Chapter Text
Moscow had always sounded colder at night.
Even as a child, Aya remembered the sharpness of voices carrying farther in winter apartments, slipping beneath doors and through cracked hallways. She remembered sitting on the floor outside the kitchen with her knees pulled against her chest while her parents fought inside.
Not screaming.
That would have been easier.
Instead, it had been the quieter kind of fighting—the exhausted kind. The kind spoken through clenched jaws and long silences.
“You cannot keep living like this.”
“I’m trying.”
“You’re never here.”
“And whose fault is that?”
Aya never understood what they were truly angry about. Not when she was five years old with tangled dark hair and socks too big for her feet. She only understood tone. The heaviness in the air. The way her mother cried quietly afterward when she thought Aya was asleep.
Her parents had never been married.
Her father had simply stayed after she was born until eventually even that stopped happening.
Aya barely remembered the separation itself. Only fragments remained in her memory: cardboard boxes near the doorway, her mother kneeling in front of her with red eyes, the sound of rain against windows.
Then suddenly it was only the two of them.
For years afterward, her mother worked endlessly.
Morning shifts. Night shifts. Office work. Restaurant work. Translation work. Anything that paid enough.
Aya learned quickly not to ask for expensive things.
Their apartment back then had been small and dim, with peeling corners near the ceiling and heaters that clicked loudly during winter nights. But despite the exhaustion hanging constantly around her mother’s shoulders, those years remained strangely warm in Aya’s memory.
Because even tired love still felt like love.
Then came Viktor Vyazemsky.
Aya had been eight years old the first time she met him.
Tall. Well-dressed. Calm in a way wealthy people often were.
He arrived carrying expensive chocolates and spoke gently to her mother over dinner while Aya sat quietly nearby pretending not to listen.
A year later, they married.
Aya’s world changed almost overnight.
The apartment became a mansion.
The crowded bus rides disappeared. Private drivers appeared instead. Expensive schools followed. Branded clothes. Quiet marble hallways. Large windows overlooking Moscow streets lit gold at night.
And suddenly Aya had two stepbrothers.
Nikolai was sixteen then—already distant and difficult to read. Quiet in the same sharp-edged way their father was.
Misha, twelve, had been easier. Louder. Restless. The kind of boy who spoke before thinking and accidentally made Aya laugh despite herself.
They were never cruel to her.
Just… separate.
Like planets sharing orbit without truly colliding.
Years passed like that.
Comfortable.
Distant.
Too large.
The mansion always felt too quiet whenever her parents traveled—which was often.
Meetings. Events. Business trips. Galas.
Aya grew used to eating dinner with staff instead of family.
She grew used to unread messages saying: Sorry, sweetheart. We’ll make it up to you.
Eventually, she stopped expecting otherwise. By fourteen, Aya had become good at disappearing into herself.
At school, she lived somewhere between invisible and familiar.
People knew her name. She had classmates who smiled at her in hallways and waved during lunch. But she was never the loudest person in the room nor the center of conversations.
She preferred it that way.
Her real world existed in smaller spaces: a group chat filled with stupid memes at two in the morning, shared playlists between friends, unfinished books stacked near her bed, headphones constantly around her neck.
And movies.
Stories were easier than people sometimes.
Pandora especially.
Aya could not explain why the world of Avatar fascinated her so much. Maybe it was the colors. Maybe the music. Maybe the impossible beauty of something so alive it almost hurt to look at.
Or maybe she simply liked worlds that felt bigger than her own.
Aya could not explain why the world of Avatar fascinated her so much. Maybe it was the colors. Maybe the music. Maybe the impossible beauty of something so alive it almost hurt to look at.
Or maybe she simply liked worlds that felt bigger than her own.
At fourteen years old, Aya knew the films nearly by heart.
The forests.
The oceans.
The language.
The glowing skies.
Sometimes, late at night beneath dim bedroom lights, she replayed scenes from Avatar: The Way of Water while listening to music through one earbud, half-asleep beneath blankets in a room far too large for one person.
Aya could not explain why the world of Avatar fascinated her so much. Maybe it was the colors. Maybe the music. Maybe the impossible beauty of something so alive it almost hurt to look at.
Or maybe she simply liked worlds that felt bigger than her own.
At fourteen years old, Aya knew the films nearly by heart.
The forests.
The oceans.
The language.
The glowing skies.
Sometimes, late at night beneath dim bedroom lights, she replayed scenes from Avatar: The Way of Water while listening to music through one earbud, half-asleep beneath blankets in a room far too large for one person.
Pandora became less of a movie and more of a place her mind returned to when reality felt too quiet.
Which was why the irony would later make her sick.
The accident happened on a Thursday.
Cold rain covered Moscow that evening, blurring lights across wet streets and bus windows. Aya stood beneath the station shelter with her white bag hanging from one shoulder, low ponytail dampened slightly by mist.
Her phone buzzed again.
Driver: Traffic near the estate. Will arrive in twenty-five minutes.
Aya stared at the message for several seconds before typing back:
It’s okay. I’ll take the bus.
Three dots appeared almost instantly.
Miss Aya—
She muted the phone before he could finish.
The bus arrived with a hiss of brakes and wet headlights.
Inside smelled faintly of rainwater and old fabric.
Aya moved toward the back automatically, slipping into an empty seat beside the window. She wore a pale blue long-sleeved polo lined with thin white stripes, light-colored pants, and white sneakers now dirtied slightly from rainwater.
Outside, Moscow blurred gold and gray beneath passing lights.
She rested her forehead lightly against cool glass and placed one earbud in.
Music filled the silence immediately.
Soft.
Distant.
Safe.
Her thoughts drifted aimlessly after that.
Homework.
A book she still hadn’t finished.
Whether she should reply to her friends tonight or tomorrow morning.
What song to add next to her playlist.
Small things.
Normal things.
The bus slowed near a crowded intersection several streets away from the estate district.
Rain intensified.
Aya barely noticed the truck until someone shouted.
Everything afterward happened too fast.
A scream.
Brakes shrieking violently against wet asphalt.
The deafening sound of metal folding inward.
The world snapped sideways.
Aya’s shoulder slammed hard against the window as passengers were thrown from seats. Glass exploded somewhere nearby. The lights flickered violently overhead before everything became noise.
People shouting.
Crying.
Metal screaming.
The bus tipped partially onto its side after impact.
Aya hit the edge of a support rail painfully before collapsing against shattered flooring.
For several seconds, she could not breathe.
The air smelled like smoke and rain and something burning.
Pain arrived all at once afterward.
Sharp.
Blinding.
Aya gasped weakly as she looked down.
A long jagged piece of torn metal had sliced deeply along her right side during the collision, staining her pale clothing crimson almost instantly. Blood soaked through fabric rapidly beneath trembling fingers.
Her head throbbed violently.
Warm blood slipped from somewhere near her temple into her vision.
Around her, people screamed for help.
Someone was crying.
Someone else was not moving.
Aya tried to sit up and nearly blacked out from pain.
The bus interior tilted strangely sideways now, shattered glass scattered everywhere like ice beneath flashing emergency lights outside.
Her hearing rang horribly.
For one disoriented moment, Aya thought about her mother.
Then about nothing at all.
Her phone screen glowed weakly nearby across broken flooring.
A paused frame from Avatar: The Way of Water reflected against cracked glass.
Blue water.
Alien skies.
Pandora.
Aya stared at it through fading vision while blood spread beneath her.
The last thing she heard was distant shouting outside the wreck.
Then darkness swallowed everything whole.