Chapter Text
Anya’s life had always been in color.
If they could, she figured the Bolsheviks would keep everyone’s world in black and white. It’d only be fair, only be equal… that was argument for everything else they did. Yet, despite even Lenin’s power in Russia, color was untouchable.
That, Anya was grateful for.
In a new social order where no one had anything to their name, Anya had even less. In 1917, the year of the revolution, she woke up in a hospital without any memory. Her appearance gave away that she had at least sixteen years of memories stored somewhere, but she couldn’t access any of them. At that point, she was still “that poor girl”. That poor teenage girl became Anya when the nurses decided she needed a name.
Without her memory, Anya didn’t even think to acknowledge that she saw in color until she commented on how dark blue the skies were. The dreariness outside seemed to reflect her mood, but she didn’t realize it revealed something deeper about her. A nurse smiled; it was the first smile she remembered, and it left her unsettled. It wasn’t a warm smile; it was as if Anya had just told the nurse a secret.
“Someone knows to look for you, then,” she said with an efficient nod.
“Who?” The thought after just a day of living without attachments, amazed Anya. It wasn’t until that moment that she fully comprehended that she had a past.
“Your soulmate,” the nurse said, eyeing Anya. Nothing registered mentally, but Anya realized her hand had moved back to the nape of her neck.
“D.S.,” she muttered without thinking; the letters popped into her head. In her head was a faint image of a girl looking into a mirror to see them etched into her skin. The nurse patted her patient softly on the shoulder.
“Good, you’ll be remembering stuff in no time. You should be ready to leave soon then.”
The nurse had been wrong. Physically Anya had recovered enough from whatever happened to be out in the cold, but she never felt ready to leave. Despite her protests, she was released the next day. Other than giving her a temporary blanket, all the hospital had done was provide her with a name and a red hat.
She was not just a girl with no memories of her own life, but with no memories of the world around her. For the first year she played catch up, learning the story of the revolution and the royal family that fell. When she first heard the story from a fellow worker she cried, but the man mistook her tears for joy of the revolution. With government officials breathing down her necks, she probably should’ve thanked him for that.
It only took her a few weeks to realize what the nurse had meant when she said there was someone looking out for her. Enough people talked about it that could piece it all together. At first she thought her soulmate was dead, how else could she still be so lost and alone in the world. A days later, after she’d mourned the loss she never knew, she realized that wasn’t possible. When you meet your soulmate, you see in color; when they die, the color fades away.
All that information she acquired from outside sources. There were few things Anya knew about her life before the memory loss. She knew she was found at the side of a road after a snow storm. She knew that her coat’s lining contained a diamond. What else she knew came to her in dreams, but the fire and shadows that haunted her revealed nothing but pain. Only one recurring dream felt solid enough to grasp onto. She dreamed of a bridge in a city, and voice that called for them to meet there. There were no other hints in the dream, but it was Paris. It had be to be Paris. The mention of the city of lights got her heart racing.
Who was it waiting for her exactly? She had no idea. The voice that whispered was thinner than a ghosts.
Lots of noble families had rushed there after the revolution, she’d learn. Even though the diamond gave her delusions of grandeur it felt silly for her to think of her fitting into that life. Some days she imagined it could be true though, and she was greeted in France by a loving family whose hug would envelop her in expensive fabrics. Other days, she met her family and they brought her to their one bedroom flat and it was perfect anyways.
And other days… well, she couldn’t ignore the only other certainty in her life.
Anya supposed that, in theory, soulmates fit the communist lifestyle. If there’s one person for everyone then there’s no need for hassles of dating; this in turn would mean more time given to the state. The reality of soulmates was that not so simple. Not everyone finds that one person whose initials are inscribed on the base of their neck. Anya had once heard that less than half of the population finds theirs, and even then it might not happen until the soulmates are old and grey. No one’s willing to wait around for anything for that, not even a perfect match.
Even though her government swore they had ended the class division in Russia, there was always the hint of a different divide. The one that came with vision. The vision of those who see color and those who don’t. The same exact division of those who’ve met their soulmate and those who have not. Luckily for the Bolsheviks, soulmates weren’t something that favored the wealthy or poor, but unluckily it still caused resentment.
Most of the time Anya just avoided making comments about color. It wasn’t that hard to do, she didn’t have friends to get into deep conversations with, and as a street sweeper she mainly just saw the tan and brown of dirt anyways.
Even without publicizing it to the world, those colors meant something. No matter how bleak they were, they reminded her that someone else could be waiting for her in Paris. First name D last name S could be there, wondering where in the world Anya was. That person would’ve been from her life before, a life that grew farther in the past as each year came and went.
Nearly ten years after she first woke up in that hospital, she still thought of Paris. It came and went in her dreams, sometimes seeming like a goal and other times like a fantasy. Obtaining the papers to leave would be a feat, and then there was the matter of passage. Selling her diamond for a fair price without getting caught was another matter.
Anya had always overheard murmurs about a less than official ways of leaving the USSR, but it wasn’t until she heard about a man who forged papers in Leningrad that she felt Paris might actually be a possibility.
And that was how she ended up at the Yusupov Palace. It was gorgeous, even in its abandonment. A trickle of girls were leaving, silent and hurried as they moved away from a place that should’ve been taken down years before.
“Is Dmitry in there?” Anya quickly asked as they hurried past her, practically creating a breeze as they went. Though most of them ignored her, but one paused.
“In the theater,” the one said. A fleeting “good luck” slipped out as she hastened her step to catch up with her friends.
Anya wasn’t sure what luck had to do with anything. In the half of her life that she knew, as a rule of thumb luck got her nowhere. In a shady business deal, she assumed luck would have even less to do.
“Excuse me?” she called, trying to get the attention of two people down by the orchestra.
The girl’s comment was completely forgotten the moment she stepped foot into the theater.
Even the facade of the palace had amazed Anya, so it shouldn’t have surprised her that the inside was as hauntingly beautiful. Tapestries hung from the walls as if they hanging by sheer will. The carpeting on the floor was covered in a layer of dust that puffed away as she walked on.
What surprised her was the visceral reaction she had. It was as if she were sleepwalking, and her body was confused between her dream state and her reality.
She stayed like this for a long moment before she saw something just ahead. She was at the back of the theater, and she could see the lobby through an opening where doors had been torn down. In her window she saw a portrait of a family she knew to be the Romanovs. Due to censorship, it was first time she was seeing them. Her eyes hovered the king and queen, onto the children beneath them, until they fell upon a girl with light hair. Even from several meters away the girls eyes gazed into hers.
“Miss?” a voice called, breaking the spell.
Anya spun around to find two men, one young and one older, looking at her curiously.