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The first thing she remembers seeing was a sunrise. A beautiful display of colours flashed across the screen of the sky, the dark blue mingling beautifully with the vivid reds and citrine yellows and royal purples. It lit up the word in an artist’s painting that none could match.
It was true beauty.
She’s never seen a sight like it, she swears that much, and she knows she’ll never see anything even close to it for the rest of her life. She’ll die without seeing that beauty again.
When she was six she found something close to it, close to that beauty, in the gentle smile of her new mother. But then again, Katarina Claes wouldn’t really be herself if she was caught up in the visuals of a woman she doesn’t really care for. She’s the villain, right? She’s going to die. She’s never going to live past her eighteenth birthday and find a nice man or woman to settle with. She’ll die, red on concrete, or grass, or even staining the ocean floor. She’ll die.
The melancholy of that realisation never really leaves.
Katarina is sad. She is melancholy and quiet, and withdrawn at best. She prefers the company of her maid to the other nobles, and aside from weekly ‘mandatory’ tea parties with her estranged brother and his group of friends she is never far form her bedroom. She looks sickly, and tired all the time, and she doesn’t say much more than a few words at a time.
It somehow manages to capture the hearts of the Fortune Lover cast regardless, and she’s not quite sure how or why. She isn’t sociable, she went out of her way to interact as little ass possible, and she barely speaks even to her maid. And yet she has the prince Jeordo Stuart begging for her hand in marriage every two weeks, and her brother Keith swearing to obliterate anyone and everyone that looks at her strangely, and Mary Hunt vowing to be her knight in shining armour and never leave her side, and Sophia and her brother looking at her like she’s some kind of idol, and her maid Anne looking like she could do no wrong.
Katarina Claes doesn’t care for death flags. She doesn’t care if one of her ‘suitors’ will kill her; she’s counting on it, really. Then maybe she can go back to A-chan, or maybe it’s all some weird coma-dream and dying wakes her up, or – she misses things, places, her home in Japan. She misses her grandmother and her father and her friend. She misses who she used to be, and she mourns.
Ah, that is it, isn’t it?
Katarina Claes is mourning a death she hasn’t had yet, and a life she hasn’t lived yet, and a world she isn’t in anymore. Katarina Claes is a widow of her own design, a mourner of her own existence, and she can’t stop. Melancholy and sadness and deep, bone-weary apathy suffuse her very being.
Katarina Claes is destined to die, and she doesn’t worry about dying.
She just wonders how many times.
Every route to the original Katarina Claes’ deaths or bad endings in Fortune Lover never really went into detail, but the one thing that stood out to her when she played the Otome game was ‘there is always a sunset’.
She was born into the word witnessing a sunrise and has never seen anything more beautiful since.
Whichever sunset she dies to, she has a feeling it will fulfil that role.
She saw beauty in birth. She will see beauty in death.
For Katarina Claes, the girl born to die, that is enough for her.