Disclaimer: SAKURA TAISEN/WARS, MARIA TACHIBANA and all related characters, names and indicia are TM & © SEGA 2004. ; AMERICAN TUNE, THE BOXER TM & © Simon & Garfunkel. Actual historical mafia members have been used for reference, their names scrambled, in the following story.

Rating: PG-13 for language and minimal violence.

"FROM THE ASHES" – I Have Squandered My Resistance

"Many's the time I've been mistaken, and many times confused.

Yes, and I've often felt forsaken, and certainly misused.

Ah, but I'm all right, I'm all right, I'm just weary to my bones.

Still, you don't expect to be bright and 'bon vivant,' so far away from home, so far away from home…"

Maria listened to the footsteps fading on the creaking staircase, and when she could hear them no longer, she let her guard down. She was standing at the door, both palms against it as if to keep it closed. She'd nearly reached up to chain the door when she realized the chain's anchor had been ripped from the wall. She locked the doorknob instead, cursory gesture though it might have been.

Water that smelled mildly brackish and a little metallic ran from the lead pipes into her sink, and did little more to help remove the smell of sulfur and gunpowder from her memory. It was long gone from her hands.

It had not been the first time she had killed someone. But war was different. In the Revolution, she was a hero. The people she and her captain and her comrades were firing upon were not really people, after all. The enemy was somehow… sub-sentient… in the eyes of the Russians. She wasn't a killer in the Revolution. She was a soldier. A hero. A servant of freedom and of her country. She hadn't committed a crime, she'd committed a great sacrifice, an undertaking of which to be proud.

And yet, the act was the same. One bullet, one death, caused by her. Did the reason for the act justify it?

She half sat, half collapsed onto her bed, all the stiffness leaving her. The suitcase beside her contained her ticket to a better life. To what great depths she'd fallen over the past months. From soldier and hero to coward, defeated and fleeing, sheltered by a fellow escapee of the ambush named Valentinov. He knew a world where they would be safe, he and four other survivors of the fateful morning. New York, where a cousin was helping build Valentinov an empire of his own, and had been doing so for a decade beforehand.

Most of the machinations of the mafia escaped Maria completely, at least for the first months of her employ. So little of her waking hours were spent sober, or unmired in grief and agony. She'd watched the man she loved fall. He'd told her to wait, back over the bluff, where it was safe. Snow fuzzied the landscape and blurred the air as a small contingent marched forward, a light wind ruffling the fur of their collars and hats. It had been moments of silence only before Maria heard the call for a retreat. He was only metres from her when he was shot in the back. In the back.

Maria remembered seeing his tinted glasses land lightly in the snow, remembered his rifle falling on top of them, shattering a lens, and oddly, this was of great concern to her – for his glasses were valuable and necessary… She did not dare consider that he would never need them again.

She'd stood at his grave the way she'd stood at her father's grave only a few years earlier. She'd been fourteen years old when a voice made her drop the roses she'd brought to lay on her father's grave. He'd offered her not revenge, but a way to carry on the cause for which her father had given his life. She had no family now, nothing left to lose. And she was safe, protected, guided and loved under the mentoring and in the arms of her captain.

Her head throbbed and she put a damp hand to her forehead. Vodka was a valuable ally and a bitter enemy. She was just tired, was all. Perhaps if she could just sleep until the evening, she might recover her wits and her composure. Russia was gone. And New York, after a little packing, would be far less hostile.

"And I don't own a soul that's not been battered,

I don't have a friend who feels at ease.

I don't have a dream that's not been shattered or driven to its knees.

But it's all right, it's all right, for we lived so well, so long.

Still, when I think of the road we were traveling on, I wonder what's gone wrong,

I can't help but wonder how it's gone wrong."

By late afternoon, everything she owned was packed in two boxes and a duffel bag. The metal frame of a bed looked worse for the lack of blankets, its blue striped mattress lumpy and yellowing. She stood at the window, but was looking instead at the framed photograph in her hands.

They were supposed to have been heroes. They were supposed to be a great light in dark times, leaders of the poor and downtrodden, saviours of those unable to defend themselves. They were compatriots, bound in blood and spirit. Now they were all gone. Everyone who knew her, loved her, understood her. Everyone was gone.

She had imagined that they'd win, that peace would reign and Russia would prosper. She had dared to hope that they would lay aside their rifles one day, perhaps in the same case. Perhaps she would become his wife one day. And perhaps her children would be three-quarters Russian. Perhaps they would have a cherry wood bed and a quilt with blue calico patterns. They were simple hopes, but they sustained her when water seeped through the stained fabric of her tent roof, when the down of her sleeping bag was not enough to keep her warm, and when sleep refused to come to her for the terrified and alert prick of her ears to every small sound. A raccoon could be an enemy spy, the wind could as easily russle the tree branches as it could the cloak of an assassin.

She would nightly promise herself that if she could only be strong for one more day, then everything would be over, victory would be assured, and her dream would come true. Somehow, everything fell apart and slipped through her fingers. Every last bit.

"And I dreamed I was dying.

I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly, and looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly.

And I dreamed I was flying.

High up above my eyes could clearly see the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea.

And I dreamed I was flying."

From the roof of her apartment building, one could see Ellis Island. But Maria's old window only had a view of the neighbouring building's crumbling brick wall. She would not miss it.

