SAKURA TAISEN/WARS, MARIA TACHIBANA and all related characters, names and indicia are TM & © SEGA 2004.

Rating: PG-13, Language, Violence

"FROM THE ASHES" – I Love You to Death

Valentinov dragged Maria out the back door by the upper arm. He whispered to her in Russian, "Shto s vami?" and she responded, "Ya nye znayu…" and the door closed behind them.

The alley was cold but still and empty. The blacktop ground was uneven, and slushy puddles caught freezing drops from awnings, fire escapes and pipes on the tall buildings all around.

A cat fled from the small stand of metal garbage cans outside the door on the other side of the alley, and then the alley was silent. Valentinov stripped off Maria's gloves, and she cringed, pulling her hands away.

He continued softly in Russian, to ensure their privacy. "How long has this been going on?"

"I-I… I don't know… I don't know what happened…"

Valentinov held out his hands, open and palm up. Maria hestitated. "Maria… I have seen your hands before."

One deep breath and then she thrust her hands at him, boldly. He regarded them before touching her. Her hands were strong, her fingers long. Her fingernails were kept short and natural. There was no reason to decorate what would never be seen. Her left hand was unmarked. But her right hand was rather lividly torn by a bullet, beginning where it grazed the back of her hand near the wrist and tore through the flesh between her thumb and index finger. The field surgeon had called it a miracle, three bullets had struck her, and NONE had struck bone. The muscles and tendons that moved her right thumb, though, were torn through. Her right thigh, just above the knee, was the location of the second bullet. That one had to be pulled out of her. The third grazed her right side, but did nothing more than superficial scraping. Her right hand had taken the worst damage.

Valentinov remembered watching her learn to shoot a pistol in Russia after the ambush, and wondered why. A rifle was so much less strain on the muscles she'd damaged. She had no target, just a British revolver she picked up somewhere… who knew how… and a big old tree. He watched her stand in the field of snow, stitched up just a week earlier, and draw slow, careful breaths to brace herself. She squeezed the trigger slowly, learning the feel of exactly where in the action the hammer clicked. And when it did, the gun kicked a little in her right fist, and she gritted her teeth around the pain. She couldn't cock the pistol with her right thumb. Panting and calming her breathing, she lowered the gun to cock the hammer back again with her left hand. Then she lifted and aimed. She braced herself and fired again, choking on the pain, this time. He almost went to her to stop her, but remembered trying to do so several days earlier and ending up staring down the business end of her revolver. A third shot and she cried out in pain, falling to her knees and gripping her right hand, her gun in the snow in front of her. Her light brown wool gloves were staining rust red with her blood.

Something about her stubborn persistence aroused the same old conflicting emotions in him that he'd always harboured for her. Somehow, the same attributes in Maria both enthralled him and drove him to fury. She was fascinating and infuriating. She seemed almost other-worldly at times, and then an instant later, something reminded him that she was just a girl, and a willful, difficult, irritating one at that. And most enraging of all, she was perpetually just outside of his reach.

Two days after she'd torn her stitches, she was on the field again, with red leather gloves on.

Valentinov took her hands in his. Her right hand was ice cold, the scars standing out lividly against her pale skin. Maria glanced aside, an almost angry humiliation staining her cheeks.

"Maria… please. Tell me. What is happening to you?"

She sighed and leaned back against the bricks, folding her arms. "I truly do not know, Major. It happens, little strange things like this, with ice. All throughout my adolescence. But very little. Only once did something… dramatic happen. I was seven years old, and it was October. My father took me to the lake where some children were ice skating. I had my own pair of skates, but Father did not have any. So he stood on the shore and watched, cheering whenever I would show him some trick, and laughing with me whenever I would fall down."

Maria paused and lowered her gaze, and then her voice.

"But it was October, not January… and the ice in some places was rather thin. I was close to the opposite shore when the ice broke under me, and my foot went through. Then it broke further and I fell in."

Valentinov listened, his expression stony and his jaw clenched. Maria continued.

"I was holding on to the edge of the ice where it had not shattered yet, yelling for Father. Father was yelling back for me to hold on as he ran around the lake to the nearest shore, looking for a branch or something for me to grab onto. Several of the other older children went to help, too, because I remember there were three of them who finally pulled me out."

