[EP] Illyana & Kitty - Rasputin Family Art Sale

[st_opsummoningme]

The Inn giveth and the Inn taketh away.

Kitty sighed and scrubbed her hands over her eyes. Yana wouldn't appreciate the tears. Honestly, it was hard to feel too emotional about Piotr checking out with Lara's return there to balance it out.

Actually, that was bullshit. If anything, she felt more topsy-turvy, and losing Piotr was a fine reminder that Lara or James or Sunny or Yana herself could be taken from her any day. But Yana still wouldn't appreciate the tears.

She sent a quick message to Lara that she'd probably be busy with Yana most of the day and that she'd probably be getting drunk-texts throughout the day because vodka, and then phased through all manner of walls and floors to avoid company while fetching the aforementioned vodka. By the time she arrived at Piotr's former room, Yana was already there. Probably only Kitty could read the grief in the too-tight straightness of her posture. Frankly, probably only Kitty could tell the difference between the regular too-tight straightness of her posture and the current too-tight straightness of her posture.

She suppressed a sigh as she opened the vodka bottle. It was going to be a long, long, long day of "not" having feelings. "What're you looking at?"

Immediately after their discussion using the journal system, Illyana had teleported to Piotr's room. She wanted to take time for herself in the room. She wanted to look at the collection of objects and find whatever traces of Piotr could be discerned from them, as if to summon his spirit through the medium of his bones.

Not his literal bones, obviously. This was only the detritus of him - concavities, not convexations. The chaff that was left of an already fractured, fragmented life. Massive clothes hung like rumpled ghosts, abandoned to his closet, remembering the shape and size and motion of a man without possessing any of his strength. The slightly sunken mattress and bedsheets still remembered him, too, their fit and fold neatly made. Had he made the bed himself, as either a dutiful son or prisoner would be expected to do, and then vanished? Or had he stopped himself, with wakefulness coming the recollection that he had a choice in how to leave his sheets, if not in so many other things? This was his skeletal easel, with no canvas to give it substance. There were his brushes and pencils, that had looked so tiny in his enormous hands, yet were always handled with such care. This was the glass he used to rinse his brushes, the same that he would on occasion lift to his lips and only remember after the first foul sip was not his beverage.

But more than anything, Piotr's presence could be felt in the smells of oil and turpentine, paper and chalk and charcoal somehow both acrid and kind. Piotr was reflected from all corners by the canvases and sketch pads that had soaked into their fibers some small part of his vital lifeforce to become paintings and drawings. They stared at her expectantly, as he had, and were just as disappointed. They judged her, for standing where he had stood. One with so much more judgment than the rest.

The largest canvas in the room, dominating the space, was метель. The Snowstorm. Kitty had once told her that Piotr had first ripped up the wallpaper and drawn the storm on the wall for days on end, and that she had encouraged him to transfer it to canvas before the inn repaired the damage. Illyana wished that she hadn't. So much whiteness shouldn't have so much definition, should not convey so much motion and intensity. The sunken recess at the center-left of it all, the heart of the darkness, even that was only truly an ominous gray. The optical illusion that the work created made that dark heart of the snowstorm both appear both lighter and darker, whorling either left or right, up or down, depending on how one focused. It was a howling abyss, struck mute. A moment, an emotion, frozen in time.

"My brother," Illyana answered simply from where she stood several inches in front of the painting that towered over her.

She turned to look directly at Kitty as she entered, the spell apparently broken. This was only a room. These were only objects.

Silently handing Yana the vodka for the first drink -- classy bitches don't need shot glasses, not for this kind of drinking, at least not while standing up -- Kitty surveyed the canvas that Yana had last been looking at.

To her, it seemed the painted version of a contemporary dance to some horrendous Coldplay song. Tortured and sad and full of a whirl of half-expressed emotions, made nominally more visible by the absence of their expression. She never had been very good with Russian modern art.

"I wish I hadn't had him transfer that to canvas. I've always hated it." Mostly because it reminded her of how things had been with him here. Far too much anger and need and passion left unexpressed behind quietly sad eyes and echoingly empty words.

"You were trying to encourage him to be more forthcoming with his feelings." Illyana accepted the bottle, taking a deep swallow as she did. She did not rush to return that bottle.

"Which worked out oh-so-well." Kitty did NOT glance at Yana as she said so. If she was honest, Yana did express some of her feelings. Usually the angry ones. It was a start. "He was here for more than a year and like three people know him."

Illyana didn't say anything for a long minute, looking around the room at the stacks of drawings, the leaning hedges of hand-stretched canvases, the sketch books. She wouldn't have minded being kept out of her brother's life here. She would have accepted that, perhaps even gladly, if only he could have found the resolve to say that was what he wanted. But she had never quite been able to tell if that was what he wanted or didn't want, and he refused to speak earnestly, to engage. She wasn't even sure Piotr knew his own heart and mind well enough to have spoken from them. He simply left himself fade away.

And that was the part that hurt and offended. The part so unlike the big brother she remembered that she had hardly even recognized him anymore. Some of her earliest memories, the ones she had clung to when everything else was stripped from her, were those memories of her brother as being larger-than-life and full of love. Somehow he had lost himself, along the way.

He probably would have said the same of her.

She huffed a frustrated sigh. "I don't want all of these." But she would probably keep метель. "What am I supposed to do with them, Kitty?"

Kitty snagged the bottle from Yana while she was busy looking around and took a healthy swallow of vodka. She'd been drinking with Yana so long now that it didn't even burn going down. The frustration in Yana's voice startled her a little, though, and she coughed around the second swallow.

"Well. I'll keep one." Head tilting as she studied Yana, trying to read her mood beyond far more hurt than she was acknowledging, Kitty slipped her arm around her best friend's waist. If she wanted a hug, or if Kitty decided she needed one, there would be hugs to be had, but a little contact even if it wasn't specifically desired would be a bad thing.

"Petey would hate it, but we could haul them down to the bar and give them to people. At least they'd get to know him..."

Illyana folded her own arm around Kitty’s back, fitting them closer together if not quite hugging. Whatever her feelings about Piotr, she loved Kitty Pryde more than she could say. “The departed have relinquished their right to say what is done in their absence. Help me get all of this downstairs and let’s continue sharing the vodka, Katya.”

************

The library would have made more sense. And felt all wrong. So Illyana had agreed to Kitty's suggestion of having an impromptu art show of Piotr's work in the Copper Cafe. Perhaps 'art sale' would be more technically correct, though something of a misnomer when no money or trade would be expected. Illyana wasn't keeping Piotr's many works, was the point, but destroying them or shutting them away never to be seen again would have felt sacrilegious in its own right. The best solution would be for other residents to come take away some of Piotr's artwork and keep it for their own enjoyment. If they could remember her brother in such a way... Or if they could at least find in his artistic renderings some piece of beauty that he must have intended to express. That seemed fitting.

It was also a socially acceptable place to drink, which was absolutely relevant to their interests. They spent a good hour arranging canvases on the walls and propping them up against the booths and stools, laying out sketchbooks and drawings (save a few special items), passing a bottle of vodka liberally between them all the while. That done, Illyana updated her previous journal entry announcing Piotr's departure to invite everyone to stop by, and the pair of them settled in more than a bit drunkenly to recount their favorite Piotr stories as they waited.

Tag Kitty or Illyana under their TL. We're not dictating every work of art available - as long as it's not too crazy a subject, please assume your character can find something of interest to their taste!