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St. Petersburg was nice this time of year, a tranquil hesitance between the death of winter and the birth of spring. The snowbanks were melting down into trickling streams that dripped into the storm drains below Zarya’s feet as she walked by as the sun glinting down upon her shoulders. Yet the air still hinted at cold weather ahead, hopeful in the thawing of the ground but grasping at the last threads of snow before giving up entirely on the chase.
She took in a deep breath as she adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder, the action causing the other to throb a little. After four trips back to medical for further wear and tear on her existing injury, the medics had pitched the biggest fit she had been privy to. Her commanding officers, however, were adamant in that she returned to the field, until Chairman Volskaya stepped in personally. Perhaps it was a silent reach of an apology from the woman, but Zarya still hadn’t found it in her heart to forgive her. Not entirely.
Katya seemed to understand her position with the soldier, as she all but gave a small little house to the soldier on the outskirts of the city in a quiet, peaceful suburb to spend the next month or so recovering. Of course it was under the guise of several frivolous, meaningless words, but there was something behind giving Zarya the old house she used to rent during her weightlifting years before the resurgence of the Crisis that the large woman had yet to pick out.
The winding streets led her feet down the familiar, nostalgic track through the road with all the small shops. Some were closed down, the owners unable to afford the rising costs that war brought with it. One was burnt down, its hollow shell standing with ghostly tendrils of soot peeking out of its boarded up windows and doors and covered in graffiti.
It wasn’t much, having deteriorated since her last visit several years ago, but it was the closest thing Zarya could call home.
Her head perked up at a familiar shop, the smell of baked goods ushering her closer to the shop with its lights casting a soft glow into the small river of meltwater. A tiny bell chimed happily as she pushed the door open, stepping into the quaint little shop. A girl was manning the counter, tapping her fingers on the glass as she read through what looked like math equations on the glowing projection before her.
“Hello, give me a second,” the girl said automatically, not even glancing up.
Zarya stared at her, her face tickling a memory in the back of her mind. “Natasha?”
The girl- Natasha- finally lifted her head, blinking bright blue eyes at Zarya for a second before realization dawned on her, the projection winking out as it fell from her fingers and clattered to the floor.
“Miss Aleksandra?” she gaped at her before beaming from ear to ear, jumping to her feet and scrambling for the kitchen door. “Grandma! Miss Aleksandra is back!”
An old, hunchback woman with thinning white hair tied into a neat little bun shuffled through the door, flour dusting her pink apron as she peered up at Zarya, giving her a crooked smile while rounding the counter to hug her.
“It’s good to see you, Aleksandra,” she said as Zarya set the bag down to give the old woman a gentle squeeze around her bony, frail shoulders. “Been too long, and without a single call? You’d make your family worry, young girls running off with no word.”
Zarya suppressed a sigh with a smile. “It’s good to see you too, Mrs. Petrov.” She couldn’t even remember the times she tried to correct the old woman in saying that she had no family left to worry about her, but there was no way in changing her mind.
“Everyone’s got family, dear,” she had told her. Zarya learned to simply grin through it.
“Going off to war like one of the boys, where has today’s youth gone?” Mrs. Petrov bemoaned, dragging Zarya back to the present as she gave her hand a pat, giving it a long look before continuing. “And you haven’t changed a bit- still no ring, I see. I keep telling you, no man’s going to want to marry you if you’re bigger than they are.”
“Grandma!” Natasha exclaimed, a slight horrified scorn in her voice. “You can’t say stuff like that!”
“Of course I can- it’s the truth!” the old woman tutted, shuffling back around the counter. “You already have your height going against you, Aleksandra, and few men like tall girls. They like pretty, dainty figures like my Natasha.”
Natasha rolled her eyes over her grandmother’s head. Zarya could feel her own face becoming a bit frozen.
“I don’t have time to look for any relationship outside of my military duties, Mrs. Petrov,” Zarya said slowly, trying to keep it as polite like she always did when dealing with Mrs. Petrov.
