EPILOGUE

The first thing she noticed, even before her eyes fluttered open, was a sharp, sterile smell, quite hospital-like.

Slowly, she managed to part her eyelids, but her eyes had been shut for so long that at first all she could glimpse were rough coloured shapes, that gradually, with a bit of an effort, began to turn into a hospital room.

She tried to move, but her body refused, as if numb because of a stay that had been ongoing since who knew how much, or maybe because of what they had pumped her full with. All she could move, at a price of a huge effort, was her head, so she began to turn it left and right, seeking a reference point to help her understand where she was.

Meanwhile, her ears began to work once more as well, allowing her to hear some noises, muffled to begin with, then more and more clear; the squeaking of a loudspeaker, the chattering of medics and nurses in the hallway, the chirping of birds coming from the park outside the open window.

A shape with its back on her was sitting at the small table near the door, busy peeling an apple. But she didn't need to look at her face to recognize her.

Her weakened vocal cords managed to let out only a squeaking whisper.

"Nonna..."

But it was more than enough to get the girl's attention, who froze for a moment, the knife falling down from her hand and clattering on the tiles.

When at last Nonna turned around, with the most incredulous and shocked expression that had ever seen on her face, Katyusha at once felt better; she loved that faze, and to see her again was what made her the happiest.

"Katyusha-sama..." she said, her eyes bright, before getting a grip of herself and yelling at the top of her lungs: "Doctor, nurse! Come, quickly! Katyusha-sama has woken up!"

Then, Nonna ran to the bed of her commander, and, any kind of reverence shoved aside, tenderly hugged her.

"Thank God, Commander. For a while I really feared you would never wake up."

"Nonna... what happened?"

"There was an accident. You fell in the sea, do you remember?"

"Vaguely."

"You fell into a coma for almost six months. They told us that the chances for you to wake up were slim at best. But in my heart I always knew you would come back, sooner or later."

Noticing the disorientated edge in the eyes of her commander, Nonna let her go, and Katyusha was free to draw her hand on her forehead, as if to ward off some dark thoughts.

"What's wrong, Katyusha-sama?"

"I was... dreaming."

"What were you dreaming about?"

"I... don't remember. But I think it was a nice dream."

Finally, after a few minutes, Katyusha was herself once more, just in time for the arrival of the doctor and his intern, both pufffing and shocked as much as Nonna at her being awake; they both looked familiar, with him austere-looking, around forty years old, her being twenty years her junior, with red hair tied up in a bun and giving a cheeky vibe, and yet Katyusha couldn't remember knowing them.

"Where am I?" she asked, as the doctor shone a rather fastidious light in her eyes.

"Anzio." he answered, before completing that quick analysis and passing his judgement. "No trace of alterations or visible damage. Which is quite surprising, considering the fall she suffered."

"But what am I doing in Anzio?"

"This is a specialized structure for trauma treatment. Although, if I have to be honest, I had more than a few doubts that you would ever wake up. I guess you ought to thank my niece Chiyomi, for being so stubborn in insisting and convincing me to get you transferred here."

"Chiyomi?! Then you are..."

"I'm her uncle. Anzai Giuseppe. And before you ask me, yes, it's my real name. I was born in Italy, after all."

"Little girl, you are literally made of steel." burst in the intern, glancing at her with her green eyes filled with life. "When they took you here you were a hair's breath away from death, and look at you now. You don't even look like somebody who just got out of a coma."

"Enough of that, Vittoria." the doctor admonished her. "Please forgive my protege. Sometimes she forgets she's no longer in high school."

After a while, the doctor and his assistant left, not before promising a slew of tests in the next few days to ascertain the lack of side effects or other damage; and just as they were leaving, from the wide open door Clara came in as well, who almost burst into joyful tears at the sight of Katyusha awake at last.

"Commander." she said, running towards the bed.

At her sight, Katyusha felt something really weird, almost a deja-vu, that made her lips almost work on their own.

"Olga?"

"Olga?!" Clara said, exchanging a befuddled glance with Nonna. "Commander, I'm Clara. Don't you recognize me?"

