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Sometimes she's not sure she was ever freed from the mind control.
It's in the creeping shadows at the edge of her vision, the pain that splits her head open, the voice in her head she can never put a name to. The red room lives within her, moulded into her psyche, inescapable. It drives her every move, even when she tries to fight it, transform into a radiant firefly, rather than the invasive wasp she feels she is doomed to be. The rhythms she was raised for control her; automatic, inescapable, welded into her skin. And as she fights to become something else, to break out of the trance the red room locked her in, Yelena wonders if this ‘freedom’ is another test, proving her loyalty. If they are watching from the edges of her consciousness, monitoring all that she is. If one day, they will come back and make it so much worse.
The guilt is the only thing that keeps Yelena intact. An emotion she never felt before, not since they first put her under. A constant replay, a stuck tape, on all that used to be, that she has to fight to remind herself is no more. But when she clocks into work each day, watching her body perform the precise movements she was trained to carry out, she doesn't see a free woman. She sees the killer they programmed her to be.
So when the guilt tells her to drink, to fight, to scroll endlessly instead of calling Kate or taking up a new hobby, she listens. She lets that voice in her head consume her, as if it can save her from her cruelty, her heartlessness, as if it can purge all that she is and mould her anew.
It's the only chance, she feels, she will be free, in some way, from the Red Room; by taking another master.
Yelena had learnt early on that there was no such thing as freedom. Seeing her sister on the last day in Ohio, protecting her, gave her a reason to fight, a desire for escape. In her heart, she wanted to be that little girl, cowering behind her sister, of course she did. But that was no longer an option. All she could do was fight, or give up. And so she trained harder, did as she was told, didn't cry like the other girls when they first came. She shaped up quickly, joined the cohort of perfectly moulded girls, and rose above them. She became a widow; her passion, her hope, her desire to fight back, was what damned her in the end. Survival rotted her apart, bit by bit, and a part of her is grateful for all the years she couldn't feel. For the years she spent not knowing she had become what she had fought so hard to avoid. She might have destroyed herself if not for that voice that merged with her own, left her without conscience, made perfection easier.
She'd be free when she was dead.
And now, without that voice to dull the world around, it is her guilt that strings her together, reminds her she is alive. It is her guilt that takes the broken pieces that claim to be Yelena, claim to be that innocent little girl in Ohio who loved my little ponies and playing as goalie on her soccer team, and help her feel like she has left that awful place. Because even if she has not changed, even if she is still a taker of life, and nothing else, at least she is away from that vacuous existence. At least she is being torn apart at the seams. No longer their mindless puppet, but one aware of the strings, controlled by a new master, by her own mind, instead of the parasite they stripped her away with.
She's not sure who she is without her guilt, without her past tearing her apart, without her constant grappling to be better, to defy what they implanted in her mind and body, even as she continues to kill and kill and kill. She thinks she understands her sister, at least partly. The need to fight, to recompense. The need to drive forward, lest she falls apart. Because if she is not moving, then the guilt will consume her.
Sometimes, Yelena wishes she was still under the mind control.