Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Lost Inside
The harder Katarina looked, the more obvious it was that yes, she was actually in the otome game Fortune Lover, and yes, it sucked hairy monkey balls, but aside from cutting her own wrists and bleeding out in the garden somewhere, Katarina didn’t really see a way out.
Katarina thunked her head down the polished mahogany desk pushed up against the wall of the library. The sun was setting. Streaks of dying sunlight were striking the wall opposite her, dying the room in roses and rouges and warm oranges, like dipping a white slice of paper in red food dye and watching the droplets slide off. Katarina sighed, feeling the pages of notebook she’d set aside for this task stir under her breath. She’d made a list of all the things she could remember from the precious few moments of worldbuilding in Fortune Lover, and everything checked out.
There was indeed a royal family, the country was called Sorcier, the more magical power you had the higher ranked you were in the country, and oh, and, also, just for the heck of it: she was gonna die. Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d died once already? Whatever higher power put in her in here must be laughing their butt off. She got, like, two minutes to be excited about being in her favorite game, and then realized she couldn’t take a second to enjoy it.
Katarina groaned, wishing the world was a kinder place to her specifically.
“Katarina? Are you alright?”
Reluctantly, Katarina peeled her face of her neat little checklist filled with check marks and glared blearily at her father, who was looking increasingly worried. He was standing in the doorway leading into the library from his office, one hand on the door, his white suit pressed just so like always. Katarina hadn’t had much of a relationship with her dad in her past life – he’d never been home. He’d been too busy working. And Katarina hadn’t really hated him for that, because she hadn’t known him well enough to care that he was always gone. In her mind’s eye, he was a shrimp of a man with a sweaty forehead and thick black-rimmed plastic glasses, who was always staring down at the ground. She could picture him now: drinking a cup of barley water, sitting at the kitchen table, listening quietly as her mother complained about the neighbors next door while making dinner.
With a pang, Katarina wondered what face he’d made at her funeral, if her mother had cried. It was weird to think about: she was dead, and yet here she was, living on. She put a hand over her heart to feel it beat, feeling the breath whistle out of the slightly stuffed nose she had. Stupid allergies. She was alive, that was what her senses told her, and yet somewhere out there, her parents were grieving in a place she couldn’t get to, and she had no idea how they were doing. With a slight feeling of discomfort, Katarina realized that she’d been too busy/excited about waking up in a video game to wonder what had happened to all the people she’d left behind, if they would be okay without her.
Who was going to help her mom peel hard boiled eggs for egg salad now?
“Katarina?”
There was a warm hand that encompassed her whole head. Katarina looked up, wondering what her was doing that her papa was looking at her with such worry in his eyes. He’d crouched down, folding himself awkwardly so he could look her in the eyes, something bleeding in his river stone blue eyes. Katarina sniffled, realizing belatedly that the reason why her eyes were so hot was because she was on the verge of tears. She hurriedly wiped away her tears before they could fall and plastered on a smile.
“I’m fine, Father,” she said, forcing cheer into her tone. “I was just thinking about something sad.”
Her new father, the one who watched her every move and tended to her better than her father did her mother, looked less than convinced. He produced a handkerchief embroidered with his initials in a flurry of cloth. “It’s okay to cry, sometimes,” he said softly. He smiled a little. “I know it can be hard to believe, but I cry, too, sometimes, when the king isn’t especially nice to me.”
Katarina stared at this blond-haired Western man and tried to imagine her father saying that to her. She completely failed. In her mind’s eye, it’s always been her mother yelling, her mother’s disappointed sighs. Even when he’d been there, her father had sat on the sidelines, not saying anything unless her mother prompted him to. And then he meekly repeated whatever her mother said to say.
And it hurt, in a special kind of place in her heart, because Katarina wasn’t going be able to go back. She didn’t know you could miss something you’d always taken for granted until it was taken away.
Katarina threw her arms around her papa’s arms and let herself cling to his hot neck, her face smushed up against his starched collar, the way she’d never get a chance to with her own father, and cried.
