Claudia Hortensia was the wife of Kirei Kotomine and mother of Caren Hortensia. She's deceased.
Claudia was terminally ill with only a few years to live when Kirei met her. He was drawn to her partly out of desperation—he'd spent years wrestling with his own twisted nature, and he thought that maybe a normal life, a wife, a family, could somehow fix him. He didn't actually want those things, but he wanted to want them. So he chose a woman with no future, as if that might be the answer.
She fell in love with him and had Caren. But Kirei discovered something uncomfortable about himself: he got happy watching them suffer. Claudia figured out what he was almost immediately. She tried to help him, to save him from himself, but that only made things worse—it made him crave her despair even more. He could see she genuinely meant to reach him, to pull him out of whatever void he had inside, and that realization only deepened his despair. No matter what she did, she couldn't fill that emptiness. She couldn't fix him.
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