The Ashram, Mt. Kailash, Tanya’s Birth

The baby suddenly came to, bleary and unaware of both its consciousness and its surroundings, trying to make sense of both. It failed in doing either. She blearily looked about, struggling for someone, something to help her, anchor her. To give her a rock.

“### ### ###### ### # ####?”

Someone, probably a woman was saying something, the baby could not understand what the woman was saying, but she knew that it would be beneficial to her, and so, she willed herself to the mysterious voice. And she was not disappointed.

“#### ####, ### ##### ## ##### ## ### ## ##, ### #### ######## ## ### ######### ######, ### ####### ######## ### ###### ### ##### ### #### ##### #########, Oksana Draken, #### ########## ## ##### # ####### ########, ######### ### #### ## #### ######, ## Tanya.”

The name slowly dripped down the baby’s consciousness, and the baby-no, Tanya sighed in contentment as her self settled down, and with it, the messed jumble that was her memories and their significances.

Before Tanya tried to open the Pandora’s box that was her memories of her most recent two lives, and another one that even unaware of the significance, she was wary to even think of it funny, fearing it may leave its heinous, immortal secrets to her soul.

She felt her self slowly lose control of the boxes of memory, not completely, but enough to remember the as of yet unnamed Salaryman, but enough, to remember who the Soldier was. She remembered her actions, yet not her thoughts.

That soon changed.

Her curiosity opened the metaphorical box that had her memories of one Tanya Von Degurechaff.

Suddenly, she understood the choices her past self, the path she walked, and just as she was about to step unto the same path, flawed as it looked, even to her clueless self, she was interrupted.

She felt herself being lifted by strong arms and laid against a woman’s shoulder, with a brownish gold being before her, who seemed many sizes larger than the woman holding her. Before she could process the information further, she felt a wetness on the top of her head, and heard the woman say something.

“## ###### #### #### ##### ## Tanya Viktoriya Oksana Nicholaus Draken”

And so, she remembered that, even if she was known as Tanya, she was not Tanya Von Degurechaff. She was once her, but no longer.

‘Von Degurechaff’ lost her hold on Tanya, at least for the moment.

Tanya then took all of the emotions of the ‘good Colonel’ and locked it deep within herself, but kept the memories, they seemed like they could be useful.

And so, utterly famished by the sheer amount of mental gymnastics she went through, Tanya went into a deep, deep slumber, unknowingly holding her mother to be in a choke hold and refusing to let go.

--- --- ---

A few days passed.

Tanya had finally managed to gain a bit of control over her eyes and focus on objects.

The very first sight she saw in the new world she was in, was of an exceptionally beautifully woman with hair so blonde that it might as well have been made of platinum, wearing some weird clothes that was unlike she had ever seen in her time as Tanya Von Degurechaff.

Even if she was mostly sure that this woman was her mother, her prior memories made it hard for her to return any of the obvious love extended to her by the woman, for what if it was not truly love, but something else entirely? What if she was to be raised by the killer of her own parents who killed her parents out of spite and wanted to train Tanya to be her successor?

As she spun into a negative spiral, she noticed that the woman, who looked to have puffy eyes, but a beautifully sculpted face which was startlingly similar to her own from her time as a soldier in the world riddled with war, was apparently both bursting into laughter and tears as she looked to her.

So, Tanya did the only logical thing she could think of.

She cooed softly and giggled as she saw her mother draw closer, her tiny hands flailing out to her mom’s general direction.

This was apparently enough for the woman to break out of her negative spiral and burst into tears once more. She then proceeded to undress and shove Tanya into her chest, which Tanya, and her suddenly hungry stomach, gladly accepted.

She was then burped, changed out of her clothes, gently washed down with warm water and an oh-so-soft cloth, put into new diapers (she felt that calling diapers clothes, even in her head was not an indignity she will suffer any longer.) and put into her cradle once more, with various toys just out of her reach hypnotically enticing her to sleep.

And repeat.

And repeat.

She had a looot of time on her hands, so she carefully perused her memories from another life.

It would seem even my previous life had no idea on how she ended up in her situation, and ended up a cynical prick, who lost faith in humanity and seemed to believe sincerely in God, with a capital G.

Wait, what if there actually was a god, and that god reincarnated the salaryman into Tanya Degurechaff. What if the entire point was to spread his faith because of the lack thereof in the world? Is that why her prior self looked so happy and ecstatic whenever she used her magic thingy, the Type-95?

Is that why she always went to that place of worship all the time, keeping her head curiously blank except for some weird sense of rage?

