At Christmas Time Tatiana descended from the wagon in much the same manner she had climbed aboard it four months earlier, even down to wearing the same jewelry. There were three main differences in the experiences: one, she was somewhat taller than she had been, two, she had supplemented her wardrobe with a heavy cloak and replaced her flats with warm boots and her light summer gloves with heavy leather ones in anticipation of the weather in Alaska in December, and third, her solemn Russian demeanor was concealing anxiety instead of an urgent desire to cry this time.
It’s been so long. What if they don’t mind me being away? What if I forget and speak English to them, like I do with Russian at school sometimes? What if Papa and Mama aren’t pleased with me? What if….
“Tatia!” exclaimed a small, slightly shrill voice, and Tatiana’s concerns fled her admittedly never extensive attention span as she spotted her younger sister.
“Katya!” she exclaimed, and impulsively rushed over to embrace Katerina, throwing her arms around her and kissing her cheek. “Mama, Papa – ah, where’s Lyoshka?”
“It was too cold to bring Lyoshka out,” said Mama. She frowned slightly at Katya. “I told Katerina it was too cold for her to come out, either, but she was very anxious to see you.”
Tatiana exchanged a wry smile with her sister, knowing what this meant: Katya had, not getting her way with Mama, doubled back to ask Papa instead, approaching him just at the right moment to get him to agree with whatever it was without thinking to check with Mama first. It was not the best way to go about things, as it couldn’t be used twice in a row, but it would work in a pinch – a good wife, Mama said, did not argue with her husband, who had the rule of their household when he chose to do so. Tatiana did not think she would make a very good wife in that way, when she thought of marriage at all – she preferred not to; for all she knew, she and her sisters could end up spread across the entire northernmost portion of the world, too far away to see each other often, and even if that didn’t happen, they wouldn’t share a set of rooms anymore. One of the hardest things at Sonora had been getting used to going to bed in a big empty room all by herself, without talking to Katya in whispers even after the lights were out and sharing a bed as often as not, and in the morning she missed the cheerful chaos of the dressing room all four girls shared – but that wasn’t important just now and so she forgot about it.
“So were we all,” said Papa. “Let’s go home.”
* * * * * * * *
The days had grown steadily shorter at Sonora over the past few months, but it was not until her first full day at home that Tatiana realized precisely how accustomed she had gotten to more daylight than was common in her village in December. She woke up to Nadezhda placing a glass of steaming hot tea, thick with honey, on the little table beside her bed, and to darkness. She drank her tea by candlelight, dressed by the same, and had breakfast with Papa and Grisha and her sisters by the same. By the time she and her sisters went to see Mama, Tatiana thought the sky looked slightly more like a shade of very dark blue than black, but that could have been wishful thinking. It was after eleven o’clock before, in English class with Katya and Anton Petrovich, Tatiana saw the sun.
By noon, it was true daylight, and though it was still fiercely cold, Mama allowed them to go out, all bundled up heavily in winter clothes. Mama and Anya went for a sleigh ride together, both all but invisible beneath the heaps of blankets and hats and mufflers and with veils even largely obscuring their faces, while Tatiana and Sofiya and Grisha and Katya built snowmen. Papa joined them to judge these, and then for a spot of sledding on the snow mountain some staff had built for them and a snowball fight. It seemed but a moment, however, before the shadows started to set in, and in no time at all, just before teatime she realized it was dark again.
Over the next few days, Tatiana felt as though she was drifting through a dream world, one where it was always night and she was the only one who registered this as in some way unusual. The absence of most lessons did not help; she spent much of her time with Mama and her siblings, sewing and painting, taking turns reading to each other, and – more to Tatya’s taste – photographing each other, compiling albums of the photographs they’d taken of each other, and playing music (both records and with their own instruments and voices; Tatiana had not practiced as often as she should have for the past few months, but she could still pick out a few tunes on her balalaika and Anya played piano as beautifully as Mama did) and dancing to it, though Mama didn’t join in this last one. The great variation in days was if Anya and Sonia and Grisha accepted invitations or received visitors of their own. Tatiana had told Papa about Ingrid Wolseithcrafte saying the village sounded interesting and about her club with the boys, but Papa put the issue off by remarking it was far too late to issue invitations now anyway. This was a disappointment, as Tatiana should have liked to command a whole room and the good silver glass-holders to herself to receive visitors like the adults and the older ones did, but she consoled herself with the thought that maybe she could do it next year, or even over the summer, when it was the days which went on as though they would never end and they could have more fun for longer than was really possible now anyway, even if there was something enchanting about really noticing, for the first time, how the fires of dozens of candles and the hearths of each room danced on the windowpanes and held back the dark….
The routines were at once familiar and alien. It was pure delight to sink again into a world full of color and music and foods that tasted right, but at the same time, she was aware of all those things. They were novel, not ordinary, part of the monotonous routine of most days she was now used to – and that, when she noticed it, upset her. This was, after all, her home. It was, however, much easier to join Katya in interrogating Sonia aggressively about who might have sent Anya that greeting card which had made their eldest sister blush so, and so she did, making a mental note to send cards of her own – and to make copies of both this year’s formal Christmas photographs of the family and Tatiana alone, wide-eyed and unsmiling in her new dark blue dress and the delicate new gold necklace and earrings that Mama and Papa had given her, among other pieces she'd already owned, to stick in her cards to her fellow language-learners, along with a description of the ballet Papa had taken them to, the strange one about the Muggle prince who fell in love with an Animagus; the really interesting thing, Tatiana had thought, had been how the mirrors around the stage had all been charmed to reflect the dancers who'd portrayed the love interest and her sister, who'd set out to end the relationship secretly to preserve her sister's honor, as birds instead of people even when they were clearly dancing their human parts – once they pressed as much information as possible out of the more gossipy half of the older pair.
OOC: Title credit to Anton Chekhov. The plot of Tatiana's ballet loosely, loosely, loosely drawn from some versions of the plot of Swan Lake.