“Of course you do, dear. You’re going to turn into an old maid before you know it with that thinking, now that you have your age and your size to worry about.” Now Zarya was getting a finger waved at her, the grandmother tutting still as she began to pick out pastries from behind the glass. “Miss Julie was tall too, and she got married to a handsome German fellow while on vacation a year ago, and she’s about the same age as you. Even my Natasha’s planning on getting married as soon as she’s done with her schooling, and she only turned 19 a week ago!”
Natasha turned as pink as Zarya’s hair, but the old woman continued on as if nothing happened.
“Every woman should have a nice, handsome man to take care of her, war or no war. I’m sure you’ll find a decent man before you get like me!”
“Grandma, don’t you have something in the oven?” Natasha saved Zarya from listening to the same old spiel as Mrs. Petrov gasped and left the pastries she had been putting into a paper bag on the counter as she shuffled off back into the kitchen.
“I am so sorry,” Natasha whispered, handing over the bag and waving off whatever money Zarya made an attempt to fish out. “She’s been getting worse in the past year or so. She still doesn’t know that I’m getting married to… well…” She trailed off, giving Zarya a look that explained everything.
Zarya had known Natasha since she was pretty young, having watched over her once or twice when her family was busy and too young to work in the bakery. She had been the first Natasha told about her crush on a girl she met online who lived in Spain- well, found out on accident and she eventually spilled the beans- and apparently the only person told if she understood that look.
Zarya knew to keep quiet. Russia was still relatively behind the times compared to a lot of other nations, and it had been one of the last to change their views on certain topics. More than plenty of the older generations were still rooted in the views, if being heckled by old grandmothers about her own life choices was bad enough, she couldn’t even begin to imagine Natasha handling them while coming out with that she had a girlfriend.
“I wish you luck,” Zarya whispered back, taking the offered bag of pastries while trying to hide a smile as the girl flushed.
As soon as she was out the door, Zarya let out the sigh she had been keeping in, all forced cheer sliding off her face. She loved Mrs. Petrov’s pastries, but the woman herself as well as many of the other shopkeepers of the small local street were almost unbearable.
“You must’ve been so pretty when you were younger, with all that blond hair,” one of them had sighed just before her first competition. “But you’ve gone and ruined it by becoming so bulky!”
Zarya had learned to smile and bear the local women’s gossiping, even though that hurt worse than the global tabloids and rumors. Perhaps it was because Zarya knew that the world knew very little about her other than her achievements in her events, and they were quick to turn eye to someone else when they did something more spectacular than a Russian woman lifting weights.
The locals, however, were always a mix bag. The younger generations and her own peers looked up to her as some hero, while older generations thought of her as wasting her time where she could have been making a career out of being something a bit more fitting for a woman- or getting married like so many others around her age. They all saw what they wanted to see and not her, not Zarya, or even Aleksandra.
The tiny house she had rented years before looked the same as if she had left it yesterday, if not having a fresh coat of paint surrounded by other worn, well lived in homes. It was two stories, only two bedrooms and one bath, but it was the closest thing to home that she could get and Zarya couldn’t help but smile a small smile as she unlocked the door to let herself in.
It was the same on the inside as well. She had left in such a hurry when she joined the military that she had simply told the owners to sell what she had left behind. But it seemed that they didn’t, and other than the floors being swept and shelves dusted, everything hadn’t been touched.
Zarya set her bag down onto the floor as she sat down on the ancient, floral-patterned couch that she had rescued from a dumpster several years ago. It was the most hideous thing she had ever set eyes on, and yet, she cherished it as she turned her eyes around the room, nibbling on one corner of the still-warm pastries.
There wasn’t much in the space, just a few books, some old trophies, but no photographs on the walls or any sort of art. She hadn’t had much time and the money she usually made before signing up for the military went to paying the bills or into her savings. And then when she did join the Siberian Front, well, she was too busy trying not to die, and didn’t take any sort of vacation time. It wasn’t like there was anyone she could visit, after all.
The house was quiet other than the soft crinkling of the paper bag as she folded it closed, setting it off to the side to finish later. She bent down to unzip her bag, pulling out her phone from the crevices of sparse, but nearly folded clothes. She hadn’t been allowed to take her cannon with her or her armor, and without either made her feel unprotected and cold. She missed the familiar weight, keeping her down to earth. Without them she felt too light and feeble and far too small, much as she had been when…
The phone buzzed in her hand, jolting Zarya out of her thoughts as she turned the device over.