"Clara...?"

Everything was so strange that Katyusha was hard pressed at following it all, and at one point she almost asked herself where she was, as if everything that surrounded her were not real.

Vehemently, she willed those pesky and stupid thoughts away; if anything that had happened, or was happening, one thing was the same: she was herself, and that was that. And yet that didn't mean that she could will away that strange pressure in her chest, once more, together with the urge to say something that she herself didn't know the sense of.

"This is my world."

"What?!" said Nonna, thoroughly baffled.

"And now, c'mon, let's hear it! What happened while I was away? I really hope that those good-for-nothings didn't take advantage of this to rest on their laurels!"

The tests all turned out negative, luckily, ascertaining the lack of any trauma and the pretty much unchanged resumption of the normal cerebral activity, which shocked to a degree the medics themselves.

It wasn't the first time that somebody recovered smoothly and completely after months in a coma, but surely that recovery had something just short of miraculous, especially considering that for a long time the trauma had been deemed so severe that at times the proposal to pull the plug was seriously considered.

Despite that, and ignoring the attempts of the doctors to convince her otherwise, Katyusha refused any notion of taking baby steps, and two weeks after waking up she was ready to get out of there.

The Winter Cup was looming on the horizon, and she wanted to get there with a team in tip-top shape; also, she had plenty of new ideas on how to revisit her old battle tactics, a few of them quite unorthodox ones, but if carefully considered they had the potential to shake things up a little and net them a few wins, and she couldn't wait to try them out in training.

And yet, there was something that kept bothering her.

She was almost sure that she had been dreaming all the time during which, as the doctors claimed, she had been unconscious, but as much as she tried she couldn't quite discern the content of her dreams. There were only vague pictures, short flashes of indistinct moments, of which only a few fragments without much sense could be glimpsed, but all sharing a lone element: the absurdity.

She saw shining palaces, worthy of a princess, old-fashioned dresses, rituals and bows; but also battles, engagements, ships, cannons, to her much more familiar, but nonetheless just as paradoxical.

When she had mentioned them to Doctor Anzai, he had told her that for the people in a coma it was quite normal to make rather vivid dreams, so much so that they looked real for the duration, but that disappeared in the infinite folds of the unconscious upon awakening, like any other dream.

But had it been really just a dream?

Something, Katyusha felt as if the world she was living in were the product of a dream: ships as large as cities, little girls manning tanks and trucks. All things considered, the few images that she could remember looked, absurdly enough, more realistic of what she saw everyday around her, and that had looked so perfectly normal and obvious before.

Trying not to mull over it, in a late fall morning Katyusha packed her things and, taking her leave from the doctor and his intern, followed Nonna and Clara towards the exit. And yet, even as she walked through the hospital's hallways, she could almost make out familiar faces in the janitor, in the old crabby man in the nearby room, in the young and dapper doctor with a curled moustache, or in the loving lady that kept a continuous vigil on her daughter, near the entrance of the ward. As if she knew, in her heart, who they were, almost to the point of being able to call them by name, even though she was sure she had never seen them before.

Climbing onto a cab, the three girls were driven towards the small school airport, in which they found a private flight come from Pravda to bring the commander home.

The voyage was a quiet one, maybe even too much for all the things Katyusha had to say, beginning with the new directives that she couldn't wait to communicate to her team; partly because of that, partly because of those thoughts that kept whispering into her hear, the girl spent much of the flight on her own, glancing from time to time towards the Hokkaido mountains out of the window.

At one point, dragging her mind away from her own thoughts, Katyusha noticed Clara reading up a substantial volume visibly in Russian, with a engrossed expression and the happy, vacant gaze of someone who is enjoying a nice story.

"What are you reading?"

"Lev Tolstoj." the young Russian answered, for once bothered enough to speak in Japanese. "The four Sevastopol Sketches."

"Four?!" Katyusha commented. "I thought there were three of them."

"Nope, there's four of them. Also, the fourth is by far my favorite."

"Really? What's the title?"

Clara smiled at that, an enigmatic smile that Katyusha couldn't quite decipher.

"The Princess and the Soldier."