When Maria paused, Valentinov's brows were lowered in confusion. Nothing was extraordinary about her story so far, people fall through the ice all the time. Most survive.

"The hole I'd made by falling through was perhaps only a metre wide. As I was holding on, the cracking ice under my arms was… no longer cracked. It felt thicker and stronger. And the hole I'd fallen through was… smaller. Major… the ice was closing up around me."

"Sometimes that can happen… can it not? If there is a very cold spot, ice can begin to reform, even while your body heat is waning?"

"I was thrashing, Major. And I was only in the water for a few minutes, there was not enough time for what was about to happen."

Valentinov lit a cigarette, and offered one to Maria, who refused, pulling her gloves back on as she continued.

"The branch they found could easily reach me. I was panicking now, I had noticed the ice closing on me. Pulling me back out of the hole was a very tight fit. And when I was able to get my knee up on the ice, I pulled myself almost completely free… except for my right foot. The ice closed around my foot and held. The laces were under the ice. I could not pull free."

"The lake froze up ON you?" Valentinov crossed himself.

"And, it was strong enough for Father to walk out on the ice to me, and beat at the ice around my foot with a stone to help free it. Another boy came to help, too. By the time we had my foot free, I had to leave my right ice skate - and both my mittens - frozen into the surface of the lake."

"My god…" Valentinov looked more frightened of the girl than concerned for her. But Maria had grown accustomed to Valentinov's strange demeanour. Ever since they'd met in the regiment, he'd been moody, evasive and seemed in turns to either care deeply for her or hate her. There were times when she saw love in his eyes so deep it scared her, and moments later, hatred so profound that she feared for her life. After several years, though, she simply learned to accept it as the way Valentinov was. Once or twice since their captain's death, Valentinov had come near to expressing some sort of sentiment to Maria, and she suspected for a brief time that he loved her. When she was suspicious of this, she would keep her distance from him, not wishing to be touched, and brooding over the silver locket she wore containing their captain's picture. In recompense, Valentinov's spite was so dire that Maria was able to convince herself that she was imagining any sentiment from him. In this way, she managed not to notice at all his growing obsession with her.

Maria shrugged, growing uncomfortable with Valentinov's stricken silence. "So. That is the only incident where it was extreme. The glass, it… I do not know. It has only been happening a little bit, recently. Only just a little."

Valentinov blew smoke aside and focused on the smouldering tip of his cigarette between his fingers. "Is that why you are afraid to swim?"

Maria gritted her teeth and nodded, disliking being accused of being 'afraid' of anything at all.

"Can you control it?"

Maria shook her head slowly. She didn't even know how it was happening, how could she stop it or harness it?

Patrick O'Rourke opened the alley door and stuck his head out. "Floor's clean. You, uh… You okay, kid?" He looked at Maria with new eyes, almost as if a little wary and suspicious of her. This was precisely what Maria hoped, her entire life, to avoid. The last thing she wanted to be known as was a freak.

She nodded and returned to broken English. "Yes. Thank you." Maria didn't like the way the Irishman looked at her, even before this incident. As if he was trying to read her. And she was quite aware of the rumours that she was Valentinov's lover. She suspected that they'd begun with Valentinov at one time, but now she was less certain. The Irishman, as far as she could tell, was one of the very few who did not seem to believe it.

In that much, his assumptions about her were correct. She may be rising quickly through the ranks because Valentinov favoured her, but his affection for her was completely unrequited.

No one had any idea where the Irishman got his brass to ask the next question. "That… uh… That glass. You know, I… I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure I saw it… I saw it start to freeze. Did it?"

Maria's glare was almost as cold as the winter. Valentinov reacted instead, throwing his head back and laughing. "Do nyet be ridiculous, O'Rourke! Kazuar is good assassin, da, but… she is nyet witch!"

Maria glanced at Valentinov. He may have said otherwise, but he really did believe she was a witch. An evil sorceress who had somehow put him under a spell to which he alternately gave in, and angrily fought. His obsession with her was entirely blamed on her.

He gestured for her to proceed him back inside.

Russian Glossary:

"Shto s vami?" – What's the matter with you?

"Ya nye znayu…" – I don't know…