kat soroka's character file
for people who love joy, beauty, and sometimes a little fun (less sorry about this one guys)
CW: mentioned suicide/suicide ideation (all related to cole/ej), murder, slight gore hypersexuality as a coping mechanism, toxic relationship dynamics (not related to cole, he would never.)
“ALL IT COMES DOWN TO IS THIS: I FEEL LIKE SHIT BUT LOOK GREAT.”
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Kat Soroka is a missing girl, mostly. She is fully Katya Marja Soroka, and she left her apartment at approximately 11:03 p.m. on a Thursday in Chicago's April, a glorified, dampened March like a squishy and warm ice pack, and never returned. She is a second-year medical student at the University of Illinois Medical Center and lives in the Pilsen neighborhood. Her nationality is Ukrainian, her hair color is an artificial jet black, her eyes are an ever-dulling, clear blue, and she stands around 5'11" tall or 182cm and 150lbs or 68kg. When the missing posters and searches for Kat die out, this information blurs and fizzles out of other students' minds, just like the boy before her, except Kat didn't have a motive like Cole to disappear. The objective information listed in her search profile was also a lie, because Kat wasn't just some med student. She was a lot worse than just a nerd. Kat was thoughtlessly intelligent, like, human encyclopedia smart, and she knew that people liked how she dressed and acted. Before January, she didn't care for people admiring her, as long as they didn't treat her like a usable rag of a person, and wouldn't be proud of it. And then January came and ruined a lot of that gentle, charming sociability. When Cole went missing, Kat seemed to suck it up on the outside. Replacing her boyfriend, in the wake of his absence, with senseless entertainment eased the sting. And then people thought she was over it weeks later, so it was a return to talking to her so often and inviting her places. Then the leverage of her looks and attitude came in with full force, and it was a support for her to lean on for people to care about how she felt again. But when the people you're surrounded with are all just selfish and seemingly deaf, the want for care becomes the desperation for something resembling care. A desire for somebody to hold you when you aren't feeling well turns into the need for somebody just to touch you and make you feel better. When all that gets your mind running thoughts a bit better than a net-zero attack on your psyche is the quick serotonin hit of sex, it turns into salvation. Guilt follows like the stench of trash cans blown over from high winds, and pain trails that, when you realize that the other person is actually pretty shitty. Like really shitty. And it's enough to begin something a lot darker.
"AND LATER, MY MACABRE JOY SOURS, AND I'M WEEPING FOR MYSELF, UNABLE TO FIND SOLACE IN ANY OF THIS."
--- Before January, most students would tell you the same things about Kat. She did well in exams and practicals, she talked with a lot of wildly different groups of friends, and she was surprisingly relaxed for how uptight her lifestyle was. She didn't seem like a med student, but she knew a lot about her field and was passionate about it. So, she complemented people who were also die-hard about her studies. After her previous, prodigy-level-smart-but-young-and-annoying, pharmaceutical lab partner transferred off-campus in October, she got paired with somebody absurdly interested in medical school but not irritating. A guy named Cole, who actually conserved his energy by not bragging about his dual-internship experience in college and not editing her lines in the lab reports to be freakishly neat and concise. Most students at this point in recalling her second year would tell you that Cole Hasan was not like Kat Soroka. Cole Hasan was off-puttingly tall and reserved, just looming over other people with a weird, calm attitude, but held conversations well enough. And he didn't smell like a greasy science prodigy, so that was at least a win, right? Kat Soroka was off-puttingly tall, not reserved at all, and let other people know exactly what she thought about everything ever in a gracious, charming enough way. Cole would break into a smile every once in a while at random, as if he needed to show everyone else that he actually could, while Kat was perpetually on the verge of laughter at herself during class or making an over-exaggerated expression as a reaction to what someone else said.
Pairing them together seemed like an idiotic decision, really. Most other students would see them working well enough together and cooperating and shrug off any idea of them being friends, but through the short cracks in their focus, it was clear they actually liked each other. First, it starts with early meetings to file down the length of their papers, then it moves on to them hanging out more often just for the sake of having someone different close at hand. A text asking about the format needed in a research paper turns into an hour-long call about a minimum wage physical exam actor actually being diagnosed with several STDs after a practice urine test. Yeah. Med students have no time, but Kat and Cole did, maybe, sometimes, to make plans around their schedules by November: meetings at eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. But they never wrote it off as romance. Because Kat wasn't supposed to like Cole since she had a boyfriend. A very bad one, at that, who doesn't last long by the end of the month. December comes with the flash of realization that maybe, they could be something more. The dead seriousness that Kat has about her ex being a jerk and not regretting leaving him shatters Cole's idea of an unavailable Kat. When they do become something more, it's sweet on the harsh edges of winter. But Cole has problems, and it really seems like Kat doesn't. And he feels awful about making her wait for him to get through depressive episodes and days of him not leaving his bed. He believes he needs to change for her, but Kat knows that he's fine as is for her and just wants to help. "I don't deserve you," in a sheepish laugh when Kat kisses him while he's slumped over in his shower's basin after forcing him out of bed, is different from the "I wish I could just stop being a burden for you, so that you could move on from me" ringing like a curse in his mind. The reassurance that he doesn't need to fix himself stops numbing his aches after New Year's Day. When muddied snow's already clogging the shoulders of the streets at seven in the morning and the metro is crammed with commuters even earlier, what's the point of even getting up? Kat still does and comes back to Cole's apartment to check in on him. She offers to let him sleep at her place just to make it easier on him while she goes off to pick up paperwork from the previous semester and finish her research for a few pages in her dissertation with her professors. And then the seventeenth of January rolls in. Cole is missing after telling Kat that he was hopping on the metro to grocery shop across the city, one of the few chores he clings to while he's down to feel like he's beneficial to her. By ten at night, he hasn't picked up a single one of her methodical streams of calls. By three in the morning, it's clear that Kat's worst fears might be true. He might've actually done it. She paces around on the phone until the next morning to call the authorities, but she knows that Cole doesn't want to be searched for. After police check the cameras around his planned route, they assume that he might've gotten entangled with a bad actor somewhere between where his appearances stop in surveillance outside of the Amtrak departing for St. Paul and stopping briefly, a few hours in, in a densely wooded town between farmland. And Kat stops believing that Cole made a silly mistake around the point when she's shown the planned road for the train. She knows what he could've done, but she doesn't tell the police that. It's not that she doesn't want to objectively know that he's dead, but that she doesn't want to remember him as dead and decomposing as food for crows in some declining town on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The days after, life is a steady, degraded low. When she's forced to reappear for the new semester, she sucks it up even though she keeps all of Cole's sweatshirts and knitted blankets in a sealed box in her bedroom's closet to not lose the smell of his cologne. She stops walking past his apartment building to get to the Ukrainian Village from Pilsen on weekends. His absence is sudden and eating away at her life, despite it being unnoticeable to everyone else. And we circle back to Kat from after January.
