Reaching Out Tatiana had gone through her entire day without taking in a single thing she was supposed to take in. Her mind had not touched on the things she, as a sixth year, was supposed to be doing at all, and she had skipped Quidditch practice in her distress, needing to first hover, worried, near Dorya, then to get away and think in silence, entirely in her own language, so she could try to understand what had happened and try to figure out what she could do about it.
For a long time, though, she had not been able to think at all. No words had come to her mind, in any language. She had taken her hair down, brushed it, and then picked up a pen and started writing in her best stilted French.
Татьяна Андреевна Воронцова Академия Сонора, Аризона
Hello, Jean-Loup.
It is Tatiana Vorontsova.
Dorian tells me you have troubles. He tells me you fight his brother when his brother break his nose. Good for you. This is what I wish I did long ago. You do not do bad things. Dorya has many emotion. I help him. Professor Brooding help him. Do not worry much.
Many years to you -
Татьяна АВ
The odds were good he could not read her signature, as it was in Russian script, and she had learned, to her amusement, that westerners apparently thought it looked as though it did not even contain letters - that they found it even worse than reading Cyrillic print, like that at the top of her letterhead. However, she had written her name in English characters, too, so hopefully he would figure it out. Who else, after all, could she be? French and English looked enough alike that she imagined 'Tatiana' looked and sounded much the same in both languages - Dorian, at least, had never seemed to have any trouble with her first name - and who else would write him in bad French to tell him they knew what had happened? Or, for that matter, would have lettering which wasn't obviously western or obviously Asian on their letterhead? So she folded it, dropped a blot of red wax onto it, and impressed it with the seal her father had given her for her birthday - a simple outline of a hummingbird. On the front, she wrote his first names, her best guess at how to spell his surname, and the name of his school, and the next morning, dispatched it with an owl, taking a moment to give the owl an extra treat as a sort of apology for the long journey.