august 2001
At first, only inviting his parents and his older brother to his wedding had seemed like a normal thing. It had taken place in France, after all, so it would have been one inconvenience after another to invite anyone else. He didn’t want to admit that his other brothers hadn’t even crossed his mind. But after a month of being married, showing his wife off to the whole of Russia, Arkasha had realized that he wanted to show her off to everyone, and that included his brothers. He started looking for both, of course, though it seemed like finding Vitya would prove to be the easier option.
It had taken him a while to do the math in his head. Vitaliy Maksimovich should be nineteen. A man. A completely different person than the four-year-old he had prodded at all those years ago. Arkasha wasn’t sure what he looked like, didn’t know who we was actually hoping to recognize. Would Vitya remember him at all? There were so many things crossing his mind that were making him reconsider this insane decision to seek him out. Add to that the fact that it had been three months of randomly selected Scottish locations with no return and Arkasha was getting burnt out.
The Zhuravlevs had taken a bit of coaxing before revealing that he was in Scotland at all. It took another few letters for them to let on that he was in Inverness, attending some sort of quidditch camp. It didn’t take long for Arkasha to make up his mind to go find him, though where he would find him in Inverness, he wasn’t sure. He started by looking for a quidditch camp and coming up with nothing, or at least he thought he was finding nothing. His English was already rather poor and whatever version of English they were speaking was not working in his favor.
It was while he was asking around for a quidditch camp, however, that he found another option: Sergey Lvovich Kuznetsov. Arkasha had gone to Durmstrang with him, sharing a dorm and the beater positions on the Klyk Vampira quidditch team. It wasn’t the particular Russian that he had been searching for, but he put his search on hold to catch up a bit. It only took a few minutes for them to get on the subject of their families, then only thirty more seconds for the subject of the younger Malenkov to come up.
True to form, Seryozha knew Vitya because
all Russians know each other. After a few drinks and some very thorough convincing, Arkasha was able to get him to agree with his new plan: Seryozha would invite Vitya out for a meal, stand him up, then Arkasha would swoop in. What he would do then, he still wasn’t sure.
He was sitting at a corner booth, nursing a cup of coffee that had cooled to room temperature ages ago. He looked up every time he heard the door open, only to return his gaze to his fidgeting hands after a few disappointing seconds. It was almost time for him to be heading back to Paris, he realized, and he pushed his coffee away from him, drumming his fingers on the table top as he looked up one more time to the freshly opened door. He would probably have to tell Florence about what he was up to all day; she was under the impression that he was attending a meeting at a publishing house in London, but no meeting, no matter how good or bad, would be taking this long.
The man that walked in almost perfectly fit the picture he had formed in his head. He was shorter, more auburn, and generally less similar to the other Malenkov men he was more accustomed to, but he was certain it was him. He looked back down to his hands, pulling the cup of coffee back to himself. No, it was now or never.
He looked up again to find Vitya seated at a table across the room. Swallowing hard, Arkasha slid out of the booth and closed the space between them in a few wide strides. “Vitaliy Maksimovich?” He posed his question awkwardly and formally, standing there with his hands securely in his pockets, unwilling to sit down without an invitation. “I—“ he stopped, feeling an enormous weight on his shoulders as he kept himself from introducing himself. That felt so wrong, for lack of a better word, to have to introduce himself to his own brother.
Instead, he settled on an easier thing to say, yet harder thing to hear an answer to: “Do you remember me?”
@Vitaliy Malenkov 
