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Keith doesn’t know what to think of his new ‘big sister’.
She is quiet. She says nothing and does her best to never make a sound unless it’s absolutely necessary.
She is stoic. Smiles and frowns are, in equal parts, rare. Her eye betray amusement or sadness, but her face is…blank. Disconcertingly so.
She is uncaring. His status as the new heir for the Claes Family was given little more than a shrug and a raised eyebrow. His new mother drank a whole two goblets of wine that night. His father vanished into his room and wasn’t seen for two days. He gets the feeling they’d hoped to bring forth some jealousy or surprise or…something from Katarina. She hadn’t even acknowledged it.
Keith has no idea what to think of his sister. One of the people she attracts to her, however…
Mary is strange to him. She is something he imagines he might have been had he never been acknowledged by his father, Luigi Claes. She is a motion picture of tragedies waiting to happen, her execution stayed by the benevolent hand of his goddess of a sister – at least, that’s what he imagines Mary to think. He thinks she’s far too melodramatic, and he shares this with the sympathetic Geordo Stuart.
She is beyond extra with her reverence of his elder sister, and for the life of him Keith cannot figure out why. His sister is quiet and coarse when she does speak. She slumps in her chairs and never speaks out for anything. She defers more to her maid than anyone else! Katarina doesn’t go out of her way for anything and doesn’t do kindness from nowhere.
She doesn’t do much of anything, really.
Katarina sits in her chair all day and does token exercises one hour every day to keep herself from degrading in health. She reads books with a glazed eye and half her mind on something else, obvious that she isn’t paying whole attention to much of anything. She genuinely couldn’t care less for anything around her – including the people that surround her with their concerns – and there’s very little that will get to acknowledge anything beyond a sarcastic greeting or a twitch of the eyebrow.
He doesn’t understand Mary’s obsession with his sister, but it’s frustrating. His sister sits there, day in and day out, sipping wine like some thirty-something widower when she’s barely eleven. She has this – this look in her eyes when she isn’t stuck in her own head, like she’d seen something, or gone through something, and it had changed her irrevocably. And despite his frustrations…
…despite his curiosity…
…despite Mary’s insistence on calling him ‘her most dangerous rival’…
…Keith can see what Mary sees in his sister; he just has to pretend to be as devoted to her as Mary is, and the cracks start to fill themselves in. Slowly, carefully, and with much reluctance. But they fill in.
He pays attention to the others and how they revolve around her like she is the sun and they are planets, and things become just the slightest bit clearer.
Geordo finds her ‘interesting’. Keith finds him creepy and unhinged, in all the worst ways imaginable, and his obsession with coaxing Katarina into a marriage is genuinely startling. The way he dismisses anything actually good about Katarina as ‘hearsay’ is downright unnerving, and the methods he uses to get her fickle attention are…best left unsaid.
Mary probably wants to do some rather unspeakable things with her. That, or start a cult. He isn’t too sure which one yet. She worships the ground Katarina walks on and refuses to see her as anything less than some divine being sent to ensure she is never alone – or some such tripe. Keith worries for her declining mental health.
Alan is too busy trying to coax his not-really-bride-to-be away from the depressive black hole that is Katarina Claes.
Sophia Ascarte has taken to a more physical model of affection than her contemporaries – and it is downright unsettling to watch her slink her way onto Katarina’s lap without any of them noticing and Katarina doing nothing about it; it is funny to watch the maid, Anne, start throwing fits. Her brother is…a commonality. He and Keith are both curios and exasperated and both wish to find out just what makes Katarina Claes so…gravitational.
He starts getting the bigger picture.
(He will look back on this situation with exasperated fondness for his younger self.
Because really; who was he fooling?
He’d barely gotten a clue.)