“IS EVIL SOMETHING YOU ARE? OR IS IT SOMETHING YOU DO?”
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Stabbing is a different word for wounding. Maiming is a different word for injuring. And succumbing is a different word for dying. Connotations are everything in Kat's mind, because murdering isn't as bad as killing when you understand that you should only target people who would commit worse crimes than you can stomach.
When Kat is confronted by a girl in February in the gritty, disgruntled bathroom of a frat house for a Valentine's Day weekend party, who falls into the doorway like a sedated animal, she asks the girl how much she had to drink and where she got her cup from. Between slurred, hushed mumbles, the girl tells her that she only had one drink and points around at a few friends she was talking to while it was being poured. Kat gives her a few pre-packaged snacks and her bottle of water she brought with her, and she does another round around the party. The guy who mixed the girl's drink was found around four days later in a dumpster by a garbage man after hauling out a few bags and noticing a roughly body bag-shaped form in one of them. His head was decapitated sloppily in another bag, with no semblance of a weapon, a culprit, or a motive around the crime scene. The bags were fresh, smelled of sterilizing alcohol to rid the odor, and had no traces of fingerprints or DNA.
Kat's coping mechanisms turn into a mix of morally questionable addictions: serial dating and vigilantism. Sometimes, she sobs after sex and letting herself be used, and then the guy's missing a week later. It gets worse when Cole's stuff begins to lose its fragrance after being left out for too long in the open air. She gets more creative: watching nail traps stab through the soles of a horrible guy's expensive shoes and bleed like a butchered hog on perfectly manicured marble flooring is the only balm that heals after planned neatness. He deserves it. Why not have fun with it? People go missing all the time in Chicago, anyway. The justification begins to wane. "Anyone else would have problems after everything that happened" turns into "it's just to enact justice" and finally turns into "if you treat someone else as subhuman, you get treated that way too." But the third line of reasoning really dissolves when the traps get grizzlier to just shed more blood spilled for the sake of morals. Do morals apply anymore to her when she's this far in? She still appears, mainly, the same Kat as before. She did well in exams and practicals, she talked with a lot of wildly different groups of acquaintances, and she was insanely relaxed for how uptight her lifestyle was. But when she thinks about it, she isn't. Because Cole wouldn't know who this person is. Kat Soroka is not Kat Soroka.
And when she's lured further into a park one night by an echoing chime and a buzz like crackling television static while she's laying her setup down, Kat hears herself speak when she's asked what she would do to see Cole again. She isn't even sure who questioned her, a vague, tall form dotting in and out of her memory. "I'd do anything." To be the person I was like with him are the words that she doesn't let escape. Then Kat disappears in April.
"I AM A GHOST TO THIS MAN, I’M THINKING."
---
Tall, not cocky but not slumped over, Kat enters the Slendermansion after weaving through jagged, unending treeline. Does Illinois even have these tall aspens and pine trees with Kudzu lapping at every old oak? Probably not. But she is entranced by the grandeur of a Victorian manor in the middle of a desolate forest and the faint, ephemeral hope of her life returning. That's not what happens. At all. When Kat's prodded on what she can do by the Slenderman, she immediately rambles on enthusiastically about her medical experience and the accolades she has personally received. And then he asks what she can actually do, and she snaps into focus about what he wants her to say. "Probably...ughh, let me think...I murder people, really. I do it a lot more than I want to. And in a lot more gruesome ways. But for the right reasons. I think that's what you wanted me to tell you first, yeah." With a sharp sear of a brand on her lower back, Kat is made a proxy, given her stupidly dumb requested ability to aid her killing, and designated her room. And unto us a catgirl is born! She mock chants to herself before collapsing like a rag doll on her mattress. It's funny to her how much this new life seems like a joke. Until she realizes that the Slenderman wasn't lying about getting to see Cole again. Because the first time Kat goes out training in the forest with some lean guy with axes who quips back at her jokes and doesn't seem to shut up like her, she notices a figure moving parallel to the tree line. Watching them without any eyes behind eyelids, once coppery, olivine skin dulled into a pale, sickened greyish tone. The scarred indentations of scavenging birds' talons around his cheeks and eye sockets briefly visible behind the shade of his mask. The circle of rope burns around his neck like a ring of brambles, marring the flesh. And he watched her without any expression, like he was detached from this person. Like he was watching a ghost.
(all quotes from american psycho cuz i looooovve american psycho)