Her landlord was not in. She put the key and seven dollars (one month's rent) in an envelope and slipped it under his door. The rent had been due the day before yesterday, and she'd been given her notice of eviction yesterday. She could have kept the seven dollars, but she did not wish to leave thinking she'd been thrown out. Even if the only one who would know or care was herself.

The steam-powered automobile idling in the street contained her belongings. She could now afford a taxi ride, and knew exactly to where she was going. Valentinov had been setting the place up for her for months. On the third floor above a bar and restaurant in Little Italy, run by the family for whom Maria and Valentinov worked.

She paused in the street, her hand on the suicide door of the Stanley and her foot on the rail step. From here, she could see Ellis Island.

She'd been travelling for months when she finally reached that island. Weeks and weeks on trains, then three weeks on a boat, and then land again at last. A tiny little dot of an island off the shore of New York, swarmed with people not of American descent.

"What kind of name is Mapra?" asked a befuddled Immigration officer, looking over Maria's papers. Knowing precious little English, Maria attempted to explain the Cyrillic alphabet, but failed. Her name, likely more accurately spelled "Marya," became Maria, more often than not with the accent on the second syllable instead of the proper first. A haphazard anglicization was performed on her surname, and Maria Tachibana believed she would now be brought by ferry to New York.

Instead, she was detained, and subjected to a battery of tests, including literacy, which she failed miserably. She was tired of answering questions, tired of being stuck with needles, tired of having her eyes and ears and nose and throat examined. More than that, she was tired of her suitcase, tired of a sea of incomprehensible strangers, tired of the overwhelming sense of poverty, hopelessness and sorrow that surrounded her in close quarters, in silence perforated by soft whispers and muffled coughs. Hope waned, and Valentinov was nowhere to be seen in the five days she was held on Ellis Island. She became certain she'd be sent back to Russia.

On the morning of the sixth day, Valentinov came. Within an hour she was on the ferry and headed to America. The island, and beyond it, France's statue, diminished in the distance. The wind at the bow of the ferry was strong, and it made her feel elated. Freedom. A new world. And a new life.

"You gettin' in or what?" the driver asked, thumping his palm against the outside of the door where he leaned out to gain her attention.

"Ah-- da. Spasi—" Maria paused and switched to English. "Yes. Thank you. I am sorry." And she got into the car, once again bidding farewell to everything she left in her wake.

"But we come on a ship they called Mayflower,

we come on a ship that sailed the moon.

We come in the ages' most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.

And it's all right, oh it's all right, it's all right, you can't be forever blessed.

Still tomorrow's going to be another working day, and I'm trying to get some rest, that's all I'm trying, to get some rest."

The fist banging against the door came all too soon, and Maria sat bolt upright in bed. She had not unpacked a thing, but just laid down to catch her breath for a moment, and fell asleep. She was cold, she realized, and had pulled her long black wool coat over her for warmth in her sleep. She cast it off and stood, squinting blearily.

"Who knocks?" she asked in a gravelly, sleep-laden voice.

"Maria, it's me, Joseph. Hey, you got a half an hour till the boss wants to see ya downstairs," Joseph spoke kindly. He was not much older than Maria. His family had been in New York for thirty years now, and Joseph was the first of his family not to be born in Italy. He was a nephew in the family for whom she worked, and by far was the kindest.

"Bal'shoye spasibe…" she whispered in extreme gratitude and turned the deadbolt to allow him inside.

He lingered politely near the door, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding his hat. He glanced around a bit. Maria's new apartment was still one room, but nearly three times the size of the old one. It had a full stove and an oven, the bed was double and wooden, the electric lights operated on switches and had beveled glass covers to diffuse the brilliance. An ice box stood in one corner, and she had two windows, both facing west, which had a view of the street, rather than a brick wall. "Do you like the new flat?"

Joseph had a way of asking Maria questions that made her feel as if she were a little girl. She often had to consider how to answer in order to dispell that image. "Fewer roaches," she stated, as if that were the only immediately visible benefit.

Joseph chuckled. "Yeah, I bet. Look, Maria," he said, mispronouncing her name, "I wanted to warn ya. Because you don't look so good after last night, and unlike my uncle, I actually care about that."

Maria narrowed her eyes at him, scrutinizingly. She folded her arms and leaned back against a wall, her lips thinning slightly.

"They were impressed by your… efficiency as a bouncer."

She huffed a mirthless laugh and shook her head. "Bouncer… This man… was not drunk… in bar downstairs… was not… bothering Valentinov or Ignazio."

"Well. He was bothering Uncle Giuseppe. Now he's not. They thought it was some good work. That's why the money was a little better than you'd thought at first. A whole year's pay for someone like you. Six hundred dollars."

Maria's eyebrows shot up at the words "someone like you." She knew what he meant, and was a little affronted that the only difference between him and her was that he relocated to America in his mother's womb. She did it all by herself. But his statement was true enough. No immigrant could earn more than six hundred a year these days.

"They have another job for you," Joseph Ignazio got to the point. "A big one. Umberto Lupo."

"Lupo!" she stood up again, as startled as when she'd first woken.

"Yeah. React like that now, and get it out of your system. Downstairs in a half hour, be cool as ice about it, got me? The job pays fifteen hundred. Yes, dollars." Joseph put a hand on her shoulder, but Maria didn't react. Her jaw hung agape, her gaze distant, lowered. "Hang in there, kid. You'll be fine."

And then Joseph was gone.

Russian Translations:

"Ah-- da. Spasi—" – Ah, yes. Thank y—

"Bal'shoye spasibe…" – Great thanks…