No one called him “Glebka” any more. Hie heart cried out for Olga in that moment and, propriety dashed to pieces on the floor as he rushed to her. Though ordered to kill her sister, Gleb could not. He knew that now. He could not rob Olga of her last family ties; just as he could not rob her of his love. He’d squelched it a long time ago.
“Love is not what revolution is for,” Stepano Vaganov once said as he watched Gleb watch Olga through the iron gate as she played in the garden with her younger siblings. “Don’t be soft. Don’t be weak. A man of the people would never betray them for love.”
Gleb was not a man of the people anymore. He was shocked to hear his name, broken and jagged from years of filling his loneliness with Communist rhetoric and hoping it would fill the void in his soul, replace the woman he loved. He’d echoed his father tonight. Love was not what revolution was for. Love was a revolution in and of itself. He was prepared to betray kin and country for Olga, now that he’d found her again. Gripping her forearms and kneeling before her.
“I am real, Olenka. I am real and I am here. I thought… I thought I’d never see you again.”
He wanted to lay his head in her lap and weep, breathe in her sweet, salty scent. He wanted to cry and tell her that the boy she’d loved was dead and at her feet was only a contrite, Soviet officer who was ready to commit treason fro her happiness. He wanted to say and do a million things.
Her knees, bared by the ballerina’s tutu she wore received the gentlest of kisses before Gleb could meet her eyes. It broke his heart to know that once he reunited her with Anya - with Anastasia - he would have to disappear again. But she would have her family. What more could he give her?
His hands slid down her arms to entwine her hands with his.
“I have crossed a continent to be here tonight,” he told her. “Tell me you don’t have anywhere else to be tonight.”
Yes, she was quite sure she’d go mad- mad from love. From fear. From everything that had happened tonight. Nana and that girl out there that resembled little Nastasia. All she wanted was a moment’s reprieve from the haunting faces she saw as she danced across the stage and yet here was yet another face grabbing at her arms and pleading with her as it sank to it’s knees. It all felt so real- he was real and somehow she couldn’t distinguish if it was a relief or more painful than a ghost.
Words were caught in her throat as she tried to find something to say to his confession- his plea to her that this was true and real. That he was really there but all she could manage to do was cry. She wasn’t entirely alone and the man she loved- the young man she loved with all her heart and left behind was there with her. On his knees like he had once before and begged her to stay. Begged her to listen.
And suddenly with his return did she feel the weight of the past few years- being alone.
Having lost everything- including her identity. No longer could she have been Olga Romanov, but Odessa except for now as the familiar name Olenka being spoken by a boy on his knees like any other Russian citizen might have done decades past. He was as much a reminder of the past as her nana out there in the box watching the performance, and the broken part of herself wanted to send him away.
Her heart however would’ve never allowed that and instead she dropped to her knees as well still sobbing as she threw herself forwards into his arm and cried into his neck unable to find it in herself to stop crying by some miracle. The young woman was so sure she had cried all the tears her body had left in her- she had left crying about the past in the past now. She refused to let anything hurt her anymore, refused to let anyone get close to her anymore, but yet for him she crumbled against him.
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