Chapter Text
Background: Geordo, Keith and Alan have all seen glimpses of their Fortune Lover counterparts and what they see looks very, very grim. Geordo was the first and told Katarina; in return she told him about the visions she'd had of the Fortune Lover routes she played through. Alan is the latest to see, and he got haunted by the ghost of FL!Mary Hunt, who did not have a happy ending in the world of FL!Alan's happy ending. No one did. And I thought - what if they also saw the ghost of FL!Katarina?
As she gazes at her translucent mirror-self floating in the air, raving, a realization crystallizes in Katarina:
More than exile,
More than imprisonment,
More than even death -
This is what she had feared. This is the horror that been driving her ever since she had struck her head in the royal gardens.
That she would degrade and rot into this,
Into someone who deserved exile
Into someone who deserved imprisonment,
Into someone who deserved death.
‘I do not want to see you. I do not want to be you,’ resounds like a struck bell in the very soul of her, and her entire self is rejection. ‘I do not want you!’
‘I reject. I reject. I 拒絶.’ Her thoughts slide backwards/forward through time, the clear brightness of Sorcieran magic melding with the shadows of a land of the rising sun.
‘ 私は拒絶する.’
The ghost hovers around her, voice like hers, horribly so, but her voice as if against the wind, with terrible harmonics shot through. “Little me, little saint, gods how do you stand it? How do you stand being such a doormat, such an idiot?”
As if from very far away, she can hear Geordo and Alan protesting, Mary screaming.
The ghost’s eyes burn like will-o’-the-wisp lights, like how her past-self/other-other-self once imagined hitodama would look like. (And yet, they still look like her eyes - her eyes in the mirror.) “Give me your body,” the ghost sings, with those terrible undertones surging through the demand like veins of sound. “You don’t need it, I need it, I’ve needed it for so long….”
“Give me your flesh. I’ve been so hungry.”
The ghost dives at her - and Katarina flings a handful of salted almonds, which she had been snacking on, at the ghost’s face. The ghost rears back, screaming, as the salt on the almonds burns her like fire would a living human.
Katarina takes good advantage of the ghost’s pause, diving towards Geordo with all the speed her trained muscles - trained to survive a fight against a prince, to outrun a brother’s magic - and natural athleticism can give her. She whirls as she nears Geordo, grabbing at his cross-motif ornament and yanking it off with a quick jerk. She holds up the cross, remembering certain anime about the effectiveness of such symbols against the undead; and the ghost wails at the sight of it.
“Salt, fire, holy water…” she mutters to herself. “Ofudas, shikigami…” She trails off, remembering that anime her past-self’s brother had especially liked - he claimed he could see himself in one of the characters and she remembered agreeing they did sound alike - and the character could summon dog shikigami to defeat jurei….
“Pochi!” she calls, and her shadow ripples for a moment before Pochi emerges - not as a tiny and adorable puppy, but as a great wolf. His eyes are not their usual warm black, but a burning and lambent amber. When he snarls, pale smoke drips from his jaws. She looks at him and remembers his other-name, the name she will not call but which blazes in her head for a moment. ‘Cerberus - the hound of the underworld.’
Pochi leaps at the ghost and his smoke-dripping jaws clamp onto her spectral arm, upflung to shield her face and throat. The ghost screams again.
“Pochi, kill,” Katarina commands, and her voice is colder than anyone has ever heard it.
“Cerberus, no!” screams the ghost of herself, and Pochi snarls again. His jaws snap close with an audible snickt, and the arm fades away like mist. The now one-armed ghost backs away.
“I reject you and all you stand for,” Katarina tells her. “I hate you. I hate what you became. I hate - that you and I are still the same, when we drill down to the beginning,” she adds, her voice softening. She steps closer, the ghost watching her with wide eyes. “Stop trying to claim Geordo. He's mine,” she whispers, moving her head close to the ghostly mirror-image.
Pochi tilts his head back and howls. And the ghost of Katarina Claes fades away in its echo.
“お前はもうしんでいる,” Katarina mutters quietly as she looks at the space where her other-self once was.
“Oh right,” she then realizes, turning to meet the shocked gazes of her friends. She giggles nervously and lightly bonks herself on the head with her fist. “Sorry for breaking your necklace, Prince Geordo!”