The Sea of Stars [Catherine, Verdada]

The sudden grab and jerk of action caused her to drop her bowl, but she didn't panic - if anything this sort of reaction was plenty expected after everything. Past events didn't just vanish because the present existed, after all; she would have to be held accountable for it at some point. There was quite a few punches in the face she was expecting from the get go anyway. Her gaze floated to that fan, of elegant make and poise, pointed at her throat. She wouldn't. Her heart raced either way, burned with that familiar anxiety as her spiritual pressure flared and spread.

Something was strange about her signature, something familiar, something that didn't immediately come to mind. She'd felt something like that before... But that wasn't the pressing issue, that heat rising in her chest,

"...I fucked up, Verdada." Her voice was low, panting puffs of hot breath, gaze flicking over to Faust who had visibly stiffened and was slowly creeping away from the situation; smart of him honestly, "Things aren't 'all fine and dandy', this is eating me from the inside. My scars ache, I can still feel him clamping down on my leg... He's dead with an heir to his family, just like he wanted. And i'm left over with killing a monster, and not my grandfather. Because I was too slow."

Her teeth grit, a smile creeping on her lips as a hand tightly gripping Verdada's wrist - not so hard that it would injure her but enough to be a firm grasp, "All this time, all that berating and abuse he put me through, all that pushing myself... And it still took me eleven years to barely kill him at his worst. Your apparent desire of wanting to see me suffer's nothing in comparison..."

She couldn't help but let out a low, wheezing laugh, as if she was between the desire to cry and the need to laugh away her pain in a twist of lunacy, "You're right, at least partially; I kill a man at the brink of madness, I rip his fangs and scales from his corpse, I take everything he's held dear for myself, and now i'm twisting it into something beyond his wishes... I'm not that girl lying helpless beneath a monster anymore, I am the monster."