Chapter Text
Georgiana’s head feels like splitting.
She is sure that if she hadn’t been holding the skull between her two palms the way she is, that there will surely be a crack in the middle. Yet, as much as the headache rings, Georgiana has never been more relieved.
It’s a curious thing, after all, to have to witness a whole vision of the future. Or, well, the past.
Apparently, past lives existed. That was one fact Georgiana had slowly come to terms with in the first few hours she could get by herself. The second was that she had lived this life before. Not as a past life, per se, but as a credulous game her past life had thoroughly enjoyed. A dating simulation game of sorts.
Every time she recalls it, her head throbs as if it rejects the foreign memories.
After all, who was the lonely woman in her early twenties passing time away clicking at choices to reply to an animated character on her phone? Certainly it wouldn’t be Georgiana Madeline Rose Bartlett, daughter of one Great Lord Griffin, head of the House Bartlett in the Kingdom of Westria. No, for Georgiana is an elegant, popular and desirable lady of the court, the only heiress to the Crown Prince and future High Queen to the land she lives in.
She groans again, turning on her side and sighs.
Yes, she confirms to herself, flexing her hands—one, then two times—when she pulls it away from pinching at her head. She is Georgiana. She remembers this slender and untainted hands that she grew up with, this deep colour of crimson hair that adorns the pillow she’s resting on. She’s sure that if she limps to the mirror now, she will see her face and the bright silver eyes to which she inherits, a famous trait of her bloodline.
And that memory…
She shudders, solemnly recalling the times she has witnessed her own demise. Deaths. So many of them, no matter the choices. Georgiana winces. How could she have been so indifferent before, in that past life of hers, to barely even blink an eye every time Georgiana Bartlett was pronounced dead. Certainly, it was because she would not expect that that would be the character she is to play the moment that life ends.
Ah, ignorance. How she has taken it too lightly.
Now, she’s woken up in a new body, a new life, tattered with memories which may just tell her of her future. And her future, she realises again bleakly, is gloom.
To be reincarnated as a doomed villainess.
Georgiana suddenly feels her mouth open, wanting to cry for a father who had fussed over her and the mother who held her hand the whole time she first gained consciousness. In her past life, her parents passed away too quickly. She lived, momentarily, with her grandparents—out near the sea where the ocean spreads for miles—before she decided to make it on her own in the city. Over the religious holidays, she would return to visit them, and there would be cousins and aunts and uncles pouring in. Little babies, both growing and new, filling every inch of that house. Despite the amount, the absence of her two parents were almost always prominent.
Now, she is being re-born lavishly. Georgiana knows this better.
Miriam Bartlett may often be sickly, usually reclusive and private as a person. Yet, Georgiana is aware that Mother cares. Father, too. The memory of him being rushed, no doubt from a meeting or an appointment, just to get to her bedside. That was yesterday. They told her she’d been unconscious for five days.
Unconscious, with no way to know whether she’d been able to wake up.
That must’ve been terrifying, Georgiana laments, to not know something. To be uncertain. Especially when it comes to someone you love.
But what I saw was terrifying too.
Georgiana immediately sits up. Right. Of course this would be no time to cry. She has just discovered that her life might end. If she remembers correctly, all of the events would transpire at the peak of the Grand Banquet in their last year in the Academy. That would be when she is eighteen, perhaps seventeen years old. She is now…
Georgiana looks around, finally seeing the basin of water that was left by her bedside. She reaches for it, and places it upon her laps.
She gasps.
Pretty. The reflection she sees is one she’s seen so many times, yet it all appears startling all of a sudden. Her brows are fine and her lips are plumped, her cheeks soft to touch with an elongated sharpness that are just barely erasing her baby fat. On the left side of her chin, sits a beauty mark. Nothing prominent or distracting, but it stays there, enhancing the face somehow. She must have just reached puberty. Thirteen, perhaps? Fourteen.
Her breasts are yet fully formed, and she knows, as she wiggles her toes, that there will be room to grow.
Young. She’s young, Georgiana concludes. There is still time.
Yes. The young lady Bartlett nods. Let us find a way to live.