A Memory
December 28, 2020 6:46 PM
Out of Place, Out of Patience by A Memory
The young woman who appeared would, to most of the residents of Sonora Academy, have been a familiar sight. Slight, and not overly tall, she had the expression of a normally upbeat person reduced to annoyance by some very persistent irritant.Even those staff and students who recognized her, though, would have found her appearance strange in this situation. For one thing, she was supposed to have left Sonora already. For another, she was usually very colorful - all glittering, varied jewels and precious metals, these somewhat overwhelming her brown hair and pale blue-green eyes - and currently was a uniform shade of silver, and not quite solid. For a third, instead of a school robe, or even an elaborate dress costume, she was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length nightgown. Strangest of all, she was in the Teppenpaw common room, where she had never set foot in seven years of residence at Sonora.
"I do not want to discuss this anymore," she said irritably, pausing in the process of plaiting her very long, very thick hair into a plait for sleeping. "I told you already - I don't understand it all either, but what is it to me? It changes nothing between us, and anyway, apparently lots of people who do understand it all - so what if we haven't? Mama does not speak English, does that mean we should not?"
Evidently this line of argument went over poorly, for the spectral Tatiana sighed, shrugged, and very nearly rolled her eyes. "All right, I know it is not the same," she conceded. "But you still have not told me why it should matter to me, and I don't think you can. My friend is my friend - and was your friend, too," she added sharply. "Your head is not on right, I wish...".
When the real Tatiana had said these things, she had been communicating her thoughts on why it would not be appropriate to disown her friend because he happened to be gay. To almost anyone who walked into the Teppenpaw common room and heard her now, though, she was not communicating at all, because she was speaking Russian rapidly, as one native speaker to another, so that even the old Club of Tongues members might have struggled to keep up with her. To everyone else, she might as well have been speaking the language of the birds, a fact that she seemed utterly oblivious to as she continued to chatter on.
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