Revenant skips down the steps from his new room in his old body and whistles a merry tune. Taking the steps 3 at a time he’s in a fine mood as he walks up this Chicago street. He stops in front of a curio store to admire a guitar. It’s one of the traits he learned while in Nara's body and his fingers tingled for it. He gets if for a fair price $20 and almost instinctively tunes it as its being rang up. Like his fingers knew what his brain didn’t remember he’s playing a tune on the way out. 

He’s almost too busy playing to notice, almost. When he rounds a corner and can get a glimpse of the city line he’s yanked out of his fantasy. Smoke raises into the air in several parts of the city. Newspaper headlines about gang war corruption and riots. He picks up a paper and crossing an oddly quiet street he sits on a park bench to read. The headlines shake him, but the obituary’s floor him. So many gone, Chicago, Philly, many others all with no leaders or even crews left.

Hanging his head, he let his mind and fingers drift along with his sorrows. Without consciously thinking of it he recalled a memory of his friend Dimitry. Only a lowly enlisted man in the Russian army they became close quickly. Playing his guitar around the fire after the day’s tasks were done Revenant learned the guitar before learning the guitar. He sang the most beautiful songs in his native tongue.  Dimitry had come from a large family who in the last few years had all died. From sickness, from war both before and after the revolution, and tragedies of life in hard times. He had nothing to go back to and nobody in the world to call family when word of the new Russian government ending their fight in the great war. Given his last pay packet he cursed the world. One legend he sung about was if you go deep into a forest and find a cuckoo bird you can ask it how long you will live. Its song notes will tell you. Dimitry shook Revenants hand warmly and with pleasant goodbyes declared that is what he would do. The silhouette of his figure slowly walking off into the distant forest was the last thing he saw of his friend.

Still hearing the song Dimitry was singing Revenant realized that he was too. The melancholy sound echoing up and down the sad and empty streets.

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(translated from the Russian he’s singing into the English words that form in his head associated with them)

How many songs have I yet to write? Tell me Cuckoo, sing it out
Will I live in city or in the country? Lie like a stone or shine like a star?
a star

Sunshine of mine gleam down on me
My hand is turned into a fist
and if there’s powder give me a light
all right

Who will follow this lonely trail?
The strong and the brave lay in the fields all killed, all dead
Few are sane today, few have kept their mind
Clear and unspool, few among us are able to fight.
To fight.

Sunshine of mine gleam down on me
My hand has turned into a fist
and if there powder give me a light
all right.

Where are you then now, freedom so bold?
Who are you then with cheerful sunrise receiving?
Reply.
It’s so good with you but so bad without,
Patient heads and shoulders - for the sure lash they lie
They lie

Sunshine of mine gleam down on me
My hand has turned into a fist
If there is powder give me a light

All right.