Externally, the baby giggled, looking happy for no apparent reason as babies do.

so, either I get mysteriously reincarnated due to unknown reasons with my memories, a theory that I am not willing to test, or there is a god, a theory I literally cannot test.

The baby had a frown on its face, looking, for all intents and purposes, on the verge of tears. Oksana, who had been nearby seemed to sense the baby’s distress and immediately rushed to the baby’s side.

Oksana picked up her little baby and rocked her back and forth, cooing a lullaby softly, seemingly uncaring of the endless wails that fell on her ears as she picked her child up. After seemingly hours of singing, the child was silent.

Tanya had, in fact, not much control over her body, not least due to the fact that her as of yet infant body was unused to the very act of living, with any exertion that was not essential to her living tiring her out to an obscene extent. Her brain simply unable to cope with actively performing multiple tasks at the same time.

But, her mental state was very much in attunement to her physical state. If one was affected, the other soon followed. This tiny tidbit of fact was not one that Tanya had seen the need to retain in her memory. And so, Tanya deceived herself, saying it was but a reaction of a baby.

She refused to forge any bonds with the woman who claimed to be her mother, no matter how much she seemed to care for her on the surface. There was no benefit to raising a child all on her lonesome after all, especially if the child was not hers.

Tanya was also learning the language used by her care giver.

It was a strange language, with a lot of emphasis on specific sounds, similar to how Tanya recalled Japanese, but was clearly of different roots entirely.

It was a very beautiful tongue, whose beauty was seen whenever Tanya’s mother sang her lullabies to put her to sleep. The language seemed to embrace beauty, lot of it being in song.

And there were a lot of songs. A few each night, with little to no repetition, each song being one that might have climbed high on the billboards in Japan had it been Japanese.

Wait!!! What are billboards? Is the bundle of memories leaking? How do I stop it? Should I? Those memories seem to be the main reason why the me from the military succeeded in life yet failed as a human.

And so, time passed.

Tanya was now a month old. Her mother was missing, possibly gone forever and she couldn’t care less. The troublesome situation as she saw it was the fact that her mom had left her alone, with an empty bottle of milk.

She was tired, too tired to fall asleep, too proudful to wail her heart out for some milk. She had been a wonderful military officer in her past life, with a record so stellar that one might throw it in the mud, and yet still have a career so brilliant that one would have no choice but to acknowledge her.

Tanya did not know why her prior self had made a point to make her soldiers think she was no believer of god, of any kind. But, what Tanya did know was that she had been a damn good soldier with a heart made of solid gold, even if it had been buried deep, deep under the guise of imperial precision and the guise she wore.

Tanya remembered being... different every once in a while, the world going gold, like all in the world is in the palm of her hand.

And so, half driven mad by the hunger she felt, she did what she promised not to do on the day she was born.

She opened her equivalent of Pandora’s Box.

Her world flashed gold.

-- -- -- -- --

When Tanya woke once more, she found herself snuggling tight to her mother’s body. She did not try to make sense of what she was doing, too hungry to do so and grabbed the dispensary of food before her, much to the amusement of her mother, to whom it would feel like her daughter liked to play with her food.

Nothing much had changed that Tanya could see after her minor lapse in consciousness.

Then she tried to move her arms around to stave off boredom as she normally did after being put into her cradle. She noticed something extremely frightening.

Her body listened to her even less than it did before the ‘Gold Episode’. She could move her head and eyes around with the same proficiency as she did before, but her arms and legs seemed to have forgotten that they were part of her body and moving totally independent of her will.

It took Tanya over three meals and six naps to manage to regain the level of motor control she had before she opened the box of forbidden gold. Not to say that she could actually do much beyond grabbing stuff or kicking out at will.

As time marched forward, her mother seemingly decided that having her in a structure that had a garden with a small tree at the center of said garden, with various living necessities in the structure around the garden, providing a uniquely interesting house, and yet, totally unsuited to living in provided the climate and general weather outside the house.

It was like the house had been built for the sole purpose of housing and protecting the sapling that was quickly growing in the garden within.

It was where Tanya was born, where she had lived, breathed air, drank water, and ate. But it was not home. It had always felt like the orphanage where she had lived in her other life, where it was where she grew up, but not where she considered herself at home.

Tanya woke to the gentle shaking of her mother rousing her.

Her mother said nothing and just presented to her the new house she would be residing in for the foreseeable future.

And.It.Was.Beautiful.

Tanya had a massive grin on her face as she watched the building, which seemed to have the same general architectural roots as her prior home, but seemed to have taken notes from houses of the 1920’s of her other life as Tanya.