The next day, her father came into the room while Katarina was still staring at the morning sunlight streaming through the door glass doors leading the balcony, trying to scramble her wits together enough to get started for the day. Ann had come and gone with the breakfast tray, but the smell of scrambled eggs made something wriggle in the pit of Katarina’s stomach. She wasn’t hungry, anyways.
“Katarina,” her father said softly as he sat down on the edge of her bed. Katarina looked over, feeling the mattress dip under her father’s weight. He was still looking pretty worried. Idly, Katarina worried what she had done wrong this time, and what she could do to undo it. The lesson she’d learned from her mother was that it best to sit there quietly and take it. If she talked back, it was always worse.
But he isn’t my mother, Katarina reminded herself. She briefly thought of how achingly lonely she was, and how much easier the silence would be to take if she had voices in her head to keep her distracted, but then her dad started talking and she quickly forgot all about that.
Her new father droned on for a while about how worried he was. Katarina tried her best to pay attention and give him encouraging little nods and smiles when he paused like he wanted her to say something, but she didn’t know what he wanted from her. He was doing half of a dance she didn’t know, and looking at her like an alien from outer space when she didn’t do her part correctly.
This freakin’ sucks, Katarina decided. It had been fun for half a minute, but she realizing now that she was in a horror game, not an otome, and it was going to be a fight just for her to make it to the ending. Is it selfish of me to wish I was already dead? Then I wouldn’t be troubled by these thoughts.
“Katarina,” her father called like he’d been calling her name more than once, and Katarina looked at him, feeling all the weight of the years she had yet to live that were all she had before going bye-bye, this time more permanently. Ah, there was that look again. “What’s troubling you? You know you can tell me anything.” Katarina took a moment to think about how her own father would never say those words to her before she forcefully shoved those dark damp feelings into a wet cardboard box.
We have to give him a reason, otherwise he’ll only keep worrying, floated through Katarina’s mind. She cast about for something a spoiled little princess would have to be worried about. Her eyes caught on the open notebook by her bedside, the words, Meritocracy based on magic power scribbled in a hurry next to Katarina has very little magic power, and an idea came to her. She hesitated for a moment to really sell it, peaking out at her father behind her bangs, and asked him, as if she really was unsure, “… Do you mean it? I can tell you anything?” She let the grief of losing her family touch her voice, just a tinge, because if she let herself acknowledge how much she’d lost she’d start crying and never stop.
Her father practically fell over himself to reassure her. “Yes, yes,” he said, something like relief in his eyes, relief that she was finally responding, “You can always come to me, my treasure.”
Katarina looked at this blond-haired blue-eyed man and let all the words she actually wanted to say die on her tongue. “It’s just, well,” she said, dithering, pretending at a child-like worry when inside she was empty, bereft of all but an all-encompassing cold she should probably be more worried about than she was. “Well, Father. I realized that one day I would leave you and Mother behind to live in the palace, and that made me sad.” She made herself smile, feeling like her face was clay and she had to instruct each one of her muscles to bend. “I also realized that my magic is very little, and I was worried that I might be a disgrace to the royal family, should the prince prove serious in his desire to wed me.”
Bait, and the trap underneath it. Katarina watched her father’s stricken face soften. “Oh, Katarina,” he said, taking her hands in his and looking her so earnestly in the eyes it made her skin crawl. “You will always be my daughter,” he told her, his voice thick with emotion. “Never forget that.”
Distantly, in a faraway part of her brain, Katarina noticed he didn’t say that she could visit them. She wondered if, once she became a royal princess, if her movements would be restricted in some way.
“As for your magic,” he continued, rubbing the dry pads of his thumbs over the sensitive skin on the back of her hands. Katarina fought not to shiver. She wished he wouldn’t do that. It made her all too aware of her body, when all she wanted to do was float away in her thoughts and never return. “The pool of mana you’re born with does effect what magic you can do at the start, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be taught exercises that will help you grow more into your own.” And he gave her a weak and watery smile when he said, “We’ll find you a teach,” like a promise, like it was the first time he was thinking about what it would be like when she was gone, when she didn’t live here anymore.
Katarina retreated away from that thought, because it hurt too much to entertain. She forced herself to smile, even if her mouth felt like it’d been carved from clay when she said, “That would be lovely.”