I honestly forgot what I was going to say to you after taking one look at that couch.
Zarya couldn’t help but snort, feeling a smile working its way onto the corners of her lips as she turned the phone towards the floral pattern and took a picture of it.
Please do not save that.
She did just that, putting the couch into her very empty photo gallery. It disappeared just as quickly.
If you take one more photograph of that hideous couch I will never speak to you again.
Zarya rolled her eyes, and instead reached forward to grasp an old photo album that she had the barest of memories of her grandfather making, favoring physical copies than anything digitalized like the old man he had been. She flipped through several pages before taking a picture of one particular image, saving it to her gallery. It was only a few seconds before the response came, but the image didn’t disappear.
Who is that?
What? You don’t recognize me from 20 years ago?
There was a long pause, before Lynx replied back.
It never occurred to me that you too were a child once.
It is hard to believe, isn’t it?
Even Zarya couldn’t believe it sometimes, that she had been so young and small. Her face was soft and round, her hair such a gorgeous gold that it was hard to compare the eight year old to the current twenty-eight. If it hadn’t been for the color of her eyes, she would have to admit that it wasn’t even her, so open and happy and innocent.
She found herself tracing the image in her lap with her fingers, wishing that she could take that youthful hope out of the picture and put it into her present day self. So many things had happened in her life, and all she could do was keep plugging along.
Zarya lifted her hands from the picture, taking up her phone as she wrote out another message, mostly for herself than anything.
I’m almost 30.
She could hear the old women gossiping, even now. Almost thirty years of age, and still not married or settled down, not even with a pet or a stable job. She may not even get to live longer than that, if the war continued its current course, and she still did not see any hope in her ever running into someone who simply wanted to know her, and not the heroic soldier of the Russian Front, or the famous weight-lifting champion who left on the eve of her competition to fight a war.
Would anyone even mourn her after she died, and not the image built around her?
The sound of a ping from her phone pulled her once again from her own head by the unexpected sound, as she usually kept it silent or on vibrate just because even if she ever got a call she didn’t want to disturb anyone else with it. Lynx must have turned the sound on, as there were several messages that were being deleted before she could read through them, and instead left a single picture in return.
It was a ticket, to a concert for a dark-skinned man with a frog motif on his arm with the warmest, brightest smile she had ever seen. It took her a moment to figure out who it was, as she wasn’t well versed in ways of popular musicians. Some of her fellow soldiers were, and Lucio was a secret favorite, since his music had apparently enticed a revolt in his home city in Brazil. It was frowned upon by their superiors to have anything to do with such a revolutionist, but there were always those who went around such things regardless.
It comes with a free plus one, but only if you want to.
Zarya stared at the sentence on her phone for almost five minutes, first in frozen shock, then her brain kicking in at double speed.
On one hand, she would be leaving Russia, but she would be leaving Russia. And then the locals would know she was gone and begin to gossip, but she could always say that she went on vacation, but they wouldn’t believe that. Perhaps on a date, then. But then they would be nosy and everyone else would be nosy, and yet…
People see what they wanted to see.
When is the first flight to Numbani?
It was an instant, insane spur of the moment, but Zarya couldn’t seem to care. She wasn’t getting any younger, and she was tired. Russia wasn’t the same anymore now that she knew what she did, the war lost all of its flavor, and if anyone found out she went to Numbani for a concert of all things?
She could think of a hundred different snide remarks to tell them.
They were always telling her to live a little, Zarya mused as she flung her bag back over her shoulder, wincing at the pain but not particularly caring. Well, she was definitely living now, wasn’t she? So what if she went to Numbani? So what if she hung out with an omnic? Their revered Chairman Volskaya made under the table deals with them for who knows how long now, and Lynx was the only person that made any sense at all in her current disaster of a life.
And with the click of the lock in place, Zarya left behind her quaint, lonely little home in the quiet spring suburbs of St. Petersburg for what would be the last time.