steelartisan | Not a member of defy_ka with this journal. Oops. So the random AU thread goes here instead!

Her only response to the amused glance is a sideways look, and a quirk of one side of her mouth.

She leans over, watching him sign the corner; she touches the edge of the paper just below it, her fingers careful. "What does it say?"

(She has a pretty good start of an idea, but he has multiple names. It is a valid question.)

"Piotr." He hovers one broad, liberally charcoal-smudged finger over the letters, and sounds them out for her, one by one.

"In Russian letters. It would be different in English."

She pulls her hand back and shakes her head, slowly.

"It's so strange; the lettering style looks so much like ours, but I can't read it."

Her voice is absent; she's watching his finger.

"English letters were like that for me once. Before I learned it."

Telepathic infodumps for the win!

"How would you write it?" There's another, smaller sketchbook on his bag in the grass, underneath the pencil case. Or there are other pages in this pad. (Or, of course, just sketching with a finger in the air.)

Maya follows his slight gesture, and she slides down to pick up the smaller sketchpad, and a pencil from the case. Setting the art supplies on the flat top of the rock, she clambers back up beside him.

She flips up the pad's cover; it opens to a blank page. She prints 'Piotr Rasputin' in neat, economical letters; no flowing script or loopy cursive here. Maya was an officer far too long for that.

(The lettering looks loosely Cyrillic-inspired; the 'N' is backward.)

"Like this," she says, and she holds the pad up. "Piotr Rasputin."

Piotr cocks his head, studying the letters as they take shape.

"Strange," he says. "It is almost between -- may I?"

He wipes his hands on his jeans, slightly sheepishly, before he takes the pencil and pad; all the same there's enough charcoal left to leave a few faint smudges. He prints his name twice, more carefully and tidily than he signed the other picture: Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, Пётр Николаевич Распутин.

"--It's a cross," says Maya, studying the two (after readily handing over the paper and pencil). She shakes her head. "The similarities just keep piling up. I think our worlds were secretly separated at birth."

Her mouth turns upward; her eyes flick from the paper to Piotr. "Can you write my name like that?"

"Da," he says, with a half-smile that says of course, and his pencil adds Майя Антарэс an inch or so below his names.

She squints at it, blonde hair tumbling out from behind her ear and fanning across her cheek.

"It's so close," she says, wonderingly, and then she takes the pencil back, but doesn't bother moving the sketchpad from where it is balanced on Piotr's thigh. She leans over and writes, just below his version of her name: MAYA AИTAЯES.

She studies the two for an appraising moment, her hand resting on the warm rock beside his leg, and then she says, "I like yours." There's a strength to it -- and the mystery of being unable to read it -- that draws her attention.

The corner of Piotr's mouth quirks up.

He steals the pencil back for a moment, and silently adds the English he'd forgotten to: Maya Antares, and after a moment's thought MAYA ANTARES in block capitals next to it.

"You just flipped--" She looks at her name; looks at Piotr. "Is that another language?"

"Capital letters. They are both English." His pencil hovers, indicating one then the other. "All capitals, like that, you would use in a newspaper headline, or perhaps a sign. Some people write so, too. Mostly it is this."

"Russian is similar -- this is the usual. But in all capitals it would be so." He writes, quickly: МАЙЯ АНТАРЭС.

"So--" She leans over again, and she circles the Cyrillic-lettered names, and points with the pencil. "Russian." She circles the English names, with another pencil point. "English." Finally, she circles and indicates the names written in her hand. "And me."

She regards the page full of names and loopy circles for a moment, tapping the pencil thoughtfully.

"I wonder how much of it is due to the translating magic of the bar, and how much is actual similarity."

"I have never figured that out," he admits, ruefully.

"I know that I speak English here, and that is what translates. That is what I hear. If I speak Russian, others seem to hear it as Russian. Another language, something else, and the same for writing. But I spoke those when I came in, and I live in America. I have never been sure how it decides to translate."

"I've had a couple of people try to talk to me in Russian, and I can never understand a word of it," she says, and she reaches out to snag the sketchpad between thumb and forefinger, and pull it back into her lap. She shoots him a smile. "Besides what you've taught me, of course."

The page is becoming pretty crowded; Maya flips to the next, her pencil already lowering. "I always th--"

There are doodles in the corners and along the right side of the page: a small, sketchy head-and-shoulders drawing of a woman without real features; a quick figure of a man bending over to talk to a boy perched on a barstool; a cluster of daffodils.

It has all been drawn with the sort of skill that Maya has come to expect from Piotr, but what she sees is the pen-and-ink headshot taking up most of the page. It is a large-scale version of the little sketch of the woman, and it is unmistakably her. She's tossing a grin over her shoulder, joyful, looking on the edge of a laugh. Her eyes lack pupils and her hair -- wind-tousled and a little tangled -- falls to mid-cheek.

Her pencil hovers, momentarily frozen.

--Oh hey. He'd forgotten that that drawing was in there. (Piotr draws kind of a lot.)

Um.

As before, he tries to read her reaction, and waits for it to become clearer. He likes that drawing -- he's satisfied with it, more than with most; he likes the expression he captured -- but he's not sure, yet, if Maya does.

It looks like this was rendered with the same care and attention to detail as the first. Weird white eyes and shorn hair; an impossibly bright smile. Maya's heart twists queerly.

"Am I going to keep stumbling across these, Piotr?" she finally asks, lifting her face to look him in the eye, and from the upturned corners of her mouth and the faint flush in her cheeks -- she likes it.

"There are a few others," he says, with a shrug that's slightly more awkward than he might like; the kind of shrug of someone who's trying not to be embarrassed, and not entirely sure of his success.

"You have always had an interesting face. Do you mind?"

She seems to consider this for a moment -- and then she shakes her head, just a little; not enough that she takes her eyes off of him.

"No," she says. "I don't."

Piotr smiles, small and genuine.

(And there's no hesitation when he meets her eyes, those blank white orbs that used to have pupils and blue irises; there never has been. Ororo Munroe, blue-eyed as Ororo and white-eyed as Storm, has been a good friend of his for years.)

"All right."

Her mouth crooks in response, a small smile in kind; it can't not.

She realizes, belatedly, that she hasn't said anything in quite a few seconds; her eyes hurriedly lower to the sketchpage. "It's--" She traces a daffodil with a slender finger. "They're really very flattering."

Aaaand suddenly this is faintly awkward.

"They are not perfect. I try to draw what I see. Is all."

"You," says Maya to the sketchpad, "are a perfectionist, Piotr Nikolaievitch."

(When she smiles, it's at him, not the paper.)

Piotr rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, but he's grinning.

"Da. I have been told."

Her smile strengthens again; solidifies.

She makes as if to lift the next page, and looks up at him. "Do you mind...?"

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