Speaking of which...

She noticed herself looking forward to meeting her mother, more and more, each day.

Her mother seemed to be a bilingual. Whenever she spoke to herself, whenever Tanya was in earshot, she seemed to use one language, but the one she always used when she sang Tanya to sleep each and every day seemed different.

It was a more musical language then the other one, and seemed to be at least as complicated, if not more, than the ‘Japanese’ that Tanya remembered from many lives before.

But, she is definitely not my birth mother, I know as much, I have seen how mothers look like shortly after giving birth, and she looked nowhere near as tired.

She might not have birthed me, but I can tell that she is doing her darndest to raise me.

It is too early to come to a conclusion... I’ll just provisionally call her mother till I have grown up.

And such went Tanya’s internal conflict till she came to the conclusion to treat the woman who was looking after her like a particularly caring superior in the army. The names did not come to her naturally, her mind rejecting excessive interference by prior iterations of itself.

She kicked the ball down the line for when she could actually do something about it.

And then came the day that changed little, and yet, changed everything at the same time.

By this point Tanya was relatively fluent in the tongues her mother spoke, and it turned out that one of them was Japanese! Which was a welcome surprise.

The day that changed her life was a day like any other, except for the fact that it was apparently her birthday. How did she know? Her mother had woken her from her slumber by the sounds of the gentle strumming of the strings of her violin (Is that what playing a violin is called? Whatever)

And then, she clicked on a strange seashell like object, which was odd, since they were in a land of snow and ice.

And a man’s voice rang out.

Happy birthday, it's Tanya’s birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Hot stuff!)
Hey, Donald, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you!

So, It appears to be my birthday, and this seems to be the message left to me by my father. This is pretty standard, so why am I so... touched?

She's funny, charming, (Hello!) our fine feathered friend. (Yeah!) WHAT? I don’t have any feathers. I think anyway. Maybe... but seeing as I never saw ‘em before, I’ll disagree.
Today's her birthday, best wishes we send. (Thank you!)
She's full o' surprises, quacks everyone up.
She's crazy for Mommy, she's our Tanya D. Raken! (Hey, toots!)

At this point, Tanya is a blubbering mess, inside and out, she can hear the emotions in the voice, and she can tell that it is sincere in every way imaginable, and more besides

Happy birthday, (Yeah!) it's Tanya's birthday, happy, happy birthday to you!
Hey, Tanya, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Oh, boy, oh, boy!)

In every country, she can be found,
Throwin' a tantrum, and jumpin' around!
The whole world loves Tanya, today is his day. (I guess.)
Across every nation, you hear people say...

Feliz cumpleaños, bon anniversaire, otanjōbiomedetō
Which means:
Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Ptooey!)

There's a party, (a party) a party today. (Oh, boy!)
A once a year occasion!
A party (party), it's comin' his way,
Donald's birthday celebration! (Wow!)

Vickie (Hi, Tanya!) and Mommy arrive with the cake, (Yum, yum!)
Daisy and Aanchal, (A-hyuck!) great Ludwig von Drake (Hello dere!)
Huey, Dewey and Louie, and Uncle Scrooge, too (Your birthday?)
They sing, "Dear Donald, happy birthday to you..." (Right!)

Happy birthday, it's Tanya's birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (For cryin' out loud!)
Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you!

Tanya, we thank you for the joy that you bring, (Aww...)
So, have a great birthday, now, everyone sing! (Yeah!)

This brought Tanya to tears once more, although this time the tears were different than before. They were tears of great happiness that she never felt before. They were also tears bidding her old self farewell

Happy birthday, it's Tanya's birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Everybody)
Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Sing along)
Happy birthday, it's Tanya's birthday, (One more song, yeah) happy happy birthday to you!
Hey, Tanya, (That's me!) happy birthday, (Tanya) happy birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (C'mon!)
Happy birthday, it's Tanya's birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (We're havin' a party!)
Hey Donald, happy birthday, happy birthday, (Hey, Donald!) happy, happy birthday to you! (C'mon!) (Phooey, ptooey!)
Happy birthday, it's Tanya's birthday, happy, happy birthday to you! (Thank you very much!)

Tanya laughed out loud and started giggling when she saw her mother’s-no her mom’s tear stricken face flinch in astonishment, and then broke into bales of laughter as she saw her mom smile a smile that might have split her face in half.

Tanya was content, she had no need on her prior life’s memories and thoughts.

And so, Tanya Von Degurechaff was locked in a box once more.

Tanya Von D. Raken was an individual of her own right, and it was about time she realised the same.