agenda—" The large man suddenly did a double-take as he took in the Avengers watching carefully from the other side of the room, then his entire face lit up. "Captain America," he practically purred, his deep voice laden with the eager promise of violence. "My great adversary in this theatre of geopolitical conflict. Hah! So, we meet again!"

Bucky and Thor glanced at Steve, but he just looked puzzled. "Sorry, have we met before?"

Alexei's eyes widened in shock at the lack of recognition, then he gestured to himself frantically. "It's me! The Red Guardian! Your Soviet contemporary!"

"I mean, yes, I know you were the Red Guardian, Wanda and Natasha briefed us, but I don't really…" Steve gave a confused smile.

The utter and abject hurt on Alexei's face looked completely genuine. "What?! We fought in Novosibirsk! I took you by the shield and threw you out the window before making my escape, surely you… this…"

"Look, I'm… when was this?"

"I don't know, like, '83, '84."

"Sorry, you must have me confused with someone else," Steve said, shaking his head. "I was frozen. I've only been back for three years."

Alexei's face collapsed and his shoulders slumped for a moment. "That's… not possible."

"Alexei," Natasha snapped. "It doesn't matter, we don't care about your stupid rivalry."

"We're going after Dreykov." Yelena shot him a look. "We need to find Mom… Melina. You know where she is?"

He scoffed quietly, still looking defeated. "You're going after Dreykov, huh?"

"Just tell us where we can find Melina," Nat said, at least making an effort to be patient with him.

"My friend, General Dreykov… hah," he nodded to himself, his face twisting into a furious scowl. "He gives me glory, Soviet Union's first and only super soldier. Then he buries me in Ohio on that stupid mission, for three years! So tedious, boring me to tears." At Yelena's expression, he shrugged. "No offense, huh?"

Lurching over to the side of the room, he dropped himself down onto one of the couches that had been dragged out of the way. I exchanged a glance with Nat and ventured a nervous smile—she was not looking particularly happy with the situation.

Alexei gestured at the air. "Then he puts me in prison for the rest of my life. Why, huh? Why? Why would he put me in prison? You know why? Because maybe I want to talk about the withering of the state. Or maybe I don't like his hair and I say something casually about that. Maybe, you know, I want the Party to feel actually like a party instead of this sourpuss organisation. But instead, no. He puts me in prison for the rest of my life. He just runs off and hides, huh? I'm not even the one who, ah, you know…" He looked at Natasha, a vaguely discomfited expression passing across his face. "I'm not the one who killed his daughter."

"His daughter's alive," I said, speaking up for the first time since Alexei had arrived.

His eyes snapped to me, as though this was the first time he'd even noticed I was there. "What would you know? Who the fuck are you, anyway, huh?" Despite his dismissal, Alexei's eyes roved up and down my body appreciatively.

I suppressed a look of annoyance at being ogled. "It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is we have the Avengers and we're going to destroy the Red Room and kill Dreykov. Tell us where Melina is and we'll let you in on it. You can pay him back for what he did to you."

Alexei studied me carefully, sucking on his teeth, before he looked back at Natasha and Yelena. After a moment of thought, he nodded. "Melina works remotely, outside of Saint Petersburg. I can show you where."