anya

It's been over a week since Anya has seen Gleb. Pushkin has seen him though, evidence of Gleb's quiet coming and going from her apartment when she's not been there is able to be found if one really looks for it. And she has looked for it. She searched for notes, for some sort of sign that he wants to see her, even a little. That hope quickly faded as the days passed. Things in the elevator had been left too broken, too heavy. She doesn't blame him for avoiding her, but she doesn't want it to on for forever.

This past weekend had been illuminating, the bright colors, the variety of human relationships and people all on display. That had been freedom, that had been hope. Anya had felt twinges of awkwardness as she had inquired as to the various meanings of different colored flags. To say that what she had learned had been illuminating would be gravely misrepresenting it.

It had offered her hope.

A possibility, albeit a faint one, glimmered just in sight, and hopefully not out of reach. A flexibility that she had not previously known.

However none of that mattered if he wouldn't even look at her. She had to speak to him, had to explain what she had said that day, what she felt. If he wasn't going to come to her, then she was going to come to him. So on Monday she had started hanging out in the lobby of his apartment building, loitering there in her free time on the hope to see him. By Tuesday she'd come to sit in a chair there, taking the elevator a few times on the hope that she would encounter him. Today she's done away with any of that pretense and is waiting outside his door, loudly conversing with his neighbors as they pass by.

She knows he can hear her.

Eventually she comes to stand against the door, pressing her ear against it as she knocks. "Gleb, please come out," she pleads with him through the door. "I'm not leaving until you let me explain."

With a gasp, Anya sits bolt upright in her bed.

The sheets are tangled around her legs, her hair clings in sweaty curls to the back of her neck, tears on cheeks. Pressing her hand to her chest, she tries to steady her rapidly beating heart. Ghostly pain lances through her limbs, screams echo through her head.

Light streams through the window telling her that morning has finally come.

It had felt bone-crushingly real. A night that has haunted her in various forms for a decade, populated by ghosts who haunt her dreams. It had been brighter somehow. More real, each time a little different, each ending horrifyingly the same despite her pleading. Except that last time.

Her fingers clench, a shiver running down her spine at the memory of Gleb. They had both been so painfully young, so desperate as they fled for that wall. But it hadn't been enough. Her father's confusion, his father's horror. She can still feel his heart slowing under her hands, the warm slickness of blood, the last of his breath against her cheek.

Had it been real? Or had her mind been trying to tell her something? Giving her yet another set of ghosts?

There is only one way to know. Sliding from the bed, she glances at the clock to check the time. Hastily pulling a simple robin's egg blue shirt dress over her head, nearly forgetting to put on leggings and socks before she slides on her boots and coat. She has to turn around in the door to grab her purse, unbuttoned coat flapping in the wind. Urgency moves her, a frantic need to know if it was all made up in her head.

The walk to his flat is a blur, the elevator ride exchange with a neighbor is a complete blank. It isn't until she is standing in front of his door, hand raised to knock that she has a moment of pause. To wonder if she is doing the right thing.

Shoving it aside, she knocks twice before letting her hand fall back to her side.